Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “They’ve gone to visit your Aunt Hortensia,” she said, showing me into the living room. “I didn’t go with them because I know very well that that gossip spends all her time making up nasty stories about me.”

  I took her by the waist, drew her to me, and tried to kiss her. She didn’t push me away, but she didn’t kiss me either: all I felt was her cold mouth against mine. As we stepped apart, I saw that she was looking at me without smiling: not in surprise, as on the night before, but rather with a certain curiosity and a faintly mocking gleam in her eyes.

  “Look, Marito”—her voice was calm, affectionate—“I’ve done all sorts of really crazy things in my life. But this is one I’m not going to do.” She burst into laughter. “Me, seducing a kid? Never!”

  We sat down and chatted for nearly two hours. I told her the whole story of my life—not my past life, but the one I was going to have in the future, when I lived in Paris and was a writer. I told her I’d wanted to write ever since I’d first read Alexandre Dumas, that since that moment I’d dreamed of going off to France and living in a garret, in the artists’ quartier, dedicating my heart and soul to literature, the most marvelous thing in the world. I told her I was studying law to please my family, but that being a lawyer struck me as the dullest and most stupid of professions, one I had no intention of ever practicing. I realized at one point that I was speaking in the most heartfelt tones, and told her that this was the very first time I’d ever confessed such intimate things not to a buddy but to a woman.

  “I seem like your mama to you, and that’s the reason you’re confiding in me,” Aunt Julia psychoanalyzed. “So Dorita’s boy has turned out to be a bohemian—who would ever have thought it? The trouble is, my son, that you’re going to starve to death.”

  She told me she hadn’t slept a wink the night before, thinking of those furtive kisses in the Bolívar Grill. She couldn’t get over the idea that Dorita’s boy, the youngster that only yesterday she and his mama had taken off to Cochabamba to put in the La Salle school, the kid she thought of as still wearing short pants, the baby she let escort her to the movies so as not to have to go alone, had all of a sudden kissed her square on the mouth like a full-grown, experienced man.

  “But I am a full-grown, experienced man,” I assured her, taking her hand and kissing it. “I’m eighteen years old. And I lost my virginity five whole years ago.”

  “Well, what does that make me then, if I’m thirty-two and lost mine fifteen years ago?” she laughed. “A decrepit old lady!”

  She had a loud, hearty laugh, spontaneous and joyous, that made her large, full-lipped mouth open wide and her eyes crinkle. She gave me an ironic, mischievous look that told me I was not yet a full-grown, experienced man in her eyes, but no longer a kid either. She got up to pour me a whiskey.

  “After the liberties you took last night, I can’t offer you Cokes any more,” she said, pretending to be embarrassed. “I’m going to have to treat you like one of my suitors.”

  I told her the difference in age between us wasn’t all that tremendous.

  “Not all that tremendous, no,” she answered. “But almost—I’m very nearly old enough for you to be my son.”

  She told me the story of her marriage. Everything had gone very well the first few years. Her husband had a ranch in the interior and she’d become so accustomed to living in the country that she rarely went to La Paz. The ranch house was very comfortable and she loved the peace and quiet of the place, the healthy, simple life: riding horseback, going on outings in the countryside, attending Indian fiestas. The first dark clouds had appeared when she couldn’t get pregnant: her husband suffered at the thought of not having children. He’d begun to drink then, and from that time on the marriage had gone downhill, by way of quarrels, separations, and reconciliations, till finally they had broken up for good. They had remained good friends after the divorce.

  “If I should ever happen to get married, I’d never have children,” I announced. “Children and literature are incompatible.”

  “Does that mean that I can present myself as a candidate and line up with the others?” Aunt Julia teased me.

