Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The Remigius Gymnasium was only a few blocks away, in the Calle Miguel Dasso, and Dr. Quinteros liked to go there on foot. He would walk along slowly, return his neighbors’ greetings, peek into their gardens, which at this hour were freshly watered and the hedges neatly trimmed, and usually he dropped in at the Castro Soto Bookstore for a few minutes to pick up a couple of best sellers. Although it was early still, the inevitable gang of youngsters with open-necked shirts and unkempt hair were already outside the Davory, sitting on their motorcycles or on the bumpers of their sports cars, eating ice-cream bars, joking with each other, and planning that night’s party. They greeted him respectfully, but he’d gone only a few steps past them when one dared give him one of those bits of advice that were his cross to bear at the gymnasium too, hoary jokes about his age and his profession, that he put up with day after day, patiently and good-naturedly: “Don’t wear yourself out, Doctor, think of your grandchildren.” He scarcely heard it because he was imagining how pretty Elianita would look in her wedding dress designed for her at Christian Dior’s in Paris.

  There weren’t many people at the gym that morning. Just Coco, the instructor, and two weight-lifting addicts, Blacky Humilla and Polly Sarmiento, three mountains of muscles the equivalent of those of ten ordinary men. They must have arrived only a short time before, as they were still warming up.

  “Well, here comes the stork,” Coco said, shaking hands.

  “Still up and around, after all these centuries?” Blacky Humilla called out.

  Polly Sarmiento limited himself to clacking his tongue and raising two fingers, his usual greeting that he’d imported from Texas. Dr. Quinteros liked the air of breezy familiarity that his gym companions adopted toward him, as though seeing each other naked and sweating together had created an egalitarian fraternity among them, in which differences in age and social position had disappeared. He answered them by saying that if they had need of his services he was at their disposal, that at the first signs of dizziness or morning sickness they should come immediately to his office, where the rubber glove for probing their privates was ready and waiting.

  “Go change clothes and come do a few warm-ups,” Coco said to him, going back to jumping in place.

  “If you feel a heart attack coming on, you may kick off, but so what?” Polly said encouragingly, picking up Coco’s rhythm.

  “The surfer’s in there,” he heard Blacky Humilla say as he entered the dressing room.

  And indeed his nephew Richard was there, in a blue sweat suit, putting on his gym shoes. He was doing so slowly and reluctantly, as though his hands had suddenly gone as limp as a rag doll’s, and he had a bitter, vacant look on his face. He sat there staring past his uncle with a completely blank expression in his blue eyes and such total indifference to his presence that Dr. Quinteros wondered whether he’d turned invisible all of a sudden.

  “It’s only lovers who get lost in thought like that,” he said to his nephew, walking over and ruffling his hair. “Come back down to earth, my boy.”

  “Sorry, Uncle,” Richard replied, coming to with a start and blushing furiously, as though he’d been doing something he shouldn’t and been caught in the act. “I was thinking.”

  “Wicked thoughts, no doubt.” Dr. Quinteros laughed as he opened his gym bag, chose a locker, and began to get undressed. “Things must be in an uproar at your house. Is Elianita very nervous?”

  Richard glared at him with what seemed like a sudden gleam of hatred in his eyes and the doctor wondered what in the world had gotten into this youngster. But his nephew, making a visible effort to appear to be his usual self, smiled faintly. “Yes, everything’s in an uproar. That’s why I came down here to the gym to burn off a little fat till it’s time.”

