Before the picturesque episode occurred, the most curious person I interviewed was a Venezuelan bullfighter. He had been a tremendous success that season in the Plaza de Acho. Following his first corrida, he had been awarded several ears, and at his second, after a miraculous faena, he was awarded a hoof and the crowd bore him on their shoulders in triumph from the Rímac to his hotel on the Plaza San Martín. But at his third and last corrida – he had scalped his own tickets for it for astronomical prices – he didn't even get close enough to the bulls to see them, since he was seized with a deerlike panic and ran from them all afternoon; he didn't make even one decent pass at them and went in for the kill so clumsily that on his second bull of the day he was given four warnings. There had been a major riot in the stands: the indignant spectators had tried to burn down the Plaza de Acho and lynch the Venezuelan, who, amid deafening jeers and boos and a hail of cushions, had had to be escorted to his hotel by the Guardia Civil. The next morning, a few hours before he was to take the plane, I interviewed him in a little reception room in the Hotel Bolívar. I was dumfounded when I realized that he was less intelligent than the bulls he fought and almost as incapable as they were of expressing himself in words. He was unable to put a coherent sentence together, his verb tenses were all wrong, his manner of coordinating his ideas made one think of tumors, aphasia, monkey men. And the form in which they were uttered was no less extraordinary than the content: his speech habits were most unfortunate, an intonation full of diminutives and apocopes and shading off, during his frequent mental vacuums, into zoological grunts.
The Mexican I was assigned to interview on the Monday of this memorable week was, on the contrary, a lucid thinker and an eloquent speaker. He was the editor and publisher of a review, he had written books on the Mexican revolution, he was visiting Peru as the head of a delegation of economists and was staying at the Bolívar. He agreed to come to the radio station and I went to get him myself. He was a tall, erect, well-dressed gentleman with white hair who must have been close to his sixties. He was accompanied by his wife, a slight woman with bright eyes who was wearing a little hat with flowers. We blocked out the interview on our way from the hotel to the station and it was recorded in fifteen minutes. Genaro Jr. was terribly upset because, in answer to one question, the economist and historian violently attacked military dictatorships (we were suffering from one in Peru at the time, headed by a certain Odría).
The unexpected happened as I was escorting the couple back to the Bolıívar. It was noon and the Calle Belén and the Plaza San Martín were jammed with people. We were walking along the street, with the husband in the center, his wife on his right, and me on his left on the curb side.
We had just passed by Radio Central, and simply to make conversation I was telling the important man once again that the interview had turned out magnificently, when all of a sudden I was definitely interrupted by the tiny voice of the Mexican lady. 'Jesus, Mary, I'm about to faint …'
I looked at her: she was haggard, and blinking her eyes and moving her mouth in a most peculiar way. But what was really surprising was the economist-historian's reaction. On hearing his wife's warning, he glanced swiftly at her, and then at me, with a bewildered expression on his face, whereupon he immediately looked straight ahead of him again and, instead of stopping, quickened his pace. The Mexican lady was now beside me, grimacing. I managed to grab her by the arm just as she was about to collapse to the sidewalk. As she was such a frail little thing, I was able fortunately to hold her up and help her along, as the important man took off in great long strides, leaving me with the delicate task of dragging his wife along the street. People moved aside to let us by, stopped to stare at us, and at one point – we had gotten as far as the Cine Colón and, in addition to making faces, the little Mexican lady was now leaking spittle, mucus, and tears – I heard a cigarette vendor say: 'What's more, she's pissing all over herself.' It was true: the wife of the economist-historian (who had crossed La Colmena and disappeared amid the crowd milling about outside the doors of the Bolívar bar) was leaving a yellow trail behind her. When we reached the corner, I had no choice but to pick her up and, a gallant, spectacular cynosure of all eyes, carry her the remaining fifty yards, amid drivers honking, policemen whistling, and people pointing at us. The little Mexican lady writhed violently in my arms without letting up for a second and went on making faces, and my hands and nose told me that she was probably now doing something worse than urinating. From her throat there came an atrophied, intermittent sound. On entering the Bolívar, I heard someone curtly order me: 'Room 301.' It was the important man, half hidden behind some drapes. The moment he'd given me that order, he made off again, heading nimbly for the elevator, and as we went upstairs he did not deign to look at me or his consort even once, as though he did not wish to appear to be intruding. The elevator operator helped me carry the lady to the room. But the minute we'd put her down on the bed, the important man literally shoved us to the door and slammed it in our faces, without saying either thanks or goodbye: there was a sour look on his face at that moment.
