the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt four)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

Toño asked him to wait while he ran to his room for his notebook. He didn’t want to miss anything that might prove important. He came back sweating, thirsty for another beer despite his finances, but thinking that Collau had lent him money to research, not to wet his whistle. He bombarded Pedro with questions, starting from the beginning, with Lalo’s origins. Toño supposed that someone close to Lalo, his mother or his father, perhaps, had taught him the guitar, but Pedro Caballero told him otherwise: Lalo Molfino had been an orphan. He never knew who his real parents were.

“And where he came from?” Toño asked, scribbling frantically.

“He never knew that either, I think,” Pedro said with a shrug. “Neither did Father Molfino, who raised him. At least he said he didn’t.”

the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt three)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

They both fell silent for a while, Toño because he was afraid if he spoke, his voice would crack and he would make a scene in front of her. That urge to cry wouldn’t leave him—and over a person he’d never spoken a word to in his life! In that moment, he made a decision. Come hell or high water, he would write a book about Lalo Molfino. He would comb through the newspapers and magazines, would talk with all the people who had known him. This book would be an homage to his talent, but also much more: he would at last put to paper those ideas about the Peruvian vals he had entertained so often as he’d observed the effect the music had on its public, epitomized in Lalo’s concert in Abajo el Puente. He would write the book even if he couldn’t find a publisher, make it known that the greatest guitarist in the world had been born here in Peru. His heart was beating faster than usual—that was Cecilia’s presence—and it gave him courage. Her scent was delicate like fresh water, but fragrant. She was smiling, beautiful, graceful, as always. He imagined the guitarist’s body lying in a potter’s field, and it infuriated him to his depths. Not even the death of Hermógenes A. Morones had affected him so. At the latter’s wake, the crowd was teeming, and even the president of the republic had sent a wreath. But now, Lalo was forgotten. It wasn’t fair. Toño would write his book about Peruvian music, even if he had to pay from his own pocket to publish it, and he was sure he would make it a fitting homage to Lalo and a contribution toward solving the great problems that plagued the nation.

the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt two)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

“You knew him well, then,” Toño concluded, deciding to take another sip of his chamomile tea, which was ice cold, as he’d expected. Cecilia had ordered, as always, tea with lemon and a bottle of mineral water.

“He had great gifts, you know,” she said. “But he was also vain, smug, incredibly difficult. A neurotic the likes of which I’ve never seen. He refused to play with the rest of the band, he wanted the stage for himself alone. The whole company hated him. They called him ‘the one and only.’ He never talked to them, and everyone thought he looked down on them. Of course, he played the guitar like a dream. But if I hadn’t fired him, the whole company would have quit on me. That last day, when he came to say goodbye, was the only time I ever saw him sad. ‘I give you my silence,’ he said, and departed, almost ran off. I don’t know what he meant by that: I give you my silence. Does that mean anything to you?”

“When I heard him playing at Abajo el Puente, a silence fell like you hear at times in the bullring,” Toño said. “It touches my soul, him having said that. I give you my silence. Of course he was in love with you, Cecilia.”

the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt one)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

Toño Azpilcueta was a scholar of creole music—all of it, from the coastal and mountain varieties to the versions played in the Amazon. He had dedicated his life to it, and had won the distinction—naturally worthless in monetary terms—of being known as the country’s greatest expert in Peruvian music, especially after the death of the grandee of Puno, Professor Hermógenes A. Morones—the A stood for Artajerjes, he would eventually discover. He had met Morones when he was a student at the Colegio La Salle, not long after his father, an Italian immigrant with a Basque surname, had rented the small house in La Perla where Toño would grow up. Toño earned his bachelor’s degree at the National University of San Marcos, and his thesis on the Peruvian vals was overseen by Morones, whose assistant and favorite disciple he had become. Toño’s work expanded upon Morones’s own studies and findings concerning regional music and dance.

In his third year, the professor allowed Toño to teach several classes, and it was expected in San Marcos that, when the master retired, Toño Azpilcueta would inherit his chair. Toño took this for granted as well. For this reason, upon finishing his five years of study in the School of Arts and Letters, he began research for a doctoral dissertation to be entitled “The Street Cries of Lima,” dedicated, naturally, to Morones.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt sixteen)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

“Again,” wrote the poet John Ashbery in his review of the MoMA show, “we are reminded that the twentieth century, whatever else it may be, is the century of Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein.” Ashbery was part of a group of young New York artists—musicians, painters, actors, poets—who congregated in Greenwich Village dive bars (the Cedar Tavern; the San Remo). In this circle, Stein’s books were read avidly, tattered copies passed around and discussed between friends over cheap beer and Martinis. One of Ashbery’s closest friends was the poet Frank O’Hara, who as an undergraduate at Harvard had written a term paper on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which he described as “one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone.” In his poem “Memorial Days 1950”—his announcement of himself as an artist, which features an image of Picasso chopping through dead art with an axe—O’Hara described his intention to complete “several last things / Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for.” He took her as a model of immediacy and directness, drawing on her multiplicity of meaning and her American idiom, which he inflected with a cool contemporary lyricism.

