Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [3]
“So you’re Dorita’s son,” she said to me, planting a kiss on my cheek. “You’ve just gotten out of high school, haven’t you?”
I hated her instantly. My slight run-ins with the family in those days were all due to the fact that everybody insisted on treating me as though I were still a child rather than a full-grown man of eighteen. Nothing irritated me as much as being called “Marito”. I had the impression that this diminutive automatically put me back in short pants.
“He’s already in his first year as a law student at the university and is working as a journalist,” my Uncle Lucho explained to her, handing me a glass of beer.
“Well, well. To tell you the truth, you look like a babe in arms, Marito,” Aunt Julia said, giving me the coup de grâce.
During lunch, with that air of affectionate condescension that adults assume when addressing idiots and children, she asked me if I had a sweetheart, if I went to parties, what sport I went in for, and then, with a spitefulness that might have been either intentional or unintentional but in any case cut me to the quick, advised me to let my mustache grow as soon as I had one. They went well with dark hair and would help me make out with girls.
“He’s not thinking about skirts or about sprees,” my Uncle Lucho explained to her. “He’s an intellectual. He’s had a short story published in the Sunday edition of El Comercio.”
“We’ll have to watch out that Dorita’s boy doesn’t turn out to be a queer, in that case.” Aunt Julia laughed, and I suddenly felt a wave of fellow feeling for her ex-husband. But I smiled and let her have her fun. During the rest of the lunch, she kept telling one dreadful Bolivian joke after the other and teasing me. As I was leaving, it seemed as though she wanted to make it up to me for all her nasty little digs, because she told me in a friendly tone of voice that we ought to go to the movies together some night, that she adored films.
I got back to Radio Panamericana just in time to keep Pascual from devoting the entire three o’clock bulletin to the news of a pitched battle between gravediggers and lepers in the exotic streets of Rawalpindi, a filler that had appeared in Ultima Hora. After I’d edited the four and five o’clock bulletins as well, I went out to have a coffee. At the door of Radio Central I ran into Genaro Jr, who was all excited. He dragged me by the arm to the Bransa. “I’ve got something fantastic to tell you.” He’d been in La Paz for several days on business, and while there he’d seen in action that man of many parts: Pedro Camacho.
“He’s not a man—he’s an industry!” he corrected himself in a voice filled with amazement. “He writes all the stage plays put on in Bolivia and acts in all of them. And he also writes all the radio serials, directs them, and plays the male lead in every one of them.”
But even more than his tremendous output and his versatility, it had been his popularity that had impressed Genaro Jr. In order to see him in one of his plays at the Teatro Saavedra in La Paz, Genaro had had to buy scalpers’ tickets at double their original price.
“Like at bullfights, can you imagine?” he marveled. “Who is there who’s ever filled an entire theater in Lima?”
He told me he’d seen, two days in a row, a huge crowd of young girls, grown women, and old ladies milling about outside the doors of Radio Illimani, waiting for their idol to come out so they could get his autograph. Moreover, the McCann Erickson office in La Paz had assured him that Pedro Camacho’s radio serials attracted more listeners than any other programs broadcast over the Bolivian airwaves. Genaro Jr. was what in those days people