Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “You’re still just a little kid,” I heard her say softly, half laughing and half crying, as I told her, without pausing for breath, that I needed her, that I loved her, that I’d never let her go back to Bolivia, that I’d kill myself if she went away. Finally, she began to talk again, in a very soft voice, trying to make a joke: “Anyone who sleeps with little kids always wakes up soaking wet in the morning. Have you ever heard that old saw?”

  “That’s huachafo and an impermissible proverb,” I answered, drying her eyes with my lips and my fingertips. “Do you have those papers here with you in Lima? Could your friend the ambassador certify them?”

  She was calmer now. She’d stopped crying and was looking at me with tender affection. “How long would it last, Varguitas?” she asked me in a voice tinged with sadness. “How long before you’d get tired of me? A year, two years, three? Do you think it’s fair that in two or three years you’ll leave me and I’ll have to start all over again?”

  “Can the ambassador certify them?” I persisted. “If he certifies that they’re valid in Bolivia, it’ll be easy to get them certified as valid in Peru. I’ll find some friend in the Ministry to help us.”

  She sat there looking at me, feeling sorry about all the trouble I was going to and at the same time deeply moved. A smile slowly appeared on her face. “If you’ll swear to put up with me for five years, without losing your heart to anyone else, loving only me, okay,” she said. “For five years of happiness I’ll do this utterly mad thing.”

  “Do you have the papers?” I asked her, smoothing her hair, kissing it. “Will the ambassador certify them?”

  She did have the papers and we did manage to get the Bolivian embassy to certify them with any number of multicolored seals and signatures. The entire business took barely half an hour, since the ambassador diplomatically swallowed Julia’s story: she needed the papers certified that very morning, in order to comply with a formality that would allow her to take out of Bolivia the property she’d received as part of the divorce settlement. Nor was it difficult to get the Peruvian Minister of Foreign Relations to certify the Bolivian documents in turn. I got a helping hand from a professor at the university, an adviser of the Chancellery, for whom I had to invent another involved radio serial: a woman dying of cancer, who had to marry the man she’d been living with for years, just as soon as possible, so as to die at peace with God.

  There in the Palacio de Torre Tagle, in a room with old colonial wood paneling centuries old and impeccably dressed young men, as I waited for the bureaucrat, apprised of the emergency situation by a telephone call from my professor, to put more seals on Aunt Julia’s birth certificate and collect the necessary signatures that went with them, I heard about yet another catastrophe. An Italian boat, anchored at a dock in El Callao, loaded with departing passengers and visitors bidding them bon voyage, had all of a sudden, contrary to all known laws of physics and reason, begun turning round and round in circles, then listed to port and sank rapidly in the Pacific, with everyone on board lost—either fatally injured, drowned, or, incredibly, devoured by sharks. I learned this from the conversation of two ladies sitting next to me, also waiting while some formality was being taken care of. They were not joking; to them this shipwreck was a tragedy.

  “It happened on one of Pedro Camacho’s radio serials, am I correct?” I butted in.

  “Yes, on the one at four o’clock,” the older of the two ladies replied, a bony, energetic woman with a heavy Slavic accent. “The one about Alberto de Quinteros, the cardiologist.”

  “The doctor who was a gynecologist last month,” a young girl sitting at a desk typing chimed in, smiling and putting her finger to her temple to indicate that somebody had obviously lost his mind.

  “Didn’t you hear yesterday’s broadcast?” the lady in glasses who was with the foreign woman said in her unmistakable Lima accent. “Dr. Quinteros was on his way to Chile for a vacation, with his wife and Charo, his little girl. And all three of them drowned!” she said, in a voice filled with grief.

  “They all drowned,” the foreign woman put in. “The doctor’s nephew Richard, and Elianita and her husband, Red Antúnez, that stupid idiot, and even the little baby born of the incestuous relation, Rubencito. They’d come down to the boat to see them off.”

  “But what’s really funny is that Lieutenant Jaime Concha, who’s from another serial, also drowned, especially since he’d already died in the El Callao fire three days before,” the girl at the desk, who’d stopped typing, butted in again, dying with laughter. “Those serials have all turned into a tremendous joke, don’t you think?”

