Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Read online

  We were in the shack talking together as I retyped news items from El Comercio and La Prensa, changing adjectives and adverbs as I went, for the Panamericana newscast at twelve. Javier was my best friend and we saw each other every day, even if only for a few minutes, to prove to each other that we were still alive and kicking. He was a creature given to short-lived, contradictory, but invariably sincere enthusiasms. He had been the star of the Department of Literature at Catholic University, where there had never before been such a hardworking student, or a more clear-sighted reader of poetry, or a more discerning interpreter of difficult texts. Everyone took it as a foregone conclusion that he would earn his degree by writing a brilliant thesis, that he would become a brilliant professor or an equally brilliant poet or critic. But one fine day, without offering any sort of explanation, he had disappointed everyone by abandoning the thesis he was working on, giving up literature and the Catholic University, and enrolling at San Marcos as a student in the Department of Economics. When someone ventured to ask him the reason for this desertion, he confessed (or remarked jokingly) that the thesis he’d been working on had opened his eyes. It was to have been entitled “Paroemias in the Works of Ricardo Palma.” He had had to read Palma’s Peruvian Traditions with a magnifying glass, searching for proverbs, and since he was a conscientious and rigorous researcher, he had managed to fill an entire file drawer with erudite index cards. And then one morning he had burned the whole drawerful of index cards in a vacant lot—he and I performed an Apache dance around the philological flames—and decided that he hated literature and that even economics was preferable to that. Javier was now a trainee at the Central Reserve Bank and could always find an excuse for dropping by Radio Panamericana every morning. One last remaining trace of his paroemiological nightmare was his habit of inflicting proverbs on me that had neither rhyme nor reason.

  I was surprised to discover that, despite the fact that she was Bolivian and lived in La Paz, Aunt Julia had never heard of Pedro Camacho. But she explained that she had never listened to soap operas and hadn’t set foot inside a theater since she’d interpreted the role of Twilight in the Dance of the Hours, in her last year at a school run by Irish nuns (“And don’t you dare ask me how many years ago that was, Marito”). This was while we were walking from Uncle Lucho’s house, at the end of the Avenida Armendáriz, to the Cine Barranco. It was she who had invited me, in the sneakiest way imaginable, at noon that day.

  It was the Thursday following her arrival, and even though the prospect of being the butt of her Bolivian jokes didn’t appeal to me, I didn’t want to miss my weekly lunch at Uncle Lucho’s and Aunt Olga’s. I had hoped she wouldn’t be there, since the night before—on Wednesday nights the whole family went to visit Aunt Gaby—I had heard Aunt Hortensia announce, in the tone of voice of one who is privy to the secrets of the gods: “During her first week in Lima she’s gone out four times—with four different suitors, one of whom is married. There are no lengths that divorcée won’t go to!”

  When I arrived at Uncle Lucho’s, after the noon Panamericana newscast, I found her there—with one of her suitors. I savored the sweet pleasure of vengeance on entering the living room and finding sitting next to her, gazing upon her with the eyes of a conquistador, looking absolutely ridiculous in his hopelessly oldfashioned suit, his bow tie, and his carnation boutonniere, an elderly relative of mine, Uncle Pancracio, my grandmother’s first cousin. He’d been a widower for ages, he walked with his feet spread wide apart, like the hands of a clock at ten past ten, and in the family his visits set tongues to wagging maliciously because he brazenly pinched the maidservants in full view of everybody. He dyed his hair, wore a pocket watch with a silver chain, and could be seen daily at 6 p.m. hanging around the Jirón de la Unión, flirting with office girls. As I leaned over to kiss her, I whispered in the Bolivian divorcée’s ear, my voice dripping with irony: “What a fine conquest, Julita.” She winked an eye and nodded slyly. During lunch, Uncle Pancracio, after holding forth on Peruvian popular music, at which he was an expert—at family celebrations he always offered a solo on the cajón, a traditional “musical instrument” that in reality was simply a wooden box or drawer on which the player drummed with his fingers or the palm of his hand—turned to her, and, licking his chops like a cat, said: “By the way, on Thursday evenings the Felipe Pinglo Association meets at the Victoria, the heart of Peruvianism. Would you like to hear a little genuine indigenous music?” Without hesitating an instant, and with an air of heartfelt regret that added insult to injury, Aunt Julia answered, pointing to me. “What a pity—Mario’s already invited me to the movies.” “Well then, I yield to youth,” Uncle Pancracio replied, like a good sport. Later, after he’d left, I thought I was saved when Aunt Olga said to Aunt Julia: “I take it that business about the movies was just to get rid of the old lecher?” But Julia shot back immediately: “Not at all, Olga, I’m dying to see the one that’s showing at the Barranco—the censors have rated it ‘not suitable for minors.’” She turned to me (I was listening intently, since my fate for that evening was at stake), and to set my mind at ease added this exquisite flower: “Don’t worry about the money, Marito—it’s my treat.”

