Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Page 7

  That afternoon, between one news broadcast and the next, I drafted several outlines of my erotico-picaresque short story based on the tragedy of the senator from Arequipa. I had every intention of working hard on it that night, but Javier dropped by after he was through work at Panamericana to take me to a spiritualist séance in Barrios Altos. The medium was a clerk I’d been introduced to in the offices of the State Reserve Bank. Javier had often talked to me about this medium, since the latter frequently told him all about his contacts with departed souls, who hastened to communicate with him not only when he convoked them in official séances but also spontaneously, in the most unexpected circumstances. It was their habit to play tricks on him, such as causing his telephone to ring at dawn: when he picked up the receiver, he could hear at the other end the unmistakable laugh of his great-grandmother, who’d been dead for half a century and had been dwelling since her demise (as she herself informed him) in Purgatory. The souls of those who had passed on appeared to him in public buses, in jitneys, or as he was walking down the street. They whispered in his ear and he was obliged to remain mute and impassive (“to snub them,” were the words he reportedly used), so that people wouldn’t think he was crazy. I was intrigued, and had asked Javier to organize a séance with this bank-clerk medium. The latter had agreed, but kept putting the séance off from week to week, for what he claimed were meteorological reasons. It was imperative to wait for certain phases of the moon, the shifting of tides, and other conditions that were even more special, since it appeared that departed souls were sensitive to the degree of humidity, the position of constellations, the direction of the wind. But the right day had finally arrived.

  It was no easy matter to find the place where the bank-clerk medium lived, a squalid apartment squeezed into the back of a block of town houses on the Jirón Cangallo. The man proved to be a much less interesting character in person than in Javier’s stories about him. A widower in his sixties, balding and smelling of liniment, he had a bovine gaze, and his conversation was so doggedly banal that no one would ever have suspected him of being in close touch with spirits. He received us in a grubby, dilapidated little front room, and offered us crackers with thin little slices of fresh cheese and a few niggardly drops of pisco. He sat there till the clock struck twelve, telling us, in a tedious, matter-of-fact way, of his experiences of the beyond. They had begun when his wife died, twenty years before. Her passing on had plunged him into a state of inconsolable despair, until one day a friend had saved him by putting him on the path of spiritualism. It was the most important thing that had happened to him in his whole life.

  “Not only because one has the opportunity of continuing to see and hear one’s loved ones,” he said to us in the tone of someone commenting on a christening party, “but also because it’s a wonderful distraction. The hours go by without one’s even noticing.”

  Listening to him, one had the impression that speaking with the dead was something more or less comparable to seeing a movie or watching a soccer match (though, doubtless, less entertaining). His version of life in the beyond was terribly pedestrian and disheartening. There was no difference whatsoever in “quality” between this world and that, to judge from what the spirits told him: they suffered from illnesses, fell in love, got married, reproduced, traveled—the one and only difference was that they never died. I was bored to tears and casting murderous glances in Javier’s direction when the clock struck twelve. The bank clerk had us sit around the table (which was not round but rectangular), turned the lights out, and ordered us to hold hands. There were a few seconds of silence, and as I sat there in tense anticipation, I had the (mistaken) impression that matters were about to take a more interesting turn. But then the spirits began to appear to the clerk, who began asking them the most tedious questions in the world, in the same bland, banal tone of voice as before: “Well, hello there, Zoilita, how are things with you? I’m delighted to hear your voice; I’m sitting here with two friends, very fine persons both of them, interested in communicating with your world, Zoilita. What’s that you say? Tell them you send them your regards? Of course I will, Zoilita. She says she sends you her most affectionate regards and asks you to pray for her from time to time, if you can, so she can get out of Purgatory sooner.” After Zoilita, a series of relatives and friends made their appearance, and the bank clerk had similar conversations with each of them. They were all in Purgatory, they all sent us their regards, they all asked for our prayers. Javier insisted that someone who was in Hell be summoned, so as to put an end to our doubts, but without a second’s hesitation the medium explained to us that that was out of the question: the ones from there could be contacted only on the first three days of an odd-numbered month and their voices were barely audible. Javier then asked to be put in touch with the nursemaid who had brought up his mother and himself and his brothers. Doña Gumercinda duly appeared, sent her regards, said that she had the fondest of memories of Javier, and that at the moment she was getting her belongings together to leave Purgatory and go meet Our Lord. I asked the bank clerk to summon my brother Juan, and surprisingly (since I’d never had any brothers), he came and told me, by way of the kindly voice of the medium, not to worry about him, because he was with God, and that he prayed continually for me. Reassured by this bit of news, I lost interest in the séance and occupied myself mentally writing my story about the senator. An enigmatic title popped into my mind: “The Incomplete Face.” While Javier tirelessly went on pressing the clerk to conjure up an angel, or at the very least, some historical figure such as Manco Cápac, I decided that the senator would eventually solve his problem thanks to a Freudian fantasy: when he made love to his wife, he would make her wear a pirate’s eye patch.

