Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I congratulated him, and asked him if he’d learned to cook.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Big Pablito suddenly said. “Let’s go hunt up Pascual and we’ll have lunch at the restaurant. I’d like the two of you to be my guests, Don Mario.”

  I accepted, because I’ve never discovered how to refuse invitations, and also because I was curious to see Pascual. Big Pablito had told me he was now the editor of a weekly scandal sheet, that he too had come up in the world. They saw each other regularly—Pascual was a steady customer at The Royal Peacock.

  The office of the weekly Extra was a fair distance away, on a street off the Avenida Arica, in Breña. We took a bus there that didn’t exist in my day. We had to wander around the neighborhood for some time, because Big Pablito didn’t remember the exact address. We finally found it, in a narrow little alleyway behind the Cine Fantasía. From the outside it was evident that Extra hadn’t exactly struck it rich: a sign bearing the name of the weekly was hanging precariously from one nail between two garage doors.

  Once inside, one could see that the two garages had been converted into one office by simply making an opening in the wall between them, without even squaring it up or roughing off the edges, as though the mason had abandoned the job before he was half done. The opening was partitioned off by a cardboard screen, scribbled all over, as in the toilets of public buildings, with dirty words and obscene drawings. On the walls of the garage we’d first come into, amid damp spots and dirt stains, were photos, posters, and front pages of Extra: one recognized certain well-known faces of soccer players and singers, and those, apparently, of criminals and victims. Each front page was full of screaming headlines, and I managed to make out phrases such as “Kills Mother So As To Marry Daughter,” and “Police Raid Masked Ball: All Men!” This garage appeared to be used as the copy room, the darkroom, and the “morgue” of the weekly. The place was so cluttered that it was hard to thread our way through it: little tables with typewriters, on which two guys were hurriedly typing, piles of unsold returned copies of the paper that a kid was doing up into bundles and tying up with string; in one corner was an open standing wardrobe full of negatives, photos, plates; and behind a table, one of whose legs had been replaced by three bricks, a girl in a red sweater was noting down moneys received in an account book. The things and the people in the place seemed to be in sad straits. Nobody stopped us or questioned us or answered us when we said hello.

  On the other side of the screen, in front of walls also covered with sensational front pages, there were three desks, each with a little square of cardboard on which the function of its occupant was written, by hand, in ink: editor-in-chief, chief copy editor, managing editor. When they saw us enter the room, two persons bending over, looking at galleys, raised their heads. The one standing was Pascual.

  He gave each of us a friendly hug. Unlike Big Pablito, he’d changed quite a lot: he’d gotten fat and had a paunch and a double chin, and somehow there was a look about him that made him seem almost an old man. He’d grown himself a very odd, almost Hitlerian mustache, which was turning gray. He greeted me with what were clearly signs of great affection, and when he smiled, I saw that he had lost some of his teeth. He then introduced me to his colleague, a swarthy, dark-haired man in a mustard-colored shirt, who remained sitting at his desk.

  “The editor of Extra,” Pascual said. “Dr. Rebagliati.”

  “I almost put my foot in my mouth,” I told Pascual as I shook hands with Dr. Rebagliati. “Big Pablito told me that you were the editor.”

  “We’ve gone downhill, but not that far,” Dr. Rebagliati said. “Have a seat, have a seat.”

  “I’m chief copy editor,” Pascual explained to me. “This is my desk.”

  Big Pablito told him we’d come to take him off to The Royal Peacock to celebrate the good old days at Panamericana. Pascual was all for it, but he hoped we wouldn’t mind, we’d have to wait for him a few minutes, he had to take the galleys there on his desk round to the printer’s on the corner, it was urgent because they were just putting the edition to bed. He went off and left me sitting face to face with Dr. Rebagliati. When the latter learned that I lived in Europe, he devoured me with questions. Was it true that Frenchwomen were pushovers, as he’d always heard? Were they as expert and as shameless in bed as they were reputed to be? Was it true that females in every country had their very own special tricks? He’d personally heard, for instance, extremely interesting things (Big Pablito’s eyes rolled in delectation as he listened to him) from people who’d traveled a lot. Was it true that Italian women were crazy about sucking cock? That Parisian women weren’t ever satisfied unless one bombarded them from behind? That Scandinavian women made out with their own fathers? I answered Dr. Rebagliati’s verborrhea as best I could as he contaminated the atmosphere of the little room with his lustful, seminal intensity, and regretted more and more having allowed myself to be trapped into accepting an invitation to this repast that would no doubt end up at some ungodly hour. Amazed and all worked up by the editor’s sociologico-erotic revelations, Big Pablito laughed and laughed. When Dr. Rebagliati’s curiosity eventually wore me out, I asked if I could use his phone.

  A sarcastic look came over his face. “It’s been cut off for a week now, because we haven’t been able to pay the bill,” he said with brutal frankness. “Because, as you can very well see, this rag is going under and all of us imbeciles who work here are going under with it.”