  She was very good at clever repartee, told risqué stories charmingly, and (like all the women I’d ever known thus far in my life) was terribly aliterary. I had the impression that during her many long, idle hours on her Bolivian hacienda the only things she’d ever read were Argentine magazines, some of Delly’s trashy books, and no more than a couple of novels at most that she considered memorable: The Sheik and Son of the Sheik, by a certain E. M. Hull. As I said goodbye to her that evening, I asked her if we could go to the movies together, and she had replied: “Yes, that’s possible.” So we went to the movies almost every night, and besides sitting through a good many Mexican and Argentine melodramas, we’d given each other a good many kisses. The movies gradually became a pretext; we chose theaters (the Montecarlo, the Colina, the Marsano) that were the farthest away from the house on Armendáriz so as to be able to be together longer. After the movies let out, we took long strolls, “making empanaditas” (she told me that that was how you said “holding hands” in Bolivia), wandering through all the empty streets of Miraflores (we let go of each other’s hand every time a passerby or a car appeared), talking about all sorts of things as—it was that dreary season known in Lima as winter—the continual drizzle soaked us to the skin. Aunt Julia went out every day to have lunch or tea with one or another of her many suitors, but she saved her evenings for me. We spent them at the movies, as a matter of fact, sitting in one of the very last rows at the back, where (especially if it was a terrible film) we could kiss without bothering the other spectators and without running the risk of somebody recognizing us. Our relationship had soon stabilized at some amorphous stage; it was situated at some indefinable point between the opposed categories of being sweethearts and being lovers. This was a subject that cropped up constantly in our conversations. We shared certain of the classic traits of lovers—secretiveness, the fear of being discovered, the feeling we were taking great risks—but we were lovers spiritually, not materially, since we didn’t make love (and, as Javier was later shocked to learn, we didn’t even “feel each other up”). At the same time we shared with sweethearts a respect for certain classic rites observed by adolescent couples of Miraflores in those days (going to the movies, kissing during the film, walking down the street hand in hand), and our behavior was equally chaste (in that Stone Age the girls of Miraflores were almost always still virgins on their wedding day and would allow their breasts and their pudenda to be touched only after their sweetheart had been officially promoted to the status of fiancé and their engagement been formally announced, but how could that ever happen to us, given the difference in age between us and the fact that we were relatives?). Realizing how ambiguous and offbeat our relationship was, we made a game of thinking up amusing names for it and called it our English engagement, our Swedish romance, our Turkish drama.

  “The love affair of a baby and an old lady who’s also more or less your aunt,” Julia said to me one night as we were crossing the Parque Central. “A perfect subject for one of Pedro Camacho’s serials.”

  I reminded her that she was only my aunt by marriage, and she replied that on the three o’clock serial a boy from San Isidro, terrifically handsome and an expert surfer, had had relations with his sister, no less, and, horror of horrors, had gotten her pregnant.

  “Since when have you been listening to radio serials?” I asked.

  “It’s a contagious vice I caught from my sister,” she answered. “The ones on Radio Central are fantastic, I must say, tremendous dramas that break your heart.”

  And she confessed to me that sometimes she and Aunt Olga sat there listening with tears in their eyes. This was the first indication I had of the impact that Pedro Camacho’s pen was having in the households of Lima. I had others during the next few days, in the households of several relatives. I happened to drop by Aunt Laura’s, and the minute s
he spied me in the doorway of the living room she put her finger to her lips to signal me to be quiet, as she sat there leaning over her radio as though trying not only to hear but also to smell, to touch the (tremulous or harsh or ardent or crystalline) voice of the Bolivian artist. I appeared at Aunt Gaby’s and found her and Aunt Hortensia mechanically unwinding a ball of yarn as they followed a dialogue, full of proparoxytones and gerunds, between Luciano Pando and Josefina Sánchez. And in my own house, my grandparents, who had always “had a liking for little novels,” as my Grandmother Carmen put it, had now conceived a genuine passion for radio serials. I woke up in the morning nowadays to the strains of Radio Central’s theme song—in their compulsive eagerness not to miss the day’s first serial, the one at 10 a.m., they’d turned in far ahead of time; I ate my lunch listening to the one at two in the afternoon; and no matter what hour of the day I came home, I found my two little old grandparents and the cook curled up in the downstairs parlor, concentrating all their attention on the radio, a great heavy monster the size of a buffet that, to top everything else off, they always kept turned up to full volume.

  “Why is it you like radio serials so much?” I asked my granny one day. “What do they have to offer that books don’t, for example?”

