Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (37 page)

In view of the magnitude of this concentration of the populace, the authorities had taken precautions. The most famous brigade of the Guardia Civil, the one which, in the space of a few months (heroism and self-sacrifice, boldness and urbanity) had cleared every last lawbreaker and malefactor out of El Callao, was brought to Lima to ensure security and civil behavior in the stands and on the playing field. Its chief, the celebrated Captain Lituma, the terror of crime, walked feverishly about the stadium and made the rounds of the gates and the adjacent streets, checking to make sure that the patrol squads were at their proper stations and issuing inspired orders to his doughty adjutant, Sergeant Jaime Concha.

Amid the roaring crowd in the western grandstand when the starting whistle blew, battered and bruised and almost unable to breathe, were, in addition to Santa Huanca Salaverría, who (masochism of the victim fallen head over heels in love with the man who has raped her) never missed one of the matches that Joaquín refereed, the venerable Don Sebastián Bergua, risen only recently from the bed of pain on which he lay as a result of the knife wounds he had received at the hands of the medical detail man Luis Marroquín Bellmont (who was in the northern grandstand of the stadium, by very special permission of the Board of Prisons?), his wife Margarita, and his daughter Rosa, now completely recovered from the bites inflicted upon her—O accursed Amazon dawn—by a pack of rats.

There was nothing to foreshadow the impending tragedy when Joaquín Hinostroza (Tello? Delfín)—who, as usual, had been obliged to make the tour of the stadium to acknowledge the applause—alert and agile, blew the starting whistle. On the contrary, the match proceeded in an enthusiastic, courteous atmosphere: the players’ passes, the fans’ applause acclaiming the forwards’ shots for the net and the goalkeepers’ blocks. From the very first moment, it was evident that the oracles would be fulfilled: the teams were evenly matched and the play fair but hard. More creative than ever, Joaquín Hinostroza (Abril?) glided across the turf as though on roller skates, never getting in the players’ way and invariably placing himself at the very best angle, and his decisions, stern but just, prevented (heat of battle that turns a contest into a brawl) the match from degenerating into violence. But (limits of the human condition) not even a saintly Jehovah’s Witness could prevent the fulfillment of what destiny (impassivity of the fakir, British phlegm) had plotted.

The irreversible infernal mechanism began to function in the second half, when the score was tied 1–1 and the spectators found themselves with no voice left and their palms burning. Captain Lituma and Sergeant Concha said to each other, naïvely, that everything was going very well: not a single incident—a robbery, a fight, a lost child—had occurred to spoil the afternoon.

But at precisely 4:13 p.m., the fifty thousand spectators saw the totally unexpected happen, before their very eyes. From the most crowded section of the southern grandstand, an apparition suddenly emerged—black, thin, very tall, one enormous tooth—nimbly scaled the fence, and rushed out onto the playing field uttering incomprehensible cries. The people in the stands were less surprised to see that the man was nearly naked—all he had on was a tiny loincloth—than they were to see that his body was covered, from head to foot, with scars. A collective gasp shook the stands; everyone realized that the tattooed man intended to kill the referee. There could be no doubt of it: the shrieking giant was running straight toward the idol of the world of soccer (Gumercindo Hinostroza Delfín?), who, totally absorbed in his art, had not seen him and was going on modeling the match.

Who was the imminent assailant? Was it perhaps that stowaway who had mysteriously arrived in El Callao and been caught by the night patrol? The same unfortunate wretch whom the authorities had euthanasiacally decided to shoot to death and whose life the sergeant (Concha?) had spared on a dark night? Neither Captain Lituma nor Sergeant Concha had time to check. Realizing that if they did not act at once, a national glory might be the victim of an attack on his life, the captain—superior and subordinate had a method of communicating with each other by blinking—ordered the sergeant to go into action. Without rising to his feet, Jaime Concha drew his revolver and fired the twelve bullets in it, every one of which lodged in different parts of the nudist’s body (at a distance of fifty yards). In this way the sergeant had finally complied (better late than never, as the old saying goes) with the orders he had been given, for, in fact, it was the stowaway of El Callao!

