Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When Father Seferino Huanca Leyva triumphantly announced, on the occasion of a procession in honor of El Señor de Limpias—whose cult he had introduced in Mendocita, where it had caught on like wildfire—that there was not a single living child in the parish, including those born in the last ten hours, who had not been baptized, the faithful were filled with pride and the Hierarchy, after its many admonitions, for once sent him its congratulations.

  On the other hand, however, he provoked a scandal when, on the occasion of the feast of the patron saint of Lima, St. Rosa, he announced in an open-air sermon he delivered in the vacant-lot soccer field of Mendocita that within the boundaries of his dusty parish there was not a single couple whose union had not been sanctified before God and the altar of his adobe shack. In stupefaction, since they knew very well that in the ex-Empire of the Incas the most solid and most respected institution—outside of the Church and the army—was concubinage, the prelates of the Peruvian Church came (dragging their feet?) to confirm the truth of this extraordinary claim with their own eyes. What they found as they nosed about the promiscuous households of Mendocita left them appalled and with an aftertaste of cheapened sacraments in their mouths. They found Father Seferino’s explanations abstruse and full of incomprehensible slang (the son of El Chirimoyo had forgotten the pure Castilian of his seminary days after his many years in the slums and adopted all the barbarisms and solecisms of the underworld argot of Mendocita), and it was the ex-faith healer and ex-Guardia Civil, Lituma, who explained to them the system used to abolish concubinage. It was sacrilegiously simple. It consisted of Christianizing, before the Gospels, all couples who had taken up with each other or were about to do so. After having taken their pleasure together for the first time, they hastened to their beloved priest to have him marry them in due and proper form, and Father Seferino, without bothering them with impertinent questions, conferred the sacrament upon them. And since this system resulted in people in the neighborhood getting married several times without having been left a widower between spouses (aeronautical speed with which the couples of the district broke up, exchanged partners, and formed new couples), Father Seferino repaired the damages thus caused, insofar as sin was concerned, through the purifying sacrament of confession. (He had explained this by citing a proverbial phrase that, in addition to being heretical, was vulgar: “One love bite hides another.”) Forbidden such practices, admonished, very nearly slapped in the face by the archbishop, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva also celebrated a sort of anniversary thanks to this entire episode: grave warning number 100.

  Thus, amid bold innovations and much-publicized reprimands, the object of heated controversy, loved by some and reviled by others, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva reached the prime of life: his fifties. He was a man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness, whose conviction, since his auroral days as a young seminarian, that imaginary love was not a sin but on the contrary a powerful bodyguard for chastity, had in fact been sufficient to keep him pure, when there arrived in Mendocita (serpent in Paradise that takes on the voluptuous, luxuriant, lustfully resplendent forms of the female) a pervert named Mayte Unzátegui who claimed to be a social worker (in reality she was—a woman after all?—a prostitute).

  She maintained that she had worked with selfless devotion in the wilds of Tingo María, ridding the bellies of the natives of parasites, and had fled from there, very annoyed and upset, because a pack of carnivorous rats had devoured her son. She was of Basque, and hence aristocratic, descent. Despite the fact that her turgescent horizons and gelatinous jiggling when she walked ought to have alerted him to the danger, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva committed (attraction of the abyss that has seen monolithic virtues succumb) the insane error of taking her on as an assistant, believing that, as she claimed, her aim was to save souls and kill parasites. In reality, she wanted to lead him into sin. She put her program for so doing into practice, coming to live in the adobe hovel, sleeping on a makeshift bed separated from him by a ridiculous little curtain which, moreover, was transparent. At night, by candlelight, on the pretext that they made her sleep better and kept her in good physical health, the temptress did exercises. But was Swedish gymnastics the proper term for that Thousand and One Nights harem dance that the Basque woman performed, standing in one spot waggling her hips, shaking her shoulders, wriggling her legs, and coiling her arms, a spectacle that the panting ecclesiastic witnessed through the little curtain lighted by the flickering candle as though watching a disturbing Chinese shadow play? And later, as everyone in Mendocita lay silently sleeping, Mayte Unzátegui, on hearing the creaking of the bed on the other side of the curtain, had the audacity to ask, in a mellifluous voice: “Are you having trouble getting to sleep, Father dear?”

