Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [53]
The five members of the cast were standing in a circle around Pedro Camacho, who—dressed as usual in his black suit and little bow tie and with his hair flying every which way—was delivering a sermon on the chapter that they were about to record. It was not instructions that he was giving them, at least not in the prosaic sense of concrete indications as to how they were to speak their lines—in measured tones or exaggeratedly, slowly or rapidly—but rather, as was his habit, noble, olympian, pontifical pronouncements having to do with profound aesthetic and philosophical truths. And naturally it was the words “art” and “artistic” that were repeated most frequently in this feverish discourse, like some sort of magic formula that revealed and explained everything. But even more surprising than the Bolivian scriptwriter’s words was the fervor with which he uttered them, and perhaps more surprising still, the effect that they caused. Gesturing furiously and standing on tiptoe as he talked, he spoke in the fanatical voice of a man in possession of an urgent truth that he must disseminate, share, drive home. He succeeded completely in doing so: the five actors and actresses listened to him in stupefaction, hanging on his every word, opening their eyes wide as though the better to absorb these maxims concerning their work (“their mission,” as the author-director put it). I was sorry Aunt Julia wasn’t there, because she’d never believe me when I told her how I had seen, with my own eyes, this handful of practitioners of the most miserable profession in Lima totally transformed, transfixed, spiritualized, for the space of an eternal half hour, beneath the sway of Pedro Camacho’s effervescent rhetoric. Big Pablito and I were sitting on the floor in one corner of the studio; in front of us, surrounded by all sorts of strange paraphernalia, was the brand-new acquisition, the defector from Radio Victoria. He too had listened to the artist’s harangue with mystical rapture; the moment the recording of the chapter began, he became the center of the spectacle for me.
He was a stocky, copper-colored man, with stiff straight hair, dressed almost like a beggar: worn overalls, a much-mended shirt, big clodhoppers without laces. (Later I found out that he was called by the mysterious nickname of Puddler.) His work tools consisted of a wooden plank, a door, a washtub full of water, a whistle, a sheet of tinfoil, a fan, and other such ordinary-looking everyday articles. Puddler then proceeded to put on an extraordinary one-man show involving ventriloquism, acrobatic feats, multiple simultaneous impersonations, the creation of imaginary physical effects. At a given signal from the director-actor—a magisterial waggling of his index finger in the air filled with dialogue, tender sighs, and lamentations—Puddler, walking across his plank at a pace whose crescendo or diminuendo was carefully calculated, made the footsteps of the characters approach or retreat in the distance, and at another signal, turning the fan to blow at different speeds across the sheet of tinfoil, he produced the sound of rain falling or the wind howling, or at yet another, putting three fingers in his mouth and whistling, he filled the studio with the chirping of birds waking up the heroine in her country house on a spring morning. It was especially impressive when he created the sounds