Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (16 page)

Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar smiled at him. “We have been privileged to witness a most unusual spectacle,” the magistrate philosophized. “That youngster has the devil in the flesh, and what’s worse, she probably doesn’t even know it.”

“Is that what Yankees call a Lolita?” the secretary asked in an attempt to further his knowledge.

“I’m certain of it—a typical Lolita,” was the judge’s verdict. And in an effort to put the best possible face on things, an impenitent sea wolf who draws optimistic lessons even from typhoons, he added: “We can at least feel pleased to have discovered that the colossus of the North doesn’t enjoy a monopoly in this field. That little home-grown product could steal any gringa Lolita’s man away from her.”

“I take it she drove that mechanic out of his mind and he deflowered her,” the secretary mused. “But after seeing and hearing her you’d swear that she was the one who raped him.”

“Stop right there. I forbid you to assume any such thing,” the judge said sternly, and the secretary paled. “Let’s have none of these suspect oracular pronouncements. Have them bring in Gumercindo Tello.”

Ten minutes later, on seeing the man enter his chambers escorted by two guards, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar realized immediately that he did not fit the neat pigeonhole that the secretary had too hastily assigned him. This was not a classic Lombrosian criminal type, but in a certain sense a far more dangerous type. a believer. With a mnemonic shiver that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, the judge, on seeing Gumercindo Tello’s face, remembered the implacable gaze of the man with the bicycle and the copies of
The Watchtower
who had given him so many nightmares, that serenely stubborn gaze of a man who knows, who has no doubts, who has solved all his problems. Rather short in stature, he was a young man, doubtless not yet thirty, whose frail physique, nothing but skin and bones, proclaimed to the four winds his scorn for bodily nourishment and the material world, with hair cropped so short his skull was nearly bare, and a swarthy complexion. He was dressed in a gray suit the color of ashes, the costume neither of a dandy nor of a beggar but something in between, which was dry now but very wrinkled from the baptismal rites, a white shirt, and ankle boots with cleats. Just one glance sufficed for the judge—a man with a flair for anthropology—to discern immediately his distinctive personality traits: circumspection, moderation, fixed ideas, imperturbability, a spiritual vocation. Obviously well-mannered, the moment he entered the room he bade the judge and the secretary good morning in a polite, friendly tone of voice.

Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar ordered the guards to remove the man’s handcuffs and leave his chambers. This was a habit he had adopted from the very beginning of his career as a magistrate: he had always interrogated even the most depraved criminals without officers of the law being present, without coercion, paternally, and in the course of these tête-à-têtes, even the most hard-bitten of them usually opened their hearts to him, like penitents to a confessor. He had never had cause to regret this risky practice. Gumercindo Tello rubbed his wrists and thanked the judge for this proof of his trust. The latter pointed to a chair and the mechanic sat down on the very edge of it, his spine rigid, like a man who feels uncomfortable at the very idea of comfort. The magistrate composed in his mind the motto that no doubt governed the Witness’s life: get up out of bed though still sleepy, get up from the table though still hungry, and (if he ever went) leave the movie before the end. He tried to imagine him lured, set on fire by the thirteen-year-old femme fatale of La Victoria, but immediately abandoned this mental exercise as being detrimental to the rights of the defendant. Gumercindo Tello had begun talking.

“It’s true that we don’t swear to obey governments, parties, armies, and other visible institutions, all of which are stepdaughters of Satan,” he said quietly, “that we don’t pledge allegiance to any bit of colored cloth, that we refuse to wear uniforms, because we are not taken in by fripperies or disguises, and that we don’t accept skin grafts or blood transfusions, because science cannot undo what God hath wrought. But none of this means that we do not fulfill our obligations. Your Honor, I place myself at your entire disposal and would pay you all due respect even if I had good reason not to.”

He spoke slowly and deliberately, as though to make the secretary’s task easier as the latter provided a musical accompaniment for his peroration on his typewriter. The judge thanked him for his kind words, informed him that he respected every person’s ideas and beliefs, particularly those having to do with religion, and permitted himself to remind him that he was not under arrest for those he professed but because he had been charged with having assaulted and raped a minor.

