Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Well, I have heard what he’s up to,” I said, disconcerted by his enthusiasm. “As a matter of fact, I talked with the actors just last night. They’re worried about him. He works much too hard, and they think he’s in danger of collapsing from exhaustion. You might very well lose the goose that laid the golden eggs. Why not give him a little vacation so he can rest up a bit?”

  “Give Camacho a vacation?” the impresario said in a shocked tone of voice. “Was he the one who suggested such a thing?”

  No, I told him, it was the scriptwriter’s co-workers who had suggested it.

  “They’re tired of working as hard as he wants them to and want to get rid of him for a few days,” he said. “It would be insane to give him a vacation right now.” He picked up a handful of papers from the desk and waved them triumphantly in the air. “We’ve beaten the record for the number of listeners again this month. In other words, his idea of tying the stories together works. My father’s worried about these existentialist innovations, but they produce results—the surveys are right here to prove it.” He laughed again. “So, as long as the listeners like what he’s doing, we’ll just have to put up with his eccentricities.”

  I didn’t press the point, so as not to say the wrong thing. And after all, wasn’t it quite possible that Genaro Jr. was right? Couldn’t it very well be that the Bolivian scriptwriter had carefully planned every last one of these inconsistencies? I didn’t feel like going home and decided to go on a spending spree. I persuaded the cashier at Radio Panamericana to give me an advance on my salary, then went straight from the station to Pedro Camacho’s cubicle to invite him to lunch. He was typing away like a madman, naturally. He accepted my invitation without enthusiasm, warning me that he didn’t have much time.

  We went to a typically Peruvian restaurant, behind the Colegio de la Immaculada on the Jirón Chancay, where the specialty of the house was traditional dishes of Arequipa that, I told him, might perhaps remind him of picantes, the famous Bolivian stews with fiery hot peppers. But the artist, faithful to his usual spartan diet, ordered only a bowl of consommé with egg and a purée of red beans that he barely tasted. He skipped dessert altogether, and with a flood of grandiloquent words that left the waiters dumfounded protested vehemently when they didn’t properly prepare his verbena-and-mint tea.

  “I’m having a bad time of it these days,” I said to him after we had ordered. “My family’s discovered my romance with your compatriot, and since she’s older than I am and a divorcée, they’re furious. They’re going to take steps to separate us and I’m feeling very bitter about it.”

  “My compatriot?” the scriptwriter said in a surprised tone of voice. “Are you having an affair of the heart with an Argentine—pardon me—a Bolivian woman?”

  I reminded him that he knew Aunt Julia, that we’d visited him in his room at La Tapada and shared his evening meal with him there, that I’d already told him about my love problems and that he’d prescribed prunes eaten on an empty stomach and anonymous letters as the cure. I did so deliberately, going into details, and observing him closely.

  He listened to me very attentively, with a grave expression on his face, not blinking an eye. “It’s not a bad thing if one is confronted with such contretemps,” he said, sipping his first spoonful of consommé. “Suffering is a good teacher.”

  Whereupon he changed the subject, holding forth at length on the art of cooking and the necessity of being moderate in one’s eating habits in order to maintain one’s spiritual health. He assured me that consuming too much fat, starch, and sugar numbed people’s moral sensibilities and inclined them toward crime and vice.

  “Conduct a statistical survey of the people you know,” he advised me. “You’ll find that it’s fat people above all who turn out to be perverts. On the other hand, you’ll see that there’s no such thing as a thin person with evil proclivities.”

  Though he was doing his best to hide the fact, he was ill at ease. He was not holding forth with his usual sincerity and heartfelt conviction, but, quite obviously, simply rattling on, his mind preoccupied by troubles he was trying to hide. A look of anxiety, fear, shame lurked in his tiny bulging eyes, and every once in a while he bit his lips. His long hair was full of dandruff, and as his neck danced back and forth in his shirt collar, I discovered that he was wearing a little medal around it that he kept fingering from time to time. “A most miraculous man: Nuestro Señor de Limpias,” he explained, showing it to me. His black suit coat drooped from his shoulders and he looked pale. I had decided I wouldn’t mention the serials, but all of a sudden, when I saw that he didn’t even remember Aunt Julia or any of the conversations we’d had about her, I was seized with a morbid curiosity. We had finished the consommé’ with egg, and were drinking dark chicha as we waited for the main dish.

