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By Root 1171 0

of a city street. It was Ochoa who provided, by means of a prerecorded tape, the sound of motors and horns honking, but all the other effects were produced by Puddler, by clacking his tongue, clucking, uttering, whispering (he seemed to be doing all these things at once), and all you needed to do was close your eyes to hear, reconstructed in the little Radio Central studio, the voices, the scattered words, the laughter, the exclamations that a person distractedly hears on walking down a crowded street. But as though this were not enough, at the same time that he was producing dozens of human voices, Puddler was also walking or leaping on the plank, manufacturing the footfalls of the pedestrians on the sidewalks and the sound of their bodies brushing against each other. He “walked” both with his feet and with his hands (thrust into a pair of shoes), squatting on his haunches, his arms dangling like a monkey’s, slapping his thighs with his elbows and his forearms. After having been (acoustically speaking) the Plaza de Armas at noon, it was a relatively trivial feat for him to re-create the chamber music, so to speak, of a tea offered by a Lima society matron to a group of her lady friends in her mansion and the tinkling of the porcelain cups by hitting two little iron bars together, scratching on a sheet of glass, and rubbing little pieces of wood on his behind to imitate the gliding of chairs and ladies’ feet over the thick, soft carpets; or, by roaring, croaking, grunting, screaming, to incarnate phonetically (and enrich with a number of species not to be found there) the Barranco zoo. By the time the recording session was over, he looked as though he’d run the Olympic marathon: he was panting, his eyes had big dark circles under them, and he was sweating like a horse.

Pedro Camacho had contrived to imbue his collaborators with his own sepulchral seriousness. It was an enormous change. The serials from the CMQ in Cuba had most often been recorded in a circus atmosphere, and as the actors read their lines they would make faces or obscene gestures at each other, making fun of themselves and of what they were saying. But nowadays one had the impression that if someone had cracked the least little joke, the others would have flung themselves on him to punish him for his sacrilege. I thought for a time that they might perhaps be pretending so as to curry favor with their boss, so as not to be thrown out like the Argentines, that in their heart of hearts they weren’t as certain as he was that they were “priests of art,” but I was wrong. On my way back to Panamericana, I walked a few blocks along the Calle Belén with Josefina Sánchez, who was going home between serials to have herself a nice cup of tea, and I asked her whether the Bolivian scriptwriter always delivered a sermon before they recorded or whether the one I’d heard had been exceptional in any way. She gave me such a scornful look it made her double chin quiver.

“He said very little today and he wasn’t inspired. Sometimes it breaks your heart to think that his ideas won’t be preserved for posterity.”

Since she was someone “who’d had so much experience,” as I put it, I asked her if she really thought that Pedro Camacho was a person possessed of great talent. It took her a few seconds to find words adequate to express her feelings on the subject: “That man sanctifies the acting profession.”

Six.

One bright summer morning, tidily dressed and punctual as usual, Dr. Don Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar, examining magistrate, First Criminal Division, Superior Court of Lima, entered his chambers. He was a man who had reached the prime of life, his fifties, and in his person—broad forehead, aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—and in his bearing his spotless moral virtue was so apparent as to earn him people’s immediate respect. He dressed with the modesty that befits a magistrate with a meager salary who is constitutionally incapable of accepting a bribe, but with such impeccable neatness that it gave the impression of elegance. The