Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (25 page)

Midyear exams at the
university were approaching, and because I had attended classes less since my romance with Aunt Julia and written more (Pyrrhic) stories, I was ill-prepared for this critical moment. One of my fellow students, a boy from Camaná whose name was Guillermo Velando, was my salvation. He lived in a boardinghouse downtown, just off the Plaza Dos de Mayo, and was a model student who never cut class, took exhaustive lecture notes that even indicated where and how long the professors paused for breath, and learned the articles of the Code by heart, the way I learned poems. He was always talking about his home town, where he’d left a fiancée, and he could hardly wait to get his law degree so as to be able to leave Lima, a city he detested, and set himself up in practice in Camaná, where he would do battle to bring progress to the region where he’d been born. He lent me his notes, whispered answers to me when we had tests, and whenever exams were coming up, I would go to his boardinghouse in the hope that he could give me some miraculous synthesis of what had gone on in class.

I was on my way home from there that Sunday, after spending three hours in Guillermo’s room, with my brain reeling with legal terms, terrified by the thought of how much jargon in Latin I had to memorize, when, arriving at the Plaza San Martín, I spied in the distance the little window of Pedro Camacho’s lair, standing open in the dull gray façade of Radio Central. I naturally decided to go say hello to him. The more time I spent with him—even though our relationship was still limited to very brief conversations over a café table—the more fascinated I was by his personality, his physical appearance, his rhetoric. As I headed across the plaza toward his office, I thought once more of the iron will that was responsible for this little man’s tremendous capacity for work, his ability to produce, from dawn to dark, from morning to night, stories full of tempestuous passions. At whatever hour of the day I happened to think of him, I would say to myself: “He’s busy writing,” and I could see him, as I had so many times, pecking away at the keys of the Remington with two lightning-quick index fingers and gazing at the platen with delirious eyes, whereupon I would feel a curious admixture of pity and envy.

The window of his little cubicle was halfway open—I could hear the typewriter keys pounding away rhythmically inside—and as I pushed it open all the way, I called out: “Hello there, hardworking sir.” But I had the impression that I’d poked my nose into the wrong place or was addressing some unknown person, and it took me several seconds to recognize the Bolivian scriptwriter beneath his disguise consisting of a white smock, a surgeon’s skullcap, and a long rabbinical black beard. He went on writing impassively, without even looking at me, his back slightly hunched over his desk. After a moment, as though he were pausing between one thought and the next, but without turning his head in my direction, I heard him say in his perfectly placed, tender voice: “The gynecologist Alberto de Quinteros is delivering his niece’s triplets, and one of the little runts is going to be a breech birth. Can you wait five minutes for me? I’ll do a Caesarean on the girl and then I’ll go have a verbena-and-mint tea with you.”

I sat on the windowsill smoking a cigarette as I waited for him to finish the breech delivery of the triplets, an operation that as a matter of fact took him no more than a few minutes. Then, as he removed his costume, carefully folded it up, and put it away in a plastic sack along with the patriarchal false beard, I said to him: “It only takes you five minutes to deliver triplets, Caesarean and all. I’m amazed: I struggled for three weeks over a story of three little kids who levitate by taking advantage of the lift effect of planes taking off.”

As we were walking over to the Bransa, I told him that after having turned out a whole bunch of stories that were miserable failures, the one about the levitating kids struck me as passable and that I’d taken it to the Sunday supplement of
El Comercio
, in fear and trembling. The editor-in-chief had read it in front of me and given me a mysterious answer: “Leave it, and we’ll see what we can do with it.” Two Sundays had gone by since then; I’d rushed out each weekend to buy the paper, and thus far, there’d been no sign of its appearing.

But Pedro Camacho was not one to waste his time on other people’s problems. “Let’s skip our pick-me-up and walk instead,” he said, taking me by the arm just as I was about to sit down, and leading me back to La Colmena. “I have pins and needles in my calves, a sure sign I’ll soon be having cramps in them. It’s the sedentary life I live. I need exercise.”

