Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I was awakened by someone knocking on the door. It was dark in the room, and streaks of electric light were visible through the cracks in the blinds over the window. I called out that I’d be there in a minute, and shaking my head to rouse myself from my torpor, I struck a match and looked at my watch. It was 7 p.m. I felt the whole world come crashing down on me: another day wasted, and what was worse, I now had almost no money left to go on searching for mayors. I groped my way over to the door in the dark, opened it, and was about to be sharp with Javier for not having awakened me sooner, when I saw that he was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Everything’s all set, Varguitas,” he said, proud as a peacock. “The mayor of Grocio Prado is making the entry in the register and filling out your marriage certificate this very minute. Stop sinning and get a move on, you two. We’ll wait for you in the taxi.”

  He closed the door and I heard him laugh as he walked down the hall. Aunt Julia had sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes, and in the semi-darkness I managed to catch just a glimpse of the surprised, slightly incredulous look on her face.

  “The very first book I write, I’m going to dedicate to that taxi driver,” I said as we were getting dressed.

  “Don’t chant a victory hymn just yet.” Aunt Julia smiled. “I’m not going to believe it even when I see the marriage certificate.”

  We rushed out of the hotel, and as we passed the dining room, where a whole bunch of men were already drinking beer, somebody made such a clever flattering remark about Aunt Julia that many of them laughed. Pascual and Javier were waiting in the taxi, but it wasn’t the same one that had taken us around that morning, nor was it the same driver.

  “The other one tried to get cute and take advantage of the situation by charging double,” Pascual explained to us. “So we told him he could go to hell and hired this gentleman here, a really honest, upright man.”

  I was suddenly panic-stricken, thinking that the change of drivers was going to mean another wild-goose chase. But Javier reassured us. It wasn’t the other driver who’d gone with the two of them to Grocio Prado that afternoon, but this one. They told us, as though they were a couple of kids who’d pulled a fast one on us, how they’d decided to “let us get some rest” and spare Aunt Julia the painful experience of yet another refusal and gone to Grocio Prado by themselves to see what they could do. They’d had a long conversation with the mayor.

  “A cultivated, enlightened mestizo, one of those superior men that are a unique product of the province of Chincha,” Pascual said. “You’re going to have to give thanks to Melchorita by coming to her procession.”

  The mayor of Grocio Prado had calmly listened to Javier’s explanations, carefully scrutinized all the papers word for word, thought the matter over for some time, and then laid down his conditions: a thousand soles, but only if a 6 on my birth certificate were changed to a 3, thus making it appear that I’d come into the world three years earlier.

  “The intelligence of the proletariat,” Javier said. “We’re a decadent class, believe me. It never crossed our minds that that was the solution, and this man of the people, with his brilliant common sense, saw it in a flash. It’s a fait accompli: you’re of age.”

  Right there in the town hall, the mayor and Javier between them had changed the 6 to a 3, by hand, and the man had said: “What difference does it make if the ink isn’t the same? What matters is what the paper says.”

  We arrived in Grocio Prado about eight in the evening. It was a clear night, with stars in the sky, and pleasantly warm. Little flames flickered in all the shacks and shanties in the village. We saw another dwelling all lighted up, with a great many candles gleaming through the cane-stalk walls, and Pascual, crossing himself, told us it was the hermitage where the Blessed Melchorita had lived.

  In the town hall, the mayor was just finishing recording the marriage in a big register with a black cover. The dirt floor of the one-room building had been wetted down only a little while before and wisps of vapor rose from it. On the table were three lighted candles, and we could make out by their dim glow a Peruvian flag pinned up with thumbtacks and a framed photograph of the President of the Republic on the whitewashed walls. The mayor was a stout, impassive man of about fifty; he was laboriously writing the entry in the register with an old-fashioned nib pen that he dipped into a wide-mouthed inkwell after each sentence. He greeted Aunt Julia and me with a bow. I calculated that, at the rate at which he was writing, it had no doubt taken him more than an hour to make the entry. When he finished, he said without budging from his chair: “There have to be two witnesses.”

