Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (14 page)

Two or three weeks went by before I met the man from Radio Victoria who had replaced Big Pablito. In the days before Pedro Camacho’s arrival at the station, anyone who wanted to could attend the recording sessions of serials, but the new star director had forbidden everyone except the actors and technicians to enter the recording studio, and to prevent anyone else from doing so he had ordered the doors to be closed and stationed Jesusito’s intimidating bulk in front of them. Not even Genaro Jr. himself was exempt from this iron rule.

I remember the afternoon when, as always happened whenever he had problems and needed a shoulder to cry on, he appeared in the shack, his nostrils quivering with indignation, to tell me his complaints. “I tried to enter the studio and he immediately stopped the program and refused to record it till I cleared out,” he said in a furious voice. “And he gave me to understand that the next time I interrupted a rehearsal he’d throw the microphone at my head. What shall I do? Kick him out on his ass, or swallow the insult?”

I told him what he wanted to hear: that in view of the success of the serials (“for the greater glory of the entire Peruvian radio broadcasting industry,” etc.) he should swallow the insult and not set foot in the artist’s territory again. He took my advice, but I for my part was still dying of curiosity and wanted desperately to attend a recording session of one of the scriptwriter’s programs.

One morning as we were having our usual break at the Bransa, after feeling out the ground very cautiously I ventured to broach the subject to Pedro Camacho. I told him I was eager to see the new sound-effects man in action and find out whether he was as good as he said he was.

“I didn’t say he was good; I said he was average,” he immediately corrected me. “But I’m training him and he might be good someday.”

He drank a sip of his herb tea and scrutinized me with his little cold, punctilious eyes, assailed by inner doubts. Finally he gave in, and reluctantly agreed. “All right then. Come tomorrow, to the one at three. But I can’t allow you to come again, I regret to say. I don’t like the actors to be distracted, any alien presence disturbs them, I lose control of them, and it’s goodbye catharsis. The recording of an episode is a Mass, my friend.”

In fact, it was something even more solemn. Among all the Masses I remembered (I hadn’t been to church in years), I never witnessed such a moving ceremony, such a deeply lived rite, as that recording of chapter 17 of “The Adventures and Misadventures of Don Alberto de Quinteros” to which I was admitted. The session couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes—ten to rehearse and twenty to record—but it seemed to me that it lasted for hours. I was immediately impressed by the reverent religious atmosphere that reigned in the little room with a glass panel and dusty green carpeting that went by the name of Radio Central Recording Studio Number One. Big Pablito and I were the only spectators present; the others were active participants. On entering the studio, Pedro Camacho had informed us with a martial look in his eye, we must remain as motionless as statues of salt throughout the session. The author-director seemed transformed: taller, stronger, a general issuing orders to disciplined troops. Disciplined? Enraptured, rather; bewitched, brainwashed fanatics. I could scarcely recognize Josefina Sánchez, with her mustache and her varicose veins, whom I had so often seen recording her lines while chewing gum and knitting, with her mind somewhere else entirely and giving the impression that she hadn’t the least idea what she was saying, as being the same person as this utterly serious creature before me who, when not absorbed in going over the script word for word, like someone praying, kept her eyes trained, respectfully and obediently, on the artist, trembling like an innocent little girl gazing at the altar on the day of her First Communion. And the same was true of Luciano Pando and the other three actors (two women and a very young man). They didn’t exchange a single word or so much as look at each other: as though magnetized, their eyes went from their scripts to Pedro Camacho. And on the other side of the glass panel even that popinjay, the sound engineer Ochoa, was enraptured: carefully monitoring the controls, pressing buttons, turning lights on and off, following with a grave and attentive frown everything that was happening in the studio.

