Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The grandiose program for that Sunday (a day on which, I firmly believe, a large part of my future was determined by the stars) got off to an excellent start. In Lima in the fifties we had very few chances to see first-rate theater, and the Argentine company of Francisco Petrone brought us a series of modern works that had never been performed before in Peru. Nancy went by Aunt Olga’s to get Aunt Julia and the two of them came downtown in a taxi. Javier and I were waiting for them at the door of the Teatro Segura. Javier, who was a great believer in the grand gesture, had rented an entire box, which turned out to be the only one occupied, so that there were almost as many eyes focused on us as on the stage. My guilty conscience made me quite certain that any number of relatives and acquaintances would see us and immediately suspect the truth. But the moment the performance began, my fears evaporated. They were doing Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, the first nontraditional play, violating the conventions of time and space, that I’d ever seen. I was so excited and so enthused that during the intermission I began to talk a blue streak, praising the work to the skies, commenting on its characters, its technique, its ideas, and later, as we were eating sausages and drinking dark beer in the Rincón Toni on La Colmena, I went on raving about it and got so absorbed in what I was saying that Javier later told me: “You would have thought you were a parrot that had been slipped a dose of Spanish fly.” My cousin Nancy, who had always thought my literary inclinations were as peculiar as the odd hobby that fascinated our Uncle Eduardo—a little old man, my grandfather’s brother, now a retired judge, whose life was centered on the unusual pastime of collecting spiders—after hearing my interminable peroration on the work we had just seen, suspected that my literary bent might lead me off the deep end. “You’re going off your rocker, my boy,” she warned me.

  Javier had chosen the Negro-Negro to end the evening because it had a certain intellectual-bohemian atmosphere—on Thursdays they gave little shows, one-act plays, monologues, recitals, and it was a favorite gathering place for painters, musicians, and writers—but besides that, it was also the darkest boîte in Lima, a basement in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín that had twenty tables at most, with a decor we thought was “existentialist.” It was a night spot that, the few times I had been there, gave me the illusion that I was in a cave in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They seated us at a little table on the edge of the dance floor, and Javier, more princely than ever, ordered four whiskies. He and Nancy immediately got up to dance, and there in that tiny, crowded basement, I went on talking to Julia about theater and Arthur Miller. We were sitting almost on top of each other, holding hands, she was patiently listening to me, and I went on and on about how that night I had discovered the theater: it could be something as complex and profound as the novel, and because it was something living, requiring the participation of flesh-and-blood beings in order to take on material form, and other arts, painting, music, it was perhaps even superior.

  “I’ve decided all of a sudden that I’m going to change genres and start writing plays instead of stories,” I told her, all excited. “What do you say to that?”

  “There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as far as I’m concerned,” Aunt Julia answered, rising to her feet. “But now, Varguitas, come dance with me and whisper sweet nothings in my ear. Between pieces, if you like, you have my permission to talk to me about literature.”

  I followed her instructions to the letter. We held each other very tightly and kissed as we danced, I told her that I was in love with her, and she answered that she was in love with me, and aided by the intimate, exciting, sensuous atmosphere and Javier’s whiskies, for the very first time I made no effort to hide the desire that she aroused in me; as we danced, my lips nuzzled her neck, my tongue stole into her mouth and sipped her saliva, I held her very close so as to feel her breasts, her belly, and her thighs, and then, back at the table, under cover of the darkness, I fondled her legs and breasts. That’s what we were doing, so happy we were giddy, when Nancy came back to the table, during a break between two boleros, and made our blood run cold by blurting out: “Good Lord, just look who’s here: Uncle Jorge.”

  It was a danger we ought to have thought of. Uncle Jorge, our youngest uncle, daringly combined, in a superfrenetic life, all sorts of business affairs and commercial ventures and an intense night life filled with wine, women, and song. A tragicomic story about him had made the rounds, the scene of which was another boîte: the Embassy. The show had just begun, the girl who was singing couldn’t go on because a drunk sitting at one of the tables kept interrupting her by shouting insults. Uncle Jorge had risen to his feet in the middle of the crowded nightclub, roaring like a Don Quixote: “Shut your mouth, you wretch, I’m going to teach you to respect a lady,” and with his fists raised like a boxer had started to move in on the idiot, only to discover a moment later that he was making a fool of himself since the pseudo-customer’s interruption of the chanteuse was part of the show. And there he was, sitting just two tables away from us, looking very elegant, his face just barely visible in the light of the matches being struck by the smokers in the place and the waiters’ flashlights. I recognized his wife, my Aunt Gaby, sitting next to him, and despite the fact that they were only a few feet away from us, both of them were deliberately avoiding looking in our direction. It was all quite obvious: they’d seen me kissing Aunt Julia, they’d immediately guessed everything, and had opted for a diplomatic blindness. Javier asked for the check, we left the Negro-Negro almost at once, and Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby carefully looked the other way even when we rubbed elbows as we passed their table on the way out. In the taxi on the way back to Miraflores, the four of us just sat there with long faces, not saying a word, till Nancy finally summed up what all of us were thinking: “All that scheming for nothing; the fat’s in the fire now.”

