I hadn't seen Aunt Julia that day but was expecting to see her on the following day, Thursday, at Uncle Lucho's. But when I arrived at the house on Armendáriz at noon for the usual Thursday lunch, I discovered she wasn't there. Aunt Olga told me she'd been invited out to lunch by 'a good match': Dr. Guillermo Osores, a physician who was some sort of distant family relation, a very presentable man in his fifties with quite a bit of money, whose wife had died fairly recently.
'A good match,' Aunt Olga repeated, winking at me. 'Rich, responsible, good-looking, and with only two sons, who are already almost grown up. Isn't he exactly the husband my sister needs?'
'She's been mooning about and wasting her time these last few weeks,' Uncle Lucho commented, also pleased at this new development. 'She didn't want to go out with anybody and was living the life of an old maid. But the endocrinologist has taken her fancy.'
I felt such pangs of jealousy that I lost my appetite, and sat there in a foul, bitter mood. It seemed to me that my aunt and uncle, on seeing how upset I was, would surely guess why I was in such a state. There was no need for me to fish for more details about Aunt Julia and Dr. Osores because that was all they talked about. She'd met him some ten days before, at a cocktail party at the Bolivian embassy, and on learning where she was staying, Dr. Osores had come by to visit her. He had sent her flowers, phoned her, invited her to have tea with him at the Bolívar and now to lunch with him at the Club de la Unión. The endocrinologist had said jokingly to Uncle Lucho: 'Your sister-in-law is super, Luis. Isn't it possible that she's the candidate I've been looking for so as to commit matri-suicide a second time?'
I tried my best to appear totally disinterested in the subject, but I did a very bad job of concealing how distraught I was, and Uncle Lucho asked me, at one point when the two of us were alone, what was troubling me: had I gone poking around in places I shouldn't have and caught myself a good dose of the clap? Luckily, Aunt Olga began talking about the radio serials, and that gave me a breathing spell. As she went on to say that Pedro Camacho sometimes laid it on too thick and that all her friends thought he'd gone too far with his story of the minister who 'wounded himself' with a letter opener in front of the judge to prove that he hadn't raped a thirteen-year-old girl, I silently went from rage to disillusionment and from disillusionment to rage. Why hadn't Aunt Julia said a single word to me about the doctor? We'd seen each other several times during the last ten days and she'd never once mentioned him. Could it really be true, as Aunt Olga claimed, that she'd finally 'gotten interested' in someone?
In the jitney, as I was going back to Radio Panamericana, my mood suddenly shifted from humiliation to pride. Our innocent love affair had lasted a long time, after all; we were bound to be found out at any moment now, and that would provoke scandal and unkind laughter in the family. Moreover, what was I doing, wasting my time with a woman who, as she herself said, was almost old enough to be my mother? As an experience, what we'd already had together was quite enough. Osores's appearance on the scene was providential; it saved me the trouble of having to get rid of her. I felt restless and upset, full of unusual impulses such as wanting to get drunk or punch somebody in the nose, and on arriving back at the radio station I had a run-in with Pascual, who, faithful to his nature, had devoted half the three o'clock news bulletin to a fire in Hamburg that had burned a dozen Turkish immigrants to death. I told him that in the future he was strictly forbidden to include any news item about dead people in the bulletins without getting my okay first, and I was curt and unfriendly to a pal from San Marcos who called me up to remind me that Law School still existed and to warn me that there was an exam in criminal law awaiting me the next day. Almost the moment I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Aunt Julia.
'I stood you up for an endocrinologist, Varguitas. I presume you missed me,' she said, cool as a cucumber. 'You're not angry?'
'Angry? Why should I be?' I replied. 'Aren't you free to do as you please?'
'Ah, so you are angry,' I heard her say in a more serious tone of voice. 'Don't be an idiot. When can we see each other, so that I can explain?'
'I can't see you today,' I replied curtly. 'I'll phone you later.'
I hung up, more furious with myself than with her, and feeling that I'd made a fool of myself. Pascual and Big Pablito were looking at me in amusement, and the lover of catastrophes subtly got back at me for having bawled him out. 'Well, well, our Don Mario is certainly high-handed with the ladies, I must say.'
'He's right to treat 'em that way,' Big Pablito said, backing me up. 'There's nothing that pleases 'em as much as being kept on a tight leash.'
