Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Get rid of the prejudices you’ve brought with you, and your suit coat and tie as well,” Dr. Lucía Acémila greeted him with the disarming straightforwardness of those possessed of genuine wisdom, pointing to the couch. “And stretch out there, face up or face down as you prefer, not because I believe in Freudian sanctimony, but because I want you to feel comfortable. And now don’t tell me your dreams or confess to me that you’re in love with your mother—just tell me, as precisely as you possibly can, how that stomach of yours is behaving.”

  Presuming that the doctor had confused him with another patient, the medical detail man, already stretched out on the comfortable couch, timidly mumbled that he hadn’t come to consult her about his stomach but about his mind.

  “They are indissociable,” the lady practitioner informed him. “A stomach that empties itself promptly and totally is the twin of a clear mind and an upright soul. A sluggish, lazy, avaricious stomach, on the other hand, engenders bad thoughts, sours the character, fosters complexes and perverted sexual appetites, and gives rise to criminal tendencies, a need to take out on others one’s own excremental tortures.”

  Thus enlightened, Lucho Abril Marroquín confessed that he sometimes suffered from attacks of indigestion, constipation, and even avowed that his stools, in addition to being irregular, also varied in color, volume, and no doubt—though he did not recall having palpated them in recent weeks—consistency and temperature. The lady doctor nodded approvingly, murmuring, “I knew it.” And she ordered the young man to eat without fail, until further advice to the contrary, a half-dozen prunes each morning on an empty stomach.

  “Now that that basic question has been resolved, let’s go on to others,” the lady philosopher added. “You may tell me what’s troubling you. But I warn you beforehand that I shall not castrate you of your problem. I shall teach you to love it, to feel as proud of it as Cervantes of his useless arm or Beethoven of his deafness. Speak.”

  With a fluency learned in ten years of professional dialogues with disciples of Hippocrates and apothecaries, Lucho Abril Marroquín frankly summed up his history, from the disastrous accident outside Pisco to his most recent nightmares and the apocalyptic consequences that this drama had had for his marital life. Overcome with self-pity, he burst into tears as he recounted the final chapters and finished his story with an outburst that to anyone else but Lucía Acémila would have been heartbreaking: “Doctor, help me!”

  “Your story doesn’t sadden me. On the contrary, it’s so banal and stupid it bores me,” this engineer of souls comforted him affectionately. “Wipe your nose and persuade yourself that in the geography of the mind your illness is the equivalent of an ingrown toenail in the geography of the body. And now listen to me.”

  With the manners and turns of speech of a woman who frequents high-society salons, she explained to him that what led men astray was the fear of the truth and the spirit of contradiction. With regard to the former, she enlightened the insomniac by explaining to him that chance, so-called accidents, did not exist; they were merely subterfuges invented by men to hide from themselves how evil they were.

  “In a word, you wanted to kill that little girl, and so you killed her,” the doctor said, dramatically summing up her thoughts on the matter. “And then, since you were ashamed of what you’d done and afraid of the police or of Hell, you wanted to be hit by the truck, as punishment for what you’d done or as an alibi for the murder.”

  “But, but…” he stammered, his bulging eyes and his forehead drenched with perspiration, betraying his abject despair. “What about the Guardia Civil? Did I kill him, too?”

  “Who hasn’t killed a Guardia Civil at some time or other?” the lady scientist reflected. “Perhaps you killed him, perhaps it was the truck driver, perhaps it was a suicide. But this isn’t a special performance, where two people get in for the price of one. Let’s concentrate on you.”

  She explained to him that, on frustrating their natural impulses, people aroused unconscious feelings of resentment in their mind, which thereupon took its vengeance by engendering nightmares, phobias, complexes, anxiety, depression.

  “One can’t fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser,” the lady apostle pontificated. “Don’t be ashamed of what you are; take consolation in the thought that all men are hyenas, and that being a good person simply means knowing how to dissimulate. Look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself: I’m an infanticide and a cowardly speed demon. Let’s have no more of these euphemisms of yours: don’t talk to me about accidents or wheel syndromes.”