  It is quite true that, in order to conceal her evil designs, the beautiful corruptress worked twelve hours a day, giving vaccinations and treating scabies, disinfecting hovels and taking oldsters out for airings. But she did so dressed in shorts, with her legs and shoulders and arms and midriff exposed, maintaining that she’d fallen into the habit of going about that way in the jungle. Father Seferino continued to exercise his creative ministry, but he grew noticeably thinner, had dark circles under his eyes, kept constantly looking about to see where Mayte Unzátegui was, and on spying her passing by, his mouth fell open and a little stream of venial saliva wet his lips. It was at this time that he took to going about with his hands in his pockets night and day, and his sacristan, the ex-abortionist Doña Angélica, prophesied that at any moment now he would begin spitting up the blood of galloping consumption.

  Would the pastor succumb to the evil spell of the social worker, or would his debilitating antidotes enable him to ward it off? Would his counterremedies lead him to the insane asylum, to the grave? In a sporting spirit, the parishioners of Mendocita followed this contest and began making wagers, with fixed time limits and a wide range of allergic outcomes on which the bettor could place his money: the Basque woman would be made pregnant by priest-seed, the man from El Chirimoyo would kill her to kill temptation, or he would defrock himself and marry her. But life itself, naturally, beat everyone at the game by using a marked card.

  Arguing that the Church must return to its earliest days, to the pure and simple Church of the Gospels, when all believers lived together and shared their earthly possessions, Father Seferino initiated an energetic campaign to restore true communal life in Mendocita—a veritable laboratory of Christian experimentation. Couples were to become part of communities of fifteen to twenty members who would share the work, the maintenance, and the domestic tasks of the collectivity between them, and would live together in dwellings remodeled to house these new nuclei of social life that would replace the traditional couple. Father Seferino set the example, enlarging his adobe hut and installing in it, in addition to the social worker, his two sacristans: Lituma the ex-sergeant and Doña Angélica the ex-abortionist. This micro-commune was the first one to be set up in Mendocita, and was to serve as a model for those to follow.

  Father Seferino stipulated that within each catholic community the members of each sex were to enjoy the most democratic equality. The males were to address each other in the familiar form, and the females likewise, but in order to ensure that the differences in musculature, intelligence, and common sense established by God would not be forgotten, he advised the females to use the formal term of address when speaking to the males and as a sign of respect try not to look them straight in the eye. The tasks of cooking, sweeping, fetching water from the public fountain, killing cockroaches and rats, washing clothes, and other domestic chores were to be rotated and the money earned—through honest labor or in any other manner—by each member was to be turned over to the community down to the last penny, whereupon it would be redistributed in equal shares after communal expenses had been taken care of. The living quarters were not to have any inside partitions, so as to do away with the sinful habit of secrecy, and all th
e activities of everyday life, from evacuation of the bowels to sexual embrace, were to be carried out in full view of the others.

  Even before the police and the army invaded Mendocita, with a cinematographic display of rifles, gas masks, and bazookas, and made the raid that kept men and women from the district shut up in police barracks for many days, not because of what they really were or had been (thieves, thugs, whores), but because they were subversives and dissidents, and Father Seferino was brought before a military tribunal and charged with establishing, under cover of his priestly functions, a bridgehead for Communism (he was acquitted, thanks to the influence exerted by his benefactress, the millionaire heiress Mayte Unzátegui), the experiment in archaic Christian communal living was already doomed.