The five members of the cast were standing in a circle around Pedro Camacho, who—dressed as usual in his black suit and little bow tie and with his hair flying every which way—was delivering a sermon on the chapter that they were about to record. It was not instructions that he was giving them, at least not in the prosaic sense of concrete indications as to how they were to speak their lines—in measured tones or exaggeratedly, slowly or rapidly—but rather, as was his habit, noble, olympian, pontifical pronouncements having to do with profound aesthetic and philosophical truths. And naturally it was the words “art” and “artistic” that were repeated most frequently in this feverish discourse, like some sort of magic formula that revealed and explained everything. But even more surprising than the Bolivian scriptwriter’s words was the fervor with which he uttered them, and perhaps more surprising still, the effect that they caused. Gesturing furiously and standing on tiptoe as he talked, he spoke in the fanatical voice of a man in possession of an urgent truth that he must disseminate, share, drive home. He succeeded completely in doing so: the five actors and actresses listened to him in stupefaction, hanging on his every word, opening their eyes wide as though the better to absorb these maxims concerning their work (“their mission,” as the author-director put it). I was sorry Aunt Julia wasn’t there, because she’d never believe me when I told her how I had seen, with my own eyes, this handful of practitioners of the most miserable profession in Lima totally transformed, transfixed, spiritualized, for the space of an eternal half hour, beneath the sway of Pedro Camacho’s effervescent rhetoric. Big Pablito and I were sitting on the floor in one corner of the studio; in front of us, surrounded by all sorts of strange paraphernalia, was the brand-new acquisition, the defector from Radio Victoria. He too had listened to the artist’s harangue with mystical rapture; the moment the recording of the chapter began, he became the center of the spectacle for me.

He was a stocky, copper-colored man, with stiff straight hair, dressed almost like a beggar: worn overalls, a much-mended shirt, big clodhoppers without laces. (Later I found out that he was called by the mysterious nickname of Puddler.) His work tools consisted of a wooden plank, a door, a washtub full of water, a whistle, a sheet of tinfoil, a fan, and other such ordinary-looking everyday articles. Puddler then proceeded to put on an extraordinary one-man show involving ventriloquism, acrobatic feats, multiple simultaneous impersonations, the creation of imaginary physical effects. At a given signal from the director-actor—a magisterial waggling of his index finger in the air filled with dialogue, tender sighs, and lamentations—Puddler, walking across his plank at a pace whose crescendo or diminuendo was carefully calculated, made the footsteps of the characters approach or retreat in the distance, and at another signal, turning the fan to blow at different speeds across the sheet of tinfoil, he produced the sound of rain falling or the wind howling, or at yet another, putting three fingers in his mouth and whistling, he filled the studio with the chirping of birds waking up the heroine in her country house on a spring morning. It was especially impressive when he created the sounds of a city street. It was Ochoa who provided, by means of a prerecorded tape, the sound of motors and horns honking, but all the other effects were produced by Puddler, by clacking his tongue, clucking, uttering, whispering (he seemed to be doing all these things at once), and all you needed to do was close your eyes to hear, reconstructed in the little Radio Central studio, the voices, the scattered words, the laughter, the exclamations that a person distractedly hears on walking down a crowded street. But as though this were not enough, at the same time that he was producing dozens of human voices, Puddler was also walking or leaping on the plank, manufacturing the footfalls of the pedestrians on the sidewalks and the sound of their bodies brushing against each other. He “walked” both with his feet and with his hands (thrust into a pair of shoes), squatting on his haunches, his arms dangling like a monkey’s, slapping his thighs with his elbows and his forearms. After having been (acoustically speaking) the Plaza de Armas at noon, it was a relatively trivial feat for him to re-create the chamber music, so to speak, of a tea offered by a Lima society matron to a group of her lady friends in her mansion and the tinkling of the porcelain cups by hitting two little iron bars together, scratching on a sheet of glass, and rubbing little pieces of wood on his behind to imitate the gliding of chairs and ladies’ feet over the thick, soft carpets; or, by roaring, croaking, grunting, screaming, to incarnate phonetically (and enrich with a number of species not to be found there) the Barranco zoo. By the time the recording session was over, he looked as though he’d run the Olympic marathon: he was panting, his eyes had big dark circles under them, and he was sweating like a horse.

Pedro Camacho had contrived to imbue his collaborators with his own sepulchral seriousness. It was an enormous change. The serials from the CMQ in Cuba had most often been recorded in a circus atmosphere, and as the actors read their lines they would make faces or obscene gestures at each other, making fun of themselves and of what they were saying. But nowadays one had the impression that if someone had cracked the least little joke, the others would have flung themselves on him to punish him for his sacrilege. I thought for a time that they might perhaps be pretending so as to curry favor with their boss, so as not to be thrown out like the Argentines, that in their heart of hearts they weren’t as certain as he was that they were “priests of art,” but I was wrong. On my way back to Panamericana, I walked a few blocks along the Calle Belén with Josefina Sánchez, who was going home between serials to have herself a nice cup of tea, and I asked her whether the Bolivian scriptwriter always delivered a sermon before they recorded or whether the one I’d heard had been exceptional in any way. She gave me such a scornful look it made her double chin quiver.