'He's not a bad husband,' Pedro Camacho was to explain to me later. 'He's simply a very sensitive person with a great fear of looking ridiculous.'
That afternoon I was to read a story that I'd just finished, 'Aunt Eliana,' to Aunt Julia and Javier. El Comercio never did publish the story about the levitating kids and I had consoled myself by writing another one, based on something that had happened in my family. Eliana was one of the many aunts who appeared at our house when I was little, and she was my favorite because she brought me chocolates and sometimes took me to tea at the Cream Rica. Everyone used to make fun of her fondness for sweets, and at our tribal gatherings there was much tongue-wagging about how she spent all her salary as a secretary on gooey pies, crusty croissants, fluffy sponge cakes, and thick chocolate at the Tiendecita Blanca. She was a plump, affectionate, jolly, talkative girl, and I used to come to her defense when people in the family would remark to each other behind her back that she was going to be an old maid if she didn't watch out. One day Aunt Eliana mysteriously stopped coming to visit us and the family never mentioned her name again. I must have been six or seven years old at the time, and I remember being suspicious of the answers I got from my parents when I asked about her: she'd gone off on a trip, she was sick, she'd be dropping by any day now. Some five years later the entire family suddenly appeared in mourning dress, and that night, at my grandparents' house, I learned that they had been to the funeral of Aunt Eliana, who had just died of cancer. I then learned what the mystery had been all about. Just as it appeared that Aunt Eliana was doomed to be a spinster for the rest of her life, she had unexpectedly married a Chinese, the owner of a grocery store in Jesús Maria, and the whole clan, beginning with her own parents, had been so horrified by this scandal – I had the impression at the time that what was so scandalous was the fact that the husband was Chinese, but I have now deduced that his principal taint was that he was a grocer – that they had decided to pretend she no longer existed and had never visited or received her from that day on. But when she died they forgave her – at heart, we were a sentimental family – attended her wake and her funeral, and shed many a tear for her.
My story was the monologue of a little boy lying in bed trying to unravel the mystery of his aunt's disappearance, and, as an epilogue, her wake. It was a 'social' story, full of anger against the parents and their prejudices. I had written it in a couple of weeks and talked about it so much to Aunt Julia and Javier that they finally capitulated and asked me to read it to them. But before doing so that Monday afternoon, I told them what had happened that morning with the little Mexican lady and the important man. It was an error for which I paid dearly, since they found this tale much more amusing than my story.
Aunt Julia was now in the habit of coming down to join me for the evening at Panamericana. We had discovered that this was the safest place, since Pascual and Big Pablito were in on our secret and we could count on their complicity. She would appear after five, the hour when things began to quiet down around the place: the Genaros had gone home, and almost no one came prowling about the shack. My co-workers, by tacit agreement, would ask permission to 'go have a cup of coffee,' so that Aunt Julia and I could hug and kiss each other and talk alone. Sometimes I would get to work writing and she would sit reading a magazine or chatting with Javier, who invariably came up to join us around seven. We had come to form an inseparable group, and in this little room with its thin plasterboard walls my romance with Aunt Julia had come to have a marvelous naturalness. We could hold hands or kiss and nobody paid any attention. That made us happy. Shutting ourselves up inside the shack was to be free, to be ourselves, we could love each other, talk about what mattered most to us, and feel surrounded by an aura of understanding. To go outside beyond these narrow limits was to enter a hostile domain, where we were forced to lie and to hide.
'Is it all right to call this our love nest?' Aunt Julia asked me. 'Or is that huachafo too?'
'Of course it's huachafo, and it's simply not permissible to call it that,' I answered. 'But we could name it Montmartre.'
We played teacher and pupil and I explained to her what things were huachafo, what things it was not permissible to say or do, and I subjected her reading matter to an inquisitorial censorship, placing all her favorite authors on the forbidden list, beginning with Frank Yerby and ending with Corín Tellado. We had a great time and laughed like fools over this huachafo game, and every once in a while Javier would join in, with fervent dialectical flourishes.
