Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [0]
Mario Vargas Llosa is the author of sixteen novels, most recently The Bad Girl. He received the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2002 and lives in London.
To
Julia Urquidi Illanes,
to whom this novel and I
owe so much
I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself writing that I was writing and that I was writing that I was writing that I was writing. I can also imagine myself writing that I had already written that I would imagine myself writing that I had written that I was imagining myself writing that I see myself writing that I am writing.
SALVADOR ELIZONDO / The Graphographer
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
One.
In those long-ago days, I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharán, in Miraflores. I was studying at the University of San Marcos, law, as I remember, resigned to earning myself a living later on by practicing a liberal profession, although deep down what I really wanted was to become a writer someday. I had a job with a pompous-sounding title, a modest salary, duties as a plagiarist, and flexible working hours: News Director of Radio Panamericana. It consisted of cutting out interesting news items that appeared in the daily papers and rewriting them slightly so that they could be read on the air during the newscasts. My editorial staff was limited to Pascual, a youngster who slicked down his hair with quantities of brilliantine and loved catastrophes. There were one-minute news bulletins every hour on the hour, except for those at noon and at 9 p.m., which were fifteen minutes long, but we were able to prepare several of the one-minute hourly ones ahead of time, so that I was often out of the office for long stretches at a time, drinking coffee in one of the cafés on La Colmena, going to class now and again, or dropping in at the offices of Radio Central, always much livelier than the ones where I worked.
The two radio stations belonged to the same owner and were next door to each other on the Calle Belén, just a few steps away from the Plaza San Martín. The two of them bore no resemblance whatsoever to each other. Or rather, like those sisters in tragic drama, one of whom has been born with every possible grace and the other with every possible defect, what was most noticeable was the contrast between them. Radio Panamericana occupied the third floor and the rooftop terrace of a brand-new building, and its personnel, its ambitions, and its programs all had about them a certain snobbish, cosmopolitan air, pretensions of being modern, youthful, aristocratic. Although its disc jockeys and m.c.’s weren’t Argentines (as Pedro Camacho would have put it), they might just as well have been. The station broadcast lots of music, hours and hours of jazz and rock plus a bit of classical stuff now and again, it was always the first to put the latest hits from New York and Europe on the air in Lima, yet at the same time it did not disdain Latin American music so long as it had a modicum of sophistication; as for Peruvian selections, they were cautiously screened and allowed on the air only if they were waltzes. There were also programs calculated to appeal to intellectuals among the listening audience, such as “Portraits from the Past” or “Reports from Abroad,” and even in frivolous mass-entertainment programs, such as