Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  He always brought back very amusing stories of Pedro Camacho’s inspired talents as an artist. One day he swore to us that Pedro had advised Luciano Pando to masturbate before delivering a love dialogue, claiming that by so doing he’d weaken his voice and produce a very romantic pant. Luciano Pando had flatly refused.

  “I understand now why it is that every time there’s a love scene coming up Don Pedro makes a visit to the downstairs bathroom, Don Mario,” Big Pablito said, crossing himself and kissing his fingers. “To jerk off—that’s why. And that’s how come his voice sounds so soft and gentle afterwards.”

  Javier and I had a long discussion as to whether this could be true or was just a story that our new editor had made up, and we arrived at the conclusion that, all things considered, there was sufficient reason not to regard it as absolutely impossible.

  “It’s things like that you should be writing a story about, not about Doroteo Martí,” Javier admonished me. “Radio Central is a literary gold mine.”

  The story I was trying my best to write at the time was based on an incident that Aunt Julia had told me about, one she herself had witnessed at the Teatro Saavedra in La Paz. Doroteo Martí was a Spanish actor who was touring Latin America, causing overflow audiences to shed floods of tears over La Malquerida and Todo un Hombre or other even more heartrending melodramas. Even in Lima, where theater was a mere curious relic, having died out the century before, the Doroteo Martí Company had drawn a full house at the Teatro Municipal for a performance of what, according to legend, was the ne plus ultra of its repertory: the Life, Passion, and Death of Our Lord. The actor had a strong sense of practicality, and malicious gossip had it that on occasion Christ broke off his sobbing soliloquy during his night of sorrows in the Garden of Olives to announce to the audience, in an affable tone of voice, that the following day the company would give a special performance to which ladies accompanied by an escort would be admitted free (whereupon Christ’s Passion continued). It was in fact a performance of the Life, Passion, and Death that Aunt Julia had seen at the Teatro Saavedra. At the supreme instant, as Jesus Christ was dying on the heights of Golgotha, the audience noted that the wooden cross to which he was tied, surrounded by clouds of incense, was beginning to collapse. Was it an accident or a deliberately planned effect? Prudently, exchanging stealthy glances, the Virgin, the Apostles, the Roman soldiers, the populace in general began backing away from the teetering cross on which, his head still bowed upon his chest, Jesus-Martí had begun to murmur in a low voice that was nonetheless audible in the first rows of the orchestra: “I’m falling, I’m falling.” Paralyzed, doubtless, with horror at the thought of committing sacrilege, none of the invisible occupants of the wings ran onstage to hold the cross upright, and it was now pivoting back and forth, defying numerous physical laws, amid cries of alarm that had replaced prayers on the actors’ lips. Seconds later the spectators of La Paz saw Martí of Galilee come tumbling down, falling flat on his face on the stage of his great triumph, beneath the weight of the sacred rood, and heard the tremendous crash that shook the theater. Aunt Julia swore to me that Christ had managed to roar out in a savage voice, seconds before coming a cropper on the boards: “Damn it to hell, I’m falling!” It was, above all, this very last scene that I wanted to re-create; my story, too, would end up with a bang, with Jesus cursing like a trooper. I I wanted it to be a funny story, and to learn the techniques of writing humor, I read—on jitneys, express buses, and in bed before falling asleep—all the witty authors I could get my hands on, from Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw to Jardiel Poncela and Fernández F1órez. But as usual I couldn’t get the story to turn out right, and Pascual and Big Pablito kept count of the number of sheets of paper I consigned to the wastebasket. Luckily, as far as paper was concerned, the Genaros were more than generous with the News Service.

  Two or three weeks went by before I met the man from Radio Victoria who had replaced Big Pablito. In the days before Pedro Camacho’s arrival at the station, anyone who wanted to could attend the recording sessions of serials, but the new star director had forbidden everyone except the actors and technicians to enter the recording studio, and to prevent anyone else from doing so he had ordered the doors to be closed and stationed Jesusito’s intimidating bulk in front of them. Not even Genaro Jr. himself was exempt from this iron rule.