An otherworldly smile crossed the face of the young man from Moquegua. “A witness is one who testifies, who offers testimony, who attests,” he said, revealing his familiarity with semantics and looking the magistrate straight in the eye. “One who, knowing that God exists, makes His existence known, one who, knowing the truth, makes the truth known. I am a Witness and you two may become Witnesses as well with a little effort of will.”

“Thank you, perhaps some other time,” the judge interrupted him, picking up the thick dossier and setting it before him as though it were a dish of food. “Time is pressing and this is what is important. Let’s get straight to the point. And first off, a word of advice: I strongly urge you, in your own best interests, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

The accused, moved by some secret memory, heaved a deep sigh. “The truth, the truth,” he murmured sadly. “Which truth, Your Honor? Isn’t what you’re after, rather, the product of those calumnies, those fabrications, those Vatican tricks that, by taking advantage of the naïveté of the masses, they try to foist off on us as the truth? With all due modesty, I believe I know the truth, but, with no offense meant, may I ask you: do you know it?”

“It’s my intention to discover it,” the judge replied shrewdly, tapping the folder.

“The truth about the fiction of the cross, the farce of Peter and the rock, the miters, the papal immortality-of-the-soul hoax?” Gumercindo Tello asked sarcastically.

“The truth about the crime you committed by abusing the minor Sarita Huanca Salaverría,” the magistrate counterattacked. “The truth about your assaulting an innocent thirteen-year-old girl. The truth about the beating you gave her, the threats that terrified her, the rape that humiliated her and perhaps left her pregnant.” The magistrate’s voice had risen, accusing, Olympian.

Gumercindo Tello looked at him gravely, as rigid as the chair he was perched on, showing no sign of either shame or repentance. But finally he nodded like a docile cow. “I am prepared for any test to which Jehovah wishes to put me,” he assured him.

“It’s not a question of God but of you,” the magistrate said, bringing him back down to earth. “Of your appetites, your lust, your libido.”

“It’s always a question of God, Your Honor,” Gumercindo Tello stubbornly insisted. “Never of you, or me, or anyone else. Of Him, and Him only.”

“Be responsible,” the judge exhorted him. “Keep to the facts. Admit your guilt and Justice may take your confession into account. Act like the religious man you’re trying to make me believe you are.”

“I repent of all my sins, which are infinite,” Gumercindo Tello said gloomily. “I know very well that I am a sinner, Your Honor.”

“Well then, the concrete facts,” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar pressed him. “Describe to me, with neither morbid delectation nor jeremiads, how you raped her.”

But the Witness had burst into sobs, covering his face with his hands. The magistrate remained unmoved. He was accustomed to the sudden cyclothymic shifts of mood of accused criminals he was interrogating and knew how to take advantage of them to ascertain the facts. Seeing Gumercindo Tello sitting there with his head bowed, shaking from head to foot, his hands wet with tears, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar said to himself, with the solemn pride of the professional noting the effectiveness of his technique, that the accused had reached that climactic emotional state in which, no longer capable of dissimulating, he would eagerly, spontaneously, abundantly confess to the truth.

“Facts, facts,” he insisted. “Facts, positions, words spoken, acts performed. Come on, be brave and tell all!”

“The trouble is, I don’t know how to lie, Your Honor,” Gumercindo Tello stammered between hiccups. “I’m prepared to suffer the consequences, whatever they may be—insults, prison, dishonor. But I can’t lie! I never learned how, I’m incapable of it!”

“There, there, that very fact does you honor,” the judge exclaimed with an encouraging gesture. “Prove it to me. Come on, tell me, how did you rape her?”

“That’s the whole problem,” the Witness said in a desperate tone of voice, swallowing hard. “I didn’t rape her!”

