Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Stop right there,” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar interrupted him as a terrible suspicion dawned on him. “What are you going to do?”

  “Cut it off and throw it in the trash to prove to you how little it means to me,” the accused replied, pointing toward the wastebasket with his chin.

  He spoke without false pride, with quiet determination. Their mouths gaping open in surprise, struck dumb, the judge and the secretary were unable to raise any sort of outcry. Gumercindo Tello was now holding the corpus delicti in his left hand and, an executioner brandishing the ax and mentally measuring its trajectory to the victim’s neck, raising the knife and preparing to let it fall to consummate the inconceivable proof.

  Would he go through with it? Would he thus deprive himself, in one stroke, of his integrity? Would he sacrifice his body, his youth, his honor, as an ethico-abstract demonstration? Would Gumercindo Tello turn the most respectable judge’s chambers in Lima into a sacrificial altar? How would this forensic drama end?

  Seven.

  My romance with Aunt Julia was going along swimmingly, except that things were getting complicated because it was becoming more and more difficult to keep it a secret. By common agreement, in order not to arouse suspicion in the family, I had drastically cut down my visits to Uncle Lucho’s. I continued, however, to appear regularly at the house for lunch on Thursdays. In order to go to the movies together at night, we invented various ruses. Aunt Julia would go out early in the evening, telephone Aunt Olga to tell her she’d be having dinner with a girlfriend, and wait for me at a place we’d agreed on beforehand. This modus operandi was rather inconvenient, however, in that Aunt Julia was obliged to while away several hours on the streets till I got off work, and most of the time she also had to go without dinner. At other times I went to pick her up in a taxi without getting out; she’d wait in the house, keeping an eye peeled, and the minute she saw the cab stop she’d come running out. But this was a risky operation: if anybody in the family spied me, they’d know immediately that there was something going on between Aunt Julia and me; and in any event her mysterious gentleman friend who invited her out for the evening but kept himself hidden in the back seat of a taxi was bound sooner or later to arouse curiosity, malicious gossip, a great many questions…

  We had decided therefore to see each other less often at night and more often in the daytime, during the hours when I had nothing to do at the radio station. Aunt Julia would take a jitney downtown around eleven in the morning, or five in the afternoon, and wait for me in a coffee shop on Camaná or in the Cream Rica on the Jirón de la Unión. I’d leave a couple of bulletins all edited and ready to go on the air and we could spend two hours together. We avoided the Bransa on La Colmena because it was a favorite hangout of all the people from Panamericana and Radio Central. From time to time (to be more precise, on paydays), I would invite her to lunch and we’d have as many as three hours together. But my meager salary didn’t really permit such extravagances. After making an elaborate speech, I’d managed to persuade Genaro Jr. to raise my salary, one morning when I’d found him in a euphoric mood because of Pedro Camacho’s successes, to exactly five thousand soles. I gave two thousand of it to my grandparents to help out with household expenses. The remaining three thousand had previously been more than enough for my vices: cigarettes, movies, and books. But since my romance with Aunt Julia, my spending money seemed to vanish into thin air immediately and I was always broke, so that I often had to touch my friends for loans and even had to resort to taking some of my belongings to the National Pawnshop, in the Plaza de Armas. Since, moreover, I had deep-rooted Spanish prejudices with regard to the relations between men and women and never allowed Aunt Julia to pick up a check, my financial situation became dramatic. To remedy it, I began to do something that Javier reprovingly called “prostituting my pen,” that is to say, writing book reviews and articles for literary supplements and periodicals published in Lima. I wrote under a pseudonym so as to feel less ashamed at how bad they were. But the two or three hundred extra soles they brought me each month were a big help in making ends meet.

