Free Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

the age of twenty-five. And then, in the course of an ill-starred trip to the U.S. on vacation, the terrible mishap had occurred. In Chicago, San Francisco, or Miami—Aunt Julia didn’t remember which exactly—young Adolfo had met a woman in a night club and made a conquest (or so he thought). She had taken him to a hotel, and he was going at it hot and heavy with her, when suddenly he felt the point of a knife blade in his back, turned around, and saw a one-eyed man a good six feet six inches tall. They didn’t use the knife on him or beat him; they merely robbed him of his watch, a gold religious medal, his dollars. That was how it all began. Simple as that. Ever since then, the minute he was with a woman and about to get down to some serious action, he would feel the touch of cold metal on his spinal column, see the ravaged face of the one-eyed man, start to sweat, and find himself with all desire gone and his spirits drooping. He had consulted an endless number of doctors and psychologists, and even a quack healer in Arequipa, who had him bury himself up to the neck at the foot of volcanoes on moonlit nights.
    “Don’t be mean, don’t make fun of the poor man, Julia,” Aunt Olga said, shaking with laughter.
    “If I were certain he’d stay that way, I’d marry him for his dough,” Aunt Julia said crassly. “But what if I cured him? Can’t you just see that old gaffer trying to make up for lost time with me?”
    I thought how happy the adventure of the senator from Arequipa would have made Pascual, how enthusiastically he would have devoted an entire newscast to him. Uncle Lucho warned Aunt Julia that if she was going to be so demanding, she’d never find a Peruvian husband. And she in turn complained that here too, as in Bolivia, the good-looking men were poor and the rich ones ugly, and when a good-looking rich man came along, he inevitably turned out to be married. Suddenly she looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I hadn’t shown up all that week because I was afraid she’d drag me off to the movies again. I said that wasn’t the reason, made up a story about exams I had coming up, and proposed that we go see a film that night.
    “Great, we’ll go to the one that’s showing at the Leuro,” she decided dictatorially. “It’s a real tearjerker.”
    On the way back to Radio Panamericana in the jitney, I mulled over the possibility of trying my hand at another short story, one based this time on the misadventures of Adolfo Salcedo; something light and entertaining, in the manner of Somerset Maugham, or perversely erotic, as in Maupassant. At the radio station, Nelly, Genaro Jr.’s secretary, was giggling to herself at her desk. “What’s so funny?” I asked her.
    “There’s been a terrible row over at Radio Central between Pedro Camacho and Genaro Sr.,” she informed me. “The Bolivian insisted he didn’t want any Argentine actors playing roles in his serials, and if they did, he was leaving. He managed to get Luciano Pando and Josefina Sánchez to back him up, and finally got his way. They’re going to cancel the Argentines’ contracts—isn’t that great news?”
    There was a fierce rivalry between the native announcers, m.c.’s, and actors and the Argentine ones—wave after wave of the latter kept arriving in Peru, many of them expelled from their own country for political reasons—and I surmised that the Bolivian scriptwriter had taken this stand so as to get on the good side of his Peruvian co-workers. But I soon discovered that he was incapable of this sort of calculated maneuver. His hatred of Argentines in general, and of Argentine actors and actresses in particular, appeared to be entirely disinterested. I went to see him after the seven o’clock news broadcast, to tell him I had a little spare time and could help him with the data he’d said he needed. He invited me into his lair and with a munificent gesture offered me the only seat possible, outside of his own