Pascual and Big Pablito were also present during my reading of 'Aunt Eliana,' because they happened to be there at the time and I didn't have the nerve to chase them out, a fortunate turn of events for me as it turned out, since they were the only ones who praised my story, even though their enthusiasm was slightly suspect, inasmuch as they were my subordinates. Javier maintained that it lacked verisimilitude, that nobody would believe that a family would ostracize a girl merely because she married a Chinese, and assured me that if her husband was a black or an Indian the story could be salvaged. Aunt Julia dealt me a mortal blow by telling me that it struck her as melodramatic and that certain words, such as 'tremulous' and 'sobbing,' sounded huachafo to her. I was just launching into a defense of 'Aunt Eliana' when I spied my cousin Nancy in the doorway of the shack. One look sufficed to tell me what had brought her there.
'The family's discovered what's going on, and they're up in arms,' she blurted out.
Smelling a bit of juicy gossip, Pascual and Big Pablito were all ears. I kept my cousin from going on with her story, asked Pascual to get the nine o'clock news bulletin ready, and the four of us, Nancy and Javier, Aunt Julia and I, went out for coffee. As we sat at a table in the Bransa, she went into more details. She had been in the bathroom shampooing her hair and had overheard a telephone conversation between her mother and Aunt Jesús. A cold chill had run down her spine on hearing the words 'the pair of them' and discovering that they were talking about Aunt Julia and me. It wasn't very clear what the conversation was all about, except that they'd known about us for some time, because at one point Aunt Laura had said: 'Can you imagine: even Camunchita saw them shamelessly holding hands on Olivar de San Isidro' (that was quite true, we'd done exactly that, just one afternoon, many months ago). When she came out of the bathroom ('trembling all over,' as she put it), Nancy had found herself face to face with her mother and had tried to pretend she had no idea what was up, her ears were ringing from the noise of the hair drier, she couldn't hear one word, but Aunt Laura shut her up, gave her a dressing-down, and called her 'a go-between for that fallen woman.'
'By a "fallen woman" she meant me?' Aunt Julia asked,more curious than angry.
'Yes, she meant you,' my cousin answered, blushing. 'They think you're the one who's responsible for starting the whole thing.'
'That's true, I'm a minor, I was peacefully studying for my law degree, and then …' I said, but nobody laughed at my joke.
'If they find out I've told you, they'll kill me,' Nancy said. 'Swear to me you won't say a word.'
Her parents had solemnly given her notice that if she committed the slightest indiscretion they wouldn't let her out of the house for a year, not even to attend Mass. They had given her such a stern lecture that she'd even hesitated whether she should tell us what had happened. The family had known everything since the very beginning and hadn't said a word, thinking that it was simply an inconsequential flirtation on the part of a flighty woman who wanted to add an exotic prize, an adolescent, to the list of amorous game she had bagged. But since Aunt Julia had not scrupled to parade about the streets and public squares hand in hand with the lad, and more and more friends and relatives had learned of the romance – even the grandparents knew what was going on, thanks to a bit of gossip passed on to them by Aunt Celia – the whole thing had become a scandal and something that was bound to harm the youngster (that is to say, me), who doubtless had lost all interest in studying ever since the divorcée had turned his head, and hence the family had decided to intervene.
'And what are they going to do to save me?' I asked, still not too panic-stricken at this point.
'Write to your folks,' Nancy said. 'Your two oldest uncles – Uncle Jorge and Uncle Lucho – already have.'
My parents were living in the U.S., and my father was a stern man I'd always been very afraid of. I'd been brought up far away from him, with my mother and her family, and when my parents were reconciled and I went to live with him, we had never gotten along well together. He was conservative and authoritarian, given to cold rages, and if it was true that they'd written to him, the news would set him off like a bombshell exploding.
Aunt Julia grabbed my hand under the table. 'You've turned deathly pale, Varguitas. This time you've got a really good subject for a short story.'
'What you need to do is to keep your head screwed on straight and not go off the deep end,' Javier said, trying to help me recover from the shock. 'Don't panic, and let's plan the best possible strategy for facing the avalanche.'
'They're furious with you, too,' Nancy warned him. 'They're calling you something terrible too, a, a—'
'A pander?' Aunt Julia smiled. And then, turning to me, she said with a sad look in her eyes: 'What matters most to me is that they're going to separate us and I won't ever be able to see you again.'
'That's huachafo, and can't be said like that,' I told her.
'How well they've hidden their real feelings,' Aunt Julia said. 'Neither my sister, nor my brother-in-law, nor any of your relatives has even led me to suspect that they knew and that they hated me. The hypocrites: they've always been so affectionate with me.'
