Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

  “Hello, Papa,” I said as I stood in the doorway, trying my best to speak in a firm voice.

  “Tell me what it is you’ve come to tell me,” he said, in a tone of voice more neutral than wrathful, pointing to a chair.

  I sat down on the edge of it and took a deep breath, like an athlete about to perform. “I’ve come to tell you what I’m doing, what I’m going to do,” I stammered.

  He sat there without saying a word, waiting for me to go on. Then, speaking very slowly so as to appear calm and collected, and carefully watching his every reaction, I gave him a detailed account of all the jobs I’d found, how much I earned from each, how I had divided my time so as to fit them all in and do my homework and prepare for my exams at the university besides. I didn’t tell any lies, but I presented everything in the most favorable light possible: I’d organized my life in an intelligent, responsible way and was anxious to get my degree. After I finished, my father remained silent, waiting for me to sum up what I’d had to say.

  Swallowing hard, I did so. “So you see that I can earn my living, support myself, and go on with my studies.” And then, hearing my voice trailing off till it was barely audible: “I’ve come to ask your permission to send for Julia. We’re married and she can’t go on living by herself.”

  He blinked, turned paler still, and for a moment I thought he was going to have one of those fits of rage that had been the nightmare of my childhood. But all he said to me, curtly and coldly, was: “As you know, this marriage isn’t legal. Being a minor, you can’t get married without your parents’ permission. So if you’ve married, you’ve been able to do so only by presenting a fake document authorizing you to do so or by tampering with your birth certificate. In either case, the marriage can easily be annulled.”

  He explained that the falsification of a legal document was a serious offense, punishable by law. If anyone had to pay the penalty for the mischief done, it wouldn’t be me, a minor, for the judges would presume me to be the innocent accomplice, but the person who was of legal age, who would logically be considered the real perpetrator. After this legal explanation, proffered in an icy tone of voice, he went on talking for a long time, little by little allowing his emotion to show through. I thought that he hated me, when the truth was that he had always acted only for my own good; if he had sometimes been severe with me, his one aim had been to correct my faults and prepare me for the future. My rebellion and my defiance would be the ruin of me. By getting married, I had put the noose around my own neck. He had been opposed to it because he was thinking of my own good and not, as I believed, because he wished to do me harm, for what sort of a father was it who didn’t love his son? Furthermore, he realized that I’d fallen in love, there was nothing wrong with that; after all, it proved I was a man. It would have been far worse, for example, if I’d turned out to be a fairy. But getting married at the age of eighteen, when I was still a kid, a student, to a mature woman and a divorcée to boot, was utter madness, the real consequences of which I would realize only later on in my life, when, because of this marriage, I’d become a wretched, embittered man who’d gotten nowhere in life. That wasn’t what he wanted for me at all, his one wish for me was the best and most illustrious life possible. In a word, I should try at the very least not to give up my studies, because I’d always regret it. He stood up and I too rose to my feet. An uncomfortable silence ensued, punctuated by the clattering of the typewriters in the other room. Stammering, I promised to get my university degree, and he nodded approvingly. As we said goodbye, after a second’s hesitation we put our arms around each other.

  I went from his office to the central post office and sent a telegram: “Amnesty granted you by Papa. Will send return ticket soonest. Love.” I spent that afternoon at the historian’s, at the rooftop shack at Panamericana, at the cemetery, racking my brains as to how I could rake up enough money for the ticket. That night I made a list of people I could ask for a loan, and how much I could ask each of them for. But the next day a telegraphed reply was delivered to me at my grandparents’: “Arriving tomorrow LAN flight. Love.” I learned later that Aunt Julia had gotten the money to pay for her ticket by selling her rings, her brooches, her bracelets, her earrings, and nearly all of her clothes. So when I went to meet her at Limatambo airport on Thursday night, she was a woman without a cent to her name.

  I took her directly to the little apartment, which had been personally waxed and polished by Cousin Nancy, who had also decorated it with a red rose, accompanied by a note that said “Welcome.” Aunt Julia looked the entire apartment over as though it were a new toy. She was amused to see the index cards for the cemetery all neatly filed, my notes for the Cultura Peruana article, the list of writers to be interviewed for El Comercio, and the work schedule and the budget I’d drawn up, theoretically proving that we would have enough money to live on. I told her that after making love to her I’d read her a story entitled “The Blessed One and Father Nicolás” so she could help me decide on the right ending.

