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 grandparents’ 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 s
urprise 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 th
ought 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.”