  “I was talking with Genaro Jr. about you just this morning,” I said in as casual a tone of voice as possible. “Good news: according to the ad-agency surveys, the number of people tuned in to your serials has gone up again this month. Even the stones are listening to them.”

  I noted that he stiffened, turned his eyes away, and began rapidly rolling up his napkin and unrolling it, blinking continuously. I hesitated as to whether I should pursue the subject further, but my curiosity got the better of me. “Genaro Jr. thinks that the increase in the number of listeners is due to your idea of mixing up the characters of different serials, of linking up the various plots,” I told him, whereupon he dropped the napkin, his eyes searched mine, and he turned white as a sheet. “He thinks it’s brilliant,” I hastened to add.

  As the artist just sat there staring at me, not saying a word, I went on talking, hearing my voice stammering. I spoke of the avant-garde, of experimentation. I cited or invented authors who, I assured him, had caused a sensation in Europe by introducing innovations very much like his: changing their characters’ identity in the middle of the story, deliberately creating glaring inconsistencies to keep the reader in suspense. They had brought the bean puree and I began to eat, happy to be able to stop talking and lower my eyes so as not to have to watch the Bolivian scriptwriter getting more and more upset. We sat there in silence for some time as I ate and he stirred the bean puree and the grains of rice round and round on his plate with his fork.

  “Something embarrassing is happening to me these days,” I finally heard him say in a very low voice, as though talking to himself. “I’m losing track of where I am in my scripts, I’m not sure of what I’m doing, and confusions creep in.” He looked at me in anguish. “I know that you’re a loyal young man, a friend who can be trusted. Not a word of any of this to the merchants!”

  I feigned surprise, overwhelmed him with assurances of my affection for him. He was not at all his usual self, but rather, a man in torment, insecure, vulnerable, his face a sickly green, with beads of sweat gleaming on his forehead.

  He raised his fingers to his temples. “My head is a boiling volcano of ideas, of course,” he declared. “It’s my memory that’s treacherous. That business about the names, I mean. I’m telling you this in all confidence, my friend. I’m not the one who’s mixing them up; they’re getting mixed up all by themselves. And when I realize what’s going on, it’s too late. I have to perform a juggling act to get them back in their proper places, to invent all sorts of clever reasons to account for all the shifting around. A compass that can’t tell the north from the south can lead to grave, grave consequences.”

  I told him that he was exhausted, that nobody could work at the pace he did without destroying himself, that he simply had to take a vacation.

  “A vacation? Not till I’m in my grave,” he bristled, as though I’d insulted him.

  But a moment later he humbly confessed that when he’d become aware of what he referred to as his “lapses of memory,” he’d tried to set up a system of index cards. But that turned out to be impossible, he didn’t even have the time to look back over the programs that had already been broadcast: every hour of his worki
ng day was taken up producing new scripts. “If I stop, it would be the end of the world,” he murmured. And why couldn’t his co-workers help him? Why couldn’t he go to them when such doubts overcame him?

  “I could never do that,” he answered. “They’d lose all respect for me. They’re simply raw material, my soldiers, and if I make a terrible mistake, it’s their duty to follow my lead and make the same mistake.”

  He abruptly interrupted our dialogue to lecture the waiters about his verbena-and-mint tea, which he maintained was insipid, and then we had to rush back to the station, practically at a run, because it was time for the three o’clock serial. As we said goodbye, I told him I’d do anything I possibly could to help him.

  “The one thing I ask of you is not to say one word to anyone,” he said. And then, with his icy little smile, he added: “Don’t worry: grave troubles are cured by grave remedies.”

  Back in my office up in the shack, I looked through the afternoon papers, circled the news items to crib for the bulletins, arranged for a six o’clock interview with a neurosurgeon doing historical research who had performed a cranial trepanation with Inca instruments lent him by the Museum of Anthropology. At three-thirty, I began eyeing the clock and the telephone, alternately. Aunt Julia called at four o’clock on the dot. Pascual and Big Pablito hadn’t come back to the office yet.

  “My sister talked to me at lunchtime,” she said in a gloomy voice. “She told me the scandal’s too serious for the family to ignore, that your parents are coming down to scratch my eyes out. She asked me to go back to Bolivia. What can I do? I have to go away, Varguitas.”

  “Will you marry me?” I asked her.

  She gave a hollow little laugh.

  “I’m serious,” I insisted.

  “Are you really asking me to marry you?” Aunt Julia laughed again, more amused this time.

