Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [49]
“And does it mean that we’ll get a twenty percent raise in salary, Don Genaro?” Pascual said, bouncing up and down on his chair.
“You don’t work at Radio Central but at Panamericana,” Genaro Jr. reminded us. “We’re a station with good taste—we don’t broadcast serials.”
The entertainment sections in the newspapers soon came up with feature stories on the large audience that the new serials had attracted and began singing the praises of Pedro Camacho. And Guido Monteverde, in his column in Última Hora, pulled out all the stops, calling him “an expert scriptwriter with a tropical imagination and a romantic gift for words, an intrepid symphony conductor of radio serials, and himself a versatile actor with a mellifluous voice.” But the object of these laudatory adjectives took no notice of the wave of enthusiasm surrounding him. As I dropped by his cubicle one morning on my way to the Bransa to pick him up for our usual coffee break together, I found a sign pasted on the window with the crudely lettered inscription: “No journalists admitted and no autographs given. The artist is working! Respect him!”
“Do you mean that, or is it a joke?” I asked him, as I sat sipping my café con leche and Pedro Camacho his cerebral cocktail of verbena-and-mint tea.
“I mean it in all seriousness,” he answered. “The local press has begun to hound me, and if I don’t put a stop to them there’ll soon be a bunch of listeners lined up over there—he gestured in the direction of the Plaza San Martín as though such an eventuality were the most natural thing in the world—asking for autographs and photos. My time is as precious as gold to me and I don’t want to waste it on foolish trifles.”
There wasn’t an ounce of conceit in what he was saying, only sincere anxiety. He was wearing his usual black suit and little bow tie and smoking awful-smelling cigarettes, a brand called Aviación. As always, he was in an utterly serious mood. I thought I’d please him by telling him that all my aunts had become fanatic listeners of his and that Genaro Jr. was overjoyed at the results of the surveys showing how many new listeners his serials had attracted. But he was merely bored and shut me up—as though these things were inevitable and he’d always known all about them—and instead went on talking about how indignant he was at the lack of sensitivity on the part of “the merchants” (an expression that from then on he always used when referring to the Genaros).
“There’s a weak spot that’s ruining the serials and it’s my duty to remedy it and their duty to help me,” he announced, frowning. “But obviously art and money are mortal enemies, like pigs and daisies.”
“A weak spot that’s ruining the serials?” I said in amazement. “But they’re a complete success.”
“The merchants don’t want to fire Pablito, even though I’ve insisted that he has to go,” he explained to me. “They say they have to keep him on for sentimental reasons, because he’s worked at Radio Central for I don’t know how many years, and other such nonsense. As though art had anything to do with charity! That sick man’s incompetence is absolutely sabotaging my work!”
Big Pablito was one of those indefinable, picturesque characters that the world of radio broadcasting attracts or produces. The diminutive suggested that he was just a kid, whereas in reality he was a mestizo in his fifties, who dragged his feet when he walked and had attacks of asthma that filled the air about him with clouds of effluvia. He was always somewhere about Radio Central and Panamericana, from morning to night, doing a little bit of everything, from giving the janitors a hand and going out to buy tickets for the movies and bullfights for the Genaros to distributing passes for broadcasts. His most permanent job was