Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [93]
“It’s quite obvious that you never listen to them,” she retorted. “In Pedro Camacho’s soap operas there are hardly ever any love affairs or anything like that. Right now, for example, Olga and I are all caught up in the one that comes on at three o’clock. The tragedy of a young man who can’t sleep because the minute he closes his eyes he starts reliving how he ran over a poor little girl and crushed her to death.”
Returning to the subject we’d been discussing, I told her that I was more optimistic. In ardent tones, to convince myself as well as her, I assured her that, whatever the difference in age might be, love based on the purely physical lasted only a short time. Once the novelty had disappeared, as routine set in, sexual attraction gradually diminished and finally died (in the case of the man especially), and the couple could then survive only if there were other attractions between them: spiritual, intellectual, moral. And for this sort of love the question of age was of no importance.
“It all sounds fine the way you tell it, and I only wish it were true,” Aunt Julia said, rubbing her nose, which as usual was ice-cold, against my cheek. “But it’s all false, from beginning to end. The physical something secondary? It’s what matters most for two people to be able to put up with each other, Varguitas.”
Had she gone out with the endocrinologist again?
“He’s phoned me several times,” she said to me, keeping me in suspense. Then, kissing me, she dispelled my doubts. “I told him I wouldn’t go out with him any more.”
Beside myself with joy, I talked to her at length about my levitation story: I’d written ten pages, it was coming along nicely, and I was going to try to get it published in the literary supplement of El Comercio with a cryptic dedication: “To the feminine of Julio.”
Ten.
The tragedy of Lucho Abril Marroquín, a young pharmaceutical detail man with every sign of a bright future before him, began on a sunny summer morning on the outskirts of a historic locale: Pisco. He had just finished making the rounds that, ever since he had first accepted employment in this itinerant profession ten years before, had taken him around the cities and towns of Peru, visiting doctors’ offices and pharmacies to give out samples and literature from the Bayer Laboratories, and now he was on his way back to Lima. His visit to the various physicians and druggists of the town had taken him about three hours. And even though he had a former classmate who was now a captain in the Ninth Air Squadron at San Andrés, at whose home he ordinarily had lunch when he came to Pisco, this time he had decided to head straight back for the capital. He was a married man, with a little wife with white skin and a French name, and his young blood and passionate heart urged him to return as soon as possible to the arms of his spouse.
It was just past noon. His brand-new Volkswagen, bought on credit at the same time he had entered into matrimony—three months before—was parked under the shade of a leafy eucalyptus in the main square. Lucho Abril Marroquín put his case with the samples and the brochures inside it, removed his suit coat and tie (which, in accordance with the strict Helvetian standards of the Laboratory, were always to be worn by its representatives when visiting clients, to give an impression of reliability and professionalism), decided again that he would not drop in on his aviator friend, and instead of a proper lunch would simply have a snack, knowing that a full meal would make him feel even sleepier during the three-hour drive across the desert.
He crossed the square to the Piave ice-cream parlor, ordered a Coke and a dish of peach ice cream from the Italian, and as he downed this Spartan repast he did not think of the past of this southern port, the colorful disembarkation of the hesitant hero San Martín and his Liberation Army, but rather (egoism and sensuality of men with ardent temperaments) of his warm, cuddly little wife—almost a child, really—with her snow-white complexion,