that they knew, and that Thursday, when I screwed up my courage and turned up for lunch at their house as usual, they were as outgoing and affectionate with me as always. Nor was Cousin Nancy the object of a single captious question on the part of Aunt Laura and Uncle Juan. And at my house, my grandparents seemed to be lost in daydreams and kept asking me, with the most angelic innocence imaginable, whether I was still taking Aunt Julia to the movies (“So nice of you—Julita’s such a film fan”). Those were anxious days, during which, taking extra precautions, Aunt Julia and I decided not to see each other, even in secret, for at least a week. We nonetheless talked to each other on the telephone. Aunt Julia would go out to the grocery store on the corner to phone me at least three times a day, and we would exchange our respective observations regarding the dreaded family reaction and entertain all sorts of hypotheses. Could Uncle Jorge possibly have decided to keep our secret to himself? I knew that this was unthinkable, in view of the family’s usual habits. So what in the world was happening? Javier advanced the thesis that Aunt Gaby and Uncle Jorge had downed so many whiskies that night that they hadn’t really realized what was going on, that the only thing that lingered in their memory was a vague suspicion, and that they hadn’t wanted to unleash a scandal over something that was not absolute proven fact. More or less out of curiosity, but also out of masochism, I made the rounds and dropped in at the homes of the entire clan that week so as to know what to expect. I noted nothing out of the ordinary, save for an omission that intrigued me and set off a pyrotechnical explosion of speculation on my part. Aunt Hortensia, who had invited me to come have tea and biscuits with her, didn’t mention Aunt Julia once in the course of a two-hour conversation. “They know everything and have plans afoot,” I assured Javier, who was sick and tired of hearing me talk of nothing else. “When you come right down to it, you’re dying to get your whole family up in arms so as to have something to write about,” he commented.
During that eventful week I also found myself unexpectedly involved in a street fight and playing the part of Pedro Camacho’s bodyguard, so to speak. I had gone one day to San Marcos University, where the results of an exam in criminal law had just been posted, and was full of remorse at having discovered that I had received a higher grade than my friend Velando, who was the one who had had everything down pat. As I was crossing the Parque Universitario, I ran into Genaro Sr., the patriarch of the phalanx that owned Radio Panamericana and Radio Central, and the two of us walked as far as the Calle Belén together, talking as we strolled along. He was a gentleman who always dressed in black and was always very solemn, and the Bolivian scriptwriter sometimes referred to him—for reasons not at all difficult to guess—as The Slave Driver.
“Your friend the genius is still giving me headaches,” Genaro Sr. said to me. “I’ve had it up to here with him. If he weren’t so productive, I’d have booted him out long before this.”
“Another protest from the Argentine embassy?” I asked.
“I don’t know what sort of a hopeless mess he’s cooking up,” he complained. “He’s taken to pulling people’s leg, shifting characters from one serial to an entirely different one or changing their names all of a sudden so as to get our listeners all confused. My wife had already told me what was going on, and now we’re starting to get phone calls, and we’ve even received two letters. It seems that the priest from Mendocita now has the name of the Jehovah’s Witness and vice versa. I’m far too busy to listen to serials. Do you ever listen to them?”
We had reached La Colmena and were heading toward the Plaza San Martín, past buses leaving for the provinces and little Chinese cafés, and I remembered that Aunt Julia, speaking of Pedro Camacho a few days before, had made me laugh and confirmed my suspicions that the scriptwriter was secretly a humorist at heart.