I told my two editors to go to hell, wrote up the four o'clock bulletin, and went to see Pedro Camacho. He was recording a script and I waited for him in his cubicle, idly leafing through the papers on his desk without understanding what I was reading because my mind was entirely occupied with the question of whether the phone conversation I'd just had with Aunt Julia meant that we'd broken up. In the space of just a few seconds I went from hating her with all my heart to missing her with all my soul.
'Come with me to buy some poison,' Pedro Camacho said in a somber voice from the doorway, shaking his lion's mane. 'We'll have time to go have something to drink afterwards.'
As we wandered up and down the side streets off the Jirón de la Unión hunting for the poison, the artist explained that the mice at La Tapada rooming house had become intolerable.
'If they were content simply to scamper around underneath my bed, I wouldn't mind, they're not children, and as far as animals are concerned, I don't have any phobias,' he said a few moments later as he sniffed with his prominent nose at some yellow powder that according to the shopkeeper could kill a cow. 'But those mustached critters eat my food; every night they nibble on the provisions I leave on the windowsill to keep cool. There's no way round it – I'm obliged to exterminate them.'
He haggled over the price of the poison, with arguments that left the shopkeeper nonplussed, paid for it, had them wrap up the little envelopes full of yellow powder, and the two of us went to a café on La Colmena. He ordered his usual herb concoction and I ordered coffee.
'I've got love troubles, my friend Camacho,' I said to him straight out, surprised at hearing myself use a soap-opera cliché; but it seemed to me that by speaking in this way I distanced myself from my own story and at the same time managed to vent my feelings. 'The woman I love is cheating on me with another man.'
He gave me a searching look, his little pop-eyes colder and more humorless than ever. His black suit had been washed, ironed, and worn so threadbare that it was as shiny as an onion peel.
'In these countries whose manners and morals have become so vulgar and plebeian, dueling has become a crime punished by imprisonment,' he reminded me, very seriously, making jerky motions with his hands. 'As for suicide, it's a gesture no one appreciates nowadays. A person kills himself, and rather than remorse, cold shivers, admiration, it's laughter that he provokes. The best thing is practical recipes, my friend.'
I was happy that I had taken him into my confidence. I knew very well that, inasmuch as no one outside himself existed for Pedro Camacho, my problem was the farthest thing from his mind; it had simply been a device to set his mechanism for churning out systematic theories in motion. Hearing the one he'd come up with would console me more (and have lesser consequences) than going out and getting drunk.
After giving me a faint smile, Pedro Camacho spelled out his recipe in detail. 'A hard, cutting, lapidary letter to the adulteress,' he said to me, wielding his adjectives with aplomb. 'A letter that will make her feel like a miserable snake in the grass, a filthy hyena. Proving to her that you're not stupid, that you know how she's betrayed you, a letter dripping with contempt, that will show her what it means to be an adulteress.' He fell silent, thought for a moment, and then, in a slightly different tone of voice, offered me the greatest proof of his friendship that I could possibly expect from him: 'If you like, I'll write it for you.'
I thanked him effusively, but said that, knowing as I did what long hours he put in working like a galley slave, I could never accept burdening him with my personal affairs in addition. (I later regretted having had such scruples, which kept me from having a holograph text of the scriptwriter's.)
'As for the seducer,' Pedro Camacho went on immediately, with an evil gleam in his eye, 'the best thing is an anonymous letter, with all the necessary malicious slander. Why should the victim sit with folded hands as he's being cuckolded? Why should he allow the adulterous couple to take their pleasure and fornicate in peace? It's necessary to ruin their love, to hit them where it hurts, to poison them with doubts. Let them begin to mistrust each other, to be suspicious of each other, to hate each other. Isn't vengeance sweet?'
I hinted that perhaps it was not gentlemanly to resort to anonymous letters, but he reassured me immediately: one should behave like a gentleman when dealing with gentlemen and like a bastard when dealing with bastards. This was 'honor rightly understood': all the rest of it was errant nonsense.
'With the letter to her and the anonymous letters to him, the lovers get the punishment they deserve,' I said. 'But what about my problem? Who's going to relieve me of my resentment, my frustration, my heartache?'
