Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [51]
He always brought back very amusing stories of Pedro Camacho’s inspired talents as an artist. One day he swore to us that Pedro had advised Luciano Pando to masturbate before delivering a love dialogue, claiming that by so doing he’d weaken his voice and produce a very romantic pant. Luciano Pando had flatly refused.
“I understand now why it is that every time there’s a love scene coming up Don Pedro makes a visit to the downstairs bathroom, Don Mario,” Big Pablito said, crossing himself and kissing his fingers. “To jerk off—that’s why. And that’s how come his voice sounds so soft and gentle afterwards.”
Javier and I had a long discussion as to whether this could be true or was just a story that our new editor had made up, and we arrived at the conclusion that, all things considered, there was sufficient reason not to regard it as absolutely impossible.
“It’s things like that you should be writing a story about, not about Doroteo Martí,” Javier admonished me. “Radio Central is a literary gold mine.”
The story I was trying my best to write at the time was based on an incident that Aunt Julia had told me about, one she herself had witnessed at the Teatro Saavedra in La Paz. Doroteo Martí was a Spanish actor who was touring Latin America, causing overflow audiences to shed floods of tears over La Malquerida and Todo un Hombre or other even more heartrending melodramas. Even in Lima, where theater was a mere curious relic, having died out the century before, the Doroteo Martí Company had drawn a full house at the Teatro Municipal for a performance of what, according to legend, was the ne plus ultra of its repertory: the Life, Passion, and Death of Our Lord. The actor had a strong sense of practicality, and malicious gossip had it that on occasion Christ broke off his sobbing soliloquy during his night of sorrows in the Garden of Olives to announce to the audience, in an affable tone of voice, that the following day the company would give a special performance to which ladies accompanied by an escort would be admitted free (whereupon Christ’s Passion continued). It was in fact a performance of the Life, Passion, and Death that Aunt Julia had seen at the Teatro Saavedra. At the supreme instant, as Jesus Christ was dying on the heights of Golgotha, the audience noted that the wooden cross to which he was tied, surrounded by clouds of incense, was beginning to collapse. Was it an accident or a deliberately planned effect? Prudently, exchanging stealthy glances, the Virgin, the Apostles, the Roman soldiers, the populace in general began backing away from the teetering cross on which, his head still bowed upon his chest, Jesus-Martí had begun to murmur in a low voice that was nonetheless audible in the first rows of the orchestra: “I’m falling, I’m falling.” Paralyzed, doubtless, with horror at the thought of committing sacrilege, none of the invisible occupants of the wings ran onstage to hold the cross upright, and it was now pivoting back and forth, defying numerous physical laws, amid cries of alarm that had replaced prayers on the actors’ lips. Seconds later the spectators of La Paz saw Martí of Galilee come tumbling down, falling flat on his face on the stage of his great triumph, beneath the weight of the sacred rood, and heard the tremendous crash that shook the theater. Aunt Julia swore to me that Christ had managed to roar out in a savage voice, seconds before coming a cropper on the boards: “Damn it to hell, I’m falling!” It was, above all, this very last scene that I wanted to re-create; my story, too, would end up with a bang, with Jesus cursing like a trooper. I I wanted it to be a funny story, and to learn the techniques of writing humor, I read—on jitneys, express buses, and in bed before falling asleep—all the witty authors I could get my hands on, from Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw to