Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (19 page)

It had been precisely this concern—placing science at the service of his religion—that, twenty years before, had impelled Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui to marry. Being only human after all, he had one day begun to conceive the idea of a dense phalanx of males, scions of his very own blood and spirit, in whom he would inculcate, from their earliest days at their mother’s breast, his fury toward the disgusting rodent breed, and who, having received an exceptional upbringing and education, would continue his mission, perhaps even beyond the borders of their native land. The image of six, seven Téllezes with doctorates from top-ranking institutions who would repeat and perpetuate
in aeternum
the vow that he had sworn, impelled him, a man who was marital inappetency incarnate, to have recourse to a matrimonial agency, which, in return for a somewhat excessive fee, supplied him with a twenty-five-year-old spouse, perhaps not a raving beauty—she had several teeth missing and, like those little ladies from the region irrigated by that supposedly silvery stream that goes by the (hyperbolic) name of the Río de la Plata, great rolls of fat around her waist and at the backs of her knees—but nonetheless possessed of the three qualities he had demanded: perfect health, an intact hymen, and high fertility.

Doña Zoila Saravia Durán was a girl from Huánuco whose family, by one of those turns of the wheel of fortune that are life’s favorite game, had come down in the world from the provincial aristocracy to the subproletariat of the capital. She had received her education at the free school run by the Salesian Mothers—for reasons of conscience or as publicity?—next door to their school for paying pupils, and like all her schoolmates had come to suffer from an Argentine complex as she grew up; in her case it took the form of meekness, silence, and gluttony. She had spent her life working as a classroom monitor for the Salesian Mothers, and her vague, undefined status as such—was she a servant? a worker? a salaried employee?—aggravated the servile insecurity that caused her to acquiesce and nod her head like a docile cow in any and every situation. When she was left an orphan at the age of twenty-four, she finally worked up the courage to visit, after much hesitation and painful soul-searching, the matrimonial agency that put her in touch with the man who was to be her lord and master. Due to the lack of erotic experience of both spouses, the consummation of the marriage was an extremely slow process, a serial in which, between false starts and impulses gone astray, fiascos due to faulty aim or precocious emission or the wrong position, the chapters followed one upon the other, the suspense mounted, and the stubborn hymen remained unperforated. Paradoxically, in view of the fact that they were an extremely virtuous couple, Doña Zoila first lost her virginity (not out of vice but due, rather, to mere blind chance and the newlyweds’ lack of practice) heterodoxically; that is to say, sodomitically.

Apart from this fortuitous abomination, the couple’s life had been a model of moral rectitude. Doña Zoila was a conscientious, hardworking, thrifty wife, and doggedly determined to respect her husband’s principles (which certain people chose to call eccentricities). She had never objected, for instance, to Don Federico’s strict injunction against the use of hot water (since, according to him, it sapped one’s will and caused head colds), despite the fact that even after twenty years she still turned purple from the cold on entering the shower. She had never failed to comply with the clause of the family code (unwritten but engraved upon the memory of each of its members) decreeing that no one was to sleep more than five hours a night so as not to encourage indolence, even though their crocodile yawns made the windowpanes quiver when the alarm clock went off every morning at 5 a.m. She had accepted with resignation her husband’s ukase that movies, dancing, theater, radio were to be excluded as permissible forms of family entertainment, on the grounds that they were immoral, and that meals in restaurants, travel, and any sort of fanciful caprice with regard to bodily attire or household furnishings was likewise forbidden as being too great a strain on the budget. It was only with respect to her one sin, gluttony, that she had been incapable of obeying the master of the house. Meat, fish, and rich desserts with whipped cream had very often appeared on the menu. This was the one and only area in his conjugal life in which Don Federico had been unable to impose his will: a strictly vegetarian diet.

