Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [205]
“I’m most grateful, colleagues,” he answered immediately, making his ritual bow. “But it’s not possible for me to come with you. My wife is waiting for me. She’d worry if I didn’t come home for lunch.”
“She’s got you tied to her apron strings, you’re her slave, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Big Pablito said, rocking him back and forth again.
“Have you gotten married?” I asked, dumfounded, unable to imagine Pedro Camacho with a home, a wife, children. “Well, congratulations, I always thought you were a confirmed bachelor.”
“We’ve celebrated our silver wedding anniversary,” he replied in his usual precise, aseptic tone of voice. “A wonderful wife, sir. Self-sacrificing and unbelievably good-hearted. We were separated, due to circumstances that life brings in its train, but when I needed help, she came back to lend me every possible aid. A wonderful wife, as I said. She’s an artiste, a foreign artiste.” I saw Big Pablito, Pascual, and Dr. Rebagliati exchange a mocking look, but Pedro Camacho appeared not to notice. After a pause, he went on: “Well, have a good time, colleagues, I shall be with you in thought.”
“Watch out that you don’t let me down again, because it’ll be the last time,” Dr. Rebagliati warned him, as the scriptwriter was disappearing behind the screen.
Pedro Camacho’s footfalls had not yet died away—he must have been heading for the street door—when Pascual, Big Pablito, and Dr. Rebagliati burst into peals of laughter, winking at each other, exchanging sly looks, and pointing to the opening he had just left by.
“He’s not as dumb as he pretends to be, he comes on as the devoted spouse to hide the fact that his wife makes him wear horns,” Dr. Rebagliati crowed. “Every time he talks about his wife I feel a terrible urge to say to him: ‘Stop using the word “artiste” for what in good Peruvian we call a cheap stripteaser.’”
“You can’t imagine what a monster she is,” Pascual said to me, with the look of a kid who’s just seen a bogeyman. “An Argentine years past middle age, fat as a sow, with bleached hair and makeup an inch thick. She sings tangos half-naked, at the Mezzanine, that nightclub for penniless wretches on the skids.”
“Shut your traps, don’t be ungrateful, you’ve both screwed her,” Dr. Rebagliati said. “And I have too, for that matter.”
“Singer or not, she’s a whore,” Big Pablito exclaimed, his eyes blazing. “I know what I’m talking about. I went to see her at the Mezzanine and after the show she made a pass at me and offered to give me a blow job for twenty libras. I said no, old girl, you haven’t got any teeth left and what I go for is nice little nips on the cock. So not even if you do it for free, not even if you pay me. Because I swear, Don Mario, she doesn’t have a tooth in her head.”
“They’d been married before,” Pascual told me as he rolled down his shirtsleeves and put his suitcoat and tie back on. “In Bolivia, before Pedrito came to Lima. It seems she left him to go off whoring around somewhere back there. They got together again when he was put in the mental asylum. That’s why he goes around saying that she’s such a self-sacrificing woman. Because she went back to him when he was crazy.”
“He’s as grateful to her as a dog, because it’s thanks to her that they have food on the table,” Dr. Rebagliati corrected him. “You don’t think they can live on what Camacho earns gathering information for us at police stations, do you? They eat on what she brings in from whoring