Performance is a quality inherent in most acts of our lives: the public lives we lead or show as leading, and when we are ourselves in our living rooms. Like the duality of our self as the subject and our image as the object, the word ‘performance’ too carries a duality: it could mean simply the carrying out of an act as we please, or it could mean carrying out an act farthest from our identity, as actors do.
In his new novel, The Neighbourhood , Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa shows how performances, honest and dishonest, mark the lives of its characters, who can be divided into four categories, mimicking the four directions indicated on the cover of the book. The closeted women, Marisa and Chabela, find sexual solace with each other, away from their respective husbands. The engineer, Enrique Cárdenas, Marisa’s husband, is photographed participating in an orgy, and is blackmailed by Rolando Garro, the editor of Exposed , who threatens to publish the images unless Cárdenas provides financial support to the newspaper.
No, not I
Then there’s Juan Peineta, more at home as a reciter of poetry than acting as one of the Three Jokers in a television show of that name. The role earns him a fortune, which he uses to pay his wife’s hospital bills. He is, however, sacked because Garro, in his review of the show, calls him ‘the most inept “pseudo-actor” of Peruvian television’. Garro does publish the images following
which he is murdered. Julieta Leguizamón, who succeeds Garro as editor, must now use carefully collected evidence to pinpoint the real killers, and separate ‘act’ from ‘reality’.
That-Which-Is-Not-I is at the core of these performances. When the scandal breaks, Cárdenas inevitably claims foul play, claiming the man in the pictures ‘was not I’. In the exchanges between Chabela and Marisa, a suggestion is made, if only very faintly, that they think of their same-sex attraction as not concurrent with their own heterosexual identities, that ‘it is not I’.
When Peineta is forced to ‘confess’ to the murder of Garro, against whom he harboured a grudge, he feigns but is also made to feign.
It now transpires that the contents of Exposed are dictated by the Doctor, President Alberto Fujimori’s right-hand man. Publishing a tell-all piece about this despotism is new editor Leguizamón’s attempt to disrupt the status quo, to reject the hidden allegiance to Fujimori’s presidency. How can a newspaper called Exposed have the integrity to be itself if propaganda guides its exposés, making it another piece of ‘pseudo-acting’?
At the end, in a contorted way, every one of Llosa’s characters finds a way to assert their It-Is-I identity. Cárdenas fulfils his and Marisa’s claim of being a closeted ‘pervert’ when he engages in a threesome with her and Chabela. Marisa, by being part of the threesome, allows for the intersection of exhibition and indulgence, the public and private, by showing a preference for Chabela. Peinata, always a reciter, never the poet, is convicted of a crime he did not commit, and performs to the dictates of the Doctor’s men in a nursing home. Leguizamón moves to television, taking with her the ideals of Exposed but performing in another medium.
Better staged
It is very easy to visualise this coterie on the stage or even the screen, as Llosa stretches the possibilities of the novelistic form to give us a babble of dialogue (especially in a chapter called ‘Whirlpool’ where all characters speak over one another) and prosaic interjections, which can only be read as stage directions to his ‘performers’. At the end, the reader returns, like the elite trio of Cárdenas, Marisa, and Chabela, to a high-rise, a fortressed state of blissful distance from the scandal and the people consumed by it.
Unfortunately, Llosa, and perhaps his translator, Edith Grossman, do not make proper use of novelistic time, trading it for theatrical or cinematic time. Yes, there is something dramatic about the progress from the That-Which-Is-Not-I stage to the It-Is-I stage: Llosa wants to depict the real-life Lima of the 90s, where the action takes place, when Fujimori’s presidency was marked by not allowing life to those who did not comply, but it falls short precisely because of his reluctance to engage with novelistic time.
It’s a thrill to read The Neighbourhood , but a rather shallow thrill, since Llosa’s ‘performers’ remain mere constituents of a larger whole. Sadly, Llosa’s best efforts are not enough to stop the reader from asking: Why should I care about any of you?
The writer, a Felix Scholar, is studying World Literatures in English at Oxford.
The Neighbourhood; Mario Vargas Llosa, trs Edith Grossman, Faber & Faber, ₹1,487