To Ashbery, O’Hara and their peers, Stein offered a model of a life devoted entirely to art—an uncompromising commitment to her vision in the face of mockery, rejection, and misunderstanding. They admired the way she turned her home into a crucible of artistic innovation; they read her lectures not as self-aggrandizement but as multifaceted works of aesthetic theory. Above all, they were interested in her writing, and the possibilities it offered to theirs. To many poets, of the New York School and beyond, the way Stein took language apart, violating all the rules of grammar, offered a blueprint for their own probings of form, memory, and voice. To artists pioneering new varieties of pop art or abstraction, her repetition and her nonrepresentational use of words offered a literary equivalent to the freedom they sought in painting, sculpture, or collage. And to theatre directors, actors, dancers, and musicians, her exploration of words’ sonic quality lent itself perfectly to cross-disciplinary performance, the form perhaps most on the ascendance in postwar New York. Stein was part of more than one revolution” after her death, across an ocean, she founds readers who would take her work utterly seriously, and build on its foundations with an explosion of creativity that would shape every notion of twentieth-century art.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt fifteen)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The news, which broke in January 1968, that Gertrude Stein’s collection was up for sale set the New York art world abuzz with excitement. A bevy of French and American lawyers, acting on behalf of Allan Stein’s three children, worked around the clock to remove the paintings from Paris before the French government could prevent their export. The Museum of Modern Art was eager to acquire six of the best Picassos, but the Steins had set the condition that the works—thirty-eight by Picasso and nine by Juan Gris—must be sold together as a single collection, independently valued at $6.8 million. The museum’s trustee David Rockefeller made a proposition to four of his colleagues on the board: that they club together to purchase the collection in its entirety, and pledge to donate six paintings to MoMA, with the rest to be shared among themselves. The syndicate prevailed, and on the afternoon of December 14, 1968, the five men met in a back room of the museum, leaned the paintings against the walls, and drew lots from an old felt hat to determine the order in which they would select works for their private collections. Rockefeller went first, and chose Young Girl with a Flower Basket, which (despite Gertrude’s dislike of the legs) she and Leo had bought in 1905 for $30. It was now valued at almost a million dollars.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt fourteen)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The writing of her memoir, however, was interrupted by a bitter dispute. Multiple high-profile art robberies had hit the headlines in recent years, which had heightened the anxiety of Allan Stein’s widow, Roubina, that her children’s inheritance remained in the care of a frail, possibly erratic old woman, protected only by ancient wooden shutters which could easily be breached. Over the years the estate’s lawyer, Edgar Allan Poe, had often recommended reevaluating the paintings, since their value had increased so greatly that the current insurance was no longer adequate; he also urged Toklas to consider placing them in a safer location than the apartment, which she staunchly refused to do. In 1960, Roubina Stein was alerted that a Picasso drawing, labeled as once belonging to the Stein collection, had sold at auction for around $10,000. Picasso’s fame was booming: his 1905 painting La Belle Hollandaise had recently garnered the highest price ever commanded by a living artist, while his retrospective that year at London’s Tate Gallery had opened to enormous fanfare, with a party featuring flamenco dancers and a special after-hours viewing attended by the queen. Shocked to discover one of the Steins’ works on the secondary market, Roubina demanded a new inventory be made of the collection, which revealed that it had depleted since Stein’s death: a portfolio of Picasso’s drawing and an oil painting, Man in Top Hat, had vanished without a trace.

Toklas calmly explained to Roubina’s personal lawyer, Bernard Dupré, that she had sold these works to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler back in 1953, when Van Vechten needed funds to guarantee the Yale Edition. Roubina was furious that Toklas had made a sale without consulting her, and at a fee (set, Toklas retorted, by Picasso himself) she considered far below market rate. She brought a legal action against Toklas, complaining that she left the collection unguarded for prolonged periods when she was away from home on her regular trips to the baths at Acqui in Italy (which helped with her arthritis), and that even when she was in residence, the apartment was vulnerable to intruders. Roubina demanded that the collection be declared “endangered,” and that all the artworks should be removed at once to a safe, dry, guarded place: the Chase Manhattan bank vault in Paris.