Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (42 page)

“There’s no doubt about it: we’re in the midst of a catastrophe,” he said to me, shaking his head sadly; it was as though we’d been discussing the subject just a moment before. “What are we going to do now, can you tell me that? They have to put him away.”

He got off the elevator on the third floor, and to compound the confusion, I’d assumed a doleful expression and murmured, as though I knew exactly what he was talking about: “Good heavens, what a pity.” I felt happy that something so serious had happened that my absence had gone unnoticed. Up in the shack, Pascual and Big Pablito were listening to Nelly, Genaro Jr.’s secretary, with faces a mile long. They barely said hello to me and nobody cracked a single joke about my having gotten married. They looked at me in despair.

“They’ve taken Pedro Camacho off to the insane asylum,” Big Pablito stammered, his voice breaking. “What a sad thing, Don Mario!”

Then, between them, with Nelly doing most of the talking, since she had followed what was going on from the Genaros’ office, they told me all the details. Everything had started during those very days when I was all wrapped up in my prematrimonial troubles. The catastrophes, the fires, earthquakes, auto accidents, shipwrecks, train derailments were the beginning of the end, for they had wreaked havoc with the radio serials by killing off dozens of characters in the space of a few minutes. This time, the actors and technicians of Radio Central, in a panic, had stopped trying to serve as a bulwark protecting the scriptwriter, or had been unable to prevent the radio listeners’ expressions of utter bewilderment and their protests from reaching the Genaros’ ears. But the latter had already been alerted by the daily papers, whose radio columnists had been making derisive remarks about Pedro Camacho’s cataclysms for days. The Genaros had called him into their office and questioned him, taking every possible precaution so as not to hurt his feelings or exasperate him. But in the middle of the conversation he’d had a nervous collapse: the catastrophes were stratagems to enable him to begin the stories all over again from scratch, since his memory was failing him, and he could no longer remember what had happened in the plots in previous episodes, nor which character was which, nor which serial they belonged to, and—“weeping hysterically and tearing his hair,” Nelly assured me—he confessed to them that in the last few weeks his work, his life, his nights had been torture. The Genaros had called in a famous Lima physician, Dr. Honorio Delgado, who had immediately announced that the scriptwriter was in no condition to work; his “exhausted” brain had to have a rest.

We were all ears listening to Nelly’s tale when the phone rang. It was Genaro Jr.; he needed to see me immediately. I went down to his office, convinced that the moment had come when I’d receive, at the very least, a severe warning. But he greeted me as he had in the elevator, presuming that I knew all about the problems confronting him. He had just talked with Havana on the phone, and was foaming at the mouth because CMQ, taking advantage of his situation, of the emergency, had quadrupled the price it was asking for its serials.

“It’s a tragedy, an incredible stroke of bad luck, Camacho’s programs were the ones with the best listener ratings, advertisers were fighting for air time on them,” he said, shuffling papers on his desk. “What a disaster to have to fall back on those sharks at CMQ again!”

I asked him how Pedro Camacho was, if he’d seen him, how long it would be before he’d be able to come back to work.

“There’s no hope for him,” he growled, with a sort of fury, but finally went on in a more compassionate tone of voice. “Dr. Delgado says that his psyche is undergoing a process of deliquescence. Deliquescence. Do you understand what he means by that? That his mind is falling to pieces, I suppose, that his brain is rotting, or something like that—right? When my father asked Dr. Delgado if his recovery might possibly take months, his reply was: ‘Years, perhaps.’ Can you imagine!”

He bowed his head, his spirits crushed, and with the certainty of a soothsayer predicted what was going to happen: when sponsors found out that the scripts from now on were going to be from CMQ, they’d cancel their contracts or demand a fifty percent reduction in advertising rates. And to top everything off, it was going to be three weeks to a month before the new serials arrived, because Cuba was in a mess, what with the terrorism and the guerrillas, CMQ had been turned topsy-turvy, with people arrested and all kinds of troubles. But leaving Radio Central listeners without any serials at all for a month was unthinkable, the station would lose its audience, Radio la Crónica or Radio Colonial would lure them all away, they’d already begun to be tough competition because they were broadcasting cheap, vulgar Argentine soap operas.

“By the way, that’s why I asked you to come down here,” he added, looking at me as though he’d just noticed that I was there. “You’ve got to give us a hand. You’re more or less of an intellectual, and it’ll be an easy job for you.”

