Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [147]
I was sitting at my desk, after writing up two more news bulletins and taping an interview for Panamericano with Gaucho Guerrero (an Argentine long-distance runner who had become a naturalized Peruvian citizen and whose entire life was devoted to beating his own record; he would run round and round a public square, for entire days and nights at a stretch, and was capable of eating, shaving, writing, and sleeping as he ran), deciphering, amid the bureaucratic prose of the certificate, some of the details surrounding my birth—I had been born on the Bulevard Parra; my grandfather and my Uncle Alejandro had been the ones who went to the city hall to announce my entry into this world—when Pascual and Big Pablito came in and distracted me. They were talking about a fire, laughing fit to kill as they went on about the victims’ agonized shrieks as they roasted to death. I tried to go on reading my abstruse birth certificate, but the comments of my two editors about the Guardias Civiles of the commissariat of El Callao that had been sprinkled with gasoline and set on fire by a demented pyromaniac, every last one of whom had been burned to cinders, from the chief on down to the humblest flatfoot, and even the dog that was the commissariat’s mascot, distracted me again.
“I’ve seen all the papers and I missed that one—where did you read about it?” I asked them. And to Pascual: “I warn you: you’re not to use up all the time on today’s bulletins talking about the fire.” And to the two of them: “You’re hopeless sadists, both of you.”
“It’s not a news item—it’s the eleven o’clock serial,” Big Pablito explained. “The one about Sergeant Lituma, the terror of the underworld of El Callao.”
“He got fried to death, too,” Pascual chimed in. “He could have gotten out alive, he was just leaving to make his rounds, but he went back in to rescue his captain. His good heart was the death of him.”
“It was the dog, Choclito, he went back in to rescue, not the captain,” Big Pablito corrected him.
“That wasn’t ever really clear,” Pascual said. “One of the jail doors fell on him. I wish you could have seen Don Pedro Camacho while he was burning to death. What a great actor!”
“And how about Puddler?” Big Pablito put in enthusiastically, eager to give credit where credit was due. “If anybody had told me you could create a roaring inferno with just two fingers, I wouldn’t have believed it. But I saw him do it with my own two eyes, Don Mario!”
Javier’s arrival interrupted the conversation. The two of us went off to have our usual cup of coffee together at the Bransa, and once we’d sat down I gave him a quick rundown of what I’d found out about the necessary papers and triumphantly showed him the copy of my birth certificate.
“I’ve been doing some thinking and I have to tell you that you’re making a stupid mistake getting married,” he said the minute I’d finished, a bit ill at ease at being so outspoken. “Not only because you’re still just a kid, but above all on account of the question of money. You’re going to have to work your ass off at all sorts of dumb jobs just to have enough to eat.”
“In other words, you’re telling me exactly what my father and mother are going to tell me,” I said mockingly. “Aren’t you going to mention that if I get married that’ll be the end of my studying law? That I’ll never become a great jurist?”
“That if you get married you won’t even have time to read. That if you get married you’ll never become a writer,” Javier answered.
“We’re going to have a fight if you go on this way,” I warned him.
“Okay then, I’ll hold my tongue.” He laughed. “I’ve done as my conscience dictated by predicting the future I see in store for you. And I