Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [2]
Genaro Jr. bought (or, rather, CMQ sold) the serials by weight and by telegram. It was he himself who had told me so one afternoon, when to his great stupefaction I had asked him if he, his brothers, or his father went over the scripts before putting them on the air. “Would you be capable of reading seventy kilos of paper?” he replied, looking at me with that benign condescension due the intellectual he considered me to be after he’d seen a short story of mine in the Sunday edition of El Comercio. “Just stop and think how much time it would take. A month, two months? Who can spend a couple of months reading the script of a radio serial? We just leave it to chance, and thus far, happily, the Lord of Miracles has protected us.” In the best of cases, Genaro Jr. was able to find out beforehand, through ad agencies or colleagues and friends, how many countries had bought the soap operas CMQ was offering him and how many listeners had tuned in according to the surveys; in the worst of cases, he made up his mind by taking a look at the titles or simply by tossing a coin. The serials were sold by weight because that was a less tricky formula than going by the number of pages or words, since that was the only thing one could verify precisely. “Obviously, if there’s not enough time to read them, there’s even less time to count all those words,” Javier said. He was intrigued by the idea of a novel weighing seventy-eight kilos thirty grams, the price of which, like that of beef cattle, butter, and eggs, would be determined by a scale.
But this system created problems for the Genaros. The texts arrived full of Cuban expressions, which, a few short minutes before each broadcast, Luciano and Josefina and their colleagues translated into Peruvian themselves, as best they could (that is to say, very badly). Moreover, on the trip from Havana to Lima, in the holds of boats or the cargo bays of planes, or at customs, the typed reams of paper were sometimes damaged, entire chapters got lost, dampness made them illegible, the pages got all mixed up, or rats in the storeroom of Radio Central devoured them. Inasmuch as such disasters were noticed only at the very last moment, as Genaro Sr. was handing around the scripts, crises frequently arose. They were resolved by skipping over the lost chapter without the slightest scruple, or, in really serious cases, by having the character played by Luciano Pando or Josefina Sánchez get sick for a day, so that in the following twenty-four hours the grams or kilos that were missing could be patched together, rescued, or eliminated without excessive trauma. And since, finally, the prices that CMQ charged were high, Genaro Jr. was naturally overjoyed when he learned of the existence and prodigious gifts of Pedro Camacho.
I remember very well the day he spoke to me of this genius of the airwaves, because that very day, at lunchtime, I saw Aunt Julia for the first time. She was my Uncle Lucho’s sister-in-law and had arrived from Bolivia the night before. She had just been divorced, and had come to rest and recover from the breakup of her marriage. “She’s really come to look for another husband,” Aunt Hortensia, the biggest backbiter of all my relatives, had said straight out at a family gathering. I ate lunch every Thursday with my Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga, and when I arrived that noon I found the whole family still in their pajamas, eating mussels in hot sauce and drinking ice-cold beer to get over a hangover. They’d stayed up till dawn gossiping with Aunt Julia, and finished off an entire bottle of whiskey