Nancy, too, was worried about my father’s reaction. “Don’t even consider going to see him till he gets over his terrible fit of temper,” she warned me. “He’s so furious he might very well kill you.”
I asked her about the little apartment she’d rented for us, and once again her sense of practicality amazed me. She’d spoken with the owner that very morning. There were things that had to be fixed in the bathroom, a door had to be replaced and painted, and therefore it was going to be at least ten days before we could move in. My heart sank when I heard this. As I was walking back to my grandparents’, I wondered where in the world we’d be able to find a roof over our heads for those two weeks.
I arrived at my grandparents’ house without having solved the problem, and found my mother waiting there for me in the living room. When she caught sight of me, she burst into a spectacular flood of tears. She gave me a tremendous hug, and as she stroked my eyes, my cheeks, and ran her fingers through my hair, half choking with sobs, she kept repeating with infinite pity in her voice: “My baby, my little darling, my treasure, what have they done to you, what has that woman done to you?” I hadn’t seen her for nearly a year, and though her face was swollen with weeping, I found her prettier and younger-looking than ever. I did my very best to calm her, assuring her that they hadn’t done anything to me, that I was the one who had decided, entirely on my own, that I wanted to get married. Every time the name of her brand-new daughter-in-law came up in the conversation, she burst into tears all over again; she fell into fits of rage in which she referred to Julia as “that old lady,” “that brazen hussy,” “that divorcée.” All at once, in the middle of this scene, I realized something that had never crossed my mind before: it wasn’t so much what people would say but religion that was making her feel so heartbroken. She was a fervent Catholic and it wasn’t the fact that Aunt Julia was older than I was that was upsetting her so much as the fact that she was divorced—in other words, forbidden to remarry within the Church.
With the help of my grandparents, I finally managed to quiet her down. The two oldsters were a model of tact, kindness, and discretion. Grandfather merely said to me, as he gave me his usual brusque kiss on the forehead: “Well, poet, you’ve finally turned up again, have you? You had us worried.” And my granny, after hugging and kissing me repeatedly, said in my ear in a half whisper so my mother wouldn’t hear, with a sort of mischievous complicity: “And what about Julita—is she all right?”
After taking a long shower and changing my clothes—I felt liberated on getting rid of the ones I’d had on for four days—I was able to have a talk with my mother. She’d stopped crying and was having a cup of tea made for her by my granny, who was sitting on the arm of my mother’s chair, caressing her as though she were a little girl. I tried to get a smile out of my mother with a joke that didn’t sit well with her at all (“But, Mama, you should be happy, I’ve married a great friend of yours”), but then I struck more sensitive chords by swearing to her that I wouldn’t give up my studies, that I’d go on and get my law degree, that I might even change my mind about the Peruvian diplomatic service (“the ones that aren’t idiots are pederasts, Mama”) and become a foreign officer, the dream of her life. She gradually softened up, and though she still looked grief-stricken, she asked me about the university, my grades, my work at the radio station, and scolded me for being such an ungrateful son that I hardly ever wrote to her. She told me that my marriage had come as a terrible blow to my father: he, too, had great ambitions for me, and that was why he was bent on keeping “that woman” from ruining my life. He’d consulted lawyers, the marriage wasn’t valid, he’d have it annulled, and might bring charges against Aunt Julia for corrupting the morals of a minor. My father was so enraged that for the moment he didn’t want to see me, to prevent “something terrible” from happening, and was demanding that Aunt Julia leave the country immediately or suffer the consequences.
I replied that Aunt Julia and I had been married precisely in order not to be separated and that it was going to be very difficult to force my wife to leave the country two days after the wedding. But my mother didn’t want to discuss the subject. “You know your papa, you know what a terrible temper he has, you’ll have to do what he wants, because if you don’t…” and a terror-stricken look came into her eyes. I finally told her that I was going to be late for work, that we’d talk some more later, and before I left, I tried again to set her mind at ease about my future, assuring her that I’d go on and get my law degree.
As I headed back downtown in a jitney, I had a gloomy presentiment: what if I found somebody sitting at my desk when I got to the office? I’d been gone for three days, and in the last few weeks, because of all the frustrating running around I’d had to do trying to arrange for us to be married, I hadn’t once looked over the news bulletins before they went on the air, and Pascual and Big Pablito must have done all sorts of horrendous things in them. I thought soberly of what would happen if, on top of all the personal complications of the moment, I were to lose my job as well, and began to think up arguments that would arouse the sympathies of Genaro Jr. and Genaro Sr. But on entering the Panamericana building, with my heart in my shoes, to my tremendous surprise the dynamic impresario, whom I happened to meet in the elevator, greeted me as though we’d seen each other only ten minutes before. He had a serious look on his face.
“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 im
mediately. 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.