'There's nothing like milk of magnesia for all that,' he replied, but I was feeling too depressed even to laugh. 'I know,' he went on, 'that strikes you as far too materialistic an answer. But, believe me, I've had a great deal of experience in life. Most of the time, so-called heartaches et cetera are simply indigestion – tough beans that won't dissolve in the stomach, fish that's not as fresh as it should be, constipation. A good laxative blasts the folly of love to bits.'
There was no doubt this time, he was a subtle humorist, he was making fun of me the way he made fun of his listeners, he didn't believe one word of what he was saying, he was practicing the aristocratic sport of proving to himself that we mortals were hopeless imbeciles.
'Have you had a great many love affairs, an extremely rich love life?' I asked him.
'Yes, extremely rich,' he avowed, looking me straight in the eye over the cup of verbena-and-mint-tea he had raised to his lips. 'But I have never loved a flesh-and-blood woman.'
He paused dramatically, as though he were sizing up exactly how innocent or stupid I was. 'Do you think it would be possible to do what I do if women sapped my energy?' he said reprovingly, with disgust in his voice. 'Do you think that it's possible to produce offspring and stories at the same time? That one can invent, imagine, if one lives under the threat of syphilis? Women and art are mutually exclusive, my friend. In every vagina an artist is buried. What pleasure is there in reproducing? Isn't that what dogs, spiders, cats do? We must be original, my friend.'
Before the last word had died away, he suddenly leapt to his feet, announcing that he had just time enough to get back to the studio for the five o'clock serial. I was disappointed; I would willingly have spent the rest of the afternoon listening to him, and I had the impression that I had inadvertently touched a sore point of his personality.
When I got back to my office at Panamericana, Aunt Julia was there waiting for me. Seated at my desk like a queen, she was receiving the homage of Pascual and Big Pablito, who were bustling about solicitously, showing her the bulletins and explaining to her how the News Department functioned. She was smiling and seemed not to have a care in the world; but as I walked into the room a serious look came over her face and she paled slightly.
'Well, what a surprise,' I said, just to say something.
But Aunt Julia was in no mood for polite chitchat. 'I came to tell you that nobody hangs up on me,' she said in a resolute voice. 'Much less a brat like you. Would you kindly explain what's gotten into you?'
Pascual and Big Pablito just stood there, turning their heads to look at her and then at me and vice versa, bursting with curiosity as to how this dramatic scene just beginning would end. When I asked them to leave us alone for a moment, they were furious, but didn't dare to refuse. They left the room exchanging dark looks with Aunt Julia to show where their sympathies lay.
'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 counter-balance 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 tome 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't paw you, who doesn't dare go to bed with you, who treats you like a little girl who's just made her First Communion. But it's a dangerous game, Varguitas, it's based on a lie …'
'That reminds me – I'm writing a story that's going to be called "Dangerous Games",' I whispered in her ear. 'It's about a bunch of little street urchins who levitate at the airport, thanks to the lift effect from planes that are taking off.'
I heard her laugh. A moment later she threw her arms around my neck and put her cheek to mine. 'Okay, I've gotten over being angry,' she said. 'Because I came here determined to tear your eyes out. But it'll be too bad for you the next time you hang up on me.'
'And it'll be too bad for you the next time you go out with that endocrinologist,' I told her, searching for her mouth. 'Promise me you'll never go out with him again.'
She drew away and looked at me with a belligerent gleam in her eye. 'Don't forget that I came to Lima looking for a husband,' she answered, half jokingly. 'And I think that this time I've found just the right one for me. Good-looking, cultivated, well-off financially, graying at the temples.'
'Are you certain that this marvel is going to marry you?' I asked her, enraged and jealous all over again.
Placing her hands on her hips in a provocative pose, she replied: 'I have ways of getting him to marry me.'
But, on seeing the expression on my face, she laughed, threw her arms around my neck again, and there we were, kissing each other lovingly and passionately, when we heard Javier's voice: 'You're going to be arrested for indecent and pornographic conduct in public.'
He was in a happy mood, and embracing the two of us, he announced: 'Little Nancy has accepted my invitation to a bullfight, and that calls for a celebration.'
'We've just had our first big fight and you caught us right in the middle of our big reconciliation scene,' I explained to him.
'It's plain to see you don't know me very well,' Aunt Julia informed me. 'When I have a really big fight I break dishes, I scratch, I'm out to kill.'