It was only because I knew what his answer was going to be that I suggested that he follow the example of Victor Hugo and Hemingway and write standing up.

But this time I was wrong. “Interesting things are happening at La Tapada,” he said without even answering me, as he led me round and round the monument to San Martín, almost at a trot. “There’s a young man staying there who weeps on moonlit nights.”

I rarely came downtown on Sundays and I was surprised to see how different the people who were there on weekdays were from the ones I saw now. Instead of middle-class office workers, the square was full of maids on their day off, mountain boys with ruddy cheeks and big clumsy clodhoppers, girls with braids and bare feet, and itinerant photographers and women selling food wandering amid the motley crowd. I made the scribe stop in front of the female figure in a tunic in the center section of the monument who represents the Motherland, and to see whether I could get a laugh out of him, I told him why an Auchenia was bizarrely perched on her head: when the bronze was cast, here in Lima, the foundry workers had not understood the sculptor’s instructions to crown her with a votive flame—a
llama votiva—
and instead had topped the statue off with the animal of the same name.

Naturally, he didn’t even smile. He took me by the arm again, and as he hurried me along, bumping into people out for a leisurely stroll, he went on with his monologue, indifferent to everything around him, beginning with me. “Nobody’s seen his face, but there is reason to believe he’s some sort of monster—the bastard son of the owner of the
pensión
perhaps?—suffering from all sorts of hereditary defects, dwarfism, bicephalism, a hunchback, whom Doña Atanasia hides during the day so as not to frighten us and lets out only at night to get a breath of fresh air.”

He said all this without the slightest emotion, like a recording machine, and to pump him for more information, I said his hypothesis sounded farfetched to me: couldn’t he be a young man who was weeping over his love troubles?

“If he were a love-smitten young man, he’d have a guitar, or a violin, or sing,” he replied with scorn tinged with compassion. “But all this one does is weep.”

I tried to get him to explain the whole thing to me from the beginning, but he was vaguer and more self-absorbed than usual. The only thing I could get out of him was that someone, for several nights now, had been crying in some corner of the rooming-house or other and that the lodgers at La Tapada were complaining. The owner of the place, Doña Atanasia, claimed she knew nothing about it, and according to the scriptwriter, used “the ghost alibi.”

“It’s also possible that he’s weeping over a crime,” Pedro Camacho speculated, in the tone of voice of an accountant adding up figures aloud, still holding me by the arm and steering me toward Radio Central after a dozen turns around the monument. “A family crime? A parricide who’s tearing his hair and gouging his flesh in remorse? A son of the rat man?”

He wasn’t the least bit agitated, though I noted that he was more distant than usual, more incapable than ever of listening, of conversing, of remembering that there was someone with him. I was certain that he didn’t even see me. I tried to get him to go on with his monologue, for it was like seeing his imagination working at top speed, but as abruptly as he’d begun speaking of the invisible weeper, he suddenly fell silent. I watched him settle down to work again in his lair, taking off his black suit coat and his little bow tie, tucking his wild mane into a hairnet, and putting on a woman’s wig with a bun that he took out of another plastic sack.

I was unable to contain myself and let out a roar of laughter. “And who is this lady in whose company I have the pleasure of finding myself?” I asked him, still laughing.

“I must give some advice to a Francophile laboratory assistant who’s killed his son,” he explained to me in a sarcastic tone of voice, gluing a coquettish beauty mark on his face this time instead of the patriarchal beard he’d worn before, and putting on a pair of colored earrings. “Goodbye,
friend
.”