  “Well, Varguitas,” she said, laughing, as she hastily undressed. “You’re growing up. And now, so that everything will be perfect and you’ll get rid of that baby face of yours, promise me you’ll let your mustache grow.”

  Twenty.

  The marriage to Aunt Julia was really a success and it lasted a good bit longer than all the parents and even she herself had feared, wished, or predicted: eight years. In that time, thanks to my persistence and her help and enthusiasm, plus a fair amount of good luck, other predictions (dreams, desires) had come true. We had managed to go to Paris and live in the famous garret, and for better or for worse I had become a writer and published several books. I never completed my law studies, but in order to make it up to my family in some way and earn a living more easily, I got myself a university degree, in an academic perversion as boring as law: Romance philology.

  When Aunt Julia and I were divorced, copious tears were shed in my vast family, because everyone (beginning, naturally, with my mother and father) adored her. And when, a year later, I married again, a cousin of mine this time (the daughter of Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho, by some odd coincidence), it created less of an uproar within the family than the first time (it consisted for the most part of a great flurry of gossip). This time, however, there was a perfectly planned conspiracy to force me to marry in the Church, in which even the archbishop of Lima was involved (he was, it goes without saying, a relative of ours), who hastened to sign the dispensations authorizing the union. But by that time the family was already panic-proof and could predict (which is tantamount to saying forgave beforehand) my blackest misdeeds.

  I had lived with Aunt Julia in Spain for a year and in France for five, and later I went on living with my cousin Patricia in Europe, in London first and then in Barcelona. In those days I had an arrangement with a magazine in Lima: I sent it articles and in return received a plane ticket that allowed me to come back to Peru every year for a few weeks. These trips, thanks to which I saw my family and friends, were very important to me. I was planning to go on living in Europe indefinitely, for a great many reasons, but above all because I had always been able to find work there—as a journalist, translator, lecturer, or professor—that left me free time. When we arrived in Madrid the first time, I’d said to Aunt Julia: “I’m going to try to be a writer; I’m not going to accept anything but jobs that won’t take me too far afield from literature.” “Shall I cut a slit in my skirt, put on a turban, and go hustle clients on the Gran Vía starting today?” she said. But I was really very lucky. Teaching Spanish at the Berlitz School in Paris, writing news bulletins at France-Presse, translating for UNESCO, dubbing films in the studios at Gennevilliers, or preparing programs for the French national radio-television network, I had always found jobs that brought in enough to live on yet allowed me to devote at least half of each day exclusively to my writing. The problem was that everything I wrote had to do with life in Peru. As time and distance began to blur my perspective, I felt more and m
ore insecure about my writing (at the time I was obsessed with the idea that fiction should be “realistic”). But I found the very thought of living in Lima inconceivable. When I remembered the seven simultaneous jobs I’d held there, which together had earned me barely enough to feed us, left me scarcely any time to read, and given me no opportunity to write except on the sly in the few slack moments during my work day or at night when I was already dead tired, my hair stood on end and I vowed to myself I’d never live that way again, even if it meant dying of starvation. Moreover, Peru had always seemed to me a country of sad people.

  Hence the agreement I had, first with the daily Expreso and then with the magazine Caretas, to write articles in exchange for two plane tickets a year, was a real stroke of luck. That month that Patricia and I spent in Peru each year, usually in winter (July or August), enabled me to steep myself in the atmosphere, the landscapes, the lives of the people that I had been trying to write about in the previous eleven months. It was tremendously useful to me (I don’t know if this was true in purely material terms, but certainly it was true psychologically), a kind of “energy injection,” to hear Peruvian spoken again, to hear all round me those turns of phrase, expressions, intonations that put me back in the midst of a milieu I felt viscerally close to but had nonetheless moved far away from, thus missing out each year on the innovations, losing overtones, resonances, keys.

