Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [71]
“The only thing the Genaros ask is that you try your best to refrain from speaking ill of Argentines in your serials,” I finally worked up my nerve to tell him straight out, coming up at the same time with an argument I hoped would win him over: “In a word, it’s better if you don’t say anything at all about them. When you come right down to it, are they worth bothering about?”
“Yes, they are, because they inspire me,” he explained, thus putting an end to the discussion.
As we were walking back to the radio station, he informed me, in a mischievous voice, that the international incident he’d set off in La Paz had come about because of a play he’d written and staged on the subject of “the bestial habits of gauchos,” which according to him had “hit home.” Once back at Panamericana, I told Genaro Jr. he ought not to labor under any illusions as to how effective a mediator I’d be.
Two or three days later I got a chance to see Pedro Camacho’s living quarters. Aunt Julia had come down to the station to meet me after the last evening newscast because she wanted to see a movie that was showing at the Metro, starring one of Hollywood’s great romantic couples: Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. As we were crossing the Plaza San Martín around midnight to catch a jitney, I spied Pedro Camacho coming out of Radio Central. The moment I pointed him out to her, Aunt Julia wanted to meet him. We walked over to him, and on learning that Aunt Julia was a compatriot of his, he warmed to her immediately.
“I’m a great admirer of yours,” Aunt Julia said to him, and to flatter him even more, she lied: “I first began listening to your serials in Bolivia, and I never miss one.”
We walked along with him, almost without realizing it, to the Jirón Quilca, and on the way Pedro Camacho and Aunt Julia had a patriotic conversation from which I was excluded, in which there passed in review the mines of Potosí and Taquiña beer, the corn soup called lagua, stewed corn with cream cheese, the climate of Cochabamba, the beauty of the women of Santa Cruz, and other national glories of Bolivia. The scriptwriter seemed to enjoy talking of the marvels of his native land. On arriving at the door of a building with balconies and jalousies, he stopped but didn’t bid us goodnight.
“Come on upstairs with me,” he proposed. “I’m having a simple dinner but we can share it.”
The La Tapada rooming house was one of those old three-story residences in downtown Lima, built in the last century, that were often spacious and comfortable and sometimes even sumptuous, but later on, as people who were well-off gradually deserted the center of the city and moved to resorts on the seashore, old Lima gradually became unfashionable, these houses gradually began to fall into ruin, grew more and more crowded as they were subdivided, and eventually turned into veritable hives thanks to the installation of partitions that doubled or quadrupled the number of rooms and the haphazard creation of minuscule living quarters in all sorts of odd corners in the entry halls, on the roof terraces, and even on the balconies and stairways. The La Tapada rooming house appeared to be about to collapse at any moment; the steps of the stairs we climbed to get to Pedro Camacho’s room swayed beneath our weight, and our feet stirred up little clouds of dust that made Aunt Julia sneeze. A thick film of dirt covered everything, walls and floors, and it was plain to see that the place had never been swept or mopped. Pedro Camacho’s room was like a cell. It was very small and almost empty. There was a cot without a headboard, covered with a faded blanket and on it a pillow without a pillowcase, a small table covered with an oilcloth, a chair with a straw seat, a suitcase, and a line strung between two walls with undershorts and socks drying on it. The fact that the scriptwriter washed his own clothes didn’t surprise me, but it did surprise me that he did his own cooking.