Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “It’s first-rate, old pal,” he said approvingly, applauding. “But is it really possible to write about the Devil nowadays? Why not write a realistic story? Why not do away with the Devil altogether and make the whole thing a series of incidents involving fake “pishtacos”? Or, alternatively, an outright fantastic tale, with all the ghostly apparitions you like. But no devils, because that smacks of religion, of hypocritical piety, of all kinds of things that are terribly old hat these days.”

  When he left, I tore “The Qualitative Leap” to bits, tossed it into the wastebasket, decided to forget all about “pishtacos,” and went to have lunch at my Uncle Lucho’s. I learned there that there was apparently a budding romance between Aunt Julia and a man I’d never met but had heard a lot about: Adolfo Salcedo, the owner of a large estate and the senator from Arequipa—a distant family relation.

  “Fortunately, Julia’s new suitor has piles of money, a high social standing, and lots of influence, plus honest intentions toward her,” my Aunt Olga commented. “He’s asked for her hand in marriage.”

  “Unfortunately, Don Adolfo’s fifty and hasn’t yet done a thing to prove that that terrible thing his wife accused him of was false,” Uncle Lucho retorted. “If your sister marries him, she’s either going to have to live in chastity or take to adultery.”

  “That whole story about him and Carlota is a typical bit of slanderous Arequipa gossip,” Aunt Olga argued. “Adolfo gives every appearance of being a real man.”

  I knew that “whole story” about the senator and Doña Carlota very well, since it had been the subject of another short story of mine that Javier’s praise had caused me to consign to the wastebasket. The marriage of Don Adolfo and Doña Carlota had been the talk of the entire south of the Republic, since both of them owned huge tracts of land in Puno and the pooling of their holdings would thus create yet another enormous landed estate. The two of them had done things in the grand manner: a wedding ceremony in the splendid Church of Yanahuara attended by guests from all over Peru, followed by a Pantagruelian banquet. During the second week of their honeymoon, the bride had upped and left her spouse somewhere or other, returned all by herself to Arequipa to the scandal of everyone, and announced, to everyone’s stupefaction, that she was about to appeal to Rome for a formal annulment of their marriage.

  Adolfo Salcedo’s mother had met Doña Carlota one Sunday after eleven o’clock Mass, and right there in the middle of the portico of the cathedral had asked her to her face, in utter fury: “Why did you abandon my poor son as you did, you shameless creature?”

  With a superbly haughty wave of her hand, Doña Carlota had answered in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Because, señora, the only use to which your son puts that particular piece of equipment that men are endowed with is to make peepee.”

  She had managed to have the religious marriage annulled, and Adolfo Salcedo had been an inexhaustible source of jokes at our family gatherings. From the day the senator had first met Aunt Julia, he had besieged her with invitations to the Bolívar Grill and the “91,” showered her with gifts of perfume, and bombarded her with baskets of roses. I was happy to hear of the romance and hoped that Aunt Julia would turn up, so I could get in a few nasty digs about her new suitor. But she took the wind out of my sails when, appearing in the dining room in time to have coffee with us, with her arms loaded with parcels, she was the one who announced, laughing fit to kill: “All that gossip turned out to be perfectly true. Senator Salcedo can’t get it up!”

  “Julia, for heaven’s sake, don’t be vulgar,” Aunt Olga protested. “Anybody would think that…”

  “He told me so himself, just this morning,” Aunt Julia explained, gloating over the senator’s tragedy.

  He’d been quite normal up until the age of twenty-five. And then, in the course of an ill-starred trip to the U.S. on vacation, the terrible mishap had occurred. In Chicago, San Francisco, or Miami—Aunt Julia didn’t remember which exactly—young Adolfo had met a woman in a night club and made a conquest (or so he thought). She had taken him to a hotel, and he was going at it hot and heavy with her, when suddenly he felt the point of a knife blade in his back, turned around, and saw a one-eyed man a good six feet six inches tall. They didn’t use the knife on him or beat him; they merely robbed him of his watch, a gold religious medal, his dollars. That was how it all began. Simple as that. Ever since then, the minute he was with a woman and about to get down to some serious action, he would feel the touch of cold metal on his spinal column, see the ravaged face of the one-eyed man, start to sweat, and find himself with all desire gone and his spirits drooping. He had consulted an endless number of doctors and psychologists, and even a quack healer in Arequipa, who had him bury himself up to the neck at the foot of volcanoes on moonlit nights.

