A Fish in the Water by Mario Vargas Llosa — Read

At the end of July 1987, I found myself in the far north of Peru, on a half-deserted beach, where, years before, a young man from Piura and his wife had built several bungalows with the idea of renting them to tourists. Isolated, rustic, squeezed in between empty stretches of sand, rock cliffs, and the foamy waves of the Pacific, Punta Sal is one of the most beautiful sites in Peru. It has the air of a place outside time and history with its flocks of seabirds-gannets, pelicans, gulls, cormorants, little ducks, and albatrosses, which the locals call tijeretas-parading in orderly formations from the bright dawns to the blood-red twilights. The fishermen of this remote stretch of the Peruvian coast use rafts still made in exactly the same way as in pre-Hispanic times, simple and light: two or three tree trunks tied together and a pole that serves as both an oar and a rudder, with which the fisherman propels the craft along in sweeping gyres, as if tracing circles in the water. The sight of those rafts had greatly impressed me the first time I visited Punta Sal, since no doubt they were craft identical to the raft from Tumbes that, according to the chronicles of the Conquest, was found by Francisco Pizarro and his comrades, four centuries ago and not far from here, and taken to be the first concrete proof that the stories of a golden empire that had made them venture forth from Panama to these shores were a reality.

I was in Punta Sal with Patricia and my children, to spend the national holiday week there, far from winter in Lima. We had returned to Peru not long before from London, where, for some time now, we were in the habit of spending three months or so every year, and I had intended to take advantage of the stay in Punta Sal to correct the proofs of my latest novel, El hablador (The Storyteller), between dips in the ocean and to practice, from morning to night, the solitary vice: reading, constantly reading.