Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [191]
“The worst thing isn’t the letter, but the fact that, given the state I saw your father in last night, he may very well carry out his threat,” Javier said consolingly, sitting himself on the windowsill. “What are we going to do, old pal?”
“For the moment, go see a lawyer,” was the one thing that occurred to me. “About my marriage and this other business. Do you know anybody who’d be willing to give us legal advice free, or let us pay later?”
We went to see a young attorney, a relative of Javier’s, with whom we’d gone surfing a couple of times at the Miraflores beach. He was very friendly, laughed good-humoredly at all our adventures in Chincha, and teased me a bit; and as Javier had thought, he refused to accept any money from me. He explained that the marriage was not null and void but could be declared so because the date on my birth certificate had been altered. But such an annulment would require a court proceeding. If suit was not brought within two years, the marriage would automatically be valid and could no longer be annulled. As for Aunt Julia, it was indeed possible to denounce her as a “corrupter of the morals of a minor,” to swear out a complaint against her at the commissariat and have her arrested, at least temporarily. There would then be a trial, but he was certain that, in view of the circumstances—that is to say, given the fact that I was eighteen and not twelve—it was inconceivable that the prosecution would win the case: any court would acquit her.
“But even so, if he wants to, your dad can give Julita a very hard time of it for a while,” Javier concluded as we were walking back to the radio station along the Jirón de la Unión. “Is it true that he’s got pull in government circles?”
I didn’t know; maybe he was the friend of some general, the bosom buddy of some minister. All of a sudden, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait till the next day to find out what they wanted of me at the commissariat. I asked Javier to help me rescue a few serials from the magma of papers at Radio Central so I could lay my doubts to rest that very day. He agreed to help, and also offered to come visit me if they threw me in jail—and bring me cigarettes each time.
At six that evening I gave Genaro Jr. two serials that I’d more or less patched together and promised him that I’d have three more the following day; I took a quick look at the 6 and 8 p.m. bulletins, promised Pascual that I’d be back for the Panamericana newscast, and half an hour later Javier and I were at the commissariat on the Malecón 28 de Julio, in Miraflores. We waited a good while, and finally the commissioner—a major in uniform—and the chief of the police detectives received us. My father had come that morning to ask them to take an official deposition from me as to what had gone on. They had a handwritten list of questions, but the chief of detectives took my answers down on a typewriter, and this took a long time because he was a terrible typist. I admitted that I’d gotten married (and pointed out emphatically that I had done so “of my own free will”) but I refused to say where or before what official. I also refused to reveal who the witnesses had been. The questions were such that they appeared to have been drawn up by a shyster lawyer with dirty work in mind: my date of birth and immediately thereafter (as though the answer were not implicit in the preceding question) whether I was a minor or not, where I lived and with whom, and of course, how old Aunt Julia was (they kept referring to her as Doña Julia), a question that I also refused to answer, saying it was not the gentlemanly thing to reveal a woman’s age. This aroused a childish curiosity on the part of the two police officials, who, after I had signed the deposition, assumed a paternal air and asked me, “merely out of curiosity,” how many years older than I the “lady” was. When we left the commissariat, I suddenly felt very depressed, with the uncomfortable sensation that I was a thief or a murderer.
Javier thought I’d put my foot in