Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  It had been vacated just a few days before and a friend of hers had it up for rent; Nancy could speak to her. I was amazed at my cousin’s practicality; while I wandered about in the romantic stratosphere of the problems before me, she was capable of turning her mind to the down-to-earth problem of where the two of us would live. Moreover, five hundred soles a month for an apartment was within my reach. All I needed now was to earn a little more money “for the extras” (as my grandfather put it). Without thinking about it twice, I asked Nancy to tell her friend that she had a renter.

  After leaving Nancy, I hurried to Javier’s pensión on the Avenida 28 de Julio, but there were no lights on in the house and I didn’t dare wake up the owner, a woman with a terrible temper. I felt very frustrated, because I needed to tell my best friend about my great plan and get his advice. I didn’t sleep well and had nightmares all that night. I had breakfast at dawn with my grandfather, who always got up at daybreak, and hurried to Javier’s pensión again. I met him just as he was leaving, and we walked to the Avenida Larco to take the jitney to Lima. The night before, for the first time in his life, he’d listened to an entire chapter of one of Pedro Camacho’s serials, along with the owner of his pensión and the other boarders, and he was impressed.

  “Your pal Camacho is capable of anything, I must say. Do you know what happened in the one last night—the one about an old boardinghouse in Lima run by a poor family that’s come down from the sierra? Everyone was sitting around the lunch table talking and all of a sudden an earthquake hit. It was all so realistic—the doors and windows shaking, the screams—that we all leapt to our feet and Señora Gracia ran out into the garden…”

  I imagined Puddler, that genius, snoring to imitate the earth’s deep rumble, reproducing the dance of Lima’s houses and buildings by shaking baby’s rattles or rubbing glass marbles together in front of the microphone, and cracking nuts with his feet or knocking stones together to produce the sounds of roofs and walls cracking and stairways coming crashing down, as Josefina, Luciano, and the other actors panicked, prayed, screamed with pain, and begged for help under Pedro Camacho’s watchful eye.

  “But the earthquake isn’t the half of it,” Javier interrupted me as I was telling him of Puddler’s extraordinary feats. “To top everything off, the entire boardinghouse fell in and everyone inside was crushed to death. Not a single one got out alive—can you believe it? A guy who’s capable of killing off every last one of his characters in a story by having them die in an earthquake is worthy of respect.”

  We’d arrived at the jitney stop and I couldn’t keep my secret a minute longer. I summed up in a few words what had happened the evening before and the great decision I’d come to.

  He pretended not to be at all taken aback by my news. “Well, well, you, too, are capable of anything,” he said, shaking his head pityingly. And then, a moment later: “Are you sure you want to get married?”

  “I’ve never been this sure of anything in my life,” I swore to him.

  And by then that was quite true. The evening before, when I’d asked Aunt Julia to marry me, it had seemed like something I hadn’t really thought about, a mere phrase, almost a joke, but now, after talking with Nancy, I felt very sure of myself. It seemed to me that I was telling him of an irrevocable decision that I had long pondered.

  “The one thing I’m sure of is that all these mad things you’re up to are going to land me in jail,” Javier commented resignedly, once we were in the jitney. And then, a few blocks later, as we reached the Avenida Javier Prado: “You don’t have much time. If your aunt and uncle have asked Julita to leave, she can’t stay with them very much longer. And you’ll have to pull the whole thing off before the bogeyman gets here, because with your father on the scene, you’re going to have a hard time of it.”

  We sat there for a while not saying anything as the jitney went down the Avenida Arequipa, stopping on the corners to let passengers out and pick up others. As we were passing the Colegio Raimondi, Javier spoke up again, his mind totally occupied with the problem now: “You’re going to need money. How are you going to manage that?”

  “I’ll ask for an advance at the radio station. Sell all the old things I have—clothes, books. And pawn my typewriter, my watch, anything else I can put in hock for cash. And start looking like crazy for extra work.”

  “I’ve got some things I can pawn, too—my radio, my pens, my good watch,” Javier said. Half closing his eyes and adding up sums on his fingers, he calculated: “I think I can lend you around a thousand soles.”