  “Don’t be mean, don’t make fun of the poor man, Julia,” Aunt Olga said, shaking with laughter.

  “If I were certain he’d stay that way, I’d marry him for his dough,” Aunt Julia said crassly. “But what if I cured him? Can’t you just see that old gaffer trying to make up for lost time with me?”

  I thought how happy the adventure of the senator from Arequipa would have made Pascual, how enthusiastically he would have devoted an entire newscast to him. Uncle Lucho warned Aunt Julia that if she was going to be so demanding, she’d never find a Peruvian husband. And she in turn complained that here too, as in Bolivia, the good-looking men were poor and the rich ones ugly, and when a good-looking rich man came along, he inevitably turned out to be married. Suddenly she looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I hadn’t shown up all that week because I was afraid she’d drag me off to the movies again. I said that wasn’t the reason, made up a story about exams I had coming up, and proposed that we go see a film that night.

  “Great, we’ll go to the one that’s showing at the Leuro,” she decided dictatorially. “It’s a real tearjerker.”

  On the way back to Radio Panamericana in the jitney, I mulled over the possibility of trying my hand at another short story, one based this time on the misadventures of Adolfo Salcedo; something light and entertaining, in the manner of Somerset Maugham, or perversely erotic, as in Maupassant. At the radio station, Nelly, Genaro Jr.’s secretary, was giggling to herself at her desk. “What’s so funny?” I asked her.

  “There’s been a terrible row over at Radio Central between Pedro Camacho and Genaro Sr.,” she informed me. “The Bolivian insisted he didn’t want any Argentine actors playing roles in his serials, and if they did, he was leaving. He managed to get Luciano Pando and Josefina Sánchez to back him up, and finally got his way. They’re going to cancel the Argentines’ contracts—isn’t that great news?”

  There was a fierce rivalry between the native announcers, m.c.’s, and actors and the Argentine ones—wave after wave of the latter kept arriving in Peru, many of them expelled from their own country for political reasons—and I surmised that the Bolivian scriptwriter had taken this stand so as to get on the good side of his Peruvian co-workers. But I soon discovered that he was incapable of this sort of calculated maneuver. His hatred of Argentines in general, and of Argentine actors and actresses in particular, appeared to be entirely disinterested. I went to see him after the seven o’clock news broadcast, to tell him I had a little spare time and could help him with the data he’d said he needed. He invited me into his lair and with a munificent gesture offered me the only seat possible, outside of his own chair: a corner of the table that served him as a desk. He still had his suit coat and his little bow tie on, and before him were countless typed sheets of paper, which he had assembled in a neat pile alongside the Remington. The map of Lima, pinned down with thumbtacks, covered part of the wall. It now had more colored patches, a number of strange symbols drawn in red pencil, and different initials labeling each district of the city. I asked him what these marks and letters stood for.

  He nodded, with one of his little mechanical smiles that always bore traces of a sense of self-satisfaction an
d a sort of kindly condescension. Settling back comfortably in his chair, he delivered himself of one of his perorations: “I work from life; my writings are firmly rooted in reality, as the grapevine is rooted in the vinestock. That’s why I need this. I want to know whether that world there is or is not as I have represented it.”

  He was pointing to the map, and I leaned closer to see if I could figure out what he was trying to get across to me. The initials were hermetic; as far as I could tell, they referred to no recognizable institution or person. The only thing that was quite clear was that he had singled out the altogether dissimilar districts of Miraflores and San Isidro, La Victoria and El Callao, by drawing red circles around them. I told him I didn’t understand at all, and asked him to explain.

