Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [99]
And going on to cite examples, she told him that the emaciated onanists who came to her on their knees begging her to cure them, she treated by giving them pornographic magazines, and that patients who were drug addicts, dregs of humanity crawling on the floor and tearing their hair as they spoke of the hand of fate, she treated by offering them marijuana cigarettes and handfuls of coca leaves.
“Are you going to recommend that I go on killing children?” the medical detail man roared, a lamb suddenly turned into a tiger.
“If that’s what gives you pleasure, why not?” the lady psychologist answered coldly. “And I warn you: no more of this shouting at me. I’m not one of those shopkeepers who believe that the customer is always right.”
Lucho Abril Marroquín burst into tears once again. Paying no attention whatsoever to him, Dr. Lucía Acémila spent the next ten minutes covering several sheets of paper with her elegant penmanship, labeling them “Exercise for learning how to live sincerely.” She handed them to him and made an appointment with him for eight weeks later. As she bade him goodbye with a cordial handshake, she reminded him not to forget to eat his prunes every morning.
Like the majority of Dr. Acémila’s patients, Lucho Abril Marroquín left her office feeling as though he’d been the victim of a psychic ambush, and certain that he had fallen in the toils of an absolute madwoman who would only make his ailments worse if he were to be foolish enough to follow her recommendations. He made up his mind to flush the “Exercises” down the toilet without even looking at them. But that very same night (debilitating insomnia that drives the sufferer to excesses), he read them. They struck him as pathologically absurd and he laughed so hard he got the hiccups (he rid himself of them by drinking a glass of water from the far edge, as his mother had taught him); but then he felt a burning curiosity. As a distraction, to while away the long sleepless hours, with no faith in their therapeutic effectiveness, he decided to try them.
Visiting the toy section of Sears, he had no difficulty finding the car, the truck number 1 and the truck number 2 that he needed, as well as the figurines that were to represent the little girl, the Guardia Civil, the thieves, and himself. Following the doctor’s instructions, he painted the vehicles the same colors he remembered them as being, and the clothes of the figurines as well. (He had an aptitude for painting, and so the guard’s uniform and the little girl’s humble garments and crusts of filth turned out very well.) To imitate the sand dunes of Pisco, he used a sheet of wrapping paper, on one edge of which, in his obsessive desire for verisimilitude, he painted the Pacific Ocean: a blue strip with a border of sea foam. The first day it took him nearly an hour, kneeling on the floor of the living room/dining room of his house, to reproduce the story, and when he came to the end, that is to say when the thieves flung themselves on the medical detail man to rob him, he was almost as terrified and heartsick as on the day it had actually happened. He lay on his back on the floor, in a cold sweat and racked with sobs. But on the following days the nervous shock became less intense, and the operation became a sort of sport, an exercise that took him back to his childhood and filled the hours he would not have otherwise known how to occupy, now that his wife was gone, since he’d never prided himself on being a voracious reader or a great music lover. It was like playing with a Meccano set, putting a jigsaw puzzle together, or doing crosswords. Sometimes, as he was handing out samples to the