Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [92]
I told her it was true, that I wasn’t at all ashamed, though I could feel my face burning. Nancy was a little embarrassed too, but being a girl from Miraflores, her curiosity got the better of her and she said, aiming straight for my heart: “If you marry her, in twenty years you’ll still be young and she’ll be a little old lady.” She took me by the arm and dragged me downstairs to the living room. “Come on, we’re going to listen to music and you can tell me all about your love affair, from A to Z.”
She selected a pile of records—Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Xavier Cugat—as she confessed to me that ever since Javier had told her about us, her hair had stood on end every time she thought about what would happen if the family found out. Surely I realized that our relatives were such busybodies that every time she went out with a different boy ten uncles, eight aunts, and five cousins phoned her mama to tell her? Me in love with Aunt Julia! What a scandal, Marito! And she reminded me that the family had great expectations for me, that I was the hope of the tribe. It was true: that cancerous family of mine had every expectation that I’d be a millionaire someday, or at the very least President of the Republic. (I have never understood how they had come to have such a high opinion of me. It certainly couldn’t have been on account of my grades in school, which had never been outstanding. Maybe it was because ever since I’d been a little boy I’d written poems to all my aunts, or because apparently I’d been a precocious child who had definite opinions about everything.) I made Nancy swear she’d be as silent as the grave about us. She was dying to know the details of our romance. “Do you just like Julita a lot, or are you mad about her?”
I’d sometimes shared secrets about my affairs of the heart with her, and since she already knew about us, I did so now, too. It had all been just a game in the beginning, but all of a sudden, on the very day I’d had a fit of jealousy because of an endocrinologist, I realized that I’d fallen in love. However, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the romance was going to turn out to be a real headache. Not only because of the difference in age. I still had three years to go before I got my law degree, and what was more, I suspected I’d never practice that profession, since the only thing I really liked was writing. But writers starved to death. For the moment, I earned just enough to buy myself cigarettes and a few books and go to the movies. Was Aunt Julia going to wait for me until I was financially solvent, if in fact I ever reached that point?
My cousin Nancy was such a good confidante that instead of offering counter-arguments, she agreed with me. “It’s a problem, all right—not to mention the fact that when that day comes you may not like Julita any more and you’ll leave her,” she said realistically. “And the poor thing will have wasted years of her life, and all for nothing. But tell me, is she really in love with you, or is it just a game with her?”
I told her that Aunt Julia wasn’t a frivolous weather vane like her (the expression pleased her immensely). But I’d asked myself the same question a number of times, and it was one I also asked Aunt Julia a few days later. We’d gone down to sit by the sea, in a lovely little park with an unpronounceable name (Domodossola or something like that), and it was there, in each other’s arms, exchanging endless kisses, that we had our first conversation about the future.
“I know what it’s like, down to the very last detail, I saw it in a crystal ball,” Aunt Julia said to me, without the least trace of bitterness. “In the best of cases, our love affair will last three, maybe four years or so; that is to say, till you meet up with a little chick who’ll be the mother of your children. Then you’ll throw me over and I’ll have to seduce another gentleman friend. And at that point the words THE END appear.”
As I kissed her hands, I told her she’d been