Seeing its idol’s potential murderer, whom an instant before it had hated, riddled with bullets was enough to cause the crowd (capricious whims of a fickle flirt, coquettishness of a changeable female) to side immediately with him, to transform him into a martyr, and to turn against the Guardia Civil. A collective hissing, booing, whistling that deafened the birds in the sky rose from the stands as the crowd voiced its protest at the sight of the black lying on the field bleeding to death from the twelve bullet holes. The sound of gunfire had disconcerted the players, but the Great Hinostroza (Téllez Unzátegui?), true to himself, had not allowed the match to be stopped, and went on with his brilliant refereeing, nimbly sidestepping the interloper’s corpse, deaf to the whistling from the stands, to which jeers, taunts, insults were now added. The first multicolored cushions were already sailing through the air, soon to become a veritable deluge raining down on Captain Lituma’s police detachment. The latter smelled a hurricane in the offing and decided to act quickly. He ordered his men to prepare to launch tear-gas bombs, his intention being to prevent at all costs a terrible bloodbath. And a few moments later, when the barriers around the ring had been breached at many points and here and there impassioned taurophiles bent on mayhem were rushing into the arena, he ordered his men to hurl a few grenades on the edges of the bullring. A few tears and coughing fits, he thought, would calm the enraged protestors down and peace would reign once again in the Plaza de Acho as soon as the wind had dispersed the chemical effluvia. He also ordered a group of four Guardias to surround Sergeant Jaime Concha, who had become the principal target of the hotheads: they were obviously determined to lynch him, even if they were obliged to confront the bull to do so.

But Captain Lituma was forgetting one essential fact: in order to keep out the spectators without tickets who were milling about outside the bullfight stadium and threatening to force their way in, he had ordered the gates and metal grilles blocking access to the stands to be lowered. When the Guardias Civiles, complying immediately with his orders, let fly with their tear-gas grenades and here and there, within a few seconds, pestilential fumes spread in the stands, the spectators’ reaction was to clear out instantly. Leaping to their feet in a panic, shoving, pushing as they covered their mouths with their handkerchiefs and tears began streaming from their eyes, they ran toward the exits. The human tide then realized that the way out was blocked by the metal gates and grilles hemming them in. Blocked? Only for a few seconds, until the front ranks of each column, transformed into ramrods by the pressure of those behind them, stove them in, knocked them down, ripped them apart, and tore them from their hinges. And thus the inhabitants of El Rímac who chanced to be strolling by the Plaza de Toros at four-thirty that Sunday afternoon witnessed a barbarous and most unusual spectacle: suddenly, amid deathly crackling flames, the doors of the Plaza de Acho burst asunder and began to spit out mangled corpses which (troubles never come singly) were also being trampled underfoot by the panicked crowd escaping through the blood-soaked breaches.

Among the first victims of the Bajo el Puente holocaust were the introducers of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect in Peru: the man from Moquegua, Don Sebastián Bergua, his wife Margarita, and his daughter Rosa, the eminent flutist. The religious family lost their lives through what ought to have saved them: prudence. For the moment that the cannibal climbed the barrier, rushed out into the ring, and was about to be mangled to death by the bull, Don Sebastián Bergua, with furrowed brow and a dictatorial finger, had given his tribe the order: “Retreat.” It was motivated not by fear, a word unknown to the evangelist, but by good sense, the thought that neither he nor members of his family ought to appear to be involved in any sort of scandal and thus give his enemies a pretext for trampling the good name of his faith in the mud. And so the Berguas hurriedly abandoned their seats on the sunny side of the ring and were making their way down the grandstand steps to the exit when the tear-gas grenades went off. The three of them were standing, beatifically, in front of metal grille number 6, waiting for it to be raised, when they caught sight of the lachrymose crowd descending upon them from behind with a great roar. They had no time to repent of sins they had never committed before they were literally mashed to bits (turned into a puree, a human soup?) against the metal grille by the terrified multitude. A second before passing on to that other life that he denied existed, Don Sebastián managed to cry out, a stubborn, heterodox believer still: “Christ died on a tree, not on a cross!”

