Julio Ramón Ribeyro
interviewed by journalist Fernando Ampuero
Source, Newspaper La Cronica Viva Lima Peru
Historical
journalism. We rescued an interview that Julio Ramón Ribeyro offered to
journalist Fernando Ampuero, in 1986, in which the prominent Peruvian writer
revealed details of his friendship and his passion for Julio Cortázar's
Peruvian food. A conversation that sleeps in the newspaper archives and we
publish it for you to enjoy: -You have been living in Europe for many years. What
changes does exile generate in a writer? -Well, in principle, I must clarify: I
am not an exile. I am simply a person who traveled to Europe and stayed there
living for various reasons, but without having any impediment to return to my
country. -Can we call it self-exile? -OK. What changes does living outside
produce in a writer? First of all, it offers a broadening of perception,
because of the contact that he feels with other cultures. And then, a direct
deal with what we have dreamed and read. -Was that what prompted you to travel?
-It is difficult to define my original intention. What I can talk about, it
seems to me, is the results: I got rid of a certain provincialism. -Did you
look for people? Did you establish any kind of contact with writers you
admired? -I never felt the need to look for well-known or famous writers. In
Paris, in my early years, there were many writers. There were Carpentier,
Miguel Ángel Asturias and García Márquez, although the latter was almost
unknown at that time. The only one I had contact and friendship with was Julio
Cortázar. He was a very cordial and simple man; very kind, especially, with
young writers. Cortázar did not talk much about literature. When he met with
his friends, he talked about other things: tango, good food (he loved good food
and he always went to my house to eat ceviche). He was a formidable, imaginative
and brilliant guy. On one occasion, when we were talking about a writer that he
considered old-fashioned, he told me that when he opened his books all his
letters flew out, like a cloud of moths. -How were your beginnings in Europe? What
kind of jobs did you get? -I had to work several jobs, but I would not want to
glorify that time. -Was it a hard time for you? -Quite hard, as is life there
for most students. I had sporadic jobs. When my scholarship ran out, and while
I was waiting to get another one, I started to work. The money they sent me
from home took a while to arrive. It was a matter of survival. I remember that
I worked, among other things, as a hotel doorman. Fortunately it was a small
hotel: it had six or seven rooms. -But day or night? -He was a permanent
goalkeeper, day and night. And I also had to take care of cleaning and
collecting rent, I did everything. In any case, it was not such a difficult
job, because the tenants (there were three Peruvians and a French writer, now
very well known) were very understanding of me. They made their room and that
allowed me to have free afternoons to dedicate myself to writing. A hard job,
on the other hand, was the one I had at a railway station. There he was a
loader of packages, with a wheelbarrow and everything; It moved loads from
trains to trucks or from trucks to trains. Very hard work, authentic worker's
work. The crew of workers included some people, now honorable and respectable,
you know? There were the poet Leopoldo Chariarse and the painters Eduardo
Gutiérrez and Sigfrido Laske. Anyway, I couldn't endure this work for long: it
required enormous physical effort. But there I had for the first time the
experience of what physical work is, a work that transmutes you into a robot,
to such a point that when you finish the day you don't feel like reading or
thinking; It just means having a beer and going to sleep. -How do you
understand the impact of your work? I am not referring to specialized
criticism, but to what occurs among ordinary people, those readers who always
come to greet you? What do you think you like or are most interested in about
your stories and novels? -I have always been intrigued by that kind of fervor
that I notice in a young audience and, even more so, in a popular audience. I
wonder what they find in what I write. I suppose they see, in a way, an image
in which they recognize themselves. But why are they recognized if they are
stories in which the situations are commonly depressing and the outcomes
tragic? They identify themselves? Do you feel a bit like my characters? Could
be. Although I also warn that others are not so attracted to my topics
themselves, but rather a certain humor. That pleases me. Many find comedy where
I precisely wanted to put it... - “Sad quarrels in the old country house”? -For
example. -It is an excellent story, with a notable sense of humor. -And there
are other stories with humor, which critics have rarely pointed out. -July,
with the violence that the country is experiencing (terrorism, crime and a much
more acute economic crisis than sharper than that of the fifties), what
situations do you imagine your characters would be involved in if you lived in
Lima now?
-I
would obviously have to modify my character gallery. To begin with, the
character of the drug trafficker, small or large, would appear in one or more
stories; then, the thugs, the kidnapping gangs and, of course, the people
linked to terrorism. They are real, serious situations. Certainly in my work
there is violence; Contained violence and explicit violence can be detected,
but it does not reflect what is happening today in Peru. In one of my stories a
small criminal appears, a pickpocket. What does this guy mean to an organized
gang? He is another world.
-One
last question, Julio. Do you think that the artist, specifically the writer,
must be a person uncomfortable with power?
-That
depends on the power. If it is a despotic government, the writer will be
attacking it and the power will feel that it is uncomfortable. That's why there
are so many exiled, deported and imprisoned writers. This is not the case of
democratic governments. The writer can then support power, even support it by
omission, if he does not speak out, or proceed as a healthy critic or a plain
critic. What I do consider inconvenient is that he becomes a sycophant of
power. Because flattery is negative for both the one who flatters and the one
who is flattered. In any case, the legitimacy of power does not derive from
whether writers adhere or not to a certain government, but from the adhesion of
the people.
Research:
Walter Sosa Vivanco
With
affection,
Ruben
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