Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [46]
As I had been struggling to defend the physical integrity of Lucho Gatica, Señora Agradecida, the charwoman, had cleaned the shack upstairs and thrown in the trash the fourth version of my story about the senator. Instead of being upset, I felt as though I’d been freed of a weight and took the whole thing as having been a warning from the gods. When I told Javier that I wasn’t going to rewrite it yet again, he congratulated me for having come to that decision rather than trying to persuade me to change my mind.
Aunt Julia found my story of my experience as a bodyguard terribly amusing. Since the night of the furtive kisses in the Bolívar Grill, we’d been seeing each other almost every day. The day after Uncle Lucho’s birthday, I’d dropped by the house unexpectedly, and luckily Aunt Julia was there alone.
“They’ve gone to visit your Aunt Hortensia,” she said, showing me into the living room. “I didn’t go with them because I know very well that that gossip spends all her time making up nasty stories about me.”
I took her by the waist, drew her to me, and tried to kiss her. She didn’t push me away, but she didn’t kiss me either: all I felt was her cold mouth against mine. As we stepped apart, I saw that she was looking at me without smiling: not in surprise, as on the night before, but rather with a certain curiosity and a faintly mocking gleam in her eyes.
“Look, Marito”—her voice was calm, affectionate—“I’ve done all sorts of really crazy things in my life. But this is one I’m not going to do.” She burst into laughter. “Me, seducing a kid? Never!”
We sat down and chatted for nearly two hours. I told her the whole story of my life—not my past life, but the one I was going to have in the future, when I lived in Paris and was a writer. I told her I’d wanted to write ever since I’d first read Alexandre Dumas, that since that moment I’d dreamed of going off to France and living in a garret, in the artists’ quartier, dedicating my heart and soul to literature, the most marvelous thing in the world. I told her I was studying law to please my family, but that being a lawyer struck me as the dullest and most stupid of professions, one I had no intention of ever practicing. I realized at one point that I was speaking in the most heartfelt tones, and told her that this was the very first time I’d ever confessed such intimate things not to a buddy but to a woman.
“I seem like your mama to you, and that’s the reason you’re confiding in me,” Aunt Julia psychoanalyzed. “So Dorita’s boy has turned out to be a bohemian—who would ever have thought it? The trouble is, my son, that you’re going to starve to death.”
She told me she hadn’t slept a wink the night before, thinking of those furtive kisses in the Bolívar Grill. She couldn’t get over the idea that Dorita’s boy, the youngster that only yesterday she and his mama had taken off to Cochabamba to put in the La Salle school, the kid she thought of as still wearing short pants, the baby she let escort her to the movies so as not to have to go alone, had all of a sudden kissed her square on the mouth like a full-grown, experienced man.
“But I am a full-grown, experienced man,” I assured her, taking her hand and kissing it. “I’m eighteen years old. And I lost my virginity five whole years ago.”
“Well, what does that make me then, if I’m thirty-two and lost mine fifteen years ago?” she laughed. “A decrepit old lady!”
She had a loud, hearty laugh, spontaneous and joyous, that made her large, full-lipped mouth open wide and her eyes crinkle. She gave me an ironic, mischievous look that told me I was not yet a full-grown, experienced man in her eyes, but no longer a kid either. She got up to pour me a whiskey.
“After the liberties you took last night, I can’t offer you Cokes any more,” she said, pretending to