  We separated at the Plaza San Martín and agreed we’d meet at noon up in my cubbyhole in the Panamericana shack. Talking with him had done me good and I arrived at the office in a good mood, feeling very optimistic. I read the newspapers, selected the news items to be put on the air, and for the second day in a row, Pascual and Big Pablito found the first bulletins all finished when they came in. Unfortunately, both of them were in the office when Aunt Julia called, and ruined the conversation. I didn’t dare tell her in front of them that I’d talked with Nancy and Javier.

  “I have to see you this very day, even if it’s only for a few minutes,” I begged her. “Everything’s coming along nicely.”

  “I’m really down in the dumps all of a sudden,” Aunt Julia said. “I’ve always been able to keep my spirits up no matter what, but right now I feel lower than a snake’s belly.”

  She had a good excuse to come downtown without arousing suspicion: making reservations for her flight back to La Paz at the Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano office. She’d come by the station around three that afternoon. Neither she nor I mentioned the subject of marriage, but it upset me to hear her talk about planes. The minute I hung up, I went down to the Lima city hall to find out what documents were necessary for a civil marriage. I had a friend who worked there and he was the one who tracked down all the information for me, thinking it was for a relative of mine who wanted to marry a foreigner who was a divorcée. The requirements turned out to involve all sorts of very worrisome stumbling blocks. Aunt Julia had to present her birth certificate and a copy of her divorce decree validated by the Ministry of Foreign Relations of both Bolivia and Peru. I, too, had to present my birth certificate. But since I was a minor, I also needed a duly notarized authorization from my parents to marry, or else be “emancipated” (declared to have attained my legal majority) by them, before the judge of the juvenile court. Both things were out of the question.

  I left the city hall making calculations; just getting Aunt Julia’s papers validated, provided, of course, that she had them here with her in Lima, could take weeks. If she didn’t have them with her, and had to ask for them to be sent from Bolivia by the proper authorities, the municipal registrar and the clerk of the divorce court respectively, it might take months. And then there was my birth certificate. I’d been born in Arequipa, and writing to a relative there to get me a copy would also take time (besides being risky). I envisioned one difficulty after another, like a series of challenges presenting themselves, but instead of dissuading me, they merely made me all the more determined (even as a youngster, I’d always been very stubborn). Halfway back to the radio station, as I was walking by the offices of La Prensa, I had a sudden inspiration and headed, almost at a run, for the university campus. Dripping with sweat by the time I got there, I made my way to the administrative office of the Faculty of Law, where the secretary, Señora Riofrío, who was in charge of giving out course grades, greeted me with her usual maternal smile and kindly listened to the complicated story I told her, involving urgent legal formalities, a unique opportunity to get a job that would help me pay for my studies.

  “It’s against the rules,” she complained, benignly rising from her rickety old desk and walking over to the files, with me right beside her. “You students are all alike—you know I’m good-hearted and you take advantage of me. Doing all of you favors like this is going to cost me my job someday, and nobody’s going to lift a finger for me.”

>   As she searched around among the students’ records, raising little clouds of dust that made us both sneeze, I told her that if such a thing ever happened, everybody in the law school would go out on strike. She finally found my folder, with a copy of my birth certificate in it, just as I’d remembered, which she handed to me with the warning that she could only let me have it for half an hour. It took me no more than fifteen minutes to have two photocopies of it made in a bookstore on the Calle Azángaro and return one of them to Señora Riofrío. I went back to the radio station flushed with triumph, feeling capable of pulverizing any and every dragon I might encounter.