The job he was speaking of was to search around in the storeroom of Radio Central, where all the old serials, the ones from before Pedro Camacho’s arrival, were kept, look through them, and find the ones that could be used right away while waiting for the new ones from CMQ to arrive.

“We’ll pay you extra, naturally,” he informed me. “We don’t exploit anybody around here.”

I felt enormous gratitude toward Genaro Jr. and great sympathy for his problems. Even if he gave me only a hundred
soles
extra, they’d be a boon to me at this point.

As I was leaving his office, his voice stopped me at the door. “Hey, I hear you’ve gotten married.” I turned around; he was gesturing affectionately in my direction. “Who’s the victim? A woman, I trust? Well, congratulations. We’ll have to have a drink together to celebrate.”

I called Aunt Julia from my office. She told me that Aunt Olga had calmed down a little, but every so often was overcome with amazement all over again and kept saying: “You’re out of your mind.” Aunt Julia wasn’t terribly upset that the apartment wasn’t quite ready to move into (“Well, Varguitas, all I can say is that we’ve slept apart for such a long time that we can go on that way for two weeks more”), and she told me that after taking a nice long bath and changing her clothes she felt very optimistic. I told her I wouldn’t be able to come by for lunch because I had to go through a huge stack of serials, but that we’d see each other that night. I got the Panamericana newscast and two bulletins out and then went digging in the storeroom of Radio Central. It was a cellar with no light and full of cobwebs, and as I went inside I heard mice scampering around in the dark. There were papers everywhere: in piles, scattered about loose, tied together in bundles. The dust and the dampness made me start sneezing immediately. It was impossible to work down there, so I began carting armfuls of paper upstairs to Pedro Camacho’s cubbyhole and sat down at what had been his desk. There was not a trace of him left: neither the dictionary of quotations, nor the map of Lima, nor his sociologico-psychologico-racial index cards. The filthy mess that the old serials from CMQ were in was unbelievable: the dampness had blurred the texts, mice and cockroaches had nibbled the pages and left droppings all over them, and the scripts had gotten as hopelessly mixed up with each other as Pedro Camacho’s plots. There wasn’t much choosing to be done; the most I could hope to do was try to find a few legible texts.

I’d been having a fit of allergic sneezing for three hours as I dove into syrupy horrors, trying to put together a few serials as though they were jigsaw puzzles, when the door of the cubbyhole opened and Javier walked in.

“It’s incredible that at a time like this, with all the problems you’ve got, you’re letting yourself get carried away again by that Pedro Camacho mania of yours,” he said angrily. “I’ve just come from your grandparents’. The least you could do is find out what’s happening and start trembling in your boots.”

He flung two envelopes down on the desk strewn with tear-jerkers. One was the letter my father had left with him the night before. It read:

“Mario: I’m giving that woman forty-eight hours to leave the country. If she does not do so, I shall use my influence and personally see to it that she pays dearly for her effrontery. As for you, I should like to inform you that I am armed and will not allow you to make a fool of me. If you do not obey to the letter and this woman does not leave the country within the time limit that I have indicated above, I shall put five bullets through you and kill you like a dog, right in the middle of the street.”

He had signed it with his two family names and added a postscript: “You can go ask for police protection if you wish. And to remove all possible doubts as to my intentions, I herewith affix my signature once again to my decision to kill you, wherever I find you, like a dog.” And he had indeed signed his name a second time, in an ever bolder hand than the first time.

The other envelope had been handed to Javier by my granny half an hour before, so that he could bring it to me at the office. It had been delivered to the house by a Guardia Civil; it was a summons to appear at the Miraflores commissariat at nine o’clock the following morning.

“The worst thing isn’t the letter, but the fact that, given the state I saw your father in last night, he may very well carry out his threat,” Javier said consolingly, sitting himself on the windowsill. “What are we going to do, old pal?”

“For the moment, go see a lawyer,” was the one thing that occurred to me. “About my marriage and this other business. Do you know anybody who’d be willing to give us legal advice free, or let us pay later?”

