Where does Bayly come from? At first glance his literary antecedents are clear. Bayly comes directly from Vargas Llosa, especially from Conversation in the Cathedral, a novel that is, among many other things, an extremely comprehensive sampler of Peruvian Spanish. Vargas Llosa’s ear finds in Bayly’s ear its most talented disciple. Yo amo a mi mami, on the other hand, reminds me of Bryce Echenique’s A World for Julius. Of course, Vargas Llosa’s prose is weightier than Bryce Echenique’s, though the weightiness of the latter isn’t insignificant. Bayly shares with Bryce the impulse to launch himself headlong, leaving the formal plotting of the novel for later, or for right this minute, to be embarked upon in the very act of writing: Bryce and Bayly are devourers of blank pages. This isn’t the only thing they have in common: they both possess an apparently incorrigible sense of humor, they’re both autobiographical writers (or so it seems, though it doesn’t pay to trust some autobiographies), both have English last names, which is saying a lot in a country like Peru, and both are “men and sentimental,” as the song goes.
Of course, there are things that make them different and even distance them from each other, but I don’t think this is the moment to make an inventory of those dissimiliarities. In fact, another similarity occurs to me: tenderness, a kind of compassionate gaze that some see in Bryce but refuse to see in Bayly. About Baylian compassion, however, which is sometimes disguised as fierceness and cynicism, I’ll have more to say later.
A clarification, possibly unnecessary. One has to be very brave to write about homosexuality in Peru. One has to be very brave to write from homosexuality in Peru. Especially if one does it without begging the pardon of anyone, whether of those on the Right or those on the Left, who in these matters are as identical as two peas in a pod, which should lead us to the conclusion that the Left isn’t the Left it claims to be, though the Right really is the Right.
A while ago, talking to Jesús Ferrero, I was told the story of a trip he took to Guatemala. Ferrero arrives in Guatemala, gets a taxi since no one has come to pick him up at the airport, and heads into the strange city. Night is falling and the streets flow into each other as if the taxi were moving through a labyrinth, the effect magnified by the darkness and the public lighting, which we should presume deficient or possibly excessive. Suddenly the taxi driver stops, whether confused or frightened we don’t know, to consult a map of the city and Ferrero looks out the window at a group of transvestites gathered around a fire in the middle of a side street. This is it, says the driver: you can get out here. Ferrero gets out with his suitcase in his hand, and is left alone in the middle of the street without another soul in sight. The taxi leaves and the fiercest transvestites in the world come up to him. They’re Indians or mestizos. Indians, yes, or urban mestizos swept into the capital by the country’s convulsions. They’re prostitutes in the bodies of raped men. They’re men in strange bodies and in a strange city that they try vainly to remake in their own image: an alien city within a Central American capital with a bloody past. In any case, they look nothing like European transvestites. They are to European transvestites what a velociraptor is to a heron. And these barbarians moved in on Ferrero like urban guerrillas, they circled him, surrounded him, cut off any possible escape routes, and then, when things looked blackest for the novelist, they began to talk to him, exchanging remarks about colonial architecture, for example, or about Guatemala City’s maze of streets, and they ask him where he comes from, and then, with a graciousness that I can only call Mayan graciousness or pre-Colombian courtesy, they show him the right way to go, and they even walk with him for a while, because at that time of night and in that part of the city everything is dangerous, though for them nothing is dangerous.
Bayly’s words. In the same way that there is sassy behavior in Bayly’s novel, there are also lots of patas. This word has always seemed mysterious to me. A pata is a friend. Where does the word pata come from? It’s crisp, easy to pronounce, and the only word that measures up to it is the Mexican cuate, which also means friend and of whose etymology I’m equally ignorant, though everything indicates that cuate means “twin.”
Bayly’s patas aren’t like Rulfo’s cuates, clearly, or like the patas of Salvador Bondy, who I don’t think ever used the term, though they share the same shadowy provenance, because patas and cuates can both come to seem like creatures straight out of hell, but they’re all we’ve got, all we can trust.
Bayly’s characters. In Yo amo a mi mami, there’s a return appearance of the character I think is his most lovable, El Papapa, who previously appeared in Los últimos días de La Prensa [The Last Days of The Press]. One of El Papapa’s traits is that when he goes to the bathroom to defecate he says “I’m going to feed the Chileans.” Extremely offensive and at the same time playful. I think he said the same thing in Los últimos días de La Prensa. As a Chilean, I find it a charming expression. His son-in-law, Jimmy’s father, meanwhile, is an admirer of Pinochet. This means that when Jimmy’s father goes to the bathroom he isn’t feeding the Chileans, at least not consciously.
There are those who reproach Bayly for his neglect of form. On rare occasions, I’ve been one of them. But actually I don’t think that Bayly neglects the formal aspect so much as it might seem at first glance. Especially beginning with his third novel, I think he tries to seek a form that suits his narrative strength, his inexhaustible verbal flow. Because let’s be clear: Bayly’s strength as a storyteller, his strength as a writer of dialogue, his ability to escape from any predicament, is extraordinary. Enough to satisfy any writer. No one asks Balzac to be Stendhal. All anyone asks of Balzac is that he be God. What we should demand of Bayly isn’t formal perfection but worlds, crowds, soap operas of real life, torrents of humor, what we should demand of Bayly is what he’s already giving us: the most wonderful ear in new Spanish fiction, an often poignant gaze that turns inward without complacency and that is turned on others with humor and irony and also tenderness, the tenderness of a survivor of a time that’s already past and that probably only existed in the narrator’s dreams, a Peru in its death throes or a Peru that is now only a glimmer of what it once was.
What a relief to read Bayly after so many inscrutable or pathetic figures who confuse realism with dogmatism, information with proclamation. What a relief Bayly’s writing is after the interminable lineup of talentless Latin American chest-thumpers, of snobs with their corseted prose, of pontificating bureaucratic heroes of the proletariat. What a relief to read someone who has the narrative will not to avoid almost anything.