The death of the mentally unbalanced assailant who had attacked Don Sebastián Bergua with a knife and raped Doña Margarita and the concert artist was (would the expression be appropriate? ) less unfair. For, once the tragedy had begun, young Marroquín Delfín thought he spied his opportunity: amid the confusion, he would escape from the guard whom the Board of Prisons had ordered to accompany him in order that he might attend the historic bullfight, and flee from Lima, from Peru; once abroad, under another name, he would begin a new life of crime and madness. Illusions that turned to dust moments later when, at the gate of exit number 5 (Lucho? Ezequiel?) Marroquín Delfín and the prison guard Chumpitaz, who was holding him by the hand, had the dubious honor of forming part of the first row of taurophiles crushed to death by the crowd. (The intertwined fingers of the police officer and the medical detail man, though those of corpses, set tongues to wagging.)

The demise of Sarita Huanca Salaverría had at least the elegance of being less promiscuous. It was a case of a tremendous misunderstanding, of an erroneous evaluation of acts and intentions on the part of the authorities. When the incidents occurred, when she saw the cannibal gored to death, the smoke of the grenades, and heard the screams of the crowd as their bones shattered, the girl from Tingo María decided that (love-passion that takes all fear of death away) she should be at the side of the man she loved. Unlike the crowd, therefore, she descended into the bullring, and was thus saved from being trampled to death. This did not save her, however, from the eagle eye of Captain Lituma, who caught sight, amid the spreading clouds of tear gas, of an unidentified figure leaping over the barrier and rushing toward the torero (who, despite everything, went on inciting the bull to charge and making passes on his knees). Convinced that his obligation, so long as he had a single breath of life left in him, was to prevent the matador from being attacked, Captain Lituma drew his revolver and with three rapid shots in succession cut short the career and life of the woman possessed by love: Sarita fell dead at the very feet of Gumercindo Bellmont.

The man from La Perla was the only one, amid all the victims of that Greek afternoon, to die a natural death—if it is possible to describe as natural the phenomenon, unheard of in these prosaic times, of a man dying of heart failure on seeing his beloved lying dead at his feet. He fell to the ground alongside Sarita, and the two of them, with their last breath, managed to embrace and thus enter, clasped in each other’s arms, the dark night of hapless lovers (such as a certain Romeo and Juliet?)…

And then the peace officer with the immaculate service record, sadly contemplating the fact that, despite his experience and sagacity, not only had the peace been disturbed but the Plaza de Acho and environs had been turned into a cemetery of unburied corpses, used his last remaining bullet to (old sea dog who goes down with his ship to the bottom of the ocean) blow his brains out and bring his biography to a (manly but not brilliant) end. The moment they saw their chief take his life, the morale of the Guardias fell apart; forgetting discipline, esprit de corps, love for the institution, they thought only of shedding their uniforms, hiding in the civilian clothes they tore off the corpses, and escaping. A number of them succeeded in doing so. But not Jaime Concha, whom the survivors first castrated, then hanged with his own leather chest belt from the crosspiece of the bull-pen door. And there the decent chap who read Uncle Donalds, the diligent centurion remained, dangling back and forth beneath the sky of Lima, which (as if wishing to be in keeping with what had happened?) had become filled with roiling clouds and begun to rain down its usual winter drizzle…

Would this story end thus, in Dantesque slaughter? Or, like the Phoenix (the Hen?), would it be reborn from its ashes in the form of new episodes and recalcitrant characters? What would the outcome of this taurine tragedy be?

We left Lima at nine
o’clock in the morning, taking a jitney at the university campus. Aunt Julia had left my aunt’s and uncle’s house on the pretext of doing some last-minute shopping before her trip, and I my grandparents’ house as though I were going to work as usual at the radio station. She was carrying a paper sack with a nightgown and a change of underwear; I had put my toothbrush, a comb, and a razor (which, to tell the truth, I didn’t often need as yet) in my pockets.

