Hungering After Nobels

In the 1980s I worked as the secretary of the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Though the Centre itself never had more than four students at a time for its M.Phil programme while I was there, it was a lively focus for leftist politics (though my boss, David Brading, a historian of Mexico and devout Catholic, never gave much credence to any of it). The Sandinistas had finally overthrown Somoza in Nicaragua, and it was the early days of the revolution, before the levels of corruption and power grabs had tainted it. I was immersed in socialism and joined my academic and administrative colleagues in marches against Thatcher during the Miners Strike. It was when I first became interested in Liberation Theology.

The Centre had an endowed Chair funded by Venezuelan oil money, the Simón Bolívar professorship, which hosted Latin American men of letters (they were all men up until 2008). While I was there, the professor was Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist.

Fuentes was born in Panama to Mexican diplomats and lived in various different Latin American cities and in Washington, DC, where he was educated (his English was much better than that of most other holders of this Chair). He was handsome and debonair. My colleague Ana was his dedicated secretary. He had an office at the Centre which he almost never used, though he did hide a letter from his Venezuelan mistress in there once, a fact we discovered when Fuentes’ wife asked to be allowed into the office (how could Ana refuse?). We giggled about the imagined sparks at the dinner table that night.

Fuentes would come into the office I shared with Ana and dictate letters (he never learned to type and wrote all his novels longhand). Many of these letters were addressed to members of the Nobel literature committee, enclosing copies of translations. One of his predecessors as SB Chair was Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, who was in 2010 awarded this pinnacle, and who was obviously a source of great jealousy to Carlitos.

Fuentes died in 2012. All his courting of Nobel committee members was for naught. Remind you of anyone?