Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (17 page)

Three things about Pedro Camacho fascinated me: what he said; the austerity of his life, entirely devoted to an obsession; and his capacity for work. This latter especially. I had read about Napoleon’s tremendous endurance in Emil Ludwig’s biography of him, how his secretaries would collapse in utter exhaustion and he would go on dictating, and I often pictured the Emperor of the French as having the same face with the prominent nose as the scriptwriter, and for some time Javier and I called Pedro Camacho the Napoleon of the Altiplano (or, alternatively, the Balzac of Peru). Out of curiosity, I managed to calculate the number of hours of work he put in every day, and even though I often had proof that my calculations were correct, his schedule always seemed to beggar belief.

In the beginning, he turned out four serials a day, but in view of their great success, their number gradually increased to ten, which were broadcast from Monday through Saturday, with each chapter of each serial lasting half an hour (or, more precisely, twenty-three minutes, since commercials took up seven minutes of each half hour). Since he directed all of them as well as playing a role in each, he must have spent around seven hours a day at the studio, if one takes into account the fact that rehearsing and recording each program took approximately forty minutes (between ten and fifteen minutes being required at each of these sessions for his initial sermon and the run-through). He wrote the serials as needed for each day’s broadcasts; I noted that each chapter took him barely twice the time required to act it out on the air: one hour. In any event, this meant spending around ten hours a day at his typewriter. He was able to cut this down a bit thanks to his labors on Sunday, his day off, which he naturally spent in his tiny little office, getting a head start on his scripts for the week coming up. His work day was thus fifteen to seventeen hours long from Monday to Saturday and eight to ten hours long on Sunday. And all of them demonstrably productive hours, an amazing “artistic” output.

He arrived at Radio Central at eight in the morning and left around midnight; the only times he went out for a break were with me, to the Bransa, to have a cup of cerebrally stimulating herb tea. He ate his lunch in his lair, a sandwich and a soft drink that Jesusito, Big Pablito, or one of his actor-disciples devotedly went out to get for him. He never accepted invitations, I never heard him say he’d gone to a movie, a theatrical performance, a soccer match, or a party. I never saw him read a book, a magazine, or a newspaper, outside of the big bulky volume of quotations and the city maps that were his “work tools.” No, I am mistaken: one day I discovered him poring over a yearbook listing the members of the Club Nacional.

“I slipped the concierge a few coins so as to have a look at it,” he explained when I asked him about it. “How else could I get the right names for my aristocrats? My ears suffice for the others: I pick plebeian names up out of the gutter.”

The way in which he produced his serials, the single hour it took him to grind out each script, without ever once stopping, never ceased to amaze me. I often watched him as he composed these chapters. Unlike the recording sessions, where he kept what transpired a closely guarded secret, he didn’t care in the least if there were people around when he was writing. As he sat typing away at his (my) Remington, he was often interrupted by his actors, Puddler, or the sound engineer. He would raise his eyes, answer their questions, give a baroque instruction, send the visitor on his way with his epidermic little smile, as different from a laugh as anything I’ve ever witnessed, and go on writing. I often used to come down to his lair on the pretext that I needed a place to study, that I had to put up with too much noise and too many people in my pigeon coop upstairs (I was studying for my year-end exams in my law courses and forgot everything the minute I’d taken them: the fact that I never flunked one didn’t so much speak well of me as it spoke badly of the university). Pedro Camacho didn’t object to my studying there, and in fact gave every appearance of being not at all displeased by this human presence feeling him “create.”

I would sit myself down on the windowsill and bury my nose in one law code or another. What I was really doing was spying on him. He wrote very quickly, typing with just his index fingers. I watched and couldn’t believe my eyes: he never stopped to search for a word or ponder an idea, not the slightest shadow of a doubt ever appeared in his fanatic, bulging little eyes. He gave the impression that he was writing out a fair copy of a text that he knew by heart, typing something that was being dictated to him. How was it possible, at the speed with which his little fingers flew over the keys, for him to be
inventing
the situations, the incidents, the dialogue of so many different stories for nine, ten hours a day? And yet it was possible: the scripts came pouring out of that tenacious head of his and those indefatigable hands one after the other, each of them exactly the right length, like strings of sausages out of a machine. Once a chapter was finished, he never made corrections in it or even read it over; he handed it to the secretary to have copies run off and immediately started in on the next one. I once told him that when I watched him work I was reminded of the theory of the French Surrealists with regard to automatic writing, which according to them flowed directly from the subconscious, bypassing the censorship of reason.

