Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (21 page)

“I hung up on you, but what I really wanted to do was wring your neck,” I said to her once we were alone.

“I’ve never known you to have fits of rage like this,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “May I ask what in the world is wrong with you?”

“You know very well what’s wrong with me, so don’t play dumb,” I said.

“Are you jealous because I went out to lunch with Dr. Osores?” she asked me in a slightly mocking tone of voice. “How easy it is to see you’re still just a kid, Marito.”

“I’ve forbidden you to call me Marito,” I reminded her. I could feel that my anger was getting the better of me, that my voice was trembling and I no longer had any idea what I was saying. “And I now forbid you to call me a kid.”

I sat down on the corner of my desk, and as though to counterbalance me, Aunt Julia rose to her feet and walked a few steps over to the window. With her arms crossed over her chest, she stood there looking out at the gray, damp, vaguely ghostly morning, not really seeing it, because she was searching for words to tell me something. She was wearing a blue tailored suit and white shoes, and all of a sudden I wanted to kiss her.

“Let’s get things straight,” she finally said, her back still turned to me. “You can’t forbid me to do anything, even as a joke, for the pure and simple reason that you’re nothing to me. You’re not my husband, you’re not my fiancé, you’re not my lover. That little game of holding hands, of kissing at the movies isn’t really serious, and above all, it doesn’t give you any hold over me. You have to get that through your head, my boy.”

“The truth of the matter is that you’re talking to me as though you were my mama,” I said to her.

“The fact is, I
could
be your mama,” Aunt Julia said, and a sad look came over her face. It was as though she’d gotten over being angry, and the only thing left in its place was a feeling of irritation that went far back in time, a profound bitterness. She turned around, walked back toward the desk, and stopped very close to me. She looked at me sorrowfully. “You make me feel old, Varguitas, even though I’m not. And I don’t like that. What there is between us has no reason for being, much less a future.”

I put my arms around her waist and drew her to me. She did not resist, but as I kissed her, very tenderly, on the cheek, on the neck, on the ear—her warm skin palpitated beneath my lips, and feeling the secret life coursing through her veins made me tremendously happy—she went on talking in the same tone of voice:

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I don’t like this situation, Varguitas. Don’t you realize it’s absurd? I’m thirty-two years old, I’m a divorcée—can you tell me what I’m doing with a kid eighteen years old? That’s a typical perversion of women in their fifties, and I’m not old enough yet for that.”

I felt so excited and so much in love as I kissed her neck, her hands, slowly nibbled her ear, ran my lips across her nose, her eyes, or wound locks of her hair around my fingers, that every so often I lost track of what she was saying. Moreover, she kept alternately raising and lowering her voice, and at times it faded to a mere whisper.

“At the beginning it was amusing, on account of having to meet in secret and all,” she said, allowing herself to be kissed, but making no move to reciprocate, “and above all because it made me feel as though I were a young girl again.”

“Where does that leave us, then, may I ask?” I murmured in her ear. “Do I make you feel like a perverted fifty-year-old woman or a young girl?”

“This whole business of being with a kid who never has a cent to his name, not doing anything but holding hands and going to the movies and giving each other tender little kisses, takes me back to when I was fifteen,” Aunt Julia went on. “It’s true that it’s nice to fall for a shy youngster who respects you, who doesn’t paw you, who doesn’t dare go to bed with you, who treats you like a little girl who’s just made her First Communion. But it’s a dangerous game, Varguitas, it’s based on a lie…”

“That reminds me—I’m writing a story that’s going to be called ‘Dangerous Games,’” I whispered in her ear. “It’s about a bunch of little street urchins who levitate at the airport, thanks to the lift effect from planes that are taking off.”

I heard her laugh. A moment later she threw her arms around my neck and put her cheek to mine. “Okay, I’ve gotten over being angry,” she said. “Because I came here determined to tear your eyes out. But it’ll be too bad for you the next time you hang up on me.”

“And it’ll be too bad for you the next time you go out with that endocrinologist,” I told her, searching for her mouth. “Promise me you’ll never go out with him again.”

She drew away and looked at me with a belligerent gleam in her eye. “Don’t forget that I came to Lima looking for a husband,” she answered, half jokingly. “And I think that this time I’ve found just the right one for me. Good-looking, cultivated, well-off financially, graying at the temples.”

