Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel Read online

  “In her condition it was imprudent of her to have danced the whole evening like that, Red,” he said in an even tone of voice, as he soaped his hands. “She might have had a miscarriage. Advise her not to wear a girdle—and especially not such a tight one. How long has she been pregnant? Three months, four?”

  It was at that moment that the first hint of the awful truth dawned on Dr. Quinteros, as swift and as deadly as a rattlesnake bite. In terror, sensing that the silence in the bathroom had turned electric, he looked in the mirror. Red was standing there, staring at him with incredibly wide-open eyes, his mouth contorted in a grimace that made his face look grotesque, and deathly pale.

  “Three months, four?” he heard him stammer in a choked voice. “A miscarriage?”

  Dr. Quinteros felt the earth sinking beneath his feet. What a stupid, ignorant fool you are, he thought. He remembered now, of course, with the terrible clarity of hindsight, that the whole thing—Elianita’s getting engaged, the wedding—had taken place within just a few short weeks. He turned his eyes away from Antúnez and stood there, drying his hands too slowly, as he searched desperately in his mind for some lie, some pretext that would rescue this youngster from the hell into which he had just plunged him. He managed only to mutter something that seemed to him to be equally stupid: “Elianita mustn’t find out that I know. I let her think I didn’t. And above all, don’t worry. She’s quite all right.”

  He headed quickly for the door, looking at Antúnez out of the corner of his eye as he went past him. He was standing there, rooted to the spot, his eyes staring into empty space, his mouth wide open too now, and his face drenched with sweat. He heard him lock the bathroom door from inside behind him. He’s going to burst into tears, he thought, pound his head against the wall and tear his hair, he’s going to curse me and hate me even more than her, even more than—who? He walked slowly down the stairs, covered with guilt, full of misgivings, as he kept repeating to people, like an automaton, that Elianita was quite all right, that she’d be coming back downstairs in just a few minutes. He went out into the garden, and breathing a bit of fresh air did him good. He walked over to the bar, drank a glass of whiskey neat, and decided to go back home without waiting to witness the denouement of the drama that, out of sheer naïveté and with the very best of intentions, he had provoked. What he wanted was to shut himself up in his study, curl up in his black leather armchair, and immerse himself in Mozart.

  At the front gate he came upon Richard, sitting on the grass in a lamentable state. He was sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, leaning back against the fence, his suit wrinkled and covered with dust, stains, bits of grass. But it was his face that distracted the doctor from the memory of Red and Elianita and made him pause: in Richard’s bloodshot eyes, alcohol and rage seemed to have wreaked their mounting havoc in equal degrees. Two threads of spittle hung from his lips, and the expression on his face was both pitiful and grotesque.

  “This can’t be, Richard,” he murmured, bending over and trying to make him get to his feet. “Your mother and father mustn’t see you like this. Come on, let me take you home with me till you’ve sobered up. I never thought I’d see you in such a state, my boy.”

  Richard looked at him without seeing him, his head dangling, and though he obediently did his best to stand up, his legs gave way. The doctor had to take him by the arms and hoist him to his feet as though he were lifting weights. He managed to make him walk, holding him up by the shoulders. Richard teetered back and forth like a rag doll and seemed about to tumble headlong at any moment. “Let’s see if we can find a taxi, because if we walk you’re not even going to make it to the corner, my boy,” he murmured, stopping along the curb of the Avenida Santa Cruz, and holding Richard up with one arm. Several taxis went by, but they were occupied. The doctor kept trying to flag one down. The wait, on top of the memory of Elianita and Antúnez and his anxiety as to the state his nephew was in, was beginning to make him nervous—him, Doctor Quinteros, who never lost his composure. At that moment, in the incoherent babble that was escaping Richard’s lips, half under his breath, he made out the word “revolver.” He couldn’t help smiling, and ever cheerful in the face of adversity, said, as if to himself, without really expecting Richard to hear him or answer: “And why do you want a revolver, my boy?”

  Richard’s reply, as he gazed into space with rolling, murderous eyes, was slow, hoarse, perfectly clear. “To kill Red with.” He had uttered each syllable with icy hatred. He paused, and then added in a voice that suddenly broke: “Or to kill myself with.”

