Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (22 page)

“He causes us headaches, but there’s no doubt that he’s the king of the Peruvian airwaves,” Genaro Jr. said to me, putting a hand on my shoulder and pointing to the mob. “What do you think of that?”

I asked how long these autographing sessions had been going on.

“For a week now, half an hour a day, from six to six-thirty. You’re not very observant, are you?” the progressive-minded impresario answered. “Haven’t you seen the ads we’re publishing, don’t you listen to the radio network you work for? I was skeptical, but you can see how wrong I was. I thought people would only show up for a couple of days, and I realize now that this may go on for a month.”

He invited me to have a drink with him at the Bolívar bar. I ordered a Coke, but he insisted that I have a whiskey with him.

“Do you have any idea what those lines mean? They’re a public demonstration of what a great hit Pedro’s serials are with radio listeners,” he explained to me.

I said I didn’t have any doubts as to how popular he was, and he made me blush by suggesting that, since I too had “literary inclinations,” I should follow the Bolivian’s example and learn his tricks for winning a mass audience. “You mustn’t shut yourself up in an ivory tower,” he advised me. He’d had five thousand photographs of Pedro Camacho printed, and beginning the following Monday, they’d be given out free to autograph hunters. I asked him if the scriptwriter had toned down his diatribes against Argentines.

“It doesn’t matter any more. He can run down anybody he pleases,” he said, assuming an air of mystery. “Haven’t you heard the big news? The General never misses one of Pedro’s serials.”

He went into details to convince me. Since affairs of state didn’t allow him time to hear them during the day, the General had tape recordings made and listened to them, one after another, each night before he went to sleep. The President’s wife herself had personally reported this to a great many ladies in Lima.

“It would appear that the General is a sensitive man, despite what people say to the contrary,” Genaro Jr. concluded. “So, if the supreme authority in the nation is on our side, what does it matter if Pedro rants and raves against the Argentines to his heart’s content? They deserve it, don’t they?”

The conversation with Genaro Jr. and the reconciliation with Aunt Julia had given me a tremendous lift, and I rushed back to the shack in a mood of white-hot inspiration to dash off my story about the gang of levitators, as Pascual cranked out the news bulletins. I already knew how I’d end it: during one of these games, one of the urchins levitated much higher than the others, suddenly lost altitude, came crashing down, broke his neck, and died. The last sentence would describe the surprised, frightened faces of his little pals as they contemplated him beneath a roar of airplane engines. It would be a Spartan story, as precise as a chronometer, in the manner of Hemingway.

A few days later I went to visit my cousin Nancy to find out how she’d taken the story of my romance with Aunt Julia. I found her still under the effect of Operation Mantilla.

“Do you realize what a fool that idiot made of me?” she said as she ran from one end of the house to the other, looking for Lasky. “All of a sudden, right there in the middle of the Plaza de Acho, he undid a package, took out a bullfighter’s cape, and draped it over my shoulders. Everybody was looking at me, and even the bull was dying of laughter. He made me keep it on during the entire corrida. And he even wanted me to walk down the street in that thing, can you imagine! I’ve never been so humiliated in my life!”

We found Lasky under the butler’s bed—in addition to being an ugly-looking, shaggy-haired dog, he was forever trying to bite me—and took him back out to his kennel. Then Nancy dragged me to her bedroom to see the corpus delicti. It was a fashion artist’s creation that brought to mind exotic gardens, gypsy tents, de luxe brothels: every imaginable shade of red, from bloody crimson to blushing tea-rose pink, was visible in its iridescent folds, it had a long knotted black fringe, and its rhinestones and spangles sparkled so garishly they left one feeling slightly nauseated. My cousin made bullfight passes with it or wrapped it around herself, roaring with laughter. I told her I wouldn’t allow her to make fun of my friend and asked her if she was ever going to take him seriously as a suitor.

“I’m thinking about it,” she replied, as usual. “But as a friend I find him simply delightful.”

I told her she was a heartless tease, that Javier had gone so far as to commit robbery in order to get the money to buy her that present.

“And what about you?” she said to me, folding the mantilla and putting it away in the armoire. “Is it true you’re running around with Julita? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Getting serious with Aunt Olga’s sister?”

