Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  We arrived in Tambo de Mora at dusk, and from the beach we saw a fiery disk sinking into the sea, in a cloudless sky with myriad stars just beginning to come out. We wandered about the two dozen shacks built of cane stalks daubed with mud that constituted the village, amid boats with hulls staved in and fishing nets full of holes stretched out between stakes to be mended. We could smell fresh fish and the sea. Half-naked little black kids surrounded us, eating us alive with questions: who were we, where did we come from, what did we want to buy? We finally found the mayor’s shack. His wife, a black keeping a hot fire burning in a brazier with a straw fan, wiping the sweat from her forehead with her other hand, told us that her husband was still out fishing. Looking up at the sky, she added that he’d be back in any minute now. We went down to the little beach to wait for him, and for an hour, sitting on a dead tree trunk, we watched the boats come back in, the day’s work over, the fishermen laboriously beach them on the sand, their wives chop the heads off the fish and gut them, right there on the beach, doing their best to hold off the hungry dogs. Martín was the last to come in. It was dark now and the moon had risen.

  He was a black with gray hair and an enormous belly, a waggish, talkative sort who, despite the cool night air, was wearing nothing but an old pair of pants that clung to his skin. We greeted him as though he were a being descended from heaven, helped him beach his boat, and escorted him home. As we made our way through the village by the dim light of the cooking fires inside the villagers’ shacks without doors, we explained the reason for our visit.

  Baring his big horse-teeth, he burst out laughing. “No way, pals, you’re going to have to hunt up some other dummy to fry you that kettle of fish,” he said in his deep, melodious voice. “I helped pull off another little trick like that and nearly got a bullet through my head for my trouble.”

  He then told us how, a few weeks before, in order to do the mayor of Chincha a favor, he’d overlooked the fact that banns hadn’t been posted and married a young couple. Four days later, who should show up, beside himself with rage, but the husband of the “fiancée” (“A girl born in the village of Cachiche, where all the women have brooms and fly on them at night,” he said); she’d been married for two years, and her husband threatened to kill the pander who had dared to lawfully wed the adulterous pair.

  “My colleague in Chincha knows all the tricks—he’s such a clever devil he’ll be going straight to Heaven one of these days,” he joked, slapping his big belly gleaming with little drops of sea water. “Every time something rotten comes his way, he sends it to Martín the fisherman as a present, and let the nigger get rid of the corpse. Take my word for it, he’s a crafty one!”

  There was no way of talking him into changing his mind. He refused even to have a look at our papers, and countered every argument that Javier, Pascual, and I could think of—Aunt Julia didn’t say a word but couldn’t help smiling now and again at the fisherman-mayor’s sly humor—by cracking more jokes about his colleagues from Chincha or by telling us once again, with great peals of laughter, the story of the husband who’d been out to kill him for having wed the little witch from Cachiche to another man when he, her spouse, was neither dead and buried nor divorced from her. When we returned to his shack, we found an unexpected ally: his wife. He himself explained to her what we wanted as he dried his face, his arms, his broad chest, and sniffed hungrily at the pot boiling on the brazier.

  “Marry them, you heartless sambo,” the woman said to him, nodding her head pityingly in Aunt Julia’s direction. “Just look at the poor thing, they’ve spirited her away and she can’t get herself married, she must be suffering from all she’s been through. Don’t you even care—or has being mayor turned your head?”

  Martín’s big flat feet padded back and forth on the beaten-earth floor of the shack as he fetched glasses and cups, as meanwhile we mounted another attack and offered him everything we could think of: from our eternal gratitude to a fat fee that would bring him as much as he could earn by many a day’s work fishing. But he was adamant, and finally told his wife in no uncertain terms not to stick her nose in affairs that were none of her business. But the next minute he was as affable as ever and shoved a glass or a cup in each of our hands and poured us all a little drink of pisco.

  “Just so you won’t have made the trip for nothing, my friends,” he consoled us, without the least hint of sarcasm in his voice, raising his glass. His toast, in view of the circumstances, was one we could all drink to: “Here’s wishing the bride and groom the best of luck.”

