Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (13 page)

And she confessed to me that sometimes she and Aunt Olga sat there listening with tears in their eyes. This was the first indication I had of the impact that Pedro Camacho’s pen was having in the households of Lima. I had others during the next few days, in the households of several relatives. I happened to drop by Aunt Laura’s, and the minute she spied me in the doorway of the living room she put her finger to her lips to signal me to be quiet, as she sat there leaning over her radio as though trying not only to hear but also to smell, to touch the (tremulous or harsh or ardent or crystalline) voice of the Bolivian artist. I appeared at Aunt Gaby’s and found her and Aunt Hortensia mechanically unwinding a ball of yarn as they followed a dialogue, full of proparoxytones and gerunds, between Luciano Pando and Josefina Sánchez. And in my own house, my grandparents, who had always “had a liking for little novels,” as my Grandmother Carmen put it, had now conceived a genuine passion for radio serials. I woke up in the morning nowadays to the strains of Radio Central’s theme song—in their compulsive eagerness not to miss the day’s first serial, the one at 10 a.m., they’d turned in far ahead of time; I ate my lunch listening to the one at two in the afternoon; and no matter what hour of the day I came home, I found my two little old grandparents and the cook curled up in the downstairs parlor, concentrating all their attention on the radio, a great heavy monster the size of a buffet that, to top everything else off, they always kept turned up to full volume.

“Why is it you like radio serials so much?” I asked my granny one day. “What do they have to offer that books don’t, for example?”

“It’s more lifelike, hearing the characters talk, it’s more real,” she explained, after thinking about it. “And what’s more, when you’re my age, your hearing is better than your eyesight.”

I made a similar survey among some of my other relatives, and the results were inconclusive. Aunt Gaby, Laura, Olga, and Hortensia liked radio serials because they were entertaining, sad, or dramatic, because they were diverting and set a person to dreaming, to living things that were impossible in real life, because there were truths to be learned from them, or because every woman remains more or less of a romantic at heart. When I asked them why they liked soap operas more than books, they protested: what nonsense, there was no comparison, books were culture and radio serials mere claptrap to help pass the time. But the truth of the matter was that they lived with their ears glued to the radio and that I’d never seen a one of them open a book. During our nocturnal rambles. Aunt Julia sometimes gave me a résumé of certain episodes that had impressed her, and I in turn gave her a rundown of my conversations with the scriptwriter, and thus, little by little, Pedro Camacho became a constituent element in our romance.

It was Genaro Jr. himself who brought me solid proof of the success of the new serials, on the very same day that I finally managed, after a thousand protests, to get my typewriter back.

He turned up in our shack with a folder in his hand and a radiant expression on his face. “It’s exceeded our most optimistic calculations,” he told us. “The number of listeners tuned in to the serials has gone up twenty percent in two weeks. Do you realize what that means? A twenty percent increase in the ad rates we charge sponsors!”

“And does it mean that we’ll get a twenty percent raise in salary, Don Genaro?” Pascual said, bouncing up and down on his chair.

“You don’t work at Radio Central but at Panamericana,” Genaro Jr. reminded us. “We’re a station with good taste—we don’t broadcast serials.”

The entertainment sections in the newspapers soon came up with feature stories on the large audience that the new serials had attracted and began singing the praises of Pedro Camacho. And Guido Monteverde, in his column in
Última Hora
, pulled out all the stops, calling him “an expert scriptwriter with a tropical imagination and a romantic gift for words, an intrepid symphony conductor of radio serials, and himself a versatile actor with a mellifluous voice.” But the object of these laudatory adjectives took no notice of the wave of enthusiasm surrounding him. As I dropped by his cubicle one morning on my way to the Bransa to pick him up for our usual coffee break together, I found a sign pasted on the window with the crudely lettered inscription: “No journalists admitted and no autographs given. The artist is working! Respect him!”

“Do you mean that, or is it a joke?” I asked him, as I sat sipping my
café con leche
and Pedro Camacho his cerebral cocktail of verbena-and-mint tea.

“I mean it in all seriousness,” he answered. “The local press has begun to hound me, and if I don’t put a stop to them there’ll soon be a bunch of listeners lined up over there—he gestured in the direction of the Plaza San Martín as though such an eventuality were the most natural thing in the world—asking for autographs and photos. My time is as precious as gold to me and I don’t want to waste it on foolish trifles.”

There wasn’t an ounce of conceit in what he was saying, only sincere anxiety. He was wearing his usual black suit and little bow tie and smoking awful-smelling cigarettes, a brand called Aviación. As always, he was in an utterly serious mood. I thought I’d please him by telling him that all my aunts had become fanatic listeners of his and that Genaro Jr. was overjoyed at the results of the surveys showing how many new listeners his serials had attracted. But he was merely bored and shut me up—as though these things were inevitable and he’d always known all about them—and instead went on talking about how indignant he was at the lack of sensitivity on the part of “the merchants” (an expression that from then on he always used when referring to the Genaros).

