What is a nation? This is not a question for polite company. It sounds like the title of a German pamphlet from around 1935. When “nation” appears in public discourse, it’s usually nestled within an even scarier word: nationalism, ethnonationalism, white nationalism, Christian nationalism—ideas that lead to trouble.
But there is also a bright side to nationality. People call it “patriotism.” This summer, the United States will co-host the World Cup, and the country will be flooded with fans from every corner of the globe, each waving their national flag; few will be alarmed by the spike in nationalist fervor. Nor is soccer fandom the only example of (relatively) harmless nationalism. Who faults an Olympian athlete for wearing a flag? Who faults a poet for writing wistfully about home? Who faults Bad Bunny for singing, “Don’t let go of the flag” on his latest album?
The ambiguity of nationalism—of the fact that nations are born out of both love and hate, and that national pride can both nurture or destroy a people—is an abiding theme in the novels of the late, great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. His final work, I Give You My Silence, published now for the first time in English, approaches the question of nationhood not in the abstract terms of a sociologist or philosopher, but obliquely, through a kind of literary ventriloquism, in a hybrid form combining the novel and essay.
The main character in this comedy is Toño Azpilcueta, a scholar of Peruvian music, a frustrated academic-turned-freelance-journalist who develops what he thinks is a comprehensive theory of Peruvian identity, one that not only captures the essence of Peru but that could, he believes, cure Peru of injustice and inequality. His encounter with a mysterious guitarist, Lalo Molfino (loosely based on the Peruvian composer Felipe Pinglo Alva), inspires Toño to write a book developing his theory—one that will become a bestseller and make Toño famous. The comedy of the novel rests largely on the fate of Toño’s theory, which in turns seems both plausible and ridiculous.
Every other chapter in Vargas Llosa’s book (translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West) is a section from Toño’s book; they discuss various aspects of Peruvian identity from its Inca roots to its Spanish tongue, its majority Catholic faith, bullfighting, soccer and, most important for Toño, la música criolla. The traditional folk music of Peru that emerged in the 19th century, la música criolla, is a type of music that developed when the Viennese waltz arrived on Peruvian shores and mixed with Spanish, African and Andean influences. It is a rhythmic and guitar-driven genre, with poetic lyrics about love, death and passion.
Toño only ever hears Lalo Molfino play guitar once, but it changes his life:
It wasn’t just his skill as his fingers danced over the frets, playing notes that sounded as though they’d been invented on the spot. It was something more: wisdom, concentration, and discipline, talent, sure, but also something miraculous…. Tears bathed Toño’s face, his soul opened wide with longing, and he longed to embrace his countrymen, his brothers and sisters, who had witnessed this marvel.
Lalo Molfino dies soon thereafter, either by suicide or from tuberculosis, and Toño never hears his music again (no recordings exist). But Molfino’s performance was so moving that it convinces Toño that criollo music holds the key to understanding Peru. As he puts it in his book:
The vals [waltz] took root in our country, spreading first among the down-and-out, then climbing to the middle class and the aristocracy, and it has retained its position, touching every Peruvian family without exception. I remember an article by Ruperto Castillo in Folklore Nacional in which he tells of his surprise upon visiting a lost village in the middle of the Amazon where, he had supposed, civilization had not yet arrived. While there, he heard a Peruvian vals sung by the indigenous people in their own language. With its arrival in the deepest heart of the jungle, who can deny that it is truly a national music?
It is a romantic idea: that a nation is held together by a musical genre, rather than by an ethnic or racial identity. Vargas Llosa wrestles with the latter, identitarian view of nationalism in his early novels set in Peru—classics like The Time of the Hero (1963) or Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) as well as later historical novels like The Dream of the Celt. But the identitarian view is barely mentioned in I Give You My Silence. Toño is more interested in proposing a new idea of Peru than in arguing against what he believes is a false one.
Peruvian-ness, for Toño, is founded neither on a specific ethnicity nor on race. The Peruvian people are not one race or ethnicity but are the product of mestizaje, a term that does not really exist in English and denotes the mixing of ethnicities in Latin America after colonial rule. In Peru, the mestizo working class are called cholos, a term that can be used in a derogatory way. But for Toño, racial or ethnic purity is a dream for bigots; like la musica criolla, each Peruvian is, to a greater or lesser degree, a “mixture” of Inca, Spanish and African sources, along with later arrivals like the Japanese and Chinese, and no one type of “mixture” should be considered superior—or more Peruvian—than another.
Mestizaje exists throughout Latin America, so by itself it cannot define Peru. Instead, Toño suggests that Peru is defined by the criollo music that its mestizo people have produced, along with the unique sensibility that that music embodies: huachafería. “Any definition of huachafería…will allow essential elements of this diffuse, hard-to-define concept to slip through its innumerable gaps.”
Huachafería is a combination of tackiness, pretention and boldness. “The emblematic act of huachafería is that of the boxer with a battered face calling out for his mother, who is watching him on TV and praying for his victory, or maybe of the failed suicide who opens his eyes and asks for a priest to take his confession.” Lalo Molfino, the supreme criollo music guitarist, was huachafo.
Toño inflates huachafería into a quasi-existentialist way of life, a truly Peruvian way of being. It is hard to distinguish here between Toño’s views and those of Vargas Llosa, given that the chapter about huachafería in the novel was originally published by Vargas Llosa under his own name as a newspaper column in 1983.
Toño’s theory raises a few issues: Mestizaje, while a noble idea, has been deployed elsewhere in Latin America to oppress indigenous peoples; huachafería is an interesting aesthetic concept but too thin to work as a worldview. It is unclear how much of Toño’s theorizing we are meant to take seriously. Vargas Llosa, the ventriloquist, doesn’t say.
Regardless, I Give You My Silence is a beautiful work—relevant for everyone, not only Peruvians, because it provokes a deeper look into that universal, unavoidable question: “What is a nation?” It is a welcome reminder that fiction can be a more nimble vehicle for the exploration of ideas than the thinkpiece or the academic tract.
This article appears in June 2026.
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