Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [105]
I sat on the windowsill smoking a cigarette as I waited for him to finish the breech delivery of the triplets, an operation that as a matter of fact took him no more than a few minutes. Then, as he removed his costume, carefully folded it up, and put it away in a plastic sack along with the patriarchal false beard, I said to him: “It only takes you five minutes to deliver triplets, Caesarean and all. I’m amazed: I struggled for three weeks over a story of three little kids who levitate by taking advantage of the lift effect of planes taking off.”
As we were walking over to the Bransa, I told him that after having turned out a whole bunch of stories that were miserable failures, the one about the levitating kids struck me as passable and that I’d taken it to the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, in fear and trembling. The editor-in-chief had read it in front of me and given me a mysterious answer: “Leave it, and we’ll see what we can do with it.” Two Sundays had gone by since then; I’d rushed out each weekend to buy the paper, and thus far, there’d been no sign of its appearing.
But Pedro Camacho was not one to waste his time on other people’s problems. “Let’s skip our pick-me-up and walk instead,” he said, taking me by the arm just as I was about to sit down, and leading me back to La Colmena. “I have pins and needles in my calves, a sure sign I’ll soon be having cramps in them. It’s the sedentary life I live. I need exercise.”
It was only because I knew what his answer was going to be that I suggested that he follow the example of Victor Hugo and Hemingway and write standing up.
But this time I was wrong. “Interesting things are happening at La Tapada,” he said without even answering me, as he led me round and round the monument to San Martín, almost at a trot. “There’s a young man staying there who weeps on moonlit nights.”
I rarely came downtown on Sundays and I was surprised to see how different the people who were there on weekdays were from the ones I saw now. Instead of middle-class office workers, the square was full of maids on their day off, mountain boys with ruddy cheeks and big clumsy clodhoppers, girls with braids and bare feet, and itinerant photographers and women selling food wandering amid the motley crowd. I made the scribe stop in front of the female figure in a tunic in the center section of the monument who represents the Motherland, and to see whether I could get a laugh out of him, I told him why an Auchenia was bizarrely perched on her head: when the bronze was cast, here in Lima, the foundry workers had not understood the sculptor’s instructions to crown her with a votive flame—a llama votiva—and instead had topped the statue off with the animal of the same name.
Naturally, he didn’t even smile. He took me by the arm again, and as he hurried me along, bumping into people out for a leisurely stroll, he went on with his monologue, indifferent to everything around him, beginning with me. “Nobody’s seen his face, but there is reason to believe he’s some sort of monster—the bastard son of the owner of the pensión perhaps?—suffering from all sorts of hereditary defects, dwarfism, bicephalism, a hunchback, whom Doña Atanasia hides during the day so as not to frighten us and lets out only at night to get a breath of fresh air.”
He said all this without the slightest emotion, like a recording machine, and to pump him for more information, I said his hypothesis sounded farfetched to me: couldn’t he be a young man who was weeping over his love troubles?
“If he were a love-smitten young man, he’d have a guitar, or a violin, or sing,” he replied with scorn tinged with compassion. “But all this one does is weep.”
I tried to get him to explain the whole thing to me from the beginning, but he was vaguer and more self-absorbed than usual. The only thing I could get out of him was that someone, for several nights now, had been crying in some