Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The Bergua family never got back on its feet again. Its moral and material downfall dated from this period. Ruined by grasping medical and legal practitioners, they were forced to give up the private piano lessons (and as a consequence the ambition to make Rosa a world-famous concert artist) and reduce their standard of living to extremes that bordered on such pernicious habits as fasting and closing their eyes to filth. The enormous old house grew even older, and little by little dust accumulated everywhere, spiders invaded it, and termites devoured it; its clients became fewer and fewer, and it became a lower- and lower-class pensión, finally reaching the point of taking in maids and street porters. It touched bottom the day a beggar came knocking at the door, asking the shocking question: “Is this the Colonial Flophouse?”

  And so, as the days, the months, followed one upon the other, thirty years went by.

  The Bergua family appeared to have become habituated to its mediocrity, when suddenly something happened (an atomic bomb that early one morning totally destroys Japanese cities) that caused a flurry of excitement in the pensión. It had been years since the radio had worked, and years since the tight family budget had permitted the purchase of a daily newspaper. News of the outside world thus reached the Berguas’ ears only rarely and indirectly, by way of the comments and the gossip of their uncultured guests.

  But that afternoon (what an odd twist of fate) a truck driver from Castrovirreina let out a burst of vulgar laughter, accompanied by a greenish gob of spit, muttered: “That nut is really the limit!” and flung down on the badly scratched little table in the parlor the copy of Ultima Hora that he had just been reading. The expianist picked it up and leafed through it. Suddenly (cheeks as deathly pale as a woman who has just been the victim of a vampire’s kiss) she ran to her room, shouting for her mother to come at once. The two of them read and reread the crumpled news item together, and then, taking turns, they read it again, at the top of their voices, to Don Sebastián, who beyond the shadow of a doubt understood, for he immediately underwent one of those dramatic crises of his that caused him to hiccup violently, break into a sweat, burst into loud sobs, and writhe like a man possessed.

  What was this piece of news that so alarmed this crepuscular family?

  At dawn the day before, in a crowded ward of the Victor Larco Herrero Psychiatric Hospital, in Magdalena del Mar, a ward of the state who had spent so many long years behind those walls that he should have been pensioned off by now had slit the throat of a male nurse with a scalpel, strung up a catatonic old man who slept in the bed next to his, thus causing him to strangle to death, and escaped to the city by athletically leaping over the wall of La Costanera. His behavior was most surprising, since he had always been remarkably peaceable and had never shown the least sign of being in an ugly mood and never been heard even to raise his voice. His one and only noteworthy occupation, in thirty years, had been to officiate at imaginary Masses in honor of El Señor de Limpias and to distribute invisible hosts to nonexistent communicants. Before making his escape from the hospital, Lucho Abril Marroquín—who had just reached the most distinguished age given a man to enjoy on this earth: his fiftieth birthday—had penned a most polite farewell letter: “I am very sorry, but I find myself obliged to flee these precincts. A fire awaits me in an old house in Lima, where a crippled woman whose passion blazes like a torch and her family mortally offend God. I have been assigned the mission of extinguishing the flames.”

  Would he do so? Would he extinguish these flames? Would this man, come to life once again from the depths of the years, appear for the second time to plunge the Berguas in horror as he had now plunged them into terror? What fate lay in store for this panic-stricken family from Ayacucho?

  Thirteen.

  The memorable week began with a picturesque episode (without the violence that had marked the encounter with the Argentine barbecue chefs), of which I was a witness and more or less a protagonist. Genaro Jr. spent all his time thinking up innovations for the programs, and one day he decided that we should include interviews in the newscasts to liven them up a little. He set Pascual and me to work, and from then on we began to broadcast a daily interview dealing with some current event on the Panamericana evening news report. This meant more work for the News Department (with no raise in salary), but I didn’t regret it, because it was fun. As I put questions to cabaret entertainers and members of parliament, soccer players and child prodigies, in the studio on the Calle Belén or in front of a tape recorder, I learned that everyone, without exception, could be turned into a subject of a short story.

  Before the picturesque episode occurred, the most curious person I interviewed was a Venezuelan bullfighter. He had been a tremendous success that season in the Plaza de Acho. Following his first corrida, he had been awarded several ears, and at his second, after a miraculous faena, he was awarded a hoof and the crowd bore him on their shoulders in triumph from the Rímac to his hotel on the Plaza San Martín. But at his third and last corrida—he had scalped his own tickets for it for astronomical prices—he didn’t even get close enough to the bulls to see them, since he was seized with a deerlike panic and ran from them all afternoon; he didn’t make even one decent pass at them and went in for the kill so clumsily that on his second bull of the day he was given four warnings. There had been a major riot in the stands: the indignant spectators had tried to burn down the Plaza de Acho and lynch the Venezuelan, who, amid deafening jeers, and boos and a hail of cushions, had had to be escorted to his hotel by the Guardia Civil. The next morning, a few hours before he was to take the plane, I interviewed him in a little reception room in the Hotel Bolívar. I was dumfounded when I realized that he was less intelligent than the bulls he fought and almost as incapable as they were of expressing himself in words. He was unable to put a coherent sentence together, his verb tenses were all wrong, his manner of coordinating his ideas made one think of tumors, aphasia, monkey men. And the form in which they were uttered was no less extraordinary than the content: his speech habits were most unfortunate, an intonation full of diminutives and apocopes and shading off, during his frequent mental vacuums, into zoological grunts.

