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placate this hunger, albeit in a distorted way. They are written and read so
that human beings may have the lives that they are not prepared to do with–
out. Within each novel, there stirs a rebellion, there beats a desire.
Does this mean that the novel is synonymous with unreality? That the
introspective buccaneers of Conrad, the languid Proustian aristocrats, the
anonymous little men punished by adversity of Franz Kafka and the eru–
dite metaphysicians of Borges's stories excite us or move us because they
have nothing to do with us, because it is impossible for us to identifY our
experiences with theirs? Of course not. One must tread carefully because
this road-of truth and lies in the world of fiction-is strewn with traps,
and the inviting oases that appear on the horizon are usually mirages.
What does it mean that a novel
always lies?
Not what the officials and
cadets thought at the Leoncio Prado Military School, where my first novel,
The Time
if
the Hero,
takes place-supposedly at least-when they burned
the book for being slanderous to their institution. Or what my first wife
thought when she read another of my novels,
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
Feeling that she had been wrongly portrayed in it, she published a book
seeking to restore the truth altered by the fiction. Of course, in both stories
there are more inventions, distortions and exaggerations than memories and,
when I wrote them, I never intended to be anecdotally faithful to events and
people that preceded or were outside the novel. In both cases, as in every–
thing that I have written, I started out from some experiences that were still
vivid in my memory and stimulated my imagination, and I imagined some–
thing that reflects these working materials in a very unfaithful way. One does
not write novels to recount life, but rather to transform it, by adding some–
thing. In the slim novels by the Frenchman Restif de la Bretonne, reality
could not be more photographic; they are a catalogue of French eighteenth–
century customs. In these laborious costumbrist sketches, in which
everything approximates to real life, we find, however, something different,
minimal but revolutionary. That in this world, men do not fall in love with
women because of the purity of their features, the elegance of their bodies,
their spiritual virtues and the like, but
exclusively
because of the beauty of
their feet (this has been called, for that reason,
bretonisme,
the fetishism of the
shoe). In a less crude and explicit, and also in a less conscious way, all novels
remake reality-embellishing or making it worse-just as the extravagant
Restif did with such delicious ingenuity. In these subtle or gross additions
to life-in which the novelist gives form to his secret obsessions-lies the
originality of a fiction. This originality is more profound the more it
expresses a general need and the more readers there are, through time and
space, that can identifY in this contraband smuggled into life the obscure
demons that disturb them. Could I, in the novels that I mentioned, have tried
to be scrupulously exact with my memories? Of course. But even
if
I had