I was greeted with a chauvinist reply: “Our mestizo Latin American brains can give birth to better things than those Frogs. Let’s not have any inferiority complexes, my friend.”

Why was it that he didn’t use the scripts he’d written in Bolivia as a basis for his stories about Lima? I put this question to him, and he answered in generalities that fell far short of being a concrete explanation. In order to reach the public, stories, like fruits and vegetables, ought to be fresh, since art would not tolerate canned ones, much less those food products that were so old they’d turned rotten. Moreover, they had to be “stories of the same provenance as the listeners.” Since the latter were from Lima, how could they be expected to be interested in episodes that took place in La Paz? But he offered these reasons because his need to theorize, to turn everything into an impersonal truth, an eternal axiom, was as compulsive as his need to write. Doubtless, his real reason for not using his old scripts was far simpler: the fact that he didn’t have the slightest interest in saving himself work. For him, to live was to write. Whether or not his works would endure didn’t matter in the least to him. Once his scripts had been broadcast, he forgot about them. He assured me he didn’t have a single copy of any of his serials. They had been composed with the tacit conviction that they would cease to exist as such once they had been digested by the public.

I once asked him whether he had ever considered publishing them. “My writings are preserved in a more indelible form than the printed page,” he replied immediately. “They are engraved upon the memory of my radio listeners.”

I brought up the subject of the Argentine protest on the very same day that I had had lunch with Genaro Jr. I dropped by Pedro’s lair around 6 p.m. and invited him to the Bransa. Fearing his reaction, I announced this piece of news in a roundabout way: there were certain people whose sensibilities were all too easily wounded, who were incapable of tolerating the slightest hint of irony, and furthermore, libel laws in Peru were extremely strict and a radio station could be closed down for the most trivial reason. Giving ample demonstration of their total lack of sophistication, the Argentine embassy had taken offense at certain allusions and was threatening to lodge an official protest with the Foreign Office…

“In Bolivia they even threatened to break off diplomatic relations,” he interrupted me. “A scandal sheet went so far as to intimate that they were massing troops on the border.”

He said this in a resigned tone of voice, as though he were thinking: by its very nature the sun is obliged to shine, and what recourse is there if its rays start a fire?

“The only thing the Genaros ask is that you try your best to refrain from speaking ill of Argentines in your serials,” I finally worked up my nerve to tell him straight out, coming up at the same time with an argument I hoped would win him over: “In a word, it’s better if you don’t say anything at all about them. When you come right down to it, are they worth bothering about?”

“Yes, they are, because
they
inspire me,” he explained, thus putting an end to the discussion.

As we were walking back to the radio station, he informed me, in a mischievous voice, that the international incident he’d set off in La Paz had come about because of a play he’d written and staged on the subject of “the bestial habits of gauchos,” which according to him had “hit home.” Once back at Panamericana, I told Genaro Jr. he ought not to labor under any illusions as to how effective a mediator I’d be.

Two or three days later I got a chance to see Pedro Camacho’s living quarters. Aunt Julia had come down to the station to meet me after the last evening newscast because she wanted to see a movie that was showing at the Metro, starring one of Hollywood’s great romantic couples: Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. As we were crossing the Plaza San Martín around midnight to catch a jitney, I spied Pedro Camacho coming out of Radio Central. The moment I pointed him out to her, Aunt Julia wanted to meet him. We walked over to him, and on learning that Aunt Julia was a compatriot of his, he warmed to her immediately.

“I’m a great admirer of yours,” Aunt Julia said to him, and to flatter him even more, she lied: “I first began listening to your serials in Bolivia, and I never miss one.”