  But, as in a good suspense film, nothing at all happened during the next few days. There was not the slightest sign that the family clan had been alerted by Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby. Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga didn’t say one word to Aunt Julia that would lead her to think that they knew, and that Thursday, when I screwed up my courage and turned up for lunch at their house as usual, they were as outgoing and affectionate with me as always. Nor was Cousin Nancy the object of a single captious question on the part of Aunt Laura and Uncle Juan. And at my house, my grandparents seemed to be lost in daydreams and kept asking me, with the most angelic innocence imaginable, whether I was still taking Aunt Julia to the movies (“So nice of you—Julita’s such a film fan”). Those were anxious days, during which, taking extra precautions, Aunt Julia and I decided not to see each other, even in secret, for at least a week. We nonetheless talked to each other on the telephone. Aunt Julia would go out to the grocery store on the corner to phone me at least three times a day, and we would exchange our respective observations regarding the dreaded family reaction and entertain all sorts of hypotheses. Could Uncle Jorge possibly have decided to keep our secret to himself? I knew that this was unthinkable, in view of the family’s usual habits. So what in the world was happening? Javier advanced the thesis that Aunt Gaby and Uncle Jorge had downed so many whiskies that night that they hadn’t really realized what was going on, that the only thing that lingered in their memory was a vague suspicion, and that they hadn’t wanted to unleash a scandal over something that was not absolute proven fact. More or less out of curiosity, but also out of masochism, I made the rounds and dropped in at the homes of the entire clan that week so as to know what to expect. I noted nothing out of the ordinary, save for an omission that intrigued me and set off a pyrotechnical explosion of speculation on my part. Aunt Hortensia, who had invited me to come have tea and biscuits with her, didn’t mention Aunt Julia once in the course of a two-hour conversation. “They know everything and have plans afoot,” I assured Javier, who was sick and tired of hearing me talk of nothing else. “When you come right down to it, you’re dying to get your whole family up in arms so as to have something to write about,” he comm
ented.

  During that eventful week I also found myself unexpectedly involved in a street fight and playing the part of Pedro Camacho’s bodyguard, so to speak. I had gone one day to San Marcos University, where the results of an exam in criminal law had just been posted, and was full of remorse at having discovered that I had received a higher grade than my friend Velando, who was the one who had had everything down pat. As I was crossing the Parque Universitario, I ran into Genaro Sr., the patriarch of the phalanx that owned Radio Panamericana and Radio Central, and the two of us walked as far as the Calle Belén together, talking as we strolled along. He was a gentleman who always dressed in black and was always very solemn, and the Bolivian scriptwriter sometimes referred to him—for reasons not at all difficult to guess—as The Slave Driver.

  “Your friend the genius is still giving me headaches,” Genaro Sr. said to me. “I’ve had it up to here with him. If he weren’t so productive, I’d have booted him out long before this.”

  “Another protest from the Argentine embassy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what sort of a hopeless mess he’s cooking up,” he complained. “He’s taken to pulling people’s leg, shifting characters from one serial to an entirely different one or changing their names all of a sudden so as to get our listeners all confused. My wife had already told me what was going on, and now we’re starting to get phone calls, and we’ve even received two letters. It seems that the priest from Mendocita now has the name of the Jehovah’s Witness and vice versa. I’m far too busy to listen to serials. Do you ever listen to them?”

  We had reached La Colmena and were heading toward the Plaza San Martín, past buses leaving for the provinces and little Chinese cafés, and I remembered that Aunt Julia, speaking of Pedro Camacho a few days before, had made me laugh and confirmed my suspicions that the scriptwriter was secretly a humorist at heart. “Something really weird has happened. The young wife had her kid, but it died at birth, and they buried it with all the rites of the Church. So how do you explain the fact that in this afternoon’s chapter they took the baby to the Cathedral to be baptized?”

  I told Genaro Sr. that I didn’t have time to listen to them either and that perhaps these interchangeable characters and mixed-up plots were Pedro Camacho’s highly original way of telling a story.

  “We aren’t paying him to be original; we’re paying him to entertain our listeners,” Genaro Sr. informed me, making it quite plain that he for his part was not a progressive-minded impresario but a thoroughgoing traditionalist. “If he keeps on with jokes like that, he’s going to make us lose our listeners, and sponsors will withdraw their commercials. You’re his friend: pass the word on to him to cut out these modernist gimmicks, or else he’s liable to end up without a job.”

  I suggested that he tell him so himself: since he was the boss, the threat would carry more weight.

  But Genaro Sr. shook his head, with an air of compunction that Genaro Jr. had inherited. “He won’t even let me speak to him. Success has gone to his head, and every time I try to have a word with him, he’s disrespectful.”

  Genaro Sr. had gone to his cubicle to tell him, as politely as possible, that the station had been receiving phone calls, and show him the letters of complaint. Without saying a single word in reply, Pedro Camacho had taken the two letters, torn them to pieces without opening them, and tossed them in the wastebasket. He then began typing, as though there were no one present, and as Genaro Sr., on the edge of apoplexy, was leaving that hostile lair, he heard him mutter: “Let the cobbler stick to his last.”

