Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [91]
“Do you have any idea what those lines mean? They’re a public demonstration of what a great hit Pedro’s serials are with radio listeners,” he explained to me.
I said I didn’t have any doubts as to how popular he was, and he made me blush by suggesting that, since I too had “literary inclinations,” I should follow the Bolivian’s example and learn his tricks for winning a mass audience. “You mustn’t shut yourself up in an ivory tower,” he advised me. He’d had five thousand photographs of Pedro Camacho printed, and beginning the following Monday, they’d be given out free to autograph hunters. I asked him if the scriptwriter had toned down his diatribes against Argentines.
“It doesn’t matter any more. He can run down anybody he pleases,” he said, assuming an air of mystery. “Haven’t you heard the big news? The General never misses one of Pedro’s serials.”
He went into details to convince me. Since affairs of state didn’t allow him time to hear them during the day, the General had tape recordings made and listened to them, one after another, each night before he went to sleep. The President’s wife herself had personally reported this to a great many ladies in Lima.
“It would appear that the General is a sensitive man, despite what people say to the contrary,” Genaro Jr. concluded. “So, if the supreme authority in the nation is on our side, what does it matter if Pedro rants and raves against the Argentines to his heart’s content? They deserve it, don’t they?”
The conversation with Genaro Jr. and the reconciliation with Aunt Julia had given me a tremendous lift, and I rushed back to the shack in a mood of white-hot inspiration to dash off my story about the gang of levitators, as Pascual cranked out the news bulletins. I already knew how I’d end it: during one of these games, one of the urchins levitated much higher than the others, suddenly lost altitude, came crashing down, broke his neck, and died. The last sentence would describe the surprised, frightened faces of his little pals as they contemplated him beneath a roar of airplane engines. It would be a Spartan story, as precise as a chronometer, in the manner of Hemingway.
A few days later I went to visit my cousin Nancy to find out how she’d taken the story of my romance with Aunt Julia. I found her still under the effect of Operation Mantilla.
“Do you realize what a fool that idiot made of me?” she said as she ran from one end of the house to the other, looking for Lasky. “All of a sudden, right there in the middle of the Plaza de Acho, he undid a package, took out a bullfighter’s cape, and draped it over my shoulders. Everybody was looking at me, and even the bull was dying of laughter. He made me keep it on during the entire corrida. And he even wanted me to walk down the street in that thing, can you imagine! I’ve never been so humiliated in my life!”
We found Lasky under the butler’s bed—in addition to being an ugly-looking, shaggy-haired dog, he was forever trying to bite me—and took him back out to his kennel. Then Nancy dragged me to her bedroom to see the corpus delicti. It was a fashion artist’s creation that brought to mind exotic gardens, gypsy tents, de luxe brothels: every imaginable shade of red, from bloody crimson to blushing tea-rose pink, was visible in its iridescent folds, it had a long knotted black fringe, and its rhinestones and spangles sparkled so garishly they left one feeling slightly nauseated. My cousin made bullfight passes with it or wrapped it around herself, roaring with laughter. I told her I wouldn’t allow her to make fun of my friend and asked her if she was ever going to take him seriously as a suitor.
“I’m thinking about it,” she replied, as usual. “But as a friend I find him simply delightful.”
I told her she was a heartless tease, that Javier had gone so far as to commit robbery in order to get the money to buy her that present.
“And what about you?” she said to me, folding the mantilla and putting it away in the armoire. “Is it true you’re running around with Julita? Aren