Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (20 page)

On the downstairs floor of his house were a little entry hall, a small living room, the dining room, and the kitchen; the bedrooms were on the upstairs floor. Don Federico spied his wife from the doorway of the living room. She was standing next to the buffet, ecstatically munching some disgusting sticky sweet—a caramel, a chocolate, Don Federico thought, Turkish delight, toffee—holding the part she hadn’t yet eaten in her fingers. On seeing him, she smiled at him with an intimidated look in her eyes, pointing to what she was eating with self-deprecating resignation.

Don Federico walked unhurriedly toward her, unfolding the magazine and holding it out between his two hands so that his wife could contemplate the cover in all its baseness. He thrust it under her nose without saying a word and enjoyed watching her turn deathly pale, her eyes nearly pop out of their sockets, her mouth gape open, and a little thread of saliva full of biscuit crumbs begin running out of it. The man from Tingo María raised his right hand and slapped the trembling woman as hard as he could across the face. She gave a moan, staggered, and fell on her knees, continuing to contemplate the cover photo with an expression of rapturous devotion, mystical illumination. Towering over her, rigid and stern-faced, Don Federico gazed down at her accusingly.

Then he curtly called upstairs to summon the two guilty parties: “Laura! Teresa!”

A noise made him turn his head. There they were, at the foot of the stairs. He hadn’t heard them come down. Teresa, the older one, was wearing a smock, as though she’d been cleaning the house, and Laura had on her school uniform. In bewilderment, the girls looked at their mother on her knees on the floor, at their father walking slowly, hieratically toward them, a high priest approaching the sacrificial stone where the knife and the vestal await, and, finally, at the magazine that Don Federico, having reached them, thrust accusingly before their eyes. His daughters’ reaction was not what he had expected. Instead of turning pale, falling on their knees, and stammering explanations, the precocious creatures blushed and exchanged a swift glance that could only be one of complicity, and Don Federico said to himself, in the depths of his despair and rage, that he had not yet drained the bitter cup of that morning to the dregs: Laura and Teresa
knew
that they had been photographed, that the photograph was going to be published, and were even delighted—what else could that gleam in their eyes mean?—that it had been. The revelation that he had incubated, in his very own home, which he had believed to be pristinely innocent, not only the municipal vice of nudism on the beach but also exhibitionism (and, why not?, nymphomania), made his muscles sag, gave him a chalky taste in his mouth, and caused him to ponder whether life was worth living. And also—all that took no more than a second—to ask himself whether the only proper punishment for such an abomination was not death. The idea of committing filicide tormented him less than the knowledge that thousands of human beings had feasted (merely with their eyes?) on the physical intimacies of his daughters.

Then he went into action. He let the magazine fall to the floor to give himself more freedom of movement, grabbed Laura by her uniform jacket with his left hand, pulled her an inch or so closer to him to have her within better range, raised his right hand high enough to ensure that the slap he was about to give her would be as powerful as possible, and let fly with the full force of his rancor. He thereupon experienced the second unbelievable surprise of that extraordinary day, one perhaps even more breathtaking than that of the pornographic cover photo. Ridiculously, frustratingly, instead of Laura’s soft cheek, his hand met empty air and his arm was painfully wrenched as the blow missed its target altogether. And that was not all: the worst was yet to come. For the girl was not content to have dodged the hard slap in the face—something that, in his immense bitterness, Don Federico suddenly remembered that no member of his family had ever done before. On the contrary, after stepping back, her little fourteen-year-old countenance contorted with hatred, she flung herself upon him
—him
, her own father—and began to pommel him with her fists, scratch him, push him, and kick him.