The moment I turned around to leave, I heard—coming back to life, steady, self-assured, compulsive, eternal—the Remington pounding away. Riding back to Miraflores in a jitney, I thought about Pedro Camacho’s life. What social milieu, what concatenation of circumstances, persons, relations, problems, events, happenstances had produced this literary vocation (literary? if not that, what should it be called, then?) that had somehow come to fruition, found expression in an
oeuvre
, and secured an audience? How could he be, at one and the same time, a parody of the writer and the only person in Peru who, by virtue of the time he devoted to his craft and the works he produced, was worthy of that name? Were all those politicians, attorneys, professors who went by the name of poets, novelists, dramatists really
writers
, simply because, during brief parentheses in lives in which four fifths of their time was spent at activities having nothing to do with literature, they had produced one slim volume of verses or one niggardly collection of stories? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived
only
to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate? When I thought about such things, I felt sad and upset. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me each day that the only thing I wanted to be in life was a writer, and I was also becoming more and more convinced each day that the only way to be one was to devote oneself heart and soul to literature. I didn’t want in the least to be a hack writer or a part-time one, but a real one, like—who? The person I’d met who came closest to being this full-time writer, obsessed and impassioned by his vocation, was the Bolivian author of radio serials: that was why he fascinated me so.

Javier was waiting for me at my grandparents’, brimming over with happiness, with a program for the rest of that Sunday that would have been enough to raise the dead. He’d just received the money order that his parents sent him every month from Piura, along with a good bit extra for the national holidays, and he had decided that the four of us would spend this unexpected windfall together.

“In your honor, I’ve drawn up a cosmopolitan, intellectual program,” he said to me, with a hearty clap on the back. “Francisco Petrone’s Argentine theatrical company, a German repast at the Rincón Toni, and winding up the festivities French-style at the Negro-Negro, dancing boleros in the dark.”

Just as Pedro Camacho was the closest thing to a writer that I’d ever seen in my short life, among all my acquaintances Javier was the one whose generosity and exuberance made him most resemble a Renaissance prince. Moreover, he was a very efficient planner: he’d already informed Aunt Julia and Nancy of what was awaiting us that night, and he already had the theater tickets in his pocket. His program couldn’t have been more enticing, and it immediately dispelled my gloomy reflections on the vocation and the miserable fate that awaited the man of letters in Peru. Javier was also very happy: he’d been going out with Nancy for a month now, and their keeping company together was taking on the proportions of a real romance. My having confessed my feelings toward Aunt Julia to my cousin had been very useful to him because, on the pretext of helping us hide our secret and making it easier for us to go out together by double-dating, he’d been managing to see Nancy several times a week. My cousin and Aunt Julia were inseparable now: they went out shopping and to the movies together and exchanged confidences. My cousin had become an enthusiastic fairy godmother of our romance, and one afternoon she raised my morale by remarking to me: “Julita has a way about her that cancels out any difference in age, Marito.”

The grandiose program for that Sunday (a day on which, I firmly believe, a large part of my future was determined by the stars) got off to an excellent start. In Lima in the fifties we had very few chances to see first-rate theater, and the Argentine company of Francisco Petrone brought us a series of modern works that had never been performed before in Peru. Nancy went by Aunt Olga’s to get Aunt Julia and the two of them came downtown in a taxi. Javier and I were waiting for them at the door of the Teatro Segura. Javier, who was a great believer in the grand gesture, had rented an entire box, which turned out to be the only one occupied, so that there were almost as many eyes focused on us as on the stage. My guilty conscience made me quite certain that any number of relatives and acquaintances would see us and immediately suspect the truth. But the moment the performance began, my fears evaporated. They were doing
Death of a Salesman
, by Arthur Miller, the first nontraditional play, violating the conventions of time and space, that I’d ever seen. I was so excited and so enthused that during the intermission I began to talk a blue streak, praising the work to the skies, commenting on its characters, its technique, its ideas, and later, as we were eating sausages and drinking dark beer in the Rincón Toni on La Colmena, I went on raving about it and got so absorbed in what I was saying that Javier later told me: “You would have thought you were a parrot that had been slipped a dose of Spanish fly.” My cousin Nancy, who had always thought my literary inclinations were as peculiar as the odd hobby that fascinated our Uncle Eduardo—a little old man, my grandfather’s brother, now a retired judge, whose life was centered on the unusual pastime of collecting spiders—after hearing my interminable peroration on the work we had just seen, suspected that my literary bent might lead me off the deep end. “You’re going off your rocker, my boy,” she warned me.