Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [85]
“He’s right to treat ’em that way,” Big Pablito said, backing me up. “There’s nothing that pleases ’em as much as being kept on a tight leash.”
I told my two editors to go to hell, wrote up the four o’clock bulletin, and went to see Pedro Camacho. He was recording a script and I waited for him in his cubicle, idly leafing through the papers on his desk without understanding what I was reading because my mind was entirely occupied with the question of whether the phone conversation I’d just had with Aunt Julia meant that we’d broken up. In the space of just a few seconds I went from hating her with all my heart to missing her with all my soul.
“Come with me to buy some poison,” Pedro Camacho said in a somber voice from the doorway, shaking his lion’s mane. “We’ll have time to go have something to drink afterwards.”
As we wandered up and down the side streets off the Jirón de la Unión hunting for the poison, the artist explained that the mice at La Tapada rooming house had become intolerable.
“If they were content simply to scamper around underneath my bed, I wouldn’t mind, they’re not children, and as far as animals are concerned, I don’t have any phobias,” he said a few moments later as he sniffed with his prominent nose at some yellow powder that according to the shopkeeper could kill a cow. “But those mustached critters eat my food; every night they nibble on the provisions I leave on the windowsill to keep cool. There’s no way round it—I’m obliged to exterminate them.”
He haggled over the price of the poison, with arguments that left the shopkeeper nonplussed, paid for it, had them wrap up the little envelopes full of yellow powder, and the two of us went to a café on La Colmena. He ordered his usual herb concoction and I ordered coffee.
“I’ve got love troubles, my friend Camacho,” I said to him straight out, surprised at hearing myself use a soap-opera cliché but it seemed to me that by speaking in this way I distanced myself from my own story and at the same time managed to vent my feelings. “The woman I love is cheating on me with another man.”
He gave me a searching look, his little pop-eyes colder and more humorless than ever. His black suit had been washed, ironed, and worn so threadbare that it was as shiny as an onion peel.
“In these countries whose manners and morals have become so vulgar and plebeian, dueling has become a crime punished by imprisonment,” he reminded me, very seriously, making jerky motions with his hands. “As for suicide, it’s a gesture no one appreciates nowadays. A person kills himself, and rather than remorse, cold shivers, admiration, it’s laughter that he provokes. The best thing is practical recipes, my friend.”
I was happy that I had taken him into my confidence. I knew very well that, inasmuch as no one outside himself existed for Pedro Camacho, my problem was the farthest thing from his mind; it had simply been a device to set his mechanism for churning out systematic theories in motion. Hearing the one he’d come up with would console me more (and have lesser consequences) than going out and getting drunk.
After giving me a faint smile, Pedro Camacho spelled out his recipe in detail. “A hard, cutting, lapidary letter to the adulteress,” he said to me, wielding his adjectives with aplomb. “A letter that will make her feel like a miserable snake in the grass, a filthy hyena. Proving to her that you’re not stupid, that you know how she’s betrayed you, a letter dripping with contempt, that will show her what it means to be an adulteress.” He fell silent, thought for a moment, and then, in a slightly different tone of voice, offered me the greatest proof of his friendship that I could possibly expect from him: “If you like, I’ll write it for you.”
I thanked him effusively, but said that, knowing