  As we bade him goodbye, he told us we’d made a mistake by coming to Tambo de Mora, on account of the unfortunate precedent of the girl from Cachiche. But we should go to Chincha Baja, El Carmen, Sunampe, San Pedro, or any of the other little villages round about, where we could be married on the spot.

  “The mayors of those villages are all loafers. They don’t have a thing to do, and when they see a marriage ceremony coming their way, they’re drunk with joy,” he shouted after us.

  We went back to where the taxi was waiting for us, not saying a word to each other. The driver informed us that we’d have to have another talk about the fee he’d be obliged to charge, since he’d had to wait for us for such a long time. During the trip back to Chincha we agreed that the next day, as soon as it was light, we would make the rounds of all the villages and hamlets in those parts, one by one, offering generous gratuities, till we found a damned mayor who’d marry Aunt Julia and me.

  “It’s nearly nine o’clock,” Aunt Julia said all of a sudden. “Do you suppose my sister’s received the message?”

  I’d made Big Pablito memorize and repeat ten times what he was to say to my Uncle Lucho or my Aunt Olga, and to make certain that he got it right, I’d written it down on a piece of paper: “Mario and Julia have gotten married. Don’t worry about them. They’re fine, and will be coming back to Lima in just a few days.” He was to call them at 9 p.m. from a public phone booth and hang up immediately after he’d given them the message. I lit a match and looked at my watch: yes, the family had already received it.

  “They must be firing one question after another at Nancy,” Aunt Julia said, trying her best to speak in an offhand tone of voice, as though commenting on something in which she was in no way involved. “They know she’s an accomplice. They’re going to give the poor thing a hard time.”

  The ancient taxi bounced up and down on the road full of potholes, threatening to turn over at any moment, and every last bolt and panel of its carcass creaked. The moon was shedding its dim light on the dunes, and from time to time we caught sight of silhouettes of palms, fig trees, and acacias. The sky was studded with stars.

  “So they’ve doubtless already told your papa the news,” Javier said. “The minute he got off the plane. What a reception!”

  “I swear to heaven we’ll find a mayor,” Pascual said. “I’ll refuse to admit I was born in the province of Chincha if we can’t get you married somewhere in these parts tomorrow. My word of honor.”

  “Do they need a mayor to marry them?” the driver said, pricking up his ears. “Have you abducted the little lady? Why didn’t you tell me before—don’t you trust me? I’d have taken you to Grocio Prado. The mayor there is a pal of mine and he’d have married you on the spot.”

  I proposed that we go on to Grocio Prado then and there, but he dissuaded me. The mayor probably wasn’t in the village at this hour, but out at his little farm, an hour’s ride from town by burro. It was best to wait till the next day. We made arrangements with the driver to come by to pick us up at eight the following morning, and I offered him a fat tip if he’d put in a good word for us with his buddy.

  “Of course I will,” he said, reviving our spirits. “You’ll be married in the village of the Blessed Melchorita—what more could you ask?”

  The dining room at the Hotel Sudamericano was just about to close, but Javier persuaded the waiter to have them fix us something to eat. He brought us Cokes and plates of
fried eggs with warmed-up rice that we barely touched. Suddenly, halfway through the meal, we realized that we were talking almost in whispers, like conspirators, and we burst into hysterical laughter. As we were leaving for our respective rooms—Pascual and Javier had planned to go back to Lima that same day after the wedding, but as things hadn’t gone as expected, they were staying on and in order to save money were sharing a room—we saw half a dozen men, some of them in boots and riding pants, come into the dining room and shout for beers. Their drunken voices, their boisterous laughter, their clinking glasses, their stupid jokes, their vulgar toasts, and later on their belches and vomiting were the background music of our wedding night. Despite the bureaucratic frustration of the day, it was an intense and beautiful wedding night, during which, in that old bed that screeched like a cat as we embraced and was no doubt crawling with fleas, we made love several times, with a fire reborn again and again, and as our hands and lips taught us to know each other and give each other pleasure, we told each other that we loved each other, that we would never lie to, cheat on, or leave each other. When they knocked on our door—we’d asked them to wake us at seven—the drunks had just shut up and we were still lying there awake, naked and curled up together on the quilt with the green diamond pattern, dizzy and drowsy with pleasure, looking at each other gratefully.

