Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [128]
“I know very well what all of you owe Pedro Camacho,” I said impatiently. “There are good reasons why his serials are the most popular ones all over the country.”
I saw them exchange looks and screw up their courage. “That’s precisely the point,” Luciano Pando finally said, anxious and upset. “In the beginning, we didn’t pay any attention. We thought they were just careless slips, the sort of absentminded mistakes that everybody makes. And especially somebody who works from sunup to sundown every single day.”
“But what is it exactly that’s happening to Pedro Camacho?” I interrupted him. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Don Luciano.”
“The serials, young man,” Josefina Sánchez murmured, as though committing a sacrilege. “They’re becoming more and more bizarre.”
“We actors and technicians are taking turns answering the telephone at Radio Central to fend off protests from the listeners,” Puddler chimed in. His hair looked like shiny porcupine bristles, as though he’d applied great quantities of brilliantine to them; as usual, he was wearing a pair of stevedore’s overalls, and shoes without laces, and he appeared to be on the point of bursting into tears. “So that the Genaros don’t boot him out, sir.”
“You know very well that he doesn’t have a cent to his name and lives from hand to mouth like the rest of us,” Luciano Pando added. “What would happen to him if they kick him out? He’d die of hunger!”
“And what about us?” Josefina Sánchez said proudly. “What would become of us without him?”
They all began to talk at once, telling me everything with a wealth of details. The inconsistencies (the “bloopers,” as Luciano Pando put it) had begun about two months before, but at the beginning they were so trivial that probably only the actors noticed them. They hadn’t said a word to Pedro Camacho because, knowing what he was like, nobody had dared to, and furthermore, for quite a long time they wondered whether he might not be playing deliberate tricks. But in the last three weeks things had become much more serious.
“It’s all turned into a hopeless mess, I assure you, young man,” Josefina Sánchez said disconsolately. “The serials have all gotten mixed up with each other, to the point that even we can’t untangle one from the other.”
“Hipólito Lituma has always been a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, the terror of the malefactors of El Callao, in the ten o’clock serial,” Luciano Pando put in, all upset. “But in the last three days that’s turned out to be the name of the judge in the four o’clock serial. His name used to be Pedro Barreda. Just to give you one example.”
“And now Don Pedro Barreda’s talking about exterminating rats, because they devoured his little girl,” Josefina Sánchez said, her eyes brimming with tears. “When, before, it was Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui’s baby daughter.”
“You can imagine what a terrible time we have of it at recording sessions,” Puddler stammered. “Saying and doing things that don’t make any sense at all.”
“And there’s just no way of straightening out the whole mess,” Josefina Sánchez murmured. “Because you’ve seen with your own eyes how Señor Camacho rules over the programs with an iron hand. He doesn’t allow us to change even a comma. Otherwise, he falls into terrible fits of rage.”
“He’s exhausted—that’s the explanation,” Luciano Pando said, shaking his head sadly. “Nobody can work twenty hours a day and still think straight. He needs a vacation to get back to his old self.”
“You get along well with the Genaros,” Josefina Sánchez said to me. “Couldn’t you have a talk with them? Just simply tell them he’s exhausted and ask them to give him a few weeks’ rest?”
“The hardest part will be convincing him to take them,” Luciano Pando said. “But things can’t go on like this. If they do, the Genaros will end up firing him.”
“People keep calling the station all the time,” Batán said. “It takes real genius to think up ways of evading their questions.