Mistress of Desires (NHB Modern Plays)

Mario Vargas Llosa, Sebastian Doggart

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780019543
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

A powerful exploration of machismo and sexual desire, by Peru's most acclaimed writer.

A Peruvian desert town in the 1940s. When a young girl disappears it seems that only La Chunga, the barwoman, knows the truth, but refuses to tell. Undeterred, the local men make up their own version of what happened in an attempt to extract the full story.

Taken from the collection, Latin American Plays, an essential introduction to the fascinating but largely unexplored theatre of Latin America, Mistress of Desires by Mario Vargas Llosa interweaves reality and fantasy in an erotically charged tale.

The full collection features new translations of five contemporary plays written by some of the region's most exciting writers. Each play is accompanied by an illuminating interview with its author conducted by the theatre director, Sebastian Doggart, who has also selected and translated the plays and provided an introductory history of Latin American drama.

The collection also includes:

Rappaccini's Daughter by Octavio Paz
A play by the Mexican Nobel laureate.

Night of the Assassins by José Triana
A controversial Cuban play in which three siblings plot the murder of their parents.

Saying Yes by Griselda Gambaro
A grotesque comedy from Argentina about man's inhumanity to man.

Orchids in the Moonlight by Carlos Fuentes
A dream play about two Mexican women exiled in Hollywood's maze of mirrors.

MISTRESS OF DESIRES

by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author’s Note

The plot of this play can be summed up in a few sentences. The action takes places in a small bar near the Stadium in Piura, a city surrounded by sand in northern Peru. The bar is run by La Chunga and is frequented by the poor and the shady. One night, one of the regulars, Josefino, comes in with his latest conquest, Meche, a young woman of strong and attractive features. La Chunga takes an immediate fancy to her. Josefino goads Meche to provoke La Chunga in order to amuse himself and his friends, a group of layabouts who call themselves the Boys. In the course of the evening, Josefino loses all his money at dice. To carry on playing, he hires out Meche to La Chunga. The two women spend the rest of the night together in La Chunga’s little room next to the bar. After that night, Meche disappears and nothing has been heard of her since. So what happened between the two women? The play begins a long time after that episode. At the same table in the bar, still playing dice, the Boys try in vain to persuade La Chunga to reveal her secret. As she won’t tell, they invent. Each Boy’s fantasies materialise on stage. They are, perhaps, fleeting images of the truth. Above all the Boys reveal their most secret desires. In La Chunga’s house, truth and lies, the past and the present co-exist, as they do in the human soul.

The play develops or touches upon several distinct themes as the story develops: love, desire, taboos, the relationship between man and woman, the fashions and customs of a particular sector of society, the status of women in a primitive and male-dominated society and the way that all of these objective factors are reflected in the realm of fantasy. I think that the play shows that real life does not condition and enslave desire; on the contrary, even the simplest man can use his imagination and his desires to break the bars of the prison that confines his body.

As in my two earlier plays, The Young Lady from Tacna and Kathie and the Hippopotamus, I have tried in Mistress of Desires to project through dramatic fiction the human totality of acts and dreams, facts and fantasies. The characters in the play are both themselves and their fantasies. They are creatures of flesh and blood whose destinies are conditioned by precise limitations – of being poor, marginalised, uneducated etc. In spite of their coarseness and the monotony of their existence, they have souls which can always escape to the relative freedom offered by man’s greatest gift: fantasy.

I use the expression ‘human totality’ to underline the obvious fact that man is an unbreakable unity of acts and desires; also, because this unity ought to be shown in performance, confronting the spectator with an integrated world, in which the man who speaks and the man who fantasises – he who is and he who imagines he is – make up an uninterrupted continuum, an obverse and an inverse which are easily confused, like those garments which can be worn either way round, making it impossible to tell which is the right side out.

I do not see why the theatre cannot be a suitable medium to represent the marriage, or rather the wedding, of human objectivity and subjectivity. Through stubborn prejudice, however, people tend to consider that a world which is ambiguous, evanescent, made up of sudden, timeless and arbitrary shades and movements, revolving around the imagination, and driven by desire cannot co-exist on stage with the world of objective life without creating insuperable difficulties for the director. I do not think that there is any explanation for this scepticism other than laziness and a fear of taking risks, that same fear which cripples any creative endeavour.