  And going on to cite examples, she told him that the emaciated onanists who came to her on their knees begging her to cure them, she treated by giving them pornographic magazines, and that patients who were drug addicts, dregs of humanity crawling on the floor and tearing their hair as they spoke of the hand of fate, she treated by offering them marijuana cigarettes and handfuls of coca leaves.

  “Are you going to recommend that I go on killing children?” the medical detail man roared, a lamb suddenly turned into a tiger.

  “If that’s what gives you pleasure, why not?” the lady psychologist answered coldly. “And I warn you: no more of this shouting at me. I’m not one of those shopkeepers who believe that the customer is always right.”

  Lucho Abril Marroquín burst into tears once again. Paying no attention whatsoever to him, Dr. Lucía Acémila spent the next ten minutes covering several sheets of paper with her elegant penmanship, labeling them “Exercise for learning how to live sincerely.” She handed them to him and made an appointment with him for eight weeks later. As she bade him goodbye with a cordial handshake, she reminded him not to forget to eat his prunes every morning.

  Like the majority of Dr. Acémila’s patients, Lucho Abril Marroquín left her office feeling as though he’d been the victim of a psychic ambush, and certain that he had fallen in the toils of an absolute madwoman who would only make his ailments worse if he were to be foolish enough to follow her recommendations. He made up his mind to flush the “Exercises” down the toilet without even looking at them. But that very same night (debilitating insomnia that drives the sufferer to excesses), he read them. They struck him as pathologically absurd and he laughed so hard he got the hiccups (he rid himself of them by drinking a glass of water from the far edge, as his mother had taught him); but then he felt a burning curiosity. As a distraction, to while away the long sleepless hours, with no faith in their therapeutic effectiveness, he decided to try them.

  Visiting the toy section of Sears, he had no difficulty finding the car, the truck number 1 and the truck number 2 that he needed, as well as the figurines that were to represent the little girl, the Guardia Civil, the thieves, and himself. Following the doctor’s instructions, he painted the vehicles the same colors he remembered them as being, and the clothes of the figurines as well. (He had an aptitude for painting, and so the guard’s uniform and the little girl’s humble garments and crusts of filth turned out very well.) To imitate the sand dunes of Pisco, he used a sheet of wrapping paper, on one edge of which, in his obsessive desire for verisimilitude, he painted the Pacific Ocean: a blue strip with a border of sea foam. The first day it took him nearly an hour, kneeling on the floor of the living room/dining room of his house, to reproduce the story, and when he came to the end, that is to say when the thieves flung themselves on the medical detail man to rob him, he was almost as terrified and heartsick as on the day it had actually happened. He lay on his back on the floor, in a cold sweat and racked with sobs. But on the following days the nervous shock became less intense, and the operation became a sort of sport, an exercise that took him back to his childhood and filled the hours he would not have otherwise known how to occupy, now that his wife was gone, since he’d never prided himself on being a voracious reader or a great music lover. It was like playing with a Meccano set, putting a jigsaw puzzle together, or doing crosswords. Sometimes, as he was handing out samples to the detail men in the warehouse
of the Bayer Laboratories, he surprised himself by digging down in his memory in search of a detail, a gesture, a motive for what had happened that would allow him to introduce a variation, to prolong his re-creations of events when he got home that evening. On seeing little wooden figurines and little plastic toy cars all over the living room/dining room floor, the cleaning woman asked him if he was thinking of adopting a child, warning him that, if so, she would charge more. In accordance with the progression outlined in the “Exercises,” he was now staging sixteen reconstructions of the—accident?—on a Lilliputian scale each night.

