Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When Javier turned up that afternoon in my shack at Radio Panamericana, he roared with laughter on hearing the story of the fight, and went with me to ask the scriptwriter how he felt. They’d put a pirate’s patch over his right eye, and he was wearing two adhesive bandages, one on his neck and another under his nose. How did he feel? He gave a disdainful wave of his hand, dismissing the entire incident as of no importance, and made no attempt to thank me for having plunged into the fray out of solidarity with him.

  His one and only comment delighted Javier. “It saved the lives of those two when people separated us. If it had gone on a few minutes more, the crowd would have recognized me and then they’d have lynched the poor things.”

  We went to the Bransa, where he told us that one day in Bolivia a soccer player “from that country” who’d heard his programs had turned up at the studio armed with a revolver, which luckily the guards had detected in time.

  “You’re going to have to be careful,” Javier warned him. “Lima is full of Argentines now.”

  “It’s a matter of little moment. Sooner or later, worms are going to eat all three of us,” Pedro Camacho philosophized.

  And he delivered us a lecture on the transmigration of souls, an article of faith with him. He told us a secret: if it were left to him to choose, he would like to be some calm, long-lived marine animal, such as a tortoise or a whale, in his next reincarnation. I took advantage of his good spirits to exercise my ad honorem role of intermediary between him and the Genaros that I had assumed some time ago and gave him Genaro Sr.’s message about the phone calls, the letters, the episodes in his serials that a number of people didn’t understand. The old man begged him not to complicate his plots, to take into account the level of intelligence of the average listener, which was quite low. I tried to sugarcoat the pill by siding with him (as a matter of fact, I really was on his side, moreover): this urgent request was absurd, naturally, one should be free to write as one pleased, and I was merely repeating what they had asked me to tell him.

  He heard me out in such silence and with such an impassive expression on his face that he made me feel very uncomfortable. And when I finished, he still didn’t say a word. He swallowed the last sip of his verbena-and-mint tea, rose to his feet, muttered that he had to get back to his office, and left without even saying goodbye. Had he taken offense because I’d talked to him about the phone calls in front of someone he didn’t know? Javier thought so, and advised me to offer him my apologies. I promised myself never to act as an intermediary for the Genaros again.

  During that week I spent without seeing Aunt Julia, I went out at night several times with old friends from Miraflores whom I hadn’t bothered to look up since the beginning of my secret romance. They were former schoolmates of mine or kids I’d known in the neighborhood, youngsters who were now studying engineering, like Blackie Salas, or medicine, like Pinky Molfino, or had gotten jobs, like Coco Lanas, pals with whom I’d shared wonderful things since I’d been knee-high to a grasshopper: pinball games and the Parque Salazar, going swimming at the Terrazas and the beaches of Miraflores, parties on Saturday nights, crushes on girls, movies. But on going out with them, after months of not seeing them, I realized that we were no longer the bosom buddies we’d once been; we were still great friends, but we no longer had as many things in common. On the nights we went out together during that week, we did the same daring things together that we’d done in the past: going to the old run-down Surco cemetery to prowl around in the moonlight amid the tombstones that had toppled over in some earthquake, trying to find a skull to make off with; skinny-dipping in the enormous Santa Rosa swimming pool near Ancón, still under construction; making the rounds of the gloomy, depressing brothels on the Avenida Grau. My pals were still the same as ever, cracking the same jokes, talking of the same girls, but I couldn’t share with them the things that mattered most to me: literature and Aunt Julia. If I’d told them that I was writing stories and dreamed of being a writer, they would doubtless have thought, just as my cousin Nancy did, that I had a screw loose. And if I’d told them about my romance—as they told me about their conquests—with a divorcée, who was not my mistress but my sweetheart, my enamorada (in the most Miraflorine sense of that word), they would have taken me for (as a poetic, esoteric, very popular expression of those days went) a cojudo a la vela—an ass under full sail. I didn’t feel the slightest scorn for them for not reading literature, nor did I consider myself superior because I was having a romance with a real, grownup woman who’d had lots of experience, but the truth of the matter was that on those nights, as we poked around graves under the eucalyptus and pepper trees of Surco, or splashed about beneath the stars of Santa Rosa, or drank beer and haggled over prices with the whores at Nanette’s, I was bored, and found my thoughts dwelling more on my “Dangerous Games” (which had not appeared in El Comercio this week either) and on Aunt Julia than on what they were saying.