  “It’s very simple,” he replied impatiently, in the tone of a parish priest. “What is most important is the truth, which is always art, as lies, on the other hand, never are, or only very rarely. I need to know if Lima is really the way I’ve shown it on the map. Do the two capital A’s, for example, fit San Isidro? Is it in fact a district where one finds Ancient Ancestry, Affluent Aristocracy?”

  He stressed the initial A’s of these words, with an intonation meant to suggest that “It is only the blind who cannot see the bright light of day.” He had classified the districts of Lima according to their social status. But the curious thing was the type of descriptive adjectives he had used, the nature of his nomenclature. In certain cases he had hit the nail squarely on the head, and in others his labels were completely arbitrary. I granted, for instance, that the initials MCLPH (Middle Classes Liberal Professions Housewives) fitted the Jesús María section of Lima, but cautioned him that it was rather unfair to sum up the districts of La Victoria and El Porvenir under the dreadful label BFHH (Bums Fairies Hoodlums Hetaerae), and extremely questionable to reduce El Callao to SFS (Sailors Fishermen Sambos) or El Cercado and El Agustino to FDFWFI (Female Domestics Factory Workers Farmhands Indians).

  “It’s not a scientific classification but an artistic one,” he informed me, making magic passes with his tiny pygmy hands. “It’s not all the people who live in each district, but only the flashiest, the most immediately noticeable, those who give each section of the city its particular flavor and color. If a person is a gynecologist, he should live in the part of town where he belongs, and the same goes for a police sergeant.”

  He subjected me to a lengthy and amusing interrogation (amusing to me, that is to say, since he for his part remained dead-serious throughout) on the human topography of the city, and I noted that the things that interested him most had to do with extremes: millionaires and beggars, blacks and whites, saints and criminals. Depending on my answers, he added, changed, or erased initials on the map with a swift gesture, not hesitating a second, thus leading me to think that he had invented this system of classification some time ago and had been using it regularly since. Why, I asked him, were Miraflores, San Isidro, La Victoria, and El Callao the only districts he’d circled in red?

  “Because, beyond question, they’ll be the principal settings of my scripts,” he said, his pop-eyes surveying those four sections of the city with Napoleonic self-importance. “I’m a man who can’t abide halftones, murky waters, weak coffee. I like a straightforward yes or no, masculine men and feminine women, night or day. In my works there are always blue bloods or the hoi polloi, prostitutes or madonnas. The bourgeoisie doesn’t inspire me or interest me—or my public, either.”

  “You’re like Romantic writers,” I unfortunately remarked.

  “In point of fact, they’re like me,” he shot back in a resentful tone of voice, bouncing up and down on his chair. “I’ve never plagiarized anybody. I’m quite willing to put up with every sort of carping criticism of my work, save that infamous libel. On the other hand, there are people who have stolen from me in the most nefarious way imaginable.”

  I endeavored to explain to him that my remark about his resembling the Romantics had not been made with any intention of offending him, that it had been a mere feeble pleasantry, but he didn’t hear me, because all of a sudden he had fallen into a seething rage, and gesticulating as though he were before an audience hanging on his every word, he raved in his magnificent voice: “All of Argentina is flooded with works of mine that have been debased by hack penny-a-liners from that country. Have you had many dealings with Argentines in your life? When you see one, cross the street and walk on the other side, because the Argentine national character is like measles: a contagious disease.”

  He had turned pale and his nose was quivering. He clenched his teeth and grimaced in disgust. I was disconcerted by this new facet of his personality and stammered something in the way of a vague general remark about its being most regrettable that there were no strict copyright laws in Latin America, no legal protection for intellectual property. I had put my foot in my mouth again.

  “That’s not the point at all. I couldn’t care less if I’m plagiarized,” he replied, more furious still. “We artists don’t create out of a desire for fame and glory, but rather out of love of humanity. What better could I ask for than to see my work becoming more and more widely disseminated throughout the world, even if it bears other people’s names? But what I can’t forgive those Argentine cacographers is the fact that they make changes in my scripts, that they cheapen them. Do you know what they do to them? I mean, of course, in addition to changing the titles of them and the names of the characters? They add typical Argentine ingredients to spice them up—”

  “Arrogance,” I broke in, certain this time that I was saying exactly the right thing. “Vulgarity.”