  “It’s more lifelike, hearing the characters talk, it’s more real,” she explained, after thinking about it. “And what’s more, when you’re my age, your hearing is better than your eyesight.”

  I made a similar survey among some of my other relatives, and the results were inconclusive. Aunt Gaby, Laura, Olga, and Hortensia liked radio serials because they were entertaining, sad, or dramatic, because they were diverting and set a person to dreaming, to living things that were impossible in real life, because there were truths to be learned from them, or because every woman remains more or less of a romantic at heart. When I asked them why they liked soap operas more than books, they protested: what nonsense, there was no comparison, books were culture and radio serials mere claptrap to help pass the time. But the truth of the matter was that they lived with their ears glued to the radio and that I’d never seen a one of them open a book. During our nocturnal rambles. Aunt Julia sometimes gave me a résumé of certain episodes that had impressed her, and I in turn gave her a rundown of my conversations with the scriptwriter, and thus, little by little, Pedro Camacho became a constituent element in our romance.

  It was Genaro Jr. himself who brought me solid proof of the success of the new serials, on the very same day that I finally managed, after a thousand protests, to get my typewriter back.

  He turned up in our shack with a folder in his hand and a radiant expression on his face. “It’s exceeded our most optimistic calculations,” he told us. “The number of listeners tuned in to the serials has gone up twenty percent in two weeks. Do you realize what that means? A twenty percent increase in the ad rates we charge sponsors!”

  “And does it mean that we’ll get a twenty percent raise in salary, Don Genaro?” Pascual said, bouncing up and down on his chair.

  “You don’t work at Radio Central but at Panamericana,” Genaro Jr. reminded us. “We’re a station with good taste—we don’t broadcast serials.”

  The entertainment sections in the newspapers soon came up with feature stories on the large audience that the new serials had attracted and began singing the praises of Pedro Camacho. And Guido Monteverde, in his column in Última Hora, pulled out all the stops, calling him “an expert scriptwriter with a tropical imagination and a romantic gift for words, an intrepid symphony conductor of radio serials, and himself a versatile actor with a mellifluous voice.” But the object of these laudatory adjectives took no notice of the wave of enthusiasm surrounding him. As I dropped by his cubicle one morning on my way to the Bransa to pick him up for our usual coffee break together, I found a sign pasted on the window with the crudely lettered inscription: “No journalists admitted and no autographs given. The artist is working! Respect him!”

  “Do you mean that, or is it a joke?” I asked him, as I sat sipping my café con leche and Pedro Camacho his cerebral cocktail of verbena-and-mint tea.

  “I mean it in all seriousness,” he answered. “The local press has begun to hound me, and if I don’t put a stop to them there’ll soon be a bunch of listeners lined up over there—he gestured in the direction of the Plaza San Martín as though such an eventuality were the most natural thing in the world—asking for autographs and photos. My time is as precious as gold to me and I don’t want to waste it on foolish trifles.”

  There wasn’t an ounce of conceit in what he was saying, only sincere anxiety. He was wearing his usual black suit and little bow tie and smoking awful-smelling cigarettes, a brand called Aviación. As always, he was in an utterly serious mood. I thought I’d please him by telling him that all my aunts had become fanatic listeners of his and that Genaro Jr. was overjoyed at the results of the surveys showing how many new listeners his serials had attracted. But he was merely bored and shut me up—as though these things were inevitable and he’d always known all about them—and instead went on talking about how indignant he was at the lack of sensitivity on the part of “the merchants” (an expression that from then on he always used when referring to the Genaros).

  “There’s a weak spot that’s ruining the serials and it’s my duty to remedy it and their duty to help me,” he announced, frowning. “But obviously art and money are mortal enemies, like pigs and daisies.”

  “A weak spot that’s ruining the serials?” I said in amazement. “But they’re a complete success.”

  “The merchants don’t want to fire Pablito, even though I’ve insisted that he has to go,” he explained to me. “They say they have to keep him on for sentimental reasons, because he’s worked at Radio Central for I don’t know how many years, and other such nonsense. As though art had anything to do with charity! That sick man’s incompetence is absolutely sabotaging my work!”

