Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (46 page)

“I’m most grateful, colleagues,” he answered immediately, making his ritual bow. “But it’s not possible for me to come with you. My wife is waiting for me. She’d worry if I didn’t come home for lunch.”

“She’s got you tied to her apron strings, you’re her slave, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Big Pablito said, rocking him back and forth again.

“Have you gotten married?” I asked, dumfounded, unable to imagine Pedro Camacho with a home, a wife, children. “Well, congratulations, I always thought you were a confirmed bachelor.”

“We’ve celebrated our silver wedding anniversary,” he replied in his usual precise, aseptic tone of voice. “A wonderful wife, sir. Self-sacrificing and unbelievably good-hearted. We were separated, due to circumstances that life brings in its train, but when I needed help, she came back to lend me every possible aid. A wonderful wife, as I said. She’s an artiste, a foreign artiste.” I saw Big Pablito, Pascual, and Dr. Rebagliati exchange a mocking look, but Pedro Camacho appeared not to notice. After a pause, he went on: “Well, have a good time, colleagues, I shall be with you in thought.”

“Watch out that you don’t let me down again, because it’ll be the last time,” Dr. Rebagliati warned him, as the scriptwriter was disappearing behind the screen.

Pedro Camacho’s footfalls had not yet died away—he must have been heading for the street door—when Pascual, Big Pablito, and Dr. Rebagliati burst into peals of laughter, winking at each other, exchanging sly looks, and pointing to the opening he had just left by.

“He’s not as dumb as he pretends to be, he comes on as the devoted spouse to hide the fact that his wife makes him wear horns,” Dr. Rebagliati crowed. “Every time he talks about his wife I feel a terrible urge to say to him: ‘Stop using the word “artiste” for what in good Peruvian we call a cheap stripteaser.’”

“You can’t imagine what a monster she is,” Pascual said to me, with the look of a kid who’s just seen a bogeyman. “An Argentine years past middle age, fat as a sow, with bleached hair and makeup an inch thick. She sings tangos half-naked, at the Mezzanine, that nightclub for penniless wretches on the skids.”

“Shut your traps, don’t be ungrateful, you’ve both screwed her,” Dr. Rebagliati said. “And I have too, for that matter.”

“Singer or not, she’s a whore,” Big Pablito exclaimed, his eyes blazing. “I know what I’m talking about. I went to see her at the Mezzanine and after the show she made a pass at me and offered to give me a blow job for twenty
libras
. I said no, old girl, you haven’t got any teeth left and what I go for is nice little nips on the cock. So not even if you do it for free, not even if you pay me. Because I swear, Don Mario, she doesn’t have a tooth in her head.”

“They’d been married before,” Pascual told me as he rolled down his shirtsleeves and put his suitcoat and tie back on. “In Bolivia, before Pedrito came to Lima. It seems she left him to go off whoring around somewhere back there. They got together again when he was put in the mental asylum. That’s why he goes around saying that she’s such a self-sacrificing woman. Because she went back to him when he was crazy.”

“He’s as grateful to her as a dog, because it’s thanks to her that they have food on the table,” Dr. Rebagliati corrected him. “You don’t think they can live on what Camacho earns gathering information for us at police stations, do you? They eat on what she brings in from whoring around, otherwise he’d have gotten t.b. long ago.”

“To tell the truth, Pedrito doesn’t need much to eat on,” Pascual said. And he explained. “They live in a back alley in Santo Cristo. He’s really come down in the world, hasn’t he? My colleague, Dr. Rebagliati here, doesn’t believe me that he was somebody in the days when he wrote soap operas, when they mobbed him for autographs.”

We left the room. In the garage next door the young girl working on the account books, the reporters, and the kid bundling up return copies had all gone home. They had turned out the light and the jumble of office furniture and the disorder now had a certain eerie air about it. As we went out into the street, Dr. Rebagliati closed the door and locked it. Walking abreast, the four of us headed toward the Avenida Arica in search of a taxi. To make conversation, I asked why Pedro Camacho was just a messenger and not a reporter.

“Because he doesn’t know how to write,” Dr. Rebagliati answered predictably. “He’s pretentious, he uses words that nobody understands, the negation of journalism. That’s why I keep him on to make the rounds of the police stations. I don’t need him, but he entertains me, he’s my buffoon, and what’s more, he costs less than an office boy.” He laughed obscenely and asked: “Well now, to put it bluntly, am I or am I not invited to that lunch of yours?”

“Of course you are, that goes without saying,” Big Pablito answered. “You and Don Mario are the guests of honor.”

“Pedro Camacho’s a guy with all sorts of weird ideas,” Pascual said, returning to the subject as we were heading for the Jirón Paruro in the taxi. “He refuses to take a bus, for instance. He goes everywhere on foot; he says it’s quicker. The very thought of how far he walks every day makes me tired; just making the rounds of the police stations in the middle of town takes him a good many miles. You saw the state his shoes were in, didn’t you?”

“He’s a fucking skinflint, that’s what,” Dr. Rebagliati said disgustedly.

“I don’t think he’s a tightwad,” Big Pablito defended him. “He’s just a wee bit touched in the head, and on top of it, a guy whose luck has run out.”

The lunch went on and on for hours, a succession of Peruvian dishes, multicolored and burning hot, washed down with cold beer, and there was a little of everything at it, risqué stories, anecdotes from bygone days, all sorts of gossip about one person or another, a pinch of politics, and I was obliged to try to satisfy, once again, the editor’s tireless curiosity regarding the women of Europe. There was even the threat of a fistfight at one point when Dr. Remagliati, drunk now, began to go too far with Big Pablito’s wife, a brunette of around forty who was still very attractive. But by straining my ingenuity, I contrived to keep the three of them from saying another word about Pedro Camacho all during that endless afternoon.

By the time I arrived at Aunt Olga’s and Uncle Lucho’s (who had gone from being my wife’s sister and brother-in-law to being my parents-in-law), night was falling. My head ached and I felt depressed. Cousin Patricia received me with a distinctly unfriendly look on her face. She told me that with all my alibis about gathering documentation for my novels I might well have been able to pull all kinds of fast ones on Aunt Julia and make her play dumb, not daring to say a word to me so people wouldn’t think she was committing a crime of
lèse-culture
. But as far as she, Patricia, was concerned, she couldn’t care less whether she committed crimes of
lèse-culture
, and therefore the next time I left the house at eight in the morning on the pretext that I was going to the Biblioteca Nacional to read the speeches of General Manuel Apolinario Odría and came back at eight in the evening with bloodshot eyes and reeking of beer, and no doubt with lipstick stains on my handkerchief, she’d scratch my eyes out or break a plate over my head. My cousin Patricia is a girl with lots of spirit, quite capable of doing precisely what she’s promised.