BLOG

This is the text i read to the public to introduce myself:

This morning, I got up very early. I put the kettle on and made myself a cup of tea. Holding the cup in both hands, I walked over to the window. From the twelfth floor, what I could see was a forest of tower-like buildings, spaced out across long stretches of asphalt roads and sidewalks lined with trees. The sounds that reached me were the birds that inhabited them, mingled with distant barking and the cars that had already begun to circulate along the broad avenues surrounding the San Felipe residential complex. It was six o’clock, and I still had no idea what I would say tonight.

Would anyone come? I imagined myself standing before an audience watching me in silence. It wasn’t the first time I had done this. I had dreamed about it.

Words almost always come more easily when I’m moving, when what lies before me is more than just my own space. I was certain that in the other towers there were hundreds of people who, like me, were looking out of their windows. What could they be thinking?

Tonight, the place we inhabit belongs to everyone, and it will continue to do so until the night melts away. Then we will return to our own private shelters.

This morning, the traffic could not quite drown out the birdsong or its echoes. How beautiful, I thought. Something like a large-scale site-specific installation. I took a deep breath and thought of wars, so distant from our everyday lives: ancient cities, other buildings, communities, hospitals, now reduced to dust. There are no birds there to sing each morning.

I love coming to Lima and standing by the window, looking and listening. Everything seems to be intertwined. The barking, the tender birdsong, and the traffic grew louder as dawn advanced. But I still don’t know what I’ll say tonight, I thought.

I could begin by telling them that the ten stories collected in this book belong to different periods of my life. The oldest is Oh Claire, featuring a character who is almost an adolescent. A middle-class girl who, apart from going to the beach and dreaming of someone who will rescue her, has no idea what she will do that morning. Claire begins her day by looking at herself in the mirror, loathing what is happening to her skin. She has pimples, and she begins to squeeze them as she looks at herself in the mirror, right there in front of the reader.

Claire’s life unfolds at the same age I was when I wrote the story. The difference is that, back then, the author was a Sanmarquina, an archaeology student with peculiar convictions that were challenged by her own family, a moderately intellectual household where conflicts arose that were difficult to decipher.

When I rediscovered the stories you will hopefully read, I was no longer in Peru. I was in my other home, England, a home that took me time to settle into. During the twenty-four years that had passed since I left my country, many things happened. To begin with, I stopped writing. I did all kinds of things just to survive. I could even say, melodramatically, that I suffered. But today, after this long journey, I have finally decided to bring Claire, the girl in my story, out into the light and out of anonymity, along with the other characters who transform into birds. They are human beings laden with emotions, changing their skin and fleeing into the night of Lima, where they disappear.

There is something in me that has made me strong, very strong, and that is finally having accepted my own vulnerability. Without fear, I try a little of this and a little of that. Without shame or guilt, I go to the hair salon and let them put eyelash extensions on me for tonight’s book presentation. Have I lost my sense of propriety? I wonder.

No. What I have lost is a good portion of the anger that accumulates inside us without our realizing it, keeping us from resting or appreciating others. We become so, so absorbed in our own convictions that we forget to listen to other voices.