He had the sensation that his blood ceased flowing in his veins out of sheer stupefaction. It was as though the stars had suddenly escaped from their orbits and were racing toward each other, colliding, shattering each other to bits, hurtling hysterically through space. Unable to react, he reeled back, his eyes gaping, pursued by the girl, who, growing bolder, beside herself with rage, was not only lashing out at him with all her might now but also shouting: “You brute, you bastard, I hate you, kick off, die, go to hell, damn you!” He was thinking he’d gone mad when—everything was happening so fast that the moment he realized what was going on the entire situation abruptly changed—he saw Teresa run toward him, but instead of holding her sister back she was helping her. His elder daughter was now attacking him too, screaming the most abominable insults—“Tightwad, cretin, maniac, filthy beast, tyrant, madman, rat killer”—and between the two of them the adolescent furies little by little were backing him into a corner against the wall. He had begun to defend himself, overcoming at last his paralyzing stupefaction, and was trying to shield his face when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his back. He turned around: Doña Zoila had risen to her feet and was biting him.

Even at this point he was capable of feeling utter amazement on seeing that his wife had undergone an even greater transformation than his daughters. Was Doña Zoila, the woman who had never let a murmur of complaint cross her lips, never once raised her voice, never shown the slightest ill temper, the same person with blazing eyes and brutal hands who was pounding him with her fists, hitting him over the head, spitting on him, ripping his shirt, and screaming like a madwoman: “Let’s kill him, let’s avenge ourselves, let’s make him swallow his manias, let’s tear his eyes out”? The three of them were yelling at the top of their lungs and Don Federico thought that their screams had ruptured his eardrums. He was defending himself with all his strength, trying to return their blows, but found himself unable to do so because—putting into practice a technique they had treacherously perfected in secret?—two of them took turns holding his arms while the third went at him hammer and tongs. He felt burning sensations, swellings, shooting pains, he saw stars, and little stains that suddenly appeared on the hands of his assailants revealed to him that he was bleeding.

He had no illusions when he saw Ricardo and Federico Jr. appear at the foot of the stairway. Having been converted to wholehearted skepticism in a matter of seconds, he was certain that they were coming to join the others, to participate in the mayhem, to give him the
coup de grâce
. Terrified, with no dignity or honor left, he had only one thought: to make his way to the front door, to flee. But it was not easy. He managed to run two or three steps, but then one of them tripped him and sent him sprawling. Lying there on the floor, curled up in a ball to protect his manhood, he saw his heirs attack his humanity with ferocious kicks as his wife and daughters armed themselves with brooms, feather dusters, the fireplace poker, in order to go on working him over. Before telling himself that he had no idea what was going on except that the whole world had gone mad, he managed to hear his sons’ voices, too, calling him a maniac, a tightwad, a filthy beast, a rat killer, rhythmically punctuating each insult with another kick. As everything began to go black, a tiny gray intruder suddenly popped out of an invisible little hole in one corner of the dining room, a mouse with white canines that contemplated the man lying on the floor with a mocking gleam in its bright eyes…

Was Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, the indefatigable executioner of the rodents of Peru, dead? Had parricide, epithalamicide, been committed? Or was he merely stunned—this husband and father who lay, amid a disorder without precedent, beneath the dining-room table as his family, having swiftly packed their personal belongings, abandoned their home and fireside in exultation? How would this unfortunate affair in the Barranco district end?

The failure of my story
about Doroteo Martí left me discouraged for several days. But the morning I heard Pascual tell Big Pablito of his discovery at the airport, I felt my vocation come to life again and began to plan another story. Pascual had surprised a bunch of ragamuffins practicing a risky and exciting sport. As darkness was falling, they would lie down on the end of the runway at Limatambo airport, and Pascual swore that each time a plane took off the kid lying on the ground would be lifted up a few centimeters or so because of the pressure of the air thus displaced, and levitate, as in a magic show, for a few seconds, and then, once the lift effect had disappeared, would suddenly come down to earth again. At about that same time I had just seen a Mexican film,
Los Olvidados
, that I was all excited about (it was not until years later that I found out it was a Buñuel film, and who Buñuel was). I decided to write a story in the same spirit; a tale of men-children, young wolf cubs toughened by the harsh conditions of life in the suburbs. Javier was skeptical and assured me that Pascual’s anecdote couldn’t possibly be true, that the change in air pressure caused by a plane taking off wouldn’t be sufficient to lift even a newborn babe off the ground. We argued back and forth, and I finally told him that the characters in my story would levitate yet at the same time it would be a realistic story (“No, fantastic!” he shouted), and we finally agreed to go with Pascual to the vacant lots of Córpac some night to see with our own eyes what was true and what was false in his account of these dangerous games (that was the title I’d chosen for the story).