I told her it was true, that I wasn’t at all ashamed, though I could feel my face burning. Nancy was a little embarrassed too, but being a girl from Miraflores, her curiosity got the better of her and she said, aiming straight for my heart: “If you marry her, in twenty years you’ll still be young and she’ll be a little old lady.” She took me by the arm and dragged me downstairs to the living room. “Come on, we’re going to listen to music and you can tell me all about your love affair, from A to Z.”

She selected a pile of records—Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Xavier Cugat—as she confessed to me that ever since Javier had told her about us, her hair had stood on end every time she thought about what would happen if the family found out. Surely I realized that our relatives were such busybodies that every time she went out with a different boy ten uncles, eight aunts, and five cousins phoned her mama to tell her? Me in love with Aunt Julia! What a scandal, Marito! And she reminded me that the family had great expectations for me, that I was the hope of the tribe. It was true: that cancerous family of mine had every expectation that I’d be a millionaire someday, or at the very least President of the Republic. (I have never understood how they had come to have such a high opinion of me. It certainly couldn’t have been on account of my grades in school, which had never been outstanding. Maybe it was because ever since I’d been a little boy I’d written poems to all my aunts, or because apparently I’d been a precocious child who had definite opinions about everything.) I made Nancy swear she’d be as silent as the grave about us. She was dying to know the details of our romance. “Do you just like Julita a lot, or are you mad about her?”

I’d sometimes shared secrets about my affairs of the heart with her, and since she already knew about us, I did so now, too. It had all been just a game in the beginning, but all of a sudden, on the very day I’d had a fit of jealousy because of an endocrinologist, I realized that I’d fallen in love. However, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the romance was going to turn out to be a real headache. Not only because of the difference in age. I still had three years to go before I got my law degree, and what was more, I suspected I’d never practice that profession, since the only thing I really liked was writing. But writers starved to death. For the moment, I earned just enough to buy myself cigarettes and a few books and go to the movies. Was Aunt Julia going to wait for me until I was financially solvent, if in fact I ever reached that point?

My cousin Nancy was such a good confidante that instead of offering counter-arguments, she agreed with me. “It’s a problem, all right—not to mention the fact that when that day comes you may not like Julita any more and you’ll leave her,” she said realistically. “And the poor thing will have wasted years of her life, and all for nothing. But tell me, is she really in love with you, or is it just a game with her?”

I told her that Aunt Julia wasn’t a frivolous weather vane like her (the expression pleased her immensely). But I’d asked myself the same question a number of times, and it was one I also asked Aunt Julia a few days later. We’d gone down to sit by the sea, in a lovely little park with an unpronounceable name (Domodossola or something like that), and it was there, in each other’s arms, exchanging endless kisses, that we had our first conversation about the future.

“I know what it’s like, down to the very last detail, I saw it in a crystal ball,” Aunt Julia said to me, without the least trace of bitterness. “In the best of cases, our love affair will last three, maybe four years or so; that is to say, till you meet up with a little chick who’ll be the mother of your children. Then you’ll throw me over and I’ll have to seduce another gentleman friend. And at that point the words
THE END
appear.”

As I kissed her hands, I told her she’d been listening to too many serials for her own good.

“It’s quite obvious that
you
never listen to them,” she retorted. “In Pedro Camacho’s soap operas there are hardly ever any love affairs or anything like that. Right now, for example, Olga and I are all caught up in the one that comes on at three o’clock. The tragedy of a young man who can’t sleep because the minute he closes his eyes he starts reliving how he ran over a poor little girl and crushed her to death.”

Returning to the subject we’d been discussing, I told her that I was more optimistic. In ardent tones, to convince myself as well as her, I assured her that, whatever the difference in age might be, love based on the purely physical lasted only a short time. Once the novelty had disappeared, as routine set in, sexual attraction gradually diminished and finally died (in the case of the man especially), and the couple could then survive only if there were other attractions between them: spiritual, intellectual, moral. And for this sort of love the question of age was of no importance.

“It all sounds fine the way you tell it, and I only wish it were true,” Aunt Julia said, rubbing her nose, which as usual was ice-cold, against my cheek. “But it’s all false, from beginning to end. The physical something secondary? It’s what matters most for two people to be able to put up with each other, Varguitas.”

