SA: As I read Bel Canto, I imagined the mise en scène in two ways: I did the usual mental translation of novel-into-film that I do when I read a realistic novel, but I also read it as novel-into-opera. Of course, a story in which an opera singer is held hostage by guerillas need not necessarily be seen as the basis for an opera, but Bel Canto is clearly that. Do you agree with this reading?
AP: I do. I wanted somehow to get all of those elements that I love about opera into a novel. I wanted to write a book that would be like an opera in its structure, its grandeur, its musicality, its melodrama.
SA: Really — melodrama?
AP: Writers are really discouraged from being melodramatic. Certainly as a writing teacher I try to turn my students away from melodrama. And yet opera is so wonderfully melodramatic. I wanted to write a book that would be flat-out melodramatic in that operatic way.
SA: I can’t remember a single melodramatic passage in Bel Canto.
AP: Well, it is and it isn’t a melodrama. It’s not melodramatic in a bad soap-opera kind of way, I would hope, but it has all of the elements of melodrama.
SA: But everything is earned, which is never the case in a flat-out melodrama, and not often the case in plenty of operas, for that matter. It takes a long time for the principal romances to develop in Bel Canto, and longer still before the lovers are in bed together. Everything is totally believable on a human scale, in terms of the progress of time and relationships.
AP: Right. But I was thinking about a core concept of melodrama when writing this book. That it is larger than life. Everything is sort of worse than you can imagine and better than you can imagine.
SA: Well, then, let’s talk a bit about the reality behind this. Because an obvious source of inspiration for Bel Canto was the guerilla seizure of the Japanese embassy in Lima a few years ago. That also stretched over several months, I believe. [On December 17th, 1996, fourteen heavily armed members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement （MRTA） seized more than 400 people attending a diplomatic reception at the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima. On April 22, 1997, Peruvian special forces launched a raid on the embassy compound, killing all fourteen of the MRTA insurgents and freeing the remaining seventy-two hostages.]
AP: You know, nobody gets that.
SA: Really?
AP: Of all the people who’ve read the book, maybe three people have said that to me. And I find it fascinating because I thought that the response would be just the opposite: “How dare you co-opt this thing that happened to these people!” But nobody has a clue.
SA: Well, that’s good old American obliviousness for you, I guess. But to be fair, at one point in the book it’s observed that, after a few weeks, life has returned to normal in the city where this “hostage drama” is playing out. And that’s exactly what happened in reality, I think. Certainly by the time the military went in and killed all the guerillas, the response up here was, “Oh, right — that.”
AP: Right.
SA: How much research did you do into this actual incident? Did you visit Peru?
AP: It’s sort of a funny story because it’s one of those classic pointless novel-research junkets in one sense. I wanted to go to Peru, I felt I owed it to the book, but I kept putting it off. The whole idea made me nervous. I don’t speak Spanish; I knew almost nothing about Peru. Finally, Karl, my long-term person, sort of pushed me into doing it. He said, “You need to go to Peru, so let’s go.” The trip got to be a little complicated. Originally, I was going to set the book not in Lima but up in the mountains, because I wanted to do something with altitude sickness and its affect on the characters. So we went up to La Paz and Lake Titicaca as well.
SA: Did you experience altitude sickness?
AP: Well, that’s just the thing — it goes away after a few days, so it wasn’t going to work for the book. It wouldn’t have been interesting, because the book takes place over such a long period of time. So we got to Lima at about ten o’clock at night and asked our driver to take us in the morning over to the Japanese embassy, and he said, “No, we don’t take people over there on tours. We don’t like to talk about that.” Finally we convinced him to at least drive us by that same night. We get to this very nice neighborhood, which could be a very nice neighborhood anywhere, and of course there’s no embassy. The building had been torn down. There are plans to build a memorial there eventually, but for now it’s just an empty lot with a wall surrounding it. You can’t see over the wall and there’s nothing to see anyway. So we pass the wall and I say thank you very much, and we drive on. Karl says to me, “That’s it? We came to Peru for that? You’re finished with your research?” [Laughs] We didn’t even get out of the car. I’m sure I could have written the book without seeing it, but it was good to be there in some indefinable way.
SA: It was an empty space that you had to fill in, repopulate, bring back to life.
AP: Sure.
SA: And actually being in Lima must have helped with some shading.
AP: Small details, tiny things. For example, Beatrice complains at some point that she wants to be outside again, walking down the street and having men honk their horns at her. That I picked up there — not because anyone was honking at me, of course! [Laughs] But when a young woman walks down the street in Lima, every man who drives by toots the horn at her. Two taps, three taps: it’s a kind of Morse code of attractiveness. Those are the kinds of things you pick up, the little cultural nuances.
SA: Like the soap operas. There’s something about that Latin American passion for soap operas. I loved that early scene of the President sitting on the edge of the bed, watching his soap.
AP: You know, that detail is true: [former Peruvian President Alberto] Fujimori was obsessed with soap operas and wouldn’t hold meetings during a broadcast.
SA: Was he supposed to have been present at that party at the Japanese embassy and cancelled because of a soap opera, or is that your embellishment?
AP: That’s my embellishment, but he did have a big soap opera problem.
SA: So what were the guerillas doing in that embassy? What was their goal, do we know?
AP: Their goal was to free their jailed comrades but also to draw attention to the Peruvian prison system, which is as brutal and inhumane as they come. They basically bury people alive in these mountain prisons. The cells are dug into the mountains along a network of tunnels — little rooms you can’t stand up in. They’re truly, truly horrible.
SA: A fact brought to the fore again recently by the Berenson case. [American Lori Berenson, then twenty-six, was convicted in 1996 by a secret military court of conspiring with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to attack Peru’s congress. A life sentence in prison was voided by a military court in August of 2000 and a new civil trial of the case commenced in March of 2001.]
AP: Exactly. And so their goal was to call attention to that. Now, I don’t want to seem to be sympathetic to people who take others hostage, but I think these people had a pretty solid argument.
SA: The Vice President’s house in your book, by contrast, is precisely not a hellhole. It’s a place of refuge where the best human qualities may blossom. Apropos of that, let me just read aloud this lovely epigraph you chose from The Magic Flute, which, come to think of it, is also a kind of hostage drama.