  Our morning toilette, in the common bathroom of the Hotel Sudamericano, was a heroic feat. The shower appeared not to have ever been used before, water spurted from the rusty shower head in all directions except that of the bather, and great quantities of a blackish liquid came out before the water ran clear. There were no bath towels, just a dirty rag for people’s hands, so we had to dry ourselves with the bed sheets. But we were happy and excited and the inconveniences amused us. We found Javier and Pascual, already dressed, in the dining room, sallow-faced with sleep, looking disgustedly at the catastrophic state the place had been left in by the drunks of the night before: broken glasses, cigarette butts, pools of vomit and spit on which a hotel employee was throwing pails of sawdust, and a terrible smell. We went out to have our morning coffee down the street, in a little café from which we could see the tall leafy trees in the square. It was an odd sensation, coming from the gray fog of Lima, to see the day beginning with bright hot sunshine and a cloudless sky. When we got back to the hotel, the taxi driver was there waiting for us.

  On the trip to Grocio Prado, along a dusty stretch of road that led past vineyards and cotton plantations and from which we could see the dark skyline of the Andes looming up in the distance on the other side of the desert, the driver, in a sudden fit of talkativeness that sharply contrasted with our total silence, rattled on and on about the Blessed Melchorita: she had given everything she had to the poor, cared for the old and the sick, comforted the suffering, and within her own lifetime had become so famous that the faithful came from all the villages in the province to pray in her presence. He told us about some of her miracles. She had saved people dying of incurable diseases, spoken with saints who had appeared to her, seen God, and made a perpetually blooming rose flower on a rock.

  “She’s more popular than the Little Blessed One of Humay and El Señor de Luren—as can easily be seen from the number of people who come to her hermitage and her procession,” he said. “There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be declared a saint. You people who are from Lima, be active in her behalf and support her cause. It’s a just one, believe me.”

  When we finally arrived, covered with dust from head to foot, in the broad treeless main square of Grocio Prado, we found out for ourselves how popular Melchorita was. Hordes of children and women surrounded the taxi and with much shouting and gesticulating offered to take us to see her hermitage, the house where she’d been born, the place where she’d mortified herself, where she’d worked her miracles, where she’d been buried, and tried to sell us pious images, prayers, scapulars, and medals with the Blessed One’s effigy. The driver had to convince them that we weren’t pilgrims or tourists before they would leave us in peace.

  The municipal building, a tiny, wretched adobe hut with a tin roof, lay drowsing in the sun on one side of the square. It was closed.

  “My pal will be along soon,” the driver said. “Let’s wait for him in the shade.”

  We sat down on the sidewalk beneath the overhanging roof of the municipal building, and from there we could see that at the end of the straight dirt streets, lined with rickety little shacks and cane-stalk shanties and leading less than fifty yards in any direction, the farms and the desert began. Aunt Julia was sitting next to me, with her head leaning on my shoulder and her eyes closed. We’d been sitting there for half an hour, watching the pack drivers going past, on foot or on the backs of their burros, and the women going to fetch water from a little stream flowing by one corner, when an old man on horseback rode by.

  “You waiting for Don Jacinto?” he asked, removing his big straw hat. “He’s gone to Ica to talk to the prefect and try to get his boy out of the military barracks. The soldiers came and took him away to do his service in the army. Don Jacinto won’t be back before nightfall.”

  The driver proposed that we wait in Grocio Prado and spend the day visiting the Melchorita pilgrimage sites, but I insisted on trying our luck in other villages. After bargaining for some time, he finally agreed to stay with us till noon.