We walked along with him, almost without realizing it, to the Jirón Quilca, and on the way Pedro Camacho and Aunt Julia had a patriotic conversation from which I was excluded, in which there passed in review the mines of Potosí and Taquiña beer, the corn soup called
lagua
, stewed corn with cream cheese, the climate of Cochabamba, the beauty of the women of Santa Cruz, and other national glories of Bolivia. The scriptwriter seemed to enjoy talking of the marvels of his native land. On arriving at the door of a building with balconies and jalousies, he stopped but didn’t bid us goodnight.

“Come on upstairs with me,” he proposed. “I’m having a simple dinner but we can share it.”

The La Tapada rooming house was one of those old three-story residences in downtown Lima, built in the last century, that were often spacious and comfortable and sometimes even sumptuous, but later on, as people who were well-off gradually deserted the center of the city and moved to resorts on the seashore, old Lima gradually became unfashionable, these houses gradually began to fall into ruin, grew more and more crowded as they were subdivided, and eventually turned into veritable hives thanks to the installation of partitions that doubled or quadrupled the number of rooms and the haphazard creation of minuscule living quarters in all sorts of odd corners in the entry halls, on the roof terraces, and even on the balconies and stairways. The La Tapada rooming house appeared to be about to collapse at any moment; the steps of the stairs we climbed to get to Pedro Camacho’s room swayed beneath our weight, and our feet stirred up little clouds of dust that made Aunt Julia sneeze. A thick film of dirt covered everything, walls and floors, and it was plain to see that the place had never been swept or mopped. Pedro Camacho’s room was like a cell. It was very small and almost empty. There was a cot without a headboard, covered with a faded blanket and on it a pillow without a pillowcase, a small table covered with an oilcloth, a chair with a straw seat, a suitcase, and a line strung between two walls with undershorts and socks drying on it. The fact that the scriptwriter washed his own clothes didn’t surprise me, but it did surprise me that he did his own cooking. There was a Primus stove on the windowsill, a bottle of kerosene, a couple of tin plates and eating utensils, a few glasses.

He offered Aunt Julia the chair and me the bed with a grand gesture. “Please be seated. My dwelling is humble but my welcome to you is from the heart.”

It took him two minutes to prepare dinner. He had the ingredients in a plastic sack, stored on the windowsill to keep cool. The menu consisted of fried eggs and boiled sausages, bread with butter and cheese, and yogurt with honey. We watched him prepare it with no wasted motions, like someone accustomed to doing so every day, and I was certain that this must be what he always had for dinner.

As we ate, he was at once courtly and chatty, condescending to deal with subjects such as the recipe for cup custard (that Aunt Julia asked him for) and the most economical laundry soap for doing white clothes. He didn’t clean up his plate; as he pushed it aside, he pointed to what was left on it, and allowed himself to venture a little joke. “For the artist, eating is a vice, my friends.”

Seeing what a good mood he was in, I dared to come right out and ask him a number of questions about his work habits. I told him I was envious of his stamina, of the fact that despite his galley-slave schedule he never seemed tired.

“I have my stratagems to make my day interesting,” he confessed to us.

Lowering his voice, as though to keep imaginary rivals from discovering his secret, he told us that he never worked for more than sixty minutes at a time on the same story and that changing from one subject to another was refreshing, since at the beginning of each hour he thus had the sensation that he was just starting to work.

“Pleasure stems from variety, my friends,” he repeated, with an excited gleam in his eye and the facial contortions of an evil gnome.

Hence, when writing stories, it was important that contrast, not continuity, be the ruling principle of composition: the complete change of place, milieu, mood, subject, and characters reinforced the exhilarating sensation that one was starting afresh. Moreover, cups of mint-and-verbena tea were helpful: they cleared one’s synapses, and one’s imagination was grateful. And leaving the typewriter every so often to go over to the studio, turning from writing to directing and acting, was also relaxing, a transition that had a tonic effect. But, in addition to all this, he had made an important discovery over the years, something that to the ignorant and insensitive might perhaps appear absolutely childish. But then, did it matter what that breed thought?