Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Terrified at the idea that they had brought into this world an offspring who was the product of too rigid inbreeding, a hemophiliac and mentally defective, doomed to become a public laughingstock, the parents sought the aid of science. A series of illustrious disciples of Aesculapius were summoned to La Perla.

  It was the city’s number-one pediatrician, Dr. Alberto de Quinteros, the star of his profession, who shed the dazzling light of his knowledge on the boy’s case and opened his tormented parents’ eyes. “He is suffering from what I call the hothouse malady,” he explained. “Plants that don’t grow outside in a garden, amid flowers and insects, become sickly and produce blossoms whose scent is nauseating. This child’s gilded cage is making an imbecile of him. All his governesses and tutors should be dismissed and he should be enrolled in a school where he can associate with boys his own age. He’ll be normal the day one of his schoolmates punches him in the nose!”

  Prepared to make any and every sacrifice to decretinize him, the haughty couple agreed to allow Joaquincito to plunge into the plebeian outside world. The school they chose for him was, naturally, the most expensive one in Lima, that of the Padres de Santa María, and in order not to destroy all hierarchical distinctions, they had a school uniform made for him in the regulation colors, but in velvet.

  The famous doctor’s prescription produced noticeable results. Admittedly, Joaquín received unusually low grades, and (the lust for lucre that brought Luther) in order for him to pass his exams, his parents were obliged to make donations (stained-glass windows for the school chapel, wool surplices for the acolytes, sturdy desks for the little school for poor children, et cetera), but nonetheless the fact is that the boy became sociable and from that time on he occasionally appeared to be happy. And it was during this period that the first sign of his genius (his uncomprehending father called it a vice) manifested itself: an interest in soccer. When they were told that young Joaquín, their apathetic, monosyllabic offspring, was transformed into an energetic, garrulous creature the moment he put on soccer shoes, his parents were delighted. They immediately purchased a vacant lot adjoining their mansion in La Perla to turn it into a soccer field, of appreciable size, where Joaquincito could play to his heart’s content.

  From then on, every afternoon when classes let out, twenty-two pupils—the faces changed, but the number was always the same—could be seen getting off the Santa María bus on the foggy Avenida de las Palmeras to play soccer on the Hinostroza Bellmonts’ field. After the game was over, the family always invited the players in for tea with chocolates, gelatine desserts, meringues, and ice cream. The wealthy parents rejoiced to see their little Joaquín panting happily each afternoon.

  After a few weeks, however, Peru’s pioneer hot-pepper grower noticed something odd. He had twice, three times, ten times found Joaquincito refereeing the game. With a whistle in his mouth and a little cap with a sun visor perched on his head, he would run after the players, call fouls, impose penalties. Although the boy seemed to have no complexes about fulfilling the role of referee rather than playing, the millionaire was incensed. He invited these boys to his house, stuffed them with sweets, allowed them to hobnob with his son as though they were equals, and then they had the nerve to foist the humble role of referee off on Joaquín? He very nearly opened his Dobermans’ cages to give those insolent boys a good scare. But in the end he merely reprimanded them severely. To his surprise, the boys protested that they were not to blame and swore that Joaquín was the referee because he wanted to be, and the supposed injured party solemnly confirmed, taking God as his witness, that what they said was true. A few months later, consulting his memorandum book and the reports of his groundskeepers, the father found himself confronted with these statistics: of the 132 games played on his field, Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont had not played in a single one and had refereed 132. Exchanging glances, the father and mother said to themselves subliminally that something wasn’t right: how could this possibly be considered normal behavior? And again they called upon science for help.

  It was the most renowned astrologer in the city, a man who read souls in the stars and mended the minds of his clients (he preferred to call them his “friends”) by means of the signs of the zodiac, Professor Lucio Assmule, who, after casting many horoscopes, interrogating the heavenly bodies, and absorbing himself in lunar meditation, pronounced his verdict, which, if perhaps not the most accurate one, was in any event the one most flattering to the parents.

  “The child knows at the cellular level that he is an aristocrat, and faithful to his origins, he cannot tolerate the idea of being equal to the others,” he explained to them, removing his glasses—to ensure that the bright gleam of intelligence that appeared in his eyes on announcing a prediction would be all the more visible? “He would rather be a referee than a player because the person who referees a match is the one in command. Did you think that Joaquincito was engaging in a sport out there on that green rectangle? You’re wrong, altogether wrong. He is indulging an ancestral appetite for domination, singularity, and hierarchical distinction which undoubtedly is in his very blood.”

  Sobbing for joy, the father smothered his son with kisses, declared himself a man blessed by heaven, and added a zero to the check in payment of the fee, already a princely sum, set by Professor Assmule. Convinced that this mania for refereeing his schoolmates’ soccer matches stemmed from a driving will to power and a superiority complex that would one day make his son the master of the world (or, in the very worst of cases, of Peru), the industrialist frequently abandoned his multiple office of an afternoon in order (sentimental weakness of the lion whose eyes brim with tears on seeing its cub tear apart its first lamb) to come to his private stadium in La Perla to paternally rejoice at the sight of Joaquín, dressed in the splendid uniform he’d given him as a present, blowing the whistle on that bastard horde (the players?).