  I remember the afternoon when, as always happened whenever he had problems and needed a shoulder to cry on, he appeared in the shack, his nostrils quivering with indignation, to tell me his complaints. “I tried to enter the studio and he immediately stopped the program and refused to record it till I cleared out,” he said in a furious voice. “And he gave me to understand that the next time I interrupted a rehearsal he’d throw the microphone at my head. What shall I do? Kick him out on his ass, or swallow the insult?”

  I told him what he wanted to hear: that in view of the success of the serials (“for the greater glory of the entire Peruvian radio broadcasting industry,” etc.) he should swallow the insult and not set foot in the artist’s territory again. He took my advice, but I for my part was still dying of curiosity and wanted desperately to attend a recording session of one of the scriptwriter’s programs.

  One morning as we were having our usual break at the Bransa, after feeling out the ground very cautiously I ventured to broach the subject to Pedro Camacho. I told him I was eager to see the new sound-effects man in action and find out whether he was as good as he said he was.

  “I didn’t say he was good; I said he was average,” he immediately corrected me. “But I’m training him and he might be good someday.”

  He drank a sip of his herb tea and scrutinized me with his little cold, punctilious eyes, assailed by inner doubts. Finally he gave in, and reluctantly agreed. “All right then. Come tomorrow, to the one at three. But I can’t allow you to come again, I regret to say. I don’t like the actors to be distracted, any alien presence disturbs them, I lose control of them, and it’s goodbye catharsis. The recording of an episode is a Mass, my friend.”

  In fact, it was something even more solemn. Among all the Masses I remembered (I hadn’t been to church in years), I never witnessed such a moving ceremony, such a deeply lived rite, as that recording of chapter 17 of “The Adventures and Misadventures of Don Alberto de Quinteros” to which I was admitted. The session couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes—ten to rehearse and twenty to record—but it seemed to me that it lasted for hours. I was immediately impressed by the reverent religious atmosphere that reigned in the little room with a glass panel and dusty green carpeting that went by the name of Radio Central Recording Studio Number One. Big Pablito and I were the only spectators present; the others were active participants. On entering the studio, Pedro Camacho had informed us with a martial look in his eye, we must remain as motionless as statues of salt throughout the session. The author-director seemed transformed: taller, stronger, a general issuing orders to disciplined troops. Disciplined? Enraptured, rather; bewitched, brainwashed fanatics. I could scarcely recognize Josefina Sánchez, with her mustache and her varicose veins, whom I had so often seen recording her lines while chewing gum and knitting, with her mind somewhere else entirely and giving the impression that she hadn’t the least idea what she was saying, as being the same person as this utterly serious creature before me who, when not absorbed in going over the script word for word, like someone praying, kept her eyes trained, respectfully and obediently, on the artist, trembling like an innocent little girl gazing at the altar on the day of her First Communion. And the same was true of Luciano Pando and the other three actors (two women and a very young man). They didn’t exchange a single word or so much as look at each other: as though magnetized, their eyes went from their scripts to Pedro Camacho. And on the other side of the glass panel even that popinjay, the sound engineer Ochoa, was enraptured: carefully monitoring the controls, pressing buttons, turning lights on and off, following with a grave and attentive frown everything that was happening in
the studio.

  The five members of the cast were standing in a circle around Pedro Camacho, who—dressed as usual in his black suit and little bow tie and with his hair flying every which way—was delivering a sermon on the chapter that they were about to record. It was not instructions that he was giving them, at least not in the prosaic sense of concrete indications as to how they were to speak their lines—in measured tones or exaggeratedly, slowly or rapidly—but rather, as was his habit, noble, olympian, pontifical pronouncements having to do with profound aesthetic and philosophical truths. And naturally it was the words “art” and “artistic” that were repeated most frequently in this feverish discourse, like some sort of magic formula that revealed and explained everything. But even more surprising than the Bolivian scriptwriter’s words was the fervor with which he uttered them, and perhaps more surprising still, the effect that they caused. Gesturing furiously and standing on tiptoe as he talked, he spoke in the fanatical voice of a man in possession of an urgent truth that he must disseminate, share, drive home. He succeeded completely in doing so: the five actors and actresses listened to him in stupefaction, hanging on his every word, opening their eyes wide as though the better to absorb these maxims concerning their work (“their mission,” as the author-director put it). I was sorry Aunt Julia wasn’t there, because she’d never believe me when I told her how I had seen, with my own eyes, this handful of practitioners of the most miserable profession in Lima totally transformed, transfixed, spiritualized, for the space of an eternal half hour, beneath the sway of Pedro Camacho’s effervescent rhetoric. Big Pablito and I were sitting on the floor in one corner of the studio; in front of us, surrounded by all sorts of strange paraphernalia, was the brand-new acquisition, the defector from Radio Victoria. He too had listened to the artist’s harangue with mystical rapture; the moment the recording of the chapter began, he became the center of the spectacle for me.

