Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “I slipped the concierge a few coins so as to have a look at it,” he explained when I asked him about it. “How else could I get the right names for my aristocrats? My ears suffice for the others: I pick plebeian names up out of the gutter.”

  The way in which he produced his serials, the single hour it took him to grind out each script, without ever once stopping, never ceased to amaze me. I often watched him as he composed these chapters. Unlike the recording sessions, where he kept what transpired a closely guarded secret, he didn’t care in the least if there were people around when he was writing. As he sat typing away at his (my) Remington, he was often interrupted by his actors, Puddler, or the sound engineer. He would raise his eyes, answer their questions, give a baroque instruction, send the visitor on his way with his epidermic little smile, as different from a laugh as anything I’ve ever witnessed, and go on writing. I often used to come down to his lair on the pretext that I needed a place to study, that I had to put up with too much noise and too many people in my pigeon coop upstairs (I was studying for my year-end exams in my law courses and forgot everything the minute I’d taken them: the fact that I never flunked one didn’t so much speak well of me as it spoke badly of the university). Pedro Camacho didn’t object to my studying there, and in fact gave every appearance of being not at all displeased by this human presence feeling him “create.”

  I would sit myself down on the windowsill and bury my nose in one law code or another. What I was really doing was spying on him. He wrote very quickly, typing with just his index fingers. I watched and couldn’t believe my eyes: he never stopped to search for a word or ponder an idea, not the slightest shadow of a doubt ever appeared in his fanatic, bulging little eyes. He gave the impression that he was writing out a fair copy of a text that he knew by heart, typing something that was being dictated to him. How was it possible, at the speed with which his little fingers flew over the keys, for him to be inventing the situations, the incidents, the dialogue of so many different stories for nine, ten hours a day? And yet it was possible: the scripts came pouring out of that tenacious head of his and those indefatigable hands one after the other, each of them exactly the right length, like strings of sausages out of a machine. Once a chapter was finished, he never made corrections in it or even read it over; he handed it to the secretary to have copies run off and immediately started in on the next one. I once told him that when I watched him work I was reminded of the theory of the French Surrealists with regard to automatic writing, which according to them flowed directly from the subconscious, bypassing the censorship of reason.

  I was greeted with a chauvinist reply: “Our mestizo Latin American brains can give birth to better things than those Frogs. Let’s not have any inferiority complexes, my friend.”

  Why was it that he didn’t use the scripts he’d written in Bolivia as a basis for his stories about Lima? I put this question to him, and he answered in generalities that fell far short of being a concrete explanation. In order to reach the public, stories, like fruits and vegetables, ought to be fresh, since art would not tolerate canned ones, much less those food products that were so old they’d turned rotten. Moreover, they had to be “stories of the same provenance as the listeners.” Since the latter were from Lima, how could they be expected to be interested in episodes that took place in La Paz? But he offered these reasons because his need to theorize, to turn everything into an impersonal truth, an eternal axiom, was as compulsive as his need to write. Doubtless, his real reason for not using his old scripts was far simpler: the fact that he didn’t have the slightest interest in saving himself work. For him, to live was to write. Whether or not his works would endure didn’t matter in the least to him. Once his scripts had been broadcast, he forgot about them. He assured me he didn’t have a single copy of any of his serials. They had been composed with the tacit conviction that they would cease to exist as such once they had been digested by the public.

  I once asked him whether he had ever considered publishing them. “My writings are preserved in a more indelible form than the printed page,” he replied immediately. “They are engraved upon the memory of my radio listeners.”

  I brought up the subject of the Argentine protest on the very same day that I had had lunch with Genaro Jr. I dropped by Pedro’s lair around 6 p.m. and invited him to the Bransa. Fearing his reaction, I announced this piece of news in a roundabout way: there were certain people whose sensibilities were all too easily wounded, who were incapable of tolerating the slightest hint of irony, and furthermore, libel laws in Peru were extremely strict and a radio station could be closed down for the most trivial reason. Giving ample demonstration of their total lack of sophistication, the Argentine embassy had taken offense at certain allusions and was threatening to lodge an official protest with the Foreign Office…

  “In Bolivia they even threatened to break off diplomatic relations,” he interrupted me. “A scandal sheet went so far as to intimate that they were massing troops on the border.”

