Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [21]
“You’re certainly an early riser, Señor Camacho,” I greeted him, stepping halfway into the room.
Without even looking up from the paper, he merely indicated, with a peremptory jerk of his head, that I should either shut up or wait, or both. I chose the latter course, and as he finished his sentence, I noted that the desktop was littered with typed pages, and the floor strewn with discarded pages he’d wadded up into a ball and tossed there because no one had thought to provide him with a wastebasket. A few moments later his hands fell away from the keyboard, he looked up at me, rose to his feet, ceremoniously held out his right hand, and answered my greeting with a maxim: “Clock time means nothing where art is concerned. Good morning, my friend.”
I didn’t ask if he was suffering from claustrophobia in this tiny cubbyhole, since I was certain he would have answered me that discomfort was propitious to art. Instead, I invited him to come with me to have coffee. He consulted a prehistoric artifact clumsily sliding back and forth on his skinny wrist and murmured: “After an hour and a half of production, I deserve time out for refreshment.” As we walked over to the Bransa, I asked him if he always began work that early in the morning, and he replied that in his case, unlike that of other “creators,” inspiration was directly proportional to daylight.
“It dawns with the sun and gradually grows warmer along with it,” he explained, musically, as a drowsy waiter swept the sawdust littered with cigarette butts and the refuse of the Bransa out from under our feet. “I begin to write at first light. By noon, my brain is a blazing torch. Then the fire dies down little by little, and around about dusk I stop, inasmuch as only embers remain. But it doesn’t matter, since the actor produces more in the afternoon and at night. I have my system all carefully plotted out.”
He delivered himself of this peroration in utter seriousness, and I realized that he scarcely seemed to notice that I was still there; he was one of those men who have no need of conversational partners: all they require is listeners. Like the first time we’d met, I was taken aback by his total lack of humor, despite the puppetlike smiles—lips turning up at the corners, brow wrinkling, teeth suddenly bared—with which he embellished his monologue. His every word was uttered with extraordinary solemnity, all of which—along with his perfect diction, his dwarflike stature, his bizarre attire, and his theatrical gestures—made him appear to be an odd sort indeed. It was obvious that he took everything he said to be the gospel truth, and he thus gave the impression of being at once the most affected and the most sincere man in the world. I did my best to bring him down from the artistic heights on which he was holding forth so grandiloquently to the more earthly plane of practical matters, and asked him if he had found a place to live yet, if he had friends here, how he liked Lima. Such mundane considerations were of no interest to him whatsoever. Impatiently breaking off his flight of eloquence, he replied that he had found an “atelier” not far from Radio Central, on Quilca, and that he felt at home wherever he found himself, for wasn’t the entire world the artist’s homeland? Instead of coffee, he ordered a lemon verbena-and-mint herb tea, which, he informed me, not only was pleasing to the palate but also “toned up one’s mind.” He downed it in short, symmetrical sips,