Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [84]
“A good match,” Aunt Olga repeated, winking at me. “Rich, responsible, good-looking, and with only two sons, who are already almost grown up. Isn’t he exactly the husband my sister needs?”
“She’s been mooning about and wasting her time these last few weeks,” Uncle Lucho commented, also pleased at this new development. “She didn’t want to go out with anybody and was living the life of an old maid. But the endocrinologist has taken her fancy.”
I felt such pangs of jealousy that I lost my appetite, and sat there in a foul, bitter mood. It seemed to me that my aunt and uncle, on seeing how upset I was, would surely guess why I was in such a state. There was no need for me to fish for more details about Aunt Julia and Dr. Osores because that was all they talked about. She’d met him some ten days before, at a cocktail party at the Bolivian embassy, and on learning where she was staying, Dr. Osores had come by to visit her. He had sent her flowers, phoned her, invited her to have tea with him at the Bolívar and now to lunch with him at the Club de la Unión. The endocrinologist had said jokingly to Uncle Lucho: “Your sister-in-law is super, Luis. Isn’t it possible that she’s the candidate I’ve been looking for so as to commit matri-suicide a second time?”
I tried my best to appear totally disinterested in the subject, but I did a very bad job of concealing how distraught I was, and Uncle Lucho asked me, at one point when the two of us were alone, what was troubling me: had I gone poking around in places I shouldn’t have and caught myself a good dose of the clap? Luckily, Aunt Olga began talking about the radio serials, and that gave me a breathing spell. As she went on to say that Pedro Camacho sometimes laid it on too thick and that all her friends thought he’d gone too far with his story of the minister who “wounded himself” with a letter opener in front of the judge to prove that he hadn’t raped a thirteen-year-old girl, I silently went from rage to disillusionment and from disillusionment to rage. Why hadn’t Aunt Julia said a single word to me about the doctor? We’d seen each other several times during the last ten days and she’d never once mentioned him. Could it really be true, as Aunt Olga claimed, that she’d finally “gotten interested” in someone?
In the jitney, as I was going back to Radio Panamericana, my mood suddenly shifted from humiliation to pride. Our innocent love affair had lasted a long time, after all; we were bound to be found out at any moment now, and that would provoke scandal and unkind laughter in the family. Moreover, what was I doing, wasting my time with a woman who, as she herself said, was almost old enough to be my mother? As an experience, what we’d already had together was quite enough. Osores’s appearance on the scene was providential; it saved me the trouble of having to get rid of her. I felt restless and upset, full of unusual impulses such as wanting to get drunk or punch somebody in the nose, and on arriving back at the radio station I had a run-in with Pascual, who, faithful to his nature, had devoted half the three o’clock news bulletin to a fire in Hamburg that had burned a dozen Turkish immigrants to death. I told him that in the future he was strictly forbidden to include any news item about dead people in the bulletins without getting my okay first, and I was curt and unfriendly to a pal from San Marcos who called me up to remind me that Law School still existed and to warn me that there was an exam in criminal law awaiting me the next day. Almost the moment I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Aunt Julia.
“I stood you up for an endocrinologist, Varguitas. I presume you missed me,” she said, cool as a cucumber. “You’re not angry?”
“Angry? Why should I be?” I replied. “Aren’t you free to do as you please?”
“Ah, so you are angry,” I heard her say in a more serious tone of voice. “Don’t be an idiot. When can we see each other, so that I can explain?”
“I can’t see you today,” I replied curtly. “I’ll phone you later.”
I hung up, more furious