Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

him, such as causing his telephone to ring at dawn: when he picked up the receiver, he could hear at the other end the unmistakable laugh of his great-grandmother, who’d been dead for half a century and had been dwelling since her demise (as she herself informed him) in Purgatory. The souls of those who had passed on appeared to him in public buses, in jitneys, or as he was walking down the street. They whispered in his ear and he was obliged to remain mute and impassive (“to snub them,” were the words he reportedly used), so that people wouldn’t think he was crazy. I was intrigued, and had asked Javier to organize a séance with this bank-clerk medium. The latter had agreed, but kept putting the séance off from week to week, for what he claimed were meteorological reasons. It was imperative to wait for certain phases of the moon, the shifting of tides, and other conditions that were even more special, since it appeared that departed souls were sensitive to the degree of humidity, the position of constellations, the direction of the wind. But the right day had finally arrived.
    It was no easy matter to find the place where the bank-clerk medium lived, a squalid apartment squeezed into the back of a block of town houses on the Jirón Cangallo. The man proved to be a much less interesting character in person than in Javier’s stories about him. A widower in his sixties, balding and smelling of liniment, he had a bovine gaze, and his conversation was so doggedly banal that no one would ever have suspected him of being in close touch with spirits. He received us in a grubby, dilapidated little front room, and offered us crackers with thin little slices of fresh cheese and a few niggardly drops of pisco. He sat there till the clock struck twelve, telling us, in a tedious, matter-of-fact way, of his experiences of the beyond. They had begun when his wife died, twenty years before. Her passing on had plunged him into a state of inconsolable despair, until one day a friend had saved him by putting him on the path of spiritualism. It was the most important thing that had happened to him in his whole life.
    “Not only because one has the opportunity of continuing to see and hear one’s loved ones,” he said to us in the tone of someone commenting on a christening party, “but also because it’s a wonderful distraction. The hours go by without one’s even noticing.”
    Listening to him, one had the impression that speaking with the dead was something more or less comparable to seeing a movie or watching a soccer match (though, doubtless, less entertaining). His version of life in the beyond was terribly pedestrian and disheartening. There was no difference whatsoever in “quality” between this world and that, to judge from what the spirits told him: they suffered from illnesses, fell in love, got married, reproduced, traveled—the one and only difference was that they never died. I was bored to tears and casting murderous glances in Javier’s direction when the clock struck twelve. The bank clerk had us sit around the table (which was not round but rectangular), turned the lights out, and ordered us to hold hands. There were a few seconds of silence, and as I sat there in tense anticipation, I had the (mistaken) impression that matters were about to take a more interesting turn. But then the spirits began to appear to the clerk, who began asking them the most tedious questions in the world, in the same bland, banal tone of voice as before: “Well, hello there, Zoilita, how are things with you? I’m delighted to hear your voice; I’m sitting here with two friends, very fine persons both of them, interested in communicating with your world, Zoilita. What’s that you say? Tell them you send them your regards? Of course I will, Zoilita. She says she sends you her most affectionate regards and asks you to pray for her from time to time, if you can, so she can get out of Purgatory sooner.” After Zoilita, a series of