Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [106]
“It’s also possible that he’s weeping over a crime,” Pedro Camacho speculated, in the tone of voice of an accountant adding up figures aloud, still holding me by the arm and steering me toward Radio Central after a dozen turns around the monument. “A family crime? A parricide who’s tearing his hair and gouging his flesh in remorse? A son of the rat man?”
He wasn’t the least bit agitated, though I noted that he was more distant than usual, more incapable than ever of listening, of conversing, of remembering that there was someone with him. I was certain that he didn’t even see me. I tried to get him to go on with his monologue, for it was like seeing his imagination working at top speed, but as abruptly as he’d begun speaking of the invisible weeper, he suddenly fell silent. I watched him settle down to work again in his lair, taking off his black suit coat and his little bow tie, tucking his wild mane into a hairnet, and putting on a woman’s wig with a bun that he took out of another plastic sack.
I was unable to contain myself and let out a roar of laughter. “And who is this lady in whose company I have the pleasure of finding myself?” I asked him, still laughing.
“I must give some advice to a Francophile laboratory assistant who’s killed his son,” he explained to me in a sarcastic tone of voice, gluing a coquettish beauty mark on his face this time instead of the patriarchal beard he’d worn before, and putting on a pair of colored earrings. “Goodbye, friend.”
The moment I turned around to leave, I heard—coming back to life, steady, self-assured, compulsive, eternal—the Remington pounding away. Riding back to Miraflores in a jitney, I thought about Pedro Camacho’s life. What social milieu, what concatenation of circumstances, persons, relations, problems, events, happenstances had produced this literary vocation (literary? if not that, what should it be called, then?) that had somehow come to fruition, found expression in an oeuvre, and secured an audience? How could he be, at one and the same time, a parody of the writer and the only person in Peru who, by virtue of the time he devoted to his craft and the works he produced, was worthy of that name? Were all those politicians, attorneys, professors who went by the name of poets, novelists, dramatists really writers, simply because, during brief parentheses in lives in which four fifths of their time was spent at activities having nothing to do with literature, they had produced one slim volume of verses or one niggardly collection of stories? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate? When I thought about such things, I felt sad and upset. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me each day that the only thing I wanted to be in life was a writer, and I was also becoming more and more convinced each day that the only way to be one was to devote oneself heart and soul to literature. I didn’t want in the least to be a hack writer or a part-time one, but a real one, like—who? The person I’d met who came closest to being this full-time writer, obsessed and impassioned by his vocation, was the Bolivian author of radio serials: that was why he fascinated me so.
Javier was waiting for me at my grandparents’, brimming over with happiness, with a program for the rest of that Sunday that would have been enough to raise the dead. He’d just received the money order that his parents sent him every month from Piura, along with a good bit extra for the national holidays, and he had decided that the four of us would spend this unexpected windfall together.
“In your honor, I’ve drawn up a cosmopolitan,