Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [107]
Just as Pedro Camacho was the closest thing to a writer that I’d ever seen in my short life, among all my acquaintances Javier was the one whose generosity and exuberance made him most resemble a Renaissance prince. Moreover, he was a very efficient planner: he’d already informed Aunt Julia and Nancy of what was awaiting us that night, and he already had the theater tickets in his pocket. His program couldn’t have been more enticing, and it immediately dispelled my gloomy reflections on the vocation and the miserable fate that awaited the man of letters in Peru. Javier was also very happy: he’d been going out with Nancy for a month now, and their keeping company together was taking on the proportions of a real romance. My having confessed my feelings toward Aunt Julia to my cousin had been very useful to him because, on the pretext of helping us hide our secret and making it easier for us to go out together by double-dating, he’d been managing to see Nancy several times a week. My cousin and Aunt Julia were inseparable now: they went out shopping and to the movies together and exchanged confidences. My cousin had become an enthusiastic fairy godmother of our romance, and one afternoon she raised my morale by remarking to me: “Julita has a way about her that cancels out any difference in age, Marito.”
The grandiose program for that Sunday (a day on which, I firmly believe, a large part of my future was determined by the stars) got off to an excellent start. In Lima in the fifties we had very few chances to see first-rate theater, and the Argentine company of Francisco Petrone brought us a series of modern works that had never been performed before in Peru. Nancy went by Aunt Olga’s to get Aunt Julia and the two of them came downtown in a taxi. Javier and I were waiting for them at the door of the Teatro Segura. Javier, who was a great believer in the grand gesture, had rented an entire box, which turned out to be the only one occupied, so that there were almost as many eyes focused on us as on the stage. My guilty conscience made me quite certain that any number of relatives and acquaintances would see us and immediately suspect the truth. But the moment the performance began, my fears evaporated. They were doing Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, the first nontraditional play, violating the conventions of time and space, that I’d ever seen. I was so excited and so enthused that during the intermission I began to talk a blue streak, praising the work to the skies, commenting on its characters, its technique, its ideas, and later, as we were eating sausages and drinking dark beer in the Rincón Toni on La Colmena, I went on raving about it and got so absorbed in what I was saying that Javier later told me: “You would have thought you were a parrot that had been slipped a dose of Spanish fly.” My cousin Nancy, who had always thought my literary inclinations were as peculiar as the odd hobby that fascinated our Uncle Eduardo—a little old man, my grandfather’s brother, now a retired judge, whose life was centered on the unusual pastime of collecting spiders—after hearing my interminable peroration on the work we had just seen, suspected that my literary bent might lead me off the deep end. “You’re going off your rocker, my boy,” she warned me.
Javier had chosen the Negro-Negro to end the evening because it had a certain intellectual-bohemian atmosphere—on Thursdays they gave little shows, one-act plays, monologues, recitals, and it was a favorite gathering place for painters, musicians, and writers—but besides that, it was also the darkest boîte in Lima, a basement in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín that had twenty tables at most, with a decor we thought was “existentialist.” It was a night spot that, the few times I had been there, gave me the illusion that I was in a