Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [48]
“The love affair of a baby and an old lady who’s also more or less your aunt,” Julia said to me one night as we were crossing the Parque Central. “A perfect subject for one of Pedro Camacho’s serials.”
I reminded her that she was only my aunt by marriage, and she replied that on the three o’clock serial a boy from San Isidro, terrifically handsome and an expert surfer, had had relations with his sister, no less, and, horror of horrors, had gotten her pregnant.
“Since when have you been listening to radio serials?” I asked.
“It’s a contagious vice I caught from my sister,” she answered. “The ones on Radio Central are fantastic, I must say, tremendous dramas that break your heart.”
And she confessed to me that sometimes she and Aunt Olga sat there listening with tears in their eyes. This was the first indication I had of the impact that Pedro Camacho’s pen was having in the households of Lima. I had others during the next few days, in the households of several relatives. I happened to drop by Aunt Laura’s, and the minute she spied me in the doorway of the living room she put her finger to her lips to signal me to be quiet, as she sat there leaning over her radio as though trying not only to hear but also to smell, to touch the (tremulous or harsh or ardent or crystalline) voice of the Bolivian artist. I appeared at Aunt Gaby’s and found her and Aunt Hortensia mechanically unwinding a ball of yarn as they followed a dialogue, full of proparoxytones and gerunds, between Luciano Pando and Josefina Sánchez. And in my own house, my grandparents, who had always “had a liking for little novels,” as my Grandmother Carmen put it, had now conceived a genuine passion for radio serials. I woke up in the morning nowadays to the strains of Radio Central’s theme song—in their compulsive eagerness not to miss the day’s first serial, the one at 10 a.m., they’d turned in far ahead of time; I ate my lunch listening to the one at two in the afternoon; and no matter what hour of the day I came home, I found my two little old grandparents and the cook curled up in the downstairs parlor, concentrating all their attention on the radio, a great heavy monster the size of a buffet that, to top everything else off, they always kept turned up to full volume.
“Why is it you like radio serials so much?” I asked my granny one day. “What do they have to offer that books don’t, for example?”
“It’s more lifelike, hearing the characters talk, it’s more real,” she explained, after thinking about it. “And what’s more, when you’re my age, your hearing is better than your eyesight.”
I made a similar survey among some of my other relatives, and the results were inconclusive. Aunt Gaby, Laura, Olga, and Hortensia liked radio serials because they were entertaining, sad, or dramatic, because they were diverting and set a person to dreaming, to living things that were impossible in real life, because there were truths to be learned from them, or because every woman remains more or less of a romantic at heart. When I asked them why they liked soap operas more than books, they protested: what nonsense, there was no comparison, books were culture and radio serials mere claptrap to help pass the time. But the truth of the matter was that they lived with their ears glued to the radio and that I’d never seen a one of them open a book. During our nocturnal rambles. Aunt Julia sometimes gave me a résumé of certain episodes that had impressed her, and I in turn gave her a rundown of my conversations with the scriptwriter, and thus, little by little, Pedro Camacho became a constituent element in our romance.
It was Genaro Jr. himself who brought me solid proof of the success of the new serials, on the very same day that I finally managed, after a thousand protests, to get my typewriter back.
He turned up