Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [190]
“We’ll pay you extra, naturally,” he informed me. “We don’t exploit anybody around here.”
I felt enormous gratitude toward Genaro Jr. and great sympathy for his problems. Even if he gave me only a hundred soles extra, they’d be a boon to me at this point.
As I was leaving his office, his voice stopped me at the door. “Hey, I hear you’ve gotten married.” I turned around; he was gesturing affectionately in my direction. “Who’s the victim? A woman, I trust? Well, congratulations. We’ll have to have a drink together to celebrate.”
I called Aunt Julia from my office. She told me that Aunt Olga had calmed down a little, but every so often was overcome with amazement all over again and kept saying: “You’re out of your mind.” Aunt Julia wasn’t terribly upset that the apartment wasn’t quite ready to move into (“Well, Varguitas, all I can say is that we’ve slept apart for such a long time that we can go on that way for two weeks more”), and she told me that after taking a nice long bath and changing her clothes she felt very optimistic. I told her I wouldn’t be able to come by for lunch because I had to go through a huge stack of serials, but that we’d see each other that night. I got the Panamericana newscast and two bulletins out and then went digging in the storeroom of Radio Central. It was a cellar with no light and full of cobwebs, and as I went inside I heard mice scampering around in the dark. There were papers everywhere: in piles, scattered about loose, tied together in bundles. The dust and the dampness made me start sneezing immediately. It was impossible to work down there, so I began carting armfuls of paper upstairs to Pedro Camacho’s cubbyhole and sat down at what had been his desk. There was not a trace of him left: neither the dictionary of quotations, nor the map of Lima, nor his sociologico-psychologico-racial index cards. The filthy mess that the old serials from CMQ were in was unbelievable: the dampness had blurred the texts, mice and cockroaches had nibbled the pages and left droppings all over them, and the scripts had gotten as hopelessly mixed up with each other as Pedro Camacho’s plots. There wasn’t much choosing to be done; the most I could hope to do was try to find a few legible texts.
I’d been having a fit of allergic sneezing for three hours as I dove into syrupy horrors, trying to put together a few serials as though they were jigsaw puzzles, when the door of the cubbyhole opened and Javier walked in.
“It’s incredible that at a time like this, with all the problems you’ve got, you’re letting yourself get carried away again by that Pedro Camacho mania of yours,” he said angrily. “I’ve just come from your grandparents’. The least you could do is find out what’s happening and start trembling in your boots.”
He flung two envelopes down on the desk strewn with tear-jerkers. One was the letter my father had left with him the night before. It read:
“Mario: I’m giving that woman forty-eight hours to leave the country. If she does not do so, I shall use my influence and personally see to it that she pays dearly for her effrontery. As for you, I should like to inform you that I am armed and will not allow you to make a fool of me. If you do not obey to the letter and this woman does not leave the country within the time limit that I have indicated above, I shall put five bullets through you and kill you like a dog, right in the middle of the street.”
He had signed it with his two family names and added a postscript: “You can go ask for police protection if you wish. And to remove all possible doubts as to my intentions, I herewith affix my signature once again to my decision to kill you, wherever I find you, like a dog.” And he had indeed signed his name a second time, in an ever bolder hand than the first time.
The other envelope had been handed to Javier by my granny half an hour before, so that he could bring it to me at the office. It had been delivered to the house by a Guardia Civil; it was a summons to appear at the Miraflores