In “The Winds,” his latest story that can be downloaded for free at Bajalibros, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner imagines a not-so-distant future in which culture as we know it disappears and, with it, the way we eat also changes. Is fiction or a prediction alarming?you?
In his latest story, “The Winds,” the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa warns about a future in which not only culture is in danger but also gastronomy as we know it.
What a strange character he is Mario Vargas Llosa! It has been at the top of Latin American culture for more than 60 years and it is still difficult to unravel it (although, reading The winds, I don't know if it's a good idea to mess with his insides).
[”The Winds”, by Vargas Llosa, can be downloaded free in Bajalibros by clicking here]
If we hurry up and assure that he is an intellectual (yes, obviously, we already know that he is), we doubt for the thousand and one caps of magazines of the heart in which the Peruvian shows, gladly, details of his intimate life like a celebrity out of a reality show.
Not to mention if we want to pigeonhole him politically: from the leftist of the sixties to the rightist of... all the decades that followed and who, however, is disconcerting by defending some inclusive flags for women that horrify those who, surely, vote like him (or for him since, we remember, He was a candidate for President of Peru in 1990).
What we can say, without fear of being wrong, is that Vargas Llosa is a writer. Or is it, perhaps, many writers together because, removing the issue of his colossal talent... Are they the same hands that wrote The War of the End of the World than those of Stepmother's Praise? Is it the same author who dared to write without periods or commas? Pantaleon and the visitors that of Bad girl antics?
Vargas Llosa wrote before and writes now. And how he writes he!
As if he had gotten bored with lecturing, win the Nobel, Cervantes and hang on to whatever intellectual nonsense is distributed around the world, the Peruvian takes the pen (or a modern keyboard) and counts in one go. how do you imagine the near future. One in which there are no flying cars but in which the most important cultural icons with which he (and you, and we) grew up are disappearing: in this story, cinemas, libraries, the museums…
En The winds Its protagonist and its culture are slowly dying. It is a future that, being so close, is less than half a turn away from the present.
The character who temporarily loses his memory and wanders through the streets of Madrid, he has partial amnesia: he does not remember where he lives but he maintains old and current memories that make him believe that, at any moment, the amnesiac period will pass. She forgot where she lives but not to the beloved Carmencita that he abandoned years ago, nor the daily conversations with his friend Osorio, nor his taste for books and paintings.
He doesn't know where to go but he does know where he's going. And, as he walks, he throws winds into the air. Poetic winds of freedom or hope? No. Odorous winds of your own body.
Yes. In Vargas Llosa's latest work, gases released into the air without remorse abound and star. Line by line we feel that his character knows he is dying and, with it, the time he enjoyed. The world is dying political correctness y fanatical care of the environment.
The world is dying, murdered by the disinterest that new generations show in sexual desire and by the forgotten habit of meat consumption. The protagonist (like the reader) becomes depressed because he no longer eats: people are fed political correctness.
Man longs for the time when eating meant eating a good steak (he calls it steak or ribeye but you know what I mean) or ones almost as extinct as longed for kidneys with wine. He says that eating and drinking in that (this?) time is disgusting and blames nutrition professionals for making dishes “seem like remedies” just as he is sad because wine seems like a “pharmaceutical liquid.”
Needless to say, the forgetful and smelly protagonist regularly goes with his friend Osorio to a clandestine restaurant to eat an oxtail or a very juicy steak... During his walk he meets in the park to discuss with a group of young acquaintances. like “Los Desequilibrados”, something like libertarians but good. Fanatics but, deep down, tender.
He accuses them of being “recalcitrant vegetarians” who enjoy the ban on eating meat. Ah...because that's how it is...in a short time, if the future imagined by Vargas Llosa comes true, it will be forbidden to eat meat of any kind (and factor, in case we like it juicy). And anyone who, in their desperation to feel the beef, ovine or poultry juices in their intestines, evades the norm, faces jail.
These “Unbalanced” (like some outside of fiction) defend the idea of a world fed only with fruits and vegetables. Not so much (and this could disorient many fans of current veganism and vegetarianism) inspired by the love of animals. They do it convinced that meat “dirties” the human body, makes it sick…Perhaps the flatulent protagonist could have settled that discussion with the argument (beautiful, unappealable and even a little insulting) used by a Basque chef who chose to live in Argentina and who is very fond of reading serious scientific studies.
During a cooking class, a group of attendees (Was Vargas Llosa inspired by them?) reproached him for cooking meat. The cook looked at them and said: “Thank our most distant ancestors. If you can try to argue this it is only because, thanks to them eating a lot of meat for hundreds of years, their brains grew enough to allow them to think and try to argue. The attendees were offended but studies carried out in Harvard They agreed with the cook, who continued his open class by gutting a haddock (very tasty, by the way).
Here we put an imaginary full stop (beyond the fact that whoever writes these lines has to do so for grammatical reasons: closes a sentence and begins another).
This gastronomic future so close that Vargas Llosa imagines, describes and even suffers from… is it real? Is today's food trend going there that makes us imagine tomorrow like this? And, if so... will that tomorrow be the same in the Europe that adopted the author as in the Peru where he was born? The avant-garde, we are used to, originates “there” and ends “here.” However, as for the food…
The American continent, from the Rio Grande to the south, exploded gastronomically more than 20 years ago and made European eyes (along with the hands, fires and knives of cooks) focus on what is done in these parts. Seen with local eyes, we could think differently.
The forgetful walker in the story has to look for a forbidden place to chew beef while, for the first time in history, a grill (beautiful, great, like Don Julio) enters the lists of international renown and is nominated as “best restaurant in meats". At the same time, the traditional recipes, brought to the new continent by immigrants, are revalued by the public and chosen over the proposals of molecular cuisine, scientist and chemist who amazed at the beginning of the century. In "The Winds", Vargas Llosa also raises the alarm regarding the danger that Artificial Intelligence represents in literature and culture.
Improved with new techniques and bromatological care, those dishes are in good health and have become the favorites of Argentine diners in the eateries and cantinas reopened less than 50 years after their almost total extinction. While young people in their twenties fill the breweries and hamburger establishments, those between 30 and 50 years old only want to taste a good Milanese with puree that meets the two fundamental requirements of national cuisine: quality plus quantity.
Of course, the new professionals incorporated other perspectives that improve the above. A healthier treatment of food, the use of natural ingredients with fewer chemical treatments and, above all, awareness when cooking seasonal products are some of the new (and good) dogmas of today's chefs.
In short…if the forgetful walker of The winds If he had continued on and arrived in Buenos Aires, we would find him sitting, very smiling, trying some delicious sweetbreads at “La Cabrera” or the beautiful provoleta flambéed in whiskey served at “Yiyo El Zeneize”.
The prose of The winds It leads us to think and feel like the character. We understand? Of course. How can we not be distressed if everything known and pleasant disappears? Who wants to live in a world without printed books, without pictures with paintings hanging on walls... without barbecues with achuras?
A world, finally, without big or small stories, written like the gods by the indefinable genius of Mario Vargas Llosa.
Source: Infobae.com