The Green House

Vargas Llosa splits The Green House across five ostensibly separate storylines: Anselmo, the outsider who builds the brothel that gives the novel its title on the edge of Piura; Bonifacia, a native girl removed from her community into a convent meant to civilize her before she ends up, after a chain of dispossessions, working in that same brothel; Fushía, a fugitive rubber trader exploiting indigenous labor deep in the Amazon; Jum, an indigenous leader resisting that exploitation; and Lituma, a native Piuran soldier moving between the desert and jungle settings. He refuses to tell any of them in straightforward chronological order, instead interweaving decades and locations within single chapters without clear signposting. The technique isn't difficulty for its own sake. It enacts the novel's actual argument, that Peru's coast and its Amazon interior, its Spanish-descended elite and its indigenous population, are not separate stories that happen to share a country but one continuous system of exploitation viewed from different, initially disorienting angles.

Bonifacia's trajectory, kidnapped from her community, civilized in a convent that treats indigenous girls as raw material to be converted rather than people with an existing culture, married briefly to a sergeant, then assaulted by his associates once he's imprisoned, and finally absorbed into prostitution at the Green House, traces nearly every institution the novel indicts, church, military, brothel, operating on the same underlying logic of extraction dressed in different justifications. Vargas Llosa doesn't soften any stage of that trajectory into redemption. Each institution that claims to be helping Bonifacia leaves her with fewer options than the one before it.

Fushía's decades-long career exploiting Aguaruna and Huambisa labor in the illegal rubber and skin trade, told largely in retrospect as he lies dying of leprosy on a riverboat, extends into the mid-twentieth century a system of Amazonian extraction whose most infamous atrocities, the Putumayo rubber boom's documented mass killings of indigenous workers a generation earlier, had already been internationally condemned by the time the novel's action takes place. Vargas Llosa's point in keeping Fushía's operation running decades after that reckoning is precise: the machinery of extraction didn't end when its worst excesses became a scandal, it just kept operating at a smaller, less spectacular scale, indifferent to the fact that the world had already agreed it was a crime.