Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [20]
Then he phoned the clinic and told the doctor on duty that he wouldn’t be coming in until the next day unless some dire emergency came up, instructed the butler to say he wasn’t in no matter who called or came to see him, poured himself a double whiskey, and shut himself up in the music room. He put a pile of Albinoni, Vivaldi, and Scarlatti records on the turntable, because he’d decided that a few superficial, Baroque, Venetian hours would be a good antidote for the dark shadows in his mind, and buried in his soft leather chair, with his Scotch meerschaum pipe smoking between his lips, he closed his eyes and waited for the music to wreak its inevitable miracle. The thought came to him that this was a privileged occasion for putting to the test that moral rule that he had tried to live by since his youth, that axiom that had it that it was better to understand men than to judge them. He did not feel horrified or indignant or unduly surprised. He noted in himself, rather, a hidden emotion, an invincible benevolence, mingled with tenderness and pity, as he said to himself that it was now blindingly clear why such a pretty girl had suddenly decided to marry an idiot, why the king of the Hawaiian surfboard, the handsomest youngster in the neighborhood, had never been known to have a girlfriend he was crazy about and seriously courting, and why he had always fulfilled without protest, with such laudable zeal, his duties as his younger sister’s chaperone. As he savored the aroma of the tobacco and sipped the pleasantly fiery whiskey in his glass, he told himself that there was no reason to worry too much about Richard. He’d find a way to persuade Roberto to send him abroad to study, to London for instance, a city where he’d find enough new and exciting things to make him forget the past. On the other hand, he really was worried, and consumed with curiosity, as to what would happen to the two other characters in the story. As the music little by little intoxicated him, a whirlwind of unanswered questions circled around and around in his mind, growing fainter and fainter, spaced farther and farther apart: Would Red Antúnez desert his reckless, foolhardy spouse that very night? Might he have done so already? Or would he say nothing, and giving proof of what might be either exceptional nobility or exceptional stupidity, stay with that deceitful girl whom he had so persistently pursued? Would there be a great public scandal, or would a chaste veil of dissimulation and pride trampled underfoot forever hide this tragedy of San Isidro?
Three.
I saw Pedro Camacho again a few days after the typewriter episode. It was 7:30 a.m., and after getting the first newscast of the day ready to go on the air, I was heading for the Bransa to have my morning café con leche. As I passed by the little window of the concierge’s cubicle at Radio Central, I spied my Remington. I could hear its heavy keys hitting the platen, but I couldn’t see anybody sitting behind it. I stuck my head through the window and saw that it was Pedro Camacho who was typing away. An office had been set up for him in the concierge’s cubbyhole. In this tiny room, with a low ceiling and walls badly damaged by the dampness and by the ravages of time and desecrated by countless graffiti, there was now a monumental wooden desk, so dilapidated that it was about to fall apart, but nonetheless as imposing as the enormous typewriter rumbling away on it. The outsize dimensions of the desk and the Remington literally swallowed up the little runt. He had put a couple of cushions on the seat of his chair, but even so, his face came up no higher than the keyboard, so that he was typing away with his hands at eye level, thus causing him to appear to be boxing. He was so totally absorbed in his work that he didn’t even notice my presence, despite the fact that I was leaning right over him. His pop-eyes were