'For the time being, the two of you have to stop seeing each other,' Javier said. 'Julia should go out with other men, and you should ask other girls out on dates. Let the family think you've had a fight.'
Discouraged, Aunt Julia and I agreed that that was the only solution. But when Nancy left – we swore to her that we'd never betray her – followed by Javier, and Aunt Julia walked back with me to Panamericana, as we went down the Calle Belén, wet with misty rain, hand in hand, with our heads drooping dispiritedly, we both knew, without any need to say so, that such a strategy risked turning what was a lie into the truth. If we didn't see each other, if we each went out with other people, sooner or later it would all be over between us. But we agreed to phone each other every day, at precise hours that we set, and gave each other a long, lingering kiss on the mouth as we said goodbye.
As I went up to my shack in the rickety elevator, I felt, as I had at other times, an inexplicable desire to tell my troubles to Pedro Camacho. It was like a premonition, because the principal collaborators of the Bolivian scriptwriter – Luciano Pando, Josefina Sánchez, and Puddler – were waiting for me in the office, absorbed in an animated conversation with Big Pablito as Pascual padded out the news bulletin with all sorts of catastrophes (he had never obeyed my orders forbidding him to include items about dead people, naturally). They waited patiently while I gave Pascual a hand with the last-minute news, and when he and Big Pablito had said good night to us and left the four of us alone in the shack, they looked at each other in embarrassment before saying anything. It was quite plain that what they wanted to talk to me about was the artist.
'You're his best friend and that's why we've come to you,' Luciano Pando murmured. He was a walleyed little man in his sixties, all bent over, who wore a greasy muffler day and night, winter and summer. He had on the only suit I'd ever seen him in, a brown one with little blue pinstripes, in tatters from being cleaned and pressed countless times. His right shoe had a tear across the instep through which you could see his sock. 'It has to do with a very delicate matter. You've doubtless already guessed …'
'Not really, Don Luciano,' I said to him. 'Are you referring to Pedro Camacho? Yes, we're friends, it's true, although as you already know, he's a person one never really gets to know. Is there something wrong?'
He nodded, but then just stood there staring at his shoes and not saying a word, as though overwhelmed by the thought of what he was about to say. I looked questioningly at Josefina and Puddler, who were also standing there motionless, with grave expressions on their faces.
'We're doing this out of affection and gratitude,' Josefina Sánchez trilled in her lovely velvet voice. 'Because no one can possibly know, young man, how much we who work in this miserably paid profession owe to Pedro Camacho.'
'We've always been made to feel we were fifth wheels, nobody thought our talents were worth two cents, we had such an inferiority complex we took ourselves to be worthless trash,' Puddler said in a voice so filled with emotion that the thought crossed my mind all of a sudden that Pedro Camacho had met with some sort of accident. 'Thanks to him, we discovered that ours was an artistic profession.'
'But you're talking about him as though he were dead,' I said.
'Because what would people do without us?' Josefina Sánchez said, citing the words of her idol without having heard what I'd just said. 'Who else gives them the illusions and emotions that help them to go on living?'
She was a woman who had been given that beautiful voice of hers more or less to make up for the collection of awkward mistakes her body represented. It was impossible to guess exactly how old she was, though she had no doubt passed the half-century mark. Her hair was naturally dark, but she bleached it with peroxide and it peeked out, like yellow straw, from beneath a pomegranate-colored turban and hung down over her ears, without, unfortunately, hiding them altogether, for they were enormous, protruding from her head like dish antennas avidly picking up all the world's sounds. But her most striking feature was her double chin, a sac of loose folds of skin that drooped down over her multicolored blouses. She had a thick fuzz on her upper lip that might well have been described as a mustache, and she had fallen into the dreadful habit of fingering it as she spoke. Her legs were swathed in elastic support hose like that worn by soccer players, because she suffered from varicose veins. At any other time, her visit would have filled me with curiosity. But that night I was altogether preoccupied with my own problems.
'I know very well what all of you owe Pedro Camacho,' I said impatiently. 'There are good reasons why his serials are the most popular ones all over the country.'
I saw them exchange looks and screw up their courage. 'That's precisely the point,' Luciano Pando finally said, anxious and upset. 'In the beginning, we didn't pay any attention. We thought they were just careless slips, the sort of absentminded mistakes that everybody makes. And especially somebody who works from sunup to sundown every single day.'