  The doctor thought Richard was going to add “to mount the gallows.” His voice was heavy with melancholy, and his features, the clumsiness with which he was tying his shoelaces, the jerky movements of his body, betrayed how troubled, upset, and anxious he was. He was unable to keep his eyes still: he kept opening them, closing them, staring into space, looking away, staring at the same imaginary point again, looking away once more, as though searching for something impossible to find. He was a strikingly handsome boy, a young god whose body had been burnished by the elements—he went surfing even in the dead of winter and also excelled at basketball, tennis, swimming, and soccer—sports that had given him one of those physiques that Blacky Humilla claimed were “every queer’s mad dream”: not an ounce of fat, a smooth, muscular torso descending in a V to a wasp waist, and long, strong, supple legs that would have made the best boxer green with envy. Alberto de Quinteros had often heard his daughter Charo and her girlfriends compare Richard with Charlton Heston and conclude that Richard was even groovier-looking, that he beat Charlton all hollow. He was in his first year at the School of Architecture, and according to Roberto and Margarita, his parents, he’d always been a model child: studious, obedient, good to them and to his sister, honest, likable. Elianita and Richard were the doctor’s favorite niece and nephew, and so, as he put on his jockstrap, his sweat suit, his gym shoes—Richard was standing over by the showers waiting for him, tapping his foot on the tile floor—Dr. Alberto de Quinteros was sad to see him looking so troubled.

  “Problems on your mind, my boy?” he asked in a deliberately offhand way and with a kindly smile. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “No, not a problem in the world, whatever gave you that idea?” Richard hastened to reply, blushing furiously once again. “I feel great and can’t wait to warm up.”

  “Did they deliver my wedding present to your sister?” the doctor suddenly remembered to ask. “They promised me at the Casa Murguía that it would arrive yesterday.”

  “A super bracelet”—Richard had begun jumping up and down on the white tiles of the locker-room floor. “Sis was delighted with it.”

  “It’s your aunt who usually takes care of things like that, but since she’s still running around Europe, I had to choose it myself.” A tender look came into Dr. Quinteros’s eyes. “Elianita in her wedding dress—what a lovely sight that’s going to be.”

  Because the daughter of his brother Roberto was as perfect a specimen of young womanhood as Richard was of young manhood: one of those beauties who do honor to the species and who make figures of speech comparing teeth to pearls, eyes to stars, hair to flax, and complexions to peaches and cream sound far too pedestrian. Slender, with dark hair and very white skin, her every movement graceful, even her manner of breathing, she had a tiny face with classic lineaments, and features that appeared to have been designed by an Oriental miniaturist. A year younger than Richard, she had just finished secondary school; her one defect was timidity—so excessive that the organizers of the Miss Peru contest, to their despair, had been unable to persuade her to enter—and everyone, including Dr. Quinteros, was at a loss to explain why she was getting married so soon, and above all why she was marrying Red Antúnez. There was no denying that young Antúnez had certain things going for him—his good heart and his good nature, a degree in business administration from the University of Chicago, the fertilizer company he would one day inherit, several cups he’d won bicycle racing—but among the innumerable boys of Miraflores and San Isidro who’d courted Elianita and who would have committed murder or robbed a bank to marry her, Red was beyond a doubt the least attractive and (Dr. Quinteros was ashamed of allowing himself to harbor such an opinion regarding someone who within a few hours would become his nephew by marriage) the dullest and most dim-witted.

  “You take longer to change clothes than my mom, Uncle Alberto,” Richard complained between leaps.

  When they went into the exercise room, Coco, for whom pedagogy was not a way of earning a living but a vocation, was instructing Blacky Humilla, pointing to his stomach and preaching this axiom of philosophy to him: “When you eat, when you work, when you’re at the movies, when you’re humping your wife, when you’re having a drink, at every moment in your li
fe, and, if possible, even in your coffin: suck in your gut!”

  “Ten minutes of warm-ups to make your carcass happy, Methuselah,” the instructor ordered Dr. Quinteros.

  As he jumped rope next to Richard and felt a pleasant warmth creep over his whole body, the thought came to him that, when all was said and done, it really wasn’t so terrible to be fifty years old if a person was in as good shape as he was. Among his friends who were his age, was there a single one with a belly as smooth as his, such supple muscles? Without searching any farther, his brother Roberto, what with his spare tire and his potbelly and his premature hunchback, looked ten years older than he did, despite the fact that he was three years younger. Poor Roberto, he must be sad at seeing Elianita, the apple of his eye, getting married. Because, of course, he’d be losing her in a way. The doctor’s daughter, Charo, would be getting married almost any day now—her fiancé, Tato Soldevilla, would soon be getting his degree in engineering—and then he, too, would feel sad and older. Dr. Quinteros went on jumping rope without getting tangled up in it or missing a step, with the agility that comes with practice, changing feet and crossing and uncrossing his hands like a consummate gymnast. He saw in the mirror, however, that his nephew was jumping too fast and recklessly tripping all over himself. His teeth were clenched, his forehead was gleaming with sweat, and he was keeping his eyes closed as though to concentrate better. Was he perhaps having woman trouble?

