Peruvian writer Luis Fernando Cueto won the XXIX Julio Ramón Ribeyro Short Novel Prize, awarded by the Central Reserve Bank of Peru (BCRP), for his novel "Los ojos del cielo" (The Eyes of the Sky), which tells the story of author José María Arguedas through the voice of his first wife, Celia Bustamante.
In an interview, Cueto said the novel was not a fictionalized biography but a fictionalized memoir. He said Bustamante, in old age, recalls everything she lived through with Arguedas during the 27 years they were together, and that memory, unlike history, allows for invention and fantasy.
Cueto explained that the project grew out of research he began around 25 years earlier, after publishing his 2006 novel "Llora corazón," which was narrated by Arguedas's niece Beatriz and depicted the writer's time in Chimbote while composing "El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo." He said he gathered so much material over the years that he originally considered writing a straightforward biography before settling on the novelized memoir format.
Arguedas and Chimbote
Cueto said there is no place in Peru where Arguedas feels more intimate than Chimbote, more so than in Apurimac or Andahuaylas, where the writer was born but spent little time before moving to Ayacucho and later San Juan de Lucanas as a child. He said Chimbote residents believe Arguedas shaped the town's identity, with local behaviour reflecting two extremes he wrote about: the character known as "loco Moncada," an almost poetic, deluded figure, and businessman Luis Banchero Rossi, representing ruthless capitalism. Cueto described this as an example of how literature can influence reality just as reality influenced Arguedas's fiction.
Admiration, love and ambition
Asked whether Bustamante's devotion to Arguedas leaned more toward admiration than romantic love, Cueto said Bustamante discovered him as a raw talent she felt compelled to polish, admiring him first and coming to love him afterward, though he said he could not be certain there was love on both sides. He said he believed there was love, more from her side than his.
Cueto said that when Bustamante first read Arguedas's early work "Agua," the author was a nobody, and that she effectively made him, using her own reputation to advance his writing career. He said that when the couple divorced, Bustamante wrote to Arguedas saying she had staked everything on him, and that he left her at an age when she could no longer rebuild her life.
A more cheerful Arguedas
Cueto said the novel presents a side of Arguedas marked by joy, unlike the image most people hold of him. He said he obtained audio recordings of Arguedas's lectures while researching the book and wondered how someone so lively and funny could have had suicidal thoughts. He said audiences at Arguedas's talks burst into laughter every few minutes, and that the writer had a particular way of joking, including making fun of himself over his background as a Quechua-speaking man from the highlands and as an orphan, showing extremes of mood.
A manipulator and a liar
The novel also portrays Arguedas as a manipulator. In one passage, an aunt of his tells Bustamante that he was a great liar. Cueto said Arguedas lied the way a child does, out of a need for recognition and affection, and that within his inner circle he liked to complain and play the victim as a way of manipulating people. Cueto said Bustamante eventually told Arguedas that he should not have married her, that what he needed was not a wife but a mother to raise him again.
Cueto said it was not his intention going in, but that he unconsciously sought to strip away the cultural hero and present the human being in his raw state, someone brilliant, with flashes of brilliance but also many shadows.
An incurable problem
Cueto said psychiatrist Lola Hoffmann told Bustamante that Arguedas's problem was incurable. He said this explains a man of sudden, volatile lows, who floated and sank, who had his preferences and who slipped away at night in search of adventures, a lesser-known side of Arguedas documented in letters to Hoffmann about his nighttime outings. Cueto said he would venture that Arguedas suffered from a kind of abandoned-child syndrome, a pattern he said he has also read about in biographies of other figures with the same problem, one of a child who lost his mother at a very young age and unconsciously sought her in the women he encountered, including prostitutes.
Cueto contrasted this with the public image of poet Cesar Vallejo, saying that where Vallejo is remembered mainly for sorrow, he was in fact also a charming figure who loved women, something that gets overlooked. Cueto said cultural heroes like Arguedas are protected by a prejudice that a writer's life must be as flawless as the quality of his books, which he called absurd, since a reader's admiration for a work should not depend on the author's personal life.
A decade as a police investigator
Asked whether he had once served in Peru's Investigative Police (PIP), Cueto confirmed he worked as a criminal investigator for ten years, serving in various units in Lima and in conflict zones, an experience he said fed into several of his novels. He said his mind constantly invents stories, even while he sleeps, and that Arguedas has been one of his greatest obsessions as a writer, prompting extensive research into the author's life for "Los ojos del cielo."
Where to find the book
"Los ojos del cielo" is available at the MUCEN store on Jiron Lampa 474, at the corner with Jiron Ucayali, in downtown Lima, priced at 30 soles. The jury for the BCRP novel competition was made up of Alonso Cueto, Francesca Denegri, Mirko Lauer, Karina Pacheco and Marcel Velasquez.
