Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  And, in fact, in the beginning young Ezequiel Delfín brought nothing but satisfaction to the Bergua family. He had no appetite and nice manners, he paid his Pensión bills promptly, and was given to such charming gestures as bringing Doña Margarita bunches of violets from time to time, offering Don Sebastián a carnation for his buttonhole, and giving Rosa musical scores and a metronome on her birthday. His shyness, which prevented him from ever speaking to a person without having first been spoken to, and in such a case, of always speaking in a soft voice and with lowered eyes, never looking directly at the person, and his refined behavior and vocabulary greatly pleased the Berguas, who soon became very fond of their boarder, and perhaps in their heart of hearts (a family won over for life to the philosophy of the lesser evil) they began to entertain the notion of eventually promoting him to the elevated status of son-in-law.

  Don Sebastián in particular became very attached to him: did he perhaps see in this well-bred traveling salesman that son that his diligent crippled wife had been unable to bear him? One afternoon in December he took him to visit the Hermitage of Saint Rose of Lima, where he saw him toss a gold piece in the well and ask a secret favor, and on a certain torrid summer Sunday he invited him to have an orange sherbet in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín. Because he was so quiet and melancholy, the young man seemed elegant to Don Sebastián. Was he suffering from some mysterious malady of soul or body that was causing him to waste away, some love wound that could not be stanched? Ezequiel Delfín was as silent as the grave about himself, and when on occasion, with all due precaution, the Berguas had offered him a shoulder to cry on and asked him why he always kept so much to himself, being such a young man, why he never went to a party, a movie, why he never laughed, why he so often heaved a deep sigh, with his eyes staring into empty space, he merely blushed and, stammering an apology, ran to shut himself up in the bathroom, where he sometimes spent hours on end, maintaining that he was suffering from constipation. He came and went on his travels in connection with his job, like a veritable sphinx—the family never even managed to find out what sort of company he worked for, what products he sold—and here in Lima, when he wasn’t out on the road, he spent his time shut up in his room (reading his Bible or absorbed in his devotions?). Because they were born matchmakers, and because they felt sorry for him, Doña Margarita and Don Sebastián urged him to come downstairs and hear Rosita practice “as a diversion,” and he obediently did so: sitting motionless in a corner of the living room, he would listen attentively and applaud politely when she finished. He often accompanied Don Sebastián to morning Mass, and during Holy Week of that year he did the Stations of the Cross with the Berguas. He already seemed like a member of the family at that point.

  Hence, the day that Ezequiel, who had just returned from a trip to the North, suddenly burst into sobs in the middle of lunch, startling the other boarders—a justice of the peace from Ancachs, a parish priest from Cajatambo, and two girls from Huanuco who were studying nursing—and spilled the meager portion of lentils that had just been served him onto the table, the Berguas were very concerned. The three of them took him up to his room Don Sebastián lent him his handkerchief, Doña Margarita made him a cup of verbena-and-mint tea, and Rosa covered his feet with a blanket. Ezequiel Delfín calmed down after a few minutes, apologized for “his weakness,” explained that he’d been very nervous lately, that he didn’t know why but very often these days, at any hour of the day and no matter where he happened to be, he’d burst into tears all of a sudden. Covered with shame, in a voice that was almost a whisper, he revealed to them that he was often overcome by fits of terror, he would lie awake all night till dawn, all curled up in a ball and dripping with cold sweat, thinking of ghosts and filled with self-pity because he was so lonely. His confession brought tears to Rosa’s eyes, and her little lame mother crossed herself. Don Sebastián offered to sleep there in the same bedroom with the terrified young man to comfort and reassure him. Ezequiel Delfín kissed Don Sebastián’s hands in gratitude.

  An extra bed was set up in the room and diligently made up by Doña Margarita and her daughter. Don Sebastián was then in the prime of life, his fifties, and was in the habit of doing fifty abdominals before getting into bed (he did his exercises before going to bed at night, instead of after getting up in the morning, so as to distinguish himself from the vulgar in this regard as well), but in order not to disturb Ezequiel, he skipped them that night. The nervous young man had retired early, after downing a lovingly prepared bowl of chicken-giblet broth and assuring them that the company of Don Sebastián had already put his mind at rest and that he was sure he’d sleep like a top.