“He said very little today and he wasn’t inspired. Sometimes it breaks your heart to think that his ideas won’t be preserved for posterity.”

Since she was someone “who’d had so much experience,” as I put it, I asked her if she really thought that Pedro Camacho was a person possessed of great talent. It took her a few seconds to find words adequate to express her feelings on the subject: “That man sanctifies the acting profession.”

One bright summer morning,
tidily dressed and punctual as usual, Dr. Don Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar, examining magistrate, First Criminal Division, Superior Court of Lima, entered his chambers. He was a man who had reached the prime of life, his fifties, and in his person—broad forehead, aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—and in his bearing his spotless moral virtue was so apparent as to earn him people’s immediate respect. He dressed with the modesty that befits a magistrate with a meager salary who is constitutionally incapable of accepting a bribe, but with such impeccable neatness that it gave the impression of elegance. The Palace of Justice was beginning to awaken from its nocturnal slumber, and the massive building was commencing to swarm with a crowd of attorneys, petty clerks, bailiffs, plaintiffs, notaries, executors of estates, law students, and idle spectators. In the heart of this beehive, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar opened his briefcase, took out two dossiers, seated himself at his desk, and prepared to begin his day. A few seconds later, his secretary appeared in his chambers, as rapidly and silently as a meteorite hurtling through space: Dr. Zelaya, a short little man with glasses and a minuscule mustache that moved rhythmically up and down as he spoke.

“A very good day to you, Your Honor,” he greeted the magistrate, bowing deeply from the waist.

“The same to you, Zelaya.” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar smiled affably. “And what does the day have in store for us?”

“Rape of a minor with mental violence as an aggravating circumstance,” the secretary replied, depositing a voluminous folder on the magistrate’s desk. “The accused, who lives in the Victoria district and has typical Lombrosian criminal features, denies the allegations against him. The principal witnesses are waiting outside in the corridor.”

“Before hearing them, I need to reread the police report and the plaintiff’s deposition,” the magistrate reminded him.

“They’ll wait as long as necessary,” the secretary replied, and left the room.

Beneath his solid juridical cuirass, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar had the soul of a poet. One reading of cold legal documents was all he required to remove the rhetorical crust of wherefores and whereases and Latin phrases and arrive at the facts themselves by way of his powers of imagination. Thus, reading the police report drawn up in La Victoria, he was able to reconstruct, in vivid detail, the events that had led to formal charges being brought against the accused. He saw the thirteen-year-old girl named Sarita Huanca Salaverría, a pupil at the Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera public-school complex, enter, on Monday last, the commissariat of this motley, parti-colored district. She arrived in tears and with bruises on her face, arms, and legs, accompanied by her parents, Don Casimiro Huanca Padrón and Doña Catalina Salaverría Melgar. This minor had been dishonored the evening before, in room H of the tenement located at Number 12, Avenida Luna Pizarro, by the accused, Gumercindo Tello, a tenant in the same building (room J). On overcoming her embarrassment, Sarita had revealed to the guardians of law and order, in a quavering voice, that her defloration had been the tragic end result of a long and secret pursuit to which she had been subjected by the rapist. For the past eight months, in fact—that is to say, ever since the day that he had come to install himself at Number 12, like some strange bird of ill omen—the latter had plagued Sarita Huanca by waylaying her where her parents or the other tenants couldn’t see and paying her indecent compliments or making bold advances (such as telling her: “I’d love to squeeze the lemons of your orchard” or: “One of these days I’m going to milk you”). From prophecies, Gumercindo Tello had gone on to overt acts, succeeding in his attempts, on a number of occasions, to fondle and kiss the pubescent girl, in the courtyard of the building at Number 12 or in nearby streets, as she was coming home from school or when she went out to run errands. Out of understandable timidity and a natural sense of modesty, the victim had not told her parents of this harassment.