“Are you certain that this marvel is going to marry you?” I asked her, enraged and jealous all over again.

Placing her hands on her hips in a provocative pose, she replied: “I have ways of getting him to marry me.”

But, on seeing the expression on my face, she laughed, threw her arms around my neck again, and there we were, kissing each other lovingly and passionately, when we heard Javier’s voice: “You’re going to be arrested for indecent and pornographic conduct in public.”

He was in a happy mood, and embracing the two of us, he announced: “Little Nancy has accepted my invitation to a bullfight, and that calls for a celebration.”

“We’ve just had our first big fight and you caught us right in the middle of our big reconciliation scene,” I explained to him.

“It’s plain to see you don’t know me very well,” Aunt Julia informed me. “When I have a really big fight I break dishes, I scratch, I’m out to kill.”

“The best part about having fights is making up afterwards,” Javier, an expert on the subject, opined. “But, damn it all, I come bouncing in here all set to commemorate my glorious victory and you start raining on my parade. What kind of friends are you, anyway? Come on, you two, I’m inviting you to lunch to fete this grand occasion.”

They waited for me while I wrote up a couple of news bulletins and then we headed for a little café on the Calle Belén that delighted Javier, since, despite its being filthy and little more than a hole in the wall, they served the best chitlings in all of Lima there. I ran into Pascual and Big Pablito standing downstairs in the doorway of Panamericana, flirting with girls passing by, and sent them back upstairs to the News Department. Despite the fact that it was broad daylight and right in the middle of the downtown area, within full view of countless pairs of eyes of relatives and friends of the family, Aunt Julia and I walked along holding hands and I kept kissing her almost every step of the way. Her cheeks were as bright red as a mountain girl’s, and she looked as happy as could be.

“That’s enough of your pornography, you selfish creatures, think about me for a minute,” Javier protested. “Let’s talk about Nancy a little.”

Nancy was a pretty young cousin of mine, a terrible flirt, whom Javier had been in love with ever since he’d reached the age of reason and whom he pursued with the persistence of a bloodhound. She had never taken him seriously, yet always managed to keep him on the string and lead him to think that maybe…that very soon…that the next time… This pre-romance had been going on since we were in high school, and I, as Javier’s confidant, bosom buddy, and go-between, had been in on every detail. Nancy had stood him up countless times, left him waiting for her countless times at the door of the Leuro while she went to the Colina or to the Metro for the Sunday matinee, appeared countless times at parties on Saturday nights with another escort. The first time in my life I ever got drunk, I was keeping Javier company, helping him drown his troubles in wine and beer in a little bar in Surquillo the day he found out that Nancy had given herself to an agronomy student named Eduardo Tiravanti (a boy who was very popular in Miraflores because he could put a lighted cigarette in his mouth and then take it out and go on smoking it as though that were the most natural thing in the world). Javier was weeping and sniveling, and in addition to serving as a shoulder to cry on, I’d been assigned the mission of taking him back to his
pension
and putting him to bed once he’d reached a comatose state (“I’m going to get plastered to the gills,” he’d warned me, imitating Jorge Negrete). But I was the one who succumbed, with spectacular fits of vomiting and an attack of the d.t.’s in the course of which—according to Javier’s vulgar version of events—I had climbed up onto the bar counter and harangued the topers, night owls, and rowdies who constituted the clientele of El Triunfo: “Lower your pants, all of you: you’re in the presence of a poet.”

He had never quite forgiven me for the fact that instead of taking care of him and consoling him on that sad night, I’d obliged him to drag me through the streets of Miraflores to my grandparents’ villa in Ocharán, so far gone that he’d handed my remains over to my terrified grandmother with the imprudent comment: “Señora Carmencita, I think Varguitas is about to die on us.”

Since that time, little Nancy had by turns taken up with and thrown over half a dozen boys from Miraflores, and Javier, too, had had several steady girlfriends. But instead of making him forget his great love for my cousin, they made it all the more intense, and he continued to phone her, visit her, invite her out, declare his feelings, taking no note of the refusals, insults, affronts, broken dates he suffered at her hands. Javier was one of those men who are able to put passion before vanity and it didn’t really matter to him in the slightest that he was the laughingstock of all his friends in Miraflores, among whom his tireless chasing after my cousin was a constant source of jokes. (One of the boys in our neighborhood swore that he’d seen Javier approach little Nancy one Sunday after Mass and make her the following proposal: “Hi there, Nancyta, nice morning, shall we go have a drink together? a Coke, a sip of champagne?”) Nancy sometimes went out with him—usually when she was between boyfriends—to the movies or a party, and Javier would then have great hopes and go around in a state of euphoria. That was the mood he was in now, talking a blue streak as we ate our chitling sandwiches and drank our coffee in the little café on the Calle Belén called El Palmero. Aunt Julia and I rubbed knees underneath the table and sat there holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes as we vaguely listened to Javier babbling on and on, like background music, about little Nancy.