  He said this in a resigned tone of voice, as though he were thinking: by its very nature the sun is obliged to shine, and what recourse is there if its rays start a fire?

  “The only thing the Genaros ask is that you try your best to refrain from speaking ill of Argentines in your serials,” I finally worked up my nerve to tell him straight out, coming up at the same time with an argument I hoped would win him over: “In a word, it’s better if you don’t say anything at all about them. When you come right down to it, are they worth bothering about?”

  “Yes, they are, because they inspire me,” he explained, thus putting an end to the discussion.

  As we were walking back to the radio station, he informed me, in a mischievous voice, that the international incident he’d set off in La Paz had come about because of a play he’d written and staged on the subject of “the bestial habits of gauchos,” which according to him had “hit home.” Once back at Panamericana, I told Genaro Jr. he ought not to labor under any illusions as to how effective a mediator I’d be.

  Two or three days later I got a chance to see Pedro Camacho’s living quarters. Aunt Julia had come down to the station to meet me after the last evening newscast because she wanted to see a movie that was showing at the Metro, starring one of Hollywood’s great romantic couples: Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. As we were crossing the Plaza San Martín around midnight to catch a jitney, I spied Pedro Camacho coming out of Radio Central. The moment I pointed him out to her, Aunt Julia wanted to meet him. We walked over to him, and on learning that Aunt Julia was a compatriot of his, he warmed to her immediately.

  “I’m a great admirer of yours,” Aunt Julia said to him, and to flatter him even more, she lied: “I first began listening to your serials in Bolivia, and I never miss one.”

  We walked along with him, almost without realizing it, to the Jirón Quilca, and on the way Pedro Camacho and Aunt Julia had a patriotic conversation from which I was excluded, in which there passed in review the mines of Potosí and Taquiña beer, the corn soup called lagua, stewed corn with cream cheese, the climate of Cochabamba, the beauty of the women of Santa Cruz, and other national glories of Bolivia. The scriptwriter seemed to enjoy talking of the marvels of his native land. On arriving at the door of a building with balconies and jalousies, he stopped but didn’t bid us goodnight.

  “Come on upstairs with me,” he proposed. “I’m having a simple dinner but we can share it.”

  The La Tapada rooming house was one of those old three-story residences in downtown Lima, built in the last century, that were often spacious and comfortable and sometimes even sumptuous, but later on, as people who were well-off gradually deserted the center of the city and moved to resorts on the seashore, old Lima gradually became unfashionable, these houses gradually began to fall into ruin, grew more and more crowded as they were subdivided, and eventually turned into veritable hives thanks to the installation of partitions that doubled or quadrupled the number of rooms and the haphazard creat
ion of minuscule living quarters in all sorts of odd corners in the entry halls, on the roof terraces, and even on the balconies and stairways. The La Tapada rooming house appeared to be about to collapse at any moment; the steps of the stairs we climbed to get to Pedro Camacho’s room swayed beneath our weight, and our feet stirred up little clouds of dust that made Aunt Julia sneeze. A thick film of dirt covered everything, walls and floors, and it was plain to see that the place had never been swept or mopped. Pedro Camacho’s room was like a cell. It was very small and almost empty. There was a cot without a headboard, covered with a faded blanket and on it a pillow without a pillowcase, a small table covered with an oilcloth, a chair with a straw seat, a suitcase, and a line strung between two walls with undershorts and socks drying on it. The fact that the scriptwriter washed his own clothes didn’t surprise me, but it did surprise me that he did his own cooking. There was a Primus stove on the windowsill, a bottle of kerosene, a couple of tin plates and eating utensils, a few glasses.