  My visits to Lima were, thus, vacations during which I literally didn’t rest for a second and from which I returned to Europe exhausted. Just between the countless relatives of my vast forest of a family and my numerous friends, we had invitations to lunch and dinner every single day, and the remainder of my time was occupied doing background research for my writing. One year, for instance, I’d taken a trip to the Alto Marañón area to see, hear, and smell from close up a world that was the scene of the novel I was writing, and another year, accompanied by diligent friends, I had systematically explored the nocturnal haunts—cabarets, bars, brothels—that were the locales of the dissipated life led by the protagonist of another story. Mixing work and pleasure—since I never considered this “research” a duty but, rather, a task that always enriched my life and was a most enjoyable diversion in itself, above and beyond the literary benefits that I might gain from it—I did things on these trips that in earlier days, when I lived in Lima, I had never done, and that now that I’ve returned to Peru to live I never do either: going to little popular clubs and to theaters to see indigenous folk dances, wandering about the tenements of slum districts, strolling through sections of town that I was not very familiar with or didn’t know at all, such as El Callao, Bajo el Puente, and Los Barrios Altos, betting at the racetrack, nosing about in the catacombs of colonial churches and the (supposed) house of La Perricholi.

  That year, however, I devoted my time to more bookish research. I was writing a novel that took place in the era of General Manuel Apolinario Odría (1948–56), and during my month’s vacation in Lima I went to the periodicals section of the Biblioteca Nacional a couple of mornings each week, to leaf through newspapers and magazines from those years and even read, somewhat masochistically, some of the speeches the dictator’s advisors (all lawyers, to judge from the forensic rhetoric) wrote for him. On leaving the Biblioteca Nacional around noon I would walk down the Avenida Abancay, which was beginning to turn into an enormous market of itinerant peddlers. On the sidewalks a dense crowd of men and women, many of them dressed in ponchos and peasant skirts, sold the most heterogeneous collection of wares imaginable, everything from needles and hairpins to dresses and suits, laid out on blankets or newspapers spread out on the ground or at stands knocked together out of wooden crates, oil drums, and canvas awnings, plus all sorts of things to eat, of course, prepared right there on the spot in little braziers. This Avenida Abancay was one of the thoroughfares in Lima that had changed the most. Jam-packed now and possessed of a distinct Andean flavor, a street on which it was not rare to hear Quechua spoken amid the strong odor of fried food and pungent seasonings, it in no way resembled the broad, austere avenue frequented by white-collar workers and an occasional beggar down which, ten years before, when I was a first-year student at the university, I used to walk on my way to that same Biblioteca Nacional. There in those blocks, one could see, and touch, in a nutshell, the problem of the migration from the countryside to the capital, which in that decade had doubled the population of Lima and caused to spring up like mushrooms, on the hillsides, the dunes, the garbage dumps, that ring of slums where thousands and thousands of people ended up, rural folk who had left the provinces because of the drought, the back-breaking working conditions, the lack of prospects for a better future, hunger.

  Getting to know this new face of the city, I walked down the Avenida Abancay toward the Parque Universitario and what had previously been San Marcos (the various faculties had been moved to the outskirts of Lima and the building where I had studied humanities and law was now occupied by a museum and offices). I was visiting the place not just out of curiosity and a certain nostalgia but also for literary reasons, since, in the novel I was working on, a number of episodes took place in the Parque Universitario, in the main classroom building of San Marcos, and in the secondhand bookstores, the billiard parlors, and the filthy café-bars of the neighboring streets. As a matter of fact, I was standing in front of the pretty Chapel of Illustrious National Heroes that morning, gawking like a tourist at the peddlers in the vicinity—bootblacks, vendors hawking pastries, ice cream, sandwiches—when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was—twelve years older, but the same as ever—Big Pablito.

