Alfredo Bryce Echenique - A veces te quiero mucho siempre (Cuento completo)

March 10, 2026·55 min·4 clips

Charlie Sugar was the only person Don Raúl ever opened his door for at 6:30 a.m. — so he could make a 7 o'clock mass in honor of a dead millionaire lover.

1. "Crónicas Lunares di Sun" presents a full reading of Alfredo Bryce Echenique's short story "A veces te quiero mucho," voiced by host Irving Sun. 2. The sole narrator is Irving Sun, host of the podcast, reading the story in Spanish; no guests appear; the episode is a literary reading. 3. The episode asks whether the weight of a life lived in full — Paris bohemia, dead friends, an eccentric house in Mallorca — can be translated into a letter to a young woman who was not there for any of it. 4. Felipe, the protagonist, is an internationally exhibited Peruvian painter who has built a mock-Inca structure called Puruchuco on Mallorca's Bahía de Poyesa, fulfilling a promise made decades earlier to an old friend. 5. He has received a letter from Alicia, a Lima fine-arts student he met two years earlier at a Barranco café, who is now ready to leave Peru and come live with him. 6. Felipe has not answered her letter for a month despite her plea — 'no seas malo, no me hagas esperar, por favor, Felipe' — and spends his days fishing without eating, drinking gin, and avoiding his cook Andrés. 7. The flashback to meeting Alicia shows her grabbing his hands and repeating 'lo sé todo de ti, Felipe' in a crowded hotel restaurant, indifferent to the thirty-year age gap and the diners who know him. 8. Raúl de Bernuil, described as 'el viejo chocho,' is a Peruvian-French nonagenarian musician and dandy who held all-night dinner parties in Paris, locked his door at midnight to keep guests until breakfast, and shouted 'oiga usted, señor obispo' as his signature exclamation. 9. Raúl claimed personal friendship with César Vallejo, carried a photograph of Vallejo's funeral proving only eight people attended, and described how Picasso drew Vallejo's likeness after noticing his absence from a Paris café. 10. Raúl's wife Greta, a Swiss professor who funded him from Zürich while he composed, is depicted floating contentedly in the Mallorca sea each August while Raúl sat on shore drinking dry white wine and shouting 'Greta, abandona inmediatamente el océano.' 11. Raúl died at 92 having composed 60 symphonies, all dedicated to 'Madame Greta de Bernuil'; his final words as he was carried to hospital after a birthday heart attack were 'pero no se me rompió la copa.' 12. His symphony Puruchuco, premiered in Lima in 1946 to a walkout, required for its final movement a chorus of 500 Inca princesses — a detail confirmed by a Brussels symphony conductor who said only Beethoven could have gotten away with it. 13. Charlie Sugar, a Chilean friend, owned a French Riviera villa bequeathed by a deceased American millionaire on the condition he attend 7 a.m. mass daily to pray for her soul; Raúl would open his door at 6:30 a.m. to ensure Charlie made the mass. 14. Charlie threw himself onto the Paris metro after a twenty-one-year-old woman caused him to miss mass for the first time; in his final weeks he repeated 'me ha pasado otra vez pero al revés, ahora es ella la de veintiún años y yo el de sesenta.' 15. Mario, the third friend, called Felipe from a New York hotel to say he was 'jodido' and heading to El Salvador 'para morirme allá,' and died there. 16. The story of Charlie and the Argentine assassination plot against Perón — in which Raúl calmly improvised an entire consulting role to extract whisky money — is recounted as evidence of Raúl's limitless composure and inventiveness. 17. The episode's tone is intimate and melancholic: Irving Sun reads the prose in a measured, unhurried voice that allows the comic anecdotes and quiet grief to coexist without forcing sentiment. 18. The story shifts between warm comic memory and a loneliness that Felipe names precisely: 'he vivido demasiado,' and 'jamás me había casado y que mi casa eran 12 hoteles en 12 ciudades diferentes.' 19. Listeners who enjoy Latin American literary fiction, Vargas Llosa-era storytelling, or slow-paced podcast readings of Spanish-language prose will find this episode absorbing. 20. Listeners expecting commentary, interviews, or non-fiction content will find no analysis here — only the story as written.

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