I hadn’t seen Aunt Julia that day but was expecting to see her on the following day, Thursday, at Uncle Lucho’s. But when I arrived at the house on Armendáriz at noon for the usual Thursday lunch, I discovered she wasn’t there. Aunt Olga told me she’d been invited out to lunch by “a good match”: Dr. Guillermo Osores, a physician who was some sort of distant family relation, a very presentable man in his fifties with quite a bit of money, whose wife had died fairly recently.

“A good match,” Aunt Olga repeated, winking at me. “Rich, responsible, good-looking, and with only two sons, who are already almost grown up. Isn’t he exactly the husband my sister needs?”

“She’s been mooning about and wasting her time these last few weeks,” Uncle Lucho commented, also pleased at this new development. “She didn’t want to go out with anybody and was living the life of an old maid. But the endocrinologist has taken her fancy.”

I felt such pangs of jealousy that I lost my appetite, and sat there in a foul, bitter mood. It seemed to me that my aunt and uncle, on seeing how upset I was, would surely guess why I was in such a state. There was no need for me to fish for more details about Aunt Julia and Dr. Osores because that was all they talked about. She’d met him some ten days before, at a cocktail party at the Bolivian embassy, and on learning where she was staying, Dr. Osores had come by to visit her. He had sent her flowers, phoned her, invited her to have tea with him at the Bolívar and now to lunch with him at the Club de la Unión. The endocrinologist had said jokingly to Uncle Lucho: “Your sister-in-law is super, Luis. Isn’t it possible that she’s the candidate I’ve been looking for so as to commit matri-suicide a second time?”

I tried my best to appear totally disinterested in the subject, but I did a very bad job of concealing how distraught I was, and Uncle Lucho asked me, at one point when the two of us were alone, what was troubling me: had I gone poking around in places I shouldn’t have and caught myself a good dose of the clap? Luckily, Aunt Olga began talking about the radio serials, and that gave me a breathing spell. As she went on to say that Pedro Camacho sometimes laid it on too thick and that all her friends thought he’d gone too far with his story of the minister who “wounded himself” with a letter opener in front of the judge to prove that he hadn’t raped a thirteen-year-old girl, I silently went from rage to disillusionment and from disillusionment to rage. Why hadn’t Aunt Julia said a single word to me about the doctor? We’d seen each other several times during the last ten days and she’d never once mentioned him. Could it really be true, as Aunt Olga claimed, that she’d finally “gotten interested” in someone?

In the jitney, as I was going back to Radio Panamericana, my mood suddenly shifted from humiliation to pride. Our innocent love affair had lasted a long time, after all; we were bound to be found out at any moment now, and that would provoke scandal and unkind laughter in the family. Moreover, what was I doing, wasting my time with a woman who, as she herself said, was almost old enough to be my mother? As an experience, what we’d already had together was quite enough. Osores’s appearance on the scene was providential; it saved me the trouble of having to get rid of her. I felt restless and upset, full of unusual impulses such as wanting to get drunk or punch somebody in the nose, and on arriving back at the radio station I had a run-in with Pascual, who, faithful to his nature, had devoted half the three o’clock news bulletin to a fire in Hamburg that had burned a dozen Turkish immigrants to death. I told him that in the future he was strictly forbidden to include any news item about dead people in the bulletins without getting my okay first, and I was curt and unfriendly to a pal from San Marcos who called me up to remind me that Law School still existed and to warn me that there was an exam in criminal law awaiting me the next day. Almost the moment I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Aunt Julia.

