Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (35 page)

Except for getting the papers certified, which had turned out to be so simple, all the other formalities, during this week of endless red tape and inquiries and running around, by myself or with Javier, to the mayor’s office of every district in Lima, were frustrating and exhausting. I didn’t set foot in the radio station except for the Panamericana news broadcast, and turned the job of preparing all the hourly bulletins over to Pascual, who was thus able to offer the radio listeners a veritable festival of accidents, crimes, acts of mayhem, and kidnappings that caused as much blood to be shed via Radio Panamericana as was being shed on the airwaves at Radio Central by my friend Camacho in his systematic genocide of his characters.

I began my rounds very early in the morning. The first mayor’s offices I visited were those of the run-down municipalities farthest from downtown Lima: El Rímac, El Porvenir, Vitarte, Chorrillos. I explained the problem a hundred and one times (blushing furiously the first few times, and after that with the greatest aplomb) to mayors, deputy mayors, municipal councilors, secretaries, janitors, messenger boys, and each time the answer was a categorical no. I ran into the same stumbling block each time: unless I could produce notarized proof of my parents’ consent, or of my having been emancipated by them before the judge of the juvenile court, I could not get married. I then tried my luck in the mayor’s offices of the districts in the center of town (except for Miraflores and San Isidro, since there might be someone around who knew my family), with precisely the same result. After looking over my papers, the functionaries would inevitably crack jokes at my expense that were like so many kicks in the belly: “So you want to marry your mama, do you?” or “Don’t be a fool, my boy, why get married? Just shack up with her and that’ll be that.” The only place where there was a ray of hope was in the mayor’s office in Surco, where a plump, beetle-browed male secretary told us that the matter could be arranged for ten thousand
soles
, “because lots of people will have to be paid to keep their mouths shut.” I tried to bargain with him, and had gotten him down to five thousand
soles
, a sum I’d have great difficulty scraping together, but at that point, as though suddenly frightened by his own audacity, he backed down and ended up kicking us out of the office.

I talked on the phone with Aunt Julia twice a day and lied to her, telling her that things were going along without a hitch, that she should have a small suitcase all packed containing the things of hers she considered indispensable, that at any moment now I’d be calling to say, “Everything’s all set.” But I was feeling more and more demoralized. On Friday evening, when I returned to my grandparents’ house, I found a telegram from my parents: “Arriving Monday, Panagra, flight 516.”

That night, after tossing and turning in bed for a long time as I thought things over, I finally turned on the lamp on the nightstand, fished out the notebook in which I kept a list of subjects for stories, and wrote down, by order of preference, the options that lay before me. The first was to marry Aunt Julia and confront the family with a legal fait accompli that they would be obliged to accept, like it or not. But inasmuch as there were only a few days left now and the municipal authorities all over Lima were proving so refractory, this first option was turning out to be more and more Utopian. The second was to flee abroad with Aunt Julia. But not to Bolivia; the idea of living in a world where she had lived without me, where she had so many friends and acquaintances, not to mention an ex-husband, bothered me. The best country for us would be Chile. She could go off to La Paz, to fool the family, and I would light out for Tacna, in an intercity bus or a jitney. I’d manage in one way or another to cross the border illegally to Arica, and from there I’d proceed overland to Santiago, where Aunt Julia would come to join me or be waiting for me. The possibility of traveling and living without a passport (getting one would also require written permission from my parents) didn’t strike me as an insuperable obstacle, and in fact it rather pleased me: it sounded like something straight out of a romantic novel. If the family, as they were certain to do, tracked me down and forced the authorities to return me to Peru, I would run away again, as many times as necessary, and that was how I’d live my life till I reached that longed-for, liberating twenty-first birthday. The third option was to kill myself, leaving an eloquent, well-written suicide note, that would plunge my parents in remorse.

The next day, at a very early hour, I rushed over to Javier’s
pensión
. We’d fallen into the habit of going over the events of the day before each morning as he shaved and showered and drawing up a plan of action for the day just beginning. Sitting on the toilet seat watching him lather his face, I read him my list of options as I had outlined them in my notebook, with comments in the margin.