  These secret meetings in downtown cafés of Lima were really quite innocent: long, romantic conversations, holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes, and if the topography of the establishment permitted it, rubbing knees. We kissed each other only when nobody could see us, something that rarely happened, since at these hours the cafés were always full of cheeky, nosy office clerks. We talked about ourselves, naturally, about the risks we were running of being surprised by some member of the family, about ways of getting around this danger; we told each other in minute detail everything we had done since the last time we’d been together (a few hours before, that is to say, or the previous day), but on the other hand we never made any sort of plans for the future. This was a subject that by tacit agreement was banished from our conversations, no doubt because both of us were equally convinced that our relationship was destined not to have a future. Nonetheless, I think that what had begun as a game little by little became serious in the course of these chaste meetings in the smoke-filled cafés of downtown Lima. It was in such places that, without our realizing it, we gradually fell in love.

  We talked a great deal about literature as well; or rather, Aunt Julia listened and I talked, about the Paris garret (an indispensable ingredient in my vocation) and about all the novels, plays, essays I’d write once I’d become a writer. The afternoon that Javier discovered us together in the Cream Rica on the Jirón de la Unión, I was reading my story on Doroteo Martí aloud to Aunt Julia. I had given it the medieval-sounding title of “The Humiliation of the Cross,” and it was five pages long. It was the first story of mine that I’d ever read her, and I did so very slowly so as to conceal my anxiety as to what her verdict would be. The experience had a devastating effect on the susceptibility of the future writer.

  As I read on, Aunt Julia kept interrupting me. “But it wasn’t like that at all, you’ve turned the whole thing topsy-turvy, that wasn’t what I told you, that’s not what happened at all…” she kept saying, surprised and even angry.

  I couldn’t have been more upset, and broke off my reading to inform her that what she was listening to was not a faithful, word-for-word recounting of the incident she’d told me about, but a story, a story, and that all the things that I’d either added or left out were ways of achieving certain effects: “Comic effects,” I emphasized, hoping she’d see what I was getting at. She smiled at me, if only out of pity for my misery.

  “But that’s precisely the point,” she protested vehemently, not giving an inch. “With all the changes you’ve made, it’s not a funny story at all any more. What reader is going to believe that such a long time goes by between the moment the cross begins to teeter and the moment it comes crashing down? The way you’ve told it, what’s there to laugh at?”

  Even though I’d already decided—feeling utterly crushed and secretly humiliated—to toss the story about Doroteo Martí in the wastebasket, I’d nonetheless launched into a passionate, pained defense of the rights of literary imagination to transgress reality, when I suddenly felt a tap on the shoulder.

  “If I’m interrupting, please tell me and I’ll clear out immediately, because I hate being a nuisance,” Javier said, drawing up a chair, sitting down, and asking the waiter to bring him a cup of coffee. He smiled at Aunt Julia. “I’m delighted to meet you, I’m Javier, the best friend of this prose writer here. You certainly have kept her well hidden, old pal.”

  “This is Julia, my Aunt Olga’s sister,” I explained.

  “What! The famous woman from Bolivia?” He’d more or less had the wind taken out of his sails: when he came across us we’d been holding hands and hadn’t let go when he sat down with us, and now he was staring intently at our intertwined fingers and had lost his air of worldly self-assurance of a few moments before. “Well, well, Varguitas!” he murmured.

  “The famous woman from Bolivia, you say? May I ask what I’m famous
for?” Aunt Julia asked.

  “For being so disagreeable, for those spiteful jokes of yours when you first arrived,” I explained to her. “Javier knows only the first part of the story.”

  “You kept the best part a secret, you bad narrator and worse friend,” Javier said, recovering his aplomb and pointing to our clasped hands. “Come on, tell me the rest, you two.”

  He was really charming that afternoon, talking a blue streak and making all sorts of jokes and witty remarks. Aunt Julia found him delightful, and I was happy that he’d discovered us; I hadn’t planned to tell him about her, because I detested sharing confidences about my love life (especially in this case, since the whole thing was so complicated), but now that he had chanced to discover my secret, I was glad that I was going to be able to talk with him about the ins and outs of this affair of the heart with Aunt Julia.

