Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I hadn’t seen Aunt Julia that day but was expecting to see her on the following day, Thursday, at Uncle Lucho’s. But when I arrived at the house on Armendáriz at noon for the usual Thursday lunch, I discovered she wasn’t there. Aunt Olga told me she’d been invited out to lunch by “a good match”: Dr. Guillermo Osores, a physician who was some sort of distant family relation, a very presentable man in his fifties with quite a bit of money, whose wife had died fairly recently.

  “A good match,” Aunt Olga repeated, winking at me. “Rich, responsible, good-looking, and with only two sons, who are already almost grown up. Isn’t he exactly the husband my sister needs?”

  “She’s been mooning about and wasting her time these last few weeks,” Uncle Lucho commented, also pleased at this new development. “She didn’t want to go out with anybody and was living the life of an old maid. But the endocrinologist has taken her fancy.”

  I felt such pangs of jealousy that I lost my appetite, and sat there in a foul, bitter mood. It seemed to me that my aunt and uncle, on seeing how upset I was, would surely guess why I was in such a state. There was no need for me to fish for more details about Aunt Julia and Dr. Osores because that was all they talked about. She’d met him some ten days before, at a cocktail party at the Bolivian embassy, and on learning where she was staying, Dr. Osores had come by to visit her. He had sent her flowers, phoned her, invited her to have tea with him at the Bolívar and now to lunch with him at the Club de la Unión. The endocrinologist had said jokingly to Uncle Lucho: “Your sister-in-law is super, Luis. Isn’t it possible that she’s the candidate I’ve been looking for so as to commit matri-suicide a second time?”

  I tried my best to appear totally disinterested in the subject, but I did a very bad job of concealing how distraught I was, and Uncle Lucho asked me, at one point when the two of us were alone, what was troubling me: had I gone poking around in places I shouldn’t have and caught myself a good dose of the clap? Luckily, Aunt Olga began talking about the radio serials, and that gave me a breathing spell. As she went on to say that Pedro Camacho sometimes laid it on too thick and that all her friends thought he’d gone too far with his story of the minister who “wounded himself” with a letter opener in front of the judge to prove that he hadn’t raped a thirteen-year-old girl, I silently went from rage to disillusionment and from disillusionment to rage. Why hadn’t Aunt Julia said a single word to me about the doctor? We’d seen each other several times during the last ten days and she’d never once mentioned him. Could it really be true, as Aunt Olga claimed, that she’d finally “gotten interested” in someone?

  In the jitney, as I was going back to Radio Panamericana, my mood suddenly shifted from humiliation to pride. Our innocent love affair had lasted a long time, after all; we were bound to be found out at any moment now, and that would provoke scandal and unkind laughter in the family. Moreover, what was I doing, wasting my time with a woman who, as she herself said, was almost old enough to be my mother? As an experience, what we’d already had together was quite enough. Osores’s appearance on the scene was providential; it saved me the trouble of having to get rid of her. I felt restless and upset, full of unusual impulses such as wanting to get drunk or punch somebody in the nose, and on arriving back at the radio station I had a run-in with Pascual, who, faithful to his nature, had devoted half the three o’clock news bulletin to a fire in Hamburg that had burned a dozen Turkish immigrants to death. I told him that in the future he was strictly forbidden to include any news item about dead people in the bulletins without getting my okay first, and I was curt and unfriendly to a pal from San Marcos who called me up to remind me that Law School still existed and to warn me that there was an exam in criminal law awaiting me the next day. Almost the moment I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Aunt Julia.

  “I stood you up for an endocrinologist, Varguitas. I presume you missed me,” she said, cool as a cucumber. “You’re not angry?”

  “Angry? Why should I be?” I replied. “Aren’t you free to do as you please?”

  “Ah, so you are angry,” I heard her say in a more serious tone of voice. “Don’t be an idiot. When can we see each other, so that I can explain?”

  “I can’t see you today,” I replied curtly. “I’ll phone you later.”