  I was sitting at my desk, after writing up two more news bulletins and taping an interview for Panamericano with Gaucho Guerrero (an Argentine long-distance runner who had become a naturalized Peruvian citizen and whose entire life was devoted to beating his own record; he would run round and round a public square, for entire days and nights at a stretch, and was capable of eating, shaving, writing, and sleeping as he ran), deciphering, amid the bureaucratic prose of the certificate, some of the details surrounding my birth—I had been born on the Bulevard Parra; my grandfather and my Uncle Alejandro had been the ones who went to the city hall to announce my entry into this world—when Pascual and Big Pablito came in and distracted me. They were talking about a fire, laughing fit to kill as they went on about the victims’ agonized shrieks as they roasted to death. I tried to go on reading my abstruse birth certificate, but the comments of my two editors about the Guardias Civiles of the commissariat of El Callao that had been sprinkled with gasoline and set on fire by a demented pyromaniac, every last one of whom had been burned to cinders, from the chief on down to the humblest flatfoot, and even the dog that was the commissariat’s mascot, distracted me again.

  “I’ve seen all the papers and I missed that one—where did you read about it?” I asked them. And to Pascual: “I warn you: you’re not to use up all the time on today’s bulletins talking about the fire.” And to the two of them: “You’re hopeless sadists, both of you.”

  “It’s not a news item—it’s the eleven o’clock serial,” Big Pablito explained. “The one about Sergeant Lituma, the terror of the underworld of El Callao.”

  “He got fried to death, too,” Pascual chimed in. “He could have gotten out alive, he was just leaving to make his rounds, but he went back in to rescue his captain. His good heart was the death of him.”

  “It was the dog, Choclito, he went back in to rescue, not the captain,” Big Pablito corrected him.

  “That wasn’t ever really clear,” Pascual said. “One of the jail doors fell on him. I wish you could have seen Don Pedro Camacho while he was burning to death. What a great actor!”

  “And how about Puddler?” Big Pablito put in enthusiastically, eager to give credit where credit was due. “If anybody had told me you could create a roaring inferno with just two fingers, I wouldn’t have believed it. But I saw him do it with my own two eyes, Don Mario!”

  Javier’s arrival interrupted the conversation. The two of us went off to have our usual cup of coffee together at the Bransa, and once we’d sat down I gave him a quick rundown of what I’d found out about the necessary papers and triumphantly showed him the copy of my birth certificate.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking and I have to tell you that you’re making a stupid mistake getting married,” he said the minute I’d finished, a bit ill at ease at being so outspoken. “Not only because you’re still just a kid, but above all on account of the question of money. You’re going to have to work your ass off at all sorts of dumb jobs just to have enough to eat.”

  “In other words, you’re telling me exactly what my father and mother are going to tell me,” I said mockingly. “Aren’t you going to mention that if I get married that’ll be the end of my studying law? That I’ll never become a great jurist?”

  “That if you get married you won’t even have time to read. That if you get married you’ll never become a writer,” Javier answered.

  “We’re going to have a fight if you go on this way,” I warned him.

  “Okay then, I’ll hold my tongue.” He laughed. “I’ve done as my conscience dictated by predicting the future I see in store for you. And I must admit that if Nancy were willing, I’d get married myself, this very day. Where do we begin, then?”

  “Since there’s no chance of getting my parents to give their consent or to emancipate me, and since it’s also possible that Julia doesn’t have all the necessary papers, the only solution is to find a kindhearted mayor.”

  “What you really mean is one who can be bribed,” he corrected me. He examined me as though I were a beetle. “But who are you in any position to bribe, you penniless wretch?”

  “A mayor with his head in the clouds who won’t notice details. One who’ll fall for most any kind of sob story.”

  “Okay, let’s start looking for this extraordinary creature, a kindhearted idiot who’ll perform the ceremony even though it’s against every law in the books.” He laughed again. “Too bad Julita’s divorced. Otherwise, you could get married in church. That’d be easy—there are any number of priests who are kindhearted idiots.”

  Javier always cheered me up, and we ended up joking about my honeymoon, about the fees he was going to charge me for his services (helping him abduct Nancy, of course), and regretting not being in Piura, where it was such a common thing for couples to elope that there would have been no problem finding the kindhearted idiot required. By the time we said goodbye to each other, he’d promised to start looking for a mayor that very afternoon and to pawn all his possessions that weren’t indispensable in order to help out with the wedding expenses.

