Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [150]
There in the Palacio de Torre Tagle, in a room with old colonial wood paneling centuries old and impeccably dressed young men, as I waited for the bureaucrat, apprised of the emergency situation by a telephone call from my professor, to put more seals on Aunt Julia’s birth certificate and collect the necessary signatures that went with them, I heard about yet another catastrophe. An Italian boat, anchored at a dock in El Callao, loaded with departing passengers and visitors bidding them bon voyage, had all of a sudden, contrary to all known laws of physics and reason, begun turning round and round in circles, then listed to port and sank rapidly in the Pacific, with everyone on board lost—either fatally injured, drowned, or, incredibly, devoured by sharks. I learned this from the conversation of two ladies sitting next to me, also waiting while some formality was being taken care of. They were not joking; to them this shipwreck was a tragedy.
“It happened on one of Pedro Camacho’s radio serials, am I correct?” I butted in.
“Yes, on the one at four o’clock,” the older of the two ladies replied, a bony, energetic woman with a heavy Slavic accent. “The one about Alberto de Quinteros, the cardiologist.”
“The doctor who was a gynecologist last month,” a young girl sitting at a desk typing chimed in, smiling and putting her finger to her temple to indicate that somebody had obviously lost his mind.
“Didn’t you hear yesterday’s broadcast?” the lady in glasses who was with the foreign woman said in her unmistakable Lima accent. “Dr. Quinteros was on his way to Chile for a vacation, with his wife and Charo, his little girl. And all three of them drowned!” she said, in a voice filled with grief.
“They all drowned,” the foreign woman put in. “The doctor’s nephew Richard, and Elianita and her husband, Red Antúnez, that stupid idiot, and even the little baby born of the incestuous relation, Rubencito. They’d come down to the boat to see them off.”
“But what’s really funny is that Lieutenant Jaime Concha, who’s from another serial, also drowned, especially since he’d already died in the El Callao fire three days before,” the girl at the desk, who’d stopped typing, butted in again, dying with laughter. “Those serials have all turned into a tremendous joke, don’t you think?”
One of the impeccably dressed young men, who had all the earmarks of an intellectual (specialty: Our Country’s Borders), smiled at her indulgently and said to the rest of us in a tone of voice that Pedro Camacho would have had every right to describe as argentine: “Didn’t I tell you that that device of carrying characters over from one story to another was invented by Balzac?” But he then drew a conclusion that gave him away: “If he discovers that Camacho’s plagiarizing him, he’ll get him sent to jail.”
“What’s so funny isn’t that he carries them over from one serial to another but that he brings them back to life,” the girl argued in her own defense. “Lieutenant Concha burned to death as he was reading a Donald Duck, so how is it possible for him to drown to death now?”
“Maybe he’s just unlucky,” the impeccably dressed young man who was bringing me my papers suggested.
I left with my papers now anointed and blessed, leaving the two ladies, the secretary, and the young diplomats engaged in an animated discussion of the Bolivian scribe. Aunt Julia was waiting for me in a café and laughed when I recounted the whole episode to her; it had been some time since she’d listened to her compatriot’s broadcasts.
Except for getting the papers certified, which had turned out to be so simple,