  And there we were, walking down the dark Quebrada de Armendáriz, then along the wide Avenida Grau, heading for a film that, to top everything off, was Mexican and called Mother and Mistress.

  “The worst thing about being a divorcée isn’t that all men think they’re obliged to proposition you,” Aunt Julia informed me. “Rather, it’s the fact that because you’re a divorcée they think there’s no need to be romantic. They don’t flirt with you, they don’t whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They just come straight out with what it is they want from you, right off the bat, in the most vulgar way imaginable. That really puts me off. That’s why I’d rather go to the movies with you than go out dancing with a man.”

  “Thanks a whole lot—I appreciate the compliment,” I said.

  “They’re so stupid they think that every divorcée’s a street-walker,” she went on, not even noticing the irony in my voice. “And what’s more, all they think about is doing things with you. Even though that’s not the best part—the best part’s falling in love with each other, don’t you think so?”

  I explained to her that love didn’t exist, that it was the invention of an Italian named Petrarch and the Provençal troubadours. That what people thought was a crystal-clear outpouring of emotion, a pure effusion of sentiment, was merely the instinctive desire of cats in heat hidden beneath the poetic words and myths of literature. I didn’t really believe a word of what I was saying and was simply trying to impress her. My erotico-biological theory, however, left Aunt Julia quite skeptical: did I honestly believe such nonsense?

  “I’m against marriage,” I told her, in the most solemnly pedantic tone of voice I could muster. “I’m a believer in what’s called free love, although if we were honest, we ought, quite simply, to call it free copulation.”

  “Does copulation mean doing things?” She laughed. But immediately a sad, disabused expression crossed her face. “In my day, boys composed acrostics, sent girls flowers, took weeks to work up enough nerve to give them a kiss. What an obscene thing love has become among kids today, Marito.”

  We had a slight argument at the box office as to which of us was going to pay for the tickets, and then, after sitting through an hour and a half of Dolores del Río moaning, embracing, taking her pleasure, weeping, running through the forest with her hair streaming in the wind, we headed back to Uncle Lucho’s, on foot this time too, in a drizzling rain that left our hair and our clothes soaking wet. As we walked along, we talked again of Pedro Camacho. Was she absolutely certain she’d never heard of him? Because, according to Genaro Jr., he was a celebrity in Bolivia. No, she’d never even heard his name mentioned. The thought came to me that they’d put one over on Genaro, or that perhaps the supposed one-man “industry” in the world of radio and theater in Bolivia was a publicity gimmic
k he’d dreamed up to drum up interest in a Peruvian pen pusher he’d just hired. Three days later I met Pedro Camacho in the flesh.