On Sunday evening, ten minutes after her parents had gone off to the Cine Metropolitán, Sarita Huanca heard a knock at the door as she was doing her homework. She went to see who it was and found herself face to face with Gumercindo Tello. “What is it you want?” she asked him politely. Assuming the most innocent air imaginable, the rapist claimed that his portable stove had run out of fuel: it was too late to go out to buy more and he’d come to borrow just enough kerosene to prepare his evening meal (and promised to return what he’d borrowed the following day). Generous-hearted and naïve, little Sarita Huanca Salaverría invited the man in and showed him the can of kerosene sitting between the stove and the bucket that served as a toilet.

(Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar smiled at this slip of the pen on the part of the officer of the law who had drawn up the complaint and thus inadvertently attributed to the Huanca Salaverrías the habit, so common among inhabitants of Buenos Aires, of attending to their calls of nature in a bucket located in the same room in which they eat and sleep.)

Once he had contrived, by means of this stratagem, to get inside room H, the accused locked the door. He then got down on his knees and, joining his hands, began to murmur words of love to Sarita Huanca Salaverría, who only then began to be alarmed as to the outcome of this visit from her neighbor. In language that the young girl described as romantic, Gumercindo Tello urged her to accede to his desires. And what were these desires? That she remove all her clothes and allow herself to be fondled, kissed, and robbed of her maidenhead. Pulling herself together, Sarita Huanca emphatically rejected his propositions, reprimanded Gumercindo Tello, and threatened to call the neighbors. On hearing these words, the accused, abandoning his supplicating attitude, drew a knife from his clothes and threatened to stab the girl if she made the slightest outcry. Rising to his feet, he advanced toward Sarita, saying: “Come, come, off with all your clothes, my love,” and when, despite everything, she did not obey him, he gave her a hail of blows and kicks until she fell to the floor. And then as she lay there, so frightened that, according to the victim, her teeth chattered, the rapist tore all her clothes off, proceeded to unbutton his own as well, and fell upon her, perpetrating there on the floor the carnal act, which, due to the resistance offered by the girl, was accompanied by further blows, of which she still bore the traces in the form of bumps and bruises. Once his desires had been satisfied, Gumercindo Tello left room H, after advising Sarita Huanca Salaverría not to say a word about what had happened if she wanted to live to a ripe old age (and brandishing the knife to show that he meant what he said). On returning from the Metropolitán, the girl’s parents found their daughter with tears streaming down her face and her body ravaged. After caring for her injuries, they pleaded with her to tell them what had happened, but out of shame she refused to do so. And thus the entire night went by. The following morning, however, having somewhat recovered from the emotional shock of losing her maidenhead, the girl told her parents everything, and they immediately presented themselves at the commissariat of La Victoria to bring a complaint.

Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar closed his eyes for a moment. He felt great pity for what had happened to the girl (despite his daily contact with crime, he had not grown callous), but he said to himself that, to all appearances, this was a case involving a prototypical crime, with nothing bizarre or mysterious about it, one minutely dealt with in the Penal Code, under the sections having to do with rape and abuse of a minor, along with the classic aggravating circumstances of premeditation, verbal and physical violence, and mental cruelty.

The next document that he reread was the report of the officers of the law who had placed Gumercindo Tello under arrest.

In accordance with instructions from their superior, Captain G. C. Enrique Soto, Guardias Civiles Alberto Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Huasi Tito Parinacocha had appeared at Number 12, Avenida Luna Pizarro, with a warrant for the arrest of the aforementioned Tello, but the individual in question was not at home. They learned from the neighbors that he was an automobile mechanic who worked at the “El Inti” Garage and Welding Shop, at the opposite end of the district, almost in the foothills of El Pino. The two officers of the law proceeded there immediately. At the garage, they were surprised to discover that Gumercindo Tello had just left, and were informed by the owner of the garage, Señor Carlos Príncipe, that he had asked for the day off to attend a baptism. When the Guardias questioned the other mechanics as to what church he might be found in, the latter exchanged sly glances and smiles. Señor Príncipe explained that Gumercindo Tello was not a Catholic, but a Jehovah’s Witness, and that in this religious sect the rite of baptism was not celebrated in church with a priest, but by giving the candidate for baptism a good ducking somewhere out of doors.