“I’m going to tell you something, Señor Tello,” the magistrate said, pronouncing each word slowly and distinctly, in the deceptively bland voice of a sly, contemptuous serpent. “You’re a false Jehovah’s Witness! An impostor!”

“I didn’t touch her, I never talked to her alone, I didn’t even see her yesterday,” Gumercindo Tello bleated like a lamb.

“A cynic, a fake, a spiritual prevaricator,” the judge declared in a stern, cold voice. “If Justice and Morality don’t matter to you, at least respect that God whose name is so often on your lips. Think of how He is watching you at this very moment, how revolted He must be to hear you lie.”

“I have never offended that child—neither by my thought nor by my gaze,” Gumercindo Tello repeated in heartrending accents.

“You threatened her, beat her, raped her,” the magistrate thundered. “With your filthy lust, Señor Tello.”

“With-my-fil-thy-lust?” the Witness repeated, like a man hit over the head with a hammer.

“That’s right, with your filthy lust,” the magistrate reiterated, and then, after a deliberately dramatic pause: “With your sinful penis!”

“With-my-sin-ful-pe-nis?” the accused stammered in a faltering voice, staring at him in utter astonishment. “My-sin-ful-pe-nis-did-you-say?”

Looking frantically about him in wild-eyed amazement, his gaze darted from the secretary to the judge, from the floor to the ceiling, from the chair to the desk, lingering on the papers, dossiers, blotters lying on top of it. Then suddenly his eyes lit up, caught by the artistic pre-Hispanic glint of the Tiahuanaco letter opener, and before the judge or the secretary could stop him, Gumercindo Tello made a lunge for it and grabbed it by the handle. He did not make a single threatening gesture with it: quite to the contrary, he clasped it to his breast like a mother cradling her child and stood looking at the two petrified men with a reassuring, kindly, sad expression in his eyes.

“You offend me by thinking I might harm you,” he said in the tone of voice of a penitent.

“You won’t be able to escape, you fool,” the judge warned him, collecting himself. “The Palace of Justice is full of guards; they’ll kill you.”

“Me, try to escape?” the mechanic asked sarcastically. “How little you know me, Your Honor.”

“Can’t you see that you’re giving yourself away?” the magistrate persisted. “Give me back the letter opener.”

“I borrowed it from you to prove my innocence,” Gumercindo Tello calmly explained.

The judge and the secretary looked at each other. The accused had risen to his feet. There was a Nazarene expression on his face, and the knife in his right hand gave off a terrible premonitory gleam. His left hand slid down unhurriedly toward his trousers fly concealing the zipper, as he said in a pained voice: “I am pure, Your Honor, I have never known a woman. What other men use to sin with, I only use to pee with…”

“Stop right there,” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar interrupted him as a terrible suspicion dawned on him. “What are you going to do?”

“Cut it off and throw it in the trash to prove to you how little it means to me,” the accused replied, pointing toward the wastebasket with his chin.

He spoke without false pride, with quiet determination. Their mouths gaping open in surprise, struck dumb, the judge and the secretary were unable to raise any sort of outcry. Gumercindo Tello was now holding the corpus delicti in his left hand and, an executioner brandishing the ax and mentally measuring its trajectory to the victim’s neck, raising the knife and preparing to let it fall to consummate the inconceivable proof.

Would he go through with it? Would he thus deprive himself, in one stroke, of his integrity? Would he sacrifice his body, his youth, his honor, as an ethico-abstract demonstration? Would Gumercindo Tello turn the most respectable judge’s chambers in Lima into a sacrificial altar? How would this forensic drama end?

