Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [86]
“As for the seducer,” Pedro Camacho went on immediately, with an evil gleam in his eye, “the best thing is an anonymous letter, with all the necessary malicious slander. Why should the victim sit with folded hands as he’s being cuckolded? Why should he allow the adulterous couple to take their pleasure and fornicate in peace? It’s necessary to ruin their love, to hit them where it hurts, to poison them with doubts. Let them begin to mistrust each other, to be suspicious of each other, to hate each other. Isn’t vengeance sweet?”
I hinted that perhaps it was not gentlemanly to resort to anonymous letters, but he reassured me immediately: one should behave like a gentleman when dealing with gentlemen and like a bastard when dealing with bastards. This was “honor rightly understood”: all the rest of it was errant nonsense.
“With the letter to her and the anonymous letters to him, the lovers get the punishment they deserve,” I said. “But what about my problem? Who’s going to relieve me of my resentment, my frustration, my heartache?”
“There’s nothing like milk of magnesia for all that,” he replied, but I was feeling too depressed even to laugh. “I know,” he went on, “that strikes you as far too materialistic an answer. But, believe me, I’ve had a great deal of experience in life. Most of the time, so-called heartaches et cetera are simply indigestion—tough beans that won’t dissolve in the stomach, fish that’s not as fresh as it should be, constipation. A good laxative blasts the folly of love to bits.”
There was no doubt this time, he was a subtle humorist, he was making fun of me the way he made fun of his listeners, he didn’t believe one word of what he was saying, he was practicing the aristocratic sport of proving to himself that we mortals were hopeless imbeciles.
“Have you had a great many love affairs, an extremely rich love life?” I asked him.
“Yes, extremely rich,” he avowed, looking me straight in the eye over the cup of verbena-and-mint-tea he had raised to his lips. “But I have never loved a flesh-and-blood woman.”
He paused dramatically, as though he were sizing up exactly how innocent or stupid I was. “Do you think it would be possible to do what I do if women sapped my energy?” he said reprovingly, with disgust in his voice. “Do you think that it’s possible to produce offspring and stories at the same time? That one can invent, imagine, if one lives under the threat of syphilis? Women and art are mutually exclusive, my friend. In every vagina an artist is buried. What pleasure is there in reproducing? Isn’t that what dogs, spiders, cats do? We must be original, my friend.”
Before the last word had died away, he suddenly leapt to his feet, announcing that he had just time enough to get back to the studio for the five o’clock serial. I was disappointed; I would willingly have spent the rest of the afternoon listening to him, and I had the impression that I had inadvertently touched a sore point of his personality.
When I got back to my office at Panamericana, Aunt Julia was there waiting for me. Seated at my desk like a queen, she was receiving the homage of Pascual and Big Pablito, who were bustling about solicitously, showing her the bulletins and explaining to her how the News Department functioned. She was smiling and seemed not to have a care in the world; but as I walked into the room a serious look came over her face and she paled slightly.
“Well, what a surprise,” I said, just to say something.
But Aunt Julia was in no mood for polite chitchat. “I came to tell you that nobody hangs up on me,” she said in a resolute voice. “Much less a brat like you. Would you kindly explain what’s gotten into you?”
Pascual and Big Pablito just stood there, turning their heads to look at her and then at me and vice versa, bursting with curiosity as to how this dramatic