Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [50]
“Those people think sound effects are dumb little things that any idiot can do. But in fact they’re art too, and what does a half-moribund brachycephalic like Pablito know about art?” Pedro Camacho raved, with icy hauteur.
He assured me that, “if need be,” he would not hesitate to eliminate, with his own hands, any obstacle to the “perfection of his work” (and he said it in such a way that I believed every word he said). He added that to his vast regret he had not had time to train a sound-effects technician, teaching him everything from A to Z, but that after rapidly reconnoitering the “Peruvian radio dial,” he had found what he was looking for.
He lowered his voice, glanced stealthily all around, and concluded, with a Mephistophelean air: “The individual we ought to have for the serials is on Radio Victoria.”
Javier and I analyzed how good the chances were that Pedro Camacho would carry out his homicidal intentions with regard to Big Pablito, and we agreed that the latter’s fate depended entirely on the surveys: if the number of listeners tuning in to the serials kept going up, he’d be ruthlessly sacrificed. As a matter of fact, before the week was out, Genaro Jr. suddenly appeared in the shack, surprising me in the midst of writing another story—he must have noticed my confusion and the haste with which I ripped the page out of the typewriter and slipped it in among the news bulletins, but he was tactful enough not to say anything—and, addressing both Pascual and me, announced with the sweeping gesture of a great Maecenas: “All your griping has finally gotten you the new editor you’ve been wanting, you two lazybones. Big Pablito is going to be working with you from now on. Don’t rest on your laurels!”
The reinforcement thus received by the News Service turned out to be more moral than material, inasmuch as when Big Pablito appeared in the office the next morning, very punctually, at seven on the dot, and asked me what he should do and I gave him the job of making a brief summary of a parliamentary report, a look of terror came over him, he had a coughing fit that left him purple in the face, and finally managed to stammer that that was impossible. “The thing is, sir, I don’t know how to read or write.”
I took the fact that Genaro Jr. had sent us an illiterate to be our new editor as a choice sample of his playful sense of humor. Pascual, who’d been a bit upset when he learned that he and Pablito were to be co-editors, positively gloated on hearing the latter confess that he was illiterate. He upbraided his brand-new colleague in my presence for his apathetic attitude, for not having been capable of educating himself as he, Pascual, had done, at an adult age, by going to free night-school classes. Big Pablito, scared to death, kept nodding in agreement, repeating like an automaton: “That’s true, I hadn’t thought of that, that’s so, you’re absolutely right,” looking at me as though he expected to be fired on the spot. I immediately set his mind at rest, telling him that his job would be to take the news bulletins downstairs to the announcers. In actual fact, he soon became Pascual’s slave, obliged to trot all day long from the shack to the street and vice versa to fetch Pascual cigarettes or stuffed potatoes from a street vendor on the Calle Carabaya, or simply to go see if it was raining outside. Big Pablito endured his slavery in an exemplary spirit of sacrifice, and in fact his attitude toward his torturer was even more respectful and friendly than his attitude toward me. When he wasn’t running errands for Pascual, he would curl up in a corner of the office, and leaning his head against the wall, fall asleep instantly, snoring in steady, sibilant wheezes, like a rusty overhead fan. He was a generous-spirited man. He didn’t feel the slightest ill will toward Pedro Camacho for having brought in an outsider from Radio Victoria to replace him. He had nothing but praise for the Bolivian scriptwriter, for whom he felt the most sincere admiration. He often asked my permission to