Read Online Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mario Vargas Llosa
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the map of Lima, he asked me, in a tone of voice fraught with mystery, if I would be willing, later on that day or the day after, to provide him with further information about the city. I told him I’d be more than happy to do so.
Back in my shack at Panamericana, I found that Pascual had already written up the text of the 9 a.m. news bulletin. It began with one of those items he took such delight in. He had copied it from the morning paper, La Crónica , embellishing it with fancy adjectives he’d picked up in the course of his studies and made an intimate part of his cultural stock in trade: “In the tempestuous seas of the Antilles, the Panamanian freighter Shark sank last night, taking with it to their death its crew of eight, drowned and masticated by the sharks that infest the aforementioned sea.” I changed “masticated” to “devoured” and edited out “tempestuous” and “aforementioned” before giving it my okay. Pascual didn’t fly into a rage—that wasn’t his way—but he nonetheless put his protest on record. “Good old Don Mario, fucking up my style as usual.”
All that week I’d been trying to write a short story, based on an incident that my Uncle Pedro, who was a doctor on a big landed estate in Ancash, had passed on to me. One night a peasant had frightened another peasant half to death by disguising himself as a “pishtaco”—a devil—and leaping out at him from the middle of a canebrake. The victim of this joke had been so scared out of his wits that he’d attacked the “pishtaco” with his machete, dispatched him to the next world with a skull split in two, and taken to the hills. Shortly thereafter, a group of peasants leaving a fiesta had come upon a “pishtaco” prowling around the village and beaten him to death. The dead man turned out to be the murderer of the first “pishtaco,” who was in the habit of disguising himself as a devil in order to visit his family at night. These assassins had in turn taken to the hills, and used to come down at night in the guise of devils to visit the community, where two of them had already been hacked to death with machetes by the terror-stricken villagers, who in turn, et cetera… What I was eager to recount in my story was not so much what had actually happened on the estate where my Uncle Pedro was employed as the ending of the story that suddenly occurred to me: at a certain moment, the Devil in person, alive and kicking and wagging his tail, slipped in among all these fake “pishtacos.” I was going to entitle my story “The Qualitative Leap,” and I wanted it to be as coldly objective, intellectual, terse, and ironic as one of Borges’s—an author whom I had just discovered at that time. I devoted to the story all the spare moments left me by the news bulletins at Panamericana, the university, and coffee breaks at the Bransa, and I also wrote at my grandparents’ house, during my lunch hours and at night. During that week, I didn’t drop in at any of my uncles’ houses for the midday meal, skipped my usual visits to my girl cousins’, and didn’t go to the movies even once. I wrote and then tore up what I wrote, or rather, the moment I’d written a sentence it struck me as absolutely dreadful and I began all over again. I was thoroughly convinced that a slip of my pen or a mistake in spelling was never a mere happenstance but rather a reminder, a warning (from my subconscious, God, or some other being) that the sentence simply wouldn’t do at all and had to be rewritten. Pascual protested: “Good Lord, if the Genaros discover how much paper you’ve wasted, they’ll take it out of our salary.” Finally, one Thursday, it seemed to me that the story was finished. It was a monologue five pages long: at the very end, the reader discovered that the narrator was the Devil himself. I read “The Qualitative Leap” to Javier in my shack, after the noon Panamericana newscast.
“It’s first-rate, old pal,” he said
Back in my shack at Panamericana, I found that Pascual had already written up the text of the 9 a.m. news bulletin. It began with one of those items he took such delight in. He had copied it from the morning paper, La Crónica , embellishing it with fancy adjectives he’d picked up in the course of his studies and made an intimate part of his cultural stock in trade: “In the tempestuous seas of the Antilles, the Panamanian freighter Shark sank last night, taking with it to their death its crew of eight, drowned and masticated by the sharks that infest the aforementioned sea.” I changed “masticated” to “devoured” and edited out “tempestuous” and “aforementioned” before giving it my okay. Pascual didn’t fly into a rage—that wasn’t his way—but he nonetheless put his protest on record. “Good old Don Mario, fucking up my style as usual.”
All that week I’d been trying to write a short story, based on an incident that my Uncle Pedro, who was a doctor on a big landed estate in Ancash, had passed on to me. One night a peasant had frightened another peasant half to death by disguising himself as a “pishtaco”—a devil—and leaping out at him from the middle of a canebrake. The victim of this joke had been so scared out of his wits that he’d attacked the “pishtaco” with his machete, dispatched him to the next world with a skull split in two, and taken to the hills. Shortly thereafter, a group of peasants leaving a fiesta had come upon a “pishtaco” prowling around the village and beaten him to death. The dead man turned out to be the murderer of the first “pishtaco,” who was in the habit of disguising himself as a devil in order to visit his family at night. These assassins had in turn taken to the hills, and used to come down at night in the guise of devils to visit the community, where two of them had already been hacked to death with machetes by the terror-stricken villagers, who in turn, et cetera… What I was eager to recount in my story was not so much what had actually happened on the estate where my Uncle Pedro was employed as the ending of the story that suddenly occurred to me: at a certain moment, the Devil in person, alive and kicking and wagging his tail, slipped in among all these fake “pishtacos.” I was going to entitle my story “The Qualitative Leap,” and I wanted it to be as coldly objective, intellectual, terse, and ironic as one of Borges’s—an author whom I had just discovered at that time. I devoted to the story all the spare moments left me by the news bulletins at Panamericana, the university, and coffee breaks at the Bransa, and I also wrote at my grandparents’ house, during my lunch hours and at night. During that week, I didn’t drop in at any of my uncles’ houses for the midday meal, skipped my usual visits to my girl cousins’, and didn’t go to the movies even once. I wrote and then tore up what I wrote, or rather, the moment I’d written a sentence it struck me as absolutely dreadful and I began all over again. I was thoroughly convinced that a slip of my pen or a mistake in spelling was never a mere happenstance but rather a reminder, a warning (from my subconscious, God, or some other being) that the sentence simply wouldn’t do at all and had to be rewritten. Pascual protested: “Good Lord, if the Genaros discover how much paper you’ve wasted, they’ll take it out of our salary.” Finally, one Thursday, it seemed to me that the story was finished. It was a monologue five pages long: at the very end, the reader discovered that the narrator was the Devil himself. I read “The Qualitative Leap” to Javier in my shack, after the noon Panamericana newscast.
“It’s first-rate, old pal,” he said
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