Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [104]
She heard them out without being in the least alarmed. “You are suffering from infantilism, and at the same time you are a potential infanticidal recidivist” was her skillful, telegraphic diagnosis. “Two bits of foolishness that don’t deserve being taken seriously and that I cure as easily as I spit. Have no fear: you’ll recover before the fetus grows eyes.”
Would she cure him? Would she free Lucho Abril Marroquín of these specters? Would the treatment for infantophobia and herodism be as risky as that which had emancipated him from his wheel complex and his obsession with crime? How would this psychodrama of San Miguel end?
Eleven.
Midyear exams at the university were approaching, and because I had attended classes less since my romance with Aunt Julia and written more (Pyrrhic) stories, I was ill-prepared for this critical moment. One of my fellow students, a boy from Camaná whose name was Guillermo Velando, was my salvation. He lived in a boardinghouse downtown, just off the Plaza Dos de Mayo, and was a model student who never cut class, took exhaustive lecture notes that even indicated where and how long the professors paused for breath, and learned the articles of the Code by heart, the way I learned poems. He was always talking about his home town, where he’d left a fiancée, and he could hardly wait to get his law degree so as to be able to leave Lima, a city he detested, and set himself up in practice in Camaná, where he would do battle to bring progress to the region where he’d been born. He lent me his notes, whispered answers to me when we had tests, and whenever exams were coming up, I would go to his boardinghouse in the hope that he could give me some miraculous synthesis of what had gone on in class.
I was on my way home from there that Sunday, after spending three hours in Guillermo’s room, with my brain reeling with legal terms, terrified by the thought of how much jargon in Latin I had to memorize, when, arriving at the Plaza San Martín, I spied in the distance the little window of Pedro Camacho’s lair, standing open in the dull gray façade of Radio Central. I naturally decided to go say hello to him. The more time I spent with him—even though our relationship was still limited to very brief conversations over a café table—the more fascinated I was by his personality, his physical appearance, his rhetoric. As I headed across the plaza toward his office, I thought once more of the iron will that was responsible for this little man’s tremendous capacity for work, his ability to produce, from dawn to dark, from morning to night, stories full of tempestuous passions. At whatever hour of the day I happened to think of him, I would say to myself: “He’s busy writing,” and I could see him, as I had so many times, pecking away at the keys of the Remington with two lightning-quick index fingers and gazing at the platen with delirious eyes, whereupon I would feel a curious admixture of pity and envy.
The window of his little cubicle was halfway open—I could hear the typewriter keys pounding away rhythmically inside—and as I pushed it open all the way, I called out: “Hello there, hardworking sir.” But I had the impression that I’d poked my nose into the wrong place or was addressing some unknown person, and it took me several seconds to recognize the Bolivian scriptwriter beneath his disguise consisting of a white smock, a surgeon’s skullcap, and a long rabbinical black beard. He went on writing impassively, without even looking at me, his back slightly hunched over his desk. After a moment, as though he were pausing between one thought and the next, but without turning his head in my direction, I heard him say in his perfectly placed, tender voice: “The gynecologist Alberto de Quinteros is delivering his niece’s triplets, and one of the