“She was impressed by my invitation,” he was telling us. “Because which of those guys in Miraflores, who are always flat broke, ever invites a girl to a bullfight, can you tell me that?”

“And how did you manage to scrape up the money?” I asked him. “Did you have a winning lottery ticket?”

“I sold the boardinghouse radio,” he told us, without the slightest regret. “They think it was the cook and they’ve fired her for stealing.”

He explained to us that he’d worked out a foolproof plan. In the middle of the corrida he’d surprise Nancy by offering her a gift that would melt her heart: a Spanish mantilla. Javier was a great admirer of the Mother Country and everything connected with it: bullfights, flamenco music, Sarita Montiel. He dreamed of going to Spain (as I dreamed of going to France) and the idea of giving Nancy a mantilla had occurred to him when he’d seen an ad in the paper. It had cost him a month’s salary from the Reserve Bank, but he was certain that the investment would pay off. He explained how he planned to go about it. He would take the mantilla to the bullfight, discreetly wrapped in plain paper, and would wait for an especially stirring moment, whereupon he would open the package, unfold the shawl, and place it about my cousin’s delicate shoulders. What did we think? What would Nancy’s reaction be? I advised him to really do things up brown by giving her a Sevillian ornamental comb and a pair of castanets as well and singing her a fandango, but Aunt Julia seconded him enthusiastically and told him that his whole plan was wonderful and that if Nancy had any feelings at all, she’d be moved to tears. And she assured him that if a boy were to offer
her
such touching demonstrations of his affection, she’d be won over instantly.

“It’s just like I keep telling you—can’t you see that?” she said to me, as though scolding me for something or other. “Javier’s a real romantic, he woos his beloved the way she ought to be wooed.”

Javier, absolutely charmed by her, proposed that the four of us go out together, any day we liked the following week, to the movies, to tea, to dance.

“And what would my little cousin Nancy say if she saw the two of us going out on a date together?” I said, to bring him back down to earth.

But he floored us by answering: “Don’t be silly, Varguitas, she knows everything and thinks it’s great. I told her all about it the other day.” And, on seeing how dumfounded we were, he added with a mischievous twinkle in his eye: “The truth of the matter is that I don’t keep anything a secret from your cousin, since sooner or later, come hell or high water, she’s going to end up marrying me.”

It worried me to hear that Javier had told her all about our romance. Nancy and I were very close, and I was quite certain she wouldn’t give us away deliberately, but she might let a word or two slip out inadvertently, and the news would spread like wildfire in the family forest. Aunt Julia had been left speechless for a moment, but now she was doing her best to conceal her surprise by encouraging Javier to proceed with his taurino-sentimental plan. He walked back with us to Panamericana and said goodbye to me at the downstairs door, and Aunt Julia and I arranged to see each other again that evening, on the usual pretext that we were just going out to take in a flick together. As I kissed her goodbye, I said in her ear: “Thanks to the endocrinologist, I’ve realized I’m in love with you.” “So I see, Varguitas,” she agreed.

I watched her walk off with Javier toward the bus stop, and it was only then that I noticed the crowd that had gathered outside the doors of Radio Central, young women for the most part, although there were a few men as well. They had formed a double line, but as more people arrived, everyone started shoving and pushing and the lines broke up. I walked over to see what was going on, presuming that whatever it was, it undoubtedly had something to do with Pedro Camacho. And in fact they turned out to be autograph hunters. I then caught sight of the scriptwriter standing at the window of his lair, with Jesusito on one side of him and Genaro Sr. on the other, scrawling a signature with fancy flourishes on the pages of autograph books, notebooks, loose sheets of paper, the margins of newspapers, and dismissing his admirers with an Olympian gesture. They were gazing at him in rapture, approaching him timidly and respectfully, stammering a few heartfelt words of appreciation.