Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [67]
“This is Julia, my Aunt Olga’s sister,” I explained.
“What! The famous woman from Bolivia?” He’d more or less had the wind taken out of his sails: when he came across us we’d been holding hands and hadn’t let go when he sat down with us, and now he was staring intently at our intertwined fingers and had lost his air of worldly self-assurance of a few moments before. “Well, well, Varguitas!” he murmured.
“The famous woman from Bolivia, you say? May I ask what I’m famous for?” Aunt Julia asked.
“For being so disagreeable, for those spiteful jokes of yours when you first arrived,” I explained to her. “Javier knows only the first part of the story.”
“You kept the best part a secret, you bad narrator and worse friend,” Javier said, recovering his aplomb and pointing to our clasped hands. “Come on, tell me the rest, you two.”
He was really charming that afternoon, talking a blue streak and making all sorts of jokes and witty remarks. Aunt Julia found him delightful, and I was happy that he’d discovered us; I hadn’t planned to tell him about her, because I detested sharing confidences about my love life (especially in this case, since the whole thing was so complicated), but now that he had chanced to discover my secret, I was glad that I was going to be able to talk with him about the ins and outs of this affair of the heart with Aunt Julia.
As he left us that day, he kissed her on the cheek, bowed, and said: “I’m a first-rate pander. If I can be of help in any way, you can count on me.”
“How come you didn’t tell us you’d even tuck us in bed?” I said testily the moment he appeared later that afternoon in my shack at Radio Panamericana, eager to hear all the details.
“She’s more or less an aunt of yours right?” he replied, clapping me on the back. “In any case, I’m really impressed. A mistress who’s old, rich, and divorced: you get an A in the course!”
“She’s not my aunt; she’s my uncle’s wife’s sister,” I said, explaining again what he already knew as I edited a news item in La Prensa on the Korean War for an upcoming bulletin. “She’s not my mistress, she’s not old, and she doesn’t have money. The only part of your description that’s true is that she’s divorced.”
“What I meant by old was older than you, and the part about her being rich wasn’t intended as criticism but as a way of extending my congratulations, since I’m all in favor of marrying for money.” Javier laughed. “And am I to take it that she’s not your mistress? If not, what is she exactly? Your girlfriend?”
“Something between the two,” I told him, knowing that that would irritate him.
“Ah, I get it, you want to keep your deep dark secrets to yourself. Well, the hell with you, then. What’s more, you’re a bastard: I tell you everything about what’s going on between me and Nancy and you won’t tell me one thing about the catch you’ve made.”
So I told him the whole story from the very beginning, the complicated schemes we had to resort to just to see each other alone, and he realized why I’d hit him for a loan two or three times during the last few weeks. He was intrigued by our story, asked me one question after another, and after hearing me out swore he’d be my fairy godmother. But as he was leaving he said in a solemn tone of voice: “I take it that this whole thing is only a game. But even so, don’t forget that you and I are still just kids,” he admonished me, looking me straight in the eye like a stern but kindly father.
“If I get pregnant, I swear to you I’ll get an abortion,” I reassured him.
Once he left, and as Pascual was telling Big Pablito all about an amusing nose-to-tail chain collision in Germany involving some twenty cars that had crashed into each other when an unthinking Belgian tourist had suddenly braked to a halt right in the middle of the Autobahn to rescue a little dog, I thought over what he’d said. Was it certain that Aunt Julia and I weren’t getting seriously involved with each