  It was only nine in the morning when we began the rounds that took us through practically the entire province of Chincha, jouncing along mule paths, getting stuck on desert trails half buried in sand, approaching the sea at times and at others the foothills of the Andes. Just as we were entering El Carmen we had a blowout, and since the driver didn’t have a jack, the four of us had to hold the car up while he put the spare tire on. After midmorning, the sun, which had grown hotter and hotter and was now downright torture, heated the taxi up like a tin box and we were all dripping with sweat as though in a Turkish bath. The radiator began to steam and we had to fill a can with water to take with us so as to cool it off every so often.

  We talked with three or four mayors of districts and as many deputy mayors of hamlets that at times consisted of no more than twenty shacks. They were simple rural types whom we had to hunt up at their little farms where they were at work in the fields, or in their little village shops where they were selling cooking oil and cigarettes to their constituents; we found one of them, the mayor of Sunampe, lying in a ditch sleeping off a hangover and had to shake him awake. Once we’d located the municipal authority in question, I would get out of the taxi, accompanied sometimes by Pascual, sometimes by the driver, sometimes by Javier—we eventually learned by experience that the more of us there were, the more intimidated the mayor tended to be—to explain the situation. No matter what arguments I put forward, I would invariably see a look of mistrust come over the face, a gleam of alarm appear in the eye of the farmer, fisherman, or shopkeeper (the mayor of Chincha Baja introduced himself as a “healer”). Only two of them turned us down flat: the mayor of Alto Larán, an old man who went on loading his pack mules with bales of alfalfa as I talked with him, and informed us that he never married anyone who wasn’t from the village; and the mayor of San Juan de Yanac, a mestizo farmer who was terrified when he saw us, thinking we were the police coming to question him about some misdeed. When he found out what we wanted, he was furious. “No, not a chance, there’s something fishy going on if a white couple come to get married in this godforsaken village.” The others all gave us more or less the same excuses. The most common: the civil register had been lost or was filled up, and until they sent a new one from Chincha there was no way of registering deaths or births or marrying anybody at the town hall. It was the mayor of Chavín who came up with the most imaginative reply: he couldn’t marry us because he was too pressed for time; he had to go out right then and shoot a fox that had been killing two or three hens a night in the district. The one place we very nearly succeeded was Pueblo Nuevo. The mayor listened to us attentively, agreed, and said th
at exempting us from posting banns was going to cost us five hundred soles. He didn’t make any fuss about my age and apparently believed us when we assured him that the law had been changed and one now reached one’s majority at eighteen, not twenty-one. We had already taken our places in front of the plank laid across two barrels that served him as a desk (the municipal building in this hamlet was an adobe hut with a roof full of holes, through which we could see the sky), when the mayor began laboriously reading our papers, one word at a time. When he realized that Aunt Julia was Bolivian, it scared him off. We explained to him that this was no obstacle, that foreigners had the right to marry too, and offered him more money, but it was no use. “I don’t want to get into any trouble,” he said. “The fact that this young woman is Bolivian could be a very serious matter.”

  We went back to Chincha around three in the afternoon, half dead from the heat, covered with dust, and depressed. On the outskirts of town, Aunt Julia began to cry. I hugged her, whispered in her ear that she mustn’t get upset, that I loved her, that we’d get married even if we had to visit every single village in Peru.

  “I’m not crying because we can’t get married,” she said, trying to smile through her tears. “I’m crying because this whole thing is getting so ridiculous.”

  None of the four of us was very hungry, so our lunch consisted of a cheese sandwich and a Coke that we downed standing up at a counter. Then we went off to take a rest. Despite our night without sleep and the frustrations of that morning, we still had the heart to make love, passionately, on the diamond-patterned quilt, in the murky light. From the bed we could see the faint feeble beams of sunlight that had managed to filter through a skylight with glass panes covered with grime. Immediately afterward, instead of getting up to join our accomplices in the dining room, we fell asleep. It was a fitful, anxious sleep, with intense rushes of desire that caused us to grope about for each other and caress each other instinctively, followed by bad dreams; we told each other about them when we woke up and learned that both of us had seen the faces of relatives in them, and Aunt Julia laughed when I told her that at one moment in my dreams I’d found myself living through one of Pedro Camacho’s recent catastrophes.