  He offered Aunt Julia the chair and me the bed with a grand gesture. “Please be seated. My dwelling is humble but my welcome to you is from the heart.”

  It took him two minutes to prepare dinner. He had the ingredients in a plastic sack, stored on the windowsill to keep cool. The menu consisted of fried eggs and boiled sausages, bread with butter and cheese, and yogurt with honey. We watched him prepare it with no wasted motions, like someone accustomed to doing so every day, and I was certain that this must be what he always had for dinner.

  As we ate, he was at once courtly and chatty, condescending to deal with subjects such as the recipe for cup custard (that Aunt Julia asked him for) and the most economical laundry soap for doing white clothes. He didn’t clean up his plate; as he pushed it aside, he pointed to what was left on it, and allowed himself to venture a little joke. “For the artist, eating is a vice, my friends.”

  Seeing what a good mood he was in, I dared to come right out and ask him a number of questions about his work habits. I told him I was envious of his stamina, of the fact that despite his galley-slave schedule he never seemed tired.

  “I have my stratagems to make my day interesting,” he confessed to us.

  Lowering his voice, as though to keep imaginary rivals from discovering his secret, he told us that he never worked for more than sixty minutes at a time on the same story and that changing from one subject to another was refreshing, since at the beginning of each hour he thus had the sensation that he was just starting to work.

  “Pleasure stems from variety, my friends,” he repeated, with an excited gleam in his eye and the facial contortions of an evil gnome.

  Hence, when writing stories, it was important that contrast, not continuity, be the ruling principle of composition: the complete change of place, milieu, mood, subject, and characters reinforced the exhilarating sensation that one was starting afresh. Moreover, cups of mint-and-verbena tea were helpful: they cleared one’s synapses, and one’s imagination was grateful. And leaving the typewriter every so often to go over to the studio, turning from writing to directing and acting, was also relaxing, a transition that had a tonic effect. But, in addition to all this, he had made an important discovery over the years, something that to the ignorant and insensitive might perhaps appear absolutely childish. But then, did it matter what that breed thought?

  We saw him hesitate; he fell silent and a sad look came over his little cartoon-character face. “Unfortunately I can’t put it into practice here,” he said dejectedly. “Only on Sundays, when I’m alone. There are too many busybodies around on weekdays, and they wouldn’t understand.”

  Since when had he, who looked upon mortals with Olympian detachment, had such scruples? I noted that Aunt Julia, too, was hanging on his every word. “You can’t leave us in suspense like this,” she said pleadingly. “What is this secret you’ve discovered, Señor Camacho?”

  He observed us for some time, in silence, like the conjurer who contemplates, with evident satisfaction, the attention that he has contrived to arouse. Then, with sacerdotal slowness, he rose to his feet (he had been sitting on the windowsill, next to the Primus stove), went over to his suitcase, opened it, and began to pull out of the depths of it, like a prestidigitator pulling rabbits or flags out of a top hat, an incredible collection of objects: an English magistrate’s court wig, false mustaches of various sizes, a fireman’s hat, military badges, masks of a fat woman, an old man, an idiot child, a traffic policeman’s stick, a sea dog’s cap and pipe, a surgeon’s white smock, false ears and noses, cotton beards… Like a little electric robot, he showed us these props, and—the better to demonstrate their effect to us? out of some intimate inner need?—he began putting them on and taking them off, with an agility that betrayed a long-standing habit, constant practice. As Aunt Julia and I watch in openmouthed amazement, by changing props and costumes Pedro Camacho transformed himself, before our very eyes, into a doctor, a sailor, a judge, an old lady, a beggar, a bigot, a cardinal… And all during this series of lightning-quick changes he kept talking, in a fervent tone of voice.

