Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [25]
There was a fierce rivalry between the native announcers, m.c.’s, and actors and the Argentine ones—wave after wave of the latter kept arriving in Peru, many of them expelled from their own country for political reasons—and I surmised that the Bolivian scriptwriter had taken this stand so as to get on the good side of his Peruvian co-workers. But I soon discovered that he was incapable of this sort of calculated maneuver. His hatred of Argentines in general, and of Argentine actors and actresses in particular, appeared to be entirely disinterested. I went to see him after the seven o’clock news broadcast, to tell him I had a little spare time and could help him with the data he’d said he needed. He invited me into his lair and with a munificent gesture offered me the only seat possible, outside of his own chair: a corner of the table that served him as a desk. He still had his suit coat and his little bow tie on, and before him were countless typed sheets of paper, which he had assembled in a neat pile alongside the Remington. The map of Lima, pinned down with thumbtacks, covered part of the wall. It now had more colored patches, a number of strange symbols drawn in red pencil, and different initials labeling each district of the city. I asked him what these marks and letters stood for.
He nodded, with one of his little mechanical smiles that always bore traces of a sense of self-satisfaction and a sort of kindly condescension. Settling back comfortably in his chair, he delivered himself of one of his perorations: “I work from life; my writings are firmly rooted in reality, as the grapevine is rooted in the vinestock. That’s why I need this. I want to know whether that world there is or is not as I have represented it.”
He was pointing to the map, and I leaned closer to see if I could figure out what he was trying to get across to me. The initials were hermetic; as far as I could tell, they referred to no recognizable institution or person. The only thing that was quite clear was that he had singled out the altogether dissimilar districts of Miraflores and San Isidro, La Victoria and El Callao, by drawing red circles around them. I told him I didn’t understand at all, and asked him to explain.
“It’s very simple,” he replied impatiently, in the tone of a parish priest. “What is most important is the truth, which is always art, as lies, on the other hand, never are, or only very rarely. I need to know if Lima is really the way I’ve shown it on the map. Do the two capital A’s, for example, fit San Isidro? Is it in fact a district where one finds Ancient Ancestry, Affluent Aristocracy?”
He stressed the initial A’s of these words, with an intonation meant to suggest that “It is only the blind who cannot see the bright light of day.” He had classified the districts of Lima according to their social status. But the curious thing was the type of descriptive adjectives he had used, the nature of his nomenclature. In certain cases he had hit the nail squarely on the head, and in others his labels were completely arbitrary. I granted, for instance, that the initials MCLPH (Middle Classes Liberal Professions Housewives) fitted the Jesús María section of Lima, but cautioned him that it was rather unfair to sum up the districts of La Victoria and El Porvenir under the dreadful label BFHH (Bums Fairies Hoodlums Hetaerae), and extremely questionable to reduce El Callao to SFS (Sailors Fishermen Sambos) or El Cercado and El Agustino to FDFWFI (Female Domestics Factory Workers Farmhands Indians).
“It’s not a scientific classification but an artistic one,” he informed me, making magic passes with his tiny pygmy hands. “It’s not all the people who live in each district, but only the flashiest, the most immediately noticeable, those who give each section of the city its particular flavor and color. If a person is a gynecologist, he should live in the part of town where he belongs, and the same goes for a police sergeant.”
He subjected me to a lengthy and amusing interrogation (amusing