But Doña Zoila had never made any attempt to indulge in her vice in secret, behind her husband’s back, and as the latter’s sedan entered the coquettish Miraflores district, he told himself that his wife’s forthrightness in this respect, while it might not have redeemed her sin, made it at most a venial one. When her irrepressible appetites were more powerful than her spirit of obedience, she devoured her beefsteak with onions, or her sole with hot peppers, or her apple pie with whipped cream before his very eyes, her cheeks beet-red with shame, and resigned beforehand to the punishment that would be meted out to her for that particular transgression. She had never objected to the sanctions he imposed. If (on account of a grilled steak or a chocolate bar) Don Federico forbade her to speak for three days, she herself stuffed a gag in her mouth so as not to disobey even in her sleep, and if the penalty was twenty spanks on her bare bottom, she hastened to undo her skirt and get the arnica out.

No, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui said to himself as he cast an absentminded glance at the gray (a color he detested) Pacific Ocean beyond the seawall of Miraflores that his sedan had just started across, when everything was said and done, Doña Zoila hadn’t disappointed him. His great failure in life was his children. What an enormous difference between the bold vanguard of princes of extermination that he had dreamed of and the four offspring that God and his gluttonous wife had inflicted upon him.

Their first two children had both been boys. But then came a rude blow. The thought had never even crossed his mind that Doña Zoila might give birth to girls. The first one had been a disappointment, something that might be attributed to mere chance. But when his wife’s fourth pregnancy also produced a creature without a visible penis or testicles, Don Federico, terrified at the prospect of continuing to engender incomplete beings, drastically eliminated the possibility that a momentary whim might lead to his begetting more offspring (by replacing the big double bed in their room by twin beds). He didn’t hate females; but, quite simply, since he was neither an erotomaniac nor a gourmand, what possible use did he have for persons whose greatest aptitudes were for fornicating and cooking? His one reason for reproducing had been to perpetuate his crusade. This hope had gone up in smoke with the arrival of Teresa and Laura, since Don Federico was not one of those modernists who stoutly maintain that a female, in addition to a clitoris, also has brains and can work side by side with males as their equal. Furthermore, he was deeply distressed by the possibility that his family name might be trampled in the mud. Didn’t statistics prove,
ad nauseam
, that ninety-five percent of women have been, are, or will be whores? In order to make certain that his daughters would end up among the five percent of virtuous females, Don Federico had organized their lives in rigorous detail: no low necklines at any time, dark stockings and long-sleeved smocks and sweaters both winter and summer, no nail polish, lipstick, rouge, eye makeup, no bangs, braids, ponytails, or any of the other bait that girls use to hook boys; no sports or diversions that might bring them into proximity with males, such as going to the beach or attending birthday parties. Infractions of these rules always met with corporal punishment.

But it was not only the intrusion of females among his descendants that had discouraged him. His sons—Ricardo and Federico Jr.—had not inherited their father’s virtues. They were weak-willed and lazy, given to useless activities (such as chewing gum and playing soccer), and they had not shown the slightest signs of enthusiasm when Don Federico explained what a glorious future lay in store for them. When, during vacations, he sent them out to work with the first-line combatants in order to train them, they proved to be slackers and took their places on the battlefield with obvious repugnance. And once he even overheard them muttering obscenities about his life’s work and confessing quite frankly that they were ashamed of their father. He had immediately shaved their heads like convicts, naturally, yet this did not in any way relieve the feeling of betrayal aroused in him by this conspiratorial conversation. Don Federico no longer entertained any illusions. He knew that, once he was dead or had grown feeble with age, Ricardo and Federico Jr. would stray from the path he had traced for them, would change professions (choosing some other with greater chrematistic attractions), and knew that his work—like a certain famous symphony—would remain unfinished.

It was at that precise moment that Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, to his physical and psychical misfortune, spied the magazine that a news vendor was thrusting through the windows of the sedan, its lurid cover gleaming in the bright morning sun. His face contorted in a grimace of disgust on noting that the cover photo showed a beach with two female bathers clad only in that mere simulacrum of swimsuits that certain hetaerae dared to parade about in, when, with a sort of painful rending of his optic nerve and his mouth gaping open like a wolf’s howling at the moon, Don Federico recognized the two half-naked bathers with obscene smiles on their faces. He felt a sudden horror rivaling that which he had felt, in that early Amazon dawn on the banks of the Pendencia, on seeing, in a cradle black with rat dung, the scattered bones of his sister’s corpse. The traffic light had turned green; the cars behind him were honking. With fumbling fingers, he took out his wallet, paid for the licentious publication, shifted into first, and took off, and sensing that he was about to have a collision—the steering wheel was slipping out of his hands and the car was lurching violently—he braked and drew to a stop along the curb.

