04 · 17 · 25

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025) and LOS CACHORROS

Rafael Aviña

In mid-1977, I was in my third or fourth semester at the CCH Sur [College of Sciences and Humanities South Campus] and there I had the fortune of immersing myself in the so-called “Latin American boom”, which began in the sixties and questioned reality and conscience. Little by little, I began to read them all: Cortázar, Onetti, Donoso, García Márquez, Sábato, the Mexican writers and more, and I discovered that their plots penetrated deep into my emotions. However, of all of them, I favored two authors in particular, whose writing stimulated me in a different way from the others: the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, recently deceased.

Above all, Benedetti represented the intense love stories doomed to failure and society as a mirror of this; on the other hand, Vargas Llosa executed a crude and merciless portrait of the prevailing reality of both the lower classes and high society. Unlike Benedetti and his direct and apparently simple literature, Vargas Llosa explored with his language and his narrative something I had never faced before: a violence capable of shaking you and leaving a hole in your stomach, without missing the black humor, the stories of love and sensuality and shortly the History with a capital letter, the coups d'état and the social revolts. During those years, I read non-stop the stories of Los jefes and Los cachorros, The Time of the Hero, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and The War of the End of the World; those readings burned me from the inside.

Of course, cinema quickly turned to the Peruvian writer and the first film adaptation was Los cachorros (1971), directed by Jorge Fons; another exceptional version was The City and the Dogs (1985) [adaptation of The Time of the Hero], also by Peruvian director Francisco J. Lombardi, who was also responsible for the second translation of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1999); the first one was filmed in 1975 by Vargas Llosa himself and José María Gutiérrez Santos; Yaguar (1986), by Sebastián Alarcón was a Russian adaptation of The Time of the Hero; La tía Julia y el escribidor (1990), by Jon Amiel, and La fiesta del Chivo (2006), by Luis Llosa, including some television versions and short films.

Fons had captured the disenchantment of his own generation in middle-class environments in the exceptional third episode of Tu, yo, nosotros (1970) and followed it up in one of the key works of the 70's, adapted by Fons himself, Eduardo Luján and José Emilio Pacheco without credit: Los cachorros, with José Alonso, in one of his most memorable roles, and his violent love-hate relationship with the beautiful young woman and liberal model played by Helena Rojo, in a drama that questioned sexual complexes and phallocracy. Cuellar is a confused, aggressive and frustrated young man due to the trauma of his emasculation (as a child he was called Pinguita) caused by a Great Dane dog that accidentally breaks free from its cage and attacks him in the showers of the luxurious school where he attends the sixth grade, in a brutal and bloody scene that continues with the boy's mother (a splendid Carmen Montejo) troubled by a nervous breakdown.

As in his short film Caridad (1972), Fons shows in a brief but intense scene with hand-held camera, the bureaucratic labyrinths that are foreign to the pain of the other; in this case, the hospital where little Cuellar (Alejandro Rojo de la Vega) has been taken, while his friends and school officials try to know the boy's health condition, as doctors and nurses smoke or drink coffee. What follows is an intense and painful study of a physical and psychological castration that the protagonist resolves through violence, alcohol, speed and the fear of facing his condition; even more dramatic because Cuéllar is represented by an example of attractive manly beauty as was José Alonso in that time, who also wears an impressive wardrobe, surrounded not only by other young gallants and beauties of those years: Arsenio Campos, Pedro Damián, Luis Torner and Eduardo Cassab, Cecilia Pezet, Silvia Mariscal, Dunia Saldívar, Ivonne Govea and of course Helena and María Rojo.

Fascinating locations such as the Francisco Possenti Institute (the children's school) and above all the famous Casa Requena on Santa Veracruz Street in Colonia Guerrero, whose mansion is inhabited by Cuellar's family, the place where he and Tere (Helena Rojo) meet and fall in love until their amorous dalliance reaches a higher level and she discovers his situation: “What happened to you, what happened to you! There are many memorable scenes such as the one in which an alcoholic Alonso dances a danzón with his mother and lets her hair down in a kind of Oedipal seduction or the aggression against María Rojo in the Ajusco when she notices his mutilated state. In turn, the motorcycle ride with the scenery of the monumental bullring in Mexico City whose speed makes Tere cry, the sequence where, shortly before the consummation of sex, they are interrupted by the arrival of the father (Augusto Benedico), caused by Alonso. Likewise, the encounter, facilitated by the “friend” played by Gabriel Retes, to sleep with Tere or the heartbreaking final encounter of Tere and Cuellar in the photographic studio where she wears face paint and an afro wig.

Los cachorros is a masterful and terrible allegory of the pressure of a patriarchal society that forces men to respond “like men” in every aspect and the submission of women to this fact, sometimes with the maternal complicity. That virility consumed in the jaws of the dog transforms the protagonist into a pathetic voyeur and a batterer of men who grope their girlfriends at the movies or assault women to supply the absent phallus.

Mario Vargas Llosa belatedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was a brilliant and prodigious writer with several personal chiaroscuros and marked by political and social ambivalences: he rubbed shoulders with the left, the right and the monarchy, he had media moments such as assuring that the PRI¹ was the “Perfect Dictatorship” in a live program on Televisa where Octavio Paz and Enrique Krauze were present in 1990 and, in the twilight of his life, he decided to return to his homeland to die. On November 29, 2019, I went with my son to the Memory and Tolerance Museum to see one of the greatest writers alive at that time.

Today, six decades after the publication of his books The Time of the Hero (1963) and Los cachorros (1967) and 54 years after this film, macho behavior, bulling, the law of the jungle, the phallic representation of how a man should behave and the glorification of the army are more alive than ever in Mexico and in many other countries.

Translated by Adrik Díaz