  I hung up, more furious with myself than with her, and feeling that I’d made a fool of myself. Pascual and Big Pablito were looking at me in amusement, and the lover of catastrophes subtly got back at me for having bawled him out. “Well, well, our Don Mario is certainly high-handed with the ladies, I must say.”

  “He’s right to treat ’em that way,” Big Pablito said, backing me up. “There’s nothing that pleases ’em as much as being kept on a tight leash.”

  I told my two editors to go to hell, wrote up the four o’clock bulletin, and went to see Pedro Camacho. He was recording a script and I waited for him in his cubicle, idly leafing through the papers on his desk without understanding what I was reading because my mind was entirely occupied with the question of whether the phone conversation I’d just had with Aunt Julia meant that we’d broken up. In the space of just a few seconds I went from hating her with all my heart to missing her with all my soul.

  “Come with me to buy some poison,” Pedro Camacho said in a somber voice from the doorway, shaking his lion’s mane. “We’ll have time to go have something to drink afterwards.”

  As we wandered up and down the side streets off the Jirón de la Unión hunting for the poison, the artist explained that the mice at La Tapada rooming house had become intolerable.

  “If they were content simply to scamper around underneath my bed, I wouldn’t mind, they’re not children, and as far as animals are concerned, I don’t have any phobias,” he said a few moments later as he sniffed with his prominent nose at some yellow powder that according to the shopkeeper could kill a cow. “But those mustached critters eat my food; every night they nibble on the provisions I leave on the windowsill to keep cool. There’s no way round it—I’m obliged to exterminate them.”

  He haggled over the price of the poison, with arguments that left the shopkeeper nonplussed, paid for it, had them wrap up the little envelopes full of yellow powder, and the two of us went to a café on La Colmena. He ordered his usual herb concoction and I ordered coffee.

  “I’ve got love troubles, my friend Camacho,” I said to him straight out, surprised at hearing myself use a soap-opera cliché but it seemed to me that by speaking in this way I distanced myself from my own story and at the same time managed to vent my feelings. “The woman I love is cheating on me with another man.”

  He gave me a searching look, his little pop-eyes colder and more humorless than ever. His black suit had been washed, ironed, and worn so threadbare that it was as shiny as an onion peel.

  “In these countries whose manners and morals have become so vulgar and plebeian, dueling has become a crime punished by imprisonment,” he reminded me, very seriously, making jerky motions with his hands. “As for suicide, it’s a gesture no one appreciates nowadays. A person kills himself, and rather than remorse, cold shivers, admiration, it’s laughter that he provokes. The best thing is practical recipes, my friend.”

  I was happy that I had taken him into my confidence. I knew very well that, inasmuch as no one outside himself existed for Pedro Camacho, my problem was the farthest thing from his mind; it had simply been a device to set his mechanism for churning out systematic theories in motion. Hearing the one he’d come up with would console me more (and have lesser consequences) than going out and getting drunk.

  After giving me a faint smile, Pedro Camacho spelled out his recipe in detail. “A hard, cutting, lapidary letter to the adulteress,” he said to me, wielding his adjectives with aplomb. “A letter that will make her feel like a miserable snake in the grass, a filthy hyena. Proving to her that you’re not stupid, that you know how she’s betrayed you, a letter dripping with contempt, that will show her what it means to be an adulteress.” He f
ell silent, thought for a moment, and then, in a slightly different tone of voice, offered me the greatest proof of his friendship that I could possibly expect from him: “If you like, I’ll write it for you.”

  I thanked him effusively, but said that, knowing as I did what long hours he put in working like a galley slave, I could never accept burdening him with my personal affairs in addition. (I later regretted having had such scruples, which kept me from having a holograph text of the scriptwriter’s.)

  “As for the seducer,” Pedro Camacho went on immediately, with an evil gleam in his eye, “the best thing is an anonymous letter, with all the necessary malicious slander. Why should the victim sit with folded hands as he’s being cuckolded? Why should he allow the adulterous couple to take their pleasure and fornicate in peace? It’s necessary to ruin their love, to hit them where it hurts, to poison them with doubts. Let them begin to mistrust each other, to be suspicious of each other, to hate each other. Isn’t vengeance sweet?”