Suspecting (as has proved to be the case) that the aforesaid sect was a brotherhood of perverts, Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha demanded that they be taken to the site where the accused might be found. After considerable hesitation and discussion, the owner of “El Inti” personally took them to the spot where, he said, Tello might possibly be, since once, some time ago now, when the latter had been trying to convert him and his fellow mechanics at the garage, he had invited him to attend a ceremony there (an experience that had left the aforementioned Señor Príncipe entirely unmoved).

The latter had driven the two officers of the law to the area bounded by the Calle Maynas on one side and the Parque Martinetti on the other, a vacant lot where people who live in that neighborhood burn their garbage and where there is a little branch of the Rímac. And that, in fact, was where the Jehovah’s Witnesses were. Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha spied a dozen persons of various ages, male and female, standing waist-deep in the muddy waters, not in bathing suits but all dressed up: a number of the men were wearing ties, and one of them was even wearing a hat. Indifferent to the jokes, the gibes, the garbage tossed at them, and the other childish pranks of the people living nearby who had congregated on the riverbank to watch them, they were devoutly going on with a ceremony that to the two officers of the law appeared at first glance to be nothing less than an attempted murder by drowning. This is what they saw: as they fervently chanted strange hymns, the Witnesses, keeping a tight grip on the arms of an old man in a poncho and a wool cap, plunged him again and again into the filthy waters—as an intended sacrifice to their God? But when the two officers of the law, drawing their revolvers and getting their leggings all muddy, ordered them to cease their criminal act, the old man was the first to become thoroughly incensed, demanding that they withdraw and calling them strange names (such as “Romans” and “papists.”). The guardians of law and order were forced to resign themselves to waiting until the baptism was over to arrest Gumercindo Tello, whom they had managed to identify thanks to Señor Príncipe. The ceremony went on for a few minutes more, in the course of which the Witnesses continued to pray and immerse the old man being baptized until the latter began to roll his eyes, swallow water, and choke, whereupon the Witnesses decided to drag him back to shore, where they began congratulating him on the new life that, they said, had just begun for him.

It was at this juncture that the officers of the law arrested Gumercindo Tello. The mechanic did not offer the slightest resistance, made no attempt to escape, and gave no sign of being surprised at having been taken into custody, limiting himself to saying to the others as the Guardias put him in handcuffs: “Brothers, I’ll never forget you.” The Witnesses immediately began singing more hymns, gazing heavenward and turning up the whites of their eyes, and accompanied them in this fashion to Señor Príncipe’s car. The latter then drove the Guardias and their prisoner back to the commissariat of La Victoria, where the two officers bade him goodbye and thanked him for his services.

Inside the commissariat, Captain G. C. Enrique Soto asked the prisoner if he would like to dry his shoes and pants in the courtyard, and Gumercindo Tello replied that he was quite accustomed to going around in wet clothes because of the great number of conversions to the true faith that had taken place recently in Lima. The captain then proceeded forthwith to interrogate him, receiving the willing cooperation of the accused. Questioned as to his identity, he replied that his name was Gumercindo Tello, the son of Doña Gumercindo Tello, a native of Moquegua and now deceased, and of an unknown father, and that he too had probably been born in Moquegua, some twenty-five to twenty-eight years ago. With respect to this doubt as to his exact age, he explained that soon after he had been born his mother had handed him over to an orphans’ home for boys run in the aforementioned city by the papist sect, in whose aberrations, he said, he had been educated and from which he had happily freed himself at the age of fifteen or eighteen. He indicated that he had remained at the orphanage until that age, at which time the institution burned to the ground in a huge fire, in which all the records were destroyed as well; it was for this reason that he was not at all certain exactly how old he was. He explained that the fire had been a providential event in his life, since it had been on that occasion that he had met a pair of wise men journeying on foot from Chile to Lima, opening the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf to the truths of philosophy. He said further that he had come to Lima with this pair of wise men, whose names he declined to reveal, claiming that it was enough to know that they existed and there was no need to label them. He then stated that from then on he had divided his time between working as a mechanic (a trade that he had learned in the orphanage) and spreading knowledge of the truth. He said he had lived in Breña, in Vitarte, in Los Barrios Altos, and had moved to La Victoria eight months before because he had found employment in the “El Inti” Garage and Welding Shop, which was located a fair distance from his former domicile.