  He began mumbling again, and Alberto de Quinteros could no longer make out what he was saying. Just then, a taxi stopped. The doctor shoved Richard inside, gave the driver the address, and got in himself. The moment the taxi started off, Richard burst into tears. He turned to look at him and the boy leaned over, put his head on his chest, and sobbed, his body shaking with a nervous tremor. The doctor put his arm around him, rumpled his hair just as he’d done a little while before with his sister, and reassured the taxi driver, who was looking at him through the rearview mirror, with a gesture that meant “the boy’s had too much to drink.” He let Richard sit there, huddled next to him, weeping and dirtying his blue suit and his silver-gray tie “with his tears and spittle and mucus. He didn’t blink an eye, nor did his heart skip a beat, when in his nephew’s incomprehensible soliloquy, he managed to make out that phrase, repeated two or three times, that horrendous phrase that at the same time sounded beautiful and even chaste: “Because I love her as a man loves a woman and I don’t give a damn about all the rest, Uncle.”

  In the garden of the house, Richard vomited, with wrenching spasms that frightened the fox terrier and brought disapproving looks from the butler and the maids. Dr. Quinteros took Richard by the arm and led him to the guest room, made him rinse out his mouth with water, undressed him, put him to bed, made him swallow a strong sleeping pill, and remained at his side, calming him with affectionate words and gestures—that he knew the boy could neither hear nor see—till he felt him fall into the deep sleep of the young.

  Then he phoned the clinic and told the doctor on duty that he wouldn’t be coming in until the next day unless some dire emergency came up, instructed the butler to say he wasn’t in no matter who called or came to see him, poured himself a double whiskey, and shut himself up in the music room. He put a pile of Albinoni, Vivaldi, and Scarlatti records on the turntable, because he’d decided that a few superficial, Baroque, Venetian hours would be a good antidote for the dark shadows in his mind, and buried in his soft leather chair, with his Scotch meerschaum pipe smoking between his lips, he closed his eyes and waited for the music to wreak its inevitable miracle. The thought came to him that this was a privileged occasion for putting to the test that moral rule that he had tried to live by since his youth, that axiom that had it that it was better to understand men than to judge them. He did not feel horrified or indignant or unduly surprised. He noted in himself, rather, a hidden emotion, an invincible benevolence, mingled with tenderness and pity, as he said to himself that it was now blindingly clear why such a pretty girl had suddenly decided to marry an idiot, why the king of the Hawaiian surfboard, the handsomest youngster in the neighborhood, had never been known to have a girlfriend he was crazy about and seriously courting, and why he had always fulfilled without protest, with such laudable zeal, his duties as his younger sister’s chaperone. As he savored the aroma of the tobacco and sipped the pleasantly fiery whiskey in his glass, he told himself that there was no reason to worry too much about Richard. He’d find a way to persuade Roberto to send him abroad to study, to London for instance, a city where he’d find enough new and exciting things to make him forget the past. On the other hand, he really was worried, and consumed with curiosity, as to what would happen to the two other characters in the story. As the music little by little intoxicated him, a whirlwind of unanswered questions circled around and around in his mind, growing fainter and fainter, spaced farther and fa
rther apart: Would Red Antúnez desert his reckless, foolhardy spouse that very night? Might he have done so already? Or would he say nothing, and giving proof of what might be either exceptional nobility or exceptional stupidity, stay with that deceitful girl whom he had so persistently pursued? Would there be a great public scandal, or would a chaste veil of dissimulation and pride trampled underfoot forever hide this tragedy of San Isidro?

  Three.