  I hinted that perhaps it was not gentlemanly to resort to anonymous letters, but he reassured me immediately: one should behave like a gentleman when dealing with gentlemen and like a bastard when dealing with bastards. This was “honor rightly understood”: all the rest of it was errant nonsense.

  “With the letter to her and the anonymous letters to him, the lovers get the punishment they deserve,” I said. “But what about my problem? Who’s going to relieve me of my resentment, my frustration, my heartache?”

  “There’s nothing like milk of magnesia for all that,” he replied, but I was feeling too depressed even to laugh. “I know,” he went on, “that strikes you as far too materialistic an answer. But, believe me, I’ve had a great deal of experience in life. Most of the time, so-called heartaches et cetera are simply indigestion—tough beans that won’t dissolve in the stomach, fish that’s not as fresh as it should be, constipation. A good laxative blasts the folly of love to bits.”

  There was no doubt this time, he was a subtle humorist, he was making fun of me the way he made fun of his listeners, he didn’t believe one word of what he was saying, he was practicing the aristocratic sport of proving to himself that we mortals were hopeless imbeciles.

  “Have you had a great many love affairs, an extremely rich love life?” I asked him.

  “Yes, extremely rich,” he avowed, looking me straight in the eye over the cup of verbena-and-mint-tea he had raised to his lips. “But I have never loved a flesh-and-blood woman.”

  He paused dramatically, as though he were sizing up exactly how innocent or stupid I was. “Do you think it would be possible to do what I do if women sapped my energy?” he said reprovingly, with disgust in his voice. “Do you think that it’s possible to produce offspring and stories at the same time? That one can invent, imagine, if one lives under the threat of syphilis? Women and art are mutually exclusive, my friend. In every vagina an artist is buried. What pleasure is there in reproducing? Isn’t that what dogs, spiders, cats do? We must be original, my friend.”

  Before the last word had died away, he suddenly leapt to his feet, announcing that he had just time enough to get back to the studio for the five o’clock serial. I was disappointed; I would willingly have spent the rest of the afternoon listening to him, and I had the impression that I had inadvertently touched a sore point of his personality.

  When I got back to my office at Panamericana, Aunt Julia was there waiting for me. Seated at my desk like a queen, she was receiving the homage of Pascual and Big Pablito, who were bustling about solicitously, showing her the bulletins and explaining to her how the News Department functioned. She was smiling and seemed not to have a care in the world; but as I walked into the room a serious look came over her face and she paled slightly.

  “Well, what a surprise,” I said, just to say something.

  But Aunt Julia was in no mood for polite chitchat. “I came to tell you that nobody hangs up on me,” she said in a resolute voice. “Much less a brat like you. Would you kindly explain what’s gotten into you?”

  Pascual and Big Pablito just stood there, turning their heads to look at her and then at me and vice versa, bursting with curiosity as to how this dramatic scene just beginning would end. When I asked them to leave us alone for a moment, they were furious, but didn’t dare to refuse. They left the room exchanging dark looks with Aunt Julia to show where their sympathies lay.

  “I hung up on you, but what I really wanted to do was wring your neck,” I said to her once we were alone.

  “I’ve never known you to have fits of rage like this,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “May I ask what in the world is wrong with you?”

  “You know very well what’s wrong with me, so don’t play dumb,” I said.

  “Are you jealous because I went out to lunch with Dr. Osores?” she asked me in a slightly mocking tone of voice. “How easy it is to see you’re still just a kid, Marito.”

  “I’ve forbidden you to call me Marito,” I reminded her. I could feel that my anger was getting the better of me, that my voice was trembling and I no longer had any idea what I was saying. “And I now forbid you to call me a kid.”