  The details of what happened that night were never to be erased from the memory of the gentleman from Ayacucho: they were to haunt him, awake or asleep, till the end of his days, and—who knows?—they were perhaps to continue to torment him in his next reincarnation. He had turned the light out at an early hour, had heard the regular breathing of the sensitive young man in the bed next to him, and, pleased and relieved, had thought to himself: He’s dropped off to sleep. He felt himself getting sleepier and sleepier too, and had heard the bells of the cathedral and the uproarious laughter of a drunk somewhere off in the distance. Then he had fallen asleep and peacefully dreamed the most pleasant and reassuring of dreams: in a castle with a pointed tower, on whose walls were hung shields, titles of nobility, parchments with heraldic flowers and family trees tracing his ancestral lineage back to Adam, the Lord of Ayacucho (he himself!) was receiving abundant tribute and fervent homage from hordes of lice-ridden Indians who were thus simultaneously feeding his coffers and his vanity.

  Suddenly—had fifteen minutes or three hours gone by?—something that could have been a noise, a presentiment, the faltering footfalls of a spirit, awakened him. In the darkness relieved only by a dim streak of light from the street filtering through the slit between the curtains, he managed to make out a silhouette rising from the bed next to his and silently floating toward the door. Still half asleep, he presumed that the constipated young man was going to the bathroom to try to move his bowels, or that he was feeling bad again, and asked in a low voice: “Ezequiel, are you all right?” Instead of an answer, he heard, very clearly, the bolt on the door being slid home (it was rusty and creaked). He did not understand, sat halfway up, and slightly alarmed, asked again: “Is anything the matter, Ezequiel? Can I help you?” He then was suddenly aware that the young man (cat-men so lightfooted they seem to be everywhere at once) had come back across the room and was now standing right next to his bed, blocking the little streak of light from the window. “Ezequiel, please answer me, what’s the matter with you?” he murmured, fumbling about in the dark for the switch of the bedside lamp. At that instant he received the first knife thrust, the deepest jab of all, the one that sank into his chest as though it were butter and pierced a collarbone. He was certain he had screamed, cried for help, and as he tried to defend himself, to free himself of the sheets tangled round his feet, he was surprised that neither his wife nor his daughter nor any of the other boarders came running to his aid. But in fact no one heard anything at all. Later, as the police and the judge reconstructed the gruesome assault, they had all been amazed that Don Sebastián had not been able to disarm the criminal, since he was so robust and Ezequiel so frail. They had no way of knowing that in the bloody shadows the medical detail man had appeared to be possessed of a supernatural strength: Don Sebastián had managed to give only imaginary cries and try to guess the trajectory of the next knife thrust in order to ward it off with his hands.

  He received fourteen or fifteen of them (the doctors were of the opinion that the gaping wound in his left buttock might have been—extraordinary coincidences that turn a man’s hair white in a single night and make a person believe in God—the result of two blows in exactly the same place), evenly distributed all over his body, with the exception of his face, which—a miracle owed to El Señor de Limpias, as Doña Margarita thought, or to
Saint Rose of Lima, as the latter’s namesake claimed?—had not received so much as a scratch. The knife, as was learned later, belonged to the Berguas, a razor-sharp blade eight inches long that had mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen a week before and that left the body of the man from Ayacucho with more holes and gashes than that of a hired ruffian.

  To what did he owe the fact that he didn’t die? To chance, to God’s mercy, and (above all) to an even greater quasi-tragedy. No one had heard anything; with fourteen—fifteen—knife wounds in his body, Don Sebastián had just lost consciousness and was slowly bleeding to death in the darkness; and the impulsive young man might have crept down to the street and disappeared forever. But, like so many famous men in history, a strange caprice was his undoing. Once his victim had ceased to resist him, Ezequiel Delfín threw the knife down and instead of getting dressed got undressed. As naked as the day he was born, he opened the door, crossed the hall, entered Doña Margarita Bergua’s room, and without further explanation flung himself on her bed with the unmistakable intention of fornicating with her. Why her? Why try to rape a lady of admittedly noble ancestry, but also in her fifties, with one leg shorter than the other, short and dumpy and, in a word, according to any known aesthetic criteria, undeniably and irredeemably ugly? Why not have attempted, rather, to pluck the forbidden fruit of the adolescent pianist, who, besides being a virgin, had vim, vigor, and vitality, raven hair, and alabaster skin? Why not try to steal into the secret seraglio of the nursing students from Huanuco, who were in their twenties and probably had firm, delectable flesh? It was these humiliating circumstances that led the Judiciary to accept the argument of the attorney for the defense that Ezequiel Delfín was mentally unbalanced and commit him to Larco Herrera instead of sending him to prison.