  Javier and Pascual stepped forward, but only the latter was accepted by the mayor, since Javier was a minor. I went out to have a word with the driver, who had stayed behind in the taxi; he agreed to be our witness if I would pay him a hundred soles. He was a skinny mestizo, with a gold tooth; on the trip to Grocio Prado he’d smoked one cigarette after another and hadn’t spoken a single word.

  When the mayor showed him where he was to sign his name, he shook his head sadly. “What a shame,” he said, in a regretful tone. “Who ever heard of a wedding without even one miserable bottle to drink to the health of the bride and groom? I can’t be a party to a thing like that.” He gave us a pitying look and added as he went out the door: “Wait a second for me.”

  Folding his arms, the mayor closed his eyes and appeared to be falling asleep. Aunt Julia, Pascual, Javier, and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do. I finally made up my mind to go out onto the street and hunt up another witness.

  “That’s not necessary. He’ll be back,” Pascual said, keeping me from leaving. “What’s more, he was quite right to say what he did. We should have thought of the wedding toast. That sambo’s shown us all up.”

  “All this takes steady nerves,” Aunt Julia whispered, grabbing my hand. “Don’t you feel as if you were holding up a bank and the police were going to come bursting in any minute?”

  The taxi driver was gone for a good ten minutes that seemed like ten years, but finally he came back clutching two bottles of wine. The ceremony could now continue. Once the witnesses signed, the mayor had Julia and me sign, opened a copy of the Civil Code, and bringing it closer to one of the candles, read us, as slowly as he had written the entry in the register, the articles appertaining to conjugal obligations and duties. He then handed us a certificate and announced that we were man and wife. We kissed each other and then the witnesses and the mayor embraced us. The driver uncorked the bottles of wine with his teeth. There were no glasses, so we drank straight out of the bottle, passing it from hand to hand after each swallow. On the ride back to Chincha—all of us were both happy and relieved—Javier made a disastrous attempt to whistle the Wedding March.

  After paying the taxi driver, we walked over to the Plaza de Armas so that Javier and Pascual could catch a jitney back to Lima. There was one that would be leaving in an hour, so we had time to eat dinner at El Sol de Chincha. During the meal, we decided on a plan. As soon as Javier got back to Miraflores, he would go to my Aunt Olga’s and Uncle Lucho’s to take the family’s temperature and then would telephone us. Aunt Julia and I would go back to Lima the following morning. Pascual would have to invent a good excuse to justify his not having shown up for more than two days at the radio station.

  We left the two of them at the jitney stop and went back to the Hotel Sudamericano, chattering away like an old married couple. Aunt Julia was feeling a little queasy and thought it was the wine we’d drunk in Grocio Prado. I told her that it had tasted like a superb vintage to me, but I didn’t tell her that it was the first time in my life that I’d ever drunk wine.

  Eighteen.

  The bard of Lima, Crisanto Maravillas, was born in the old city, in a little alleyway off the Plaza de Santa Ana from the rooftops of whose dwellings the most graceful kites in Peru were flown, beautiful objects made of tissue paper that the good nuns cloistered in the convent of Las Descalzas ran to look at through their skylights wh
en they soared elegantly into the air over Los Barrios Altos. In fact, the birth of the child who in years to come would raise the Peruvian waltz, the marinera, the polka to heights worthy of a kite, coincided with the baptism of one, a fiesta that brought the best guitarists, drummers, and singers of the neighborhood together in the Callejón de Santa Ana. On opening the little window of room H, where the birth took place, to announce that the population count of that corner of the city had increased, the midwife predicted: “If he survives, he’ll be a popular singer.”

