Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a completely blank expression in his blue eyes and such total indifference to his presence that Dr. Quinteros wondered whether he’d turned invisible all of a sudden.
    “It’s only lovers who get lost in thought like that,” he said to his nephew, walking over and ruffling his hair. “Come back down to earth, my boy.”
    “Sorry, Uncle,” Richard replied, coming to with a start and blushing furiously, as though he’d been doing something he shouldn’t and been caught in the act. “I was thinking.”
    “Wicked thoughts, no doubt.” Dr. Quinteros laughed as he opened his gym bag, chose a locker, and began to get undressed. “Things must be in an uproar at your house. Is Elianita very nervous?”
    Richard glared at him with what seemed like a sudden gleam of hatred in his eyes and the doctor wondered what in the world had gotten into this youngster. But his nephew, making a visible effort to appear to be his usual self, smiled faintly. “Yes, everything’s in an uproar. That’s why I came down here to the gym to burn off a little fat till it’s time.”
    The doctor thought Richard was going to add “to mount the gallows.” His voice was heavy with melancholy, and his features, the clumsiness with which he was tying his shoelaces, the jerky movements of his body, betrayed how troubled, upset, and anxious he was. He was unable to keep his eyes still: he kept opening them, closing them, staring into space, looking away, staring at the same imaginary point again, looking away once more, as though searching for something impossible to find. He was a strikingly handsome boy, a young god whose body had been burnished by the elements—he went surfing even in the dead of winter and also excelled at basketball, tennis, swimming, and soccer—sports that had given him one of those physiques that Blacky Humilla claimed were “every queer’s mad dream”: not an ounce of fat, a smooth, muscular torso descending in a V to a wasp waist, and long, strong, supple legs that would have made the best boxer green with envy. Alberto de Quinteros had often heard his daughter Charo and her girlfriends compare Richard with Charlton Heston and conclude that Richard was even groovier-looking, that he beat Charlton all hollow. He was in his first year at the School of Architecture, and according to Roberto and Margarita, his parents, he’d always been a model child: studious, obedient, good to them and to his sister, honest, likable. Elianita and Richard were the doctor’s favorite niece and nephew, and so, as he put on his jockstrap, his sweat suit, his gym shoes—Richard was standing over by the showers waiting for him, tapping his foot on the tile floor—Dr. Alberto de Quinteros was sad to see him looking so troubled.
    “Problems on your mind, my boy?” he asked in a deliberately offhand way and with a kindly smile. “Anything I can do to help?”
    “No, not a problem in the world, whatever gave you that idea?” Richard hastened to reply, blushing furiously once again. “I feel great and can’t wait to warm up.”
    “Did they deliver my wedding present to your sister?” the doctor suddenly remembered to ask. “They promised me at the Casa Murguía that it would arrive yesterday.”
    “A super bracelet”—Richard had begun jumping up and down on the white tiles of the locker-room floor. “Sis was delighted with it.”
    “It’s your aunt who usually takes care of things like that, but since she’s still running around Europe, I had to choose it myself.” A tender look came into Dr. Quinteros’s eyes. “Elianita in her wedding dress—what a lovely sight that’s going to be.”
    Because the daughter of his brother Roberto was as perfect a specimen of young womanhood as Richard was of young manhood: one of those beauties who do honor to the species and who make figures of speech comparing teeth to pearls, eyes to stars, hair to flax, and complexions to peaches and cream sound far too pedestrian. Slender,