'But what is it exactly that's happening to Pedro Camacho?' I interrupted him. 'I don't have any idea what you're talking about, Don Luciano.'
'The serials, young man,' Josefina Sánchez murmured, as though committing a sacrilege. 'They're becoming more and more bizarre.'
'We actors and technicians are taking turns answering the telephone at Radio Central to fend off protests from the listeners,' Puddler chimed in. His hair looked like shiny porcupine bristles, as though he'd applied great quantities of brilliantine to them; as usual, he was wearing a pair of stevedore's overalls, and shoes without laces, and he appeared to be on the point of bursting into tears. 'So that the Genaros don't boot him out, sir.'
'You know very well that he doesn't have a cent to his name and lives from hand to mouth like the rest of us,' Luciano Pando added. 'What would happen to him if they kick him out? He'd die of hunger!'
'And what about us?' Josefina Sánchez said proudly. 'What would become of us without him?'
They all began to talk at once, telling me everything with a wealth of details. The inconsistencies (the 'bloopers,' as Luciano Pando put it) had begun about two months before, but at the beginning they were so trivial that probably only the actors noticed them. They hadn't said a word to Pedro Camacho because, knowing what he was like, nobody had dared to, and furthermore, for quite a long time they wondered whether he might not be playing deliberate tricks. But in the last three weeks things had become much more serious.
'It's all turned into a hopeless mess, I assure you, young man,' Josefina Sánchez said disconsolately. 'The serials have all gotten mixed up with each other, to the point that even we can't untangle one from the other.'
'Hipólito Lituma has always been a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, the terror of the malefactors of El Callao, in the ten o'clock serial,' Luciano Pando put in, all upset. 'But in the last three days that's turned out to be the name of the judge in the four o'clock serial. His name used to be Pedro Barreda. Just to give you one example.'
'And now Don Pedro Barreda's talking about exterminating rats, because they devoured his little girl,' Josefina Sánchez said, her eyes brimming with tears. 'When, before, it was Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui's baby daughter.'
'You can imagine what a terrible time we have of it at recording sessions,' Puddler stammered. 'Saying and doing things that don't make any sense at all.'
'And there's just no way of straightening out the whole mess,' Josefina Sánchez murmured. 'Because you've seen with your own eyes how Señor Camacho rules over the programs with an iron hand. He doesn't allow us to change even a comma. Otherwise, he falls into terrible fits of rage.'
'He's exhausted – that's the explanation,' Luciano Pando said, shaking his head sadly. 'Nobody can work twenty hours a day and still think straight. He needs a vacation to get back to his old self.'
'You get along well with the Genaros,' Josefina Sánchez said to me. 'Couldn't you have a talk with them? Just simply tell them he's exhausted and ask them to give him a few weeks' rest?'
'The hardest part will be convincing him to take them,' Luciano Pando said. 'But things can't go on like this. If they do, the Genaros will end up firing him.'
'People keep calling the station all the time,' Batán said. 'It takes real genius to think up ways of evading their questions. And the other day there was even something about the whole business in La Crónica.'
I didn't tell them that Genaro Sr. already knew and had asked me to have a talk with Pedro Camacho. We agreed that I should sound out Genaro Jr., and then, depending on his reaction, we would decide whether it was advisable for them to come see him themselves to speak up in the scriptwriter's defense in the name of all his co-workers. I thanked them for their confidence and tried to bolster their morale a little: Genaro Jr. had a more modern outlook than Genaro Sr. and was more understanding, and surely he could be persuaded to give Pedro Camacho a vacation. We went on talking as I turned out the lights and locked the shack. We shook hands and said goodbye on the Calle Belén. I saw the scriptwriter's three homely, generous-hearted co-workers disappear down the empty street in the misty rain.
I didn't sleep a wink that night. As usual, I found my dinner all ready and being kept warm for me in the oven at my grandparents', but I couldn't get a single mouthful down (and in order not to worry my granny, I threw the breaded steak and rice out of sight in the garbage can). The little old couple were in bed but still awake, and when I went into their room to give them a good-night kiss, I eyed them as closely as a police detective, trying to discover the slightest fleeting expression on their faces that would betray the fact that they were upset by my scandalous romance. Nothing, not a sign: they were affectionate and solicitous; my grandfather asked me about one of the words in his crossword puzzle. But they told me the good news: my mama had written that she and my papa would be coming down to Lima for a vacation very soon, and would send word as to the exact date of their arrival. They couldn't show me the letter because one of the aunts had taken it home with her. There was no question about it: this was the result of the traitorous letters the family had sent them about my romance. My father had doubtless said: 'We're going down to Peru and straighten things out.' And my mother: 'How could Julia have possibly done a thing like that!' (She and Aunt Julia had been friends when my family lived in Bolivia and I hadn't yet reached the age of reason.)
