Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [65]
“Stop right there,” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar interrupted him as a terrible suspicion dawned on him. “What are you going to do?”
“Cut it off and throw it in the trash to prove to you how little it means to me,” the accused replied, pointing toward the wastebasket with his chin.
He spoke without false pride, with quiet determination. Their mouths gaping open in surprise, struck dumb, the judge and the secretary were unable to raise any sort of outcry. Gumercindo Tello was now holding the corpus delicti in his left hand and, an executioner brandishing the ax and mentally measuring its trajectory to the victim’s neck, raising the knife and preparing to let it fall to consummate the inconceivable proof.
Would he go through with it? Would he thus deprive himself, in one stroke, of his integrity? Would he sacrifice his body, his youth, his honor, as an ethico-abstract demonstration? Would Gumercindo Tello turn the most respectable judge’s chambers in Lima into a sacrificial altar? How would this forensic drama end?
Seven.
My romance with Aunt Julia was going along swimmingly, except that things were getting complicated because it was becoming more and more difficult to keep it a secret. By common agreement, in order not to arouse suspicion in the family, I had drastically cut down my visits to Uncle Lucho’s. I continued, however, to appear regularly at the house for lunch on Thursdays. In order to go to the movies together at night, we invented various ruses. Aunt Julia would go out early in the evening, telephone Aunt Olga to tell her she’d be having dinner with a girlfriend, and wait for me at a place we’d agreed on beforehand. This modus operandi was rather inconvenient, however, in that Aunt Julia was obliged to while away several hours on the streets till I got off work, and most of the time she also had to go without dinner. At other times I went to pick her up in a taxi without getting out; she’d wait in the house, keeping an eye peeled, and the minute she saw the cab stop she’d come running out. But this was a risky operation: if anybody in the family spied me, they’d know immediately that there was something going on between Aunt Julia and me; and in any event her mysterious gentleman friend who invited her out for the evening but kept himself hidden in the back seat of a taxi was bound sooner or later to arouse curiosity, malicious gossip, a great many questions…
We had decided therefore to see each other less often at night and more often in the daytime, during the hours when I had nothing to do at the radio station. Aunt Julia would take a jitney downtown around eleven in the morning, or five in the afternoon, and wait for me in a coffee shop on Camaná or in the Cream Rica on the Jirón de la Unión. I’d leave a couple of bulletins all edited and ready to go on the air and we could spend two hours together. We avoided the Bransa on La Colmena because it was a favorite hangout of all the people from Panamericana and Radio Central. From time to time (to be more precise, on paydays), I would invite her to lunch and we’d have as many as three hours together. But my meager salary didn’t really permit such extravagances. After making an elaborate speech, I’d managed to persuade Genaro Jr. to raise my salary, one morning when I’d found him in a euphoric mood because of Pedro Camacho’s successes, to exactly five thousand soles. I gave two thousand of it to my grandparents to help out with household expenses. The remaining three thousand had previously been more than enough for my vices: cigarettes, movies, and books. But since my romance with Aunt Julia, my spending money seemed to vanish into thin air immediately and I was always broke, so that I often had to touch my friends for loans and even had to resort to taking