  The Mexican I was assigned to interview on the Monday of this memorable week was, on the contrary, a lucid thinker and an eloquent speaker. He was the editor and publisher of a review, he had written books on the Mexican revolution, he was visiting Peru as the head of a delegation of economists and was staying at the Bolívar. He agreed to come to the radio station and I went to get him myself. He was a tall, erect, well-dressed gentleman with white hair who must have been close to his sixties. He was accompanied by his wife, a slight woman with bright eyes who was wearing a little hat with flowers. We blocked out the interview on our way from the hotel to the station and it was recorded in fifteen minutes. Genaro Jr. was terribly upset because, in answer to one question, the economist and historian violently attacked military dictatorships (we were suffering from one in Peru at the time, headed by a certain Odría).

  The unexpected happened as I was escorting the couple back to the Bolívar. It was noon and the Calle Belén and the Plaza San Martín were jammed with people. We were walking along the street, with the husband in the center, his wife on his right, and me on his left on the curb side.

  We had just passed by Radio Central, and simply to make conversation I was telling the important man once again that the interview had turned out magnificently, when all of a sudden I was definitely interrupted by the tiny voice of the Mexican lady. “Jesus, Mary, I’m about to faint…”

  I looked at her: she was haggard, and blinking her eyes and moving her mouth in a most peculiar way. But what was really surprising was the economist-historian’s reaction. On hearing his wife’s warning, he glanced swiftly at her, and then at me, with a bewildered expression on his face, whereupon he immediately looked straight ahead of him again and, instead of stopping, quickened his pace. The Mexican lady was now beside me, grimacing. I managed to grab her by the arm just as she was about t
o collapse to the sidewalk. As she was such a frail little thing, I was able fortunately to hold her up and help her along, as the important man took off in great long strides, leaving me with the delicate task of dragging his wife along the street. People moved aside to let us by, stopped to stare at us, and at one point—we had gotten as far as the Cine Colón and, in addition to making faces, the little Mexican lady was now leaking spittle, mucus, and tears—I heard a cigarette vendor say: “What’s more, she’s pissing all over herself.” It was true: the wife of the economist-historian (who had crossed La Colmena and disappeared amid the crowd milling about outside the doors of the Bolívar bar) was leaving a yellow trail behind her. When we reached the corner, I had no choice but to pick her up and, a gallant, spectacular cynosure of all eyes, carry her the remaining fifty yards, amid drivers honking, policemen whistling, and people pointing at us. The little Mexican lady writhed violently in my arms without letting up for a second and went on making faces, and my hands and nose told me that she was probably now doing something worse than urinating. From her throat there came an atrophied, intermittent sound. On entering the Bolívar, I heard someone curtly order me: “Room 301.” It was the important man, half hidden behind some drapes. The moment he’d given me that order, he made off again, heading nimbly for the elevator, and as we went upstairs he did not deign to look at me or his consort even once, as though he did not wish to appear to be intruding. The elevator operator helped me carry the lady to the room. But the minute we’d put her down on the bed, the important man literally shoved us to the door and slammed it in our faces, without saying either thanks or goodbye: there was a sour look on his face at that moment.

  “He’s not a bad husband,” Pedro Camacho was to explain to me later. “He’s simply a very sensitive person with a great fear of looking ridiculous.”

  That afternoon I was to read a story that I’d just finished, “Aunt Eliana,” to Aunt Julia and Javier. El Comercio never did publish the story about the levitating kids and I had consoled myself by writing another one, based on something that had happened in my family. Eliana was one of the many aunts who appeared at our house when I was little, and she was my favorite because she brought me chocolates and sometimes took me to tea at the Cream Rica. Everyone used to make fun of her fondness for sweets, and at our tribal gatherings there was much tongue-wagging about how she spent all her salary as a secretary on gooey pies, crusty croissants, fluffy sponge cakes, and thick chocolate at the Tiendecita Blanca. She was a plump, affectionate, jolly, talkative girl, and I used to come to her defense when people in the family would remark to each other behind her back that she was going to be an old maid if she didn’t watch out. One day Aunt Eliana mysteriously stopped coming to visit us and the family never mentioned her name again. I must have been six or seven years old at the time, and I remember being suspicious of the answers I got from my parents when I asked about her: she’d gone off on a trip, she was sick, she’d be dropping by any day now. Some five years later the entire family suddenly appeared in mourning dress, and that night, at my grandparents’ house, I learned that they had been to the funeral of Aunt Eliana, who had just died of cancer. I then learned what the mystery had been all about. Just as it appeared that Aunt Eliana was doomed to be a spinster for the rest of her life, she had unexpectedly married a Chinese, the owner of a grocery store in Jesús María, and the whole clan, beginning with her own parents, had been so horrified by this scandal—I had the impression at the time that what was so scandalous was the fact that the husband was Chinese, but I have now deduced that his principal taint was that he was a grocer—that they had decided to pretend she no longer existed and had never visited or received her from that day on. But when she died they forgave her—at heart, we were a sentimental family—attended her wake and her funeral, and shed many a tear for her.