  “I can’t put up with any more insults like that; I’d have to kick him out, and that wouldn’t be realistic either,” he concluded with a weary gesture. “But you don’t have anything to lose. He’s not going to insult you—you’re more or less a writer too, aren’t you? Give us a hand, do it for the corporation, talk to him.”

  I promised him I would, and in fact, to my misfortune, I went down after the twelve o’clock Panamericana newscast to invite Pedro Camacho to come have a cup of verbena-and-mint. We were leaving Radio Central when two big strapping young men blocked our path. I recognized them immediately: the barbecue cooks, two brothers with big bushy mustaches, from the Argentina Grill, a restaurant located on the same street, across from the school run by the Little Sisters of Bethlehem; dressed in white aprons and tall chef’s toques, they were the ones who prepared the rare steaks and grilled tripe that were the specialty of the restaurant.

  The two of them surrounded him, looking as though they were out for trouble, and the older and fatter one said to him in a threatening tone of voice: “So we’re child-killers, are we, Camacho, you bastard? Did you think there was nobody in this country who could teach you a little respect, you bum?”

  He grew more and more excited as he spoke, turning bright red and stumbling over his words. The younger brother kept nodding in agreement, and as his elder paused for a moment, choking with rage, he too put in his two cents’ worth. “And what about the lice? So you think, do you, that women where we come from eat the vermin they pull out of their kids’ hair as a special treat, you fucking son of a bitch? Do you think I’m going to let you get away with insulting my mother?”

  The Bolivian scriptwriter hadn’t backed away an inch and stood there listening to them with a magisterial air, his exophthalmic eyes slowly shifting from one to the other. Then, with a characteristic little bow from the waist, mindful of a master of ceremonies, and in a very solemn tone of voice, he suddenly asked them the most civil question imaginable. “Are you by any chance Argentines?”

  The fat barbecue chef, foaming at the mustache now, his face only a few inches away from Pedro Camacho’s (a confrontation that had forced him to bend way over), roared patriotically: “Yes, you bastard, we’re Argentines—and proud of it!”

  Once he had received this confirmation—really quite unnecessary since the moment they had spoken two words it was obvious from their accent that they were Argentines—I saw the Bolivian turn deathly pale, as though something had exploded inside him; his eyes blazed, he assumed a threatening expression, and whipping the air with his index finger, he apostrophized them thus: “I suspected as much. Well, then: clear out of here immediately and go sing tangos!”

  The order was not meant humorously; his tone of voice was deadly serious. For a second the barbecue chefs just stood there, at a loss for words. It was plain to see that the scriptwriter wasn’t joking: despite the fact that he was absolutely defenseless physically, the tiny little man was stubbornly holding his ground, his fierce eyes glaring at them scornfully.

  “What was that you said?” the fat one finally blurted out, nonplussed and beside himself with rage. “Huh, huh? What was that again?”

  “Go sing tangos and wash your ears!” Pedro Camacho said, enlarging on his order, in his impeccable accent. And then, after the briefest of pauses, with the audacity that was to be our downfall, he said slowly and distinctly, in a glacially calm voice: “If you don’t want a beating.”

  This time I was even more surprised than the barbecue cooks. That this little man, scarcely taller than a dwarf and with the physique of a third-grade schoolchild, was threatening to thrash two Samsons weighing well over two hundred pounds apiece was not only mad but suicidal. But the fatter one was already going into action: he grabbed the Bolivian by the collar and, amid the laughter of the crowd that had gathered round, lifted him off his feet as though he were a feather, and shouted: “You’re going to give me a beating? Well, we’ll see about that, shorty…”

  When I saw that the older brother was about to send Pedro Camacho flying with a straight right to the jaw, I was obliged to intervene. I grabbed the Samson’s arm, trying at the same time to free the scriptwriter, who was suspended in midair, purple-faced and jerking his legs like a spider, and I managed to say something like: “Listen, don’t be a bully, let him go,” when suddenly, without warning, the younger brother gave me a punch that sent me sprawling on the ground. As I struggled
to my feet in a daze and prepared to put into practice the philosophy taught me by my grandfather, a gentleman of the old school, who held that no Arequipan worthy of the name ever refuses an invitation to fight (and above all an invitation as clear as a sock in the jaw), I saw that the older brother was soundly boxing the artist’s ears (he had mercifully chosen to cuff him rather than punch him, in view of his adversary’s Lilliputian stature). Then, after that, as I traded rights and lefts with the younger barbecue cook (in defense of art, I thought to myself), I didn’t see much else. The fight didn’t last very long, but when people from Radio Central finally rescued us from the hands of the two hulking brutes, I had bumps and bruises all over and Pedro Camacho’s face was so puffy and swollen that Genaro Sr. had to take him to the public emergency clinic. That afternoon, instead of thanking me for having risked my neck defending his exclusive star, Genaro Jr. bawled me out for a news item that Pascual, taking advantage of all the confusion, had managed to slip into two successive bulletins; the paragraph in question began (with a certain amount of exaggeration) as follows: “Thugs from the Río de la Plata today criminally attacked our news director, the celebrated journalist…”