Sleeping with My Aunt
Forget about MILFs. For some writers, only an Aunt will do.
Last night, I dreamed I was 18 again and living in Peru when an extraordinary thing happened. I fell in love with a beautiful older woman who was also my aunt. We were not related by blood. She was only my aunt through marriage.
At the time, I was studying for a law degree and working as a news writer at a radio station that ran daily soap operas. This was the 1950s, and television had not yet reached Lima. Radio serials were everything. Listeners hung on to their storylines like life rafts.
One day I showed up for work to find a dwarflike creature with black shoulder-length hair sitting at my desk. Like my aunt, he too was from Bolivia, where he had been famous as the creator of the country’s most popular radio dramas. Hiring him was a coup for my station. They let him have anything he wanted, including my typewriter.
I didn’t like this one bit.
For one thing, it made my job plagiarizing wire-service news more difficult. But it was also a painful reminder that something I desperately wanted was slipping away. Because more than anything, I wanted to be a writer.
I’d been struggling to create short stories for some time but had failed to publish anything. Having my typewriter taken from me without warning bummed me out. Was life sending a message? Was it telling me that becoming a lawyer would end my dreams? Or that I was not cut out to be a writer? That success belonged to runts with long hair who spent their days churning out soaps?
Fortunately, my beautiful aunt made life pleasant. She was living with my father’s brother and his wife, who was her sister, and I saw her often.
My fantasies about her increased.
When she went out with older men, I got very jealous. I knew she had come to Peru to find a husband, but that didn’t stop my blood from boiling every time I saw her with another man.
Between her dates with these pursuers, she would sometimes go to the movies with me. This was considered harmless. No one expected anything romantic between a 32-year-old woman and an 18-year-old student. Especially, since she was also my aunt.
But I was smitten and grew excited each time we were together. I had never known such a woman. To me she was like — what was it Shakespeare said? — like heaven walking on earth. Whenever I was with her, I felt as if I had entered that celestial realm myself.
And then the unspeakable happened.
Before I could fully enjoy these romantic moments, I soon found myself confronted with harsh reality. I attended a wedding that involved a forbidden love between a brother and a sister, a beautiful girl who’d become pregnant as a result of their incest. Was life trying to tell me to lay off my aunt? That even though we were not related by blood, society would look upon our relationship as incest if it continued?
After the wedding, I became a rat killer. A one-toothed Black man found hiding in a warehouse. An aspirin salesman who accidentally runs over a child. A soccer referee. A famous composer who falls in love with a Carmelite nun. A madman who stabs his host in the middle of the night, then jumps into bed with the man’s dessicated old wife, knowing all along that his comely young daughter was in the room downstairs. When the court heard that I’d done this, they assumed I was insane and confined me to an asylum. Not because I’d nearly killed a man but because I tried to have sex with a wrinkled old lady.
Fortunately, the times with my aunt were more pleasant. Eventually, my passion was returned, and we decided to elope. This part of the dream felt like a chase scene in a movie. We had to tie the knot before my parents discovered our plans and tried to stop it. First, I had to alter my birth certificate, then find a mayor who would marry us. We journeyed from one rural town to another until we found the barefoot mayor of a fishing village who tied the knot for us. Married at last, we made love like crazed weasels night and day.
My parents were upset, of course.
My father even showed up with a revolver, threatening to shoot me like a dog. But eventually I convinced him I would finish my studies, which I did. My aunt and I moved to Paris, where she typed the manuscript of my first novel. I thought of Hemingway and Hadley. I wondered if one day I too might win the Nobel Prize.
When I woke up, I felt terrible. I had indeed won the coveted Nobel but had also dumped my aunt after eight years and married my 20-year-old cousin. What is love, I wondered, if you can risk everything for a “heavenly” older woman then toss her aside for someone else? Could it be that inter-generational sex was like all sex — and no replacement for actual love?
By the time I’d brushed my teeth, I knew what had happened. I’d spent the whole night dreaming of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the hilarious postmodern novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. His book was a dream based on his real-life marriages to both an older aunt and a younger cousin. By reading it before going to bed, I entered this dream and also dreamed it when I fell asleep.
It is a good thing to enter another man’s dream when he has turned it into a novel. But it is a far, far better thing to write your own dreams — and to learn what love is before it’s too late.
© 2021 Andrew Jazprose Hill
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