Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [87]
“I hung up on you, but what I really wanted to do was wring your neck,” I said to her once we were alone.
“I’ve never known you to have fits of rage like this,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “May I ask what in the world is wrong with you?”
“You know very well what’s wrong with me, so don’t play dumb,” I said.
“Are you jealous because I went out to lunch with Dr. Osores?” she asked me in a slightly mocking tone of voice. “How easy it is to see you’re still just a kid, Marito.”
“I’ve forbidden you to call me Marito,” I reminded her. I could feel that my anger was getting the better of me, that my voice was trembling and I no longer had any idea what I was saying. “And I now forbid you to call me a kid.”
I sat down on the corner of my desk, and as though to counterbalance me, Aunt Julia rose to her feet and walked a few steps over to the window. With her arms crossed over her chest, she stood there looking out at the gray, damp, vaguely ghostly morning, not really seeing it, because she was searching for words to tell me something. She was wearing a blue tailored suit and white shoes, and all of a sudden I wanted to kiss her.
“Let’s get things straight,” she finally said, her back still turned to me. “You can’t forbid me to do anything, even as a joke, for the pure and simple reason that you’re nothing to me. You’re not my husband, you’re not my fiancé, you’re not my lover. That little game of holding hands, of kissing at the movies isn’t really serious, and above all, it doesn’t give you any hold over me. You have to get that through your head, my boy.”
“The truth of the matter is that you’re talking to me as though you were my mama,” I said to her.
“The fact is, I could be your mama,” Aunt Julia said, and a sad look came over her face. It was as though she’d gotten over being angry, and the only thing left in its place was a feeling of irritation that went far back in time, a profound bitterness. She turned around, walked back toward the desk, and stopped very close to me. She looked at me sorrowfully. “You make me feel old, Varguitas, even though I’m not. And I don’t like that. What there is between us has no reason for being, much less a future.”
I put my arms around her waist and drew her to me. She did not resist, but as I kissed her, very tenderly, on the cheek, on the neck, on the ear—her warm skin palpitated beneath my lips, and feeling the secret life coursing through her veins made me tremendously happy—she went on talking in the same tone of voice:
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I don’t like this situation, Varguitas. Don’t you realize it’s absurd? I’m thirty-two years old, I’m a divorcée—can you tell me what I’m doing with a kid eighteen years old? That’s a typical perversion of women in their fifties, and I’m not old enough yet for that.”
I felt so excited and so much in love as I kissed her neck, her hands, slowly nibbled her ear, ran my lips across her nose, her eyes, or wound locks of her hair around my fingers, that every so often I lost track of what she was saying. Moreover, she kept alternately raising and lowering her voice, and at times it faded to a mere whisper.
“At the beginning it was amusing, on account of having to meet in secret and all,” she said, allowing herself to be kissed, but making no move to reciprocate, “and above all because it made me feel as though I were a young girl again.”
“Where does that leave us, then, may I ask?” I murmured in her ear. “Do I make you feel like a perverted fifty-year-old woman or a young girl?”
“This whole business of being with a kid who never has a cent to his name, not doing anything but holding hands and going to the movies and giving each other tender little kisses, takes me back to when I was fifteen,” Aunt Julia went on. “It’s true that it’s nice to fall for a shy youngster who respects you, who doesn