“I stood you up for an endocrinologist, Varguitas. I presume you missed me,” she said, cool as a cucumber. “You’re not angry?”

“Angry? Why should I be?” I replied. “Aren’t you free to do as you please?”

“Ah, so you
are
angry,” I heard her say in a more serious tone of voice. “Don’t be an idiot. When can we see each other, so that I can explain?”

“I can’t see you today,” I replied curtly. “I’ll phone you later.”

I hung up, more furious with myself than with her, and feeling that I’d made a fool of myself. Pascual and Big Pablito were looking at me in amusement, and the lover of catastrophes subtly got back at me for having bawled him out. “Well, well, our Don Mario is certainly high-handed with the ladies, I must say.”

“He’s right to treat ’em that way,” Big Pablito said, backing me up. “There’s nothing that pleases ’em as much as being kept on a tight leash.”

I told my two editors to go to hell, wrote up the four o’clock bulletin, and went to see Pedro Camacho. He was recording a script and I waited for him in his cubicle, idly leafing through the papers on his desk without understanding what I was reading because my mind was entirely occupied with the question of whether the phone conversation I’d just had with Aunt Julia meant that we’d broken up. In the space of just a few seconds I went from hating her with all my heart to missing her with all my soul.

“Come with me to buy some poison,” Pedro Camacho said in a somber voice from the doorway, shaking his lion’s mane. “We’ll have time to go have something to drink afterwards.”

As we wandered up and down the side streets off the Jirón de la Unión hunting for the poison, the artist explained that the mice at La Tapada rooming house had become intolerable.

“If they were content simply to scamper around underneath my bed, I wouldn’t mind, they’re not children, and as far as animals are concerned, I don’t have any phobias,” he said a few moments later as he sniffed with his prominent nose at some yellow powder that according to the shopkeeper could kill a cow. “But those mustached critters eat my food; every night they nibble on the provisions I leave on the windowsill to keep cool. There’s no way round it—I’m obliged to exterminate them.”

He haggled over the price of the poison, with arguments that left the shopkeeper nonplussed, paid for it, had them wrap up the little envelopes full of yellow powder, and the two of us went to a café on La Colmena. He ordered his usual herb concoction and I ordered coffee.

“I’ve got love troubles, my friend Camacho,” I said to him straight out, surprised at hearing myself use a soap-opera cliché but it seemed to me that by speaking in this way I distanced myself from my own story and at the same time managed to vent my feelings. “The woman I love is cheating on me with another man.”

He gave me a searching look, his little pop-eyes colder and more humorless than ever. His black suit had been washed, ironed, and worn so threadbare that it was as shiny as an onion peel.

“In these countries whose manners and morals have become so vulgar and plebeian, dueling has become a crime punished by imprisonment,” he reminded me, very seriously, making jerky motions with his hands. “As for suicide, it’s a gesture no one appreciates nowadays. A person kills himself, and rather than remorse, cold shivers, admiration, it’s laughter that he provokes. The best thing is practical recipes, my friend.”

I was happy that I had taken him into my confidence. I knew very well that, inasmuch as no one outside himself existed for Pedro Camacho, my problem was the farthest thing from his mind; it had simply been a device to set his mechanism for churning out systematic theories in motion. Hearing the one he’d come up with would console me more (and have lesser consequences) than going out and getting drunk.

After giving me a faint smile, Pedro Camacho spelled out his recipe in detail. “A hard, cutting, lapidary letter to the adulteress,” he said to me, wielding his adjectives with aplomb. “A letter that will make her feel like a miserable snake in the grass, a filthy hyena. Proving to her that you’re not stupid, that you know how she’s betrayed you, a letter dripping with contempt, that will show her what it means to be an adulteress.” He fell silent, thought for a moment, and then, in a slightly different tone of voice, offered me the greatest proof of his friendship that I could possibly expect from him: “If you like, I’ll write it for you.”

