Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [122]
But that afternoon (what an odd twist of fate) a truck driver from Castrovirreina let out a burst of vulgar laughter, accompanied by a greenish gob of spit, muttered: “That nut is really the limit!” and flung down on the badly scratched little table in the parlor the copy of Ultima Hora that he had just been reading. The expianist picked it up and leafed through it. Suddenly (cheeks as deathly pale as a woman who has just been the victim of a vampire’s kiss) she ran to her room, shouting for her mother to come at once. The two of them read and reread the crumpled news item together, and then, taking turns, they read it again, at the top of their voices, to Don Sebastián, who beyond the shadow of a doubt understood, for he immediately underwent one of those dramatic crises of his that caused him to hiccup violently, break into a sweat, burst into loud sobs, and writhe like a man possessed.
What was this piece of news that so alarmed this crepuscular family?
At dawn the day before, in a crowded ward of the Victor Larco Herrero Psychiatric Hospital, in Magdalena del Mar, a ward of the state who had spent so many long years behind those walls that he should have been pensioned off by now had slit the throat of a male nurse with a scalpel, strung up a catatonic old man who slept in the bed next to his, thus causing him to strangle to death, and escaped to the city by athletically leaping over the wall of La Costanera. His behavior was most surprising, since he had always been remarkably peaceable and had never shown the least sign of being in an ugly mood and never been heard even to raise his voice. His one and only noteworthy occupation, in thirty years, had been to officiate at imaginary Masses in honor of El Señor de Limpias and to distribute invisible hosts to nonexistent communicants. Before making his escape from the hospital, Lucho Abril Marroquín—who had just reached the most distinguished age given a man to enjoy on this earth: his fiftieth birthday—had penned a most polite farewell letter: “I am very sorry, but I find myself obliged to flee these precincts. A fire awaits me in an old house in Lima, where a crippled woman whose passion blazes like a torch and her family mortally offend God. I have been assigned the mission of extinguishing the flames.”
Would he do so? Would he extinguish these flames? Would this man, come to life once again from the depths of the years, appear for the second time to plunge the Berguas in horror as he had now plunged them into terror? What fate lay in store for this panic-stricken family from Ayacucho?
Thirteen.
The memorable week began with a picturesque episode (without the violence that had marked the encounter with the Argentine barbecue chefs), of which I was a witness and more or less a protagonist. Genaro Jr. spent all his time thinking up innovations for the programs, and one day he decided that we should include interviews in the newscasts to liven them up a little. He set Pascual and me to work, and from then on we began to broadcast a daily interview dealing with some current event on the Panamericana evening news report. This meant more work for the News Department (with no raise in salary), but I didn’t regret it, because it was fun. As I put questions to cabaret entertainers and members of parliament, soccer players and child prodigies, in the studio on the Calle Belén or in front of a tape recorder, I learned that everyone, without exception, could be turned into a subject of a short story.
Before the picturesque episode occurred, the most curious person I interviewed was a Venezuelan bullfighter. He had been a tremendous