Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [112]
His one and only comment delighted Javier. “It saved the lives of those two when people separated us. If it had gone on a few minutes more, the crowd would have recognized me and then they’d have lynched the poor things.”
We went to the Bransa, where he told us that one day in Bolivia a soccer player “from that country” who’d heard his programs had turned up at the studio armed with a revolver, which luckily the guards had detected in time.
“You’re going to have to be careful,” Javier warned him. “Lima is full of Argentines now.”
“It’s a matter of little moment. Sooner or later, worms are going to eat all three of us,” Pedro Camacho philosophized.
And he delivered us a lecture on the transmigration of souls, an article of faith with him. He told us a secret: if it were left to him to choose, he would like to be some calm, long-lived marine animal, such as a tortoise or a whale, in his next reincarnation. I took advantage of his good spirits to exercise my ad honorem role of intermediary between him and the Genaros that I had assumed some time ago and gave him Genaro Sr.’s message about the phone calls, the letters, the episodes in his serials that a number of people didn’t understand. The old man begged him not to complicate his plots, to take into account the level of intelligence of the average listener, which was quite low. I tried to sugarcoat the pill by siding with him (as a matter of fact, I really was on his side, moreover): this urgent request was absurd, naturally, one should be free to write as one pleased, and I was merely repeating what they had asked me to tell him.
He heard me out in such silence and with such an impassive expression on his face that he made me feel very uncomfortable. And when I finished, he still didn’t say a word. He swallowed the last sip of his verbena-and-mint tea, rose to his feet, muttered that he had to get back to his office, and left without even saying goodbye. Had he taken offense because I’d talked to him about the phone calls in front of someone he didn’t know? Javier thought so, and advised me to offer him my apologies. I promised myself never to act as an intermediary for the Genaros again.
During that week I spent without seeing Aunt Julia, I went out at night several times with old friends from Miraflores whom I hadn’t bothered to look up since the beginning of my secret romance. They were former schoolmates of mine or kids I’d known in the neighborhood, youngsters who were now studying engineering, like Blackie Salas, or medicine, like Pinky Molfino, or had gotten jobs, like Coco Lanas, pals with whom I’d shared wonderful things since I’d been knee-high to a grasshopper: pinball games and the Parque Salazar, going swimming at the Terrazas and the beaches of Miraflores, parties on Saturday nights, crushes on girls, movies. But on going out with them, after months of not seeing them, I realized that we were no longer the bosom buddies we’d once been; we were still great friends, but we no longer had as many things in common. On the nights we went out together during that week, we did the same daring things together that we’d done in the past: going to the old run-down Surco cemetery to prowl around in the moonlight amid the tombstones that had toppled over in some earthquake, trying to find a skull to make off with; skinny-dipping in the enormous Santa Rosa swimming pool near Ancón, still under construction; making the rounds of the gloomy, depressing brothels on the Avenida Grau. My pals were still the same as ever, cracking the same jokes, talking of the same girls, but I couldn’t share with them the things that mattered most to me: literature and Aunt Julia. If I’d told them that I was writing stories and dreamed of being a writer, they would doubtless have thought, just as my cousin Nancy did, that I had a screw loose. And if I’d told them about my romance—as they told me about their conquests—with a divorcée, who was not my mistress but my sweetheart, my enamorada (in the most Miraflorine sense of