  But it appeared doubtful that he would survive: he weighed less than a kilo and his little legs were so shrunken that he would probably never walk. The father, Valentín Maravillas, who had spent his life trying to acclimatize devotion to El Señor de Lunpias in the district (he had founded the Brotherhood in his own room and—rash act, or clever trick to ensure himself a long old age—had sworn that before his death it would have more members than that of Our Lord of Miracles), proclaimed that his patron saint would carry off the extraordinary feat: he would save his son’s life and enable him to walk like a normal Christian. The mother, María Portal, a cook with magic fingers who had never had so much as a cold in her life, was so upset on seeing that the child she had so long dreamed of and prayed to God for was this creature (the larva of a hominid? a miserable fetus? ) that she threw her husband out, claiming that he was responsible and accusing him in front of all the neighbors of being only half a man because of his sanctimonious piety.

  In any event, Crisanto Maravillas survived, and managed to learn to walk despite his ridiculous little legs. Without elegance, naturally, but, rather, like a puppet that jerks ahead step by step by making three separate motions—lifting the foot, bending the knee, lowering the foot—and so slowly that to those walking along with him it seemed as though they were following a religious procession making its way through congested narrow streets at a snail’s pace. But at least Crisanto could get around without crutches and by himself, his parents (now reconciled) said. Kneeling in the Church of Santa Ana, his eyes brimming with tears, Don Valentín thanked El Señor de Limpias, but María Portal said that the one and only worker of this miracle was the most famous Aesculapius of the city, whose specialty was cripples and who had turned countless paralytics into sprinters: Dr. Alberto de Quinteros. María had prepared memorable Peruvian banquets in his house and the savant had taught her the massages, exercises, and treatments required in order that Crisanto’s legs, despite being so spindly and rachitic, would be able to support him and get him about in this world.

  It cannot be said that Crisanto Maravillas had a childhood like that of other children of the traditional quarter in which he had chanced to be born. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, his weak constitution did not allow him to share in any of those activities that strengthened the bodies and minds of the boys in the neighborhood : he did not play soccer with a ball made of rags, he was never able to box in a ring or have a fistfight on a street corner, he never participated in those pitched battles fought with slingshots, stones, or kicks that in the streets of old Lima brought urchins from the Plaza de Santa Ana face to face with gangs from El Chirimoyo, Cocharcas, Cinco Esquinas, El Cercado. He was not able to go with his pals from the little public school on the Plazuela de Santa Clara (where he learned to read) to steal fruit from the orchards of Cantogrande and Ñaña, or swim naked in the Rímac or ride burros bareback in the pasture lots of El Santoyo. So short that he was practically a dwarf, as skinny as a broom, with his father’s chocolate-colored skin and his mother’s straight hair, Crisanto watched his pals from a distance, with intelligent eyes, as they amused themselves, sweated, grew, and toughened themselves in those adventures that were forbidden him, and on his face there would appear an expression of—melancholy resignation? quiet sadness?

  It seemed at one point that he would become as religious as his father (who, in addition to his worship of El Señor de Limpias, had spent his life carrying various Christs and Virgins in processions and wearing the habit of a number of different orders), since for years he was a faithful acolyte in the churches round about the Plaza de Santa Ana. As he was diligent, had all the responses down pat, and appeared to be the soul of innocence, the priests in the neighborhood closed their eyes to the fact that his movements were so slow and clumsy and frequently summoned him to serve Mass, ring the little bell during Holy Week reenactments of the Via Crucis, or bear the censer in processions. Seeing him enveloped in his acolyte’s surplice, which was always too big for him, and hearing him recite the responses with devotion, in good Latin, at the altars of Las Trinitarias, San Andrés, El Carmen, La Buena Muerte, and the little church of Cocharcas (for he was summoned even by the priests of that distant quarter), María Portal, who would have wished her son a tempestuous career as a soldier, an adventurer, an irresistible Don Juan instead, repressed a sigh. But the king of the Brotherhood of Lima, Valentín Maravillas, felt his heart swell with pride at the thought that this child of his own flesh and blood seemed destined to become a priest.

