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By Root 1050 0

wreaked havoc with the radio serials by killing off dozens of characters in the space of a few minutes. This time, the actors and technicians of Radio Central, in a panic, had stopped trying to serve as a bulwark protecting the scriptwriter, or had been unable to prevent the radio listeners’ expressions of utter bewilderment and their protests from reaching the Genaros’ ears. But the latter had already been alerted by the daily papers, whose radio columnists had been making derisive remarks about Pedro Camacho’s cataclysms for days. The Genaros had called him into their office and questioned him, taking every possible precaution so as not to hurt his feelings or exasperate him. But in the middle of the conversation he’d had a nervous collapse: the catastrophes were stratagems to enable him to begin the stories all over again from scratch, since his memory was failing him, and he could no longer remember what had happened in the plots in previous episodes, nor which character was which, nor which serial they belonged to, and—“weeping hysterically and tearing his hair,” Nelly assured me—he confessed to them that in the last few weeks his work, his life, his nights had been torture. The Genaros had called in a famous Lima physician, Dr. Honorio Delgado, who had immediately announced that the scriptwriter was in no condition to work; his “exhausted” brain had to have a rest.

We were all ears listening to Nelly’s tale when the phone rang. It was Genaro Jr.; he needed to see me immediately. I went down to his office, convinced that the moment had come when I’d receive, at the very least, a severe warning. But he greeted me as he had in the elevator, presuming that I knew all about the problems confronting him. He had just talked with Havana on the phone, and was foaming at the mouth because CMQ, taking advantage of his situation, of the emergency, had quadrupled the price it was asking for its serials.

“It’s a tragedy, an incredible stroke of bad luck, Camacho’s programs were the ones with the best listener ratings, advertisers were fighting for air time on them,” he said, shuffling papers on his desk. “What a disaster to have to fall back on those sharks at CMQ again!”

I asked him how Pedro Camacho was, if he’d seen him, how long it would be before he’d be able to come back to work.

“There’s no hope for him,” he growled, with a sort of fury, but finally went on in a more compassionate tone of voice. “Dr. Delgado says that his psyche is undergoing a process of deliquescence. Deliquescence. Do you understand what he means by that? That his mind is falling to pieces, I suppose, that his brain is rotting, or something like that—right? When my father asked Dr. Delgado if his recovery might possibly take months, his reply was: ‘Years, perhaps.’ Can you imagine!”

He bowed his head, his spirits crushed, and with the certainty of a soothsayer predicted what was going to happen: when sponsors found out that the scripts from now on were going to be from CMQ, they’d cancel their contracts or demand a fifty percent reduction in advertising rates. And to top everything off, it was going to be three weeks to a month before the new serials arrived, because Cuba was in a mess, what with the terrorism and the guerrillas, CMQ had been turned topsy-turvy, with people arrested and all kinds of troubles. But leaving Radio Central listeners without any serials at all for a month was unthinkable, the station would lose its audience, Radio la Crónica or Radio Colonial would lure them all away, they’d already begun to be tough competition because they were broadcasting cheap, vulgar Argentine soap operas.

“By the way, that’s why I asked you to come down here,” he added, looking at me as though he’d just noticed that I was there. “You’ve got to give us a hand. You’re more or less of an intellectual, and it’ll be an easy job for you.”

The job he was speaking of was to search around in the storeroom of Radio Central, where all the old serials, the ones from before Pedro Camacho’s arrival, were kept, look through them, and find the ones that could