  I saw Pedro Camacho again a few days after the typewriter episode. It was 7:30 a.m., and after getting the first newscast of the day ready to go on the air, I was heading for the Bransa to have my morning café con leche. As I passed by the little window of the concierge’s cubicle at Radio Central, I spied my Remington. I could hear its heavy keys hitting the platen, but I couldn’t see anybody sitting behind it. I stuck my head through the window and saw that it was Pedro Camacho who was typing away. An office had been set up for him in the concierge’s cubbyhole. In this tiny room, with a low ceiling and walls badly damaged by the dampness and by the ravages of time and desecrated by countless graffiti, there was now a monumental wooden desk, so dilapidated that it was about to fall apart, but nonetheless as imposing as the enormous typewriter rumbling away on it. The outsize dimensions of the desk and the Remington literally swallowed up the little runt. He had put a couple of cushions on the seat of his chair, but even so, his face came up no higher than the keyboard, so that he was typing away with his hands at eye level, thus causing him to appear to be boxing. He was so totally absorbed in his work that he didn’t even notice my presence, despite the fact that I was leaning right over him. His pop-eyes were riveted on the paper as he pecked at the keys with his two forefingers, biting his tongue. He was wearing the same black suit as on the first day, and had taken off neither his suit coat nor his little bow tie. At the sight of him, with his long hair and his attire mindful of a nineteenth-century poet, sitting there rigid and dead-serious, concentrating all his attention on what he was typing so furiously, in front of that desk and that typewriter that were far too big for him, in this den that was much too small for the three of them, I couldn’t quite decide whether the whole scene was pitiful or wildly funny.

  “You’re certainly an early riser, Señor Camacho,” I greeted him, stepping halfway into the room.

  Without even looking up from the paper, he merely indicated, with a peremptory jerk of his head, that I should either shut up or wait, or both. I chose the latter course, and as he finished his sentence, I noted that the desktop was littered with typed pages, and the floor strewn with discarded pages he’d wadded up into a ball and tossed there because no one had thought to provide him with a wastebasket. A few moments later his hands fell away from the keyboard, he looked up at me, rose to his feet, ceremoniously held out his right hand, and answered my greeting with a maxim: “Clock time means nothing where art is concerned. Good morning, my friend.”

  I didn’t ask if he was suffering from claustrophobia in this tiny cubbyhole, since I was certain he would have answered me that discomfort was propitious to art. Instead, I invited him to come with me to have coffee. He consulted a prehistoric artifact clumsily sliding back and forth on his skinny wrist and murmured: “After an hour and a half of production, I deserve time out for refreshment.” As we walked over to the Bransa, I asked him if he always began work that early in the morning, and he replied that in his case, unlike that of other “creators,” inspiration was directly proportional to daylight.

  “It dawns with the sun and gradually grows warmer along with it,” he explained, musically, as a drowsy waiter swept the sawdust littered with cigarette butts and the refuse of the Bransa out from under our feet. “I begin to write at first light. By noon, my brain is a blazing torch. Then the fire dies down little by little, and around about dusk I stop, inasmuch as only embers remain. But it doesn’t matter, since the actor produces more in the afternoon and at night. I have my system all carefully plotted out.”

  He delivered himself of this peroration in utter seriousness, and I realized that he scarcely seemed to notice that I was still there; he was one of those men who have no need of conversational partners: all they require is listeners. Like the first time we’d met, I was taken aback by his total lack of humor, despite the puppetlike smiles—lips turning up at the corners, brow wrinkling, teeth suddenly bared—with which he embellished his monologue. His every word was uttered with extraordinary solemnity, all of which—along with his perfect diction, his dwarflike stature, his bizarre attire, and his theatrical gestures—made him appear to be an odd sort indeed. It was obvious that he took everything he said to be the gospel truth, and he thus gave the impression of being at once the most affected and the most sincere man in the world. I did my best to bring him down from the artistic heights on which he was holding forth so grandiloquently to the more earthly plane of practical matters, and asked him if he had found a place to live yet, if he had friends here, how he liked Lima. Such mundane considerations were of no interest to him whatsoever. Impatiently breaking off his flight of eloquence, he replied that he had found an “atelier” not far from Radio Central, on Quilca, and that he felt at home wherever he found himself, for wasn’t the entire world the artist’s homeland? Instead of coffee, he ordered a lemon verbena-and-mint herb tea, which, he informed me, not only was pleasing to the palate but also “toned up one’s mind.” He downed it in short, symmetrical sips, as though he had calculated the precise intervals at which to raise the cup to his lips, and the moment he’d finished it, he rose to his feet, insisted on splitting the check, and asked me to go with him to buy a map showing the streets and districts of Lima. We found what he wanted at an outdoor newsstand along the Jirón de la Unión. He unfolded the map, held it up to the light, studied it, and was pleased to note that the various districts of the city were marked off in different colors. He also asked for a receipt for the twenty soles the map had cost him.