I thanked him effusively, but said that, knowing as I did what long hours he put in working like a galley slave, I could never accept burdening him with my personal affairs in addition. (I later regretted having had such scruples, which kept me from having a holograph text of the scriptwriter’s.)

“As for the seducer,” Pedro Camacho went on immediately, with an evil gleam in his eye, “the best thing is an anonymous letter, with all the necessary malicious slander. Why should the victim sit with folded hands as he’s being cuckolded? Why should he allow the adulterous couple to take their pleasure and fornicate in peace? It’s necessary to ruin their love, to hit them where it hurts, to poison them with doubts. Let them begin to mistrust each other, to be suspicious of each other, to hate each other. Isn’t vengeance sweet?”

I hinted that perhaps it was not gentlemanly to resort to anonymous letters, but he reassured me immediately: one should behave like a gentleman when dealing with gentlemen and like a bastard when dealing with bastards. This was “honor rightly understood”: all the rest of it was errant nonsense.

“With the letter to her and the anonymous letters to him, the lovers get the punishment they deserve,” I said. “But what about my problem? Who’s going to relieve me of my resentment, my frustration, my heartache?”

“There’s nothing like milk of magnesia for all that,” he replied, but I was feeling too depressed even to laugh. “I know,” he went on, “that strikes you as far too materialistic an answer. But, believe me, I’ve had a great deal of experience in life. Most of the time, so-called heartaches et cetera are simply indigestion—tough beans that won’t dissolve in the stomach, fish that’s not as fresh as it should be, constipation. A good laxative blasts the folly of love to bits.”

There was no doubt this time, he was a subtle humorist, he was making fun of me the way he made fun of his listeners, he didn’t believe one word of what he was saying, he was practicing the aristocratic sport of proving to himself that we mortals were hopeless imbeciles.

“Have you had a great many love affairs, an extremely rich love life?” I asked him.

“Yes, extremely rich,” he avowed, looking me straight in the eye over the cup of verbena-and-mint-tea he had raised to his lips. “But I have never loved a flesh-and-blood woman.”

He paused dramatically, as though he were sizing up exactly how innocent or stupid I was. “Do you think it would be possible to do what I do if women sapped my energy?” he said reprovingly, with disgust in his voice. “Do you think that it’s possible to produce offspring and stories at the same time? That one can invent, imagine, if one lives under the threat of syphilis? Women and art are mutually exclusive, my friend. In every vagina an artist is buried. What pleasure is there in reproducing? Isn’t that what dogs, spiders, cats do? We must be original, my friend.”

Before the last word had died away, he suddenly leapt to his feet, announcing that he had just time enough to get back to the studio for the five o’clock serial. I was disappointed; I would willingly have spent the rest of the afternoon listening to him, and I had the impression that I had inadvertently touched a sore point of his personality.

When I got back to my office at Panamericana, Aunt Julia was there waiting for me. Seated at my desk like a queen, she was receiving the homage of Pascual and Big Pablito, who were bustling about solicitously, showing her the bulletins and explaining to her how the News Department functioned. She was smiling and seemed not to have a care in the world; but as I walked into the room a serious look came over her face and she paled slightly.

“Well, what a surprise,” I said, just to say something.

But Aunt Julia was in no mood for polite chitchat. “I came to tell you that nobody hangs up on me,” she said in a resolute voice. “Much less a brat like you. Would you kindly explain what’s gotten into you?”

Pascual and Big Pablito just stood there, turning their heads to look at her and then at me and vice versa, bursting with curiosity as to how this dramatic scene just beginning would end. When I asked them to leave us alone for a moment, they were furious, but didn’t dare to refuse. They left the room exchanging dark looks with Aunt Julia to show where their sympathies lay.