  He was a stocky, copper-colored man, with stiff straight hair, dressed almost like a beggar: worn overalls, a much-mended shirt, big clodhoppers without laces. (Later I found out that he was called by the mysterious nickname of Puddler.) His work tools consisted of a wooden plank, a door, a washtub full of water, a whistle, a sheet of tinfoil, a fan, and other such ordinary-looking everyday articles. Puddler then proceeded to put on an extraordinary one-man show involving ventriloquism, acrobatic feats, multiple simultaneous impersonations, the creation of imaginary physical effects. At a given signal from the director-actor—a magisterial waggling of his index finger in the air filled with dialogue, tender sighs, and lamentations—Puddler, walking across his plank at a pace whose crescendo or diminuendo was carefully calculated, made the footsteps of the characters approach or retreat in the distance, and at another signal, turning the fan to blow at different speeds across the sheet of tinfoil, he produced the sound of rain falling or the wind howling, or at yet another, putting three fingers in his mouth and whistling, he filled the studio with the chirping of birds waking up the heroine in her country house on a spring morning. It was especially impressive when he created the sounds of a city street. It was Ochoa who provided, by means of a prerecorded tape, the sound of motors and horns honking, but all the other effects were produced by Puddler, by clacking his tongue, clucking, uttering, whispering (he seemed to be doing all these things at once), and all you needed to do was close your eyes to hear, reconstructed in the little Radio Central studio, the voices, the scattered words, the laughter, the exclamations that a person distractedly hears on walking down a crowded street. But as though this were not enough, at the same time that he was producing dozens of human voices, Puddler was also walking or leaping on the plank, manufacturing the footfalls of the pedestrians on the sidewalks and the sound of their bodies brushing against each other. He “walked” both with his feet and with his hands (thrust into a pair of shoes), squatting on his haunches, his arms dangling like a monkey’s, slapping his thighs with his elbows and his forearms. After having been (acoustically speaking) the Plaza de Armas at noon, it was a relatively trivial feat for him to re-create the chamber music, so to speak, of a tea offered by a Lima society matron to a group of her lady friends in her mansion and the tinkling of the porcelain cups by hitting two little iron bars together, scratching on a sheet of glass, and rubbing little pieces of wood on his behind to imitate the gliding of chairs and ladies’ feet over the thick, soft carpets; or, by roaring, croaking, grunting, screaming, to incarnate phonetically (and enrich with a number of species not to be found there) the Barranco zoo. By the time the recording session was over, he looked as though he’d run the Olympic marathon: he was panting, his eyes had big dark circles under them, and he was sweating like a horse.

  Pedro Camacho had contrived to imbue his collaborators with his own sepulchral seriousness. It was an enormous change. The serials from the CMQ in Cuba had most often been recorded in a circus atmosphere, and as the actors read their lines they would make faces or obscene gestures at each other, making fun of themselves and of what they were saying. But nowadays one had the impression that if someone had cracked the least little joke, the others would have flung themselves on him to punish him for his sacrilege. I thought for a time that they might perhaps be pretending so as to curry favor with their boss, so as not to be thrown out like the Argentines, that in their heart of hearts they weren’t as certain as he was that they were “priests of art,” but I was wrong. On my way back to Panamericana, I walked a few blocks along the Calle Belén with Josefina Sánchez, who was going home between serials to have herself a nice cup of tea, and I asked her whether the Bolivian scriptwriter always delivered a sermon before they recorded or whether the one I’d heard had been exceptional in any way. She gave me such a scornful look it made her double chin quiver.