Pascual and Javier were waiting for us at the university campus and had already bought the jitney tickets. Luckily, no other passengers turned up. Pascual and Javier very discreetly sat down in the front seat with the driver, leaving the back seat for Aunt Julia and me. It was a typical winter morning, with an overcast sky and a continual drizzle that escorted us a good part of the way across the desert. During very nearly the entire trip, Aunt Julia and I kissed passionately and held hands without exchanging a word, as we listened to the murmur of conversation between Pascual and Javier, mingled with the sound of the engine, and from time to time a comment from the driver. We arrived in Chincha at eleven-thirty; there was splendid sun now and it was delightfully warm. The clear sky, the luminous air, the noisy hustle and bustle on the streets filled with people all seemed favorable omens. Aunt Julia smiled happily.

As Pascual and Javier headed for the city hall to see if everything was ready, Aunt Julia and I went to get a room at the Hotel Sudamericano. It was an old single-story wood-and-adobe brick building, with a covered patio that served as a dining room, and a dozen tiny rooms along either side of a narrow hall with a tiled floor, like a bordello. The ’man at the desk asked us for identification papers; my journalist’s card was enough to satisfy him, and when I added “and wife” next to my name in the guest register he merely gave Aunt Julia a mocking look. The little room that we were given had a cracked tile floor with bare earth showing through, a sagging double bed with a quilt in a green diamond pattern, a little chair with a straw seat, and a couple of stout nails on the wall to hang our clothes on. The minute we stepped inside, we embraced passionately and stood there kissing and caressing till Aunt Julia pushed me away, laughing. “Stop right there, Varguitas, we have to get married first.”

She was all excited, her eyes shining with joy. I felt that I loved her very much and was happy to be marrying her, and as I waited for her to wash her hands and comb her hair in the common bathroom down the hall, I vowed to myself that we wouldn’t be like all the married couples I knew, one more disaster, but would live happily ever after, and that getting married wouldn’t stop me from becoming a writer someday. Aunt Julia finally came out and we walked hand in hand to the city hall.

We found Pascual and Javier standing in the doorway of a café, having a cold drink. The mayor had gone off to preside over an inaugural ceremony of some sort, but would be back soon. I asked them if they were absolutely certain they’d definitely arranged for Pascual’s relative to marry us at noon, and they made fun of me. Javier cracked jokes about the impatient bridegroom and made a terrible pun: “Better wait than never.” To pass the time, the four of us strolled around the Plaza de Armas beneath the tall eucalyptus and oak trees. There were some kids running around chasing each other and some old men having their shoes shined as they read the Lima papers. Half an hour later, we were back at the city hall. The secretary, a skinny little man with enormous glasses, passed on the bad news: the mayor had returned from the inauguration, but he’d gone to have lunch at El Sol de Chincha.

“Didn’t you tell him we were waiting for him for the marriage ceremony?” Javier said reprovingly.

“He was with a group of people and it wasn’t the right moment,” the secretary replied with the air of an expert in matters of etiquette.

“We’ll go find him at the restaurant and bring him back,” Pascual said to me reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Don Mario.”

By asking around, we finally found El Sol de Chincha, near the Plaza. It was a typical provincial restaurant, with little tables without tablecloths, and a stove at the back, sputtering and smoking, with women bustling about it with copper pans and pots and platters full of wonderful-smelling dishes. There was a phonograph blaring out a Peruvian waltz at top volume, and the place was full of people. Just as Aunt Julia, standing in the doorway, was starting to say that it might be more prudent to wait till the mayor had finished his lunch, the latter recognized Pascual and called him over to his table in one corner. We saw the Panamericana editor being greeted with a big hug by a rather fair-haired young man who had gotten up from a table with half a dozen other people, all men, sitting around it, each with a bottle of beer in front of him. Pascual motioned to us to come over.

“Of course—the fiancé’s—I’d completely forgotten,” the mayor said, shaking our hands and looking Aunt Julia over from head to foot with an expert eye. He turned to his companions, who contemplated him with servile expressions on their faces, and informed them, in a loud voice so as to make himself heard over the waltz: “These two have just eloped from Lima and I’m going to marry them.”