  “It’s something I need for my work and my employers should reimburse me,” he declared, as we walked back to our respective offices. His walk was also quite odd: quick, nervous strides, as though he were afraid he’d miss a train.

  As we bade each other goodbye at the entrance to Radio Central, he gestured in the direction of his cramped little cubbyhole of an office as though he were proudly showing off a palace. “It’s practically right out in the middle of the street,” he said, pleased with himself and with things in general. “It’s as if I were working out on the sidewalk.”

  “Won’t all the noise of so many people and cars passing by distract you?” I ventured to ask.

  “On the contrary,” he reassured me, delighted at the chance to offer me one last edifying maxim: “I write about life, and the impact of reality is crucial to my work.”

  As I turned to leave, he waggled his forefinger to call me back. Pointing to the map of Lima, he asked me, in a tone of voice fraught with mystery, if I would be willing, later on that day or the day after, to provide him with further information about the city. I told him I’d be more than happy to do so.

  Back in my shack at Panamericana, I found that Pascual had already written up the text of the 9 a.m. news bulletin. It began with one of those items he took such delight in. He had copied it from the morning paper, La Crónica, embellishing it with fancy adjectives he’d picked up in the course of his studies and made an intimate part of his cultural stock in trade: “In the tempestuous seas of the Antilles, the Panamanian freighter Shark sank last night, taking with it to their death its crew of eight, drowned and masticated by the sharks that infest the aforementioned sea.” I changed “masticated” to “devoured” and edited out “tempestuous” and “aforementioned” before giving it my okay. Pascual didn’t fly into a rage—that wasn’t his way—but he nonetheless put his protest on record. “Good old Don Mario, fucking up my style as usual.”

  All that week I’d been trying to write a short story, based on an incident that my Uncle Pedro, who was a doctor on a big landed estate in Ancash, had pass
ed on to me. One night a peasant had frightened another peasant half to death by disguising himself as a “pishtaco”—a devil—and leaping out at him from the middle of a canebrake. The victim of this joke had been so scared out of his wits that he’d attacked the “pishtaco” with his machete, dispatched him to the next world with a skull split in two, and taken to the hills. Shortly thereafter, a group of peasants leaving a fiesta had come upon a “pishtaco” prowling around the village and beaten him to death. The dead man turned out to be the murderer of the first “pishtaco,” who was in the habit of disguising himself as a devil in order to visit his family at night. These assassins had in turn taken to the hills, and used to come down at night in the guise of devils to visit the community, where two of them had already been hacked to death with machetes by the terror-stricken villagers, who in turn, et cetera… What I was eager to recount in my story was not so much what had actually happened on the estate where my Uncle Pedro was employed as the ending of the story that suddenly occurred to me: at a certain moment, the Devil in person, alive and kicking and wagging his tail, slipped in among all these fake “pishtacos.” I was going to entitle my story “The Qualitative Leap,” and I wanted it to be as coldly objective, intellectual, terse, and ironic as one of Borges’s—an author whom I had just discovered at that time. I devoted to the story all the spare moments left me by the news bulletins at Panamericana, the university, and coffee breaks at the Bransa, and I also wrote at my grandparents’ house, during my lunch hours and at night. During that week, I didn’t drop in at any of my uncles’ houses for the midday meal, skipped my usual visits to my girl cousins’, and didn’t go to the movies even once. I wrote and then tore up what I wrote, or rather, the moment I’d written a sentence it struck me as absolutely dreadful and I began all over again. I was thoroughly convinced that a slip of my pen or a mistake in spelling was never a mere happenstance but rather a reminder, a warning (from my subconscious, God, or some other being) that the sentence simply wouldn’t do at all and had to be rewritten. Pascual protested: “Good Lord, if the Genaros discover how much paper you’ve wasted, they’ll take it out of our salary.” Finally, one Thursday, it seemed to me that the story was finished. It was a monologue five pages long: at the very end, the reader discovered that the narrator was the Devil himself. I read “The Qualitative Leap” to Javier in my shack, after the noon Panamericana newscast.