Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (18 page)

We saw him hesitate; he fell silent and a sad look came over his little cartoon-character face. “Unfortunately I can’t put it into practice here,” he said dejectedly. “Only on Sundays, when I’m alone. There are too many busybodies around on weekdays, and they wouldn’t understand.”

Since when had he, who looked upon mortals with Olympian detachment, had such scruples? I noted that Aunt Julia, too, was hanging on his every word. “You can’t leave us in suspense like this,” she said pleadingly. “What is this secret you’ve discovered, Señor Camacho?”

He observed us for some time, in silence, like the conjurer who contemplates, with evident satisfaction, the attention that he has contrived to arouse. Then, with sacerdotal slowness, he rose to his feet (he had been sitting on the windowsill, next to the Primus stove), went over to his suitcase, opened it, and began to pull out of the depths of it, like a prestidigitator pulling rabbits or flags out of a top hat, an incredible collection of objects: an English magistrate’s court wig, false mustaches of various sizes, a fireman’s hat, military badges, masks of a fat woman, an old man, an idiot child, a traffic policeman’s stick, a sea dog’s cap and pipe, a surgeon’s white smock, false ears and noses, cotton beards… Like a little electric robot, he showed us these props, and—the better to demonstrate their effect to us? out of some intimate inner need?—he began putting them on and taking them off, with an agility that betrayed a long-standing habit, constant practice. As Aunt Julia and I watch in openmouthed amazement, by changing props and costumes Pedro Camacho transformed himself, before our very eyes, into a doctor, a sailor, a judge, an old lady, a beggar, a bigot, a cardinal… And all during this series of lightning-quick changes he kept talking, in a fervent tone of voice.

“And why shouldn’t I have the right to become one with characters of my own creation, to resemble them? Who is there to stop me from having their noses, their hair, their frock coats as I describe them?” he said, exchanging a biretta for a meerschaum, the meerschaum for a duster, and the duster for a crutch. What does it matter to anyone if I lubricate my imagination with a few bits of cloth? What is realism, ladies and gentlemen—that famous realism we hear so much about? What better way is there of creating realistic art than by materially identifying oneself with reality? And doesn’t the day’s work thereby become more tolerable, more pleasant, more varied, more dynamic?”

But naturally—and his voice became first furious, then disconsolate—through stupidity and lack of understanding, people were bound to get the wrong idea. If he were seen at Radio Central wearing disguises as he wrote, tongues would immediately begin to wag, the rumor would spread that he was a transvestite, his office would become a magnet attracting the morbid curiosity of the vulgar. He finished putting away the masks and other objects, closed the valise, and returned to the windowsill. He was in a melancholy mood now. He murmured that in Bolivia, where he always worked in his own atelier, he’d never had any problem “with his props and his bits of cloth.” Here, however, it was only on Sundays that he could write in the way that had long been his habit.

“Do you acquire disguises to fit your characters, or do you invent your characters on the basis of disguises you already have?” I asked, just to be saying something, still overcome with astonishment.

He looked at me as though I were a newborn babe.

“It’s plain from your question that you’re still very young,” he chided me gently. “Don’t you know that in the beginning is the Word—always?”

When, after thanking him effusively for his invitation, we went back down to the street, I said to Aunt Julia that Pedro Camacho had given us an exceptional proof of his confidence by letting us in on his secret, and that I’d been touched by his doing so. She was happy: she’d never imagined that intellectuals could be such amusing characters.

“Well, they’re not all like that.” I laughed. “Pedro Camacho is an ‘intellectual’ in quotation marks. Did you notice that there wasn’t a single book in his room? He once explained to me that he doesn’t read, because other writers might influence his style.”

Holding hands, we walked back through the silent downtown streets to the jitney stop and I told her that some Sunday I’d come down to Radio Central by myself just to see the scriptwriter become one with his creatures by way of his disguises.

“He lives like a beggar—there’s no justice,” Aunt Julia expostulated. “Since his serials are so famous, I thought he must earn piles of money.”