My romance with Aunt Julia
was going along swimmingly, except that things were getting complicated because it was becoming more and more difficult to keep it a secret. By common agreement, in order not to arouse suspicion in the family, I had drastically cut down my visits to Uncle Lucho’s. I continued, however, to appear regularly at the house for lunch on Thursdays. In order to go to the movies together at night, we invented various ruses. Aunt Julia would go out early in the evening, telephone Aunt Olga to tell her she’d be having dinner with a girlfriend, and wait for me at a place we’d agreed on beforehand. This modus operandi was rather inconvenient, however, in that Aunt Julia was obliged to while away several hours on the streets till I got off work, and most of the time she also had to go without dinner. At other times I went to pick her up in a taxi without getting out; she’d wait in the house, keeping an eye peeled, and the minute she saw the cab stop she’d come running out. But this was a risky operation: if anybody in the family spied me, they’d know immediately that there was something going on between Aunt Julia and me; and in any event her mysterious gentleman friend who invited her out for the evening but kept himself hidden in the back seat of a taxi was bound sooner or later to arouse curiosity, malicious gossip, a great many questions…

We had decided therefore to see each other less often at night and more often in the daytime, during the hours when I had nothing to do at the radio station. Aunt Julia would take a jitney downtown around eleven in the morning, or five in the afternoon, and wait for me in a coffee shop on Camaná or in the Cream Rica on the Jirón de la Unión. I’d leave a couple of bulletins all edited and ready to go on the air and we could spend two hours together. We avoided the Bransa on La Colmena because it was a favorite hangout of all the people from Panamericana and Radio Central. From time to time (to be more precise, on paydays), I would invite her to lunch and we’d have as many as three hours together. But my meager salary didn’t really permit such extravagances. After making an elaborate speech, I’d managed to persuade Genaro Jr. to raise my salary, one morning when I’d found him in a euphoric mood because of Pedro Camacho’s successes, to exactly five thousand
soles
. I gave two thousand of it to my grandparents to help out with household expenses. The remaining three thousand had previously been more than enough for my vices: cigarettes, movies, and books. But since my romance with Aunt Julia, my spending money seemed to vanish into thin air immediately and I was always broke, so that I often had to touch my friends for loans and even had to resort to taking some of my belongings to the National Pawnshop, in the Plaza de Armas. Since, moreover, I had deep-rooted Spanish prejudices with regard to the relations between men and women and never allowed Aunt Julia to pick up a check, my financial situation became dramatic. To remedy it, I began to do something that Javier reprovingly called “prostituting my pen,” that is to say, writing book reviews and articles for literary supplements and periodicals published in Lima. I wrote under a pseudonym so as to feel less ashamed at how bad they were. But the two or three hundred extra
soles
they brought me each month were a big help in making ends meet.

These secret meetings in downtown cafés of Lima were really quite innocent: long, romantic conversations, holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes, and if the topography of the establishment permitted it, rubbing knees. We kissed each other only when nobody could see us, something that rarely happened, since at these hours the cafés were always full of cheeky, nosy office clerks. We talked about ourselves, naturally, about the risks we were running of being surprised by some member of the family, about ways of getting around this danger; we told each other in minute detail everything we had done since the last time we’d been together (a few hours before, that is to say, or the previous day), but on the other hand we never made any sort of plans for the future. This was a subject that by tacit agreement was banished from our conversations, no doubt because both of us were equally convinced that our relationship was destined not to have a future. Nonetheless, I think that what had begun as a game little by little became serious in the course of these chaste meetings in the smoke-filled cafés of downtown Lima. It was in such places that, without our realizing it, we gradually fell in love.

We talked a great deal about literature as well; or rather, Aunt Julia listened and I talked, about the Paris garret (an indispensable ingredient in my vocation) and about all the novels, plays, essays I’d write once I’d become a writer. The afternoon that Javier discovered us together in the Cream Rica on the Jirón de la Unión, I was reading my story on Doroteo Martí aloud to Aunt Julia. I had given it the medieval-sounding title of “The Humiliation of the Cross,” and it was five pages long. It was the first story of mine that I’d ever read her, and I did so very slowly so as to conceal my anxiety as to what her verdict would be. The experience had a devastating effect on the susceptibility of the future writer.

As I read on, Aunt Julia kept interrupting me. “But it wasn’t like that at all, you’ve turned the whole thing topsy-turvy, that wasn’t what I told you, that’s not what happened at all…” she kept saying, surprised and even angry.