  One of the impeccably dressed young men, who had all the earmarks of an intellectual (specialty: Our Country’s Borders), smiled at her indulgently and said to the rest of us in a tone of voice that Pedro Camacho would have had every right to describe as argentine: “Didn’t I tell you that that device of carrying characters over from one story to another was invented by Balzac?” But he then drew a conclusion that gave him away: “If he discovers that Camacho’s plagiarizing him, he’ll get him sent to jail.”

  “What’s so funny isn’t that he carries them over from one serial to another but that he brings them back to life,” the girl argued in her own defense. “Lieutenant Concha burned to death as he was reading a Donald Duck, so how is it possible for him to drown to death now?”

  “Maybe he’s just unlucky,” the impeccably dressed young man who was bringing me my papers suggested.

  I left with my papers now anointed and blessed, leaving the two ladies, the secretary, and the young diplomats engaged in an animated discussion of the Bolivian scribe. Aunt Julia was waiting for me in a café and laughed when I recounted the whole episode to her; it had been some time since she’d listened to her compatriot’s broadcasts.

  Except for getting the papers certified, which had turned out to be so simple, all the other formalities, during this week of endless red tape and inquiries and running around, by myself or with Javier, to the mayor’s office of every district in Lima, were frustrating and exhausting. I didn’t set foot in the radio station except for the Panamericana news broadcast, and turned the job of preparing all the hourly bulletins over to Pascual, who was thus able to offer the radio listeners a veritable festival of accidents, crimes, acts of mayhem, and kidnappings that caused as much blood to be shed via Radio Panamericana as was being shed on the airwaves at Radio Central by my friend Camacho in his systematic genocide of his characters.

  I began my rounds very early in the morning. The first mayor’s offices I visited were those of the run-down municipalities farthest from downtown Lima: El Rímac, El Porvenir, Vitarte, Chorrillos. I explained the problem a hundred and one times (blushing furiously the first few times, and after that with the greatest aplomb) to mayors, deputy mayors, municipal councilors, secretaries, janitors, messenger boys, and each time the answer was a categorical no. I ran into the same stumbling block each time: unless I could produce notarized proof of my parents’ consent, or of my having been emancipated by them before the judge of the juvenile court, I could not get married. I then tried my luck in the mayor’s offices of the districts in the center of town (except for Miraflores and San Isidro, since there might be someone around who knew my family), with precisely the same result. After looking over my papers, the functionaries would inevitably crack jokes at my expense that were like so many kicks in the belly: “So you want to marry your mama, do you?” or “Don’t be a fool, my boy, why get married? Just shack up with her and that’ll be that.” The only place where there was a ray of hope was in the mayor’s office in Surco, where a plump, beetle-browed male secretary told us that the matter could be arranged for ten thousand soles, “because lots of people will have to be paid to keep their mouths shut.” I tried to bargain with him, and had gotten him down to five thousand soles, a sum I’d have great difficulty scraping together, but at that point, as though suddenly frightened by his own audacity, he backed down and ended up kicking us ou
t of the office.

  I talked on the phone with Aunt Julia twice a day and lied to her, telling her that things were going along without a hitch, that she should have a small suitcase all packed containing the things of hers she considered indispensable, that at any moment now I’d be calling to say, “Everything’s all set.” But I was feeling more and more demoralized. On Friday evening, when I returned to my grandparents’ house, I found a telegram from my parents: “Arriving Monday, Panagra, flight 516.”

  That night, after tossing and turning in bed for a long time as I thought things over, I finally turned on the lamp on the nightstand, fished out the notebook in which I kept a list of subjects for stories, and wrote down, by order of preference, the options that lay before me. The first was to marry Aunt Julia and confront the family with a legal fait accompli that they would be obliged to accept, like it or not. But inasmuch as there were only a few days left now and the municipal authorities all over Lima were proving so refractory, this first option was turning out to be more and more Utopian. The second was to flee abroad with Aunt Julia. But not to Bolivia; the idea of living in a world where she had lived without me, where she had so many friends and acquaintances, not to mention an ex-husband, bothered me. The best country for us would be Chile. She could go off to La Paz, to fool the family, and I would light out for Tacna, in an intercity bus or a jitney. I’d manage in one way or another to cross the border illegally to Arica, and from there I’d proceed overland to Santiago, where Aunt Julia would come to join me or be waiting for me. The possibility of traveling and living without a passport (getting one would also require written permission from my parents) didn’t strike me as an insuperable obstacle, and in fact it rather pleased me: it sounded like something straight out of a romantic novel. If the family, as they were certain to do, tracked me down and forced the authorities to return me to Peru, I would run away again, as many times as necessary, and that was how I’d live my life till I reached that longed-for, liberating twenty-first birthday. The third option was to kill myself, leaving an eloquent, well-written suicide note, that would plunge my parents in remorse.