  When I told Javier about my disappointing reunion with my old neighborhood gang of buddies, he stuck out his chest and replied: “It’s because they’re still just kids. But you and I are men now, Varguitas.”

  Twelve.

  In the dusty downtown section of the city, halfway down the Jirón Ica, is an old house, with balconies and jalousies, on whose walls ravaged by time and uncivilized passersby (sentimental hands that inscribe hearts and arrows and scribble names of women, perverted fingers that engrave sex organs and dirty words) one can still see, as from a great distance, faint traces of the original paint, that color used in colonial days to adorn aristocratic mansions: indigo blue. The building (once the residence of marquises?) is today a rickety, oft-repaired structure that has miraculously withstood not only earthquakes but the gentle winds of Lima, and even its fine mists. Riddled by termites from top to bottom, full of ratholes and shrews’ nests, it has been divided and subdivided countless times, courtyards and rooms that need turns into hives, in order to house more and more tenants. A teeming multitude of modest means lives within (and risks being crushed to death beneath) its fragile walls and shaky ceilings. Occupying the second floor, in half a dozen rooms full of tumbledown furniture and bric-a-brac, perhaps not the most beautiful quarters imaginable, yet morally impeccable, is the Pensión Colonial.

  It is owned and run by the Berguas, a family of three that came to Lima from the stony Andean city of innumerable churches, Ayacucho, over thirty years ago and that here (O Manes of life) has gradually declined physically, economically, socially, and even psychically, and will doubtless give up the ghost in this City of Kings and be reincarnated as fish, birds, or insects.

  Today the Pensión Colonial is undergoing a painful decadence, and its boarders are humble, insolvent persons, in the best of cases little provincial parish priests come to the capital to deal with some archiepiscopal formality or other, and in the worst of cases little peasant women with purplish cheeks and vicuña eyes who keep their few coins knotted in pink handkerchiefs and recite the rosary in Quechua. There are no servants in the pensión, of course, and Señora Margarita Bergua and her daughter, a forty-year-old spinster who answers to the perfumed name of Rosa, are saddled with all the work of making the beds, cleaning, doing the shopping, preparing the meals. Señora Margarita Bergua (as the diminutive ending of her name might indicate) is a skinny little runt of a woman, with more wrinkles than a raisin, who, curiously enough, smells of cats (there are no cats in the pensión). She works without stopping from dawn to dark, and as she harriedly hurries through the house, through life, her movements are spectacular, for one of her legs is eight inches shorter than the other and hence she wears an elevator-type shoe, with a wooden platform resembling the box of boys who shine shoes on the street, built for her many years ago by a skillful sculptor of altarpieces back in Ayacucho, which makes the floorboards shake as she drags it along. She has always been thrifty, but over the years this virtue has degenerated into an obsession, and today there is no denying the fact that the harsh epithet “tightwad”
fits her perfectly. She does not allow any boarder, for instance, to take a bath except on the first Friday of each month, and she has forced everyone staying at the pensión to adopt the Argentine habit—so widespread in the dwellings of that sister country—of flushing the toilet only once a day (she pulls the chain herself, just before going to bed), the hundred percent cause of that constant heavy, warm, fetid smell that pervades the Pensión Colonial and nauseates the boarders, especially in the beginning (with that typical female imagination that cooks up an answer for everything, she maintains that it makes them sleep better).