  “Is it yes or no?” I asked. “Hurry up and decide—Pascual and Big Pablito are just coming in.”

  “Are you asking me to marry you to show your family you’re grown up now?” Aunt Julia asked me affectionately.

  “There’s that, too,” I granted.

  Fourteen.

  The story of the Reverend Father Don Seferino Huanca Leyva, that parish priest of the dung heap adjacent to the soccer-mad district of La Victoria known as Mendocita, began half a century ago, one night during the carnival season, when a young man of good family, who enjoyed mingling with the rabble, raped a carefree laundress, Black Teresita—in a Chirimoyo alleyway.

  When the latter discovered that she was pregnant, seeing as how she already had eight children and no husband and knew it was unlikely that any man would lead her to the altar, what with all those kids, she immediately called upon the services of Doña Angélica, a wise old woman who lived on the Plaza de la Inquisición and acted as midwife, but was even better known as a supplier of houseguests for limbo (in plain words: an abortionist). However, despite the poisonous concoctions (her own urine, in which mice had been marinated) that Doña Angélica had Teresita drink, the fetus that was the consequence of the rape, with a stubbornness that was a portent of what his character would be, refused to detach itself from the maternal placenta and remained there, curled up like a screw thread, getting bigger and bigger and taking on a more and more definite form, until nine months after the fornicatory carnival, the laundress was necessarily obliged to give birth to him.

  He was given the Christian name Seferino to please his godfather, a concierge at the Congressional Building who was named that, and his mother’s two surnames. During his childhood, there was nothing that would have led one to guess he would one day become a priest, because what he liked most was not pious religious practices but spinning tops and flying kites. But from the very first, even before he knew how to talk, he gave every sign of having real character. The laundress followed a philosophy of education instinctively inspired by Sparta or Darwin that consisted of informing her offspring that if they wished to continue to exist in this jungle, they had to learn to bite and to be bitten, and that having milk to drink and food to eat was entirely their own concern once they’d reached the age of three, since by doing other people’s washing ten hours a day and delivering it from one end of Lima to the other for another eight hours, she made just enough to feed herself and those of her children who had not yet arrived at the minimum age to fly on their own wings.

  The rape-child gave proof of the same stubborn will to survive that had caused him to persist in living when in his mother’s womb: he was able to feed himself by downing all the revolting refuse he collected from garbage cans, fighting with beggars and dogs over these filthy scraps. While his half brothers and half sisters died like flies of tuberculosis or food poisoning, or managed to live to adulthood though afflicted with rickets and psychic defects, thus only half passing the test, Seferino Huanca Leyva grew up in good health, physically robust and relatively sound mentally. When the laundress (a victim of hydrophobia? ) was no longer able to work, it was Seferino who supported her, and later paid for a first-class funeral for her, conducted by the Guimet Undertaking Parlor, that El Chirimoyo regarded as the very best in the history of the neighborhood (by then he was the parish priest of Mendocita).

  He was a precocious child who did all sorts of things to make himself a few pennies. As he learned to talk, he also learned to beg for alms from passersby on the Avenida Abancay, assuming the expression of a little gutter angel that melted the hearts of highborn ladies and loosened their purse strings. Later on, he was a shoeshine boy, a kid who guarded parked cars, a street peddler hawking newspapers, emollients, nougat, an usher at the soccer stadium, a secondhand clothes peddler. Who would ever have predicted that this child with dirty fingernails, filthy bare feet, a head of hair full of nits, his clothes covered with mends and patches, and his torso squeezed into an old sweater much too small for him and full of holes would one day become the most controversial parish priest in all of Peru?

  How he learned to read was a mystery, since he had never set foot in a school. People in El Chirimoyo said that his godfather, the concierge who worked in the Congressional Building, had taught him the alphabet and showed him how to spell out syllables, and that the rest came to him (children of the gutter who by sheer tenacity become Nobel Prize winners) by dint of a pure effort of will. Seferino Huanca Leyva was twelve years old, making the rounds of the city’s great mansions asking for worn-out clothes and old shoes (which he then sold in tenement districts and slums), when he met the person who was to provide him with the material means that enabled him to become a saint: an owner of vast landed estates, Mayte Unzátegui, of Basque origin, of whom it was impossible to say which was greater—her fortune or her faith, the size of her holdings or her devotion to Nuestro Señor de Limpias. She was coming out of her Moorish-style mansion on the Avenida San Felipe, in Orrantia, and her chauffeur was holding the door of her Cadillac open for her, when the lady spied the product of the rape, standing in the middle of the street next to his pushcart full of old clothes that he had collected that morning. His abject poverty, his intelligent eyes, his features of a headstrong young wolf pleased her. She told him she would come visit him at dusk that evening.