  The next day, at a very early hour, I rushed over to Javier’s pensión. We’d fallen into the habit of going over the events of the day before each morning as he shaved and showered and drawing up a plan of action for the day just beginning. Sitting on the toilet seat watching him lather his face, I read him my list of options as I had outlined them in my notebook, with comments in the margin.

  As he rinsed the lather off, he argued insistently that I should change the order of my preferences and put suicide at the head of my list. “If you kill yourself, the junk you’ve written will automatically attract attention, people with a morbid turn of mind will want to read your stories, and it’ll be easy to bring them out as a book,” he said persuasively as he dried his face. “You’ll be a famous writer—posthumously, I grant you.”

  “You’re going to make me miss the first news bulletin,” I said, to hurry him up. “You can stop the Cantinflas act—I don’t find your jokes the least bit funny.”

  “If you did yourself in, I wouldn’t have to miss so many days at work or so many of my classes at the university,” Javier went on as he got dressed. “The best possible thing would be for you to go through with it today, right away, this very morning. That way, I wouldn’t have to pawn my things, which naturally I’m never going to be able to redeem before they auction them off, because, is there any chance you’ll be able to pay me back someday?”

  And as we were trotting down the street to the jitney stop, still convinced that he was a first-rate comedian, he went on: “And one last thing: if you kill yourself, you’ll be the talk of the town, and reporters will flock to interview your best friend, your confidant, the witness of the tragedy, and his picture will be in all the papers. Don’t you think there’s a good chance that your cousin Nancy would be swayed by all that publicity I’d get?”

  In the (horribly named) Bureau of Pignoration on the Plaza de Armas, we pawned my typewriter and his radio, my watch and his pens, and I finally persuaded him that he should also pawn his watch. Despite bargaining furiously, all we managed to get was two thousand soles. Earlier on, without my grandparents’ noticing, I had little by little sold my suits, shoes, shirts, ties, sweaters to secondhand clothes dealers on the Calle La Paz, till I had practically nothing left but the clothes on my back. But the immolation of my wardrobe brought me barely four hundred soles. I had better luck, however, with Genaro Jr, whom I finally persuaded, after a dramatic half hour, to give me four months’ salary in advance and deduct the amount advanced me from my paychecks over a year’s time. The conversation had an unexpected ending. I had sworn that I needed the money urgently to pay for a hernia operation my granny had to have, a plea that had left him unmoved. But then suddenly he said: “All right, I’ll give you the advance,” and then added, with a friendly smile: “But admit that it’s to pay for your girlfriend’s abortion.” I lowered my eyes and begged him not to give my secret away.

  On seeing how depressed I was at having gotten so little money for the things we’d pawned, Javier went back to the radio station with me, since we’d decided that we’d both ask for the afternoon off from our respective jobs so as to go to Huacho together. Perhaps the municipal authorities in the provinces would turn out to be more sentimental. I arrived in my office up in the shack just as the phone was ringing. It was Aunt Julia, beside herself with rage. The night before, Aunt Hortensia and Uncle Alejandro had dropped by Uncle Lucho’s for a visit, and had refused to even say hello to her.

  “They looked at me like something the cat dragged in, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d called me a whore to my face,” she said indignantly. “I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from telling them to go you know where. I held my temper for my sister’s sake, and for ours too, so as not to make things worse than they are already. How’s everything going, Varguitas?”

  “Monday, first thing,” I assured her. “You should say you’re postponing your flight to La Paz for a day. I’ve got everything almost ready.”