  Señorita Rosa has (or rather had, since after the great nocturnal tragedy even this changed) the soul and the fingers of an artist. As a child, in Ayacucho, when the family was at its apogee (three stone houses and grazing land with sheep), she learned to play the piano and showed such talent that she even gave a recital in the municipal theater, attended by the mayor and the prefect, at which her parents, hearing the applause, wept with emotion. Encouraged by this glorious evening, at which Inca princesses also danced, the Berguas decided to sell everything they had and move to Lima so that their daughter could become a concert pianist. That was why they had purchased this huge old house (which they then rented out and sold off bit by bit), why they bought a piano, why they enrolled their gifted daughter at the National Conservatory. But the big lustful city soon shattered their provincial illusions. For the Berguas promptly discovered something that they would never have suspected: Lima was a den of a million sinners, and every one of them, without a single exception, was out to rape the inspired young girl from Ayacucho. At least that was what the adolescent with shining braided tresses recounted morning, noon, and night, her big round fear-filled eyes brimming with tears: her solfeggio teacher had leapt upon her, panting and snorting, and tried his best to consummate the sinful act using a pile of music scores as a mattress, the concierge of the conservatory had sidled up to her and asked her obscenely: “Would you like to be my hetaera?”, two boys in her class had invited her to go to the lavatory with them to watch them pee, the policeman on the corner whom she had asked for directions had confused her with someone else and tried to fondle her breasts, and the bus driver had pinched her nipple as she had handed him her fare… Determined to defend the integrity of that hymen which, in accordance with moral precepts of the highlands, as inflexible as marble, the young pianist ought to sacrifice only to her future lord and master, her lawfully wedded spouse, the Berguas withdrew her from the conservatory, arranged for her to take lessons from a young lady who came to the house, dressed Rosa like a nun, and forbade her to go out on the street unless the two of them were with her. Twenty-five years had gone by since then, and as a matter of fact her hymen is still intact and in place, but at this point this is no longer of any great moment, inasmuch as outside of this attraction—for which, moreover, modern young men have nothing but scorn—the ex-pianist (after the tragedy the private lessons were stopped and the piano sold in order to pay the hospital and the doctors) has no others to offer. She is stouter and dumpier and all hunched over now, and since she is always bundled up in anti-aphrodisiac tunics and hooded cloaks that hide her hair and her forehead, she looks more like a bulky walking parcel than a woman. She insists that men paw her, frighten her with filthy propositions, and try to rape her, but at this juncture, even her parents wonder whether these ideas of hers were ever more than fantasies.

  But the really moving, tutelary figure of the Pensión Colonial is Don Sebastián Bergua, an old man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness. An old-fashioned man, one might safely say, he has inherited from his distant ancestors, those Spanish conquistadors the brothers Bergua, natives of the mountain heights of Cuenca who came to Peru with Pizarro, not so much that tendency to indulge in excesses that led them to garrote hundreds of Incas (apiece) and to get a comparable number of vestals of El Cuzco pregnant, as their simon-pure Catholicism and their bold conviction that gentlemen of ancient lineage can live on their investments and on rapine, but not by the sweat of their brow. Since childhood, he had gone to Mass every day, taken Communion each Friday in homage to El Señor de Limpias, to whom he was fervently devoted, and he had flagellated himself or worn a hair shirt at least three days out of every month. His aversion to work, a base occupation fit only for Argentines, had always been so extreme that he even refused to make the rounds of his properties to collect the rents that were his means of livelihood, and once he had settled in Lima, he had never bothered to drop by the bank to collect the interest on the bonds in which he’d invested his money. Such duties, practical matters that females are capable of handling, had always devolved upon the diligent Margarita and, once the girl had grown up, on the ex-pianist as well.

