"Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" [.]

[fiefoe]

There were a couple of places where Marito was self-conscious about the many ways the radio serial was seeping into his life:

• (I was) surprised at hearing myself use a soap-opera cliché; but it seemed to me that by speaking in this way I distanced myself from my own story.
• (To convince the school secretary to release my birth certificate,) I had to invent another involved radio serial: a woman dying of cancer, who had to marry the man she'd been living with for years.
  

Before the radio serials became too outre and incoherent, ('impassivity of the fakir, British phlegm' surely qualify as SIPs,) they were fun to read:

• This engineer of souls comforted him affectionately, "Wipe your nose and persuade yourself that in the geography of the mind your illness is the equivalent of an ingrown toenail in the geography of the body."
• (Father Seferino) explained sanctioning polygamy by citing a proverbial phrase that, in addition to being heretical, was vulgar: "One love bite hides another."
• 'the ghost alibi'
• his "art", that is to say, his work or his vice, that urgent necessity that swept aside men, things, appetites.

The last quarter of the book just sort of fizzed out. The scriptwriter experienced a deliquescence of the mind; Marito did manager to find a morally flexible small-town mayor to marry him and Aunt Julia and their marriage lasted eight years.

latifundium: A great landed estate, especially of the ancient Romans.