Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (6 page)

Richard’s reply, as he gazed into space with rolling, murderous eyes, was slow, hoarse, perfectly clear. “To kill Red with.” He had uttered each syllable with icy hatred. He paused, and then added in a voice that suddenly broke: “Or to kill myself with.”

He began mumbling again, and Alberto de Quinteros could no longer make out what he was saying. Just then, a taxi stopped. The doctor shoved Richard inside, gave the driver the address, and got in himself. The moment the taxi started off, Richard burst into tears. He turned to look at him and the boy leaned over, put his head on his chest, and sobbed, his body shaking with a nervous tremor. The doctor put his arm around him, rumpled his hair just as he’d done a little while before with his sister, and reassured the taxi driver, who was looking at him through the rearview mirror, with a gesture that meant “the boy’s had too much to drink.” He let Richard sit there, huddled next to him, weeping and dirtying his blue suit and his silver-gray tie “with his tears and spittle and mucus. He didn’t blink an eye, nor did his heart skip a beat, when in his nephew’s incomprehensible soliloquy, he managed to make out that phrase, repeated two or three times, that horrendous phrase that at the same time sounded beautiful and even chaste: “Because I love her as a man loves a woman and I don’t give a damn about all the rest, Uncle.”

In the garden of the house, Richard vomited, with wrenching spasms that frightened the fox terrier and brought disapproving looks from the butler and the maids. Dr. Quinteros took Richard by the arm and led him to the guest room, made him rinse out his mouth with water, undressed him, put him to bed, made him swallow a strong sleeping pill, and remained at his side, calming him with affectionate words and gestures—that he knew the boy could neither hear nor see—till he felt him fall into the deep sleep of the young.

Then he phoned the clinic and told the doctor on duty that he wouldn’t be coming in until the next day unless some dire emergency came up, instructed the butler to say he wasn’t in no matter who called or came to see him, poured himself a double whiskey, and shut himself up in the music room. He put a pile of Albinoni, Vivaldi, and Scarlatti records on the turntable, because he’d decided that a few superficial, Baroque, Venetian hours would be a good antidote for the dark shadows in his mind, and buried in his soft leather chair, with his Scotch meerschaum pipe smoking between his lips, he closed his eyes and waited for the music to wreak its inevitable miracle. The thought came to him that this was a privileged occasion for putting to the test that moral rule that he had tried to live by since his youth, that axiom that had it that it was better to understand men than to judge them. He did not feel horrified or indignant or unduly surprised. He noted in himself, rather, a hidden emotion, an invincible benevolence, mingled with tenderness and pity, as he said to himself that it was now blindingly clear why such a pretty girl had suddenly decided to marry an idiot, why the king of the Hawaiian surfboard, the handsomest youngster in the neighborhood, had never been known to have a girlfriend he was crazy about and seriously courting, and why he had always fulfilled without protest, with such laudable zeal, his duties as his younger sister’s chaperone. As he savored the aroma of the tobacco and sipped the pleasantly fiery whiskey in his glass, he told himself that there was no reason to worry too much about Richard. He’d find a way to persuade Roberto to send him abroad to study, to London for instance, a city where he’d find enough new and exciting things to make him forget the past. On the other hand, he really was worried, and consumed with curiosity, as to what would happen to the two other characters in the story. As the music little by little intoxicated him, a whirlwind of unanswered questions circled around and around in his mind, growing fainter and fainter, spaced farther and farther apart: Would Red Antúnez desert his reckless, foolhardy spouse that very night? Might he have done so already? Or would he say nothing, and giving proof of what might be either exceptional nobility or exceptional stupidity, stay with that deceitful girl whom he had so persistently pursued? Would there be a great public scandal, or would a chaste veil of dissimulation and pride trampled underfoot forever hide this tragedy of San Isidro?