  “And why shouldn’t I have the right to become one with characters of my own creation, to resemble them? Who is there to stop me from having their noses, their hair, their frock coats as I describe them?” he said, exchanging a biretta for a meerschaum, the meerschaum for a duster, and the duster for a crutch. What does it matter to anyone if I lubricate my imagination with a few bits of cloth? What is realism, ladies and gentlemen—that famous realism we hear so much about? What better way is there of creating realistic art than by materially identifying oneself with reality? And doesn’t the day’s work thereby become more tolerable, more pleasant, more varied, more dynamic?”

  But naturally—and his voice became first furious, then disconsolate—through stupidity and lack of understanding, people were bound to get the wrong idea. If he were seen at Radio Central wearing disguises as he wrote, tongues would immediately begin to wag, the rumor would spread that he was a transvestite, his office would become a magnet attracting the morbid curiosity of the vulgar. He finished putting away the masks and other objects, closed the valise, and returned to the windowsill. He was in a melancholy mood now. He murmured that in Bolivia, where he always worked in his own atelier, he’d never had any problem “with his props and his bits of cloth.” Here, however, it was only on Sundays that he could write in the way that had long been his habit.

  “Do you acquire disguises to fit your characters, or do you invent your characters on the basis of disguises you already have?” I asked, just to be saying something, still overcome with astonishment.

  He looked at me as though I were a newborn babe.

  “It’s plain from your question that you’re still very young,” he chided me gently. “Don’t you know that in the beginning is the Word—always?”

  When, after thanking him effusively for his invitation, we went back down to the street, I said to Aunt Julia that Pedro Camacho had given us an exceptional proof of his confidence by letting us in on his secret, and that I’d been touched by his doing so. She was happy: she’d never imagined that intellectuals could be such amusing characters.

  “Well, they’re not all like that.” I laughed. “Pedro Camacho is an ‘intellectual’ in quotation marks. Did you notice that there wasn’t a single book in his room? He once explained to me that he doesn’t read, because other writers might influence his style.”

  Holding hands, we walked back through the silent downtown streets to the jitney stop and I told her that some Sunday I’d come down to Radio Central by myself just to see the scriptwriter become one with his creatures by way of his disguises.

  “He lives like a beggar—there’s no justice,” Aunt Julia expostulated. “Since his serials are so famous, I thought he must earn piles of money.”

  She couldn’t help remembering that she hadn’t seen a bathtub or a shower in the La Tapada rooming house, just a toilet and a washstand green with mold on the first landing. Did I think Pedro
Camacho never bathed? I told her that the scriptwriter couldn’t care less about such trivial details. She confessed to me that it had turned her stomach when she’d seen how filthy the pensión was, that she’d had to make a superhuman effort to get the sausage and the egg down.

  Once we’d gotten in the jitney, an old rattletrap that kept stopping at every corner all along the Avenida Arequipa, as I was slowly kissing her on the ear, in the neck, I heard her say in alarm: “In other words, if you’re a writer you’re poverty-stricken. That means you’re going to be down-and-out all your life, Varguitas.”

  Ever since she’d heard Javier calling me that, she too now addressed me as Varguitas.

  Eight.

  Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui looked at his watch, saw that it was noon, told the half-dozen employees of Rodent Exterminators, Inc., that they could go out to lunch, and did not remind them to be back by three on the dot, not one minute later, since all of them knew full well that, in this company, lack of punctuality was sacrilege: those who were late were fined or even fired on the spot. Once they had left, Don Federico, as was his habit, double-locked the office himself, put on his mouse-gray hat, and headed down the crowded sidewalks of the Jirón Huancavelica to the parking lot where he kept his car (a Dodge sedan).

  He was a man who aroused fear and dismal thoughts in the minds of others; a person had only to see him passing by on the street to note immediately that he was different from his fellows. He was in the prime of life, his fifties, and his distinguishing traits—a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—might have made him a Don Juan had he been interested in women. But Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui had devoted his entire existence to a crusade and allowed nothing and no one—with the exception of those hours that had necessarily to be set aside for sleeping, eating, and family life—to distract him from it. He had been waging this war for forty years now, his ultimate goal being the extermination of every last rodent in the land.