Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [151]
I began my rounds very early in the morning. The first mayor’s offices I visited were those of the run-down municipalities farthest from downtown Lima: El Rímac, El Porvenir, Vitarte, Chorrillos. I explained the problem a hundred and one times (blushing furiously the first few times, and after that with the greatest aplomb) to mayors, deputy mayors, municipal councilors, secretaries, janitors, messenger boys, and each time the answer was a categorical no. I ran into the same stumbling block each time: unless I could produce notarized proof of my parents’ consent, or of my having been emancipated by them before the judge of the juvenile court, I could not get married. I then tried my luck in the mayor’s offices of the districts in the center of town (except for Miraflores and San Isidro, since there might be someone around who knew my family), with precisely the same result. After looking over my papers, the functionaries would inevitably crack jokes at my expense that were like so many kicks in the belly: “So you want to marry your mama, do you?” or “Don’t be a fool, my boy, why get married? Just shack up with her and that’ll be that.” The only place where there was a ray of hope was in the mayor’s office in Surco, where a plump, beetle-browed male secretary told us that the matter could be arranged for ten thousand soles, “because lots of people will have to be paid to keep their mouths shut.” I tried to bargain with him, and had gotten him down to five thousand soles, a sum I’d have great difficulty scraping together, but at that point, as though suddenly frightened by his own audacity, he backed down and ended up kicking us out of the office.
I talked on the phone with Aunt Julia twice a day and lied to her, telling her that things were going along without a hitch, that she should have a small suitcase all packed containing the things of hers she considered indispensable, that at any moment now I’d be calling to say, “Everything’s all set.” But I was feeling more and more demoralized. On Friday evening, when I returned to my grandparents’ house, I found a telegram from my parents: “Arriving Monday, Panagra, flight 516.”
That night, after tossing and turning in bed for a long time as I thought things over, I finally turned on the lamp on the nightstand, fished out the notebook in which I kept a list of subjects for stories, and wrote down, by order of preference, the options that lay before me. The first was to marry Aunt Julia and confront the family with a legal fait accompli that they would be obliged to accept, like it or not. But inasmuch as there were only a few days left now and the municipal authorities all over Lima were proving so refractory, this first option was turning out to be more and more Utopian. The second was to flee abroad with Aunt Julia. But not to Bolivia; the idea of living in a world where she had lived without me, where she had so many friends and acquaintances, not to mention an ex-husband, bothered me. The best country for us would be Chile. She could go off to La Paz, to fool the family, and I would light out for Tacna, in an intercity bus or a jitney. I’d manage in one way or another to cross the border illegally to Arica, and from there I’d proceed overland to Santiago, where Aunt Julia would come to join me or be waiting for me. The possibility of traveling and living without a passport (getting one would also require written permission