  Doomed, naturally, by the ecclesiastical authorities, who officially condemned it (grave warning number 233) on the grounds that it was highly suspect as a theory and insane as a practice (the facts, alas, proved that they were right), but doomed above all by the nature of the men and women of Mendocita, clearly allergic to collectivism. The number-one problem was the traffic in sex. In the stimulating promiscuity of the collective dormitories, under cover of the darkness, the most ardent fondlings, seminal rubbings, frictions took place from mattress to mattress, or outright rapes, acts of sodomy, impregnations, and as a consequence crimes of passion multiplied. Problem number two was theft: instead of doing away with the appetite for property, communal living exacerbated it to the point of madness. The members stole from each other even the fetid air they breathed. Rather than fraternally uniting the people of Mendocita, cohabitation made them mortal enemies. It was in this period of chaos and disorder that the social worker (Mayte Unzátegui?) announced that she was pregnant and ex-sergeant Lituma admitted that he was the father. With tears in his eyes, Father Seferino gave his Christian blessing to this union brought about by his socio-Catholic innovations. (People say that since then he sobs all night long and chants elegies to the moon.)

  But almost immediately thereafter he was obliged to face an even worse catastrophe than that of having lost this Basque woman whom he had never managed to possess: the arrival in Mendocita of a formidable rival, the evangelical minister Don Sebastián Bergua. The latter was a man still in the flower of youth, athletic-looking, with strong biceps, who the moment he arrived announced that he proposed to win over to the true religion—the reformed church—all of Mendocita, including the Catholic priest and his three acolytes, within a period of six months. Don Sebastián (who before he became a minister had been—a gynecologist worth millions?) had the financial means to impress the people of the district: he had a brick house built for himself, paying the men in the neighborhood royally for the work they did on it, and began giving what he called “religious breakfasts,” to which he invited, free of charge, those who attended his Bible talks and learned certain hymns by heart. Seduced by his eloquence and his baritone voice, or by the coffee with milk and bread with cracklings that went with them, the people of Mendocita began to desert Catholic adobe for Evangelical brick.

  Father Seferino naturally resorted at this point to armed preaching. He challenged Don Sebastián Bergua to fisticuffs to prove which of the two of them was the true servant of God. Weakened by his excessive practice of the Exercise of Onan that had enabled him to resist the temptations of the Devil, the man from El Chirimoyo was k.o.’d by Don Sebastián Bergua’s second punch; for twenty years the latter had done calisthenics and boxed for an hour a day (in the Remigius Gymnasium in San Isidro?). It was not his having lost two incisors and been left with his nose permanently flattened that plunged Father Seferino into despair, but rather, the humiliation of being beaten at his own game and noting that with each passing day he was losing more parishioners to his adversary.

  But (bold men who grow even bolder in the face of danger, and firm believers in the old saying, “For a terrible ill, a worse remedy”) one day the man from El Chirimoyo mysteriously brought to his adobe hut several jerry cans full of a liquid which he hid from the gaze of the curious (but which any sensitive nose would have immediately recognized as kerosene). That night, when everyone in Mendocita was fast asleep, accompanied by his faithful Lituma, he boarded up the doors and windows of the brick house from the outside, using thick planks and big stout nails. Don Sebastián Bergua was sleeping the sleep of the just, dreaming of an incestuous nephew who, repenting having raped his sister, ended up a papist priest in a Lima slum: Mendocita? He was unable to hear Lituma’s hammer blows which transformed the Evangelical temple Into a rat trap because Doña Angélica, the ex-midwife, on orders from Father Seferino, had given him a thick anesthetic potion. Once the Mission was hermetically sealed, the man from El Chirimoyo personally sprinkled it with kerosene. Then he crossed himself, lit a match, and was on the point of throwing it. But something caused him to hesitate. Ex-sergeant Lituma, the social worker, the ex-abortionist, the dogs of Mendocita saw him standing there, tall and gaunt, beneath the stars, with a look of torment in his eyes, holding the lighted match between his fingers, pondering whether he should roast his enemy to death.

  Would he do so? Would he toss the match? Would Father Seferino Huanca Leyva turn the Mendocita night into a raging inferno? Would he thus ruin an entire life devoted to religion and the common good? Or would he blow out the little flame that was burning his fingertips, open the doors of the brick house, and fall to his knees to beg the Evangelical minister’s forgiveness? How would this parable of the slums end?

