Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [73]
“And why shouldn’t I have the right to become one with characters of my own creation, to resemble them? Who is there to stop me from having their noses, their hair, their frock coats as I describe them?” he said, exchanging a biretta for a meerschaum, the meerschaum for a duster, and the duster for a crutch. What does it matter to anyone if I lubricate my imagination with a few bits of cloth? What is realism, ladies and gentlemen—that famous realism we hear so much about? What better way is there of creating realistic art than by materially identifying oneself with reality? And doesn’t the day’s work thereby become more tolerable, more pleasant, more varied, more dynamic?”
But naturally—and his voice became first furious, then disconsolate—through stupidity and lack of understanding, people were bound to get the wrong idea. If he were seen at Radio Central wearing disguises as he wrote, tongues would immediately begin to wag, the rumor would spread that he was a transvestite, his office would become a magnet attracting the morbid curiosity of the vulgar. He finished putting away the masks and other objects, closed the valise, and returned to the windowsill. He was in a melancholy mood now. He murmured that in Bolivia, where he always worked in his own atelier, he’d never had any problem “with his props and his bits of cloth.” Here, however, it was only on Sundays that he could write in the way that had long been his habit.
“Do you acquire disguises to fit your characters, or do you invent your characters on the basis of disguises you already have?” I asked, just to be saying something, still overcome with astonishment.
He looked at me as though I were a newborn babe.
“It’s plain from your question that you’re still very young,” he chided me gently. “Don’t you know that in the beginning is the Word—always?”
When, after thanking him effusively for his invitation, we went back down to the street, I said to Aunt Julia that Pedro Camacho had given us an exceptional proof of his confidence by letting us in on his secret, and that I’d been touched by his doing so. She was happy: she’d never imagined that intellectuals could be such amusing characters.
“Well, they’re not all like that.” I laughed. “Pedro Camacho is an ‘intellectual’ in quotation marks. Did you notice that there wasn’t a single book in his room? He once explained to me that he doesn’t read, because other writers might influence his style.”
Holding hands, we walked back through the silent downtown streets to the jitney stop and I told her that some Sunday I’d come down to Radio Central by myself just to see the scriptwriter become one with his creatures by way of his disguises.
“He lives like a beggar—there’s no justice,” Aunt Julia expostulated. “Since his serials are so famous, I thought he must earn piles of money.”
She couldn’t help remembering that she hadn’t seen a bathtub or a shower in the La Tapada rooming house, just a toilet and a washstand green with mold on the first landing. Did I think Pedro Camacho never bathed? I told her that the scriptwriter couldn’t care less about such trivial details. She confessed to me that it had turned her stomach when she’d seen how filthy the pensión was, that she’d had to make a superhuman effort to get the sausage and the egg down.
Once we’d gotten in the jitney, an old rattletrap that kept stopping at every corner all along the Avenida Arequipa, as I was slowly kissing her on the ear, in the neck, I heard her say in alarm: “In other words, if you’re a writer you’re poverty-stricken. That means you’re going to be down-and-out all your life, Varguitas.”
Ever since she’d heard Javier calling me that, she too now addressed me as Varguitas.
Eight.