Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [52]
Two or three weeks went by before I met the man from Radio Victoria who had replaced Big Pablito. In the days before Pedro Camacho’s arrival at the station, anyone who wanted to could attend the recording sessions of serials, but the new star director had forbidden everyone except the actors and technicians to enter the recording studio, and to prevent anyone else from doing so he had ordered the doors to be closed and stationed Jesusito’s intimidating bulk in front of them. Not even Genaro Jr. himself was exempt from this iron rule.
I remember the afternoon when, as always happened whenever he had problems and needed a shoulder to cry on, he appeared in the shack, his nostrils quivering with indignation, to tell me his complaints. “I tried to enter the studio and he immediately stopped the program and refused to record it till I cleared out,” he said in a furious voice. “And he gave me to understand that the next time I interrupted a rehearsal he’d throw the microphone at my head. What shall I do? Kick him out on his ass, or swallow the insult?”
I told him what he wanted to hear: that in view of the success of the serials (“for the greater glory of the entire Peruvian radio broadcasting industry,” etc.) he should swallow the insult and not set foot in the artist’s territory again. He took my advice, but I for my part was still dying of curiosity and wanted desperately to attend a recording session of one of the scriptwriter’s programs.
One morning as we were having our usual break at the Bransa, after feeling out the ground very cautiously I ventured to broach the subject to Pedro Camacho. I told him I was eager to see the new sound-effects man in action and find out whether he was as good as he said he was.
“I didn’t say he was good; I said he was average,” he immediately corrected me. “But I’m training him and he might be good someday.”
He drank a sip of his herb tea and scrutinized me with his little cold, punctilious eyes, assailed by inner doubts. Finally he gave in, and reluctantly agreed. “All right then. Come tomorrow, to the one at three. But I can’t allow you to come again, I regret to say. I don’t like the actors to be distracted, any alien presence disturbs them, I lose control of them, and it’s goodbye catharsis. The recording of an episode is a Mass, my friend.”
In fact, it was something even more solemn. Among all the Masses I remembered (I hadn’t been to church in years), I never witnessed such a moving ceremony, such a deeply lived rite, as that recording of chapter 17 of “The Adventures and Misadventures of Don Alberto de Quinteros” to which I was admitted. The session couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes—ten to rehearse and twenty to record—but it seemed to me that it lasted for hours. I was immediately impressed by the reverent religious atmosphere that reigned in the little room with a glass panel and dusty green carpeting that went by the name of Radio Central Recording Studio Number One. Big Pablito and I were the only spectators present; the others were active participants. On entering the studio, Pedro Camacho had informed us with a martial look in his eye, we must remain as motionless as statues of salt throughout the session. The author-director seemed transformed: taller, stronger, a general issuing orders to disciplined troops. Disciplined? Enraptured, rather; bewitched, brainwashed fanatics. I could scarcely recognize Josefina Sánchez, with her mustache and her varicose veins, whom I had so often seen recording her lines while chewing gum and knitting, with her mind somewhere else entirely and giving the impression that she hadn’t the least idea what she was saying, as being the same person as this utterly serious creature before me who, when not absorbed in going over the script word