  “That’s enough rope jumping, you two lazybones.” Even though he was lifting weights with Polly and Blacky, Coco had had his eye on them and was keeping track of the time. “Three sets of sit-ups. On your butts, you fossils.”

  Abdominals were Dr. Quinteros’s strong point. He did them very fast, with his hands behind the nape of his neck, with the board raised to the second position, keeping his back raised off the floor and almost touching his knees with his forehead. Between each series of thirty he took a one-minute rest, lying stretched out flat, breathing deeply. When he’d finished the ninety, he sat down and noted, to his satisfaction, that he’d beaten Richard. After this workout, he was sweating from head to foot and could feel his heart pounding.

  “I just can’t understand why Elianita’s marrying Red Antúnez,” he suddenly heard himself say. “What does she see in him?”

  It was the wrong thing to say and he immediately regretted having done so, but Richard didn’t seem to be at all taken aback. Panting—he’d just finished his abdominals—he replied with a feeble joke: “They say love is blind, Uncle Alberto.”

  “He’s a fine boy and I’m sure he’ll make her very happy,” Dr. Quinteros went on, feeling a bit disconcerted and trying to make up for having been so outspoken. “What I meant was that among your sister’s admirers were the best matches in Lima. And what did she do but send them all packing and end up saying yes to Red Antúnez, who’s a good kid, but such an, well, er, let’s face it…”

  “Such an ass, is that what you’re trying to say?” Richard broke in helpfully.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have put it that crudely,” Dr. Quinteros said, inhaling and exhaling and flinging his arms in and out. But, to tell the truth, he does seem a bit dim-witted. He’d be perfect for anyone else, but he just can’t hold a candle to a girl as outstanding as Elianita. His own outspokenness made him feel uncomfortable. “Listen, you mustn’t take what I said the wrong way.”

  “Don’t worry, Uncle Alberto.” Richard smiled. “Red’s a good egg and if the kid’s picked him she knows what she’s doing.”

  “Three sets of side bends, you cripples!” Coco roared, with eighty kilos above his head and puffed out like a toad. “Sucking in your belly—not sticking it out!”

  Dr. Quinteros thought that, with the gymnastics, Richard would forget his problems, but as he did his side bends, he saw his nephew working out with renewed fury, his face again set in an anxious, irritated expression. He remembered that in the Quinteros family there were a great many neurotics and thought that perhaps Roberto’s eldest son had inherited the tendency and was destined to carry on the tradition among the younger generation, and then he was distracted by the thought that it might have been more prudent after all to have dropped by the clinic before coming to the gym so as to have a look at the woman with the triplets and the one he’d operated on for the tumor. Then he stopped thinking altogether because the physical effort absorbed him totally, and as he raised and lowered his legs (“Leg rises, fifty times!”), flexed his trunk (“Trunk twist with bar, three sets, till your lungs burst!”), working his back, his torso, his forearms, his neck, obeying Coco’s orders (“Harder, great-granddaddy! Faster, corpse!”), he was simply a pair of lungs inhaling and exhaling, skin dripping with sweat, muscles straining, tiring, aching. When Coco yelled out: “Three sets of fifteen pullovers with dumbbells!” he’d reached his limit. Out of pride, he tried nonetheless to do at least one set with twelve kilos, but he couldn’t. He was exhausted. The weight slipped out of his hands on the third try and he had to put up with the jokes of the weight lifters (“Mummies to the grave and storks to the zoo!” “Call the funeral home!” “Requiescat in pace, amen!”) and watch with mute envy as Richard—still in a hurry, still furious—completed his routine with no difficulty. Discipline, perseverance, balanced diets, regular habits aren’t enough, Dr. Quinteros thought. Up to a certain limit they compensated for the differences; once past that limit, age created insuperable distances, unbreachable walls. Later, sitting naked in the sauna, blinded by the sweat dripping through his eyelashes, he mournfully repeated a phrase he’d read in a book: “Youth, whose memory brings despair!” As he was leaving, he saw that Richard had joined the weight lifters and was working out with them. Coco made a mocking gesture in Richard’s direction and said: “This handsome lad has decided to commit suicide, Doctor.”

