Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Javier thought I’d put my foot in it; my having refused to reveal the place where the marriage ceremony had been performed was an act of defiance that would make my father even more furious, and completely useless, since he’d be able to find out in just a few days.

  I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the radio station that night in the mood I was in, so I went to Uncle Lucho’s. It was Aunt Olga who came to the door; she greeted me with a grave face and a murderous look, but didn’t let a peep out and even offered me her cheek to kiss. She went into the living room with me, where Aunt Julia and Uncle Lucho were sitting. One look at them sufficed to tell me that things were going from bad to worse. I asked them what was up.

  “Events have taken a terrible turn,” Aunt Julia said to me, interlocking her fingers with mine, and I could see how much this upset Aunt Olga. “My father-in-law is trying to have me thrown out of the country as an undesirable alien.”

  Uncle Jorge, Uncle Juan, and Uncle Pedro had gone to talk to my father that afternoon, and had come back badly frightened by the state they’d found him in. A cold fury, a fixed stare, a way of speaking that made it unmistakable that nothing could possibly get him to change his mind. He was categorical: Aunt Julia had to leave Peru within forty-eight hours or suffer the consequences. It so happened that he was an intimate friend—a former schoolmate, perhaps—of the Minister of Labor in the dictator’s cabinet, a general named Villacorta, he’d already talked to him, and if Aunt Julia refused to leave the country voluntarily, she would be put aboard the plane by soldiers. As for me, if I didn’t obey him, I would pay dearly for it. And, as he’d done with Javier, he showed the revolver to my uncles. I completed the picture by showing them my father’s letter and telling them about the police interrogation. The letter had one virtue at least: it won my aunt and uncle over a hundred percent to our cause. Uncle Lucho poured us all whiskies and as we sat there drinking them Aunt Olga suddenly began to cry and ask how all this could possibly be, her sister treated like a common criminal, threatened by the police, when the two of them belonged to one of the best families in Bolivia.

  “There’s no other solution except for me to leave, Varguitas,” Aunt Julia said. I saw her exchange glances with my aunt and uncle and realized that they’d already talked the matter over. “Don’t look at me that way, it’s not a plot against you, it’s not forever. Just till your father gets over his tantrum. To avoid more scandal.”

  They had discussed the situation and among the three of them they’d come up with a plan. They’d decided that Bolivia was out of the question and that Aunt Julia ought to go to Chile, to Valparaíso, where her grandmother lived. She would stay there just long enough for people’s tempers to calm down, and would come back the moment I gave her the word. I objected furiously; Aunt Julia was my wife, I’d gotten married so that we could be together, the two of us would leave the country together. They reminded me that I was a minor: I couldn’t apply for a passport or leave Peru without my parents’ permission. I said I’d sneak over the border illegally. They asked me how much money I had to go abroad to live. (I was hard put even to buy cigarettes on some days: after paying the wedding expenses and the rent on the little apartment, there wasn’t a sol left of the advance from Radio Panamericana or of the money I’d gotten from selling my clothes and putting my things in hock.)

  “We’re married now and they can’t take that away from us,” Aunt Julia said, running her fingers through my hair and kissing me as tears welled in her eyes. “It’s only for a few weeks, a few months at most. I don’t want you to get a bullet through you on account of me.”

  During supper, Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho presented their arguments to try to persuade me. I had to be reasonable, I’d done as I pleased and gotten married, and now I had to make a temporary concession to keep something irreparable from happening. I had to understand their position; as Aunt Julia’s sister and brother-in-law, they were in a very delicate situation vis-à-vis my father and the rest of the family: they couldn’t be either for or against her. They would help us, they were doing so at that very moment, and I had to do my part, too. While Aunt Julia was in Valparaíso, I would have to look for more work, because if not, how the devil were we going to live, who was going to support us? My father would eventually calm down and accept the facts.

  Around midnight—my aunt and uncle had gone discreetly off to bed and Aunt Julia and I were making love in the worst possible circumstances, half dressed, filled with anxiety, our ears alert for the least little sound—I finally gave in. There was no other way out. The following morning we would try to exchange her plane ticket to La Paz for one to Chile. Half an hour later, as I was walking down the streets of Miraflores, heading for my little bachelor’s room at my grandparents’, I felt bitter and powerless, and I cursed myself for not having even enough money to buy myself a revolver, too.

  Aunt Julia went to Chile two days later, on a plane that left at dawn. The airline had had no objection to exchanging the ticket, but there was a difference in price, which we were able to meet thanks to a loan of fifteen hundred soles made us by none other than Pascual. (He left me openmouthed with amazement when he told me that he had five thousand soles in a savings account, a sum that, considering the salary he earned, was a really heroic feat.) So as to be able to give Aunt Julia some money to take with her, I went to the bookseller on the Calle La Paz and sold all the books I still had left, including my copies of the Civil Codes and my law textbooks, and then bought fifty U.S. dollars for her.

  Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho went to the airport with us. I had stayed over at their house the night before. Aunt Julia and I didn’t sleep, and we didn’t make love. After supper my aunt and uncle went off to their bedroom and I sat on the end of Aunt Julia’s bed, watching her carefully pack her suitcase. Then we went and sat in the living room in the dark. We stayed there for three or four hours, holding hands, cuddled up in the armchair together, talking in low voices so as not to wake up the relatives. We embraced every so often, turning our faces toward each other and kissing, but we spent most of the time smoking and talking. We talked about what we’d do once we were back together again, how she’d help me with my work, and how, in one way or another, sooner or later, we’d go to Paris to live in that garret where I would become a writer at last. I told her the story of her compatriot Pedro Camacho, who was now in a private mental hospital, surrounded by madmen and in all likelihood going mad himself, and we made plans to write each other every day, long letters in which we’d tell each other absolutely everything we did, thought, and felt. I promised her that by the time she came back I’d have everything all arranged and would be earning enough money to make ends meet. When the alarm clock went off at five, it was still pitch-dark outside, and when we arrived at Limatambo airport an hour later, it was just barely beginning to get light. Aunt Julia was wearing the blue tailored suit that I liked so much and that looked so pretty on her. She seemed very calm when we said goodbye, but I could feel her trembling in my arms; I, on the other hand, seeing her enter the plane as I watched from the visitors’ terrace, felt a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

  Her Chilean exile lasted one month and fourteen days. For me, these were six decisive weeks, during which (thanks to my importuning of friends, acquaintances, fellow students, professors, whom I sought out, earnestly beseeched, pestered, drove mad with my pleas to lend me a helping hand) I managed to land myself seven jobs, including, naturally, the one I was already holding down at Panamericana. The first one I nailed down was at the library of the Club Nacional, next door to the radio station; it consisted of spending two hours a day there, between morning news bulletins at the station, making a list of the new books and magazines that arrived and cataloguing everything already in the library. A history professor at San Marcos, in whose course I had had outstanding grades, took me on as an assistant; every day from three to five I went to his home in Miraflores, where I noted down on filing cards various subjects that had been dealt with by ch
roniclers, for a projected History of Peru for which he would be writing the volumes on the Conquest and Emancipation. The most picturesque of these new jobs was a contract from the Lima Bureau of Public Welfare. In the Presbítero Maestro Cemetery were a series of grave plots, dating from the colonial era, for which all records had been lost. My task was to decipher the inscriptions on the gravestones and compile lists of all the names and dates. It was a job I could do whenever I found the time, and I was paid at piecework rates for it: one sol per dead person. I worked at this in the late afternoons and early evenings, between the 6 p.m. news bulletin and the Panamericana newscast, and Javier, who was free at those hours, would go with me. As it was winter and it got dark early, the director of the cemetery, a fat man who claimed that he had witnessed in person the inauguration of eight presidents of Peru before Congress, lent us flashlights and a little ladder so that we could read the inscriptions way up high in the tombs. At times, pretending to each other that we heard voices, moans, chains clanking and spied ghostly silhouettes flitting about amid the tombs, we ended up giving ourselves a real scare. Besides going to the cemetery two or three times during the week, I devoted every Sunday morning to this task. The remaining jobs were more or less (rather less than more) of a literary nature. In a column entitled “The Man and His Work,” I interviewed a poet, novelist, or essayist each week for the Sunday supplement of El Comercio; I wrote a monthly article in the magazine Cultura Peruana for a section that I had invented, called “Men, Books, and Ideas”: and, finally, another professor who was a friend of mine entrusted me with the job of writing a text on Civic Education for candidates for enrollment at the Universidad Católica (despite the fact that I was a student at the rival university, San Marcos); every Monday I had to come up with an essay for him on one or another of the many subjects dealt with in this pre-enrollment course, ranging from symbols of the Motherland to the polemics between the Indigenists and the Hispanicists, and passing by way of native flora and fauna.

  Thanks to all these jobs (which made me feel something like a rival of Pedro Camacho’s), I contrived to triple my income and earn enough with the seven of them for two people to live on. I asked for advances on each job and was able to redeem my typewriter, indispensable for the newspaper and magazine assignments (although I wrote many of the articles at Panamericana), and also give Nancy money to buy things to furnish and decorate the rented apartment, which the owner had ready for occupancy within the two weeks promised. The morning she turned this little studio apartment and the minuscule bathroom over to me was one of great joy. I continued to sleep at my grandparents’, however, because I decided I’d celebrate definitely moving into the apartment on the day that Aunt Julia arrived, but I went there almost every night to write articles and draw up my lists of the dead. Even though all my time was taken up at one or another of my jobs all daylong, and continually running back and forth between them, I didn’t feel tired or depressed; on the contrary, I was full of energy and, as I remember, I even read as much as I always had (though I did so only in the innumerable buses and jitneys I had to take every day).