'The best part about having fights is making up afterwards,' Javier, an expert on the subject, opined. 'But, damn it all, I come bouncing in here all set to commemorate my glorious victory and you start raining on my parade. What kind of friends are you, anyway? Come on, you two, I'm inviting you to lunch to fete this grand occasion.'
They waited for me while I wrote up a couple of news bulletins and then we headed for a little café on the Calle Belén that delighted Javier, since, despite its being filthy and little more than a hole in the wall, they served the best chitlings in all of Lima there. I ran into Pascual and Big Pablito standing downstairs in the doorway of Panamericana, flirting with girls passing by, and sent them back upstairs to the News Department. Despite the fact that it was broad daylight and right in the middle of the downtown area, within full view of countless pairs of eyes of relatives and friends of the family, Aunt Julia and I walked along holding hands and I kept kissing her almost every step of the way. Her cheeks were as bright red as a mountain girl's, and she looked as happy as could be.
'That's enough of your pornography, you selfish creatures, think about me for a minute,' Javier protested. 'Let's talk about Nancy a little.'
Nancy was a pretty young cousin of mine, a terrible flirt, whom Javier had been in love with ever since he'd reached the age of reason and whom he pursued with the persistence of a bloodhound. She had never taken him seriously, yet always managed to keep him on the string and lead him to think that maybe … that very soon… that the next time … This pre-romance had been going on since we were in high school, and I, as Javier's confidant, bosom buddy, and go-between, had been in on every detail. Nancy had stood him up countless times, left him waiting for her countless times at the door of the Leuro while she went to the Colina or to the Metro for the Sunday matinee, appeared countless times at parties on Saturday nights with another escort. The first time in my life I ever got drunk, I was keeping Javier company, helping him drown his troubles in wine and beer in a little bar in Surquillo the day he found out that Nancy had given herself to an agronomy student named Eduardo Tiravanti (a boy who was very popular in Miraflores because he could put a lighted cigarette in his mouth and then take it out and go on smoking it as though that were the most natural thing in the world). Javier was weeping and sniveling, and in addition to serving as a shoulder to cry on, I'd been assigned the mission of taking him back to his pension and putting him to bed once he'd reached a comatose state ('I'm going to get plastered to the gills,' he'd warned me, imitating Jorge Negrete). But I was the one who succumbed, with spectacular fits of vomiting and an attack of the d.t.'s in the course of which – according to Javier's vulgar version of events – I had climbed up onto the bar counter and harangued the topers, night owls, and rowdies who constituted the clientele of El Triunfo: 'Lower your pants, all of you: you're in the presence of a poet.'
He had never quite forgiven me for the fact that instead of taking care of him and consoling him on that sad night, I'd obliged him to drag me through the streets of Miraflores to my grand-parents' villa in Ocharán, so far gone that he'd handed my remains over to my terrified grandmother with the imprudent comment: 'Señora Carmencita, I think Varguitas is about to die on us.'
Since that time, little Nancy had by turns taken up with and thrown over half a dozen boys from Miraflores, and Javier, too, had had several steady girlfriends. But instead of making him forget his great love for my cousin, they made it all the more intense, and he continued to phone her, visit her, invite her out, declare his feelings, taking no note of the refusals, insults, affronts, broken dates he suffered at her hands. Javier was one of those men who are able to put passion before vanity and it didn't really matter to him in the slightest that he was the laughingstock of all his friends in Miraflores, among whom his tireless chasing after my cousin was a constant source of jokes. (One of the boys in our neighborhood swore that he'd seen Javier approach little Nancy one Sunday after Mass and make her the following proposal: 'Hi there, Nancyta, nice morning, shall we go have a drink together? a Coke, a sip of champagne?') Nancy sometimes went out with him – usually when she was between boyfriends – to the movies or a party, and Javier would then have great hopes and go around in a state of euphoria. That was the mood he was in now, talking a blue streak as we ate our chitling sandwiches and drank our coffee in the little café on the Calle Belén called El Palmero. Aunt Julia and I rubbed knees underneath the table and sat there holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes as we vaguely listened to Javier babbling on and on, like background music, about little Nancy.
'She was impressed by my invitation,' he was telling us. 'Because which of those guys in Miraflores, who are always flat broke, ever invites a girl to a bullfight, can you tell me that?'
'And how did you manage to scrape up the money?' I asked him. 'Did you have a winning lottery ticket?'
