Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [152]
The next day, at a very early hour, I rushed over to Javier’s pensión. We’d fallen into the habit of going over the events of the day before each morning as he shaved and showered and drawing up a plan of action for the day just beginning. Sitting on the toilet seat watching him lather his face, I read him my list of options as I had outlined them in my notebook, with comments in the margin.
As he rinsed the lather off, he argued insistently that I should change the order of my preferences and put suicide at the head of my list. “If you kill yourself, the junk you’ve written will automatically attract attention, people with a morbid turn of mind will want to read your stories, and it’ll be easy to bring them out as a book,” he said persuasively as he dried his face. “You’ll be a famous writer—posthumously, I grant you.”
“You’re going to make me miss the first news bulletin,” I said, to hurry him up. “You can stop the Cantinflas act—I don’t find your jokes the least bit funny.”
“If you did yourself in, I wouldn’t have to miss so many days at work or so many of my classes at the university,” Javier went on as he got dressed. “The best possible thing would be for you to go through with it today, right away, this very morning. That way, I wouldn’t have to pawn my things, which naturally I’m never going to be able to redeem before they auction them off, because, is there any chance you’ll be able to pay me back someday?”
And as we were trotting down the street to the jitney stop, still convinced that he was a first-rate comedian, he went on: “And one last thing: if you kill yourself, you’ll be the talk of the town, and reporters will flock to interview your best friend, your confidant, the witness of the tragedy, and his picture will be in all the papers. Don’t you think there’s a good chance that your cousin Nancy would be swayed by all that publicity I’d get?”
In the (horribly named) Bureau of Pignoration on the Plaza de Armas, we pawned my typewriter and his radio, my watch and his pens, and I finally persuaded him that he should also pawn his watch. Despite bargaining furiously, all we managed to get was two thousand soles. Earlier on, without my grandparents’ noticing, I had little by little sold my suits, shoes, shirts, ties, sweaters to secondhand clothes dealers on the Calle La Paz, till I had practically nothing left but the clothes on my back. But the immolation of my wardrobe brought me barely four hundred soles. I had better luck, however, with Genaro Jr, whom I finally persuaded, after a dramatic half hour, to give me four months’ salary in advance and deduct the amount advanced me from my paychecks over a year’s time. The conversation had an unexpected ending. I had sworn that I needed the money urgently to pay for a hernia operation my granny had to have, a plea that had left him unmoved. But then suddenly he said: “All right, I’ll give you the advance,” and then added, with a friendly smile: “But admit that it’s to pay for your girlfriend’s abortion.” I lowered my eyes and begged him not to give my secret away.
On seeing how depressed I was at having gotten so little money for the things we’d pawned, Javier went back to the radio station with me, since we’d decided that we’d both ask for the afternoon off from our respective jobs so as to go to Huacho together. Perhaps the municipal authorities in the provinces would turn out to be more sentimental. I arrived in my office up in the shack just as the phone was ringing. It was Aunt Julia, beside herself with rage. The night