“If I’d told them that I was writing stories and dreamt of becoming a writer, they would doubtless have thought, I have a screw loose. And if I’d told them about my romance with a divorcée, who was not my mistress but my sweetheart, my enamorada, they would have taken me a cojudo a la vela – an ass under full sail.”
Eighteen-year-old Mario’s life is anchored by two desires – to become a writer and to be taken seriously as his 32-year-old Aunt Julia’s romantic partner. Like Indian families, Peruvian families are sprawling and knitted together by relations direct and distant. Mario’s “Aunt” Julia is his mother’s brother’s wife’s sister – a relation not close enough to not be demonised as incest, but not distant enough to evade gossip and the dramatic fury of his parents and other uncles and aunts. While the chief reservations are against being related and the age gap, attendant complaints include her being a foreigner (a Bolivian) and an incorrigible flirt, and putting the Catholic church to shame by getting a divorce.
The drama
Aunt Julia skips around Lima in pursuit of a new husband, her eyes firmly set on ageing, wealthy men. Mario and Aunt Julia get off on the wrong foot as she teases him cruelly about his age and inexperience. However, it is not long before she is charmed by his earnestness and he, by her beauty and wit. The two start to meet secretly in dark movie halls and cafés, and soon Mario falls in love with her. The logistical complications of the situation pale in comparison to the burning passion they feel for one another – for a substantial length of the “relationship”, they do not put labels on each other and restrict sexual activities to kissing and fondling fully clothed. This suits a virgin Mario just fine.
The co-conspirators in this romance are Mario’s friends Javier and Pascual, and his cousin Nancy. When they learn of his secret, they mock him at first but once they realise that the feelings of both parties are genuine, they solemnly promise to safeguard the couple from seething relatives and salacious gossip.
Once he gets serious about Aunt Julia, it dawns on Mario that love is a tough affair – there are practical things to consider, most important of which is money. His role as the news bulletin editor at Radio Panamericana brings him precious little, but it is an ideal job in the sense that it leaves him enough time to write. At work, he befriends the genius, eccentric scriptwriter Pedro Camacho, who writes soap operas at the rate of one per hour, without bothering to make any edits or remembering them once they are broadcast. The scriptwriter’s prodigious output, at first, is a cause of envy but Mario slowly warms up to – and even begins to revere – his talent. They forge a friendship of sorts, but Pedro Camacho seems least interested in life in general and Mario’s love life in particular.
The novel is interspersed with soap opera scripts that read like short stories and leave the listener/reader with a multitude of questions about the story they have just encountered. Pedro Camacho’s dramas make Radio Panamericana the number one station in every home in Peru, and when the scriptwriter starts losing his mind from the pressures of work and holding on to the top position, the bosses turn a blind eye as he becomes increasingly capricious and inattentive to his creations.
The melodrama
The romance between Aunt Julia and Mario is seriously endangered when his father learns of it. A man of “cold anger”, he promises to fly down from the US and shoot Mario “like a dog” if he dares continue with it. Not the one to doubt the authenticity of his father’s threats, Mario sees only one way to save his skin – that is, to marry Aunt Julia. But first, they must take care of various obstacles – for instance, Mario is a minor, Aunt Julia is a Bolivian, and no mayor will risk scrutiny by meddling in the affairs of a well-known family of Lima. With fire in their hearts and no money in their pockets, the helpless couple (along with Javier and Pescual) set off on a cross-country tour to get married.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a coming-of-age story, a love story, and a lighthearted satire on the creative process. The book is a laugh-a-minute and the melodramatic outbursts of the family only add to its hilarity. The story is so alive, so eccentric, that it starts to feel completely true.
And it is, to an extent. Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s seventh novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, is a work of autofiction. He indeed married his Aunt Julia, Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle’s sister-in-law, in 1955. He was 19, and she was ten years older than him. They got divorced in 1964 and a year later, Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia. He never had to look far for home for love. In 1983, Urquidi published a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Varguitas Didn’t Say), in response to the production of a soap opera based on the novel.
The novel is as sweet as it is saucy, and the story of young love fighting to survive against all odds turns into a quixotic adventure. It gallops ahead at full speed, sweeping away the reader in its frenzy and fury.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Helen R Lane, Faber and Faber.
