Only one person on the El Hormiguero set could dispute Isabel Preysler’s starring role of the night: her daughter, Tamara Falcó. It wasn’t an easy feat, for the queen of hearts was fascinating and told anecdote after anecdote, spurred on by a Pablo Motos who pulled from her memories as much as he wished. All the same, at the end of the interview, the surprise came from the hand of the Marquesa de Griñón. What they say in her family is true: she has no filter.
Isabel Preysler walked onto the El Hormiguero set, moving with difficulty on impossibly high heels and dressed in blue. Let’s put it this way: she was dazzling at 74. She sat at the familiar table but spared the intervention of the infamous ants, who on this occasion limited themselves to laughing when it was their turn. Off camera, Tamara Falcó waited her turn alongside her fellow panelists.
From time to time, the camera made a close-up of Tamara Falcó to show her reaction to her mother’s words or to seek her assent. However, at the end of the interview, when she bit into the thorny topic of Isabel Preysler’s relationship with Mario Vargas Llosa, the veteran socialite looked directly at her daughter and asked: “Shall I tell it?” She was referring to an anecdote that happened during the early dates between the writer and Isabel.
Isabel and Mario Had Their First Date at Home
According to Isabel Preysler, she and Mario Vargas Llosa had known each other for forty years, but they had never met alone. However, once she was widowed and he spent long stays in Madrid, began visiting her at her La Moraleja home. It seems he came to dine with Preysler and her daughters at least three times, in courting fashion. It was during one of those meals that Tamara Falcó, as we know her to be very devout, let loose her mischievous side.
Isabel Preysler recounted the anecdote properly lightened: she said that Tamara, annoyed by seeing Mario Vargas Llosa at her house so often, directly asked him if he was married. Tamara Falcó, however, remembered the anecdote a bit more forcefully and revealingly and did not hesitate to correct her mother’s account. According to the Marquesa de Griñón, her conversation with the Peruvian writer at the family home in La Moraleja went as follows:
Tamara Falcó and Isabel Preysler, on El Hormiguero.
“Mario, what a pleasure to see you for the third time, where is your wife?” Tamara Falcó asked at the start of the meal, not only aware that the writer was married, but eager to make clear that everyone in the house knew the fact. “There was a silence”; recalled the Marquesa de Griñón. “My mother wanted to kill me, but at that moment I was the one protecting the family. It didn’t help much,” Tamara concluded with a half-smile.
The bombshell landed amid laughter, but that did not make it any less of a bombshell. Evidently, Tamara Falcó (and probably Ana Boyer, also present at the table) did not find it amusing that Mario Vargas Llosa, married for decades, courted her mother. And, in fact, the Marquesa de Griñón dropped that she always knew the relationship did not have a great future. “I, a visionary,” she said with irony. “See how it ended.”