  We gave each other a big bear hug. He really hadn’t changed at all: he was the same sturdily built, smiling mestizo with the asthmatic wheeze, who barely lifted his feet off the ground as he walked and thus seemed to skate through life. He didn’t have a single gray hair, despite the fact that he must have been close to sixty by then, and his straight hair was carefully slicked down with quantities of brilliantine, like an Argentine of the 1940’s. But he was much better dressed than when he was (theoretically) a newsman at Radio Panamericana: a green plaid suit, a loud tie (it was the first time I’d ever seen him wearing one), and brightly polished shoes. And on his index finger was a gold ring with an Inca design. I was so pleased to see him that I suggested we go have a cup of coffee together. He agreed and we ended up at a table in the Palermo, a little combination bar-and-grill also linked in my memory to my years at the university. I told him I wouldn’t ask him how life had treated him since one look at him sufficed to show that it had treated him very well.

  Glancing down at the gold ring on his finger, he smiled complacently. “I can’t complain,” he admitted. “After all the hard times I went through, my luck changed in my old age. But first, let me buy you a glass of beer, just because I’m so glad to see you.” He called the waiter over, ordered us Pilseners, good and cold, and gave a hearty laugh, which brought on one of his traditional fits of asthmatic wheezing and gasping. “They say that once a man gets married he’s a goner. Well, it was exactly the opposite with me.”

  As we drank our beer, Big Pablito, with pauses forced on him by his bronchia, told me that when television arrived in Peru, the Genaros had made him a doorman, with a maroon uniform and a kepi, at the studios they had built on the Avenida Arequipa for Channel 5.

  “From a newsman to a doorman—it sounds like I was demoted,” he said with a shrug. “And I’ll admit it was a demotion, as far as titles are concerned. But I ask you, can you eat a title? They raised my salary—that’s what really counts.”

  Being a doorman wasn’t killing work: announcing visitors, telling them where the various departments were located, making the spectators waiting to attend broadcasts form orderly lines. The rest of his time he spent discussing soccer with the policeman stationed on the corner. But then, in addition—and he clacked his tongue, savoring a pleasant memory—after a few months, one of his duties was to go every noon to buy those pasties filled with meat and che
ese that they make at the Berisso, a place on Arenales, a block away from Channel 5. The Genaros were crazy about them, and so were the office clerks, the actors, the announcers, the producers, to whom Big Pablito also brought back empanadas, and earned good tips for doing so. It was on these trips back and forth between the television station and the Berisso (his uniform had earned him the nickname of the Fireman among the kids of the neighborhood) that Big Pablito had struck up an acquaintance with his future wife. She was the woman who made these delicious, crusty delicacies: the cook at the Berisso.

  “She was impressed by my uniform and my general’s kepi. She took one look at me and fell at my feet.” Big Pablito laughed, choked, drank a sip of his beer, choked and wheezed some more, and went on. “A gorgeous brunette. Twenty years younger than yours truly. A pair of tits so firm a bullet wouldn’t pierce them. Like I’m telling you, Don Mario, a real eyeful.”

  He’d begun by striking up a conversation with her and dishing out compliments, she’d laughed, and they’d started going out together, just like that. They’d fallen in love and had a romance straight out of a movie. The brunette had energy to spare, was filled with ambition, and had her head chockful of plans. She was the one who’d decided they should open a restaurant. And when Big Pablito asked “What’ll we use for money?” she had said: what they’d both have coming when they left their jobs. And though it seemed utter madness to him to trade certainty for uncertainty, she’d had her way. The severance pay the two of them received was enough to buy a tiny little place on the Jirón Paruro, and they had had to ask everybody they knew to lend them money to buy tables and kitchen equipment, and Big Pablito himself had painted the walls and the name of the place over the door: The Royal Peacock. The first year they’d barely made enough to live on and had worked like slaves. They’d get up at the crack of dawn to go to La Parada, the wholesale market, to buy the best ingredients and pay the lowest prices, and they did everything themselves: she cooked and he waited on table and acted as cashier, and the two of them swept and cleaned up. They slept on mattresses they laid out each night between the tables after they closed up. But from the second year on, they drew more and more customers. So many that they’d had to take on a boy to help in the kitchen and another to wait on table, and after a while they were even obliged to turn clients away because there was no more room. And then the brunette had had the idea of renting the place next door, which was three times as big. They’d done so and hadn’t regretted it. They’d even put tables on the second floor now, and had a little place of their own to live in across the street from The Royal Peacock. Seeing as how they got along so well together, they got married.