  Ten years later, the disconcerted parents couldn’t help wondering whether the astral prophecies might not have been too optimistic. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont was now eighteen years old and had reached the last grade in his high school several years after the boys who’d been his classmates at the beginning, and it was only thanks to his family’s philanthropy that he had managed to get that far. There were no signs anywhere of the genes of a conqueror of the world that, according to Lucio Assmule, were camouflaged beneath the innocent whim to referee soccer games, whereas, on the other hand, it was becoming terribly obvious that this son of aristocrats was a hopeless disaster when it came to anything but awarding free kicks. Judging by the things he said, he had an intelligence that placed him, Darwinianly speaking, somewhere between the oligophrenic and the monkey, and his lack of wit, of ambition, of interest in anything save his frantic activities as a referee, made him a profoundly dull person.

  It is true, however, that insofar as his first vice was concerned (the second was alcohol), the boy displayed something that deserved to be called talent. His teratological impartiality (in the sacred space of the soccer field and the magic time of competition?) earned him a reputation as a referee among the students and teachers at Santa María, as did (hawk that from the clouds spies beneath the carob tree the rat that will be its lunch) his vision that permitted him to detect, infallibly, at any distance and from any angle, the sly kick in the shins given the center forward by the defensive half, or the vicious elbow blow dealt the goalie by the wing who jumped with him. His omniscient knowledge of the rules and the happy intuition that enabled him to fill in the gaps in the rule book with lightning decisions were also extraordinary. His fame soon spread beyond the walls of Santa María and the aristocrat of La Perla began to referee interscholastic games, district championships, and one day the news got around that—at the stadium in El Potao?—he had substituted for a referee in a second-division match.

  Once he finished high school at Santa María, Joaquín’s bewildered parents were faced with a problem: his future. The idea of sending him to the university was painfully reject
ed, to spare the boy pointless humiliations and inferiority complexes and avoid further drains on the family fortune in the form of donations. An attempt to get him to learn foreign languages ended in a resounding failure. After a year in the United States and another in France, he had not picked up a single word of English or of French, and in the meantime his already rachitic Spanish became positively tubercular. When Joaquín returned to Lima, the manufacturer of woolen textiles finally resigned himself to the fact that his son would never have a degree after his name, and thoroughly disillusioned, put him to work in the tangled thickets of the many interlocking family enterprises. As might have been predicted, the results were catastrophic. Within two years, his acts or omissions had driven two spinning mills into bankruptcy, and put the most flourishing firm of the conglomerate—a road-construction company—deeply into debt, and the hot-pepper plantations in the jungle had had their entire crop eaten by insects, flattened by avalanches, engulfed by floods (thus proving that Joaquincito was a jinx). Stunned by his son’s immeasurable incompetence, his pride wounded, the father lost all his energy, became nihilistic, and neglected his various businesses so badly that in a short time they were bled white by greedy lieutenants, and he developed a laughable tic: sticking out his tongue and trying (inanely?) to lick his ear. Following in his wife’s footsteps, his nervousness and bouts of insomnia delivered him into the hands of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (Alberto de Quinteros? Lucio Assmule?), who soon relieved him of whatever good sense and money he had left.

  His progenitors’ financial ruin and mental collapse did not drive Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont to the brink of suicide. He went on living in La Perla, in a ghostly mansion that little by little had faded, grown moldy, lost its gardens and soccer field (sold to pay off debts), been abandoned and invaded by filth and spiders. The young man spent his days refereeing the street games gotten up by the homeless ragamuffins of the district, in the vacant lots separating La Perla from Bellavista. It was at one of these matches fought by rowdy urchins, right in the middle of a street, with a couple of stones serving as goals and lampposts as boundary markers, which Joaquín (arbiter elegantiarum, dressed in evening clothes, to dine in the middle of the jungle) refereed as though they were championship finals, that the son of aristocrats met the person who was to make him a star and a victim of cirrhosis of the liver: Sarita Huanca Salaverría?

  He had seen her play several times in these street matches and had even penalized her repeatedly for her aggressive manner of charging her adversary. They called her Virago, but Joaquín had never suspected that this adolescent with the sallow complexion, dressed in blue jeans and a ragged sweater, and wearing a pair of old house slippers, was a female. He discovered this fact erotically. One day, after he had given her a penalty for what was unquestionably foul play (she’d scored a point by kicking the ball and the goalie at the same time), she’d responded by uttering a crude insult having to do with his mother.

  “What was that you said?” the son of aristocrats shot back indignantly—thinking that at that very moment his mother was doubtless swallowing a pill, sipping a sedative potion, receiving a painful injection? “If you’re a man, I dare you to repeat it.”

