Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [70]
I would sit myself down on the windowsill and bury my nose in one law code or another. What I was really doing was spying on him. He wrote very quickly, typing with just his index fingers. I watched and couldn’t believe my eyes: he never stopped to search for a word or ponder an idea, not the slightest shadow of a doubt ever appeared in his fanatic, bulging little eyes. He gave the impression that he was writing out a fair copy of a text that he knew by heart, typing something that was being dictated to him. How was it possible, at the speed with which his little fingers flew over the keys, for him to be inventing the situations, the incidents, the dialogue of so many different stories for nine, ten hours a day? And yet it was possible: the scripts came pouring out of that tenacious head of his and those indefatigable hands one after the other, each of them exactly the right length, like strings of sausages out of a machine. Once a chapter was finished, he never made corrections in it or even read it over; he handed it to the secretary to have copies run off and immediately started in on the next one. I once told him that when I watched him work I was reminded of the theory of the French Surrealists with regard to automatic writing, which according to them flowed directly from the subconscious, bypassing the censorship of reason.
I was greeted with a chauvinist reply: “Our mestizo Latin American brains can give birth to better things than those Frogs. Let’s not have any inferiority complexes, my friend.”
Why was it that he didn’t use the scripts he’d written in Bolivia as a basis for his stories about Lima? I put this question to him, and he answered in generalities that fell far short of being a concrete explanation. In order to reach the public, stories, like fruits and vegetables, ought to be fresh, since art would not tolerate canned ones, much less those food products that were so old they’d turned rotten. Moreover, they had to be “stories of the same provenance as the listeners.” Since the latter were from Lima, how could they be expected to be interested in episodes that took place in La Paz? But he offered these reasons because his need to theorize, to turn everything into an impersonal truth, an eternal axiom, was as compulsive as his need to write. Doubtless, his real reason for not using his old scripts was far simpler: the fact that he didn’t have the slightest interest in saving himself work. For him, to live was to write. Whether or not his works would endure didn’t matter in the least to him. Once his scripts had been broadcast, he forgot about them. He assured me he didn’t have a single copy of any of his serials. They had been composed with the tacit conviction that they would cease to exist as such once they had been digested by the public.
I once asked him whether he had ever considered publishing them. “My writings are preserved in a more indelible form than the printed page,” he replied immediately. “They are engraved upon the memory of my radio listeners.”
I brought up the subject of the Argentine protest on the very same day that I had had lunch with Genaro Jr. I dropped by Pedro’s lair around 6 p.m. and invited him to the Bransa. Fearing his reaction, I announced this piece of news in a roundabout way: there were certain people whose sensibilities were all too easily wounded, who were incapable of tolerating the slightest hint of irony, and furthermore, libel laws in Peru were extremely strict and a radio station could be closed down for the most trivial reason. Giving ample demonstration of their total lack of sophistication, the Argentine embassy had taken offense at certain allusions and was threatening to lodge an official protest with the Foreign Office…
“In Bolivia they even threatened to break off diplomatic relations,” he interrupted me. “A scandal sheet went so far as to intimate that they were massing troops on the border.”
He said this in a resigned