  Aunt Julia had said she’d come by the office at three, and when she hadn’t shown up by three-thirty, I began to worry. At four, my fingers were getting in each other’s way as I typed, and I was chain-smoking. At four-thirty, Big Pablito, seeing how pale I was, asked me if I wasn’t feeling well. At five, I had Pascual phone Uncle Lucho’s house and ask to speak to her. She hadn’t come back there. She still hadn’t come back half an hour later, or at six or at seven. After the last evening newscast, instead of getting off the jitney at my grandparents’ street, I went on as far as the Avenida Armendáriz and hung around my aunt’s and uncle’s house, without daring to knock at the door. I spied Aunt Olga through the windows, changing the water in a vase of flowers, and a few minutes later I saw Uncle Lucho turn out the lights in the dining room. I walked around the block several times, overcome by contrary emotions: anxiety, anger, sadness, a desire to slap Aunt Julia’s face, and a desire to kiss her. I was just completing one of these agitated turns around the block when I saw her get out of a big expensive car with diplomatic plates. I strode over to the car, my legs trembling with fury and jealousy, and determined to punch my rival in the nose, whoever he might be. He turned out to be a gentleman with white hair, and moreover, there was a lady sitting inside the car. Aunt Julia introduced me, explaining that I was a nephew of her brother-in-law’s, and I discovered that I was meeting the ambassador of Bolivia and his wife. I felt ridiculous, and at the same time as though I’d had a great load taken off my chest. When the car drove off, I grabbed Aunt Julia by the arm and almost dragged her bodily across the avenue and down toward the Malecón.

  “Good heavens, what a temper,” I heard her say as we came within sight of the sea. “You looked as though you were about to strangle poor Dr. Gumucio.”

  “You’re the one I’m going to strangle,” I said to her. “I’ve been waiting for you since three o’clock this afternoon and it’s now eleven at night. Did you forget that we had a date?”

  “I didn’t forget. I stood you up on purpose,” she said firmly.

  We’d reached the little park in front of the Jesuit seminary. It was deserted, and though it wasn’t raining, the grass, the laurel trees, the geraniums were glistening from the dampness. The mist was forming ghostly little umbrellas around the yellow cones of light from the la
mpposts.

  “Well, let’s postpone this fight to another day,” I said to her, sitting her down on the edge of the jetty, with the deep-pitched, synchronous sound of the breaking waves mounting from below. “There’s very little time now and a great many problems. Do you have a copy of your birth certificate and your divorce decree here?”

  “What I have here is my ticket back to La Paz,” she said, patting her purse. “I’m leaving at 10 a.m. on Sunday. And I’m happy. I’ve had it up to here with Peru and Peruvians.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but for the moment it just isn’t possible for us to go live in another country,” I said, sitting down next to her and putting my arm around her. “But I promise you that someday we’ll go live in a garret in Paris.”

  Up till then, despite the hostile things she’d said, she’d been calm, half joking, very sure of herself. But suddenly a bitter look came over her face and she said in a harsh tone of voice, without looking at me: “Don’t make things more difficult for me, Varguitas. It’s your parents’ fault that I’m going back to Bolivia, but I’m also going back because what’s happening between us is stupid. You know very well we can’t get married.”

  “Yes, we can,” I said, kissing her on the cheek, on the neck, holding her tight, avidly touching her breasts, searching for her mouth with mine. “We need to find a kindhearted idiot of a judge, that’s all. Javier’s helping me. And Nancy’s already found us a little apartment in Miraflores. There’s no reason for us to be pessimistic.”

  She let me kiss and caress her, but she remained distant, very sedate. I told her about my conversation with Nancy, with Javier, my inquiries at the city hall, the way I’d managed to get a copy of my birth certificate, and told her that I loved her with all my heart, that we were going to get married even though I had to kill a whole bunch of people. When I tried to force her teeth apart with my tongue, she resisted, but then she opened her mouth and I was able to enter it and taste her palate, her gums, her saliva. I felt Aunt Julia’s free arm creep around my neck, felt her huddle up close to me and begin to cry with sobs that shook her bosom. I consoled her in a voice that was an incoherent murmur, kissing her the while.