  The séance ended around two in the morning. As we walked through the streets of Barrios Altos in search of a taxi that would take us to the Plaza San Martín, where we could catch the jitney, I infuriated Javier by telling him that it was all his fault that the beyond had lost its poetry and mystery for me, that it was all his fault that I had had incontrovertible proof that dead people became stupid idiots, that it was all his fault that I could no longer be an agnostic and would henceforth have to live with the certainty that in the next life, which beyond a doubt existed, an eternity of imbecility and boredom awaited me. We found a taxi and as punishment Javier paid for it.

  Back home, alongside the breaded steak, the egg, and the rice, I found another message: “Julia phoned you: she received your roses, they’re very pretty, they pleased her a lot. But you’re not to get the idea that you’ll get out of taking her to the movies one of these days by sending roses. Grandfather.”

  The next day was Uncle Lucho’s birthday. I bought a tie to give him and was getting ready to leave for his house at noon, when Genaro Jr. turned up in my shack at just the wrong moment and dragged me off to the Raimondi to have lunch with him. He wanted me to help him draft the text of the advertisements that were going to be published in the Sunday papers, announcing Pedro Camacho’s serials, which were to start on Monday. “But wouldn’t it have been more logical for the author himself to have had a hand in writing these announcements?” I asked.

  “The hitch is that he’s refused to have anything to do with them,” Genaro Jr. explained, smoking like a chimney. “He claims his scripts don’t need paid publicity, that they command attention by themselves, and all sorts of other nonsense. The guy’s turning out to be a tough one to figure out; he’s got all sorts of manias. You heard about that whole hassle over the Argentines, didn’t you? He forced us to cancel contracts, to pay indemnities. I just hope his programs justify all his high-handedness.”

  As we wrote the ads, downed two sea bass, drank ice-cold beer, and watched little gray mice scamper across the overhead beams of the Raimondi every so often, as though they’d been put there on purpose as proof of how old the place was, Genaro Jr. told me of another run-in he’d had with Pedro Camacho. The reason behind this one: the protagonists of the four serials that repres
ented his debut in Lima. In all four of them, the male lead was a man in his fifties “who had miraculously retained his youth.”

  “We explained to him that all the surveys have proved the public wants leading men between thirty and thirty-five, but he’s as stubborn as a mule,” Genaro Jr. said in a doleful voice, exhaling cigarette smoke through his mouth and his nose. “What if I’ve made a terrible mistake and the Bolivian is a colossal failure?”

  I remembered that at one point in our conversation the evening before, in his cubbyhole at Radio Central, Camacho had held forth, dogmatically and eloquently, on the subject of the man in his fifties. The age at which his intellectual powers and his sensuality are at their peak, he had said, the age at which he has assimilated all his experiences. That age at which one is most desired by women and most feared by men. And he had insisted, in a highly suspect way, that old age was an “optative” phenomenon. I had deduced that the Bolivian scriptwriter was fifty himself and terrified at the prospect of old age: a tiny crack of human frailty in that spirit as solid as marble.