  He shook his head contemptuously, and with tragic solemnity, pronouncing each syllable slowly, in a cavernous voice that bounced off the walls of that tiny den, he uttered the only two dirty expressions I ever heard cross his lips: “Chasing after cunt and assholing with queers.”

  I was tempted to draw him out, to find out why his hatred of Argentines was more vehement than was the case with normal people, but on seeing how overwrought he was, I didn’t dare to. A bitter look came over his face and he rubbed a hand over his eyes, as though to blot out certain phantoms of things past. Then, with a doleful expression, he closed the windows of his cubbyhole, centered the platen of the Remington and put its cover over it, straightened his little bow tie, took a weighty tome out of his desk, tucked it under his arm, and motioned toward the door as a sign to me that we were leaving. He turned the light out and, once outside, locked up his cave after him. I asked him what the book was. He stroked the spine of it affectionately, as he might have petted a beloved cat.

  “An old traveling companion who’s been through thick and thin with me,” he murmured in a voice tinged with emotion, as he handed the volume to me. “A faithful friend and an invaluable help in my work.”

  The book, published in prehistoric times by Espasa Calpe—its thick worn covers had all sorts of stains and scratches on them and its pages were yellow with age—was by an author nobody had ever heard of, despite his pompous compendium of credentials (Adalberto Castejón de la Reguera, M.A. in Classical Literature, Grammar, and Rhetoric), and the tide was nothing if not vast in scope: Ten Thousand Literary Quotations Drawn from the Hundred Best Writers in the World, with the subtitle: “What Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière, etc., have had to say about God, Life, Death, Love, Suffering, etc….”

  We had already walked as far as the Calle Belén. As I shook hands with him to bid him goodbye, I happened to glance at my watch. I panicked: it was 10 p.m. I had the impression that I’d spent half an hour at most with him, but in fact the sociological-analysis-cum-gossipy-chitchat about the city and the abominable character of Argentines had gone on for three. I headed for Panamericana as fast as my legs could carry me, convinced that Pascual had no doubt devoted the entire fifteen minutes of the nine o’clock newscast to some pyromaniac in Turkey or an infanticide in El Porvenir. But things couldn’t have gone as badly as all that, since I ran into the Genaros, Jr
. and Sr., in the elevator, and they gave no sign of being beside themselves with rage. They told me that they had signed a contract that afternoon with Lucho Gatica, hiring him to come to Lima for a week of broadcasts to be transmitted exclusively by Panamericana. Up in my rooftop shack, I had a look at the news bulletins that had gone out over the air and found them more or less acceptable. With my mind thus set at ease, I then sauntered down to the Plaza San Martín to catch the jitney.

  I arrived at my grandparents’ house at 11 p.m. to find everyone fast asleep. They were in the habit of leaving my dinner ready in the oven for me, but this time, in addition to the breaded steak with rice and a fried egg—my invariable evening meal—there was a message written in a shaky hand: “Your Uncle Lucho called to say that you stood up Julia, who was waiting to go to the movies with you, that you’re an ill-mannered monster, and that you must call her to apologize. Grandfather.”

  The thought occurred to me that forgetting all about newscasts and a date with a lady on account of the Bolivian scriptwriter was going too far. I went to bed ill at ease and out of sorts for having been so impolite without intending to be. I mulled all this over in my mind interminably before I finally dropped off to sleep, trying to persuade myself that it was Aunt Julia’s fault for having insisted on going to the movies with me, for being so terribly overbearing, and searching my mind for some possible excuse to give her when I phoned her the next day. Nothing plausible occurred to me, and I didn’t dare tell her the unvarnished truth. I resorted instead to an epic gesture. After the 8 a.m. newscast, I went to a downtown florist’s and sent her a bouquet of roses that cost me ten soles, along with a card on which, after much hesitation, I wrote what impressed me as a miracle of laconic elegance: “Humblest apologies.”