Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

relatives and friends made their appearance, and the bank clerk had similar conversations with each of them. They were all in Purgatory, they all sent us their regards, they all asked for our prayers. Javier insisted that someone who was in Hell be summoned, so as to put an end to our doubts, but without a second’s hesitation the medium explained to us that that was out of the question: the ones from there could be contacted only on the first three days of an odd-numbered month and their voices were barely audible. Javier then asked to be put in touch with the nursemaid who had brought up his mother and himself and his brothers. Doña Gumercinda duly appeared, sent her regards, said that she had the fondest of memories of Javier, and that at the moment she was getting her belongings together to leave Purgatory and go meet Our Lord. I asked the bank clerk to summon my brother Juan, and surprisingly (since I’d never had any brothers), he came and told me, by way of the kindly voice of the medium, not to worry about him, because he was with God, and that he prayed continually for me. Reassured by this bit of news, I lost interest in the séance and occupied myself mentally writing my story about the senator. An enigmatic title popped into my mind: “The Incomplete Face.” While Javier tirelessly went on pressing the clerk to conjure up an angel, or at the very least, some historical figure such as Manco Cápac, I decided that the senator would eventually solve his problem thanks to a Freudian fantasy: when he made love to his wife, he would make her wear a pirate’s eye patch.
    The séance ended around two in the morning. As we walked through the streets of Barrios Altos in search of a taxi that would take us to the Plaza San Martín, where we could catch the jitney, I infuriated Javier by telling him that it was all his fault that the beyond had lost its poetry and mystery for me, that it was all his fault that I had had incontrovertible proof that dead people became stupid idiots, that it was all his fault that I could no longer be an agnostic and would henceforth have to live with the certainty that in the next life, which beyond a doubt existed , an eternity of imbecility and boredom awaited me. We found a taxi and as punishment Javier paid for it.
    Back home, alongside the breaded steak, the egg, and the rice, I found another message: “Julia phoned you: she received your roses, they’re very pretty, they pleased her a lot. But you’re not to get the idea that you’ll get out of taking her to the movies one of these days by sending roses. Grandfather.”
    The next day was Uncle Lucho’s birthday. I bought a tie to give him and was getting ready to leave for his house at noon, when Genaro Jr. turned up in my shack at just the wrong moment and dragged me off to the Raimondi to have lunch with him. He wanted me to help him draft the text of the advertisements that were going to be published in the Sunday papers, announcing Pedro Camacho’s serials, which were to start on Monday. “But wouldn’t it have been more logical for the author himself to have had a hand in writing these announcements?” I asked.
    “The hitch is that he’s refused to have anything to do with them,” Genaro Jr. explained, smoking like a chimney. “He claims his scripts don’t need paid publicity, that they command attention by themselves, and all sorts of other nonsense. The guy’s turning out to be a tough one to figure out; he’s got all sorts of manias. You heard about that whole hassle over the Argentines, didn’t you? He forced us to cancel contracts, to pay indemnities. I just hope his programs justify all his high-handedness.”
    As we wrote the ads, downed two sea bass, drank ice-cold beer, and watched little gray mice scamper across the overhead beams of the Raimondi every so often, as though they’d been put there on purpose as proof of how old the place was, Genaro Jr. told me of another run-in he’d had with Pedro