We went to see a young attorney, a relative of Javier’s, with whom we’d gone surfing a couple of times at the Miraflores beach. He was very friendly, laughed good-humoredly at all our adventures in Chincha, and teased me a bit; and as Javier had thought, he refused to accept any money from me. He explained that the marriage was not null and void but could be declared so because the date on my birth certificate had been altered. But such an annulment would require a court proceeding. If suit was not brought within two years, the marriage would automatically be valid and could no longer be annulled. As for Aunt Julia, it was indeed possible to denounce her as a “corrupter of the morals of a minor,” to swear out a complaint against her at the commissariat and have her arrested, at least temporarily. There would then be a trial, but he was certain that, in view of the circumstances—that is to say, given the fact that I was eighteen and not twelve—it was inconceivable that the prosecution would win the case: any court would acquit her.

“But even so, if he wants to, your dad can give Julita a very hard time of it for a while,” Javier concluded as we were walking back to the radio station along the Jirón de la Unión. “Is it true that he’s got pull in government circles?”

I didn’t know; maybe he was the friend of some general, the bosom buddy of some minister. All of a sudden, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait till the next day to find out what they wanted of me at the commissariat. I asked Javier to help me rescue a few serials from the magma of papers at Radio Central so I could lay my doubts to rest that very day. He agreed to help, and also offered to come visit me if they threw me in jail—and bring me cigarettes each time.

At six that evening I gave Genaro Jr. two serials that I’d more or less patched together and promised him that I’d have three more the following day; I took a quick look at the 6 and 8 p.m. bulletins, promised Pascual that I’d be back for the Panamericana newscast, and half an hour later Javier and I were at the commissariat on the Malecón 28 de Julio, in Miraflores. We waited a good while, and finally the commissioner—a major in uniform—and the chief of the police detectives received us. My father had come that morning to ask them to take an official deposition from me as to what had gone on. They had a handwritten list of questions, but the chief of detectives took my answers down on a typewriter, and this took a long time because he was a terrible typist. I admitted that I’d gotten married (and pointed out emphatically that I had done so “of my own free will”) but I refused to say where or before what official. I also refused to reveal who the witnesses had been. The questions were such that they appeared to have been drawn up by a shyster lawyer with dirty work in mind: my date of birth and immediately thereafter (as though the answer were not implicit in the preceding question) whether I was a minor or not, where I lived and with whom, and of course, how old Aunt Julia was (they kept referring to her as Doña Julia), a question that I also refused to answer, saying it was not the gentlemanly thing to reveal a woman’s age. This aroused a childish curiosity on the part of the two police officials, who, after I had signed the deposition, assumed a paternal air and asked me, “merely out of curiosity,” how many years older than I the “lady” was. When we left the commissariat, I suddenly felt very depressed, with the uncomfortable sensation that I was a thief or a murderer.

Javier thought I’d put my foot in it; my having refused to reveal the place where the marriage ceremony had been performed was an act of defiance that would make my father even more furious, and completely useless, since he’d be able to find out in just a few days.

I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the radio station that night in the mood I was in, so I went to Uncle Lucho’s. It was Aunt Olga who came to the door; she greeted me with a grave face and a murderous look, but didn’t let a peep out and even offered me her cheek to kiss. She went into the living room with me, where Aunt Julia and Uncle Lucho were sitting. One look at them sufficed to tell me that things were going from bad to worse. I asked them what was up.

“Events have taken a terrible turn,” Aunt Julia said to me, interlocking her fingers with mine, and I could see how much this upset Aunt Olga. “My father-in-law is trying to have me thrown out of the country as an undesirable alien.”

Uncle Jorge, Uncle Juan, and Uncle Pedro had gone to talk to my father that afternoon, and had come back badly frightened by the state they’d found him in. A cold fury, a fixed stare, a way of speaking that made it unmistakable that nothing could possibly get him to change his mind. He was categorical: Aunt Julia had to leave Peru within forty-eight hours or suffer the consequences. It so happened that he was an intimate friend—a former schoolmate, perhaps—of the Minister of Labor in the dictator’s cabinet, a general named Villacorta, he’d already talked to him, and if Aunt Julia refused to leave the country voluntarily, she would be put aboard the plane by soldiers. As for me, if I didn’t obey him, I would pay dearly for it. And, as he’d done with Javier, he showed the revolver to my uncles. I completed the picture by showing them my father’s letter and telling them about the police interrogation. The letter had one virtue at least: it won my aunt and uncle over a hundred percent to our cause. Uncle Lucho poured us all whiskies and as we sat there drinking them Aunt Olga suddenly began to cry and ask how all this could possibly be, her sister treated like a common criminal, threatened by the police, when the two of them belonged to one of the best families in Bolivia.