Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

in my work.”
    The book, published in prehistoric times by Espasa Calpe—its thick worn covers had all sorts of stains and scratches on them and its pages were yellow with age—was by an author nobody had ever heard of, despite his pompous compendium of credentials (Adalberto Castejón de la Reguera, M.A. in Classical Literature, Grammar, and Rhetoric), and the tide was nothing if not vast in scope: Ten Thousand Literary Quotations Drawn from the Hundred Best Writers in the World , with the subtitle: “What Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière, etc., have had to say about God, Life, Death, Love, Suffering, etc….”
    We had already walked as far as the Calle Belén. As I shook hands with him to bid him goodbye, I happened to glance at my watch. I panicked: it was 10 p.m. I had the impression that I’d spent half an hour at most with him, but in fact the sociological-analysis-cum-gossipy-chitchat about the city and the abominable character of Argentines had gone on for three. I headed for Panamericana as fast as my legs could carry me, convinced that Pascual had no doubt devoted the entire fifteen minutes of the nine o’clock newscast to some pyromaniac in Turkey or an infanticide in El Porvenir. But things couldn’t have gone as badly as all that, since I ran into the Genaros, Jr. and Sr., in the elevator, and they gave no sign of being beside themselves with rage. They told me that they had signed a contract that afternoon with Lucho Gatica, hiring him to come to Lima for a week of broadcasts to be transmitted exclusively by Panamericana. Up in my rooftop shack, I had a look at the news bulletins that had gone out over the air and found them more or less acceptable. With my mind thus set at ease, I then sauntered down to the Plaza San Martín to catch the jitney.
    I arrived at my grandparents’ house at 11 p.m. to find everyone fast asleep. They were in the habit of leaving my dinner ready in the oven for me, but this time, in addition to the breaded steak with rice and a fried egg—my invariable evening meal—there was a message written in a shaky hand: “Your Uncle Lucho called to say that you stood up Julia, who was waiting to go to the movies with you, that you’re an ill-mannered monster, and that you must call her to apologize. Grandfather.”
    The thought occurred to me that forgetting all about newscasts and a date with a lady on account of the Bolivian scriptwriter was going too far. I went to bed ill at ease and out of sorts for having been so impolite without intending to be. I mulled all this over in my mind interminably before I finally dropped off to sleep, trying to persuade myself that it was Aunt Julia’s fault for having insisted on going to the movies with me, for being so terribly overbearing, and searching my mind for some possible excuse to give her when I phoned her the next day. Nothing plausible occurred to me, and I didn’t dare tell her the unvarnished truth. I resorted instead to an epic gesture. After the 8 a.m. newscast, I went to a downtown florist’s and sent her a bouquet of roses that cost me ten soles , along with a card on which, after much hesitation, I wrote what impressed me as a miracle of laconic elegance: “Humblest apologies.”
    That afternoon, between one news broadcast and the next, I drafted several outlines of my erotico-picaresque short story based on the tragedy of the senator from Arequipa. I had every intention of working hard on it that night, but Javier dropped by after he was through work at Panamericana to take me to a spiritualist séance in Barrios Altos. The medium was a clerk I’d been introduced to in the offices of the State Reserve Bank. Javier had often talked to me about this medium, since the latter frequently told him all about his contacts with departed souls, who hastened to communicate with him not only when he convoked them in official séances but also spontaneously, in the most unexpected circumstances. It was their habit to play tricks on