  On receiving the unexpected amorous visit from the young man, Señora Margarita Bergua realized that something very serious was happening. She was a realistic woman and had no illusions as to her charms. “Even in my dreams, nobody tried to rape me, so I knew immediately that that stark-naked man was either utterly mad or a criminal,” she declared. And so she defended herself like an enraged lioness: in her testimony she swore by the Virgin Mary that the impetuous intruder had been incapable of inflicting so much as a kiss upon her—and in addition to keeping her honor from being outraged, she had saved her husband’s life. For as she fought off the pervert with tooth and nail, elbow and knee, she let out screams and shouts (real ones, in her case) that awoke her daughter and the other boarders. Rosa, the judge from Ancachs, the parish priest from Cajatambo, and the student nurses from Huanuco managed between them to overpower the exhibitionist and tie him up, and then all of them ran to look for Don Sebastián: was he still alive?

  It took them nearly an hour to get an ambulance to take him to Arzobispo Loayza Hospital, and it was nearly three hours before the police arrived to rescue Lucho Abril Marroquín from the clutches of the young pianist, who, beside herself with fury (because of the wounds inflicted upon her father? because of the offense to her mother’s honor? because perhaps—a human soul with turbid flesh and poisonous secret recesses—of the affront to herself?), was trying to scratch his eyes out and drink his blood. At the police station, the young medical detail man, recovering his usual gentle manner and soft-spoken voice, blushing out of sheer timidity as he spoke, roundly denied the evidence. The Berguas and the boarders were slandering him: he had never attacked anyone, he had never attempted to rape any woman, certainly not a cripple like Margarita Bergua, a lady who, because of her many kindnesses and thoughtful attentions, was—after, naturally, his own wife, that young woman with Italian eyes and musical knees and elbows who came from the country of love and song—the person whom he loved and respected more than anyone else in this world. His serenity, his courtesy, his meekness, the splendid character references given him by his superiors and co-workers at the Bayer Laboratories, the lily-whiteness of his police record, made the guardians of law and order hesitate. Could it be that (fathomless magic spell of deceptive appearances) all this was a plot cooked up by the wife and daughter of the victim and the other boarders against this sensitive young man? The fourth power of the state looked upon this hypothesis with favor and ordered the record to so show.

  To further complicate matters and contribute to keeping the city in suspense, the object of the crime, Don Sebastián Bergua, was in no condition to settle the question, for he was lingering between life and death in the public clinic on the Avenue Alfonso Ugarte. He was given copious blood transfusions, which brought many of his compatriots from the Tambo-Ayacucho Club to the very brink of tuberculosis, for the moment they heard about the tragedy they had rushed to the clinic to Doñate their blood, and these transfusions, plus serums, sutures, disinfections, bandages, nurses on duty at his bedside round the clock, surgeons who reset his bones, rebuilt his organs, and calmed his nerves, exhausted in the space of just a few weeks the last of the family’s financial resources (already vastly reduced by inflation and the galloping cost of living). The Berguas were therefore obliged to sell off their bonds at a ridiculously low price, to divide their property and rent it out in bits and pieces and hole up on the second floor, where they were now vegetating.

  Don Sebastián managed to escape death, but in the beginning his recovery was apparently not complete enough to lay the suspicions of the police to rest. As a result of the knife wounds, the terror that he had undergone, or the moral sullying of his wife’s honor, he was left a mute (and, it was rumored, an idiot as well). He could not utter a single word, he looked at everything and everybody with the lethargic inexpressiveness of a tortoise, and his fingers, too, would not obey him, since he could not (would not?) answer in writing the questions put to him when the insane man’s case was tried.

