Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [108]
“I’ve decided all of a sudden that I’m going to change genres and start writing plays instead of stories,” I told her, all excited. “What do you say to that?”
“There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as far as I’m concerned,” Aunt Julia answered, rising to her feet. “But now, Varguitas, come dance with me and whisper sweet nothings in my ear. Between pieces, if you like, you have my permission to talk to me about literature.”
I followed her instructions to the letter. We held each other very tightly and kissed as we danced, I told her that I was in love with her, and she answered that she was in love with me, and aided by the intimate, exciting, sensuous atmosphere and Javier’s whiskies, for the very first time I made no effort to hide the desire that she aroused in me; as we danced, my lips nuzzled her neck, my tongue stole into her mouth and sipped her saliva, I held her very close so as to feel her breasts, her belly, and her thighs, and then, back at the table, under cover of the darkness, I fondled her legs and breasts. That’s what we were doing, so happy we were giddy, when Nancy came back to the table, during a break between two boleros, and made our blood run cold by blurting out: “Good Lord, just look who’s here: Uncle Jorge.”
It was a danger we ought to have thought of. Uncle Jorge, our youngest uncle, daringly combined, in a superfrenetic life, all sorts of business affairs and commercial ventures and an intense night life filled with wine, women, and song. A tragicomic story about him had made the rounds, the scene of which was another boîte: the Embassy. The show had just begun, the girl who was singing couldn’t go on because a drunk sitting at one of the tables kept interrupting her by shouting insults. Uncle Jorge had risen to his feet in the middle of the crowded nightclub, roaring like a Don Quixote: “Shut your mouth, you wretch, I’m going to teach you to respect a lady,” and with his fists raised like a boxer had started to move in on the idiot, only to discover a moment later that he was making a fool of himself since the pseudo-customer’s interruption of the chanteuse was part of the show. And there he was, sitting just two tables away from us, looking very elegant, his face just barely visible in the light of the matches being struck by the smokers in the place and the waiters’ flashlights. I recognized his wife, my Aunt Gaby, sitting next to him, and despite the fact that they were only a few feet away from us, both of them were deliberately avoiding looking in our direction. It was all quite obvious: they’d seen me kissing Aunt Julia, they’d immediately guessed everything, and had opted for a diplomatic blindness. Javier asked for the check, we left the Negro-Negro almost at once, and Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby carefully looked the other way even when we rubbed elbows as we passed their table on the way out. In the taxi on the way back to Miraflores, the four of us just sat there with long faces, not saying a word, till Nancy finally summed up what all of us were thinking: “All that scheming for nothing; the fat’s in the fire now.”
But, as in a good suspense film, nothing at all happened during the next few days. There was not the slightest sign that the family clan had been alerted by Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby. Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga didn’t say one word to Aunt Julia that would lead her to think