Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [132]
As the artist just sat there staring at me, not saying a word, I went on talking, hearing my voice stammering. I spoke of the avant-garde, of experimentation. I cited or invented authors who, I assured him, had caused a sensation in Europe by introducing innovations very much like his: changing their characters’ identity in the middle of the story, deliberately creating glaring inconsistencies to keep the reader in suspense. They had brought the bean puree and I began to eat, happy to be able to stop talking and lower my eyes so as not to have to watch the Bolivian scriptwriter getting more and more upset. We sat there in silence for some time as I ate and he stirred the bean puree and the grains of rice round and round on his plate with his fork.
“Something embarrassing is happening to me these days,” I finally heard him say in a very low voice, as though talking to himself. “I’m losing track of where I am in my scripts, I’m not sure of what I’m doing, and confusions creep in.” He looked at me in anguish. “I know that you’re a loyal young man, a friend who can be trusted. Not a word of any of this to the merchants!”
I feigned surprise, overwhelmed him with assurances of my affection for him. He was not at all his usual self, but rather, a man in torment, insecure, vulnerable, his face a sickly green, with beads of sweat gleaming on his forehead.
He raised his fingers to his temples. “My head is a boiling volcano of ideas, of course,” he declared. “It’s my memory that’s treacherous. That business about the names, I mean. I’m telling you this in all confidence, my friend. I’m not the one who’s mixing them up; they’re getting mixed up all by themselves. And when I realize what’s going on, it’s too late. I have to perform a juggling act to get them back in their proper places, to invent all sorts of clever reasons to account for all the shifting around. A compass that can’t tell the north from the south can lead to grave, grave consequences.”
I told him that he was exhausted, that nobody could work at the pace he did without destroying himself, that he simply had to take a vacation.
“A vacation? Not till I’m in my grave,” he bristled, as though I’d insulted him.
But a moment later he humbly confessed that when he’d become aware of what he referred to as his “lapses of memory,” he’d tried to set up a system of index cards. But that turned out to be impossible, he didn’t even have the time to look back over the programs that had already been broadcast: every hour of his working day was taken up producing new scripts. “If I stop, it would be the end of the world,” he murmured. And why couldn’t his co-workers help him? Why couldn’t he go to them when such doubts overcame him?
“I could never do that,” he answered. “They’d lose all respect for me. They’re simply raw material, my soldiers, and if I make a terrible mistake, it’s their duty to follow my lead and make the same mistake.”
He abruptly interrupted our dialogue to lecture the waiters about his verbena-and-mint tea, which he maintained was insipid, and then we had to rush back to the station, practically at a run, because it was time for the three o’clock serial. As we said goodbye, I told him I’d do anything I possibly could to help him.
“The one thing I ask of you is not to say one word to anyone,” he said. And then, with his icy little smile, he added: “Don’t worry: grave troubles are cured by grave remedies.”
Back in my office up in the shack, I looked through the afternoon papers, circled the news items to crib for the bulletins, arranged