I slept in a tiny little room, jam-packed with books, valises, and trunks in which my grandparents kept their memorabilia, a great many photographs of their long-ago splendor, when they had a large cotton plantation in Camaná, when grandfather played at being a pioneer farmer-settler in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, when he was consul in Cochabamba or prefect in Piura. Lying on my back in bed in the darkness, I thought a long time about Aunt Julia; sooner or later, in one way or another, they'd manage to separate us. It made me very angry and the whole thing seemed terribly stupid and shabby, and then all of a sudden the image of Pedro Camacho came to my mind. I thought of all the telephone calls back and forth between aunts and uncles and cousins about Aunt Julia and me, and I also began hearing in my imagination all the calls from radio listeners all upset and confused by those characters who'd suddenly changed names and leapt from the three o'clock serial to the five o'clock one, and by those episodes that were becoming as hopelessly tangled as jungle vines, and I tried my best to guess what could be going on in the scriptwriter's labyrinthine brain, but I didn't think it was the least bit funny; on the contrary, I was touched to think of the actors at Radio Central conspiring with the sound engineers, the secretaries, the doormen, to intercept the calls in order to keep the artist from being fired. I was touched that Luciano Pando, Josefina Sánchez, and Puddler had thought that I, a real fifth wheel, could influence the Genaros. How little they must think of themselves, what miserable salaries they must earn, if I seemed to them to be an important person by comparison! And every so often I was overcome with an irresistible desire to see, touch, kiss Aunt Julia at that very moment. Then finally I saw day break and heard the dogs barking at dawn.
I was at my desk in the shack at Panamericana earlier than usual that morning, and when Pascual and Big Pablito arrived at eight, I had already written the bulletins, read all the newspapers, and annotated and marked in red all the news items to be plagiarized. As I did all these things, I kept watching the clock. Aunt Julia called me at exactly the hour we'd agreed on.
'I didn't close my eyes all night long,' she murmured in a faint voice I could barely hear. 'I love you very much, Varguitas.'
'I love you too, with all my heart,' I whispered, feeling indignant on seeing Pascual and Big Pablito move closer so as to be able to hear better. 'I didn't sleep at all either, thinking about you.'
'You can't imagine how nice my sister and my brother-in-law were to me,' Aunt Julia said. 'We stayed up late playing cards. It's hard to believe that they know, that they're plotting against us.'
'They are, though,' I told her. 'My parents have sent word that they're coming to Lima. And that's the only possible reason – they never travel at this time of year.'
She didn't answer, and in my mind's eye I could see her on the other end, looking sad, furious, disappointed. I told her again that I loved her.
'I'll phone you again at four, as we agreed,' she finally said. 'I'm at the Chinese grocery store on the corner and there's a line waiting. Ciao.'
I went down to Genaro Jr.'s office, but he wasn't there. I left a message for him that there was an urgent matter I needed to discuss with him immediately, and just to be doing something, to fill up in some way or other the emptiness I felt, I went to the university. It was the day of my class in penal law, taught by a professor who had always struck me as a character straight out of a short story. A perfect combination of satyriasis and coprolalia, he looked at his girl students as though he were undressing them and used anything and everything as an excuse for double entendres and obscene remarks. When one girl, who was very flat-chested, answered a question well, he congratulated her, savoring the word: 'You're very synthetic, señorita,' and on commenting on one article in the Code, he launched into a peroration on venereal diseases.
When I went back to the radio station, Genaro Jr. was waiting for me in his office. 'I trust you're not here to ask me for a raise,' he warned me the moment I entered the door. 'We're on the edge of bankruptcy.'
'I want to talk to you about Pedro Camacho,' I said, to set his mind at ease on that score.
'Did you know he's started to do all sorts of outrageous things?' he said to me, as though laughing at a good joke. 'He's been shifting his characters around from one serial to another, changing their names, mixing up all the plots, and gradually turning all the stories into one. A stroke of genius, don't you agree?'
