Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (2 page)

He told me he’d seen, two days in a row, a huge crowd of young girls, grown women, and old ladies milling about outside the doors of Radio Illimani, waiting for their idol to come out so they could get his autograph. Moreover, the McCann Erickson office in La Paz had assured him that Pedro Camacho’s radio serials attracted more listeners than any other programs broadcast over the Bolivian airwaves. Genaro Jr. was what in those days people were beginning to call a “dynamic” impresario: more interested in making profits than in honors, he was neither a member of the Club Nacional nor eager to be one, made friends with anyone and everyone, and had so much drive and energy that it was exhausting just to be around him. A man capable of lightning-quick decisions, once he’d visited Radio Illimani he immediately persuaded Pedro Camacho to come to Peru and work exclusively for Radio Central.

“It wasn’t hard—he was earning starvation wages there,” he explained to me. “He’ll be in charge of all the serials and I’ll be able to tell all those sharks from CMQ to go to hell.”

I did my best to shatter his illusions. I told him that it was quite obvious that Peruvians had an antipathy toward Bolivians and that Pedro Camacho would get along very badly with all the people at Radio Central. His Bolivian accent would grate on the ears of listeners, and since he didn’t know the first thing about Peru he’d make one dreadful mistake after another. But Genaro Jr. merely smiled and turned a deaf ear to all my pessimistic prophecies. Even though he’d never set foot in the country, Pedro Camacho had spoken to him of the heart and soul of the people of Lima with as much feeling and understanding as though he’d been born in Bajo el Puente, and his accent was impeccable, without a single jarring
s
or
r
; in a word, as soft and smooth as velvet.

“Between Luciano Pando and the other actors, that poor foreigner’s going to be eaten up alive,” Javier opined. “Or else the beauteous Josefina Sánchez will rape him.”

We were in the shack talking together as I retyped news items from
El Comercio
and
La Prensa
, changing adjectives and adverbs as I went, for the Panamericana newscast at twelve. Javier was my best friend and we saw each other every day, even if only for a few minutes, to prove to each other that we were still alive and kicking. He was a creature given to short-lived, contradictory, but invariably sincere enthusiasms. He had been the star of the Department of Literature at Catholic University, where there had never before been such a hardworking student, or a more clear-sighted reader of poetry, or a more discerning interpreter of difficult texts. Everyone took it as a foregone conclusion that he would earn his degree by writing a brilliant thesis, that he would become a brilliant professor or an equally brilliant poet or critic. But one fine day, without offering any sort of explanation, he had disappointed everyone by abandoning the thesis he was working on, giving up literature and the Catholic University, and enrolling at San Marcos as a student in the Department of Economics. When someone ventured to ask him the reason for this desertion, he confessed (or remarked jokingly) that the thesis he’d been working on had opened his eyes. It was to have been entitled “Paroemias in the Works of Ricardo Palma.” He had had to read Palma’s
Peruvian Traditions
with a magnifying glass, searching for proverbs, and since he was a conscientious and rigorous researcher, he had managed to fill an entire file drawer with erudite index cards. And then one morning he had burned the whole drawerful of index cards in a vacant lot—he and I performed an Apache dance around the philological flames—and decided that he hated literature and that even economics was preferable to that. Javier was now a trainee at the Central Reserve Bank and could always find an excuse for dropping by Radio Panamericana every morning. One last remaining trace of his paroemiological nightmare was his habit of inflicting proverbs on me that had neither rhyme nor reason.

I was surprised to discover that, despite the fact that she was Bolivian and lived in La Paz, Aunt Julia had never heard of Pedro Camacho. But she explained that she had never listened to soap operas and hadn’t set foot inside a theater since she’d interpreted the role of Twilight in the Dance of the Hours, in her last year at a school run by Irish nuns (“And don’t you dare ask me how many years ago that was, Marito”). This was while we were walking from Uncle Lucho’s house, at the end of the Avenida Armendáriz, to the Cine Barranco. It was she who had invited me, in the sneakiest way imaginable, at noon that day.

It was the Thursday following her arrival, and even though the prospect of being the butt of her Bolivian jokes didn’t appeal to me, I didn’t want to miss my weekly lunch at Uncle Lucho’s and Aunt Olga’s. I had hoped she wouldn’t be there, since the night before—on Wednesday nights the whole family went to visit Aunt Gaby—I had heard Aunt Hortensia announce, in the tone of voice of one who is privy to the secrets of the gods: “During her first week in Lima she’s gone out four times—with four different suitors, one of whom is married. There are no lengths that divorcée won’t go to!”