Had she gone out with the endocrinologist again?

“He’s phoned me several times,” she said to me, keeping me in suspense. Then, kissing me, she dispelled my doubts. “I told him I wouldn’t go out with him any more.”

Beside myself with joy, I talked to her at length about my levitation story: I’d written ten pages, it was coming along nicely, and I was going to try to get it published in the literary supplement of
El Comercio
with a cryptic dedication: “To the feminine of Julio.”

The tragedy of Lucho
Abril Marroquín, a young pharmaceutical detail man with every sign of a bright future before him, began on a sunny summer morning on the outskirts of a historic locale: Pisco. He had just finished making the rounds that, ever since he had first accepted employment in this itinerant profession ten years before, had taken him around the cities and towns of Peru, visiting doctors’ offices and pharmacies to give out samples and literature from the Bayer Laboratories, and now he was on his way back to Lima. His visit to the various physicians and druggists of the town had taken him about three hours. And even though he had a former classmate who was now a captain in the Ninth Air Squadron at San Andrés, at whose home he ordinarily had lunch when he came to Pisco, this time he had decided to head straight back for the capital. He was a married man, with a little wife with white skin and a French name, and his young blood and passionate heart urged him to return as soon as possible to the arms of his spouse.

It was just past noon. His brand-new Volkswagen, bought on credit at the same time he had entered into matrimony—three months before—was parked under the shade of a leafy eucalyptus in the main square. Lucho Abril Marroquín put his case with the samples and the brochures inside it, removed his suit coat and tie (which, in accordance with the strict Helvetian standards of the Laboratory, were always to be worn by its representatives when visiting clients, to give an impression of reliability and professionalism), decided again that he would not drop in on his aviator friend, and instead of a proper lunch would simply have a snack, knowing that a full meal would make him feel even sleepier during the three-hour drive across the desert.

He crossed the square to the Piave ice-cream parlor, ordered a Coke and a dish of peach ice cream from the Italian, and as he downed this Spartan repast he did not think of the past of this southern port, the colorful disembarkation of the hesitant hero San Martín and his Liberation Army, but rather (egoism and sensuality of men with ardent temperaments) of his warm, cuddly little wife—almost a child, really—with her snow-white complexion, her blue eyes, her curly golden locks, and of how, in the romantic darkness of night, she brought him to extremes of Neronian fever by singing in his ear, with the moans of a languorous little cat, in the erotic language par excellence (a French all the more exciting in that it was incomprehensible to him), a song entitled “Les feuilles mortes.” Noting that these marital reminiscences were beginning to have their effect on him, he put such thoughts out of his mind, paid, and left.

In a nearby service station he filled the tank with gas and the radiator with water and took off. Despite the fact that at this hour, when the sun was at its hottest, the streets of Pisco were empty, he drove slowly and carefully, thinking not so much of the safety of pedestrians as of his yellow Volkswagen, which, after his little blond French wife, was the apple of his eye. As he made his way through the streets of the town, he thought about his life. He was twenty-eight years old. After finishing high school, he’d decided to go to work, for he was too impatient to go all the way through the university before getting himself a job. He’d been hired by the Bayer Laboratories after taking an exam. In these ten years his salary had gone up steadily, he’d had several promotions, and his work wasn’t boring. He preferred a job that took him outside the office rather than vegetating behind a desk. Except that now it was out of the question for him to go on spending all his time traveling, leaving the delicate flower of France in Lima, a city that, as everyone knows, is full of sharks lying in wait for mermaids. Lucho Abril Marroquín had already spoken with his superiors. They had great regard for him, and had reassured him: he would remain on the road for only a few months more, and at the beginning of the following year they would give him a post in the provinces. And Dr. Schwalb, a laconic Swiss, had added: “A post that will be a promotion.” Lucho Abril Marroquín couldn’t help thinking that perhaps they would offer him the job of managing director of the branch office in Trujillo, Arequipa, or Chiclayo. And what more could he ask?