I couldn’t have been more upset, and broke off my reading to inform her that what she was listening to was not a faithful, word-for-word recounting of the incident she’d told me about, but
a story, a story
, and that all the things that I’d either added or left out were ways of achieving certain effects: “
Comic
effects,” I emphasized, hoping she’d see what I was getting at. She smiled at me, if only out of pity for my misery.

“But that’s precisely the point,” she protested vehemently, not giving an inch. “With all the changes you’ve made, it’s not a funny story at all any more. What reader is going to believe that such a long time goes by between the moment the cross begins to teeter and the moment it comes crashing down? The way you’ve told it, what’s there to laugh at?”

Even though I’d already decided—feeling utterly crushed and secretly humiliated—to toss the story about Doroteo Martí in the wastebasket, I’d nonetheless launched into a passionate, pained defense of the rights of literary imagination to transgress reality, when I suddenly felt a tap on the shoulder.

“If I’m interrupting, please tell me and I’ll clear out immediately, because I hate being a nuisance,” Javier said, drawing up a chair, sitting down, and asking the waiter to bring him a cup of coffee. He smiled at Aunt Julia. “I’m delighted to meet you, I’m Javier, the best friend of this prose writer here. You certainly have kept her well hidden, old pal.”

“This is Julia, my Aunt Olga’s sister,” I explained.

“What! The famous woman from Bolivia?” He’d more or less had the wind taken out of his sails: when he came across us we’d been holding hands and hadn’t let go when he sat down with us, and now he was staring intently at our intertwined fingers and had lost his air of worldly self-assurance of a few moments before. “Well, well, Varguitas!” he murmured.

“The famous woman from Bolivia, you say? May I ask what I’m famous for?” Aunt Julia asked.

“For being so disagreeable, for those spiteful jokes of yours when you first arrived,” I explained to her. “Javier knows only the first part of the story.”

“You kept the best part a secret, you bad narrator and worse friend,” Javier said, recovering his aplomb and pointing to our clasped hands. “Come on, tell me the rest, you two.”

He was really charming that afternoon, talking a blue streak and making all sorts of jokes and witty remarks. Aunt Julia found him delightful, and I was happy that he’d discovered us; I hadn’t planned to tell him about her, because I detested sharing confidences about my love life (especially in this case, since the whole thing was so complicated), but now that he had chanced to discover my secret, I was glad that I was going to be able to talk with him about the ins and outs of this affair of the heart with Aunt Julia.

As he left us that day, he kissed her on the cheek, bowed, and said: “I’m a first-rate pander. If I can be of help in any way, you can count on me.”

“How come you didn’t tell us you’d even tuck us in bed?” I said testily the moment he appeared later that afternoon in my shack at Radio Panamericana, eager to hear all the details.

“She’s more or less an aunt of yours right?” he replied, clapping me on the back. “In any case, I’m really impressed. A mistress who’s old, rich, and divorced: you get an A in the course!”

“She’s not my aunt; she’s my uncle’s wife’s sister,” I said, explaining again what he already knew as I edited a news item in
La Prensa
on the Korean War for an upcoming bulletin. “She’s not my mistress, she’s not old, and she doesn’t have money. The only part of your description that’s true is that she’s divorced.”

“What I meant by old was older than you, and the part about her being rich wasn’t intended as criticism but as a way of extending my congratulations, since I’m all in favor of marrying for money.” Javier laughed. “And am I to take it that she’s not your mistress? If not, what is she exactly? Your girlfriend?”

“Something between the two,” I told him, knowing that that would irritate him.

“Ah, I get it, you want to keep your deep dark secrets to yourself. Well, the hell with you, then. What’s more, you’re a bastard: I tell you everything about what’s going on between me and Nancy and you won’t tell me one thing about the catch you’ve made.”