There was laughter, applause, hands reaching out to shake ours, and the mayor insisted that we sit down with them and ordered more beer to drink a toast to our happiness.

“But you’re not to sit next to each other—you’ve got all the rest of your life for that,” he said euphorically, taking Aunt Julia by the arm and seating her next to him. “The right place for the bride-to-be is here beside me, since luckily my wife isn’t here.”

Everyone at the table applauded his little joke. All of them were older than the mayor, merchants or planters dressed in their best, and they all appeared to be as drunk as he was. Some of them knew Pascual and asked him how things were going for him in Lima and when he was going to come back home. Sitting next to Javier at one end of the table, I was trying my best to smile, drinking little sips of nearly lukewarm beer, and counting the minutes ticking by. The mayor and the others soon lost interest in us. The bottles kept coming, by themselves at first, then accompanied by raw fish marinated in lemon juice, smoked sole, almond pastries filled with custard, and then by themselves again. Nobody remembered the marriage ceremony, not even Pascual, who, with bloodshot eyes and a thick tongue, had joined in with the others and was singing sentimental songs with the mayor. Having flirted with Aunt Julia all through lunch, the latter was now trying to put his arm around her and leaning his bloated face toward hers. With little forced smiles, Aunt Julia was keeping her distance and casting anxious looks in our direction every so often.

“Cool it, old pal,” Javier kept saying to me. “Don’t think about anything but the marriage ceremony.”

“It seems to me the whole thing’s gone down the drain,” I said when I heard the mayor, who was high as a kite now, talking about bringing in guitarists, closing El Sol de Chincha, having a private dancing party. “And I predict I’ll end up in jail once I’ve punched that stupid bastard in the nose.”

I was furious and determined to knock his block off if he got out of line. I got to my feet and told Aunt Julia that we were leaving. Vastly relieved, she stood up immediately and the mayor made no attempt to hold her back. He went on singing
marineras
, on key, and as we started for the door he gave us a little farewell smile that struck me as being sarcastic, but Javier, who was following along behind us, said that it was merely alcoholic. As we were walking back to the Hotel Sudamericano, I began saying nasty things about Pascual, whom I blamed—I don’t know why—for the entire absurd lunch.

“Don’t be a spoiled brat, and learn to keep a cool head,” Javier said reprovingly. “That cousin of his is plastered to the gills and doesn’t remember a thing. But don’t worry, he’ll marry you today. Wait in the hotel till I call you.”

The moment Aunt Julia and I were alone in the room, we fell into each other’s arms and began kissing with a sort of desperation. We didn’t say a word, but our hands and mouths spoke volumes about all the intense and beautiful things we were feeling. We’d begun to embrace standing just inside the door, and little by little we drew closer to the bed, first sitting down on it and finally lying down on it, without ever having let go of each other. Half blind with happiness and desire, I fondled Aunt Julia’s body with inexpert, eager hands, with all her clothes on at first, and then I unbuttoned her brick-colored blouse, badly wrinkled now, and was kissing her breasts when there was an inopportune knock at the door.

“Everything’s all set, you concubines,” we heard Javier’s voice say. “In five minutes, in the mayor’s office. The famous kindhearted idiot is waiting for us.”

We leapt up from the bed, dazed and happy, and Aunt Julia, beet-red with embarrassment, straightened her clothes, as meantime, like a little boy, I closed my eyes and thought about abstract, respectable things—numbers, triangles, circles, my granny, my mama—to make my erection go away. Taking turns in the bathroom down the hall, we washed and combed our hair a little, then walked back to the city hall, so fast that we arrived all out of breath. The secretary immediately ushered us into the mayor’s office, a big room with a Peruvian seal of state hanging on the wall, overlooking a desk with little flags and official registers and half a dozen benches, like a schoolroom. With his face washed and his hair still damp, calm and collected, the rubicund burgomaster bowed ceremoniously to us from behind the desk. He was an entirely different person: formal and solemn. Javier and Pascual, standing on either side of the desk, smiled at us roguishly.

“Well then, let’s begin,” the mayor said, his voice betraying him: thick and hesitant, as though his tongue were blocking it. “Where are the papers?”