'Well, I have heard what he's up to,' I said, disconcerted by his enthusiasm. 'As a matter of fact, I talked with the actors just last night. They're worried about him. He works much too hard, and they think he's in danger of collapsing from exhaustion. You might very well lose the goose that laid the golden eggs. Why not give him a little vacation so he can rest up a bit?'
'Give Camacho a vacation?' the impresario said in a shocked tone of voice. 'Was he the one who suggested such a thing?'
No, I told him, it was the scriptwriter's co-workers who had suggested it.
'They're tired of working as hard as he wants them to and want to get rid of him for a few days,' he said. 'It would be insane to give him a vacation right now.' He picked up a handful of papers from the desk and waved them triumphantly in the air. 'We've beaten the record for the number of listeners again this month. In other words, his idea of tying the stories together works. My father's worried about these existentialist innovations, but they produce results – the surveys are right here to prove it.' He laughed again. 'So, as long as the listeners like what he's doing, we'll just have to put up with his eccentricities.'
I didn't press the point, so as not to say the wrong thing. And after all, wasn't it quite possible that Genaro Jr. was right? Couldn't it very well be that the Bolivian scriptwriter had carefully planned every last one of these inconsistencies? I didn't feel like going home and decided to go on a spending spree. I persuaded the cashier at Radio Panamericana to give me an advance on my salary, then went straight from the station to Pedro Camacho's cubicle to invite him to lunch. He was typing away like a madman, naturally. He accepted my invitation without enthusiasm, warning me that he didn't have much time.
We went to a typically Peruvian restaurant, behind the Colegio de la Immaculada on the Jirón Chancay, where the specialty of the house was traditional dishes of Arequipa that, I told him, might perhaps remind him of picantes, the famous Bolivian stews with fiery hot peppers. But the artist, faithful to his usual spartan diet, ordered only a bowl of consommé with egg and a purée of red beans that he barely tasted. He skipped dessert altogether, and with a flood of grandiloquent words that left the waiters dumfounded protested vehemently when they didn't properly prepare his verbena-and-mint tea.
'I'm having a bad time of it these days,' I said to him after we had ordered. 'My family's discovered my romance with your compatriot, and since she's older than I am and a divorcée, they're furious. They're going to take steps to separate us and I'm feeling very bitter about it.'
'My compatriot?' the scriptwriter said in a surprised tone of voice. 'Are you having an affair of the heart with an Argentine – pardon me – a Bolivian woman?'
I reminded him that he knew Aunt Julia, that we'd visited him in his room at La Tapada and shared his evening meal with him there, that I'd already told him about my love problems and that he'd prescribed prunes eaten on an empty stomach and anonymous letters as the cure. I did so deliberately, going into details, and observing him closely.
He listened to me very attentively, with a grave expression on his face, not blinking an eye. 'It's not a bad thing if one is confronted with such contretemps,' he said, sipping his first spoonful of consommé. 'Suffering is a good teacher.'
Whereupon he changed the subject, holding forth at length on the art of cooking and the necessity of being moderate in one's eating habits in order to maintain one's spiritual health. He assured me that consuming too much fat, starch, and sugar numbed people's moral sensibilities and inclined them toward crime and vice.
'Conduct a statistical survey of the people you know,' he advised me. 'You'll find that it's fat people above all who turn out to be perverts. On the other hand, you'll see that there's no such thing as a thin person with evil proclivities.'
Though he was doing his best to hide the fact, he was ill at ease. He was not holding forth with his usual sincerity and heartfelt conviction, but, quite obviously, simply rattling on, his mind preoccupied by troubles he was trying to hide. A look of anxiety, fear, shame lurked in his tiny bulging eyes, and every once in a while he bit his lips. His long hair was full of dandruff, and as his neck danced back and forth in his shirt collar, I discovered that he was wearing a little medal around it that he kept fingering from time to time. 'A most miraculous man: Nuestro Señor de Limpias,' he explained, showing it to me. His black suit coat drooped from his shoulders and he looked pale. I had decided I wouldn't mention the serials, but all of a sudden, when I saw that he didn't even remember Aunt Julia or any of the conversations we'd had about her, I was seized with a morbid curiosity. We had finished the consommé with egg, and were drinking dark chicha as we waited for the main dish.
'I was talking with Genaro Jr. about you just this morning,' I said in as casual a tone of voice as possible. 'Good news: according to the ad-agency surveys, the number of people tuned in to your serials has gone up again this month. Even the stones are listening to them.'
