Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [185]
Nineteen.
Javier phoned us from Lima at seven o’clock in the morning. It was a very bad connection, but even all the crackling and buzzing on the line could not conceal the alarm in his voice.
“Bad news,” he told me straight out. “Lots of bad news.”
About fifty kilometers outside Lima, the jitney in which he and Pascual had been returning to the city the night before had gone off the road and rolled over in the sand. Neither of them had been hurt, but the driver and another passenger had suffered serious contusions; it had been a nightmare trying to get a car to stop in the middle of the night and lend them a hand. Javier was dead tired by the time he got back to his pensión. And on his arrival there he’d had an even worse scare. My father had been waiting for him at the door. Livid with rage, he had approached Javier, brandishing a revolver and threatening to shoot him if he didn’t reveal instantly where Aunt Julia and I were. Utterly panic-stricken (“Till that moment, the only time I’d ever seen revolvers was in the movies, old pal”), Javier had sworn to him, taking his mother and all the saints as his witnesses, that he had no idea, that he hadn’t seen me for a week. My father had finally calmed down a little and left Javier a letter that he was to deliver to me personally. In a daze after what had just happened, Javier (“I had quite a night of it, Varguitas, believe me”) had decided, once my father had left, to go have a word with my Uncle Lucho straightway to find out whether my mother’s side of the family had also worked itself up into such an insane rage. My uncle had received him in his bathrobe. They had talked for nearly an hour. Uncle Lucho, it turned out, wasn’t furious, just sad, worried, troubled. Javier confirmed the fact that Aunt Julia and I had complied with all the formalities and were legally married, and also assured my uncle that he, too, had done his best to dissuade me, to no avail. Uncle Lucho suggested that Aunt Julia and I return to Lima at once to take the bull by the horns and try to settle things.
“The big problem is your father,” Javier said, winding up his report. “The rest of the family will eventually accept the situation. But your dad’s foaming at the mouth. You can’t imagine what he says in that letter he left for you!”
I scolded him for reading other people’s letters, and told him that we were coming back to Lima immediately, that I would come by to see him at the office where he worked or would phone him. As she was getting dressed, I told Aunt Julia everything he’d said, not hiding anything from her, but at the same time trying to make everything that had happened sound less violent.
“What I don’t like at all is the business with the revolver,” she commented. “I presume that the person he really wants to put a bullet through is me, right? Listen, Varguitas, I do hope my father-in-law won’t shoot me right in the middle of my honeymoon. And isn’t it awful about that jitney accident? Poor Javier! Poor Pascual! Our madness has really gotten them into a heap of trouble.”
She wasn’t the least bit frightened or upset by the prospects that lay in store for us; she seemed very happy and determined to face up to any and every disaster that might await us. And that was how I felt, too. We paid the hotel bill, walked over to the Plaza de Armas to have our morning coffee, and half an hour later were on our way back to Lima, in an ancient jitney. During almost the entire trip we kept kissing on the mouth, on the cheeks, on the hands, whispering into each other’s ear that we loved each other, and paying no attention to the uneasy looks of the other passengers and the driver, who kept sneaking glances at us in the rearview mirror.
We arrived in Lima around 10 a.m. It was a gray day, the fog turned all the people and all the buildings into ghostly apparitions, and the air was so damp we felt as though we were breathing water.