  And he immediately went on to tell me, with masochistic pleasure, that Extra had been born in the Odría era, under very favorable auspices: the regime placed ads in it and slipped it money under the table to attack certain individuals and defend others. Moreover, it was one of the few publications that were allowed to appear, and it had sold like hotcakes. But once Odría had been ousted, cutthroat competitors had appeared on the scene and Extra had gone broke. And it was at that point that he had taken it over, when it was already on its last legs. And he had gotten it back on its feet, by changing its policy, by turning it into a scandal sheet. Everything had gone smoothly for a while, despite the debts hanging round its neck like a millstone. But in the last year, with the price of paper going up and up, the mounting expenses at the printer’s, the campaign waged against it by its enemies, and the loss of advertising revenue, things had gone sour. Moreover, they had lost several court suits brought by riffraff accusing them of libel. And now the panic-stricken owners had offered all the stock to the editors so that the creditors wouldn’t get everything when the rag went into bankruptcy. Which was about to happen any day now, since in the last few weeks the situation had become tragic: there was no money for the payroll, employees were making off with typewriters, selling the desks, stealing everything that was of any value, getting what they could before everything caved in.

  “It won’t last another month, my friend,” he repeated, snorting with a sort of pleased disgust. “We’re already corpses—can’t you smell the rot?”

  I was about to tell him that indeed I could, when the conversation was interrupted by a skeletonlike little figure, so thin that he entered the room through the narrow opening without any need to push the screen aside. He had a rather ridiculous German-style haircut and was dressed like a tramp, in worn blue overalls and an old patched shirt under a grayish sweater that was much too tight for him. The most unusual thing about his attire was his footgear: faded red tennis shoes, so old that one of them had a length of string tied around the end of it as though the sole were loose or about to fall off. The minute he laid eyes on him, Dr. Rebagliati began to read him the riot act.

  “If you think you can go on making a fool of me, you’re wrong,” he said, approaching him with such a threatening air that the skeleton gave a little leap backward. “Weren’t you to bring the stuff on the arrival of the Monster of Ayacucho last night?”

  “I brought it, sir. I was here with all the pertinent details half an hour after the patrolmen brought the decedent into the Prefecture,” the little ma
n declaimed.

  I was so dumfounded that I must have looked as though I were in a daze. The perfect diction, the warm timbre of the voice, the words “pertinent” and “decedent” could only have come from him. But how, with that physique and getup, could this scarecrow that Dr. Rebagliati was eating alive possibly be the Bolivian scriptwriter?

  “Don’t lie; have the courage at least to own up to your faults. You didn’t bring the material and Gumball couldn’t finish his article and the facts are going to be all wrong. And I don’t like articles with factual errors, because that’s bad journalism!”

  “I brought it, sir,” Pedro Camacho answered, in a terrified but polite tone of voice. “I found the office here closed. It was eleven-fifteen on the dot. I asked a passerby the exact time, sir. And then, because I knew how important this material was, I went to Gumball’s house. And I waited for him out on the sidewalk till two in the morning, but he didn’t come back home to sleep. It isn’t my fault, sir. The patrolmen who were bringing the Monster in got caught in a rock slide that blocked the highway and didn’t arrive till eleven instead of nine. Don’t accuse me of dereliction of duty. For me, Extra comes first, even before my health, sir.”

  Little by little, not without an effort, I related, I compared what I remembered of Pedro Camacho with what was before me. The bulging eyes were the same, though they had lost their fanaticism, their obsessive gleam. The light in them now was dim, opaque, fleeting, panicked. And his facial expressions and gestures, his manner of gesticulating as he spoke, that unnatural movement of his arm and hand that made him look like a circus barker, were the same as before, as was his incomparable, measured voice, as spellbinding as ever.

  “What happens is that you’re too tightfisted ever to take a bus or a jitney, you always arrive everywhere too late, that’s the pure and simple truth of the matter,” Dr. Rebagliati fumed hysterically. “Don’t be so stingy, damn it, spend the four pennies it costs to take a bus and get where you’re supposed to be on time!”

  But the differences were greater than the resemblances. The principal change in his appearance was due to the haircut. Having the locks that had come down to his shoulders shorn and what was left cropped so close to his skull that his head appeared to be shaved had made his face look more angular, smaller; it had lost character and authority. Moreover, he was a very great deal thinner; he looked like a fakir, a specter almost. But what really kept me from recognizing him at first was his attire. I had never seen him dressed in anything but black, the funereal, shiny suit and the little bow tie that were inseparable from his person. Now, with this pair of stevedore’s overalls, this much-mended shirt, these tennis shoes with string tied round them, he looked like a caricature of the caricature he had been twelve years before.

  “I assure you that things don’t turn out the way you think, sir,” he said, standing his ground. “I’ve demonstrated to you that I arrive at any assigned destination faster on foot than in those pestilential public vehicles. It’s not out of niggardliness that I walk places, but in order to fulfill my duties more diligently. And frequently, sir, I run.”

  In this respect, too, he was the same as before: his total lack of a sense of humor. He spoke without the slightest spark of wit, or even of emotion, in an automatic, depersonalized way, though the things he was saying would have been unthinkable coming from him in the old days.

