Hay Festival Cartagena, day two : Colombia's got talent

Herta Müller’s face, projected above her tiny form onto a vast screen in Cartagena’s main theatre, looked as though it might have been filmed by Pabst or Fritz Lang. 

Her black hair was cut into a chin length bob, her wide pale eyes outlined in black, her mouth a bright red slit from which emerged the rolling, rasping German she learned growing up as a member of a minority in rural Romania in the 1.950s.

For some of us, the alienation effect was increased by a simultaneous translation into Spanish filtering into one ear (English was not offered), but that did nothing to minimise her expressive, haunted likeness to Lotte Lenya, and even, occasionally, to Louise Brooks.

The novelist said she did not learn Romanian until she arrived in Bucharest at the age of 15 in the late 1.960s. 

For a full year she almost didn’t speak at all, but she found Romanian “very melodious”. 

“Everyday language is grandiose, unordinary. 

I liked the language, I liked the taste of it, I felt like I wanted to eat it,” she said, adding : 

“Swear words are an art in Romanian.” (Some might conclude that she had translated some of that art into German. 

At a party later that night, Müller was heard to complain: “Was ist diese Discoscheiße?”)

Müller spoke mesmerisingly about her childhood, when, as an only child left to her own devices, she befriended the plants gave them names and stories, imagined they married one another, and got up to things when she wasn’t looking. 

But a story that at first seemed merely sweet morphed into one that said a great deal about the effect on the mind of living in a totalitarian regime. 

Because she knew them so well, Müller suspected some of the flowers of being collaborators. 

She began to blame the sun for shining on beaches that belonged to the dictator. “It doesn’t know who it’s dealing with!” she thought.

Müller, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for her novels about Romania’s crimes under communism and during the war, described being having her house bugged by the Securitate, and said that, unless the country learned from its mistakes, it would continue to make them. 

“Still, today, they deny there were Romanian personnel running the [Nazi] concentration camps, and no one knows who was responsible for the 2,000 people who were assassinated during the dictatorship,” she said, calling for the state archives to be opened. 

“No one talks about it. 

And history is repeating itself: in Romania today there is terrible anti-Semitism. 

The people from the old system are still there, and very active. 

They know each other, they protect each other. Why?” she asked. 

“What happened? It’s so important to know what happened.”

At the start of Mario Vargas Llosa's event politicians lined up to read out long paragraphs of citation, and pin things to his chest. 

He was given a medal, and a Miss World-style sash, and by the time the Mayor turned up to grant their “illustrious guest” the keys to the city, the 2,000-strong crowd in the convention centre grumbled as one giant herd of cattle. 

The words went on, and the audience resorted to a whistling and clapping tactic, until Vargas Llosa sat down with his eventual interlocutor to talk about books.

When the Nobel laureate was asked to look back half a century to the years of “El Boom”, the Latin American literary movement of which he was a staple member, he replied that he never knew he was Latin American until he moved to France. 

The Ethiopian born American novelist Dinaw Mengestu echoed this statement more politically later in the day, when he said, of identities granted by others : “As an American living in Paris I’m an expatriate; as an African in Paris I’m a refugee.”

Vargas Llosa said: “I thought of myself as a Peruvian who wanted to live in Paris. 

And what I discovered in Paris was Latin America: Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes.” (Those novelists were, respectively, Argentinian, Colombian and Mexican.) 

“Peru was part of a community,” he explained, “which shared certain things, including a certain freedom: it made us brothers. 

We were recognised and translated, and there was a friendship between us and this, which began in Europe, bounced back to Latin America. Until politics arrived to introduce its poison.

” Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa suggested, the most important thing is that “those books opened a door that has never closed”.

Walking through the streets of central Cartagena that evening, passersby were treated to an impromptu street performance by a stripper. 

Not a woman, and not really a drag artist either, but a large man in a shell suit whose girth uncannily resembled that of a pregnant woman. 

He turned on some music and stood next to the amp. 

He took off his top to reveal a very small, flat bikini top. 

Then he placed on his head what looked to be a yellow mop, and started dancing. 

He rolled his hips, he winked, he flicked his ankle and did something unspeakable with his muscles where the baby should be. 

And it was only when the whole low-tech act came together that we realised: he was a Shakira impersonator.

Colombians weren’t so slow to work it out. 

Apart from anything else, Shakira is a local hero, she was born about an hour away in Barranquilla, where there is a statue of her that is entirely black except for its yellow hair. 

And the impersonator himself is famous too. Nicknamed “Chanchiro” loosely, “Fatty” or “Piglet”  he appeared on Colombia Tiene Talento (yes, really: Colombia’s Got Talent) and was thought to be so hilarious he got through to quite a late round.

The bad news for Chanchiro is that his act has just expired : Shakira had given birth two days before we spotted him in the street. 

But the good news for the Hay Festival is that Shakira’s father has written a book.