  As he left us that day, he kissed her on the cheek, bowed, and said: “I’m a first-rate pander. If I can be of help in any way, you can count on me.”

  “How come you didn’t tell us you’d even tuck us in bed?” I said testily the moment he appeared later that afternoon in my shack at Radio Panamericana, eager to hear all the details.

  “She’s more or less an aunt of yours right?” he replied, clapping me on the back. “In any case, I’m really impressed. A mistress who’s old, rich, and divorced: you get an A in the course!”

  “She’s not my aunt; she’s my uncle’s wife’s sister,” I said, explaining again what he already knew as I edited a news item in La Prensa on the Korean War for an upcoming bulletin. “She’s not my mistress, she’s not old, and she doesn’t have money. The only part of your description that’s true is that she’s divorced.”

  “What I meant by old was older than you, and the part about her being rich wasn’t intended as criticism but as a way of extending my congratulations, since I’m all in favor of marrying for money.” Javier laughed. “And am I to take it that she’s not your mistress? If not, what is she exactly? Your girlfriend?”

  “Something between the two,” I told him, knowing that that would irritate him.

  “Ah, I get it, you want to keep your deep dark secrets to yourself. Well, the hell with you, then. What’s more, you’re a bastard: I tell you everything about what’s going on between me and Nancy and you won’t tell me one thing about the catch you’ve made.”

  So I told him the whole story from the very beginning, the complicated schemes we had to resort to just to see each other alone, and he realized why I’d hit him for a loan two or three times during the last few weeks. He was intrigued by our story, asked me one question after another, and after hearing me out swore he’d be my fairy godmother. But as he was leaving he said in a solemn tone of voice: “I take it that this whole thing is only a game. But even so, don’t forget that you and I are still just kids,” he admonished me, looking me straight in the eye like a stern but kindly father.

  “If I get pregnant, I swear to you I’ll get an abortion,” I reassured him.

  Once he left, and as Pascual was telling Big Pablito all about an amusing nose-to-tail chain collision in Germany involving some twenty cars that had crashed into each other when an unthinking Belgian tourist had suddenly braked to a halt right in the middle of the Autobahn to rescue a little dog, I thought over what he’d said. Was it certain that Aunt Julia and I weren’t getting seriously involved with each other? Yes, certain. It was simply a different experience, a bit more mature and daring than the ones I’d had before, but if I was to have pleasant memories of our affair, it shouldn’t last very long. I had thought things through that far when Genaro Jr. appeared to invite me to lunch. He took me to Magdalena, to a restaurant with an outdoor patio that specialized in Peruvian cuisine, insisted that I order the rice with duck and the fritters with honey, and then, as we were having coffee, handed me the check, so to speak. “You’re the only friend he’s got, talk to him, he’s getting us into terrible trouble. I don’t dare say a word to him, he calls me an ignoramus, and yesterday he called my father a mesocrat. I don’t want to have any more run-ins with him. I’d have to fire him and that would be a disaster for the corporation.”

  The problem was a letter from the Argentine ambassador to Radio Central, couched in poisonous language, protesting the “slanderous, perverse, and psychotic” references to the fatherland of Sarmiento and San Martín that cropped up everywhere in the serials (which the diplomat called “sensationalist stories presented in episodic form”). The ambassador offered a number of examples which, he assured his addressees, had not been sought ex professo but collected at random by the personnel of the legation “with a penchant for this sort of broadcast.” In one of them it had been suggested, no less, that the proverbial virility of Argentine men residing in the capital was a myth since nearly all of them practiced homosexuality (and, preferably, the passive form); in another, that in Buenos Aires families, noted for living together in teeming hordes, it was customary to allow useless members—the oldsters and the invalids—to die of hunger so as to lighten the budget; on another, that beef cattle were raised for export only because in Argentine homes the meat that was most highly prized was horseflesh; in another, that the widespread participation in the sport of soccer had damaged the national genes, above all because of the players’ practice of butting the ball with their heads, thus explaining the ever-increasing numbers of oligophrenics, acromegalics, and other subvarieties of cretins on the shores of the tawny-colored Río de la Plata; that in the homes of Buenos Aires—“a similar cosmopolis,” as the letter put it—it was a common custom to attend to one’s biological necessities in a simple bucket, in the same room where one ate and slept…

