Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [47]
I told her the difference in age between us wasn’t all that tremendous.
“Not all that tremendous, no,” she answered. “But almost—I’m very nearly old enough for you to be my son.”
She told me the story of her marriage. Everything had gone very well the first few years. Her husband had a ranch in the interior and she’d become so accustomed to living in the country that she rarely went to La Paz. The ranch house was very comfortable and she loved the peace and quiet of the place, the healthy, simple life: riding horseback, going on outings in the countryside, attending Indian fiestas. The first dark clouds had appeared when she couldn’t get pregnant: her husband suffered at the thought of not having children. He’d begun to drink then, and from that time on the marriage had gone downhill, by way of quarrels, separations, and reconciliations, till finally they had broken up for good. They had remained good friends after the divorce.
“If I should ever happen to get married, I’d never have children,” I announced. “Children and literature are incompatible.”
“Does that mean that I can present myself as a candidate and line up with the others?” Aunt Julia teased me.
She was very good at clever repartee, told risqué stories charmingly, and (like all the women I’d ever known thus far in my life) was terribly aliterary. I had the impression that during her many long, idle hours on her Bolivian hacienda the only things she’d ever read were Argentine magazines, some of Delly’s trashy books, and no more than a couple of novels at most that she considered memorable: The Sheik and Son of the Sheik, by a certain E. M. Hull. As I said goodbye to her that evening, I asked her if we could go to the movies together, and she had replied: “Yes, that’s possible.” So we went to the movies almost every night, and besides sitting through a good many Mexican and Argentine melodramas, we’d given each other a good many kisses. The movies gradually became a pretext; we chose theaters (the Montecarlo, the Colina, the Marsano) that were the farthest away from the house on Armendáriz so as to be able to be together longer. After the movies let out, we took long strolls, “making empanaditas” (she told me that that was how you said “holding hands” in Bolivia), wandering through all the empty streets of Miraflores (we let go of each other’s hand every time a passerby or a car appeared), talking about all sorts of things as—it was that dreary season known in Lima as winter—the continual drizzle soaked us to the skin. Aunt Julia went out every day to have lunch or tea with one or another of her many suitors, but she saved her evenings for me. We spent them at the movies, as a matter of fact, sitting in one of the very last rows at the back, where (especially if it was a terrible film) we could kiss without bothering the other spectators and without running the risk of somebody recognizing us. Our relationship had soon stabilized at some amorphous stage; it was situated at some indefinable point between the opposed categories of being sweethearts and being lovers. This was a subject that cropped up constantly in our conversations. We shared certain of the classic traits of lovers—secretiveness, the fear of being discovered, the feeling we were taking great risks—but we were lovers spiritually, not materially, since we didn’t make love (and, as Javier was later shocked to learn, we didn’t even “feel each other up”). At the same time we shared with sweethearts a respect for certain classic rites observed by adolescent couples of Miraflores in those days (going to the movies, kissing during the film, walking down the street hand in hand), and our behavior was equally chaste (in that Stone Age the girls of Miraflores were almost always still virgins on their wedding day and would allow their breasts and their pudenda to be touched only after their sweetheart had been officially promoted to the status of fiancé and their engagement been formally announced, but how could that ever happen to