  “That’s enough of your nonsense and your manias. I’m too old to bamboozle.” Dr. Rebagliati turned to us, taking us as witnesses. “Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? That a person can make the rounds of the commissariats of Lima faster on foot than by bus? And this gentleman wants me to swallow shit like that.” He turned once again to the Bolivian scriptwriter, who hadn’t taken his eyes off him or given the rest of us so much as a side-long glance. “I don’t have to remind you, because I imagine that you remember it every time you sit down with a plate of food in front of you, that we’re doing you a big favor around here by giving you work when we’re in such terrible straits that we have to let reporters go, not to mention messengers. You could at least be grateful and do your job properly.”

  At this point Pascual came back in, announcing from the screen: “Everything’s all set, the edition’s gone to press,” and apologizing for having made us wait.

  I walked over to Pedro Camacho as he was about to leave. “How are you, Pedro?” I said, holding out my hand. “Don’t you remember me?”

  He looked me up and down, squinting his eyes and bringing his face closer, looking surprised, as though this were the first time in his life that he’d ever seen me. Finally, he extended his hand, shook mine briefly and ceremoniously, made his characteristic bow, and said: “Pleased to meet you. My name is Pedro Camacho.”

  “But this can’t be,” I said, feeling quite distraught. “Have I gotten as old as all that?”

  “Stop pretending you’ve had one of your attacks of amnesia,” Pascual said, clapping him on the back so hard he staggered. “Don’t you remember how you spent all your time cadging coffees at the Bransa off him, either?”

  “No, it was verbena-and-mint tea,” I joked, scrutinizing Pedro Camacho’s face, at once politely attentive and indifferent, for some sign of recognition.

  He nodded (I saw his nearly bare skull) and gave me a very brief, courteous smile that exposed his teeth to the air for a second or so. “Highly recommended for the stomach, an excellent digestive, and moreover it burns up fat,” he said. And then rapidly, as though making a concession in order to be free of us: “Yes, it’s possible, I don’t deny the fact. We might indeed have met before.” And he added: “It’s been my pleasure.”

  Big Pablito had also walked over to him. He put an arm around his shoulder, in a paternal, mocking gesture. As he rocked him back and forth, half affectionately and half derisively, he turned to me and said: “The thing is, Pedrito doesn’t want to remember when he was somebody, now that he’s a fifth wheel around this place.” Pascual laughed, Big Pablito laughed, I pretended to laugh, and even Pedro Camacho gave a little forced smile. “He even tries to make out that he doesn’t remember either Pascual or me.” He patted him on his nearly bare pate, as though he were a little dog. “We’re going to have lunch together to celebrate those days when you were king. You’re in luck, Pedrito, you’ll have a good hot meal today. I want you to come along as my guest!”

  “I’m most grateful, colleagues,” he answered immediately, making his ritual bow. “But it’s not possible for me to come with you. My wife is waiting for me. She’d worry if I didn’t come home for lunch.”

  “She’s got you tied to her apron strings, you’re her slave, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Big Pablito said, rocking him back and forth again.

  “Have you gotten married?” I asked, dumfounded, unable to imagine Pedro Camacho with a home, a wife, children. “Well, congratulations, I always thought you were a confirmed bachelor.”

  “We’ve celebrated our silver wedding anniversary,” he replied in his usual precise, aseptic tone of voice. “A wonderful wife, sir. Self-sacrificing and unbelievably good-hearted. We were separated, due to circumstances that life brings in its train, but when I needed help, she came back to lend me every possible aid. A wonderful wife, as I said. She’s an artiste, a foreign artiste.” I saw Big Pablito, Pascual, and Dr. Rebagliati exchange a mocking look, but Pedro Camacho appeared not to notice. After a pause, he went on: “Well, have a good time, colleagues, I shall be with you in thought.”

  “Watch out that you don’t let me down again, because it’ll be the last time,” Dr. Rebagliati warned him, as the scriptwriter was disappearing behind the screen.

  Pedro Camacho’s footfalls had not yet died away—he must have been heading for the street door—when Pascual, Big Pablito, and Dr. Rebagliati burst into peals of laughter, winking at each other, exchanging sly looks, and pointing to the opening he had just left by.

  “He’s not as dumb as he pretends to be, he comes on as the devoted spouse to hide the fac
t that his wife makes him wear horns,” Dr. Rebagliati crowed. “Every time he talks about his wife I feel a terrible urge to say to him: ‘Stop using the word “artiste” for what in good Peruvian we call a cheap stripteaser.’”

  “You can’t imagine what a monster she is,” Pascual said to me, with the look of a kid who’s just seen a bogeyman. “An Argentine years past middle age, fat as a sow, with bleached hair and makeup an inch thick. She sings tangos half-naked, at the Mezzanine, that nightclub for penniless wretches on the skids.”

  “Shut your traps, don’t be ungrateful, you’ve both screwed her,” Dr. Rebagliati said. “And I have too, for that matter.”