  “Don’t worry too much about finding that obliging mayor,” Aunt Julia said. “I’m so furious now I don’t give a damn. Even if you don’t find one, we’ll run away together anyway.”

  “Why don’t the two of you get married in Chincha, Don Mario?” I heard Pascual say the minute I hung up. Seeing how dumfounded I was, he turned beet-red: “It’s not that I’m a busybody who’s trying to stick my nose in your affairs. We couldn’t help overhearing the two of you, that’s all, and naturally we tumbled to what was going on. I’m just trying to help. The mayor of Chincha’s my cousin and he’ll marry you on the spot, with or without papers, whether you’re of age or not.”

  Everything was miraculously resolved that very day. Javier and Pascual went to Chincha by bus that afternoon, with all the papers and instructions to get everything all set for Monday. As they were off doing that, I went with my cousin Nancy to rent the one-room studio apartment in Miraflores, asked for three days off from work (I got them after a Homeric discussion with Genaro Sr., boldly threatening to quit if he refused to let me have the time off), and organized my escape from Lima. On Saturday night Javier returned with good news. The mayor was a congenial young guy, and when Javier and Pascual had told him the whole story, he’d laughed and applauded our plans to elope. “How romantic!” he’d commented. He’d kept the papers and assured them, “just between us,” that there would be a way of getting around posting the banns as well.

  On Sunday I phoned Aunt Julia to inform her that I’d found our kindhearted idiot of a mayor, that we’d elope the following day at eight o’clock in the morning, and that at noon we’d be husband and wife.

  Sixteen.

  Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont, who was destined to bring stadium crowds to their feet, not by making goals or blocking penalty kicks but by making memorable decisions as a referee at soccer matches, and whose thirst for alcohol was to
leave traces and debts in many a Lima bar, was born in one of those residences that mandarins had built for them thirty years ago, in La Perla, with the aim of turning that vast empty tract of land into the Copacabana of Lima (an aim that miscarried due to the dampness, which—punishment of the camel that stubbornly insists on passing through the eye of the needle—ravaged the throats and bronchia of the Peruvian aristocracy).

  Joaquín was the only son of a family that, in addition to being wealthy, had ties (dense forest of trees whose intertwining branches are titles and coats of arms) with the blue bloods of Spain and France. But the father of the future referee and drunkard had put patents of nobility aside and devoted his life to the modern ideal of multiplying his fortune many times over, in business enterprises that ranged from the manufacture of fine woolen textiles to the introduction of the cultivation of hot peppers as a cash crop in the Amazon region. The mother, a lymphatic madonna, a self-abnegating spouse, had spent her life paying out the money her husband made to doctors and healers (for she suffered from a number of diseases common to the upper class of society). The two of them had had Joaquín rather late in life, after having long prayed to God to give them an heir. His birth brought indescribable happiness to his parents, who, from his cradle days, dreamed of a future for him as a prince of industry, a king of agriculture, a magus of diplomacy, or a Lucifer of politics.

  Was it out of rebellion, a stubborn refusal to accept this radiant social and chrematistic glory to which he was destined, that the child became a soccer referee, or was it due to some psychological shortcoming? No, it was the result of a genuine vocation. From his last baby bottle to the first fuzz on his upper lip he had, naturally, any number of governesses, imported from foreign countries: France, England. And teachers at the best private schools in Lima were recruited to teach him numbers and his ABC’s. One after the other, all of them ended up giving up their fat salary, demoralized and hysterical in the face of the little boy’s ontological indifference toward any sort of knowledge. At the age of eight he hadn’t yet learned to add, and, as for the alphabet, was still learning, with the greatest of difficulty, to recite the vowels. He spoke only in monosyllables, was a quiet child who never misbehaved, and wandered from one room to the other of the mansion in La Perla, amid the countless toys imported from every corner of the globe to amuse him—German Meccano sets, Japanese trains, Chinese puzzles, Austrian tin soldiers, North American tricycles—looking as though he were bored to death. The one thing that seemed to bring him out of his Brahmanic torpor from time to time were the little cards with pictures of soccer players that came with boxes of Mar del Sur chocolates; he would paste them in fancy albums and spend hours on end looking at them with great interest.