When I arrived at Uncle Lucho’s, after the noon Panamericana newscast, I found her there—with one of her suitors. I savored the sweet pleasure of vengeance on entering the living room and finding sitting next to her, gazing upon her with the eyes of a conquistador, looking absolutely ridiculous in his hopelessly oldfashioned suit, his bow tie, and his carnation boutonniere, an elderly relative of mine, Uncle Pancracio, my grandmother’s first cousin. He’d been a widower for ages, he walked with his feet spread wide apart, like the hands of a clock at ten past ten, and in the family his visits set tongues to wagging maliciously because he brazenly pinched the maidservants in full view of everybody. He dyed his hair, wore a pocket watch with a silver chain, and could be seen daily at 6 p.m. hanging around the Jirón de la Unión, flirting with office girls. As I leaned over to kiss her, I whispered in the Bolivian divorcée’s ear, my voice dripping with irony: “What a fine conquest, Julita.” She winked an eye and nodded slyly. During lunch, Uncle Pancracio, after holding forth on Peruvian popular music, at which he was an expert—at family celebrations he always offered a solo on the cajón, a traditional “musical instrument” that in reality was simply a wooden box or drawer on which the player drummed with his fingers or the palm of his hand—turned to her, and, licking his chops like a cat, said: “By the way, on Thursday evenings the Felipe Pinglo Association meets at the Victoria, the heart of Peruvianism. Would you like to hear a little genuine indigenous music?” Without hesitating an instant, and with an air of heartfelt regret that added insult to injury, Aunt Julia answered, pointing to me. “What a pity—Mario’s already invited me to the movies.” “Well then, I yield to youth,” Uncle Pancracio replied, like a good sport. Later, after he’d left, I thought I was saved when Aunt Olga said to Aunt Julia: “I take it that business about the movies was just to get rid of the old lecher?” But Julia shot back immediately: “Not at all, Olga, I’m dying to see the one that’s showing at the Barranco—the censors have rated it ‘not suitable for minors.’” She turned to me (I was listening intently, since my fate for that evening was at stake), and to set my mind at ease added this exquisite flower: “Don’t worry about the money, Marito—it’s my treat.”

And there we were, walking down the dark Quebrada de Armendáriz, then along the wide Avenida Grau, heading for a film that, to top everything off, was Mexican and called
Mother and Mistress
.

“The worst thing about being a divorcée isn’t that all men think they’re obliged to proposition you,” Aunt Julia informed me. “Rather, it’s the fact that because you’re a divorcée they think there’s no need to be romantic. They don’t flirt with you, they don’t whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They just come straight out with what it is they want from you, right off the bat, in the most vulgar way imaginable. That really puts me off. That’s why I’d rather go to the movies with you than go out dancing with a man.”

“Thanks a whole lot—I appreciate the compliment,” I said.

“They’re so stupid they think that every divorcée’s a street-walker,” she went on, not even noticing the irony in my voice. “And what’s more, all they think about is doing things with you. Even though that’s not the best part—the best part’s falling in love with each other, don’t you think so?”

I explained to her that love didn’t exist, that it was the invention of an Italian named Petrarch and the Provençal troubadours. That what people thought was a crystal-clear outpouring of emotion, a pure effusion of sentiment, was merely the instinctive desire of cats in heat hidden beneath the poetic words and myths of literature. I didn’t really believe a word of what I was saying and was simply trying to impress her. My erotico-biological theory, however, left Aunt Julia quite skeptical: did I honestly believe such nonsense?

“I’m against marriage,” I told her, in the most solemnly pedantic tone of voice I could muster. “I’m a believer in what’s called free love, although if we were honest, we ought, quite simply, to call it free copulation.”

“Does copulation mean doing things?” She laughed. But immediately a sad, disabused expression crossed her face. “In my day, boys composed acrostics, sent girls flowers, took weeks to work up enough nerve to give them a kiss. What an obscene thing love has become among kids today, Marito.”

We had a slight argument at the box office as to which of us was going to pay for the tickets, and then, after sitting through an hour and a half of Dolores del Río moaning, embracing, taking her pleasure, weeping, running through the forest with her hair streaming in the wind, we headed back to Uncle Lucho’s, on foot this time too, in a drizzling rain that left our hair and our clothes soaking wet. As we walked along, we talked again of Pedro Camacho. Was she absolutely certain she’d never heard of him? Because, according to Genaro Jr., he was a celebrity in Bolivia. No, she’d never even heard his name mentioned. The thought came to me that they’d put one over on Genaro, or that perhaps the supposed one-man “industry” in the world of radio and theater in Bolivia was a publicity gimmick he’d dreamed up to drum up interest in a Peruvian pen pusher he’d just hired. Three days later I met Pedro Camacho in the flesh.