She couldn’t help remembering that she hadn’t seen a bathtub or a shower in the La Tapada rooming house, just a toilet and a washstand green with mold on the first landing. Did I think Pedro Camacho never bathed? I told her that the scriptwriter couldn’t care less about such trivial details. She confessed to me that it had turned her stomach when she’d seen how filthy the
pensión
was, that she’d had to make a superhuman effort to get the sausage and the egg down.

Once we’d gotten in the jitney, an old rattletrap that kept stopping at every corner all along the Avenida Arequipa, as I was slowly kissing her on the ear, in the neck, I heard her say in alarm: “In other words, if you’re a writer you’re poverty-stricken. That means you’re going to be down-and-out all your life, Varguitas.”

Ever since she’d heard Javier calling me that, she too now addressed me as Varguitas.

Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui
looked at his watch, saw that it was noon, told the half-dozen employees of Rodent Exterminators, Inc., that they could go out to lunch, and did not remind them to be back by three on the dot, not one minute later, since all of them knew full well that, in this company, lack of punctuality was sacrilege: those who were late were fined or even fired on the spot. Once they had left, Don Federico, as was his habit, double-locked the office himself, put on his mouse-gray hat, and headed down the crowded sidewalks of the Jirón Huancavelica to the parking lot where he kept his car (a Dodge sedan).

He was a man who aroused fear and dismal thoughts in the minds of others; a person had only to see him passing by on the street to note immediately that he was different from his fellows. He was in the prime of life, his fifties, and his distinguishing traits—a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—might have made him a Don Juan had he been interested in women. But Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui had devoted his entire existence to a crusade and allowed nothing and no one—with the exception of those hours that had necessarily to be set aside for sleeping, eating, and family life—to distract him from it. He had been waging this war for forty years now, his ultimate goal being the extermination of every last rodent in the land.

His acquaintances and even his wife and their four children did not know the reason behind this chimerical campaign. Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui kept it a secret but never forgot it: it haunted his memory day and night, a persistent nightmare from which he drew new strength, renewed hatred enabling him to persevere in this combat that some people considered preposterous, others repellent, and the rest commercial. At this very moment, as he entered the parking lot, checked with the eye of a condor whether the Dodge had been washed, started it, and waited precisely two minutes by his watch for the engine to warm up, his thoughts, moths hovering about flames in which they would burn their wings, went back yet again in time and space to the remote village of his childhood and the terror that had forged his destiny.

It had happened in the first decade of the century, when Tingo María was just a tiny dot on the map, a few cabins in a clearing surrounded by dense jungle. Adventurers abandoning the soft life of the capital with the dream of conquering virgin forest ended up there from time to time, after countless hardships. That was how the engineer Hildebrando Téllez had happened to come to the region, along with his young wife (in whose veins, as her name, Mayte, and surname, Unzátegui, proclaimed, Basque blood flowed) and their young son: Federico. The engineer had grandiose plans: cutting down trees, exporting precious woods for building mansions and making furniture for the affluent, growing pineapples, avocados, watermelon, custard apples, and eggfruit for the world’s exotic palates, and in time, steamboat service up and down the rivers of the Amazon basin. But the gods and men reduced these fires to ashes. Natural catastrophes—rains, plagues, floods—and human limitationsthe shortage of workers, the indolence and stupidity of the few he did have, alcohol, the scarcity of credit—wiped out all the pioneer’s vast projects, one after the other, so that, two years after his arrival in Tingo María, he was obliged to earn his living in a very modest, humble way, by growing sweet potatoes on a small farm up the Pendencia River. It was there, in a cabin built of logs and palm fronds, that on a stifling hot night rats ate alive María Téllez Unzátegui, the couple’s newborn daughter, as she lay in her crib without a mosquito netting.

