Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [12]
“Such an ass, is that what you’re trying to say?” Richard broke in helpfully.
“Well, I wouldn’t have put it that crudely,” Dr. Quinteros said, inhaling and exhaling and flinging his arms in and out. But, to tell the truth, he does seem a bit dim-witted. He’d be perfect for anyone else, but he just can’t hold a candle to a girl as outstanding as Elianita. His own outspokenness made him feel uncomfortable. “Listen, you mustn’t take what I said the wrong way.”
“Don’t worry, Uncle Alberto.” Richard smiled. “Red’s a good egg and if the kid’s picked him she knows what she’s doing.”
“Three sets of side bends, you cripples!” Coco roared, with eighty kilos above his head and puffed out like a toad. “Sucking in your belly—not sticking it out!”
Dr. Quinteros thought that, with the gymnastics, Richard would forget his problems, but as he did his side bends, he saw his nephew working out with renewed fury, his face again set in an anxious, irritated expression. He remembered that in the Quinteros family there were a great many neurotics and thought that perhaps Roberto’s eldest son had inherited the tendency and was destined to carry on the tradition among the younger generation, and then he was distracted by the thought that it might have been more prudent after all to have dropped by the clinic before coming to the gym so as to have a look at the woman with the triplets and the one he’d operated on for the tumor. Then he stopped thinking altogether because the physical effort absorbed him totally, and as he raised and lowered his legs (“Leg rises, fifty times!”), flexed his trunk (“Trunk twist with bar, three sets, till your lungs burst!”), working his back, his torso, his forearms, his neck, obeying Coco’s orders (“Harder, great-granddaddy! Faster, corpse!”), he was simply a pair of lungs inhaling and exhaling, skin dripping with sweat, muscles straining, tiring, aching. When Coco yelled out: “Three sets of fifteen pullovers with dumbbells!” he’d reached his limit. Out of pride, he tried nonetheless to do at least one set with twelve kilos, but he couldn’t. He was exhausted. The weight slipped out of his hands on the third try and he had to put up with the jokes of the weight lifters (“Mummies to the grave and storks to the zoo!” “Call the funeral home!” “Requiescat in pace, amen!”) and watch with mute envy as Richard—still in a hurry, still furious—completed his routine with no difficulty. Discipline, perseverance, balanced diets, regular habits aren’t enough, Dr. Quinteros thought. Up to a certain limit they compensated for the differences; once past that limit, age created insuperable distances, unbreachable walls. Later, sitting naked in the sauna, blinded by the sweat dripping through his eyelashes, he mournfully repeated a phrase he’d read in a book: “Youth, whose memory brings despair!” As he was leaving, he saw that Richard had joined the weight lifters and was working out with them. Coco made a mocking gesture in Richard’s direction and said: “This handsome lad has decided to commit suicide, Doctor.”
Richard didn’t even smile. He was holding the weights over his head and the expression on his beet-red face, dripping with sweat, the veins standing out, betrayed an exasperation that he appeared to be on the point of taking out on them. The idea flashed through the doctor’s mind that his nephew was about to bash in the heads of all four of them with the weights he was holding in his hands. He said goodbye to the others and murmured to Richard: “I’ll see you at the church in a little while.”
Once he’d returned home and called the clinic, he was relieved to learn that the mother of the triplets wanted to play bridge with some friends in her room and that the woman who’d had the tumor removed had asked if she could eat some won ton in tamarind sauce today. He authorized the bridge game and the won ton, and with his mind completely at ease now, he changed into a dark blue suit, a white silk shirt, and a silver-gray tie that he fastened down with a pearl