I’d just had a set-to with Genaro Sr., because Pascual, with his usual irrepressible penchant for terrible catastrophes, had devoted the entire eleven o’clock bulletin to an earthquake in Isfahan. What irritated Genaro Sr. was not so much the fact that Pascual had completely disregarded other news items to give himself time to describe, with a wealth of details, how the Persians who survived the disastrous cave-ins had been attacked by snakes that had surfaced, hissing in fury, once their subterranean refuges had been destroyed, but rather the fact that this earthquake had occurred a week previously. I had to agree that Genaro Sr. had good reason for being upset, and I let off steam by telling Pascual he was completely irresponsible. Where in the world had he come across such stale news? In an Argentine magazine. And why had he put out such an idiotic bulletin? Because there wasn’t any really important hot news item to report, and this one had at least a certain entertainment value. When I explained to him that we weren’t being paid to entertain the radio listeners but to give them a summary of the news of the day, Pascual, eager to make his peace with me, nodded in agreement while at the same time confronting me with his irrefutable argument: “The thing is, Don Mario, the two of us, have entirely different conceptions of what news is.” I was about to answer that if every time I turned my back he persisted in putting into practice his sensationalist conception of news reporting, the two of us would very soon be thrown out into the street, when a most unusual silhouette appeared in the doorway of the shack: a minuscule figure, on the very borderline between a man extremely short in stature and a dwarf, with a huge nose and unusually bright eyes with a disturbing, downright abnormal gleam in them. He was dressed in a black suit that was quite obviously old and threadbare, and a shirt and bow tie with visible stains, but at the same time he gave the impression of being extremely neat, fastidious, and proper with regard to his standard of dress, like those gentlemen in old photographs who appear to be imprisoned in their stiff frock coats and tight-fitting silk hats. He might have been anywhere between thirty and fifty, with oily black shoulder-length hair. His bearing, his movements, his expression appeared to be the absolute contrary of the natural and spontaneous, immediately mindful of an articulated doll, of puppet strings. He bowed to us politely and, with a solemnity as out of the ordinary as his person, introduced himself by saying: “I’ve come to steal a typewriter from you, gentlemen. I would be most grateful for your help. Which of those two machines is the best?”

His index finger pointed in turn to my typewriter and Pascual’s. Despite my having become quite accustomed to the contrasts between voices and outward appearances thanks to my habit of dropping by Radio Central between Panamericana bulletins, I was amazed to hear such a firm and melodious voice, such perfect diction, come pouring out of such a tiny, unimposing figure. I had the impression that in that voice not only each letter marched past in perfect order, without a single one of them being mutilated, but also the particles and atoms of each one, the very sounds of sound. Without even noticing the surprise that his appearance, his audacity, and his voice aroused in us, he had impatiently begun to examine both typewriters carefully, to sniff them over, so to speak. He finally chose my enormous ancient Remington, a big hulk of a hearse invulnerable to the ravages of time.

Pascual was the first to react. “Are you a thief or what?” he asked him point-blank, and I realized that he was paying me back for the earthquake in Isfahan. “Do you think you’re going to get away with carting off the typewriters of the News Department that way?”

“Art is more important than your News Department, you sprite,” the character thundered, looking at him in lofty disdain, as though at a mere insect he had just crushed underfoot, and went on with the job at hand. As Pascual watched him, openmouthed with amazement (and doubtless trying, as I was, to figure out what he meant by “sprite”), the visitor attempted to carry off the Remington. He managed to lift the monster off the desk by dint of a superhuman effort that made the veins in his neck swell and very nearly caused his eyes to pop out of their sockets. His face turned a deeper and deeper purple and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead, but he went right on. Clenching his teeth, staggering, he managed to take a few steps in the direction of the door, but then he had to give up: in one more second his load would have come crashing to the floor, with him tumbling after. He set the Remington down on Pascual’s desk and stood there panting, completely indifferent to the smiles on our two faces that this spectacle had provoked and apparently not even noticing that Pascual had tapped his forehead with his finger several times to indicate to me that we were dealing with a madman. But the moment he’d caught his breath, he reprimanded us in a stern voice: “Don’t be lazy, sirs; a little human solidarity. Give me a hand.”