  The section of the “Exercises for learning how to live sincerely” having to do with children seemed even more preposterous to him than the business with the figurines, but (the inertia that leads to vice or the curiosity that is responsible for scientific progress?) he faithfully followed it as well. It was subdivided into two parts: “Theoretical Exercises” and “Practical Exercises” and Dr. Acémila pointed out that it was imperative that the former precede the latter, for wasn’t man a rational being whose ideas preceded his acts? The theoretical part left ample scope for the pharmaceutical representative’s gift for observation and speculative turn of mind. All it prescribed was: “Reflect daily on the disasters to humanity caused by children.” He was to do so systematically, at all hours, and wherever he might be.

  “What harm did innocent little children do humanity? Were they not grace, purity, happiness, life itself?” Lucho Abril Marroquín asked himself on the morning of the first theoretical exercise as he walked the five kilometers to his office. But, more out of a desire to make this exercise assigned him as interesting as possible than out of heartfelt conviction, he admitted to himself that at times they could be very noisy. As a matter of fact, they cried a lot, at all hours, for all sorts of reasons, and since they were not yet rational creatures, they did not realize the harm caused by this propensity, nor could they be persuaded of the virtues of silence. He then remembered the case of that worker who, after his exhausting day’s work in the mine, returned home and was unable to sleep because of the frantic wailing of his newborn baby, whom he had finally—murdered? How many millions of similar cases occurred around the globe? How many manual laborers, peasants, shopkeepers, office clerks, who—the high cost of living, low salaries, lack of adequate housing—lived in tiny apartments and shared their cramped quarters with their offspring, were prevented from enjoying a well-deserved night’s sleep by the howls of a baby incapable of telling its progenitors whether its bawling meant it had diarrhea or wanted to be nursed again?

  Thoroughly searching his mind that evening as he walked the five kilometers home, Lucho Abril Marroquín discovered that they could be held responsible for causing a great deal of havoc. Unlike any animal, it took them much too long before they could manage on their own without being watched every minute, and how much damage resulted from this shortcoming! They broke everything, from artistic bibelots to rock-crystal vases, they pulled down curtains that the mistress of the house had strained her eyes sewing, and without the slightest embarrassment placed their hands smeared with number two on the starched tablecloth or the lace mantilla purchased with love and privation. Not to mention the fact that they were in the habit of sticking their fingers in light sockets and causing short circuits, or stupidly electrocuting themselves, with all that that implied for the family: a little white coffin, a grave, a wake, a death announcement in El Comercio, mourning dress, bereavement.

  He acquired the habit of devoting himself to these mental gymnastics as he walked to and from the Laboratories and San Miguel. In order not to repeat himself, he began by making a rapid summary of the charges leveled at them in the previous reflection and then proceeded to explore another one. One theme led quite naturally to another, and he never found himself short of arguments.

  Their economic misdeeds, for example, furnished enough material to occupy his mind for thirty kilometers. Wasn’t it distressing how they ruined the family budget? They ate up the paternal income in inverse proportion to their size, not only because of their persistent gluttony and their delicate stomachs which required special foods, but also because of the countless institutions they had given rise to, midwives, day nurseries, child-care centers, kindergartens, nannies, circuses, children’s matinees, toy stores, juvenile courts, reformatories, not to mention the specialists in the treatment of children who (arborescent parasites that asphyxiate the host plant) had sprouted in medicine, psychology, odontology, and other sciences, an army, in a word, that had to be dressed, fed, and pensioned off at the expense of the poor fathers.

  Lucho Abril Marroquín found himself about to burst into tears one day just thinking about those young mothers who, zealously fulfilling their moral responsibilities and ever mindful of what people might say, bury themselves alive in order to care for their offspring, giving up parties, movies, vacation trips, and by so doing end up being abandoned by their spouses, who, on being obliged to go out so often by themselves, inevitably stray from the path of virtue. And how do these children repay all these sleepless nights, all this suffering? By growing up, by moving away from home and founding their own family, by forsaking their mothers in the lonely orphanhood of their old age.

