Bel Canto(104)

SA: Like the soap operas. There’s something about that Latin American passion for soap operas. I loved that early scene of the President sitting on the edge of the bed, watching his soap.

AP: You know, that detail is true: [former Peruvian President Alberto] Fujimori was obsessed with soap operas and wouldn’t hold meetings during a broadcast.

SA: Was he supposed to have been present at that party at the Japanese embassy and cancelled because of a soap opera, or is that your embellishment?

AP: That’s my embellishment, but he did have a big soap opera problem.

SA: So what were the guerillas doing in that embassy? What was their goal, do we know?

AP: Their goal was to free their jailed comrades but also to draw attention to the Peruvian prison system, which is as brutal and inhumane as they come. They basically bury people alive in these mountain prisons. The cells are dug into the mountains along a network of tunnels — little rooms you can’t stand up in. They’re truly, truly horrible.

SA: A fact brought to the fore again recently by the Berenson case. [American Lori Berenson, then twenty-six, was convicted in 1996 by a secret military court of conspiring with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to attack Peru’s congress. A life sentence in prison was voided by a military court in August of 2000 and a new civil trial of the case commenced in March of 2001.]

AP: Exactly. And so their goal was to call attention to that. Now, I don’t want to seem to be sympathetic to people who take others hostage, but I think these people had a pretty solid argument.

SA: The Vice President’s house in your book, by contrast, is precisely not a hellhole. It’s a place of refuge where the best human qualities may blossom. Apropos of that, let me just read aloud this lovely epigraph you chose from The Magic Flute, which, come to think of it, is also a kind of hostage drama.

AP: I love those lines. Go ahead.

SA: Speaker: Stranger, what do you seek or ask from us?

Tamino: Friendship and love.

Speaker: And are you prepared even if it costs you your life?

Tamino: I am.

AP: Do you want to weep?

SA: Yeah, but also let me just take off my editor’s eyeshade and place it over my heart, because it’s so rare that you get an epigraph that’s right on the money like that — one you can flip back to having just finished the book and say, “Oh, perfect!”

AP: I’ve always thought an epigraph an example of really good writing followed by an example of often really mediocre writing. [Laughter]

SA: Look, if we start to think that way here we’ll all be out of work very soon. [Laughter] But, friendship and love: You evoke these in Bel Canto, you create this ideal society, and with it you make us confront the enormous problems that come with the creation of an ideal society. It’s a society that came into being at gunpoint, organized itself around opera, chess, and French cooking, and so is such a massive contradiction that it cannot possibly survive — and does not. It presents a rather large political and philosophical problem, doesn’t it?

AP: I think that the problem is twofold: One, the guerillas end up saving the people they don’t care about saving. If you’re thinking in terms of some sort of spiritual salvation, they’re taking the wealthiest people and somehow redirecting their lives towards the better, which was not the Generals’ intention. At the same time they’re taking these very poor children and saving them through exposure to the kinds of things that come with wealth and luxury. All the Generals really know is that they want something to be different and something to be better. But they really haven’t thought it out beyond that. And so what they get is not what they had vaguely formulated in their minds. They get something different and they get something better, but it is a passage into a world that is tied to the very materialism that is of course bringing down “their people.”

SA:Right, and it’s this that the people end up praying for. Here’s a passage about Carmen at the end of chapter five: “Yes, the Generals wanted something better for the people, but weren’t they [the guerillas] the people? Would it be the worst thing in the world if nothing happened at all, if they all stayed together in this generous house? Carmen prayed hard. . . . What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.” A romantic dream about a beautiful world that cannot possibly be sustained.

AP: Right.

SA: Opera, of course, is also a beautiful world that can’t be sustained, which is probably why people become so nutty about it. Mr. Hosokawa is such a nut. At the risk of being brusque, but to come right out with it, since you did write this book, Bel Canto, where do you fall on the opera nut scale?

AP: I’m not one, but I used to have a boyfriend who was an opera nut. He was once a Canadian quiz kid and he had memorized the Grove Encyclopedia of Opera by the time he was eight. He knew everything in the world about opera. In the years that we were together he played opera all the time and I would walk into the room and think, Oh that’s nice. [Laughs] We never talked about it. Probably something lodged in my brain during those years, but I kick myself that I never did the work to figure it all out when the quiz kid was at my disposal. Years later, when I was watching this [Peruvian hostage] story unfolding on the news it seemed so much like an opera to me. Though at that point in my life I had never been to an opera.

SA: No!

AP: Yeah.