The way the tragedy happened was both simple and horrible. The father and the mother were to stand as godparents at a baptism and would be spending the night on the other side of the river, attending the usual festivities in honor of such an occasion. They had left the farm in charge of the foreman, who lived, along with the two farmhands, in a lean-to a long distance away from the boss’s cabin. The cabin was where Federico and his sister were to sleep. But when the weather was very hot, the little boy would often take his straw pallet down to the banks of the Pendencia, where the sound of the water lulled him to sleep. That was what he had done that night (and all the rest of his life was to reproach himself for having done so). He bathed himself in the river in the moonlight, lay down on his pallet, and fell asleep. In his dreams he seemed to hear a baby crying. But the sound was not loud enough or did not last a long enough time to awaken him. At dawn he felt sharp little teeth biting his foot. He opened his eyes and thought he would die, or rather, that he had died and was in Hell: he was surrounded by dozens of rats, writhing, twisting, stumbling over each other, jostling each other, and above all devouring everything within their reach. He leapt up from the pallet, grabbed a stick, and managed to alert the foreman and the farmhands by shouting at the top of his lungs. Among all of them, they were able to drive the colony of invaders off with torches, clubs, kicks. But when they entered the cabin all that was left of the baby (the piece de résistance of the famished rodents’ feast) was a little pile of bones.

The two minutes were up and Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui started off. In a serpentine of cars, he slowly made his way along the Avenida Tacna, intending to head off down Wilson and Arequipa to the Barranco district, where lunch was waiting for him. As he stopped for the red lights, he closed his eyes and felt, as he always did whenever he remembered that terrifying dawn, a burning, effervescent sensation, like acid bubbling inside him. Because, as folk wisdom has it, “misfortunes never come one at a time.” As a result of the tragedy, his mother, the young woman of Basque descent, contracted chronic hiccups, which brought on spasms, kept her from being able to eat, and struck other people as hilariously funny. She never again uttered a single word: only croaks and gurgles. She went about like that, with terror-stricken eyes, hiccuping constantly, wasting away, until she finally died of exhaustion a few months later. His father let himself go, lost all his ambition, all his energy, the habit of washing. When, out of sheer negligence, he lost the farm and it was sold at auction to pay off his creditors, he earned his living for a while as a raftsman, ferrying human passengers, goods, and animals from one shore of the Huallaga to the other. But one day when the river was in flood the current drove the raft into a clump of trees, completely destroying it, and he lost all interest in building another one. He took to the slopes of that pornographic mountain with maternal breasts and eager hips they call the Sleeping Beauty, built himself a refuge of leaves and stalks, let his hair and beard grow, and remained there for years, eating wild herbs and smoking leaves that make your head swim. When Federico, by then an adolescent, left the jungle, the ex-engineer was known in Tingo María as the Sorcerer and lived near the grotto of Las Pavas, cohabiting with three Indian women from Huánuco, who had borne him several half-wild children with round bellies.

Only Federico was able to confront the catastrophe creatively. That very morning, after having been whipped for leaving his sister alone in the cabin, the boy (who had become a man in the space of a few hours) had knelt beside the little mound of earth that was María’s tomb and swore to devote his life, to his last breath, to the annihilation of the murderous species. To seal his vow, he sprinkled the earth covering the little girl with drops of blood from the gashes left by the whip.

Forty years later, Don Federico Té11ez Unzátegui, the very exemplar of the single-mindedness of men of honor that moves mountains, could tell himself, as his sedan rolled down the avenues toward his frugal daily lunch, that he had proved that he was a man of his word. For in all those years it was probable that, thanks to his labors and his inspiration, the number of rodents that had perished in Peru exceeded the number of Peruvians born. Difficult work, involving many sacrifices and no rewards, that had made him a dour, inflexible, friendless man with odd habits. In the beginning, when he was still a child, the hardest part had been overcoming his feelings of repugnance toward the nasty gray creatures. His initial technique had been primitive: setting traps for them. With his pocket money he bought (at the Deep Sleep Mattress Shop and General Store on the Avenida Raimondi) one that he used as a model for making many others. He cut wood and wire to the proper size, assembled his traps, and set them out twice a day all over the farm. Sometimes the little creatures caught in them were still alive. Trembling with emotion, he would kill them by slowly burning them to death or torture them by stabbing them, mutilating them, putting their eyes out before doing them in.

