Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [19]
At the front gate he came upon Richard, sitting on the grass in a lamentable state. He was sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, leaning back against the fence, his suit wrinkled and covered with dust, stains, bits of grass. But it was his face that distracted the doctor from the memory of Red and Elianita and made him pause: in Richard’s bloodshot eyes, alcohol and rage seemed to have wreaked their mounting havoc in equal degrees. Two threads of spittle hung from his lips, and the expression on his face was both pitiful and grotesque.
“This can’t be, Richard,” he murmured, bending over and trying to make him get to his feet. “Your mother and father mustn’t see you like this. Come on, let me take you home with me till you’ve sobered up. I never thought I’d see you in such a state, my boy.”
Richard looked at him without seeing him, his head dangling, and though he obediently did his best to stand up, his legs gave way. The doctor had to take him by the arms and hoist him to his feet as though he were lifting weights. He managed to make him walk, holding him up by the shoulders. Richard teetered back and forth like a rag doll and seemed about to tumble headlong at any moment. “Let’s see if we can find a taxi, because if we walk you’re not even going to make it to the corner, my boy,” he murmured, stopping along the curb of the Avenida Santa Cruz, and holding Richard up with one arm. Several taxis went by, but they were occupied. The doctor kept trying to flag one down. The wait, on top of the memory of Elianita and Antúnez and his anxiety as to the state his nephew was in, was beginning to make him nervous—him, Doctor Quinteros, who never lost his composure. At that moment, in the incoherent babble that was escaping Richard’s lips, half under his breath, he made out the word “revolver.” He couldn’t help smiling, and ever cheerful in the face of adversity, said, as if to himself, without really expecting Richard to hear him or answer: “And why do you want a revolver, my boy?”
Richard’s reply, as he gazed into space with rolling, murderous eyes, was slow, hoarse, perfectly clear. “To kill Red with.” He had uttered each syllable with icy hatred. He paused, and then added in a voice that suddenly broke: “Or to kill myself with.”
He began mumbling again, and Alberto de Quinteros could no longer make out what he was saying. Just then, a taxi stopped. The doctor shoved Richard inside, gave the driver the address, and got in himself. The moment the taxi started off, Richard burst into tears. He turned to look at him and the boy leaned over, put his head on his chest, and sobbed, his body shaking with a nervous tremor. The doctor put his arm around him, rumpled his hair just as he’d done a little while before with his sister, and reassured the taxi driver, who was looking at him through the rearview mirror, with a gesture that meant “the boy’s had too much to drink.” He let Richard sit there, huddled next to him, weeping and dirtying his blue suit and his silver-gray tie “with his tears and spittle and mucus. He didn’t blink an eye, nor did his heart skip a beat, when in his nephew’s incomprehensible soliloquy, he managed to make out that phrase, repeated two or three times, that horrendous phrase that at the same time sounded beautiful and even chaste: “Because I love her as a man loves a woman and I don’t give a damn about all the rest, Uncle.”
In the garden of the house, Richard vomited, with wrenching spasms that frightened the fox terrier and brought disapproving looks from the butler and the maids. Dr. Quinteros took Richard by the arm and led him to the guest room, made him rinse out his mouth with water, undressed him, put him to bed, made him swallow a strong sleeping pill,