  My story was the monologue of a little boy lying in bed trying to unravel the mystery of his aunt’s disappearance, and, as an epilogue, her wake. It was a “social” story, full of anger against the parents and their prejudices. I had written it in a couple of weeks and talked about it so much to Aunt Julia and Javier that they finally capitulated and asked me to read it to them. But before doing so that Monday afternoon, I told them what had happened that morning with the little Mexican lady and the important man. It was an error for which I paid dearly, since they found this tale much more amusing than my story.

  Aunt Julia was now in the habit of coming down to join me for the evening at Panamericana. We had discovered that this was the safest place, since Pascual and Big Pablito were in on our secret and we could count on their complicity. She would appear after five, the hour when things began to quiet down around the place: the Genaros had gone home, and almost no one came prowling about the shack. My co-workers, by tacit agreement, would ask permission to “go have a cup of coffee,” so that Aunt Julia and I could hug and kiss each other and talk alone. Sometimes I would get to work writing and she would sit reading a magazine or chatting with Javier, who invariably came up to join us around seven. We had come to form an inseparable group, and in this little room with its thin plasterboard walls my romance with Aunt Julia had come to have a marvelous naturalness. We could hold hands or kiss and nobody paid any attention. That made us happy. Shutting ourselves up inside the shack was to be free, to be ourselves, we could love each other, talk about what mattered most to us, and feel surrounded by an aura of understanding. To go outside beyond these narrow limits was to enter a hostile domain, where we were forced to lie and to hide.

  “Is it all right to call this our love nest?” Aunt Julia asked me. “Or is that huachafo too?”

  “Of course it’s huachafo, and it’s simply not permissible to call it that,” I answered. “But we could name it Montmartre.”

  We played teacher and pupil and I explained to her what things were huachafo, what things it was not permissible to say or do, and I subjected her reading matter to an inquisitorial censorship, placing all her favorite authors on the forbidden list, beginning with Frank Yerby and ending with Corín Tellado. We had a great time and laughed like fools over this huachafo game, and every once in a while Javier would join in, with fervent dialectical flourishes.

  Pascual and Big Pablito were also present during my reading of “Aunt Eliana,” because they happened to be there at the time and I didn’t have the nerve to chase them out, a fortunate turn of events for me as it turned out, since they were the only ones who praised my story, even though their enthusiasm was slightly suspect, inasmuch as they were my subordinates. Javier maintained that it lacked verisimilitude, that nobody would believe that a family would ostracize a girl merely because she married a Chinese, and assured me that if her husband was a black or an Indian the story could be salvaged. Aunt Julia dealt me a mortal blow by telling me that it struck her as melodramatic and that certain words, such as “tremulous” and “sobbing,” sounded huachafo to her. I was just launching into a defense of “Aunt Eliana” when I spied my cousin Nancy in the doorway of the shack. One look sufficed to tell me what had brought her there.

  “The family’s discovered what’s going on, and they’re up in arms,” she blurted out.

  Smelling a bit of juicy gossip, Pascual and Big Pablito were all ears. I kept my cousin from going on with her story, asked Pascual to get the nine o’clock news bulletin ready, and the four of us, Nancy and Javier, Aunt Julia and I, went out for coffee. As we sat at a table in the Bransa, she went into more details. She had been in the bathroom shampooing her hair and had overheard a telephone conversation between her mother and Aunt Jesús. A cold chill had run down her spine on hearing the words “the pair of them” and discovering that they were talking about Aunt Julia and me. It wasn’t very clear what the conversation was all about, except that they’d known about us for some time, because at one point Aunt Laura had said: “Can you imagine: even Camunchita saw them shamelessly holding hands on Olivar de San Isidro” (that was quite true, we’d done exactly that, just one afternoo
n, many months ago). When she came out of the bathroom (“trembling all over,” as she put it), Nancy had found herself face to face with her mother and had tried to pretend she had no idea what was up, her ears were ringing from the noise of the hair drier, she couldn’t hear one word, but Aunt Laura shut her up, gave her a dressing-down, and called her “a go-between for that fallen woman.”

  “By a ‘fallen woman’ she meant me?” Aunt Julia asked, more curious than angry.

  “Yes, she meant you,” my cousin answered, blushing. “They think you’re the one who’s responsible for starting the whole thing.”