“You have them, sir,” Javier answered, with infinite politeness. “Pascual and I left them with you on Friday so as to expedite matters, remember?”

“You really must be sozzled if you’ve forgotten, cousin.” Pascual laughed in an equally drunken voice. “Especially since you were the one who asked us to leave them with you.”

“Well, the secretary must have them, then,” the mayor muttered in embarrassment. Giving Pascual a dirty look, he called out: “Secretary!”

It took the skinny little man with enormous glasses several minutes to find the birth certificates and Aunt Julia’s divorce decree. We waited in silence as the mayor smoked a cigarette, yawned, and impatiently looked at his watch. The secretary finally brought them in, scrutinizing them with a disgusted look on his face. As he laid them down on the desk, he murmured in a slightly officious tone of voice: “Here they are, sir. There’s a problem on account of the young man’s age, as I’ve already told you.”

“Did anybody ask you?” Pascual said, taking a step in his direction as though he were about to strangle him.

“I’m only doing my duty,” the secretary said. And then, turning to the mayor, he insisted acidly, pointing to me: “He’s only eighteen and he hasn’t presented a document proving he has official court permission to marry.”

“How come you’ve got such an imbecile for an assistant, cousin?” Pascual burst out. “What’s keeping you from booting him out and bringing in somebody with a few more brains?”

“Be quiet. The alcohol you’ve consumed has gone to your head and you’re getting nasty,” the mayor said. He cleared his throat to give himself a little time, crossed his arms, and looked at Aunt Julia and me gravely. “I’m prepared to allow you to dispense with posting banns, in order to do you a favor. But this other is a more serious matter. I’m very sorry.”

“What!” I said to him, completely taken aback. “Haven’t you known since Friday that I’m a minor?”

“What’s this whole stupid farce all about, anyway?” Javier chimed in. “You and I had an understanding that you’d marry them without any problem.”

“Are you asking me to commit a crime?” the mayor huffed. He too was indignant now. And with an air of injured dignity he added: “Furthermore, don’t raise your voice like that when you speak to me. People with manners settle misunderstandings by talking things over, not by shouting.”

“But you’ve gone mad, cousin,” Pascual said in a fury, pounding on the desk. “You agreed, you knew there was an age problem, you said it didn’t matter. Don’t pull this amnesiac bit on me or start splitting legal hairs. Marry them once and for all and stop screwing around!”

“Don’t use dirty words in front of a lady, and don’t drink any more, because you can’t hold your liquor,” the mayor replied serenely. He turned to the secretary and motioned for him to leave the room. Once we were alone, he lowered his voice and gave us a conspiratorial smile. “Can’t you see that that guy is a spy for my enemies? Now that he’s caught on, I can’t marry you. I’d be up to my neck in trouble in no time.”

There was nothing I could say to persuade him: I swore to him that my parents lived in the U.S. and that was the reason I hadn’t presented a court dispensation, that nobody in my family was going to make trouble if he married us, that the minute Aunt Julia and I were man and wife we’d be going off to live abroad for the rest of our lives.

“We were all agreed. You can’t play a dirty trick like this on us,” Javier said.

“Don’t be such a hard-ass, cousin,” Pascual said, taking him by the arm. “Don’t you realize we’ve come all the way from Lima?”

“Quiet down and stop ganging up on me. I think I’ve got an idea. Yes, that’s the solution, all right. Your troubles are over,” the mayor finally said, getting up from his desk and winking at us. “Tambo de Mora! Martín the fisherman! Go down there right now. Tell him I sent you. Martín the fisherman, a sambo, a really nice guy. He’d be delighted to marry you. It’s better that way, a little village, no fuss. Martín, Martín the mayor. Just slip him a little tip and that’ll be it. He can barely read or write—he won’t even look at your papers.”

I tried to persuade him to come with us, I joked with him, I buttered him up, I pleaded with him, but there was nothing doing: he had appointments, work to do, his family was waiting for him. He showed us to the door, assuring us that the whole thing could be taken care of in a couple of minutes in Tambo de Mora.