  “I’m not one, but I’ll repeat it,” Virago replied. And (honor of a Spartan woman capable of allowing herself to be burned alive rather than take back what she has said) she repeated the rude insult, embroidering it with gutter adjectives.

  Joaquín tried to throw a punch at her, but it landed in thin air, and the next moment he found himself lying on the ground, knocked down by a roundhouse from Virago, who then fell on him, hitting him with her fists, feet, knees, elbows. And there on the ground (violent gymnastics on the canvas that end up resembling passionate embraces) he discovered—stupefied, erogenized, ejaculating—that his adversary was a woman. The emotion aroused in him by this wrestling match, along with its attendant unexpected turgescences, was so intense that it changed his life. After making his peace with her after the fight and learning that her name was Sarita Huanca Salaverría, he invited her then and there to go to the movies with him to see a Tarzan film, and a week later he proposed to her. Sarita’s refusal to become his wife, or even allow him to kiss her, drove Joaquín classically to drink and to cheap bars. Within a short time, he went from being a romantic drowning his troubles in whiskey to being a hopeless alcoholic capable of trying to quench his African thirst with kerosene.

  What was it that awakened in Joaquín this passion for Sarita Huanca Salaverría? She was young, with the svelte physique of a banty rooster, a complexion tanned by exposure to the elements, hair cut in bangs like a jeune premier ballet dancer, and as a soccer player she wasn’t bad. All in all, her manner of dress, the things she did, the company she kept seemed very odd for a woman. Was it precisely this perhaps—a penchant for originality bordering on vice, a frantic tendency toward bizarre behavior—that made her so attractive to the aristocrat? The first time he took Virago to the run-down mansion in La Perla, his parents looked at each other in disgust once the two of them had left. The former millionaire summed up all his bitterness in a single phrase: “We’ve engendered not only an imbecile but a sexual pervert as well.”

  Nonetheless, while Sarita Huanca Salaverría was responsible for Joaquín’s becoming an alcoholic, she served at the same time as the trampoline that catapulted him from his status as a referee of street games played with a ball made of rags to championship matches in the National Stadium.

  Virago was not content merely to refuse the aristocrat’s passionate advances; she took great pleasure in making him suffer. She accepted his invitations to the movies, to soccer matches, to bullfights, to restaurants, she allowed him to shower her with expensive presents (on which her love-smitten suitor spent the last dregs of the family fortune?), but she did not permit Joaquín to speak to her of love. The moment he tried to tell her how much he loved her (timidity of a stripling who blushes and gets all choked up on paying compliments to a flower), Sarita Huanca Salaverría would rise to her feet in fury, insult him with a vulgarity worthy of Bajo el Puente, and demand to be taken home. It was then that Joaquín began to drink, going from one cheap bar to another, and mixing his drinks in order to obtain rapid and explosive effects. It was a common sight for his parents to see him coming home at the hour when night owls go to roost, stumbling through the rooms of the La Perla mansion, leaving behind him a trail of vomit. Just as he seemed about to dissolve in alcohol, a telephone call from Sarita would bring him back to life. He would get his hopes up once more and the infernal cycle would begin all over again. Consumed with bitterness, the man with the tic and his hypochondriac spouse died almost at the same time and were buried in a mausoleum in the Presbítero Maestro Cemetery. The tumbledown mansion in La Perla, what was left of the surrounding property, and all the other meager assets that still remained were handed over to creditors or confiscated by the state. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont was obliged to work for a living.

  Considering the sort of person he was (his past deafeningly proclaimed that he would either die of consumption or end up begging on the streets), he did more than well for himself. What profession did he choose? Soccer referee! Goaded on by hunger and the desire to go on spoiling the disdainful Sarita, he began asking for a few soles from the urchins who asked him to referee their games, and on seeing that they managed to pay him by prorating the sum among themselves, two plus two are four and four and two are six, gradually raised his fees and began watching where his money went. As his skills on the soccer field became well known, he secured contracts for himself at junior competitions, and one day he boldly presented himself at the Association for Soccer Referees and Coaches and applied for membership. He passed the examinations with a brilliance that dizzied those who from that moment on he was able to refer to (conceitedly?) as his colleagues.

  The appearance of Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont—black uniform with white pinstripes, little green sun visor on his forehead, silver-plated whistle in his mouth—i
n the José Díaz National Stadium marked a red-letter day in the history of Peruvian soccer. A veteran sports reporter was to write: “With him, unbending justice and artistic inspiration entered our stadiums.” His rectitude, his impartiality, his quick and unerring eye for fouls and his adroitness at meting out exactly the right penalty, his authority (the players always lowered their eyes when they spoke to him, and addressed him as Don), and his physical fitness that enabled him to run for the entire ninety minutes of a match and never be more than ten meters from the ball, soon made him popular. As someone once put it in a speech, he was the only referee who was never disobeyed by the players or attacked by the spectators, and the only one who received an ovation from the grandstands after every match.