  Big Pablito was one of those indefinable, picturesque characters that the world of radio broadcasting attracts or produces. The diminutive suggested that he was just a kid, whereas in reality he was a mestizo in his fifties, who dragged his feet when he walked and had attacks of asthma that filled the air about him with clouds of effluvia. He was always somewhere about Radio Central and Panamericana, from morning to night, doing a little bit of everything, from giving the janitors a hand and going out to buy tickets for the movies and bullfights for the Genaros to distributing passes for broadcasts. His most permanent job was doing the sound effects for the serials.

  “Those people think sound effects are dumb little things that any idiot can do. But in fact they’re art too, and what does a half-moribund brachycephalic like Pablito know about art?” Pedro Camacho raved, with icy hauteur.

  He assured me that, “if need be,” he would not hesitate to eliminate, with his own hands, any obstacle to the “perfection of his work” (and he said it in such a way that I believed every word he said). He added that to his vast regret he had not had time to train a sound-effects technician, teaching him everything from A to Z, but that after rapidly reconnoitering the “Peruvian radio dial,” he had found what he was looking for.

  He lowered his voice, glanced stealthily all around, and concluded, with a Mephistophelean air: “The individual we ought to have for the serials is on Radio Victoria.”

  Javier and I analyzed how good the chances were that Pedro Camacho would carry out his homicidal intentions with regard to Big Pablito, and we agreed that the latter’s fate depended entirely on the surveys: if the number of listeners tuning in to the serials kept going up, he’d be ruthlessly sacrificed. As a matter of fact, before the week was out, Genaro Jr. suddenly appeared in the shack, surprising me in the midst of writing another story—he must have noticed my confusion and the haste with which I ripped the page out of the typewriter and slipped it in among the news bulletins, but he was tactful enough not to say anything—and, addressing both Pascual and me, announced with the sweeping gesture
of a great Maecenas: “All your griping has finally gotten you the new editor you’ve been wanting, you two lazybones. Big Pablito is going to be working with you from now on. Don’t rest on your laurels!”

  The reinforcement thus received by the News Service turned out to be more moral than material, inasmuch as when Big Pablito appeared in the office the next morning, very punctually, at seven on the dot, and asked me what he should do and I gave him the job of making a brief summary of a parliamentary report, a look of terror came over him, he had a coughing fit that left him purple in the face, and finally managed to stammer that that was impossible. “The thing is, sir, I don’t know how to read or write.”

  I took the fact that Genaro Jr. had sent us an illiterate to be our new editor as a choice sample of his playful sense of humor. Pascual, who’d been a bit upset when he learned that he and Pablito were to be co-editors, positively gloated on hearing the latter confess that he was illiterate. He upbraided his brand-new colleague in my presence for his apathetic attitude, for not having been capable of educating himself as he, Pascual, had done, at an adult age, by going to free night-school classes. Big Pablito, scared to death, kept nodding in agreement, repeating like an automaton: “That’s true, I hadn’t thought of that, that’s so, you’re absolutely right,” looking at me as though he expected to be fired on the spot. I immediately set his mind at rest, telling him that his job would be to take the news bulletins downstairs to the announcers. In actual fact, he soon became Pascual’s slave, obliged to trot all day long from the shack to the street and vice versa to fetch Pascual cigarettes or stuffed potatoes from a street vendor on the Calle Carabaya, or simply to go see if it was raining outside. Big Pablito endured his slavery in an exemplary spirit of sacrifice, and in fact his attitude toward his torturer was even more respectful and friendly than his attitude toward me. When he wasn’t running errands for Pascual, he would curl up in a corner of the office, and leaning his head against the wall, fall asleep instantly, snoring in steady, sibilant wheezes, like a rusty overhead fan. He was a generous-spirited man. He didn’t feel the slightest ill will toward Pedro Camacho for having brought in an outsider from Radio Victoria to replace him. He had nothing but praise for the Bolivian scriptwriter, for whom he felt the most sincere admiration. He often asked my permission to go downstairs to sit in on rehearsals of the serials, returning each time more enthusiastic than ever. “That man is a genius,” he would say, his voice choking with emotion. “The ideas that pop into his head are simply miraculous.”