'I sold the boardinghouse radio,' he told us, without the slightest regret. 'They think it was the cook and they've fired her for stealing.'
He explained to us that he'd worked out a foolproof plan. In the middle of the corrida he'd surprise Nancy by offering her a gift that would melt her heart: a Spanish mantilla. Javier was a great admirer of the Mother Country and everything connected with it: bullfights, flamenco music, Sarita Montiel. He dreamed of going to Spain (as I dreamed of going to France) and the idea of giving Nancy a mantilla had occurred to him when he'd seen an ad in the paper. It had cost him a month's salary from the Reserve Bank, but he was certain that the investment would pay off. He explained how he planned to go about it. He would take the mantilla to the bullfight, discreetly wrapped in plain paper, and would wait for an especially stirring moment, whereupon he would open the package, unfold the shawl, and place it about my cousin's delicate shoulders. What did we think? What would Nancy's reaction be? I advised him to really do things up brown by giving her a Sevillian ornamental comb and a pair of castanets as well and singing her a fandango, but Aunt Julia seconded him enthusiastically and told him that his whole plan was wonderful and that if Nancy had any feelings at all, she'd be moved to tears. And she assured him that if a boy were to offer her such touching demonstrations of his affection, she'd be won over instantly.
'It's just like I keep telling you – can't you see that?' she said to me, as though scolding me for something or other. 'Javier's a real romantic, he woos his beloved the way she ought to be wooed.'
Javier, absolutely charmed by her, proposed that the four of us go out together, any day we liked the following week, to the movies, to tea, to dance.
'And what would my little cousin Nancy say if she saw the two of us going out on a date together?' I said, to bring him back down to earth.
But he floored us by answering: 'Don't be silly, Varguitas, she knows everything and thinks it's great. I told her all about it the other day.' And, on seeing how dumfounded we were, he added with a mischievous twinkle in his eye: 'The truth of the matter is that I don't keep anything a secret from your cousin, since sooner or later, come hell or high water, she's going to end up marrying me.'
It worried me to hear that Javier had told her all about our romance. Nancy and I were very close, and I was quite certain she wouldn't give us away deliberately, but she might let a word or two slip out inadvertently, and the news would spread like wildfire in the family forest. Aunt Julia had been left speechless for a moment, but now she was doing her best to conceal her surprise by encouraging Javier to proceed with his taurino-sentimental plan. He walked back with us to Panamericana and said goodbye to me at the downstairs door, and Aunt Julia and I arranged to see each other again that evening, on the usual pretext that we were just going out to take in a flick together. As I kissed her goodbye, I said in her ear: 'Thanks to the endocrinologist, I've realized I'm in love with you.' 'So I see, Varguitas,' she agreed.
I watched her walk off with Javier toward the bus stop, and it was only then that I noticed the crowd that had gathered outside the doors of Radio Central, young women for the most part, although there were a few men as well. They had formed a double line, but as more people arrived, everyone started shoving and pushing and the lines broke up. I walked over to see what was going on, presuming that whatever it was, it undoubtedly had something to do with Pedro Camacho. And in fact they turned out to be autograph hunters. I then caught sight of the scriptwriter standing at the window of his lair, with Jesusito on one side of him and Genaro Sr. on the other, scrawling a signature with fancy flourishes on the pages of autograph books, notebooks, loose sheets of paper, the margins of newspapers, and dismissing his admirers with an Olympian gesture. They were gazing at him in rapture, approaching him timidly and respectfully, stammering a few heartfelt words of appreciation.
'He causes us headaches, but there's no doubt that he's the king of the Peruvian airwaves,' Genaro Jr. said to me, putting a hand on my shoulder and pointing to the mob. 'What do you think of that?'
I asked how long these autographing sessions had been going on.
'For a week now, half an hour a day, from six to six-thirty. You're not very observant, are you?' the progressive-minded impresario answered. 'Haven't you seen the ads we're publishing, don't you listen to the radio network you work for? I was skeptical, but you can see how wrong I was. I thought people would only show up for a couple of days, and I realize now that this may go on for a month.'
He invited me to have a drink with him at the Bolívar bar. I ordered a Coke, but he insisted that I have a whiskey with him.
'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't you ashamed of yourself? Getting serious with Aunt Olga's sister?'
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 listening to too many serials for her own good.
'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.'
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