  “You’re laughing. We laughed too, but today we had a visit from a lawyer and suddenly the whole thing doesn’t seem the least bit funny,” Genaro Jr. said, biting his fingernails. “If the embassy formally protests to the government, they can make us stop broadcasting serials, fine us, close down the station. Plead with him, threaten him, anything, so long as he drops the subject of Argentines.”

  I promised to do what I could, but without much hope of getting anywhere, since the scriptwriter was a man of unshakable convictions. I had come to feel genuine friendship for him; above and beyond the entomological curiosity he aroused in me, I truly respected him. But was the feeling mutual? Pedro Camacho didn’t seem to me to be capable of wasting his time, his energy, on friendship or on anything else that would distract him from “his art” that is to say, his work or his vice, that urgent necessity that swept aside men, things, appetites. It was true, however, that he was more tolerant of me than of others. We had coffee together (or, rather, I had coffee and he had his verbena-and-mint tea), and I dropped by his cubbyhole every so often to spend a few minutes with him, thus giving him a brief respite between one page and another. I listened to him very attentively and perhaps he found this flattering; he may have considered me a disciple, or I might simply have been for him what a lapdog is to an old maid and crossword puzzles to the pensioner: something, someone to help while away the empty hours.

  Three things about Pedro Camacho fascinated me: what he said; the austerity of his life, entirely devoted to an obsession; and his capacity for work. This latter especially. I had read about Napoleon’s tremendous endurance in Emil Ludwig’s biography of him, how his secretaries would collapse in utter exhaustion and he would go on dictating, and I often pictured the Emperor of the French as having the same face with the prominent nose as the scriptwriter, and for some time Javier and I called Pedro Camacho the Napoleon of the Altiplano (or, alternatively, the Balzac of Peru). Out of curiosity, I managed to calculate the number of hours of work he put in every day, and even though I often had proof that my calculations were correct, his schedule always seemed to beggar belief.

  In the beginning, he turned out four serials a day, but in view of their great success, their number gradually increased to ten, which were broadcast from Monday through Saturday, with each chapter of each s
erial lasting half an hour (or, more precisely, twenty-three minutes, since commercials took up seven minutes of each half hour). Since he directed all of them as well as playing a role in each, he must have spent around seven hours a day at the studio, if one takes into account the fact that rehearsing and recording each program took approximately forty minutes (between ten and fifteen minutes being required at each of these sessions for his initial sermon and the run-through). He wrote the serials as needed for each day’s broadcasts; I noted that each chapter took him barely twice the time required to act it out on the air: one hour. In any event, this meant spending around ten hours a day at his typewriter. He was able to cut this down a bit thanks to his labors on Sunday, his day off, which he naturally spent in his tiny little office, getting a head start on his scripts for the week coming up. His work day was thus fifteen to seventeen hours long from Monday to Saturday and eight to ten hours long on Sunday. And all of them demonstrably productive hours, an amazing “artistic” output.

  He arrived at Radio Central at eight in the morning and left around midnight; the only times he went out for a break were with me, to the Bransa, to have a cup of cerebrally stimulating herb tea. He ate his lunch in his lair, a sandwich and a soft drink that Jesusito, Big Pablito, or one of his actor-disciples devotedly went out to get for him. He never accepted invitations, I never heard him say he’d gone to a movie, a theatrical performance, a soccer match, or a party. I never saw him read a book, a magazine, or a newspaper, outside of the big bulky volume of quotations and the city maps that were his “work tools.” No, I am mistaken: one day I discovered him poring over a yearbook listing the members of the Club Nacional.