Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [69]
In the beginning, he turned out four serials a day, but in view of their great success, their number gradually increased to ten, which were broadcast from Monday through Saturday, with each chapter of each serial lasting half an hour (or, more precisely, twenty-three minutes, since commercials took up seven minutes of each half hour). Since he directed all of them as well as playing a role in each, he must have spent around seven hours a day at the studio, if one takes into account the fact that rehearsing and recording each program took approximately forty minutes (between ten and fifteen minutes being required at each of these sessions for his initial sermon and the run-through). He wrote the serials as needed for each day’s broadcasts; I noted that each chapter took him barely twice the time required to act it out on the air: one hour. In any event, this meant spending around ten hours a day at his typewriter. He was able to cut this down a bit thanks to his labors on Sunday, his day off, which he naturally spent in his tiny little office, getting a head start on his scripts for the week coming up. His work day was thus fifteen to seventeen hours long from Monday to Saturday and eight to ten hours long on Sunday. And all of them demonstrably productive hours, an amazing “artistic” output.
He arrived at Radio Central at eight in the morning and left around midnight; the only times he went out for a break were with me, to the Bransa, to have a cup of cerebrally stimulating herb tea. He ate his lunch in his lair, a sandwich and a soft drink that Jesusito, Big Pablito, or one of his actor-disciples devotedly went out to get for him. He never accepted invitations, I never heard him say he’d gone to a movie, a theatrical performance, a soccer match, or a party. I never saw him read a book, a magazine, or a newspaper, outside of the big bulky volume of quotations and the city maps that were his “work tools.” No, I am mistaken: one day I discovered him poring over a yearbook listing the members of the Club Nacional.
“I slipped the concierge a few coins so as to have a look at it,” he explained when I asked him about it. “How else could I get the right names for my aristocrats? My ears suffice for the others: I pick plebeian names up out of the gutter.”
The way in which he produced his serials, the single hour it took him to grind out each script, without ever once stopping, never ceased to amaze me. I often watched him as he composed these chapters. Unlike the recording sessions, where he kept what transpired a closely guarded secret, he didn’t care in the least if there were people around when he was writing. As he sat typing away at his (my) Remington, he was often interrupted by his actors, Puddler, or the sound engineer. He would raise his eyes, answer their questions, give a baroque instruction, send the visitor on his way with his epidermic little smile, as different from a laugh as anything I’ve ever witnessed, and go on writing. I often used to come down to his lair on the pretext that I needed a place to study, that I had to put up with too much noise and too many people in my pigeon coop upstairs (I was studying for my year-end exams in my law courses and forgot everything the minute I’d taken them: the fact that I never flunked one didn’t so much speak well of me as it spoke badly of the university). Pedro Camacho didn’t