  And thus, by imperceptible degrees, he finally destroyed the myth of their innocence and goodness. Taking advantage of the wellknown pretext that they lacked the powers of reason, did they not tear the wings off butterflies, roast live baby chicks in the oven, flip tortoises onto their backs and leave them to die, pluck squirrels’ eyes out? Was a slingshot for killing little birds an adult weapon? And were they not totally without pity for children weaker than themselves? Moreover, how could one possibly apply the word “intelligent” to beings who, at an age when any little kitten can already hunt its own food, are still clumsily toddling about, bumping into walls, and getting black and blue all over?

  Lucho Abril Marroquín was possessed of acute aesthetic sensibilities, and they provided him with food for thought for many a walk between home and office. He would have liked all women to stay lithe and supple until the menopause, and it pained him to inventory the ravages undergone by mothers as a result of child-birth: their wasp waists that would fit in one hand all went to fat, and likewise their breasts and buttocks and smooth bellies, expanses of flesh as hard as metal that lips did not dent, went soft, swelled, sagged, wrinkled, and certain women, as a consequence of all the pushing and contractions of difficult births, waddled like ducks afterwards. Remembering the statuesque body of the little Frenchwoman who bore his name, Lucho Abril Marroquín was happy and relieved to think that she had given birth not to a chubby creature that had utterly destroyed her beauty but to little more than a blob of human detritus. Another day, as he was sitting on the toilet—the prunes had made his bowels as punctual as an English train—he realized that it no longer made him tremble with fear to think of Herod. And one morning he found himself giving a little beggar boy a clout on the head.

  He knew then that, without any conscious intent on his part, he had gone on (as stars naturally journey on from night to day) to the “Practical Exercises.” Dr. Acémila had subtitled these instructions “Direct Action,” and Lucho Abril Marroquín had the impression that he was hearing her scientist’s voice speaking as he reread them. Unlike the instructions for the theoretical exercises, these were quite precise. Once he had become clearly aware of the disasters they caused, it was now a matter of engaging in minor acts of reprisal, on an individual level. It was necessary to do so in a discreet manner, in view of the tyrannical demagoguery underlying such sentiments as “Children are defenseless creatures,” “Never hit a child, not even with a rose,” and “Whippings cause complexes.”

  These instructions admittedly proved difficult to follow in the beginning, and when he passed one of them on the street, neither the latter nor he himself knew whether that hand laid on the little one’s childish head was meant as a chastisement or as a clumsy pat. But with the self-assurance that comes with
practice, he little by little overcame his timidity and ancestral inhibitions, growing bolder, bettering his score, taking the initiative, and after a few weeks, as the “Exercises” predicted, he noted that the cuffs on the head that he dealt out on street corners, the pinches that left bruises, the kicks that caused the recipients to howl in pain, were no longer a duty he took upon himself for moral and theoretical reasons, but a sort of pleasure. He enjoyed seeing little boys who went around selling lottery tickets burst into tears when they walked up to him to offer him a lucky number and to their surprise got their ears soundly boxed, and it excited him as much as watching a bullfight when the boy guide of a blind woman, who had approached him with his tin alms saucer tinkling in the morning air, fell to the ground rubbing the shin on which a good swift kick had just landed. The “Practical Exercises” were risky, but realizing that at heart he was fearless and foolhardy, this spurred him on rather than dissuading him. Not even on the day that he stamped on a soccer ball till it burst and was pursued with sticks and stones by a pack of pygmies did his determination falter.

  Thus, during the weeks that the treatment lasted, he committed a great many of those acts that (mental laziness that turns people into idiots) are ordinarily referred to as evil deeds. He decapitated the dolls with which, in public parks, nursemaids entertained them; he snatched lollipops, toffee, caramels that little girls were about to put in their mouths and trampled them underfoot or threw them to dogs; he hung about circuses, children’s matinees, and puppet theaters, and pulled braids and ears, pinched little arms and legs and behinds till his fingers turned numb, and, naturally, made use of the age-old stratagem of sticking his tongue out at them and making faces, and talked to them at length, till his voice grew hoarse or gave out altogether, of the Bogeyman, the Big Bad Wolf, the Policeman, the Skeleton, the Witch, the Vampire, and other characters created by the imagination of adults to frighten them.