Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [131]
We went to a typically Peruvian restaurant, behind the Colegio de la Immaculada on the Jirón Chancay, where the specialty of the house was traditional dishes of Arequipa that, I told him, might perhaps remind him of picantes, the famous Bolivian stews with fiery hot peppers. But the artist, faithful to his usual spartan diet, ordered only a bowl of consommé with egg and a purée of red beans that he barely tasted. He skipped dessert altogether, and with a flood of grandiloquent words that left the waiters dumfounded protested vehemently when they didn’t properly prepare his verbena-and-mint tea.
“I’m having a bad time of it these days,” I said to him after we had ordered. “My family’s discovered my romance with your compatriot, and since she’s older than I am and a divorcée, they’re furious. They’re going to take steps to separate us and I’m feeling very bitter about it.”
“My compatriot?” the scriptwriter said in a surprised tone of voice. “Are you having an affair of the heart with an Argentine—pardon me—a Bolivian woman?”
I reminded him that he knew Aunt Julia, that we’d visited him in his room at La Tapada and shared his evening meal with him there, that I’d already told him about my love problems and that he’d prescribed prunes eaten on an empty stomach and anonymous letters as the cure. I did so deliberately, going into details, and observing him closely.
He listened to me very attentively, with a grave expression on his face, not blinking an eye. “It’s not a bad thing if one is confronted with such contretemps,” he said, sipping his first spoonful of consommé. “Suffering is a good teacher.”
Whereupon he changed the subject, holding forth at length on the art of cooking and the necessity of being moderate in one’s eating habits in order to maintain one’s spiritual health. He assured me that consuming too much fat, starch, and sugar numbed people’s moral sensibilities and inclined them toward crime and vice.
“Conduct a statistical survey of the people you know,” he advised me. “You’ll find that it’s fat people above all who turn out to be perverts. On the other hand, you’ll see that there’s no such thing as a thin person with evil proclivities.”
Though he was doing his best to hide the fact, he was ill at ease. He was not holding forth with his usual sincerity and heartfelt conviction, but, quite obviously, simply rattling on, his mind preoccupied by troubles he was trying to hide. A look of anxiety, fear, shame lurked in his tiny bulging eyes, and every once in a while he bit his lips. His long hair was full of dandruff, and as his neck danced back and forth in his shirt collar, I discovered that he was wearing a little medal around it that he kept fingering from time to time. “A most miraculous man: Nuestro Señor de Limpias,” he explained, showing it to me. His black suit coat drooped from his shoulders and he looked pale. I had decided I wouldn’t mention the serials, but all of a sudden, when I saw that he didn’t even remember Aunt Julia or any of the conversations we’d had about her, I was seized with a morbid curiosity. We had finished the consommé’ with egg, and were drinking dark chicha as we waited for the main dish.
“I was talking with Genaro Jr. about you just this morning,” I said in as casual a tone of voice as possible. “Good news: according to the ad-agency surveys, the number of people tuned in to your serials has gone up again this month. Even the stones are listening to them.”
I noted that he