Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel
Page 45
“Singer or not, she’s a whore,” Big Pablito exclaimed, his eyes blazing. “I know what I’m talking about. I went to see her at the Mezzanine and after the show she made a pass at me and offered to give me a blow job for twenty libras. I said no, old girl, you haven’t got any teeth left and what I go for is nice little nips on the cock. So not even if you do it for free, not even if you pay me. Because I swear, Don Mario, she doesn’t have a tooth in her head.”
“They’d been married before,” Pascual told me as he rolled down his shirtsleeves and put his suitcoat and tie back on. “In Bolivia, before Pedrito came to Lima. It seems she left him to go off whoring around somewhere back there. They got together again when he was put in the mental asylum. That’s why he goes around saying that she’s such a self-sacrificing woman. Because she went back to him when he was crazy.”
“He’s as grateful to her as a dog, because it’s thanks to her that they have food on the table,” Dr. Rebagliati corrected him. “You don’t think they can live on what Camacho earns gathering information for us at police stations, do you? They eat on what she brings in from whoring around, otherwise he’d have gotten t.b. long ago.”
“To tell the truth, Pedrito doesn’t need much to eat on,” Pascual said. And he explained. “They live in a back alley in Santo Cristo. He’s really come down in the world, hasn’t he? My colleague, Dr. Rebagliati here, doesn’t believe me that he was somebody in the days when he wrote soap operas, when they mobbed him for autographs.”
We left the room. In the garage next door the young girl working on the account books, the reporters, and the kid bundling up return copies had all gone home. They had turned out the light and the jumble of office furniture and the disorder now had a certain eerie air about it. As we went out into the street, Dr. Rebagliati closed the door and locked it. Walking abreast, the four of us headed toward the Avenida Arica in search of a taxi. To make conversation, I asked why Pedro Camacho was just a messenger and not a reporter.
“Because he doesn’t know how to write,” Dr. Rebagliati answered predictably. “He’s pretentious, he uses words that nobody understands, the negation of journalism. That’s why I keep him on to make the rounds of the police stations. I don’t need him, but he entertains me, he’s my buffoon, and what’s more, he costs less than an office boy.” He laughed obscenely and asked: “Well now, to put it bluntly, am I or am I not invited to that lunch of yours?”
“Of course you are, that goes without saying,” Big Pablito answered. “You and Don Mario are the guests of honor.”
“Pedro Camacho’s a guy with all sorts of weird ideas,” Pascual said, returning to the subject as we were heading for the Jirón Paruro in the taxi. “He refuses to take a bus, for instance. He goes everywhere on foot; he says it’s quicker. The very thought of how far he walks every day makes me tired; just making the rounds of the police stations in the middle of town takes him a good many miles. You saw the state his shoes were in, didn’t you?”
“He’s a fucking skinflint, that’s what,” Dr. Rebagliati said disgustedly.
“I don’t think he’s a tightwad,” Big Pablito defended him. “He’s just a wee bit touched in the head, and on top of it, a guy whose luck has run out.”
The lunch went on and on for hours, a succession of Peruvian dishes, multicolored and burning hot, washed down with cold beer, and there was a little of everything at it, risqué stories, anecdotes from bygone days, all sorts of gossip about one person or another, a pinch of politics, and I was obliged to try to satisfy, once again, the editor’s tireless curiosity regarding the women of Europe. There was even the threat of a fistfight at one point when Dr. Remagliati, drunk now, began to go too far with Big Pablito’s wife, a brunette of around forty who was still very attractive. But by straining my ingenuity, I contrived to keep the three of them from saying another word about Pedro Camacho all during that endless afternoon.
By the time I arrived at Aunt Olga’s and Uncle Lucho’s (who had gone from being my wife’s sister and brother-in-law to being my parents-in-law), night was falling. My head ached and I felt depressed. Cousin Patricia received me with a distinctly unfriendly look on her face. She told me that with all my alibis about gathering documentation for my novels I might well have been able to pull all kinds of fast ones on Aunt Julia and make her play dumb, not daring to say a word to me so people wouldn’t think she was committing a crime of lèse-culture. But as far as she, Patricia, was concerned, she couldn’t care less whether she committed crimes of lèse-culture, and therefore the next time I left the house at eight in the morning on the pretext that I was going to the Biblioteca Nacional to read the speeches of General Manuel Apolinario Odría and came back at eight in the evening with bloodshot eyes and reeking of beer, and no doubt with lipstick stains on my handkerchief, she’d scratch my eyes out or break a plate over my head. My cousin Patricia is a girl with lots of spirit, quite capable of doing precisely what she’s promised.
Also by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Cubs and Other Stories
A Writer’s Reality
The Time of the Hero
The Green House
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Conversation in the Cathedral
The War of the End of the World
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
The Perpetual Orgy
Who Killed Palomino Molero?
The Storyteller
In Praise of the Stepmother
A Fish in the Water
Death in the Andes
Making Waves
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
The Feast of the Goat
Letters to a Young Novelist
The Language of Passion
The Way to Paradise
The Bad Girl
AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER. Copyright © 1977 by Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., Spain. Translation copyright © 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 1936–
[Tía Julia y el escribidor. English]
Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter / Mario Vargas Llosa ; translated by Helen R. Lane.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-42724-5
1. Radio writers—Fiction. 2. Courtship—Fiction. 3. Aunts—Fiction. I. Title.
PQ8498.32.A65 T513 1982
863—dc19
82005159
Originally published in Spain by Editorial Seix Barral, S.A.,
as La tía Julia y el escribidor
* How?
With love, with love, with love
Doing what?
Wearing a flower, a flower, a flower
Where?
In my lapel, my lapel, my lapel
For whom?
For María Portal, María Portal, María Portal…