  There was laughter in El Chirimoyo when Seferino Huanca Leyva announced that a lady in a big luxury car driven by a chauffeur in a blue uniform would be coming to see him after sunset. But when, at six o’clock, the Cadillac braked to a stop at the entrance to the alleyway and Doña Mayte Unzátegui, as elegant as a duchess, entered it and asked for Teresita, everyone was convinced (and dumfounded). Doña Mayte (one of those businesswomen who carefully calculate every moment of their time, including that required for menstruation) immediately made the laundress a proposal that caused her to shout for joy. Doña Mayte offered to pay for Seferino Huanca Leyva’s education and give his mother a sum of ten thousand soles provided the boy became a priest.

  It was thus that the rape-child came to be a student at Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo seminary in Magdalena de
l Mar. Unlike others, who first feel a sense of vocation and then act, Seferino Huanca Leyva discovered that he had been born to be a priest, after he had become a seminarian. He proved to be a pious and diligent student, a favorite of his teachers, and the pride and joy of Black Teresita and his benefactress. But while his grades in Latin, theology, and patristics attained lofty heights, and his religiosity was irreproachably manifested in the form of Masses said, prayers recited, and self-flagellations administered, from his adolescence onward he began to show symptoms of what, in the future, at the time of the heated debates that his daring acts gave rise to, his defenders were to call impetuousness motived by religious zeal and his detractors evidences of the delinquent and criminal influence of El Chirimoyo. Thus, for instance, before being ordained he began to propound to his fellow seminarians the thesis that it was necessary to revive the Crusades, to do battle with Satan once more, not only with the feminine weapons of prayer and sacrifice, but also with the virile (and, he assured them, far more effective) ones of punches, butting with the head, and, if circumstances so required, knives and guns.

  His superiors, alarmed, hastened to combat these wild ideas. But Doña Mayte Unzátegui, on the other hand, warmly applauded them, and inasmuch as the latifundian philanthropist was helping to support a third of the seminarians, the reverend fathers (bitter pill that is swallowed for budgetary reasons) were obliged to overlook what was going on and close their ears to Seferino Huanca Leyva’s theories. And they were not merely theories: they were confirmed by practice. On the days when the seminarians were allowed out to visit their homes, the boy from El Chirimoyo invariably returned at nightfall with some example of what he called armed preaching. Thus, one day, on seeing a drunken husband beating his wife on one of the tumultuous streets of his neighborhood, he had intervened and broken the bully’s shinbones with a couple of good swift kicks, followed by a lecture on the proper behavior of the good Christian husband. Another day, having surprised a greenhorn pickpocket trying to rob an old woman in the Cinco Esquinas bus, he had knocked him out by clouting him over the head (and then personally taking him to the public emergency clinic to get his face sewed up). Finally, one day, having surprised a couple taking their pleasure together like animals in the tall grass of the Bosque de Matamula, he had whipped the two of them till the blood came, and made them swear on their knees, if they didn’t want another whipping, that they’d go get married forthwith. But Seferino Huanca Leyva’s real red-letter day (so to speak), insofar as his axiom “Purity, like the alphabet, is best beaten into people’s heads” was concerned, was the day on which he gave his tutor and Thomist-philosophy teacher, the gentle Father Alberto de Quinteros, a punch in the jaw, in the seminary chapel no less, because the latter, in a gesture of fraternity or an access of warm fellow feeling, had tried to kiss him on the mouth. A guileless, not at all spiteful man (he had come to the priesthood late in life, after earning fame and fortune as a psychologist who had first made a name for himself in a famous case in which he had cured a young doctor who had run over and killed his own daughter on the outskirts of Pisco), the Reverend Father Quinteros, on returning to the seminary from the hospital where they had stitched up the gash in his mouth and replaced with false ones the three teeth that had been knocked out, opposed the expulsion of Seferino Huanca Leyva, and he himself (with that generosity of great souls who turn the other cheek so often that they find their posthumous place on church altars) acted as sponsor of the rape-child at the Mass receiving him into the priesthood.