LA PAZ – The woman who inspired Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “La tia Julia y el escribidor” (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) has died in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, the daily El Deber reported Thursday. She was 84.

Julia Urquidi Illanes died of respiratory complications on Wednesday and her wake is scheduled to be held at the La Misiones hall in that provincial capital.

A native of Cochabamba, Bolivia, she had been the sister-in-law of Vargas Llosa’s uncle before becoming the now-famed Peruvian novelist’s first wife in 1955. He was 19, 13 years her junior, when they were wed and the marriage lasted nine years.

Vargas Llosa immortalized that peculiar love story in his acclaimed 1978 novel, which features another character, Pedro Camacho, the “scriptwriter,” inspired by a Bolivian – journalist, writer and former La Paz Mayor Raul Salmon, who died in 1990.

According to El Deber, Urquidi objected to the novelist’s version of their relationship and wrote a book that was titled “Lo que Varguitas no dijo” (What Varguitas Didn’t Say) and published in 1983 to give her side of the story.

After divorcing the acclaimed writer, Urquidi returned to Cochabamba, where she worked as private secretary to the wife of Gen. Rene Barrientos, Bolivia’s then-vice president.

After a sojourn in Lima, she returned to Bolivia in the 1970s and became secretary to the wife of the Andean nation’s then-dictator, Gen. Hugo Banzer, who later went on to win election as president. EFE