I saw Pedro Camacho
again a few days after the typewriter episode. It was 7:30 a.m., and after getting the first newscast of the day ready to go on the air, I was heading for the Bransa to have my morning
café con leche
. As I passed by the little window of the concierge’s cubicle at Radio Central, I spied my Remington. I could hear its heavy keys hitting the platen, but I couldn’t see anybody sitting behind it. I stuck my head through the window and saw that it was Pedro Camacho who was typing away. An office had been set up for him in the concierge’s cubbyhole. In this tiny room, with a low ceiling and walls badly damaged by the dampness and by the ravages of time and desecrated by countless graffiti, there was now a monumental wooden desk, so dilapidated that it was about to fall apart, but nonetheless as imposing as the enormous typewriter rumbling away on it. The outsize dimensions of the desk and the Remington literally swallowed up the little runt. He had put a couple of cushions on the seat of his chair, but even so, his face came up no higher than the keyboard, so that he was typing away with his hands at eye level, thus causing him to appear to be boxing. He was so totally absorbed in his work that he didn’t even notice my presence, despite the fact that I was leaning right over him. His pop-eyes were riveted on the paper as he pecked at the keys with his two forefingers, biting his tongue. He was wearing the same black suit as on the first day, and had taken off neither his suit coat nor his little bow tie. At the sight of him, with his long hair and his attire mindful of a nineteenth-century poet, sitting there rigid and dead-serious, concentrating all his attention on what he was typing so furiously, in front of that desk and that typewriter that were far too big for him, in this den that was much too small for the three of them, I couldn’t quite decide whether the whole scene was pitiful or wildly funny.

“You’re certainly an early riser, Señor Camacho,” I greeted him, stepping halfway into the room.

Without even looking up from the paper, he merely indicated, with a peremptory jerk of his head, that I should either shut up or wait, or both. I chose the latter course, and as he finished his sentence, I noted that the desktop was littered with typed pages, and the floor strewn with discarded pages he’d wadded up into a ball and tossed there because no one had thought to provide him with a wastebasket. A few moments later his hands fell away from the keyboard, he looked up at me, rose to his feet, ceremoniously held out his right hand, and answered my greeting with a maxim: “Clock time means nothing where art is concerned. Good morning, my friend.”

I didn’t ask if he was suffering from claustrophobia in this tiny cubbyhole, since I was certain he would have answered me that discomfort was propitious to art. Instead, I invited him to come with me to have coffee. He consulted a prehistoric artifact clumsily sliding back and forth on his skinny wrist and murmured: “After an hour and a half of production, I deserve time out for refreshment.” As we walked over to the Bransa, I asked him if he always began work that early in the morning, and he replied that in his case, unlike that of other “creators,” inspiration was directly proportional to daylight.

“It dawns with the sun and gradually grows warmer along with it,” he explained, musically, as a drowsy waiter swept the sawdust littered with cigarette butts and the refuse of the Bransa out from under our feet. “I begin to write at first light. By noon, my brain is a blazing torch. Then the fire dies down little by little, and around about dusk I stop, inasmuch as only embers remain. But it doesn’t matter, since the actor produces more in the afternoon and at night. I have my system all carefully plotted out.”

He delivered himself of this peroration in utter seriousness, and I realized that he scarcely seemed to notice that I was still there; he was one of those men who have no need of conversational partners: all they require is listeners. Like the first time we’d met, I was taken aback by his total lack of humor, despite the puppetlike smiles—lips turning up at the corners, brow wrinkling, teeth suddenly bared—with which he embellished his monologue. His every word was uttered with extraordinary solemnity, all of which—along with his perfect diction, his dwarflike stature, his bizarre attire, and his theatrical gestures—made him appear to be an odd sort indeed. It was obvious that he took everything he said to be the gospel truth, and he thus gave the impression of being at once the most affected and the most sincere man in the world. I did my best to bring him down from the artistic heights on which he was holding forth so grandiloquently to the more earthly plane of practical matters, and asked him if he had found a place to live yet, if he had friends here, how he liked Lima. Such mundane considerations were of no interest to him whatsoever. Impatiently breaking off his flight of eloquence, he replied that he had found an “atelier” not far from Radio Central, on Quilca, and that he felt at home wherever he found himself, for wasn’t the entire world the artist’s homeland? Instead of coffee, he ordered a lemon verbena-and-mint herb tea, which, he informed me, not only was pleasing to the palate but also “toned up one’s mind.” He downed it in short, symmetrical sips, as though he had calculated the precise intervals at which to raise the cup to his lips, and the moment he’d finished it, he rose to his feet, insisted on splitting the check, and asked me to go with him to buy a map showing the streets and districts of Lima. We found what he wanted at an outdoor newsstand along the Jirón de la Unión. He unfolded the map, held it up to the light, studied it, and was pleased to note that the various districts of the city were marked off in different colors. He also asked for a receipt for the twenty
soles
the map had cost him.

