Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [6]
I explained to her that love didn’t exist, that it was the invention of an Italian named Petrarch and the Provençal troubadours. That what people thought was a crystal-clear outpouring of emotion, a pure effusion of sentiment, was merely the instinctive desire of cats in heat hidden beneath the poetic words and myths of literature. I didn’t really believe a word of what I was saying and was simply trying to impress her. My erotico-biological theory, however, left Aunt Julia quite skeptical: did I honestly believe such nonsense?
“I’m against marriage,” I told her, in the most solemnly pedantic tone of voice I could muster. “I’m a believer in what’s called free love, although if we were honest, we ought, quite simply, to call it free copulation.”
“Does copulation mean doing things?” She laughed. But immediately a sad, disabused expression crossed her face. “In my day, boys composed acrostics, sent girls flowers, took weeks to work up enough nerve to give them a kiss. What an obscene thing love has become among kids today, Marito.”
We had a slight argument at the box office as to which of us was going to pay for the tickets, and then, after sitting through an hour and a half of Dolores del Río moaning, embracing, taking her pleasure, weeping, running through the forest with her hair streaming in the wind, we headed back to Uncle Lucho’s, on foot this time too, in a drizzling rain that left our hair and our clothes soaking wet. As we walked along, we talked again of Pedro Camacho. Was she absolutely certain she’d never heard of him? Because, according to Genaro Jr., he was a celebrity in Bolivia. No, she’d never even heard his name mentioned. The thought came to me that they’d put one over on Genaro, or that perhaps the supposed one-man “industry” in the world of radio and theater in Bolivia was a publicity gimmick he’d dreamed up to drum up interest in a Peruvian pen pusher he’d just hired. Three days later I met Pedro Camacho in the flesh.
I’d just had a set-to with Genaro Sr., because Pascual, with his usual irrepressible penchant for terrible catastrophes, had devoted the entire eleven o’clock bulletin to an earthquake in Isfahan. What irritated Genaro Sr. was not so much the fact that Pascual had completely disregarded other news items to give himself time to describe, with a wealth of details, how the Persians who survived the disastrous cave-ins had been attacked by snakes that had surfaced, hissing in fury, once their subterranean refuges had been destroyed, but rather the fact that this earthquake had occurred a week previously. I had to agree that Genaro Sr. had good reason for being upset, and I let off steam by telling Pascual he was completely irresponsible. Where in the world had he come across such stale news? In an Argentine magazine. And why had he put out such an idiotic bulletin? Because there wasn’t any really important hot news item to report, and this one had at least a certain entertainment value. When I explained to him that we weren’t being paid to entertain the radio listeners but to give them a summary of the news of the day, Pascual, eager to make his peace with me, nodded in agreement while at the same time confronting me with his irrefutable argument: “The thing is, Don Mario, the two of us, have entirely different conceptions of what news is.” I was about to answer that if every time I turned my back he persisted in putting into practice his sensationalist conception of news reporting, the two of us would very soon be thrown out into the street, when a most unusual silhouette appeared in the doorway of the shack: a minuscule figure, on the very borderline between a man extremely short in stature and a dwarf, with a huge nose and unusually bright eyes with a disturbing, downright abnormal gleam in them. He was dressed in a black suit that was quite obviously old and threadbare, and a shirt and bow tie with visible stains, but at the same time he gave the impression of being extremely neat, fastidious,