Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [127]
As I went up to my shack in the rickety elevator, I felt, as I had at other times, an inexplicable desire to tell my troubles to Pedro Camacho. It was like a premonition, because the principal collaborators of the Bolivian scriptwriter—Luciano Pando, Josefina Sánchez, and Puddler—were waiting for me in the office, absorbed in an animated conversation with Big Pablito as Pascual padded out the news bulletin with all sorts of catastrophes (he had never obeyed my orders forbidding him to include items about dead people, naturally). They waited patiently while I gave Pascual a hand with the last-minute news, and when he and Big Pablito had said good night to us and left the four of us alone in the shack, they looked at each other in embarrassment before saying anything. It was quite plain that what they wanted to talk to me about was the artist.
“You’re his best friend and that’s why we’ve come to you,” Luciano Pando murmured. He was a walleyed little man in his sixties, all bent over, who wore a greasy muffler day and night, winter and summer. He had on the only suit I’d ever seen him in, a brown one with little blue pinstripes, in tatters from being cleaned and pressed countless times. His right shoe had a tear across the instep through which you could see his sock. “It has to do with a very delicate matter. You’ve doubtless already guessed…”
“Not really, Don Luciano,” I said to him. “Are you referring to Pedro Camacho? Yes, we’re friends, it’s true, although as you already know, he’s a person one never really gets to know. Is there something wrong?”
He nodded, but then just stood there staring at his shoes and not saying a word, as though overwhelmed by the thought of what he was about to say. I looked questioningly at Josefina and Puddler, who were also standing there motionless, with grave expressions on their faces.
“We’re doing this out of affection and gratitude,” Josefina Sánchez trilled in her lovely velvet voice. “Because no one can possibly know, young man, how much we who work in this miserably paid profession owe to Pedro Camacho.”
“We’ve always been made to feel we were fifth wheels, nobody thought our talents were worth two cents, we had such an inferiority complex we took ourselves to be worthless trash,” Puddler said in a voice so filled with emotion that the thought crossed my mind all of a sudden that Pedro Camacho had met with some sort of accident. “Thanks to him, we discovered that ours was an artistic profession.”
“But you’re talking about him as though he were dead,” I said.
“Because what would people do without us?” Josefina Sánchez said, citing the words of her idol without having heard what I’d just said. “Who else gives them the illusions and emotions that help them to go on living?”
She was a woman who had been given that beautiful voice of hers more or less to make up for the collection of awkward mistakes her body represented. It was impossible to guess exactly how old she was, though she had no doubt passed the half-century mark. Her hair was naturally dark, but she bleached it with peroxide and it peeked out, like yellow straw, from beneath a pomegranate-colored turban and hung down over her ears, without, unfortunately, hiding them altogether, for they were enormous, protruding from her head like dish antennas avidly picking up all the world’s sounds. But her most striking feature was her double chin, a sac of loose folds of skin that drooped down over her multicolored blouses. She had a thick fuzz on her upper lip that might well have been described as a mustache, and she had fallen into the dreadful habit of fingering it as she spoke. Her legs were swathed in elastic support hose like that worn by soccer players, because she suffered from varicose