  I sat down on the corner of my desk, and as though to counterbalance me, Aunt Julia rose to her feet and walked a few steps over to the window. With her arms crossed over her chest, she stood there looking out at the gray, damp, vaguely ghostly morning, not really seeing it, because she was searching for words to tell me something. She was wearing a blue tailored suit and white shoes, and all of a sudden I wanted to kiss her.

  “Let’s get things straight,” she finally said, her back still turned to me. “You can’t forbid me to do anything, even as a joke, for the pure and simple reason that you’re nothing to me. You’re not my husband, you’re not my fiancé, you’re not my lover. That little game of holding hands, of kissing at the movies isn’t really serious, and above all, it doesn’t give you any hold over me. You have to get that through your head, my boy.”

  “The truth of the matter is that you’re talking to me as though you were my mama,” I said to her.

  “The fact is, I could be your mama,” Aunt Julia said, and a sad look came over her face. It was as though she’d gotten over being angry, and the only thing left in its place was a feeling of irritation that went far back in time, a profound bitterness. She turned around, walked back toward the desk, and stopped very close to me. She looked at me sorrowfully. “You make me feel old, Varguitas, even though I’m not. And I don’t like that. What there is between us has no reason for being, much less a future.”

  I put my arms around her waist and drew her to me. She did not resist, but as I kissed her, very tenderly, on the cheek, on the neck, on the ear—her warm skin palpitated beneath my lips, and feeling the secret life coursing through her veins made me tremendously happy—she went on talking in the same tone of voice:

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I don’t like this situation, Varguitas. Don’t you realize it’s absurd? I’m thirty-two years old, I’m a divorcée—can you tell me what I’m doing with a kid eighteen years old? That’s a typical perversion of women in their fifties, and I’m not old enough yet for that.”

  I felt so excited and so much in love as I kissed her neck, her hands, slowly nibbled her ear, ran my lips across her nose, her eyes, or wound locks of her hair around my fingers, that every so often I lost track of what she was saying. Moreover, she kept alternately raising and lowering her voice, and at times it faded to a mere whisper.

  “At the beginning it was amusing, on account of having to meet in secret and all,” she said, allowing herself to be kissed, but making no move to reciprocate, “and above all because it made me feel as though I were a young girl again.”

  “Where does that leave us, then, may I ask?” I murmured in her ear. “Do I make you feel like a perverted fifty-year-old woman or a young girl?”

  “This whole business of being with a kid who never has a cent to his name, not doing anything but holding h
ands and going to the movies and giving each other tender little kisses, takes me back to when I was fifteen,” Aunt Julia went on. “It’s true that it’s nice to fall for a shy youngster who respects you, who doesn’t paw you, who doesn’t dare go to bed with you, who treats you like a little girl who’s just made her First Communion. But it’s a dangerous game, Varguitas, it’s based on a lie…”

  “That reminds me—I’m writing a story that’s going to be called ‘Dangerous Games,’” I whispered in her ear. “It’s about a bunch of little street urchins who levitate at the airport, thanks to the lift effect from planes that are taking off.”

  I heard her laugh. A moment later she threw her arms around my neck and put her cheek to mine. “Okay, I’ve gotten over being angry,” she said. “Because I came here determined to tear your eyes out. But it’ll be too bad for you the next time you hang up on me.”

  “And it’ll be too bad for you the next time you go out with that endocrinologist,” I told her, searching for her mouth. “Promise me you’ll never go out with him again.”

  She drew away and looked at me with a belligerent gleam in her eye. “Don’t forget that I came to Lima looking for a husband,” she answered, half jokingly. “And I think that this time I’ve found just the right one for me. Good-looking, cultivated, well-off financially, graying at the temples.”

  “Are you certain that this marvel is going to marry you?” I asked her, enraged and jealous all over again.

  Placing her hands on her hips in a provocative pose, she replied: “I have ways of getting him to marry me.”

  But, on seeing the expression on my face, she laughed, threw her arms around my neck again, and there we were, kissing each other lovingly and passionately, when we heard Javier’s voice: “You’re going to be arrested for indecent and pornographic conduct in public.”