Explore "A Fish in the Water" by Mario Vargas Llosa on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
After the Meetings for Freedom, in August and September 1987, I left for Europe, on October 2, as I was in the habit of doing every year during this period. But unlike other years, this time I took along, deep within me, despite Patricia's outbursts and her apocalyptic prophecies, the disease of politics. Before leaving Lima, in a televised program thanking those who had supported me in the mobilizations against nationalization, I said that I was returning "to my study and my books," but nobody believed me, beginning with my wife. I didn't believe it either.
In the two months that I was in Europe, as I was attending the premiere of my work La chunga, in a theater in Madrid, or was scribbling the drafts of my novel Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother) under the skylighted cupola of the Reading Room of the British Museum (just a step away from the little cubicle in which Marx had written a good part of Das Kapital), my mind often wandered from the fantasies of La chunga's male characters or from the erotic rites of Don Rigoberto and Doña Lucrecia to what was happening in Peru.