But young as he was, his intelligence told him that if he gave in to such inclinations he would fail in the task he had set himself: his goal was quantitative, not qualitative. It was not a question of inflicting the greatest possible suffering on each individual enemy but of destroying the greatest possible number of enemies at one and the same time. With a clearheadedness and a strength of will remarkable at his tender years, he rooted out every last remaining trace of sentimentality within him and thereafter pursued his genocidal goal in accordance with impeccably objective criteria, coldly, statistically, scientifically. Stealing time from his studies at the Canadian Brothers’ School and from sleep (though not from recreation, since after the tragedy he no longer ever played), he perfected the traps, adding a blade to them that chopped the victims’ bodies to bits so that they never remained alive after being caught (not in order to spare them pain but in order not to have to waste time killing them off). He then built multifamily traps, with a broad base, in which a fork with curved tines could simultaneously crush the father, the mother, and four little ones. Everyone in the region soon heard about his skills at rat killing, and little by little it ceased to be merely a penitence, a personal vendetta, and became a service to the community, for which he was paid very little, but a mere pittance was better than nothing. The boy was summoned to farms both near and far the moment there were signs of an invasion, and with the diligence of an omnipotent ant, he would rid them of every last rodent in a matter of a few days. They began to call upon his services in Tingo María as well, to clean out cabins, houses, offices, and the youngster had his moment of glory when the captain of the Guardia Civil gave him the job of ridding the commissariat of the rats that had overrun the building. He spent all the money he received building more traps in order to expand what naïve souls took to be his business—or his perversion. When the ex-engineer buried himself in the sexualoid tangle of jungle growth of the Sleeping Beauty, Federico, who had dropped out of school, began to complement his clean weapon, traps, with another, more cunning one: poisons.

This work allowed him to earn his own living at an age when other boys are still spinning tops. But it also turned him into an outcast. People would call him in to get rid of their hordes of scampering rodents, but they never invited him to sit down at table with them and never had a kind word to say to him. If this hurt his feelings, he did not let it show; on the contrary, it almost seemed to please him that his fellows found him repellent. He was an unsociable, taciturn adolescent; no one could boast of ever having made him laugh, or even seen him laugh, and his one passion seemed to be killing the filthy creatures that were his enemy. He charged people only a modest fee for his work, and moreover waged campaigns
ad honorem
, in the dwellings of poor folk, appearing on their doorstep with his gunnysack full of traps and his vials of poison the moment he learned that the enemy had set up camp there. In addition to killing the lead-colored vermin, a technique that the lad kept tirelessly perfecting, there was the problem of getting rid of the dead bodies, the part of the whole business that families, housewives, or maidservants found most repugnant. Federico expanded his commercial enterprise by hiring the village idiot, a cross-eyed hunchback who lived at the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, who for a pittance collected the remains of the victims and took them off to burn them behind the Coliseo Abad or offer them as a feast to the dogs, cats, pigs, and vultures of Tingo María.

What a long time had gone by since then! As he stopped at the red light on the corner of the Avenida Javier Prado, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui said to himself that he had undoubtedly come up in the world since the days when, a raw youth still, he went up and down the muddy streets of Tingo María from sunup to sundown, followed by the idiot, waging his war against the murderers of his little sister María with his craftsmanship and skill as his only weapon. He was scarcely past childhood then, had nothing but the clothes on his back, and one helper at most. Thirty-five years later, he was the head of a vast technico-commercial enterprise, with branches in every city in Peru, with fifteen trucks in its motor pool and seventy-eight experts in the fumigation of ratholes, the compounding of poisons, and the installation of traps. The latter operated on the front lines—the streets, houses, and fields of the entire country—wholeheartedly devoted to searching out, surrounding, and annihilating the enemy, and receiving orders, advice, and logistic support from the headquarters staff over which he presided (the six technocrats who had just gone out to lunch). But in addition to this constellation, Don Federico had enlisted the aid of two laboratories in his crusade, by signing contracts with them (that were practically subsidies) for constant experimentation with new poisons, a crucial tactic in view of the enemy’s prodigious capacity for acquiring immunity: after two or three campaigns, the toxics became obsolete, simply a source of food for the creatures they were intended to kill. Moreover, Don Federico—who at this moment shifted into first as the light turned green, and continued on his way toward the residential districts along the seashore—had set up a scholarship whereby Rodent Exterminators, Incorporated sent a newly graduated chemist to the University of Baton Rouge each year to do advanced research on rat poisons.