I noted that he stiffened, turned his eyes away, and began rapidly rolling up his napkin and unrolling it, blinking continuously. I hesitated as to whether I should pursue the subject further, but my curiosity got the better of me. 'Genaro Jr. thinks that the increase in the number of listeners is due to your idea of mixing up the characters of different serials, of linking up the various plots,' I told him, whereupon he dropped the napkin, his eyes searched mine, and he turned white as a sheet. 'He thinks it's brilliant,' I hastened to add.
As the artist just sat there staring at me, not saying a word, I went on talking, hearing my voice stammering. I spoke of the avant-garde, of experimentation. I cited or invented authors who, I assured him, had caused a sensation in Europe by introducing innovations very much like his: changing their characters' identity in the middle of the story, deliberately creating glaring inconsistencies to keep the reader in suspense. They had brought the bean puree and I began to eat, happy to be able to stop talking and lower my eyes so as not to have to watch the Bolivian scriptwriter getting more and more upset. We sat there in silence for some time as I ate and he stirred the bean puree and the grains of rice round and round on his plate with his fork.
'Something embarrassing is happening to me these days,' I finally heard him say in a very low voice, as though talking to himself. 'I'm losing track of where I am in my scripts, I'm not sure of what I'm doing, and confusions creep in.' He looked at me in anguish. 'I know that you're a loyal young man, a friend who can be trusted. Not a word of any of this to the merchants!'
I feigned surprise, overwhelmed him with assurances of my affection for him. He was not at all his usual self, but rather, a man in torment, insecure, vulnerable, his face a sickly green, with beads of sweat gleaming on his forehead.
He raised his fingers to his temples. 'My head is a boiling volcano of ideas, of course,' he declared. 'It's my memory that's treacherous. That business about the names, I mean. I'm telling you this in all confidence, my friend. I'm not the one who's mixing them up; they're getting mixed up all by themselves. And when I realize what's going on, it's too late. I have to perform a juggling act to get them back in their proper places, to invent all sorts of clever reasons to account for all the shifting around. A compass that can't tell the north from the south can lead to grave, grave consequences.'
I told him that he was exhausted, that nobody could work at the pace he did without destroying himself, that he simply had to take a vacation.
'A vacation? Not till I'm in my grave,' he bristled, as though I'd insulted him.
But a moment later he humbly confessed that when he'd become aware of what he referred to as his 'lapses of memory,' he'd tried to set up a system of index cards. But that turned out to be impossible, he didn't even have the time to look back over the programs that had already been broadcast: every hour of his working day was taken up producing new scripts. 'If I stop, it would be the end of the world,' he murmured. And why couldn't his co-workers help him? Why couldn't he go to them when such doubts overcame him?
'I could never do that,' he answered. 'They'd lose all respect for me. They're simply raw material, my soldiers, and if I make a terrible mistake, it's their duty to follow my lead and make the same mistake.'
He abruptly interrupted our dialogue to lecture the waiters about his verbena-and-mint tea, which he maintained was insipid, and then we had to rush back to the station, practically at a run, because it was time for the three o'clock serial. As we said goodbye, I told him I'd do anything I possibly could to help him.
'The one thing I ask of you is not to say one word to anyone,' he said. And then, with his icy little smile, he added: 'Don't worry: grave troubles are cured by grave remedies.'
Back in my office up in the shack, I looked through the afternoon papers, circled the news items to crib for the bulletins, arranged for a six o'clock interview with a neurosurgeon doing historical research who had performed a cranial trepanation with Inca instruments lent him by the Museum of Anthropology. At three-thirty, I began eyeing the clock and the telephone, alternately. Aunt Julia called at four o'clock on the dot. Pascual and Big Pablito hadn't come back to the office yet.
'My sister talked to me at lunchtime,' she said in a gloomy voice. 'She told me the scandal's too serious for the family to ignore, that your parents are coming down to scratch my eyes out. She asked me to go back to Bolivia. What can I do? I have to go away, Varguitas.'
'Will you marry me?' I asked her.
She gave a hollow little laugh.
'I'm serious,' I insisted.
'Are you really asking me to marry you?' Aunt Julia laughed again, more amused this time.
'Is it yes or no?' I asked. 'Hurry up and decide – Pascual and Big Pablito are just coming in.'
'Are you asking me to marry you to show your family you're grown up now?' Aunt Julia asked me affectionately.
'There's that, too,' I granted.
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