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By Root 1132 0

could be from, do you have any idea?” I, too, wrote regularly (it was the last thing I did every night, so sleepy at times that I felt tipsy), telling her all the many things I’d done that day. In the days following her departure I kept running into my countless relatives, at my grandparents’, at Uncle Lucho’s and Aunt Olga’s, in the street, and discovering the reactions of each. They varied a good deal and some of them were quite unexpected. Uncle Pedro’s was the most severe: he left me standing there with my outstretched hand and turned his back after giving me an icy look. Aunt Jesús shed great floods of tears and embraced me, whispering dramatically: “You poor child!” Other aunts and uncles chose to act as though nothing had happened; they were affectionate with me, but didn’t mention Aunt Julia and pretended not to know we’d been married.

I hadn’t seen my father, but I knew that once his demand that Aunt Julia leave the country had been met, he’d cooled off a bit. My parents were staying with paternal aunts and uncles, whom I never visited, but my mother came to my grandparents’ house every day and we saw each other there. She adopted an ambivalent, affectionate, maternal attitude toward me, but every time the taboo subject came up, directly or indirectly, she turned pale, tears came to her eyes, and she assured me: “I’ll never accept it.” When I suggested she come see the little apartment, she was as offended as though I’d insulted her, and she always spoke of my having sold my books and my clothes as though it were a Greek tragedy. I cut her short by saying: “Mama dearest, don’t begin another of your radio serials.” She never spoke of my father either, and I didn’t ask about him, but I learned through other relatives who saw him that his wrath had given way to despair as to the future that awaited me, and that he was in the habit of saying: “He’ll have to obey me till he’s twenty-one; after that, he can ruin his life if he wants to.”

Despite my multiple jobs, I wrote another story during these weeks. It was called “The Blessed One and Father Nicolás.” It took place in Grocio Prado, of course, and was anticlerical: the story of a sly little priest who, noting the fervent devotion of the people to Melchorita, decided to industrialize it for her benefit, and with the cold ambition of a good businessman set up a multiple operation: manufacturing and selling pious images, scapulars, good-luck charms, and all sorts of relics of the Blessed One, charging admission to the places where she had lived, taking up collections and organizing raffles to build her a chapel and pay the expenses of delegations sent off to Rome to hurry her canonization along. I wrote two different epilogues, in the form of newspaper items: in one of them, the inhabitants of Grocio Prado discovered all the business dealings that Father Nicolás was involved in and lynched him, and in the other the little priest eventually became the archbishop of Lima. (I decided I would wait until I read the story to Aunt Julia to choose which of the two endings I would use.) I wrote it in the library of the Club Nacional, where my job as cataloguer of acquisitions was more or less symbolic.

The soap operas I rescued from the storeroom of Radio Central (a task that brought me two hundred soles extra salary) were condensed to make a month’s worth of broadcasts—the time it would take for the scripts from CMQ to arrive. But neither the old serials nor the new ones, as the dynamic impresario had correctly predicted, were able to keep the gigantic audience that Pedro Camacho had won for the station. The surveys showed that the number of listeners had fallen off, and the ad rates had to be lowered so as not to lose sponsors. But this was not a terrible disaster for the Genaros; as inventive and go-getting as ever, they soon found a new gold mine in the form of a program called “The Sixty-Four-Thousand Soles Question.” It was broadcast from Le Paris, a movie theater, and on it contestants who were experts on various subjects (cars, Sophocles, soccer, the Incas) answered