  Richard didn’t even smile. He was holding the weights over his head and the expression on his beet-red face, dripping with sweat, the veins standing out, betrayed an exasperation that he appeared to be on the point of taking out on them. The idea flashed through the doctor’s mind that his nephew was about to bash in the heads of all four of them with the weights he was holding in his hands. He said goodbye to the others and murmured to Richard: “I’ll see you at the church in a little while.”

  Once he’d returned home and called the clinic, he was relieved to learn that the mother of the triplets wanted to play bridge with some friends in her room and that the woman who’d had the tumor removed had asked if she could eat some won ton in tamarind sauce today. He authorized the bridge game and the won ton, and with his mind completely at ease now, he changed into a dark blue suit, a white silk shirt, and a silver-gray tie that he fastened down with a pearl stickpin. As he was putting scent on his handkerchief, a letter from his wife arrived, with a P.S. from Charito. They had mailed it from Venice, city number 14 on the tour, and had written: “By the time you receive this letter, we’ll have done at least seven more cities, all gorgeous.” They were happy and Charito was very taken with Italian men: “…as handsome as movie stars, Papa, and you can’t imagine what big flirts they are, but don’t tell Tato, a thousand kisses, ciao.”

  He walked over to the Church of Santa María, on the Óvalo Gutiérrez. It was still early and the guests were just beginning to arrive. He sat down in one of the front rows and whiled away the time looking at the altar, decorated with lilies and white roses, and the stained-glass windows that looked like bishop’s miters. Once again he realized that he didn’t like this church at all: its combination of stucco and bricks was unaesthetic and its ogee arches pretentious. Every so often, he greeted an acquaintance with a smile. Naturally, since everybody he’d ever known was arriving little by little: very distant relatives, friends he hadn’t seen for ages, and the crème de la crème of the city, of course, bankers, ambassadors, industrialists, politicians. Ah, that Roberto, that Margarita, such social butterflies, Dr. Quinteros thought, without acrimony, full of indulgence toward the weaknesses of his brother and sister-in-law. Th
e wedding luncheon was bound to be a lavish affair.

  He felt a rush of emotion on seeing the bride enter, just as the first bars of the Wedding March pealed out. She was really stunningly beautiful, in her filmy white dress, and her little face, in profile beneath the veil, had something extraordinarily graceful, ethereal, spiritual about it as she walked toward the altar, with lowered eyes, on Roberto’s arm; corpulent and august, her father was hiding his emotion by assuming the air of a grand seigneur. Red Antúnez seemed less homely than usual in his brand-new cutaway coat, his face radiant with happiness, and even his mother—an ungainly Englishwoman who despite having lived in Peru for a quarter of a century still got her Spanish prepositions mixed up—looked attractive in her long dark dress and her hairdo two stories high. It’s quite true, Dr. Quinteros thought: patience pays off. Because poor Red Antúnez had pursued Elianita ever since the two had been children, and had besieged her with thoughtful and attentive gestures that she had invariably greeted with Olympian disdain. But he had put up with all of Elianita’s cutting remarks and snubs and the dreadful jokes of the youngsters in the neighborhood poking fun at his resignation. A persistent young man, Dr. Quinteros reflected, whose determination had been rewarded, and now here he was, pale with emotion, slipping the wedding band on the ring finger of the prettiest girl in Lima. The ceremony had ended, and as Dr. Quinteros was making his way toward the church reception rooms, amid a buzzing throng, nodding his head right and left, he suddenly spied Richard, standing by himself next to a column, as though he were disgustedly keeping his distance from everyone.