  Up until the tragedy that cruelly hastened the decline in the Berguas’ fortunes, a curse visited upon a family whose very name will be forgotten, Don Sebastián’s life in the capital had been that of a scrupulous Christian gentleman. He was in the habit of arising at a late hour of the morning, not out of laziness, but so as not to be obliged to eat his breakfast with the boarders—he did not hold humble folk in contempt yet he believed in the necessity of maintaining social and, above all, racial, distances—and eating a frugal repast, then going to Mass. Possessed of an inquiring mind permeable to history, he was in the habit of visiting different churches from one morning to the next—San Agustín, San Pedro, San Francisco, Santo Domingo—so that as he fulfilled his Christian duty to worship God he might at the same time delight his senses by contemplating the masterworks of colonial faith; moreover, these reminiscences of the past sculpted in stone transported his spirit to the days of the Conquest and the Colony—so much more colorful than the monotonous gray present—in which he would have preferred to live as a daring captain or a pious destroyer of idols. Steeped in his fantasies of the past, Don Sebastián would make his way back along the busy streets of the downtown area—rigid and reserved in his neat black suit, his shirt with gleaming, stiffly starched detachable collar and cuffs, and his turn-of-the-century patent-leather shoes—to the Pensión Colonial, where, comfortably settled in a rocking chair facing the balcony with its jalousies—so much in keeping with his nostalgia for the days of La Perrichola—he would spend the rest of the morning reading the newspapers half-aloud to himself (even the advertisements) so as to know what was going on in the world. Ever-faithful to the traditions of his forebears, after lunch—which he was obliged to share with the boarders, toward whom his manner was nonetheless unfailingly courteous—he observed the quintessentially Spanish rite of the siesta. On awakening, he once again donned his black suit, his starched shirt, his gray hat, and strolled down to the Tambo-Ayacucho Club, an institution on the Jirón Cailloma frequented by many friends and acquaintances from his lovely Andean homeland. Playing dominoes, stud poker, ombre, exchanging small talk about politics and sometimes—being as human as the next man—gossip about subjects not fit for the ears of young girls, he saw dusk descend and night fall. He then walked back at a leisurely pace to the Pensión Colonial, ate his soup and his pot-au-feu alone in his room, listened to one program or another on the radio, and went to sleep, at peace with his conscience and with God.

  But all that was before. Today Don Sebastián never sets foot in the street, never changes his attire—which consists, day and night alike, of a brick-colored pair of pajamas, a blue bathrobe, wool socks, and alpaca slippers—and since the tragedy he has never again uttered a complete sentence. He no longer goes to Mass, no longer reads the newspapers. When he is feeling well, the longtime boarders (once they discovered that every man in the world was a satyr, the owners of the Pensión Colonial took in only females or decrepit males whose sexual appetites had—as was obvious at first glance—dwindled away due to illness or old age) see him wandering like a ghost through the dark, centuries-old rooms, his eyes blank, unshaven, his hair unkempt and full of dandruff, or see him swaying slowly back and forth in his rocking ch
air, mute and dazed, for hours on end. He no longer eats either breakfast or lunch with the boarders, for (fear of appearing ridiculous in the eyes of others that haunts aristocrats even in the poorhouse) Don Sebastián is unable to lift his spoon to his mouth and his wife and daughter must feed him. When he is feeling poorly, the boarders do not see him: the venerable old man stays in bed, with the door of his room locked. But they hear him: they hear his bellows, his sighs, his moans or screams that shake the windowpanes. Newcomers to the Pensión Colonial are surprised to discover that during these crises, as the descendant of conquistadors howls, Doña Margarita and Señorita Rosa go on sweeping, tidying up, cooking, serving at table, and conversing as though nothing were happening. These boarders think them heartless, cold as ice, indifferent to the suffering of a husband, a father. To those curious and impertinent recent arrivals who, pointing to the closed door, dare to ask: “Is Don Sebastián feeling ill?” Señora Margarita’s answer is a grudging: “There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s remembering a bad scare he had, he’ll be over it soon.” And, in fact, two or three days later the crisis is over and Don Sebastián emerges from his room and is seen once again in the halls and rooms of the Pensión Bayer, pale and thin amid the spiderwebs, with a terrified look on his face.

  What was this tragedy exactly? Where, when, how did it occur?

  It all began with the arrival at the Pensión Colonial, twenty years before, of a young man with sad eyes dressed in the attire of a disciple of Our Lord of Miracles. He was a traveling salesman, born in Arequipa, suffering from chronic constipation, whose first name was that of a prophet and whose last name was that of a fish—Ezequiel Delfín (Dolphin)—and despite his youth he was taken in as a boarder because the physical signs of his spirituality (extreme emaciation, a deep pallor, delicate bones) and his evident religiosity—in addition to wearing a dark purple tie, breast-pocket handkerchief, and armband, he had a Bible hidden in his baggage, and a scapular peeked out of the folds of his garments—appeared to be a guarantee against any attempt on his part to sully the virtue of the pubescent girl.