So I told him the whole story from the very beginning, the complicated schemes we had to resort to just to see each other alone, and he realized why I’d hit him for a loan two or three times during the last few weeks. He was intrigued by our story, asked me one question after another, and after hearing me out swore he’d be my fairy godmother. But as he was leaving he said in a solemn tone of voice: “I take it that this whole thing is only a game. But even so, don’t forget that you and I are still just kids,” he admonished me, looking me straight in the eye like a stern but kindly father.

“If I get pregnant, I swear to you I’ll get an abortion,” I reassured him.

Once he left, and as Pascual was telling Big Pablito all about an amusing nose-to-tail chain collision in Germany involving some twenty cars that had crashed into each other when an unthinking Belgian tourist had suddenly braked to a halt right in the middle of the Autobahn to rescue a little dog, I thought over what he’d said. Was it certain that Aunt Julia and I weren’t getting seriously involved with each other? Yes, certain. It was simply a different experience, a bit more mature and daring than the ones I’d had before, but if I was to have pleasant memories of our affair, it shouldn’t last very long. I had thought things through that far when Genaro Jr. appeared to invite me to lunch. He took me to Magdalena, to a restaurant with an outdoor patio that specialized in Peruvian cuisine, insisted that I order the rice with duck and the fritters with honey, and then, as we were having coffee, handed me the check, so to speak. “You’re the only friend he’s got, talk to him, he’s getting us into terrible trouble. I don’t dare say a word to him, he calls me an ignoramus, and yesterday he called my father a mesocrat. I don’t want to have any more run-ins with him. I’d have to fire him and that would be a disaster for the corporation.”

The problem was a letter from the Argentine ambassador to Radio Central, couched in poisonous language, protesting the “slanderous, perverse, and psychotic” references to the fatherland of Sarmiento and San Martín that cropped up everywhere in the serials (which the diplomat called “sensationalist stories presented in episodic form”). The ambassador offered a number of examples which, he assured his addressees, had not been sought
ex professo
but collected at random by the personnel of the legation “with a penchant for this sort of broadcast.” In one of them it had been suggested, no less, that the proverbial virility of Argentine men residing in the capital was a myth since nearly all of them practiced homosexuality (and, preferably, the passive form); in another, that in Buenos Aires families, noted for living together in teeming hordes, it was customary to allow useless members—the oldsters and the invalids—to die of hunger so as to lighten the budget; on another, that beef cattle were raised for export only because in Argentine homes the meat that was most highly prized was horseflesh; in another, that the widespread participation in the sport of soccer had damaged the national genes, above all because of the players’ practice of butting the ball with their heads, thus explaining the ever-increasing numbers of oligophrenics, acromegalics, and other subvarieties of cretins on the shores of the tawny-colored Río de la Plata; that in the homes of Buenos Aires—“a similar cosmopolis,” as the letter put it—it was a common custom to attend to one’s biological necessities in a simple bucket, in the same room where one ate and slept…

“You’re laughing. We laughed too, but today we had a visit from a lawyer and suddenly the whole thing doesn’t seem the least bit funny,” Genaro Jr. said, biting his fingernails. “If the embassy formally protests to the government, they can make us stop broadcasting serials, fine us, close down the station. Plead with him, threaten him, anything, so long as he drops the subject of Argentines.”

I promised to do what I could, but without much hope of getting anywhere, since the scriptwriter was a man of unshakable convictions. I had come to feel genuine friendship for him; above and beyond the entomological curiosity he aroused in me, I truly respected him. But was the feeling mutual? Pedro Camacho didn’t seem to me to be capable of wasting his time, his energy, on friendship or on anything else that would distract him from “his art” that is to say, his work or his vice, that urgent necessity that swept aside men, things, appetites. It was true, however, that he was more tolerant of me than of others. We had coffee together (or, rather, I had coffee and he had his verbena-and-mint tea), and I dropped by his cubbyhole every so often to spend a few minutes with him, thus giving him a brief respite between one page and another. I listened to him very attentively and perhaps he found this flattering; he may have considered me a disciple, or I might simply have been for him what a lapdog is to an old maid and crossword puzzles to the pensioner: something, someone to help while away the empty hours.