Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [125]
Aunt Julia was now in the habit of coming down to join me for the evening at Panamericana. We had discovered that this was the safest place, since Pascual and Big Pablito were in on our secret and we could count on their complicity. She would appear after five, the hour when things began to quiet down around the place: the Genaros had gone home, and almost no one came prowling about the shack. My co-workers, by tacit agreement, would ask permission to “go have a cup of coffee,” so that Aunt Julia and I could hug and kiss each other and talk alone. Sometimes I would get to work writing and she would sit reading a magazine or chatting with Javier, who invariably came up to join us around seven. We had come to form an inseparable group, and in this little room with its thin plasterboard walls my romance with Aunt Julia had come to have a marvelous naturalness. We could hold hands or kiss and nobody paid any attention. That made us happy. Shutting ourselves up inside the shack was to be free, to be ourselves, we could love each other, talk about what mattered most to us, and feel surrounded by an aura of understanding. To go outside beyond these narrow limits was to enter a hostile domain, where we were forced to lie and to hide.
“Is it all right to call this our love nest?” Aunt Julia asked me. “Or is that huachafo too?”
“Of course it’s huachafo, and it’s simply not permissible to call it that,” I answered. “But we could name it Montmartre.”
We played teacher and pupil and I explained to her what things were huachafo, what things it was not permissible to say or do, and I subjected her reading matter to an inquisitorial censorship, placing all her favorite authors on the forbidden list, beginning with Frank Yerby and ending with Corín Tellado. We had a great time and laughed like fools over this huachafo game, and every once in a while Javier would join in, with fervent dialectical flourishes.
Pascual and Big Pablito were also present during my reading of “Aunt Eliana,” because they happened to be there at the time and I didn’t have the nerve to chase them out, a fortunate turn of events for me as it turned out, since they were the only ones who praised my story, even though their enthusiasm was slightly suspect, inasmuch as they were my subordinates. Javier maintained that it lacked verisimilitude, that nobody would believe that a family would ostracize a girl merely because she married a Chinese, and assured me that if her husband was a black or an Indian the story could be salvaged. Aunt Julia dealt me a mortal blow by telling me that it struck her as melodramatic and that certain words, such as “tremulous” and “sobbing,” sounded huachafo to her. I was just launching into a defense of “Aunt Eliana” when I spied my cousin Nancy in the doorway of the shack. One look sufficed to tell me what had brought her there.
“The family’s discovered what’s going on, and they’re up in arms,” she blurted out.
Smelling a bit of juicy gossip, Pascual and Big Pablito were all ears. I kept my cousin from going on with her story, asked Pascual to get the nine o’clock news bulletin ready, and the four of us, Nancy and Javier, Aunt Julia and I, went out for coffee. As we sat at a table in the Bransa, she went into more details. She had been in the bathroom shampooing her hair and had overheard a telephone conversation between her mother and Aunt Jesús. A cold chill had run down her spine on hearing the words “the pair of them” and discovering that they were talking about Aunt Julia and me. It wasn’t very clear what the conversation was all about, except that they’d known about us for some time, because at one point Aunt Laura had said: “Can you imagine: even Camunchita saw them shamelessly holding hands on Olivar de San Isidro” (that was quite true, we’d done exactly that, just one afternoon,