  “He said very little today and he wasn’t inspired. Sometimes it breaks your heart to think that his ideas won’t be preserved for posterity.”

  Since she was someone “who’d had so much experience,” as I put it, I asked her if she really thought that Pedro Camacho was a person possessed of great talent. It took her a few seconds to find words adequate to express her feelings on the subject: “That man sanctifies the acting profession.”

  Six.

  One bright summer morning, tidily dressed and punctual as usual, Dr. Don Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar, examining magistrate, First Criminal Division, Superior Court of Lima, entered his chambers. He was a man who had reached the prime of life, his fifties, and in his person—broad forehead, aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—and in his bearing his spotless moral virtue was so apparent as to earn him people’s immediate respect. He dressed with the modesty that befits a magistrate with a meager salary who is constitutionally incapable of accepting a bribe, but with such impeccable neatness that it gave the impression of elegance. The Palace of Justice was beginning to awaken from its nocturnal slumber, and the massive building was commencing to swarm with a crowd of attorneys, petty clerks, bailiffs, plaintiffs, notaries, executors of estates, law students, and idle spectators. In the heart of this beehive, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar opened his briefcase, took out two dossiers, seated himself at his desk, and prepared to begin his day. A few seconds later, his secretary appeared in his chambers, as rapidly and silently as a meteorite hurtling through space: Dr. Zelaya, a short little man with glasses and a minuscule mustache that moved rhythmically up and down as he spoke.

  “A very good day to you, Your Honor,” he greeted the magistrate, bowing deeply from the waist.

  “The same to you, Zelaya.” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar smiled affably. “And what does the day have in store for us?”

  “Rape of a minor with mental violence as an aggravating circumstance,” the secretary replied, depositing a voluminous folder on the magistrate’s desk. “The accused, who lives in the Victoria district and has typical Lombrosian criminal features, denies the allegations against him. The principal witnesses are waiting outside in the corridor.”

>   “Before hearing them, I need to reread the police report and the plaintiff’s deposition,” the magistrate reminded him.

  “They’ll wait as long as necessary,” the secretary replied, and left the room.

  Beneath his solid juridical cuirass, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar had the soul of a poet. One reading of cold legal documents was all he required to remove the rhetorical crust of wherefores and whereases and Latin phrases and arrive at the facts themselves by way of his powers of imagination. Thus, reading the police report drawn up in La Victoria, he was able to reconstruct, in vivid detail, the events that had led to formal charges being brought against the accused. He saw the thirteen-year-old girl named Sarita Huanca Salaverría, a pupil at the Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera public-school complex, enter, on Monday last, the commissariat of this motley, parti-colored district. She arrived in tears and with bruises on her face, arms, and legs, accompanied by her parents, Don Casimiro Huanca Padrón and Doña Catalina Salaverría Melgar. This minor had been dishonored the evening before, in room H of the tenement located at Number 12, Avenida Luna Pizarro, by the accused, Gumercindo Tello, a tenant in the same building (room J). On overcoming her embarrassment, Sarita had revealed to the guardians of law and order, in a quavering voice, that her defloration had been the tragic end result of a long and secret pursuit to which she had been subjected by the rapist. For the past eight months, in fact—that is to say, ever since the day that he had come to install himself at Number 12, like some strange bird of ill omen—the latter had plagued Sarita Huanca by waylaying her where her parents or the other tenants couldn’t see and paying her indecent compliments or making bold advances (such as telling her: “I’d love to squeeze the lemons of your orchard” or: “One of these days I’m going to milk you”). From prophecies, Gumercindo Tello had gone on to overt acts, succeeding in his attempts, on a number of occasions, to fondle and kiss the pubescent girl, in the courtyard of the building at Number 12 or in nearby streets, as she was coming home from school or when she went out to run errands. Out of understandable timidity and a natural sense of modesty, the victim had not told her parents of this harassment.