Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [72]
He offered Aunt Julia the chair and me the bed with a grand gesture. “Please be seated. My dwelling is humble but my welcome to you is from the heart.”
It took him two minutes to prepare dinner. He had the ingredients in a plastic sack, stored on the windowsill to keep cool. The menu consisted of fried eggs and boiled sausages, bread with butter and cheese, and yogurt with honey. We watched him prepare it with no wasted motions, like someone accustomed to doing so every day, and I was certain that this must be what he always had for dinner.
As we ate, he was at once courtly and chatty, condescending to deal with subjects such as the recipe for cup custard (that Aunt Julia asked him for) and the most economical laundry soap for doing white clothes. He didn’t clean up his plate; as he pushed it aside, he pointed to what was left on it, and allowed himself to venture a little joke. “For the artist, eating is a vice, my friends.”
Seeing what a good mood he was in, I dared to come right out and ask him a number of questions about his work habits. I told him I was envious of his stamina, of the fact that despite his galley-slave schedule he never seemed tired.
“I have my stratagems to make my day interesting,” he confessed to us.
Lowering his voice, as though to keep imaginary rivals from discovering his secret, he told us that he never worked for more than sixty minutes at a time on the same story and that changing from one subject to another was refreshing, since at the beginning of each hour he thus had the sensation that he was just starting to work.
“Pleasure stems from variety, my friends,” he repeated, with an excited gleam in his eye and the facial contortions of an evil gnome.
Hence, when writing stories, it was important that contrast, not continuity, be the ruling principle of composition: the complete change of place, milieu, mood, subject, and characters reinforced the exhilarating sensation that one was starting afresh. Moreover, cups of mint-and-verbena tea were helpful: they cleared one’s synapses, and one’s imagination was grateful. And leaving the typewriter every so often to go over to the studio, turning from writing to directing and acting, was also relaxing, a transition that had a tonic effect. But, in addition to all this, he had made an important discovery over the years, something that to the ignorant and insensitive might perhaps appear absolutely childish. But then, did it matter what that breed thought?
We saw him hesitate; he fell silent and a sad look came over his little cartoon-character face. “Unfortunately I can’t put it into practice here,” he said dejectedly. “Only on Sundays, when I’m alone. There are too many busybodies around on weekdays, and they wouldn’t understand.”
Since when had he, who looked upon mortals with Olympian detachment, had such scruples? I noted that Aunt Julia, too, was hanging on his every word. “You can’t leave us in suspense like this,” she said pleadingly. “What is this secret you’ve discovered, Señor Camacho?”
He observed us for some time, in silence, like the conjurer who contemplates, with evident satisfaction, the attention that he has contrived to arouse. Then, with sacerdotal slowness, he rose to his feet (he had been sitting on the windowsill, next to the Primus stove), went over to his suitcase, opened it, and began to pull out of the depths of it, like a prestidigitator pulling rabbits or flags out of a top hat, an incredible collection of objects: an English magistrate’s court wig, false mustaches of various sizes, a fireman’s hat, military badges, masks of a fat woman, an old man, an idiot child, a traffic policeman’s stick, a sea dog’s cap and pipe, a surgeon’s white smock, false ears and noses, cotton beards… Like a little electric robot, he showed us these props, and—the better to demonstrate their effect to us? out of some intimate inner need?—he began putting them on and taking them off, with an agility that betrayed