“There’s a weak spot that’s ruining the serials and it’s my duty to remedy it and their duty to help me,” he announced, frowning. “But obviously art and money are mortal enemies, like pigs and daisies.”

“A weak spot that’s ruining the serials?” I said in amazement. “But they’re a complete success.”

“The merchants don’t want to fire Pablito, even though I’ve insisted that he has to go,” he explained to me. “They say they have to keep him on for sentimental reasons, because he’s worked at Radio Central for I don’t know how many years, and other such nonsense. As though art had anything to do with charity! That sick man’s incompetence is absolutely sabotaging my work!”

Big Pablito was one of those indefinable, picturesque characters that the world of radio broadcasting attracts or produces. The diminutive suggested that he was just a kid, whereas in reality he was a mestizo in his fifties, who dragged his feet when he walked and had attacks of asthma that filled the air about him with clouds of effluvia. He was always somewhere about Radio Central and Panamericana, from morning to night, doing a little bit of everything, from giving the janitors a hand and going out to buy tickets for the movies and bullfights for the Genaros to distributing passes for broadcasts. His most permanent job was doing the sound effects for the serials.

“Those people think sound effects are dumb little things that any idiot can do. But in fact they’re art too, and what does a half-moribund brachycephalic like Pablito know about art?” Pedro Camacho raved, with icy hauteur.

He assured me that, “if need be,” he would not hesitate to eliminate, with his own hands, any obstacle to the “perfection of his work” (and he said it in such a way that I believed every word he said). He added that to his vast regret he had not had time to train a sound-effects technician, teaching him everything from A to Z, but that after rapidly reconnoitering the “Peruvian radio dial,” he had found what he was looking for.

He lowered his voice, glanced stealthily all around, and concluded, with a Mephistophelean air: “The individual we ought to have for the serials is on Radio Victoria.”

Javier and I analyzed how good the chances were that Pedro Camacho would carry out his homicidal intentions with regard to Big Pablito, and we agreed that the latter’s fate depended entirely on the surveys: if the number of listeners tuning in to the serials kept going up, he’d be ruthlessly sacrificed. As a matter of fact, before the week was out, Genaro Jr. suddenly appeared in the shack, surprising me in the midst of writing another story—he must have noticed my confusion and the haste with which I ripped the page out of the typewriter and slipped it in among the news bulletins, but he was tactful enough not to say anything—and, addressing both Pascual and me, announced with the sweeping gesture of a great Maecenas: “All your griping has finally gotten you the new editor you’ve been wanting, you two lazybones. Big Pablito is going to be working with you from now on. Don’t rest on your laurels!”

The reinforcement thus received by the News Service turned out to be more moral than material, inasmuch as when Big Pablito appeared in the office the next morning, very punctually, at seven on the dot, and asked me what he should do and I gave him the job of making a brief summary of a parliamentary report, a look of terror came over him, he had a coughing fit that left him purple in the face, and finally managed to stammer that that was impossible. “The thing is, sir, I don’t know how to read or write.”

I took the fact that Genaro Jr. had sent us an illiterate to be our new editor as a choice sample of his playful sense of humor. Pascual, who’d been a bit upset when he learned that he and Pablito were to be co-editors, positively gloated on hearing the latter confess that he was illiterate. He upbraided his brand-new colleague in my presence for his apathetic attitude, for not having been capable of educating himself as he, Pascual, had done, at an adult age, by going to free night-school classes. Big Pablito, scared to death, kept nodding in agreement, repeating like an automaton: “That’s true, I hadn’t thought of that, that’s so, you’re absolutely right,” looking at me as though he expected to be fired on the spot. I immediately set his mind at rest, telling him that his job would be to take the news bulletins downstairs to the announcers. In actual fact, he soon became Pascual’s slave, obliged to trot all day long from the shack to the street and vice versa to fetch Pascual cigarettes or stuffed potatoes from a street vendor on the Calle Carabaya, or simply to go see if it was raining outside. Big Pablito endured his slavery in an exemplary spirit of sacrifice, and in fact his attitude toward his torturer was even more respectful and friendly than his attitude toward me. When he wasn’t running errands for Pascual, he would curl up in a corner of the office, and leaning his head against the wall, fall asleep instantly, snoring in steady, sibilant wheezes, like a rusty overhead fan. He was a generous-spirited man. He didn’t feel the slightest ill will toward Pedro Camacho for having brought in an outsider from Radio Victoria to replace him. He had nothing but praise for the Bolivian scriptwriter, for whom he felt the most sincere admiration. He often asked my permission to go downstairs to sit in on rehearsals of the serials, returning each time more enthusiastic than ever. “That man is a genius,” he would say, his voice choking with emotion. “The ideas that pop into his head are simply miraculous.”

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.