  When we finished writing the ads, it was too late in the afternoon to drop by Miraflores, so I phoned Uncle Lucho to tell him that I’d come by that evening to give him a birthday hug. I had presumed that I’d find a whole bunch of relatives gathered together to celebrate the occasion, but no one was there except Aunt Olga and Aunt Julia. The relatives had trooped in and out of the house during the day. The two of them were drinking whiskey and they poured me a glass, too. Aunt Julia thanked me again for the roses—I saw them on the sideboard, so few of them as scarcely to make a decent bouquet—and she began to poke fun at me, as usual, pressing me to confess what sort of “program” I’d gotten involved with on the night I’d stood her up: a dusky-skinned little chick from the university, a crisis at Radio Central? She was wearing a blue dress and white shoes, and had a salon makeup job and hairdo; her laugh was hearty and spontaneous, her voice throaty, and the look in her eyes downright provocative. I discovered, somewhat belatedly, that she was an attractive woman. In a sudden burst of enthusiasm, Uncle Lucho said that a person celebrated his fiftieth birthday only once in his life and that he was inviting all of us to the Bolívar Grill. The thought crossed my mind that for the second day in a row I would be obliged to postpone writing my story about the perverted eunuch senator (what if I used that phrase as the title?). But I didn’t regret having to put it aside, and was more than happy to find myself included in the gala supper party. After looking me over, Aunt Olga decreed that my attire wasn’t exactly suitable for the Bolívar Grill and had Uncle Lucho lend me a clean shirt and a flashy tie that would somewhat compensate for my threadbare, badly wrinkled suit. The shirt was miles too big for me, and I was concerned about the way I looked with my neck waggling back and forth inside the collar (thereby causing Aunt Julia to begin calling me Popeye).

  I’d never been to the Bolívar Grill and it seemed to me the most chic and elegant place in the world, and the supper we had the most exquisite meal I’d ever tasted. An orchestra played boleros, paso dobles, and blues, and the star of the show was a French girl, as white as snow, who caressed each syllable of her songs while seemingly masturbating the microphone with her hands, and Uncle Lucho, with a euphoria heightened by each drink he downed, cheered her on in a gibberish that he took to be French: “Vravooooo! Vravooooooo, mamuasel cherí!” I was the first one to venture out onto the dance floor, dragging Aunt Olga with me, to my own vast surprise, since I didn’t know how to dance (at the time, I was firmly convinced that a literary vocation was incompatible with dancing and sports), but happily the floor was crowded, and in the crush and the darkness no one noticed. Aunt Julia, in turn, gave Uncle Lucho a hard time of it for a while, making him dance apart from her and do fancy twists and turns. She was a good dancer and many of the women watched her every move.