“It’s something I need for my work and my employers should reimburse me,” he declared, as we walked back to our respective offices. His walk was also quite odd: quick, nervous strides, as though he were afraid he’d miss a train.

As we bade each other goodbye at the entrance to Radio Central, he gestured in the direction of his cramped little cubbyhole of an office as though he were proudly showing off a palace. “It’s practically right out in the middle of the street,” he said, pleased with himself and with things in general. “It’s as if I were working out on the sidewalk.”

“Won’t all the noise of so many people and cars passing by distract you?” I ventured to ask.

“On the contrary,” he reassured me, delighted at the chance to offer me one last edifying maxim: “I write about life, and the impact of reality is crucial to my work.”

As I turned to leave, he waggled his forefinger to call me back. Pointing to the map of Lima, he asked me, in a tone of voice fraught with mystery, if I would be willing, later on that day or the day after, to provide him with further information about the city. I told him I’d be more than happy to do so.

Back in my shack at Panamericana, I found that Pascual had already written up the text of the 9 a.m. news bulletin. It began with one of those items he took such delight in. He had copied it from the morning paper,
La Crónica
, embellishing it with fancy adjectives he’d picked up in the course of his studies and made an intimate part of his cultural stock in trade: “In the tempestuous seas of the Antilles, the Panamanian freighter
Shark
sank last night, taking with it to their death its crew of eight, drowned and masticated by the sharks that infest the aforementioned sea.” I changed “masticated” to “devoured” and edited out “tempestuous” and “aforementioned” before giving it my okay. Pascual didn’t fly into a rage—that wasn’t his way—but he nonetheless put his protest on record. “Good old Don Mario, fucking up my style as usual.”

All that week I’d been trying to write a short story, based on an incident that my Uncle Pedro, who was a doctor on a big landed estate in Ancash, had passed on to me. One night a peasant had frightened another peasant half to death by disguising himself as a “pishtaco”—a devil—and leaping out at him from the middle of a canebrake. The victim of this joke had been so scared out of his wits that he’d attacked the “pishtaco” with his machete, dispatched him to the next world with a skull split in two, and taken to the hills. Shortly thereafter, a group of peasants leaving a fiesta had come upon a “pishtaco” prowling around the village and beaten him to death. The dead man turned out to be the murderer of the first “pishtaco,” who was in the habit of disguising himself as a devil in order to visit his family at night. These assassins had in turn taken to the hills, and used to come down at night in the guise of devils to visit the community, where two of them had already been hacked to death with machetes by the terror-stricken villagers, who in turn, et cetera… What I was eager to recount in my story was not so much what had actually happened on the estate where my Uncle Pedro was employed as the ending of the story that suddenly occurred to me: at a certain moment, the Devil in person, alive and kicking and wagging his tail, slipped in among all these fake “pishtacos.” I was going to entitle my story “The Qualitative Leap,” and I wanted it to be as coldly objective, intellectual, terse, and ironic as one of Borges’s—an author whom I had just discovered at that time. I devoted to the story all the spare moments left me by the news bulletins at Panamericana, the university, and coffee breaks at the Bransa, and I also wrote at my grandparents’ house, during my lunch hours and at night. During that week, I didn’t drop in at any of my uncles’ houses for the midday meal, skipped my usual visits to my girl cousins’, and didn’t go to the movies even once. I wrote and then tore up what I wrote, or rather, the moment I’d written a sentence it struck me as absolutely dreadful and I began all over again. I was thoroughly convinced that a slip of my pen or a mistake in spelling was never a mere happenstance but rather a reminder, a warning (from my subconscious, God, or some other being) that the sentence simply wouldn’t do at all and had to be rewritten. Pascual protested: “Good Lord, if the Genaros discover how much paper you’ve wasted, they’ll take it out of our salary.” Finally, one Thursday, it seemed to me that the story was finished. It was a monologue five pages long: at the very end, the reader discovered that the narrator was the Devil himself. I read “The Qualitative Leap” to Javier in my shack, after the noon Panamericana newscast.

