Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [83]
He had no illusions when he saw Ricardo and Federico Jr. appear at the foot of the stairway. Having been converted to wholehearted skepticism in a matter of seconds, he was certain that they were coming to join the others, to participate in the mayhem, to give him the coup de grâce. Terrified, with no dignity or honor left, he had only one thought: to make his way to the front door, to flee. But it was not easy. He managed to run two or three steps, but then one of them tripped him and sent him sprawling. Lying there on the floor, curled up in a ball to protect his manhood, he saw his heirs attack his humanity with ferocious kicks as his wife and daughters armed themselves with brooms, feather dusters, the fireplace poker, in order to go on working him over. Before telling himself that he had no idea what was going on except that the whole world had gone mad, he managed to hear his sons’ voices, too, calling him a maniac, a tightwad, a filthy beast, a rat killer, rhythmically punctuating each insult with another kick. As everything began to go black, a tiny gray intruder suddenly popped out of an invisible little hole in one corner of the dining room, a mouse with white canines that contemplated the man lying on the floor with a mocking gleam in its bright eyes…
Was Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, the indefatigable executioner of the rodents of Peru, dead? Had parricide, epithalamicide, been committed? Or was he merely stunned—this husband and father who lay, amid a disorder without precedent, beneath the dining-room table as his family, having swiftly packed their personal belongings, abandoned their home and fireside in exultation? How would this unfortunate affair in the Barranco district end?
Nine.
The failure of my story about Doroteo Martí left me discouraged for several days. But the morning I heard Pascual tell Big Pablito of his discovery at the airport, I felt my vocation come to life again and began to plan another story. Pascual had surprised a bunch of ragamuffins practicing a risky and exciting sport. As darkness was falling, they would lie down on the end of the runway at Limatambo airport, and Pascual swore that each time a plane took off the kid lying on the ground would be lifted up a few centimeters or so because of the pressure of the air thus displaced, and levitate, as in a magic show, for a few seconds, and then, once the lift effect had disappeared, would suddenly come down to earth again. At about that same time I had just seen a Mexican film, Los Olvidados, that I was all excited about (it was not until years later that I found out it was a Buñuel film, and who Buñuel was). I decided to write a story in the same spirit; a tale of men-children, young wolf cubs toughened by the harsh conditions of life in the suburbs. Javier was skeptical and assured me that Pascual’s anecdote couldn’t possibly be true, that the change in air pressure caused by a plane taking off wouldn’t be sufficient to lift even a newborn babe off the ground. We argued back and forth, and I finally told him that the characters in my story would levitate yet at the same time it would be a realistic story (“No, fantastic!” he shouted), and we finally agreed to go with Pascual to the vacant lots of Córpac some night to see with our own eyes what was true and what was false in his account of these dangerous games (that was the title I’d chosen for the story).
I hadn’t seen Aunt Julia that day but was expecting to see her on the following day, Thursday, at Uncle Lucho’s. But when I arrived at the house on Armendáriz at noon for the usual Thursday lunch, I discovered she wasn’t there. Aunt Olga told me she’d been invited out to lunch by “a good match”: Dr. Guillermo Osores, a physician who was some sort of distant family relation, a very presentable man in his fifties with quite a bit of money,