It is simply a question of creating theatre that plays deeply on theatricality and people’s aptitude for pretending and for multiplying themselves through situations and personalities different from their own. In the scenes in which the characters live out their dreams, they must indulge themselves, embody themselves, make a double of themselves like actors do when they go on stage, or as men and women do when they call on their imagination to enrich their existence, illusorily enacting what real life forbids or denies them.

Finding a technique of theatrical expression for this universally shared activity – enriching life through the creation of images and fictions – should be a stimulating challenge for those who want to renovate the theatre and explore new avenues, rather than continue cacophonously reworking the three canonical models of modern theatre which are starting to show signs of sclerosis: Brecht’s epic didacticism; the amusements of the theatre of the absurd; and the threats posed by the happenings and other variants on the text-bereft show. Theatre is, I am sure, a genre whose imagery is exceptionally good at portraying the disturbing labyrinth of angels, demons, and marvels in which our desires abide.

MVLl, Florence, July 9, 1985.

Note

The Spanish title, La Chunga, is a word used in northern Peru to refer to a strong woman at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. There is no equivalent in English. Vargas Llosa and I discussed an English title during our interview and, following various proposals, he agreed that Mistress of Desires was an appropriate English title. S.D.

La Chunga’s House

Piura, 1945.

La Chunga’s bar-restaurant is near the Stadium, in that slum of planks and matting which sprang out of the sands not long ago. It is located between the road to Sullana and the Grau barracks. It is large and square and, unlike many of the flimsy buildings in the neighbourhood, it has been properly constructed with adobe walls and a calamine roof. On the ground floor there are rough tables, benches and seats where customers sit, and a counter made of wooden beams. Behind the counter is the sooty, smoky kitchen. On a higher level, reached by a staircase which has only a few steps, is the room which no customer has ever seen: the boss’ bedroom. From there, La Chunga can watch through a window, concealed behind a floral-patterned curtain, and see everything that is happening below.

The customers in the bar are from the neighbourhood: soldiers on leave from the Grau barracks, football or boxing fans who have dropped in on their way to the Stadium, or construction workers from Buenos Aires, the new white neighbourhood which is making Piura into an expanding city.

La Chunga has a cook who sleeps in front of the stove and a boy who comes during the day to serve at the tables. She is always at the bar, usually standing. On a night like tonight, when there are few customers, just the four layabouts who call themselves the Boys and have been playing dice and drinking beer for some time, La Chunga can be seen rocking gently in her straw rocking-chair, creaking rhythmically, her eyes lost in the void. Is she submerged in her memories? Or is she just existing, her mind a blank?

She is a tall and ageless woman, with a hard face, smooth and taut skin, firm bones and forceful gestures. She looks at others unblinkingly. She has a mop of dark hair, tied back with a band, a cold mouth with thin lips which speak little and smile rarely. She wears short-sleeved blouses and skirts so unseductive that she looks like she could be wearing the uniform of a college for nuns. Sometimes she goes barefoot, at others she wears flat sandals. She is an efficient woman; she runs the place with an iron hand and she knows how to command respect. Her physical appearance, her severity and her terseness are intimidating, and hardly ever do drunks try and take liberties with her. She does not listen to confidences, nor is she susceptible to charm. She is not known to have a boyfriend, a lover, or even a friend. She seems determined to live always alone, dedicated to her business, body and soul. Except for the very brief episode with Meche – which confused the customers a great deal – nothing or no-one is known to have upset her routine. For as long as the Piuranos who frequent the place can remember, she has been standing gravely and motionlessly behind the bar. Does she go occasionally to the Variedades or the Municipal to see a movie? Does she ever take an afternoon walk in the Plaza de Armas to listen to an open-air recital? Does she go out to the Eguiguren waterfront or to the Puente Viejo to bathe in the river – if it has rained in the Cordillera – at the beginning of every summer? Does she watch the military parade on Fiestas Patrias among the crowd standing at the foot of the Monumento Grau?

She is not an easy woman to eng...