Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [200]
We gave each other a big bear hug. He really hadn’t changed at all: he was the same sturdily built, smiling mestizo with the asthmatic wheeze, who barely lifted his feet off the ground as he walked and thus seemed to skate through life. He didn’t have a single gray hair, despite the fact that he must have been close to sixty by then, and his straight hair was carefully slicked down with quantities of brilliantine, like an Argentine of the 1940’s. But he was much better dressed than when he was (theoretically) a newsman at Radio Panamericana: a green plaid suit, a loud tie (it was the first time I’d ever seen him wearing one), and brightly polished shoes. And on his index finger was a gold ring with an Inca design. I was so pleased to see him that I suggested we go have a cup of coffee together. He agreed and we ended up at a table in the Palermo, a little combination bar-and-grill also linked in my memory to my years at the university. I told him I wouldn’t ask him how life had treated him since one look at him sufficed to show that it had treated him very well.
Glancing down at the gold ring on his finger, he smiled complacently. “I can’t complain,” he admitted. “After all the hard times I went through, my luck changed in my old age. But first, let me buy you a glass of beer, just because I’m so glad to see you.” He called the waiter over, ordered us Pilseners, good and cold, and gave a hearty laugh, which brought on one of his traditional fits of asthmatic wheezing and gasping. “They say that once a man gets married he’s a goner. Well, it was exactly the opposite with me.”
As we drank our beer, Big Pablito, with pauses forced on him by his bronchia, told me that when television arrived in Peru, the Genaros had made him a doorman, with a maroon uniform and a kepi, at the studios they had built on the Avenida Arequipa for Channel 5.
“From a newsman to a doorman—it sounds like I was demoted,” he said with a shrug. “And I’ll admit it was a demotion, as far as titles are concerned. But I ask you, can you eat a title? They raised my salary—that’s what really counts.”
Being a doorman wasn’t killing work: announcing visitors, telling them where the various departments were located, making the spectators waiting to attend broadcasts form orderly lines. The rest of his time he spent discussing soccer with the policeman stationed on the corner. But then, in addition—and he clacked his tongue, savoring a pleasant memory—after a few months, one of his duties was to go every noon to buy those pasties filled with meat and cheese that they make at the Berisso, a place on Arenales, a block away from Channel 5. The Genaros were crazy about them, and so were the office clerks, the actors, the announcers, the producers, to whom Big Pablito also brought back empanadas, and earned good tips for doing so. It was on these trips back and forth between the television station and the Berisso (his uniform had earned him the nickname of the Fireman among the kids of the neighborhood) that Big Pablito had struck up an acquaintance with his future wife. She was the woman who made these delicious, crusty delicacies: the cook at the Berisso.
“She was impressed by my uniform and my general’s kepi. She took one look at me and fell at my feet.” Big Pablito laughed, choked, drank a sip of his beer, choked and wheezed some more, and went on. “A gorgeous brunette. Twenty years younger than yours truly. A pair of tits so firm a bullet wouldn’t pierce them. Like I’m telling you, Don Mario, a real eyeful.”
He’d begun by striking up a conversation with her and dishing out compliments, she