  Faithful to the promise we’d made each other, Aunt Julia wrote me every day, and my granny would hand me the letters with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, murmuring: “Well now, I wonder who this little letter could be from, do you have any idea?” I, too, wrote regularly (it was the last thing I did every night, so sleepy at times that I felt tipsy), telling her all the many things I’d done that day. In the days following her departure I kept running into my countless relatives, at my grandparents’, at Uncle Lucho’s and Aunt Olga’s, in the street, and discovering the reactions of each. They varied a good deal and some of them were quite unexpected. Uncle Pedro’s was the most severe: he left me standing there with my outstretched hand and turned his back after giving me an icy look. Aunt Jesús shed great floods of tears and embraced me, whispering dramatically: “You poor child!” Other aunts and uncles chose to act as though nothing had happened; they were affectionate with me, but didn’t mention Aunt Julia and pretended not to know we’d been married.

  I hadn’t seen my father, but I knew that once his demand that Aunt Julia leave the country had been met, he’d cooled off a bit. My parents were staying with paternal aunts and uncles, whom I never visited, but my mother came to my grandparents’ house every day and we saw each other there. She adopted an ambivalent, affectionate, maternal attitude toward me, but every time the taboo subject came up, directly or indirectly, she turned pale, tears came to her eyes, and she assured me: “I’ll never accept it.” When I suggested she come see the little apartment, she was as offended as though I’d insulted her, and she always spoke of my having sold my books and my clothes as though it were a Greek tragedy. I cut her short by saying: “Mama dearest, don’t begin another of your radio serials.” She never spoke of my father either, and I didn’t ask about him, but I learned through other relatives who saw him that his wrath had given way to despair as to the future that awaited me, and that he was in the habit of saying: “He’ll have to obey me till he’s twenty-one; after that, he can ruin his life if he wants to.”

  Despite my multiple jobs, I wrote another story during these weeks. It was called “The Blessed One and Father Nicolás.” It took place in Grocio Prado, of course, and was anticlerical: the story of a sly little priest who, noting the fervent devotion of the people to Melchorita, decided to industrialize it for her benefit, and with the cold ambition of a good businessman set up a multiple operation: manufacturing and selling pious images, scapulars, good-luck charms, and all sorts of relics of the Blessed One, charging admission to the places where she had lived, taking up collections and organizing raffles to build her a chapel and pay the expenses of delegations sent off to Rome to hurry her canonization along. I wrote two different epilogues, in the form of newspaper items: in one of them, the inhabitants of Grocio Prado discovered all the business dealings that Father Nicolás was involved in and lynched him, and in the other the little priest eventually became the archbishop of Lima. (I decided I would wait until I read the story to Aunt Julia to choose which of the two endings I would use.) I wrote it in the library of the Club Nacional, where my job as cataloguer of acquisitions was more or less symbolic.

  The soap operas I rescued from the storeroom of Radio Central (a task that brought me two hundred soles extra salary) were condensed to make a month’s worth of broadcasts—the time it would take for the scripts from CMQ to arrive. But neither the old serials nor the new ones, as the dynamic impresario had correctly predicted, were able to keep the gigantic audience that Pedro Camacho had won for the station. The surveys showed that the number of listeners had fallen off, and the ad rates had to be lowered so as not to lose sponsors. But this was not a terrible disaster for the Genaros; as inventive and go-getting as ever, they soon found a new gold mine in the form of a program called “The Sixty-Four-Thousand Soles Question.” It was broadcast from Le Paris, a movie theater, and on it contestants who were experts on various subjects (cars, Sophocles, soccer, the Incas) answered questions for sums that could reach that figure. Through Genaro Jr., with whom I sometimes had coffee at the Bransa on La Colmena (though only on rare occasions now), I kept track of Pedro Camacho’s whereabouts. He’d spent almost a month in Dr. Delgado’s private clinic, but as it was very expensive, the Genaros managed to have him transferred to Larco Herrera, the public asylum, where, apparently, he was being treated with kindness and respect. One Sunday, after cataloguing tombs in the Presbítero Maestro Cemetery, I took a bus to the entrance of Larco Herrera, intending to pay him a visit. I was bringing him as a present some little bags of verbena and mint so he could have his herb tea. But just as I was about to pass through the main gate of that prisonlike place, along with other visitors, I changed my mind. The idea of seeing the scriptwriter shut up inside that crowded institution—during my first-year psychology class at the university, we’d been sent to work on the wards as student assistants—just one more madman among hordes
of other madmen, was so distressing I couldn’t make myself go inside. I turned around and went back to Miraflores.

  That Monday I told my mama that I wanted to have a talk with my father. She counseled me to be careful, not to say anything that might make him angry, not to get myself into a situation where he might do me harm, and gave me the phone number of the house where he was staying. My father informed me that he would receive me the following morning, at eleven, in what had been his office before he left for the United States. It was on the Jirón Carabaya, at the end of a tiled corridor on both sides of which there were apartments and offices. At the Import/Export Company—I recognized several employees I’d met before when he was working there—I was shown into the managing director’s office. My father was alone, sitting at his former desk. He was wearing a cream-colored suit and a green tie with white polka dots; he looked to me as though he’d lost weight since the year before and seemed a bit pale.