Sitting there trembling with indignation, he stared for several long minutes at the terrible evidence. There was no possible doubt: it was his daughters. Photographed, no doubt, without their being aware of it by a brazen paparazzo hidden among the other bathers, the girls were not looking at the camera; they appeared to be chatting together as they lay on the sands of a voluptuous beach that might be Agua Dulce or La Herradura. Little by little Don Federico recovered his breath; despite being absolutely crushed, he managed to think of the incredible series of happenstances: that a roving photographer should chance to snap a picture of Laura and Teresa, that an ignoble magazine should expose them to the view of this rotten world, that he should happen to see them… And so, by the workings of blind chance, there the awful truth was, spread out before his eyes in lurid color. So his daughters obeyed him, then, only when he was present; so, the minute he turned his back, with the collusion, doubtless, of their brothers and, alas—Don Federico felt a sudden stab of pain in his heart—of his own wife, they defied his orders and went to the beach, they took their clothes off and exhibited themselves. Tears streamed down his face. He took a closer look at their bathing suits: two minuscule bits of cloth whose function was not to hide anything but simply to catapult the imagination to the most perverted extremes. There they were, within full view of anyone and everyone: the legs, arms, bellies, shoulders, necks of Laura and Teresa. He felt indescribably ridiculous as the thought crossed his mind that he himself had never seen these extremities and members that were now displayed before the entire universe.

He dried his eyes and started the engine up again. He had calmed down on the surface, but a blazing fire was burning deep within him. As the sedan proceeded very slowly toward his little house on the Avenida Pedro de Osma, he told himself that since they went to the beach naked it was only natural to presume that in his absence they also went to parties, wore pants, hung around with men, sold their bodies—did they perhaps receive the men they lured into their beds under his very own roof? was it Doña Zoila who set the prices and collected the money? Ricardo and Federico Jr. probably were in charge of the unspeakable task of hustling up customers for their sisters. Gasping for breath, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui saw the whole horrifying cast assembled before his very eyes: your daughters, the whores; your sons, the pimps; and your wife, the madam.

His daily contact with violence—after all, he had killed off thousands upon thousands of living beings—had made Don Federico a man who could not be provoked without grave risk. One day an agronomist with pretensions to being an expert in nutrition had dared to state in his presence that, in view of the lack of beef cattle in Peru, it was necessary to intensify the raising of guinea pigs as a source of food for the nation. Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui politely reminded the bold planner that guinea pigs were first cousins to rats. The expert, not giving an inch, cited statistics, spoke of their great nutritive value and the agreeable taste of their flesh. Don Federico then proceeded to slap him and, as the nutrition expert fell to the floor, rubbing his face, called him names he roundly deserved: a shameless wretch and a public-relations man for murderers. Now, as he got out of the car, locked it, and walked unhurriedly toward the door of his house, frowning and very pale, the man from Tingo María felt a volcanic lava boiling up within him, as on the day that he had taught the nutrition expert a lesson. He was carrying the infernal magazine, like a red-hot iron bar, in his right hand and felt an intense itching sensation in his eyes.

He was so upset he was unable to imagine a punishment that would fit the heinous crime. His mind felt hazy, he realized he was so angry he couldn’t think straight, and this made him more bitter still, for Don Federico was a man whose conduct was ruled by reason, and who despised that uncouth breed that acted, like animals, out of instinct and sheer gut feeling rather than out of conviction. But this time, as he took out his key, fumblingly inserted it in the keyhole, his fingers trembling with rage, and finally managed to get the door unlocked and push it open, he realized that he was not going to be able to act calmly and deliberately, but rather as his wrath dictated, following the inspiration of the moment. As he closed the door behind him, he took a deep breath, trying to get hold of himself. He was ashamed to think that those ingrates would doubtless see how profoundly they had humiliated him.