  I took Aunt Julia out onto the floor for the next piece and cautioned her that I didn’t know how to dance, but as they were playing a very slow blues number, I turned out to be a fairly decent partner. We danced the next few pieces, too, and gradually got farther and farther away from Uncle Lucho’s and Aunt Olga’s table. Just as the orchestra stopped playing and Aunt Julia started to step away from me, I held her back and planted a kiss on her cheek, very close to her lips. She looked at me in astonishment, as though she’d witnessed a miracle. There was a break as another orchestra took over, and we were obliged to return to the table. The minute we sat down, Aunt Julia began to joke with Uncle Lucho about being fifty, the age at which males reached their second youth and started to become dirty old men. Every so often she darted a quick glance in my direction, as though to make sure I was really there, and from the look in her eyes, it was plain that she couldn’t get over the fact that I’d kissed her. Aunt Olga was tired now and wanted us to leave, but I insisted on having one more dance. “Our intellectual’s becoming perverted,” Uncle Lucho remarked, and dragged Aunt Olga out for one last turn around the dance floor. I followed with Aunt Julia, and as we danced, there wasn’t a peep out of her—for the first time. When Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga were out of sight amid the crowd of couples on the dance floor, I held her tighter and snuggled up cheek-to-cheek with her. “Listen, Marito,” I heard her murmur disconcertedly, but I interrupted her by whispering in her ear: “I forbid you to call me Marito ever again—I’m not a little kid any more.” She drew her face away to look at me and tried to force herself to smile, and at that point, almost automatically, I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. Our lips barely touched, but she was not expecting any such thing, and this time she was so surprised she stopped dancing for a moment. She was absolutely dumfounded now: standing there wide-eyed and openmouthed. When the piece ended, Uncle Lucho paid the check and we left. As we drove back to Miraflores—Aunt Julia and I were sitting in the back seat—I took her hand, gave it an affectionate squeeze, and held it in mine. She didn’t draw it away, but she was obviously still bowled over and didn’t once open her mouth. As I got out of the car at my grandfather’s, I suddenly wondered how many years older she was than me.

  Four.

  In the El Callao night, damp and dark as a wolf’s mouth, Sergeant Lituma turned up the collar of his greatcoat, rubbed his hands together, and prepared to do his duty. He was a man in the prime of life, his fifties, whom the entire Civil Guard respected; he had served in commissariats in the roughest districts without complaining, and his body still bore scars of the battles he had waged against crime. The prisons of Peru were full of malefactors whom he had clapped in handcuffs. He had been cited as an exemplary model in orders of the day, praised in official speeches, and twice decorated: but these honors had not altered his modesty, no less great than his courage and his honesty. He had been working out of the Fourth Commissariat of El Callao for a year now, and for the past three months he had been assigned the toughest duty that can fall to the lot of a sergeant in the port district: night patrol.

  The distant bells of the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen de la Legua struck midnight, and punctual as always, Sergeant Lituma—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—began his rounds, leaving behind him the old wooden headquarters building of the Fourth Commissariat, a blaze of light amid the darkness. He imagined the scene inside in his mind’s eye: Lieutenant Jaime Concha would be reading Donald Duck, officers Snotnose Camacho and Apple Dumpling Arévalo would be sugaring their freshly made coffee, and the only prisoner of the day—a pickpocket caught in flagrante in the Chucuito—La Parada bus and brought to the commissariat, with bruises from head to foot, by half a dozen irate passengers—would be curled up in a ball, sleeping on the floor of his cell.

  He began his rounds in the Puerto Nuevo district, where the guard on duty was Shorty Soldevilla, a young man from Túmbez who sang tonderos in an inspired voice. Puerto Nuevo was the terror of the guards and detectives of El Callao, because in its labyrinth of shanties made of wood, galvanized iron, corrugated tin, bricks, only an inf
initesimal proportion of the inhabitants earned their living as dockers or fishermen. The majority were bums, thieves, drunks, pickpockets, pimps, and queers (not to mention the countless whores), who went at each other with knives on the slightest provocation and sometimes shot each other. This district, without water or sewers, without electricity or paved streets, had more than once run red with the blood of officers of the law. But things were exceptionally quiet that night. As he made his way along the meanders of the neighborhood in search of Shorty, stumbling over invisible stones, wrinkling up his nose at the stench of excrement and rotten garbage rising to his nostrils, Sergeant Lituma thought: The cold has sent the night birds to bed early. For it was mid-August, the dead of winter, and a heavy fog that blurred and distorted everything, along with a steady drizzle that saturated the air, had turned this night into a dreary and inhospitable one. Where could Shorty Soldevilla be? Chilled to the bone or scared of the thugs, that chicken from Túmbez might very well have gone off to one of the bars along the Avenida Huáscar to get warm and have himself a drink. No, he wouldn’t dare, Sergeant Lituma thought. He knows that I’m making my rounds and if I find he’s abandoned his post his goose is cooked.