He was leaving the city now, heading off down the main highway to Lima. He had made the trip back and forth along this route so many times—on interurban buses, in jitneys, being driven or driving himself—that he knew it by heart. The ribbon of black asphalt disappeared in the distance, amid dunes and bare hills, without the least quicksilver gleam that would reveal the presence of other vehicles on the road up ahead. In front of him was an old rattletrap of a truck, and he was just about to pass it when he spied the bridge and the intersection where the Southern Highway branches off in a cloverleaf from the road he was on, which continues on up the sierra in the direction of the metallic mountains of Castrovirreina. He therefore decided (prudence of the man who loves his car and fears the law) to wait until after the turnoff. The truck was lumbering along at no more than thirty miles an hour and Lucho Abril Marroquín resignedly slowed down and trailed along after it, keeping a good ten yards’ distance. Up ahead he could see the bridge, the intersection, flimsy buildings—roadside stands selling cold drinks and cigarettes, the Southern Highway toll booth—and silhouettes whose faces he could not make out—the sun behind them was shining directly in his eyes—walking back and forth alongside the buildings.

The little girl loomed up all of a sudden, as though she had emerged from underneath the truck, just as he reached the end of the bridge. That tiny figure suddenly appearing directly in his path would remain engraved on his memory forever, her little face frozen in terror and her hands in the air, hitting the front of the Volkswagen like a stone. It all happened so fast that he had no time either to brake or to swerve aside till after the catastrophe (the beginning of the catastrophe). In utter horror, and with the weird sensation that none of this had anything to do with him, he felt the dull thud of the body against the front bumper, and saw it rise in the air, trace a parabolic curve, and fall to the ground eight or ten yards farther on.

He managed to brake then, so abruptly that the steering wheel hit him in the chest, and with his mind a blank and his ears ringing, he got out of the car immediately, and tripping over his own feet, thinking: “I’m an Argentine, I kill children,” he ran over to the little girl and picked her up in his arms. She looked to be about five or six years old, and was barefoot and poorly dressed, with crusts of dirt and filth on her face, hands, and knees. There were no visible signs of blood, but her eyes were closed and she didn’t seem to be breathing. Staggering like a drunk, Lucho Abril Marroquín looked all about and shouted to the sand dunes, to the wind, to the distant waves: “An ambulance, a doctor!” As though in a dream, he could hear a truck coming down the mountainside and perhaps he noted that its speed was excessive for a vehicle approaching an intersection. But if in fact he noticed this, his attention was immediately diverted on seeing a Guardia Civil come running out of one of the buildings, headed his way. Panting, perspiring, a custodian of law and order out to do his job properly, he looked at the little girl and asked: “Is she knocked unconscious, or is she dead?”

For all the rest of his life Lucho Abril Marroquín would ask himself what the right answer would have been at that moment. Was she just badly hurt, or had she been killed? He never did answer the panting Guardia Civil because the latter had no sooner asked that question than suddenly such a horrified expression came over his face that Lucho Abril Marroquín turned his head just in time to realize that the truck that was coming down the mountainside was hurtling straight toward them, its horn blaring madly. He closed his eyes; a tremendous roar tore the little girl from his arms and plunged him in a darkness full of tiny stars. He could still hear a terrible din, screams and cries, as he fell into an almost-mystical stupor.

Much later he was to learn that he had been knocked down, not because there was such a thing as immanent justice, charged with fulfilling the equitable proverb: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” but because the brakes of the truck from the mines had failed. And he was also to learn that the Guardia Civil had died instantly from a broken neck and that the poor little girl—a true daughter of Sophocles—had not only been killed in this second accident (if in fact the first one had not been fatal), but her body crushed spectacularly flat (a joyous devils’ carnival) as the double rear wheel of the truck ran over her.

But with the passage of the years Lucho Abril Marroquín was to tell himself that of all the instructive experiences of that morning, the most unforgettable had not been either the first or the second accident but what happened afterwards. Because, curiously enough, despite the violence of the impact (which was to keep him for many weeks in the Social Security Clinic as they mended his body, which had suffered countless broken bones, dislocations, cuts, and contusions), the medical detail man had not lost consciousness, or at most had been unconscious for only a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, he realized that the accident had happened only instants before, because he could see—though the sun was still shining directly in his eyes—ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen skirts and pairs of pants come running toward him from the flimsy roadside buildings. He couldn’t move, but he felt no pain, only relief and a calm reassurance. The thought came to him that he didn’t have to think any more; he thought of the ambulance, doctors, devoted nurses. They were there, they’d already arrived. He tried to smile at the faces bending down toward him. But then, feeling fingers tickling him, poking him, prying at him, he realized that the newcomers were not helping him: they were yanking his watch off, putting their hands in his pockets, snatching his wallet, jerking off the medal of El Señor de Limpias that he’d worn around his neck ever since his First Communion. And it was at that moment that Lucho Abril Marroquín, overcome with amazement at human nature, was plunged into darkest night.