  I’d just had a set-to with Genaro Sr., because Pascual, with his usual irrepressible penchant for terrible catastrophes, had devoted the entire eleven o’clock bulletin to an earthquake in Isfahan. What irritated Genaro Sr. was not so much the fact that Pascual had completely disregarded other news items to give himself time to describe, with a wealth of details, how the Persians who survived the disastrous cave-ins had been attacked by snakes that had surfaced, hissing in fury, once their subterranean refuges had been destroyed, but rather the fact that this earthquake had occurred a week previously. I had to agree that Genaro Sr. had good reason for being upset, and I let off steam by telling Pascual he was completely irresponsible. Where in the world had he come across such stale news? In an Argentine magazine. And why had he put out such an idiotic bulletin? Because there wasn’t any really important hot news item to report, and this one had at least a certain entertainment value. When I explained to him that we weren’t being paid to entertain the radio listeners but to give them a summary of the news of the day, Pascual, eager to make his peace with me, nodded in agreement while at the same time confronting me with his irrefutable argument: “The thing is, Don Mario, the two of us, have entirely different conceptions of what news is.” I was about to answer that if every time I turned my back he persisted in putting into practice his sensationalist conception of news reporting, the two of us would very soon be thrown out into the street, when a most unusual silhouette appeared in the doorway of the shack: a minuscule figure, on the very borderline between a man extremely short in stature and a dwarf, with a huge nose and unusually bright eyes with a disturbing, downright abnormal gleam in them. He was dressed in a black suit that was quite obviously old and threadbare, and a shirt and bow tie with visible stains, but at the same time he gave the impression of being extremely neat, fastidious, and proper with regard to his standard of dress, like those gentlemen in old photographs who appear to be imprisoned in their stiff frock coats and tight-fitting silk hats. He might have been anywhere between thirty and fifty, with oily black shoulder-length hair. His bearing, his movements, his expression appeared to be the absolute contrary of the natural and spontaneous, immediately mindful of an articulated doll, of puppet strings. He bowed to us politely and, with a solemnity as out of the ordinary as his person, introduced himself by saying: “I’ve come to steal a typewriter from you, gentlemen. I would be most grateful for your help. Which of those two machines is the best?”

  His index finger pointed in turn to my typewriter and Pascual’s. Despite my having become quite accustomed to the contrasts between voices and outward appearances thanks to my habit of dropping by Radio Central between Panamericana bulletins, I was amazed to hear such a firm and melodious voice, such perfect diction, come pouring out of such a tiny, unimposing figure. I had the impression that in that voice not only each letter marched past in perfect order, without a single one of them being mutilated, but also the particles and atoms of each one, the very sounds of sound. Without even noticing the surprise that his appearance, his audacity, and his voice aroused in us, he had impatiently begun to examine both typewriters carefully, to sniff them over, so to speak. He finally chose my enormous ancient Remington, a big hulk of a hearse invulnerable to the ravages of time.

  Pascual was the first to react. “Are you a thief or what?” he asked him point-blank, and I realized that he was paying me back for the earthquake in Isfahan. “Do you think you’re going to get away with carting off the typewriters of the News Department that way?”

  “Art is more important than your News Department, you sprite,” the character thundered, looking at him in lofty disdain, as though at a mere insect he had just crushed underfoot, and went on with the job at hand. As Pascual watched him, openmouthed with amazement (and doubtless trying, as I was, to figure out what he meant by “sprite”), the visitor attempted to carry off the Remington. He managed to lift the monster off the desk by dint of a superhuman effort that made the veins in his neck swell and very nearly caused his eyes to pop out of their sockets. His face turned a deeper and deeper purple and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead, but he went right on. Clenching his teeth, staggering, he managed to take a few steps in the direction of the door, but then he had to give up: in one more second his load would have come crashing to the floor, with him tumbling after. He set the Remington down on Pascual’s desk and stood there panting, completely indifferent to the smiles on our two faces that this spectacle had provoked and apparently not even noticing that Pascual had tapped his forehead with his finger several times to indicate to me that we were dealing with a madman. But the moment he’d caught his breath, he reprimanded us in a stern voice: “Don’t be lazy, sirs; a little human solidarity. Give me a hand.”

  I told him I was very sorry but that if he wanted to carry off the Remington he would first have to pass over Pascual’s dead body and then, if it came to that, over mine. The little man straightened his tie, a wee bit out of place after his herculean effort. To my astonishment, with an annoyed expression on his face and showing every sign of possessing no sense of humor whatsoever, he nodded gravely and replied: “When challenged, no gentleman ever refuses to fight a duel. The place and the hour, if you please, sirs.”

  The providential appearance of Genaro Jr. in the shack frustrated what threatened to become formal arrangements for a duel. He came in just as the stubborn little man, turning purple, was attempting once again to lift the Remington.

  “Wait a minute, Pedro, I’ll help you,” he said, grabbing the typewriter away from him as though it were a box of matches. Realizing then, on seeing the expression on my face and Pedro’s, that he owed us some sort of explanation, he said, with a cheery, conciliatory smile: “There’s no reason to look so down in the mouth—nobody’s died. My father will get you another typewriter in just a few days.”

