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By Root 1123 0

other? Yes, certain. It was simply a different experience, a bit more mature and daring than the ones I’d had before, but if I was to have pleasant memories of our affair, it shouldn’t last very long. I had thought things through that far when Genaro Jr. appeared to invite me to lunch. He took me to Magdalena, to a restaurant with an outdoor patio that specialized in Peruvian cuisine, insisted that I order the rice with duck and the fritters with honey, and then, as we were having coffee, handed me the check, so to speak. “You’re the only friend he’s got, talk to him, he’s getting us into terrible trouble. I don’t dare say a word to him, he calls me an ignoramus, and yesterday he called my father a mesocrat. I don’t want to have any more run-ins with him. I’d have to fire him and that would be a disaster for the corporation.”

The problem was a letter from the Argentine ambassador to Radio Central, couched in poisonous language, protesting the “slanderous, perverse, and psychotic” references to the fatherland of Sarmiento and San Martín that cropped up everywhere in the serials (which the diplomat called “sensationalist stories presented in episodic form”). The ambassador offered a number of examples which, he assured his addressees, had not been sought ex professo but collected at random by the personnel of the legation “with a penchant for this sort of broadcast.” In one of them it had been suggested, no less, that the proverbial virility of Argentine men residing in the capital was a myth since nearly all of them practiced homosexuality (and, preferably, the passive form); in another, that in Buenos Aires families, noted for living together in teeming hordes, it was customary to allow useless members—the oldsters and the invalids—to die of hunger so as to lighten the budget; on another, that beef cattle were raised for export only because in Argentine homes the meat that was most highly prized was horseflesh; in another, that the widespread participation in the sport of soccer had damaged the national genes, above all because of the players’ practice of butting the ball with their heads, thus explaining the ever-increasing numbers of oligophrenics, acromegalics, and other subvarieties of cretins on the shores of the tawny-colored Río de la Plata; that in the homes of Buenos Aires—“a similar cosmopolis,” as the letter put it—it was a common custom to attend to one’s biological necessities in a simple bucket, in the same room where one ate and slept…

“You’re laughing. We laughed too, but today we had a visit from a lawyer and suddenly the whole thing doesn’t seem the least bit funny,” Genaro Jr. said, biting his fingernails. “If the embassy formally protests to the government, they can make us stop broadcasting serials, fine us, close down the station. Plead with him, threaten him, anything, so long as he drops the subject of Argentines.”

I promised to do what I could, but without much hope of getting anywhere, since the scriptwriter was a man of unshakable convictions. I had come to feel genuine friendship for him; above and beyond the entomological curiosity he aroused in me, I truly respected him. But was the feeling mutual? Pedro Camacho didn’t seem to me to be capable of wasting his time, his energy, on friendship or on anything else that would distract him from “his art” that is to say, his work or his vice, that urgent necessity that swept aside men, things, appetites. It was true, however, that he was more tolerant of me than of others. We had coffee together (or, rather, I had coffee and he had his verbena-and-mint tea), and I dropped by his cubbyhole every so often to spend a few minutes with him, thus giving him a brief respite between one page and another. I listened to him very attentively and perhaps he found this flattering; he may have considered me a disciple, or I might simply have been for him what a lapdog is to an old maid and crossword puzzles to the pensioner: something, someone to help while away the empty hours.

Three things about Pedro Camacho fascinated me: what he said; the austerity of his