Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [4]
“It wasn’t hard—he was earning starvation wages there,” he explained to me. “He’ll be in charge of all the serials and I’ll be able to tell all those sharks from CMQ to go to hell.”
I did my best to shatter his illusions. I told him that it was quite obvious that Peruvians had an antipathy toward Bolivians and that Pedro Camacho would get along very badly with all the people at Radio Central. His Bolivian accent would grate on the ears of listeners, and since he didn’t know the first thing about Peru he’d make one dreadful mistake after another. But Genaro Jr. merely smiled and turned a deaf ear to all my pessimistic prophecies. Even though he’d never set foot in the country, Pedro Camacho had spoken to him of the heart and soul of the people of Lima with as much feeling and understanding as though he’d been born in Bajo el Puente, and his accent was impeccable, without a single jarring s or r; in a word, as soft and smooth as velvet.
“Between Luciano Pando and the other actors, that poor foreigner’s going to be eaten up alive,” Javier opined. “Or else the beauteous Josefina Sánchez will rape him.”
We were in the shack talking together as I retyped news items from El Comercio and La Prensa, changing adjectives and adverbs as I went, for the Panamericana newscast at twelve. Javier was my best friend and we saw each other every day, even if only for a few minutes, to prove to each other that we were still alive and kicking. He was a creature given to short-lived, contradictory, but invariably sincere enthusiasms. He had been the star of the Department of Literature at Catholic University, where there had never before been such a hardworking student, or a more clear-sighted reader of poetry, or a more discerning interpreter of difficult texts. Everyone took it as a foregone conclusion that he would earn his degree by writing a brilliant thesis, that he would become a brilliant professor or an equally brilliant poet or critic. But one fine day, without offering any sort of explanation, he had disappointed everyone by abandoning the thesis he was working on, giving up literature and the Catholic University, and enrolling at San Marcos as a student in the Department of Economics. When someone ventured to ask him the reason for this desertion, he confessed (or remarked jokingly) that the thesis he’d been working on had opened his eyes. It was to have been entitled “Paroemias in the Works of Ricardo Palma.” He had had to read Palma’s Peruvian Traditions with a magnifying glass, searching for proverbs, and since he was a conscientious and rigorous researcher, he had managed to fill an entire file drawer with erudite index cards. And then one morning he had burned the whole drawerful of index cards in a vacant lot—he and I performed an Apache dance around the philological flames—and decided that he hated literature and that even economics was preferable to that. Javier was now a trainee at the Central Reserve Bank and could always find an excuse for dropping by Radio Panamericana every morning. One last remaining trace of his paroemiological nightmare was his habit of inflicting proverbs on me that had neither rhyme nor reason.
I was surprised to discover that, despite the fact that she was Bolivian and lived in La Paz, Aunt Julia had never heard of Pedro Camacho. But she explained that she had never listened to soap operas and hadn’t set foot inside a theater since she’d interpreted the role of Twilight in the Dance of the Hours, in her last year at a school run by Irish nuns (“And don’t you dare ask me how many years ago that was, Marito”). This was while we were walking from Uncle