Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Were these talents and efforts due only to an exceptional professional conscience? This was a partial explanation, to be sure. But the most profound reason behind them was that Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont wanted most of all (the secret of a young man who triumphs in Europe but whose days are nonetheless filled with bitterness, because what he really wanted was the applause of his little village in the Andes) to impress Virago with his magic skills as a referee. They were still seeing each other, nearly every day, and scabrous popular gossip had it that they were lovers. In reality, despite his amorous stubbornness, which had remained undiminished throughout the years, the referee had not managed to overcome Sarita’s resistance.

  One day, after picking him up off the floor of a cheap bar in El Callao, taking him to the pensión in the center of town where he lived, wiping away the spittle and sawdust he was covered with, and putting him to bed, Sarita Huanca Salaverría revealed to him the secret of her life. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont thus learned (pallor of a man who has received the vampire’s kiss) that in her early youth there had been an accursed love and a conjugal catastrophe. In fact, between Sarita and her brother (Richard?) a tragic love affair had taken place that (cataracts of fire, a rain of poison on humanity) had led to her becoming pregnant. She had cleverly entered into matrimony with a suitor whom she had previously disdained (Red Antúnez? Luis Marroquín?), so that the child born of incest would not have a blot upon his name, but the happy young husband (the Devil sticking his tail in the pot and curdling the sauce) had discovered her trickery in time and repudiated the treacherous wife who had tried to pass off another man’s child as his. Forced to have an abortion, Sarita abandoned her family of noble lineage, her elegant residential district, her impressive name, and becoming a tramp, had acquired the personality and nickname of Virago in the vacant lots of Bellavista and La Perla. From that time on, she had sworn never again to give herself to a man and to live the rest of her life, for all practical purposes (except, alas, that of the production of spermatozoa?), as a male.

  Learning of the tragedy, seasoned with sacrilege, the transgression of taboos, the trampling underfoot of civic morality and religious commandments, of Sarita Huanca Salaverría did not destroy Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont’s passionate love; on the contrary, it made it all the more intense. The man from La Perla even conceived the idea of curing Virago of her traumas and reconciling her with society and men; he wanted to make of her, once again, a very feminine young woman of Lima, a charming, flirtatious, piquant little rascal—like La Perricholi?

  As his fame spread, he was asked to referee international matches in Lima and abroad, and received offers to work in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, which (patriotism of the scientist who turns down the computers of New York in order to go on experimenting with his tubercular guinea pigs in the laboratories of the Peruvian School of Medicine) he always refused; at the same time, his siege of the incestuous Sarita’s heart became more stubborn than ever.

  And it seemed to him that he glimpsed certain signs (Apache smoke signals on the hills, tom-toms in the African rain forest) that Sarita Huanca Salaverría might yield. One afternoon, after coffee with croissants at the Haití, on the Plaza de Armas, he managed to hold the girl’s right hand between his for more than a minute (precisely: the chronometer in his referee’s head timed it). Shortly thereafter, there was an international match in which the team that had won the Peruvian championship confronted a band of assassins from a country of little renown (Argentina, or something like that?), who showed up on the playing field in cleated shoes, knee guards, and elbow patches which were really weapons to injure their adversary. Paying no attention to their arguments (as a matter of fact, they were telling the truth) that in their country that was how soccer was played (topping it off with torture and crime?), Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont ordered them off the field, with the result that the Peruvian team won a technical victory for lack of an opposing team. The referee, naturally, was carried out of the stadium in triumph on the shoulders of the crowd, and Sarita Huanca Salaverría, once they were alone (a burst of patriotic enthusiasm? sportive sentimentality?) threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Once, when he was taken ill (cirrhosis was insidiously, fatally mineralizing the liver of the Man of the Stadiums and beginning to cause him to suffer periodic crises), she took care of him, never once leaving his bedside, during the entire week that he remained in the Hospital Carrión, and one night Joaquín saw her shed tears (for him?). All this encouraged him, and continually thinking up new arguments, he proposed to her every day. But it was to no avail. Sarita Huanca Salaverría attended all the matches that he interpreted (the sportswriters were now comparing his refereeing to conducting a symphony), she accompanied him when he went abroad, and she had even moved to the Pensión Colonial, where Joaquín lived with his sister the pianist and his aged parents. She refused, however, to allow this fraternity to cease to be chaste and turn into joyous lovemaking. The uncertainty (daisy with an infinite number of petals to be torn off) continued little by little to aggravate Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont’s alcoholism, to the point where eventually he was more often drunk than sober.

  Alcohol was the Achilles’ heel of his professional life, the millstone around his neck that, according to those in the know, kept him from being invited to Europe to referee. How to explain, on the other hand, how a man who drank as much as he did was able to practice a profession demanding such taxing physical effort? The fact is that (enigmas paving the path of history) he pursued both vocations at the same time, and from his thirtieth year on, they overlapped: Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont began refereeing matches drunk as a skunk and continued to referee them in his mind afterwards in bars.

  Alcohol did not dull his talents: it neither blurred his vision nor lessened his authority nor set back his career. It is quite true that every so often he was overcome by an attack of the hiccups in the middle of a match, and that (calumnies that poison the air and stab genuine merit in the back) there were those who swore that once, overcome by Saharan thirst, he grabbed a bottle of liniment out of the hands of a medical attendant hurrying out onto the field to aid a player and gulped it down as though it were cold water. But such episodes—a collection of picturesque anecdotes, the mythology that surrounds genius—in no way hindered his triumphant march to fame and glory.

  And so, amid the thundering applause of the crowd in the stadium and the penitential drinking bouts whereby he endeavored to drown his remorse (inquisitor’s pincers that dig about in living flesh, the rack that breaks bones) in his soul of a missionary of the true faith (Jehovah’s Witnesses?) for having impulsively raped, on a mad night in his youth, a minor from La Victoria (Sarita Huanca Salaverría?), Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont 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, who had climbed to the heights of his profession.

  It was at this juncture that Lima became the site of the most important soccer event of the half century, the final match of the South American Championship series, between two teams who in the semifinals had each overwhelmingly defeated their opponents: Bolivia and Peru. Although tradition recommended that a referee from a neutral country be chosen to preside over this match, the two teams, and (chivalry of the Altiplano, Andean nobility, Aymara point of honor) the foreigners in particular, insisted that the famous Joaquín Hinostroza Marroquín referee the match. And since players, substitutes, and coaches threatened to strike if this demand was not granted, the Federation finally agreed and the Jehovah’s Witness was given the mission of presiding over this match that everyone prophesied would be a memorable one.

  The stubborn gray clouds of Lima lifted that Sunday, permitting the sun’s warm rays to shine down upon the contest. Many people had spent the night in line in the open air, hoping to be able to buy tickets (even though everyone knew they had been sold out for a month). From dawn on, all around the National Stadium, swarms of people milled a
bout looking for scalpers and prepared to commit every imaginable crime in order to get in. Two hours before the match, the stadium was so jam-packed there wasn’t room for a fly. Several hundred citizens of the great country to the south (Bolivia?), come to Lima from their limpid mountain heights by plane, by car, and on foot, had banded together in the eastern grandstand. The wild cheers and locomotives of visitors and natives had raised the excitement in the stadium to fever pitch as the crowd waited for the teams to appear on the field.

  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 Je
hovah’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.)