  “We’re fifth wheels,” I protested, pro forma. “You’ve stuck us up here in this filthy shack, you’ve already taken a desk away from me to give to the accountant, and now you’re carrying off my Remington. And you didn’t even tell me beforehand.”

  “We thought this gentleman was a thief,” Pascual said, backing me up. “He burst in here heaping insults on us and acting as though he owned the place.”

  “Colleagues shouldn’t quarrel,” Genaro Jr. replied, playing Solomon. He’d hoisted the Remington to his shoulder and I noticed that the little man came exactly up to his lapels. “Didn’t my father come up to introduce you to each other? If not, I’ll do the honors, and you can stop fighting.”

  Immediately, with a rapid, automatic movement, the little man stretched out one of his little arms, took a couple of steps toward me, offered me a tiny child’s hand, and bowing politely once again, introduced himself to me in his exquisite tenor voice: “Pedro Camacho. A Bolivian and an artist: a friend.”

  He repeated the gesture, the bow, and the phrase with Pascual, who was quite obviously experiencing a moment of utter confusion, unable to decide whether the little man was pulling our leg or always went through this routine. After ceremoniously shaking hands with us, Pedro Camacho turned to the entire staff of the News Department, and standing in the center of the shack in the shadow of Genaro Jr., who looked like a giant behind him and was watching him with a very serious expression on his face, raised his upper lip, screwed his face up, and bared yellowed teeth in the caricature or the specter of a smile. He waited a few seconds before favoring us with these musical words, accompanied by the gesture of a stage magician taking leave of his audience: “I don’t hold it against you—I’m quite accustomed to being misunderstood. Till we meet again, gentlemen!”

  He disappeared through the door of the shack, hurriedly hopping and skipping along like an elf to catch up with the dynamic impresario heading for the elevator in great long strides with the Remington on his shoulder.

  Two.

  On o
ne of those sunny spring mornings in Lima when the geraniums are an even brighter red, the roses more fragrant, and the bougainvillaeas curlier as they awaken, a famous physician of the city, Dr. Alberto de Quinteros—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—opened his eyes in his vast mansion in San Isidro and stretched his limbs. Through the curtains he could see the sun shedding its golden light on the lawn of the carefully tended grounds enclosed by hedges of evergreen shrubs, the bright blue sky, the cheery flowers, and felt that sense of well-being that comes from eight hours of restorative sleep and a clear conscience.

  It was Saturday and—providing there were not last-minute complications in the case of the woman with the triplets—he would not be obliged to go to the clinic and could devote the morning to working out at the gym and taking a sauna before Elianita’s wedding. His wife and daughter were in Europe, cultivating their minds and replenishing their wardrobes, and would not be back for a month. Any other man with his considerable fortune and his looks—his hair that had turned to silver at the temples and his distinguished bearing, along with his elegant manners, awakened a gleam of desire even in the eyes of incorruptible married women—might have taken advantage of his temporary bachelorhood to have himself a little fun. But Alberto de Quinteros was a man not unduly attracted to gambling, skirt chasing, or drinking, and among his friends—who were legion—it was commonly said that “his vices are science, his family, and the gymnasium.”

  He ordered his breakfast sent up, and as it was being prepared he phoned the clinic. The doctor on duty informed him that the woman with the triplets had spent a quiet night and that the hemorrhaging of the woman he had operated on to remove a tumor had stopped. He gave instructions, left word that if an emergency came up he could be reached at the Remigius Gymnasium, or, if it were lunchtime, at his brother Roberto’s, and said he’d drop by the clinic in any case in the late afternoon. By the time the butler brought him his papaya juice, his black coffee, and his toast with honey, Alberto de Quinteros had shaved and put on a pair of gray corduroy pants, heelless moccasins, and a green turtleneck sweater. As he ate his breakfast, he idly glanced through the usual reports of catastrophes and the gossip of the day as aired in the morning newspapers, then got out his gym bag and left the house. He stopped in the garden for a few seconds to pet Puck, the badly spoiled fox terrier, who bade him goodbye with affectionate yaps.