  But they were all mistaken: the boy did not have a religious vocation. He was possessed of an intense inner life and had found no answer as to where, how, by what means he might nourish his sensibility. His precocious thirst for poetry, his hunger for spirituality were assuaged by the atmosphere of sputtering candles, burning incense and prayers, statues covered with ex-votos, responses and rites, crosses and genuflexions.

  María Portal gave the Discalced Carmelite nuns a helping hand with their domestic labors and their pastrymaking and hence was one of the rare persons allowed inside the strictly cloistered convent. The famous cook took Crisanto with her, and as the boy grew (in age, not in stature), the nuns became so accustomed to seeing him (a mere object, a tattered rag, a little half-being, a human trinket) that they allowed him to wander about the cloister as María Portal and the good sisters prepared the celestial pastries, the quivering custards, the snow-white meringues, the floating-island puddings, and the marzipan that they then sold to earn money for the missions in Africa. And that was how Crisanto Maravillas, at the age of ten, learned what love was…

  The young girl who instantly attracted him was named Fátima; she was his own age and in the feminine universe of the Discalced Carmelites she fulfilled the humble duties of a domestic servant. When Crisanto Maravillas saw her for the first time, she was just finishing washing down the flagstone walkways of the cloister and was about to water the lilies and roses in the garden. She was a slip of a girl who, despite the fact that she was bundled up in a shapeless burlap garment full of holes and had all her hair tucked up under a bit of coarse cotton cloth like a coif, was unable to conceal her origins: an ivory complexion, dark blue circles under her eyes, an arrogant chin, slender ankles. She was (aristocratic tragedies envied by the vulgar) a foundling. She had been abandoned one winter night, wrapped in a sky-blue blanket, in the convent turn-box on the Calle Junín, along with a message in elegant handwriting blurred by teardrops: “I am the offspring of an accursed love, the despair of an honorable family, and I could not live within society without being a continual guilty reminder of the sin of the parents who brought me into this world. Since they have the same father and the same mother, they are prevented from loving each other, from keeping me, and from recognizing me. You, blessed Discalced Carmelites, are the only persons who can raise me without being ashamed of me or making me feel ashamed of myself. My tormented procreators will generously reward the Congregation for this act of charity that will open the gates of Heaven unto you.”

  Alongside the offspring of incest, the nuns found a sack full of money. This (pagan cannibals who must be evangelized, clothed, and fed) was what finally made them decide to take the child in: she would be raised as their servant, and later, if she proved to have a vocation, they would make of her another slave of Our Lord in a white habit. They would christen her Fátima, since she had been found in the turn-box on the anniversary of the day that the Virgin had appeared to the little shepherd c
hildren of Portugal. And so the little girl grew up, withdrawn from the world, amid the virginal walls of the Carmelite convent, in an unpolluted environment, without seeing a single man (before Crisanto) save for the old gout-ridden Don Sebastián (Bergua?), the chaplain who came once a week to absolve the good sisters of their (always merely venial) sins. She was sweet-natured, gentle, docile, and the most discerning nuns said that (purity of the soul that sharpens the vision and beatifies the breath) they noted in her behavior unmistakable signs of sanctity.

  In a superhuman effort to overcome the timidity that made him tongue-tied, Cristano Maravillas approached the girl and asked if he could help her water the flower garden. She consented, and from that day forward, each time that María Portal went to the convent, while she was in the kitchen cooking with the nuns, Fátima and Crisanto swept the cells together or scrubbed the patios together or changed the flowers on the altar together or washed the windows together or waxed the floors together or dusted the missals together. Between the ugly young boy and the pretty young girl there arose (first love that is always remembered as the best) a bond that—only death would break?

  It was when the young half-cripple was nearing the age of twelve that Valentín Maravillas and María Portal noticed the first signs of that inclination which in a short time was to make of Crisanto a miraculously inspired poet and a famous composer.