Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Read Online Free PDF Page B

from head to foot and could feel his heart pounding.
    “I just can’t understand why Elianita’s marrying Red Antúnez,” he suddenly heard himself say. “What does she see in him?”
    It was the wrong thing to say and he immediately regretted having done so, but Richard didn’t seem to be at all taken aback. Panting—he’d just finished his abdominals—he replied with a feeble joke: “They say love is blind, Uncle Alberto.”
    “He’s a fine boy and I’m sure he’ll make her very happy,” Dr. Quinteros went on, feeling a bit disconcerted and trying to make up for having been so outspoken. “What I meant was that among your sister’s admirers were the best matches in Lima. And what did she do but send them all packing and end up saying yes to Red Antúnez, who’s a good kid, but such an, well, er, let’s face it…”
    “Such an ass, is that what you’re trying to say?” Richard broke in helpfully.
    “Well, I wouldn’t have put it that crudely,” Dr. Quinteros said, inhaling and exhaling and flinging his arms in and out. But, to tell the truth, he does seem a bit dim-witted. He’d be perfect for anyone else, but he just can’t hold a candle to a girl as outstanding as Elianita. His own outspokenness made him feel uncomfortable. “Listen, you mustn’t take what I said the wrong way.”
    “Don’t worry, Uncle Alberto.” Richard smiled. “Red’s a good egg and if the kid’s picked him she knows what she’s doing.”
    “Three sets of side bends, you cripples!” Coco roared, with eighty kilos above his head and puffed out like a toad. “Sucking in your belly—not sticking it out!”
    Dr. Quinteros thought that, with the gymnastics, Richard would forget his problems, but as he did his side bends, he saw his nephew working out with renewed fury, his face again set in an anxious, irritated expression. He remembered that in the Quinteros family there were a great many neurotics and thought that perhaps Roberto’s eldest son had inherited the tendency and was destined to carry on the tradition among the younger generation, and then he was distracted by the thought that it might have been more prudent after all to have dropped by the clinic before coming to the gym so as to have a look at the woman with the triplets and the one he’d operated on for the tumor. Then he stopped thinking altogether because the physical effort absorbed him totally, and as he raised and lowered his legs (“Leg rises, fifty times!”), flexed his trunk (“Trunk twist with bar, three sets, till your lungs burst!”), working his back, his torso, his forearms, his neck, obeying Coco’s orders (“Harder, great-granddaddy! Faster, corpse!”), he was simply a pair of lungs inhaling and exhaling, skin dripping with sweat, muscles straining, tiring, aching. When Coco yelled out: “Three sets of fifteen pullovers with dumbbells!” he’d reached his limit. Out of pride, he tried nonetheless to do at least one set with twelve kilos, but he couldn’t. He was exhausted. The weight slipped out of his hands on the third try and he had to put up with the jokes of the weight lifters (“Mummies to the grave and storks to the zoo!” “Call the funeral home!” “Requiescat in pace, amen!”) and watch with mute envy as Richard—still in a hurry, still furious—completed his routine with no difficulty. Discipline, perseverance, balanced diets, regular habits aren’t enough, Dr. Quinteros thought. Up to a certain limit they compensated for the differences; once past that limit, age created insuperable distances, unbreachable walls. Later, sitting naked in the sauna, blinded by the sweat dripping through his eyelashes, he mournfully repeated a phrase he’d read in a book: “Youth, whose memory brings despair!” As he was leaving, he saw that Richard had joined the weight lifters and was working out with them. Coco made a mocking gesture in Richard’s direction and said: “This handsome lad has decided to commit