Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [198]
When Aunt Julia and I were divorced, copious tears were shed in my vast family, because everyone (beginning, naturally, with my mother and father) adored her. And when, a year later, I married again, a cousin of mine this time (the daughter of Aunt Olga and Uncle Lucho, by some odd coincidence), it created less of an uproar within the family than the first time (it consisted for the most part of a great flurry of gossip). This time, however, there was a perfectly planned conspiracy to force me to marry in the Church, in which even the archbishop of Lima was involved (he was, it goes without saying, a relative of ours), who hastened to sign the dispensations authorizing the union. But by that time the family was already panic-proof and could predict (which is tantamount to saying forgave beforehand) my blackest misdeeds.
I had lived with Aunt Julia in Spain for a year and in France for five, and later I went on living with my cousin Patricia in Europe, in London first and then in Barcelona. In those days I had an arrangement with a magazine in Lima: I sent it articles and in return received a plane ticket that allowed me to come back to Peru every year for a few weeks. These trips, thanks to which I saw my family and friends, were very important to me. I was planning to go on living in Europe indefinitely, for a great many reasons, but above all because I had always been able to find work there—as a journalist, translator, lecturer, or professor—that left me free time. When we arrived in Madrid the first time, I’d said to Aunt Julia: “I’m going to try to be a writer; I’m not going to accept anything but jobs that won’t take me too far afield from literature.” “Shall I cut a slit in my skirt, put on a turban, and go hustle clients on the Gran Vía starting today?” she said. But I was really very lucky. Teaching Spanish at the Berlitz School in Paris, writing news bulletins at France-Presse, translating for UNESCO, dubbing films in the studios at Gennevilliers, or preparing programs for the French national radio-television network, I had always found jobs that brought in enough to live on yet allowed me to devote at least half of each day exclusively to my writing. The problem was that everything I wrote had to do with life in Peru. As time and distance began to blur my perspective, I felt more and more insecure about my writing (at the time I was obsessed with the idea that fiction should be “realistic”). But I found the very thought of living in Lima inconceivable. When I remembered the seven simultaneous jobs I’d held there, which together had earned me barely enough to feed us, left me scarcely any time to read, and given me no opportunity to write except on the sly in the few slack moments during my work day or at night when I was already dead tired, my hair stood on end and I vowed to myself I’d never live that way again, even if it meant dying of starvation. Moreover, Peru had always seemed to me a country of sad people.
Hence the agreement I had, first with the daily Expreso and then with the magazine Caretas, to write articles in exchange for two plane tickets a year, was a real stroke of luck. That month that Patricia and I spent in Peru each year, usually in winter (July or August), enabled me to steep myself in the atmosphere, the landscapes, the lives of the people that I had been trying to write about in the previous eleven months. It was tremendously useful to me (I don’t know if this was true in purely material terms, but certainly it was true psychologically), a kind of “energy injection,” to hear Peruvian spoken again, to hear all round me those turns of phrase, expressions, intonations that put me back in the midst of a milieu I felt viscerally close to but had nonetheless moved far away from, thus missing out each year on the innovations, losing overtones, resonances, keys.
My visits to Lima were, thus, vacations during which I literally didn’t