The Imprint of Mario Vargas Llosa in Cochabamba: The “Eden” Where He Learned to Read

“I learned to read at five years old, in Brother Justiniano’s class, at La Salle school in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me in my life.” These words, with which Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away on April 13 in Lima, begins his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, greet visitors arriving in the alumni room of La Salle school, one of the most traditional educational institutions in the Bolivian city where the Peruvian-Spanish writer spent almost nine of his first 10 years, from 1937 to 1945.

In Praise of Reading and Fiction is the title of the text delivered by Vargas Llosa on December 7, 2010, in Stockholm, the first paragraph of which is fully reproduced on a golden plaque nailed to the left side of the entrance to the alumni room and beneath an enlarged photograph of the author of The Green House flanked by students and alumni of La Salle. This was taken in May 1986, when he had already become a renowned novelist and returned to Cochabamba. “It was taken there,” says Alison Peredo, director of the school, pointing to the exact location of the photograph inside a dim classroom adorned with mosaics celebrating the promotions of the educational establishment founded in 1925. “We won’t find his class photo, because he [Vargas Llosa] only studied until the fourth grade,” she clarifies.

Marco Antonio Macías, an architect and La Salle alumnus, recalls the photo taken in 1986, when he was 19 years old and had the fortune to pose with Vargas Llosa. He, his wife Patricia, and one of their children visited the school where “they were warmly welcomed and honored by the educational community of the Brothers of La Salle,” Macías recounts in an article published days after the writer’s death.

During that same visit to Cochabamba, Bolivian writer Gonzalo Lema, a confessed admirer of the author of The War of the End of the World, met him personally. The memory of that first encounter is so vivid for Lema that he can still pinpoint that it took place during a barbecue lunch on the day Brazil defeated Spain 1-0 in the 1986 World Cup. It was not the last time he had direct contact with Vargas Llosa, whom he considers the most famous man to have lived in Cochabamba: in 1998, during a subsequent visit to Bolivia, he accompanied him while he toured La Paz and Cochabamba, during which he shared the head table and introduced him to his entire family.

The ‘orphan’ of Ladislao Cabrera

“The Llosa family moved to Cochabamba, then a more visible city than the tiny, isolated town of Santa Cruz, and settled in a large house on Ladislao Cabrera Street, where my entire childhood took place. I remember it as an Eden,” Vargas Llosa recounts in the opening pages of The Fish in the Water, his memoir. They arrived at that Eden because his maternal grandfather was hired to manage a cotton plantation in the town of Saipina (Santa Cruz) and because his mother needed to escape the provincial gossip of Arequipa in the late thirties, where she had married a man who abandoned her shortly before Mario was born.

However, during his time in Cochabamba, the future writer believed the lie that he was an orphan. “From this time, there was a photograph of him, very handsome, in a naval uniform, that adorned my nightstand throughout my childhood in Cochabamba, and that I apparently kissed as I got into bed, saying goodnight to my ‘daddy who is in heaven,” he recounts in his memoirs. His only family was maternal, consisting of his mother, grandparents, some uncles, and a few cousins with whom he lived until late 1945 in the house with three courtyards on Ladislao Cabrera, where “we replayed the Tarzan movies and serials that we watched on Sundays” and where “there were always chickens and, for a time, a goat that they brought from Saipina” and “a chatty parrot who […] squawked like I did.”

In that large house in the historic center of Cochabamba, Liz Tapia, a Cochabamban communicator now based in La Paz, lived decades later. The daughter of a couple who bought the property in the second half of the 20th century, Tapia lived there from 1978 to 2002, a period during which she recalls having recorded Vargas Llosa’s visit at least three times. The most memorable occurred in 1998 when he dedicated a book to her mother, “Carmen widow of Tapia, with much nostalgia for the house on Ladislao Cabrera where I was a happy child.”

The Tapia family sold the property in 2021 and, although Liz left even before, she still misses returning to that place where she, like the author of Conversation in the Cathedral, was also happy. Her fondness for the large house led her to propose to the Cochabamba municipality that it be declared a historical heritage site. A proposal that has gained momentum following the death of the Peruvian storyteller. Ronald MacLean, a former Bolivian minister, suggested to the Cochabamba City Hall that the house on Ladislao Cabrera be declared municipal heritage, with the aim of creating a museum dedicated to the author who “considered having lived in Cochabamba the most beautiful time of his life, his most cherished childhood memory […], his idea of paradise.” Today, the blue-painted house with a sloping roof is occupied by a liquor store and a screen printing company.

A library as heritage

“Nothing would make me happier than knowing that the people of Cochabamba, a fondness I always keep in my memory, are reading many books from my personal library,” Vargas Llosa writes in a letter dated May 2, 2023, sent to the representatives of the Patiño Foundation in Cochabamba. The letter speaks of the enduring affection he has for the city where he spent his childhood, where his two wives (Julia Urquidi and Patricia Llosa) were born, to which he returned as an essential figure in Spanish literature, and to which he donated 4,600 books from his library shortly before his death.

The Patiño Foundation managed and received Vargas Llosa’s publications between 2023 and 2024, says Angélica Gumucio, coordinator of the Pedagogical Laboratory of the institution that received the donation. Although the titles are still being cataloged, a small portion has already been used to create an exhibit at the Cochabamba Book Fair last October. They were classified into three groups: special editions of Vargas Llosa’s books, publications dedicated to his life and work, and titles by other authors. Among these latter titles are works by writers he revered, such as Jorge Luis Borges and William Faulkner, in whose pages he left handwritten annotations and brief essays.

The handwritten notes in the books reveal the rigor with which the author of The Green House approached reading. It is no coincidence that he stated upon receiving the Nobel: reading was the most important thing that ever happened to him in life. And it happened in Cochabamba, the city to which he left 4,600 books in his final years, along with the hope of sharing the joy that written words had afforded him. As he mentions in his 2023 letter, recognizing that “nothing could make me as happy as having a library there (in Cochabamba), open to all audiences, with my books at the service of that society.”