  Fifteen.

  The first person I talked to about my having proposed to Aunt Julia was not Javier but Nancy. After my telephone conversation with Aunt Julia, I called my cousin and suggested that we go to the movies together. But we ended up instead at El Patio, a bar-and-grill in Miraflores on the Calle San Martín and a favorite hangout of wrestlers that Max Aguirre, the Luna Park promoter, brought to Lima. The establishment—located in a small two-story building designed to house middle-class tenants that thoroughly detested being turned into a bar—was empty when we arrived, and we were able to have a quiet conversation as I consumed my tenth cup of coffee of the day and Nancy had a Coca-Cola.

  The minute we sat down, I began to think up various ways of breaking the news to her gently. But she was the one who started the conversation, bursting with news she couldn’t wait to tell me. The night before, there had been a family meeting at Aunt Hortensia’s, attended by a dozen relatives, to discuss “the affair.” At this gathering, it had been decided that Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga would ask Aunt Julia to go back to Bolivia.

  “They did so for your sake,” Nancy explained. “It seems that your father is beside himself with rage and wrote a really scary letter.”

  Uncle Jorge and Uncle Lucho, who loved me dearly, were very worried now as to what punishment he might decide to inflict on me. It was their thought that if Aunt Julia had already left when he arrived in Lima, he would be placated and deal less harshly with me.

  “As a matter of fact, all that is of no importance now,” I assured her smugly. “Because I’ve asked Aunt Julia to marry me.”

  Her reaction was spectacular and caricatural, like a double take in a film. She choked on her Coca-Cola, was overcome by a frankly overdone coughing fit, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Stop clowning, you idiot,” I said angrily. “I need your help.”

  “It wasn’t your news that made me do that—I just swallowed the wrong way,” my cousin stammered, drying her eyes and trying to clear her throat. And a few seconds later, lowering her voice, she added: “But you’re still just a kid. Do you have the money to get married? And what about your father? He’ll kill you!”

  But the very next moment, piqued by her terrible curiosity, she bombarded me with questions about things I hadn’t had time to think about: Had Julita said yes? Were we going to elope? Who were our witnesses going to be? We wouldn’t be able to be married in church because she was divorced, right? Where were we going to live?

  “But, Marito,”
she said again after she finished firing off all these questions one after the other, completely taken aback once again, “don’t you realize that you’re only eighteen years old?”

  She burst out laughing then, and I did too. I told her that she might very well have reason on her side, but that what I needed now was her help in carrying out my plan. We’d grown up together and seen each other through lots of things, we loved each other dearly, and I knew she’d be on my side no matter what happened.

  “Of course I’m going to help you if you ask me to, even if what you’re trying to do is utter madness, even if they kill me as well as you,” she finally said. “And, by the way, have you thought of what the whole family’s going to say if you really get married?”

  We had a great time for a while imagining just what various aunts and uncles and cousins would say and do when confronted with the news. Aunt Hortensia would burst into tears, Aunt Jesús would rush off to church, Uncle Javier would utter his classic all-purpose exclamation (“What shamelessness!”), and our youngest cousin, Jaimito, who was three years old and lisped, would ask: “What doeth getting married mean, Mama?” The game ended when we burst into hysterical laughter, bringing the waiters running to see what was so funny. When we calmed down, Nancy agreed to be our spy, to report to us all the family’s maneuvers and intrigues. I had no idea how many days it would take me to get everything ready and I needed to know what the relatives were up to in the meantime. She also agreed to act as Aunt Julia’s messenger, and to take her out of the house with her every so often so that I could see her.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll be your fairy godmother. But if someday I need one, I hope the two of you will do as much for me.”

  As I was walking her home, my cousin suddenly smote her forehead with the palm of her hand. “What luck—I just remembered something! I can get you exactly what you need. An apartment in a villa on the Calle Porta. A one-room studio, with a little kitchen and a bath, really tiny but just darling. And only five hundred a month.”