Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [22]
“It’s something I need for my work and my employers should reimburse me,” he declared, as we walked back to our respective offices. His walk was also quite odd: quick, nervous strides, as though he were afraid he’d miss a train.
As we bade each other goodbye at the entrance to Radio Central, he gestured in the direction of his cramped little cubbyhole of an office as though he were proudly showing off a palace. “It’s practically right out in the middle of the street,” he said, pleased with himself and with things in general. “It’s as if I were working out on the sidewalk.”
“Won’t all the noise of so many people and cars passing by distract you?” I ventured to ask.
“On the contrary,” he reassured me, delighted at the chance to offer me one last edifying maxim: “I write about life, and the impact of reality is crucial to my work.”
As I turned to leave, he waggled his forefinger to call me back. Pointing to the map of Lima, he asked me, in a tone of voice fraught with mystery, if I would be willing, later on that day or the day after, to provide him with further information about the city. I told him I’d be more than happy to do so.
Back in my shack at Panamericana, I found that Pascual had already written up the text of the 9 a.m. news bulletin. It began with one of those items he took such delight in. He had copied it from the morning paper, La Crónica, embellishing it with fancy adjectives he’d picked up in the course of his studies and made an intimate part of his cultural stock in trade: “In the tempestuous seas of the Antilles, the Panamanian freighter Shark sank last night, taking with it to their death its crew of eight, drowned and masticated by the sharks that infest the aforementioned sea.” I changed “masticated” to “devoured” and edited out “tempestuous” and “aforementioned” before giving it my okay. Pascual didn’t fly into a rage—that wasn’t his way—but he nonetheless put his protest on record. “Good old Don Mario, fucking up my style as usual.”
All that week I’d been trying to write a short story, based on an incident that my Uncle Pedro, who was a doctor on a big landed estate in Ancash, had passed on to me. One night a peasant had frightened another peasant half to death by disguising himself as a “pishtaco”—a devil—and leaping out at him from the middle of a canebrake. The victim of this joke had been so scared out of his wits that he’d attacked the “pishtaco” with his machete, dispatched him to the next world with a skull split in two, and taken to the hills. Shortly thereafter, a group of peasants leaving a fiesta had come upon a “pishtaco” prowling around the village and beaten him to death. The dead man turned out to be the murderer of the first “pishtaco,” who was in the habit of disguising himself as a devil in order to visit his family at night. These assassins had in turn taken to the hills, and used to come down at night in the guise of devils to visit the community, where two of them had already been hacked to death with machetes by the terror-stricken villagers, who in turn, et cetera… What I was eager to recount in my story was not so much what had actually happened on the estate where my Uncle Pedro was employed as the ending of the story that suddenly occurred to me: at a certain moment, the Devil in person, alive and kicking and wagging his tail, slipped in among all these fake “pishtacos.” I was going to entitle my story “The Qualitative Leap,” and I wanted it to be as coldly objective, intellectual, terse, and ironic as one of Borges