“It’s first-rate, old pal,” he said approvingly, applauding. “But is it really possible to write about the Devil nowadays? Why not write a realistic story? Why not do away with the Devil altogether and make the whole thing a series of incidents involving fake “pishtacos”? Or, alternatively, an outright fantastic tale, with all the ghostly apparitions you like. But no devils, because that smacks of religion, of hypocritical piety, of all kinds of things that are terribly old hat these days.”

When he left, I tore “The Qualitative Leap” to bits, tossed it into the wastebasket, decided to forget all about “pishtacos,” and went to have lunch at my Uncle Lucho’s. I learned there that there was apparently a budding romance between Aunt Julia and a man I’d never met but had heard a lot about: Adolfo Salcedo, the owner of a large estate and the senator from Arequipa—a distant family relation.

“Fortunately, Julia’s new suitor has piles of money, a high social standing, and lots of influence, plus honest intentions toward her,” my Aunt Olga commented. “He’s asked for her hand in marriage.”

“Unfortunately, Don Adolfo’s fifty and hasn’t yet done a thing to prove that that terrible thing his wife accused him of was false,” Uncle Lucho retorted. “If your sister marries him, she’s either going to have to live in chastity or take to adultery.”

“That whole story about him and Carlota is a typical bit of slanderous Arequipa gossip,” Aunt Olga argued. “Adolfo gives every appearance of being a real man.”

I knew that “whole story” about the senator and Doña Carlota very well, since it had been the subject of another short story of mine that Javier’s praise had caused me to consign to the wastebasket. The marriage of Don Adolfo and Doña Carlota had been the talk of the entire south of the Republic, since both of them owned huge tracts of land in Puno and the pooling of their holdings would thus create yet another enormous landed estate. The two of them had done things in the grand manner: a wedding ceremony in the splendid Church of Yanahuara attended by guests from all over Peru, followed by a Pantagruelian banquet. During the second week of their honeymoon, the bride had upped and left her spouse somewhere or other, returned all by herself to Arequipa to the scandal of everyone, and announced, to everyone’s stupefaction, that she was about to appeal to Rome for a formal annulment of their marriage.

Adolfo Salcedo’s mother had met Doña Carlota one Sunday after eleven o’clock Mass, and right there in the middle of the portico of the cathedral had asked her to her face, in utter fury: “Why did you abandon my poor son as you did, you shameless creature?”

With a superbly haughty wave of her hand, Doña Carlota had answered in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Because, señora, the only use to which your son puts that particular piece of equipment that men are endowed with is to make peepee.”

She had managed to have the religious marriage annulled, and Adolfo Salcedo had been an inexhaustible source of jokes at our family gatherings. From the day the senator had first met Aunt Julia, he had besieged her with invitations to the Bolívar Grill and the “91,” showered her with gifts of perfume, and bombarded her with baskets of roses. I was happy to hear of the romance and hoped that Aunt Julia would turn up, so I could get in a few nasty digs about her new suitor. But she took the wind out of my sails when, appearing in the dining room in time to have coffee with us, with her arms loaded with parcels, she was the one who announced, laughing fit to kill: “All that gossip turned out to be perfectly true. Senator Salcedo can’t get it up!”

“Julia, for heaven’s sake, don’t be vulgar,” Aunt Olga protested. “Anybody would think that…”

“He told me so himself, just this morning,” Aunt Julia explained, gloating over the senator’s tragedy.