  The trial assumed major proportions and the City of Kings held its breath in suspense during the hearings. Lima, Peru—all of mestizo America?—followed the courtroom battle with passionate interest, the forensic disputes, the testimony and counter-testimony of the experts, the arguments of the public prosecutor and the attorney for the defense, a famous jurist who had come especially from Rome, the city of marble, to defend Lucho Abril Marroquín, because the latter was the husband of a little Italian girl who, besides being the legal expert’s compatriot, was also his daughter.

  The country was divided into two opposing factions. Those convinced of the innocence of the medical detail man—all the newspapers—maintained that Don Sebastián had been the victim of a murder attempt on the part of his wife and offspring, in collusion with the judge from Ancachs, the little parish priest from Cajatambo, and the nursing students from Huanuco, their motives doubtless having been the inheritance and monetary gain. The Roman jurist imperially defended this view, affirming that, having become aware of the gentle madness of Lucho Abril Marroquín, the family and the boarders had hatched a plot to foist the blame for the crime on him (or perhaps to induce him to commit it?). And he continued to adduce arguments in support of this thesis, which the organs of the press then enlarged upon, applauded, and claimed were proven fact: could anyone in his right mind possibly believe that a man would receive fourteen, and perhaps fifteen, knife thrusts in respectful silence? And if, as was only logical to presume, Don Sebastián Bergua had howled in pain, could anyone in his right mind possibly believe that neither the wife, nor the daughter, nor the judge, nor the priest, nor the nurses had heard those cries, given the fact that the walls of the Pensión Colonial were made of canestalks and mud, mere flimsy partitions through which one could hear a mosquito buzzing or a scorpion running about? And how was it possible, given the fact that the young boarders from Huanuco were nursing students with good grades, that they had not managed to give the wounded man first aid and had merely waited, nothing daunted, for the ambulance to arrive while the gentleman lay bleeding to death? And how was it possible that not one of the six adults, seeing that the ambulance was delayed, had had the idea, which should have been obvious even to an oligophrenic, of
going to get a taxi, since there was a taxi stand right down the street from the Pensión Colonial on the nearest corner? Wasn’t all this odd, devious, revealing?

  After having been detained in Lima for three months, the little parish priest from Cajatambo—who had come to the capital intending to stay only four days to arrange to procure a new Christ for the church in his village because rowdy urchins had decapitated with their slingshots the one that had been there before—terrified at the prospect of being found guilty of attempted murder and spending the rest of his days in prison, had a heart attack and died. His death electrified public opinion and had disastrous consequences for the defense; the newspapers now turned their backs on the imported jurist, accused him of being a casuist, a practitioner of bel canto, a colonialist, a strange migratory bird from other shores, and of having caused the death of a good shepherd with his sibylline, anti-Christian insinuations, and the judges (docility of reeds bending with journalistic winds) disqualified him on the grounds that he was a foreigner, deprived him of the right to plead before the country’s tribunals, and, in a decision that the newspapers hailed with nationalist ruffles and flourishes, ordered him deported to Italy as an undesirable alien.

  The death of the little priest from Cajatambo saved the mother and the daughter and the boarders from probable prison sentences for attempted murder and criminal conspiracy. As the press and public opinion shifted radically, the public prosecutor also began to sympathize with the Berguas, and accepted, as he had at the beginning, the mother’s and daughter’s version of events. Lucho Abril Marroquín’s new attorney, a native-born jurist, adopted an entirely different strategy: he conceded that his client had committed the crimes, but argued that he could in no way be held responsible for his acts, since he was suffering from paropsis and rachitis brought on by anemia, along with schizophrenia and other tendencies pertaining to the domain of mental pathology, as eminent psychiatrists corroborated in amiable depositions. As definite proof that the defendant was mentally deranged, they pointed to the fact that, among the four women in the Pensión Colonial, he had chosen the oldest one and the only one who was crippled. During the final summation by the public prosecutor (dramatic climax that deifies actors and makes spectators shiver with excitement), Don Sebastián, who up to that point had sat silent and bleary-eyed in his wheelchair, as though the trial had nothing to do with him, slowly raised one hand and with eyes suddenly red from the effort, anger, or humiliation, pointed fixedly, for an entire minute as timed by a chronometer (dixit a journalist), at Lucho Abril Marroquín. The gesture was judged to be as extraordinary as though the equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar had broken into a gallop… The court accepted all the arguments of the public prosecutor, and Lucho Abril Marroquín was shut up in the insane asylum.