That night, practically speaking, lasted an entire year. In the beginning, the consequences of the catastrophe had seemed to be merely physical. When Lucho Abril Marroquín recovered consciousness, he was in Lima, in a small hospital room, bandaged from head to foot, and at his bedside (Guardian Angels bringing peace of mind to a soul in agitation), keeping anxious watch over him, were the blond compatriot of Juliette Greco and Dr. Schwalb of Bayer Laboratories. Amid his tipsiness brought on by the smell of chloroform, he was suddenly overcome with happiness, and tears streamed down his cheeks, as he felt his wife’s lips brush the gauze bandages covering his forehead.

The knitting of bones, the return of muscles and tendons to their proper place, and the closing and healing of his wounds—in other words, the mending of the animal half of his person—took a number of weeks, which were relatively tolerable thanks to the superb skills of his doctors, the attentiveness of the nurses, the Magdalene-like devotion of his wife, and the solicitude of the Laboratories, whose behavior toward him was impeccable both from the point of view of sentiment and of cash on the line for his every need. And in the Social Security Clinic, in the middle of his convalescence, Lucho Abril Marroquín learned a gratifying piece of news: his little French wife had conceived and in seven months would give birth to his child.

It was only after he was let out of the hospital and went back to his little house in San Miguel and his job that the secret, complicated wounds that his mind had suffered in the two accidents came to light. Of the many ills that now befell him, insomnia was the most benign. Unable to sleep, he spent his nights wandering all about the house in the dark, chain-smoking in a state of extreme agitation, and muttering disjointed phrases in which, to his wife’s vast surprise, the word “Herod” kept recurring. When his insomnia was overcome chemically through the use of sleeping pills, the result was even worse: Abril Marroquín’s sleep was haunted by nightmares in which he saw himself hacking his own as yet unborn daughter to pieces. His wild shrieks terrified his wife in the beginning and eventually caused her to have a miscarriage. the fetus was probably of the female sex. “My dreams have come true, I’ve killed my own daughter, the only thing left to do is go live in Buenos Aires,” the oneiric filicide lugubriously repeated night and day.

But even this was not the worst of it. The nights when he didn’t sleep at all, or had terrible nightmares, were followed by awful days. Ever since the accident, Lucho Abril Marroquín had suffered from a visceral phobia toward any wheeled vehicle, to the point where he could not get in one, either as the driver or as a passenger, without feeling dizzy, having vomiting spells, sweating profusely, and bursting into screams. His every attempt to overcome this taboo proved completely fruitless, with the result that he was obliged to resign himself to living, in the middle of the twentieth century, as though he were back in the days of the Inca empire (a society in which the wheel was unknown). If the distances that he had to cover were merely a question of the five kilometers between his house and the Bayer Laboratories, this would not have been such a serious matter; for a tormented spirit, the two-hour walk morning and evening might have had a sedative effect. But for a medical detail man whose area of operations was the vast territory of Peru, this phobia toward all wheeled vehicles was tragic. Since there was not the slightest possibility of reviving the athletic era of Indian couriers, the professional future of Lucho Abril Marroquín was seriously threatened. The Laboratory agreed to give him a sedentary job in the Lima office, and even though they did not reduce his salary, from the moral and psychological point of view, the change (he was now in charge of inventorying samples) represented a demotion. And as a crowning misfortune, his little French wife, who, a worthy emulator of the Maid of Orleans, had courageously borne up under the strain of her husband’s nervous afflictions, eventually also succumbed to hysteria, especially after her miscarriage. The couple decided to separate until better days came along, and the young woman (pale cheeks mindful of dawn and Antarctic nights) went off to France to seek consolation in her parents’ château.