As he rinsed the lather off, he argued insistently that I should change the order of my preferences and put suicide at the head of my list. “If you kill yourself, the junk you’ve written will automatically attract attention, people with a morbid turn of mind will want to read your stories, and it’ll be easy to bring them out as a book,” he said persuasively as he dried his face. “You’ll be a famous writer—posthumously, I grant you.”

“You’re going to make me miss the first news bulletin,” I said, to hurry him up. “You can stop the Cantinflas act—I don’t find your jokes the least bit funny.”

“If you did yourself in, I wouldn’t have to miss so many days at work or so many of my classes at the university,” Javier went on as he got dressed. “The best possible thing would be for you to go through with it today, right away, this very morning. That way, I wouldn’t have to pawn my things, which naturally I’m never going to be able to redeem before they auction them off, because, is there any chance you’ll be able to pay me back someday?”

And as we were trotting down the street to the jitney stop, still convinced that he was a first-rate comedian, he went on: “And one last thing: if you kill yourself, you’ll be the talk of the town, and reporters will flock to interview your best friend, your confidant, the witness of the tragedy, and his picture will be in all the papers. Don’t you think there’s a good chance that your cousin Nancy would be swayed by all that publicity I’d get?”

In the (horribly named) Bureau of Pignoration on the Plaza de Armas, we pawned my typewriter and his radio, my watch and his pens, and I finally persuaded him that he should also pawn his watch. Despite bargaining furiously, all we managed to get was two thousand
soles
. Earlier on, without my grandparents’ noticing, I had little by little sold my suits, shoes, shirts, ties, sweaters to secondhand clothes dealers on the Calle La Paz, till I had practically nothing left but the clothes on my back. But the immolation of my wardrobe brought me barely four hundred
soles
. I had better luck, however, with Genaro Jr, whom I finally persuaded, after a dramatic half hour, to give me four months’ salary in advance and deduct the amount advanced me from my paychecks over a year’s time. The conversation had an unexpected ending. I had sworn that I needed the money urgently to pay for a hernia operation my granny had to have, a plea that had left him unmoved. But then suddenly he said: “All right, I’ll give you the advance,” and then added, with a friendly smile: “But admit that it’s to pay for your girlfriend’s abortion.” I lowered my eyes and begged him not to give my secret away.

On seeing how depressed I was at having gotten so little money for the things we’d pawned, Javier went back to the radio station with me, since we’d decided that we’d both ask for the afternoon off from our respective jobs so as to go to Huacho together. Perhaps the municipal authorities in the provinces would turn out to be more sentimental. I arrived in my office up in the shack just as the phone was ringing. It was Aunt Julia, beside herself with rage. The night before, Aunt Hortensia and Uncle Alejandro had dropped by Uncle Lucho’s for a visit, and had refused to even say hello to her.

“They looked at me like something the cat dragged in, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d called me a whore to my face,” she said indignantly. “I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from telling them to go you know where. I held my temper for my sister’s sake, and for ours too, so as not to make things worse than they are already. How’s everything going, Varguitas?”

“Monday, first thing,” I assured her. “You should say you’re postponing your flight to La Paz for a day. I’ve got everything almost ready.”

“Don’t worry too much about finding that obliging mayor,” Aunt Julia said. “I’m so furious now I don’t give a damn. Even if you don’t find one, we’ll run away together anyway.”

“Why don’t the two of you get married in Chincha, Don Mario?” I heard Pascual say the minute I hung up. Seeing how dumfounded I was, he turned beet-red: “It’s not that I’m a busybody who’s trying to stick my nose in your affairs. We couldn’t help overhearing the two of you, that’s all, and naturally we tumbled to what was going on. I’m just trying to help. The mayor of Chincha’s my cousin and he’ll marry you on the spot, with or without papers, whether you’re of age or not.”

Everything was miraculously resolved that very day. Javier and Pascual went to Chincha by bus that afternoon, with all the papers and instructions to get everything all set for Monday. As they were off doing that, I went with my cousin Nancy to rent the one-room studio apartment in Miraflores, asked for three days off from work (I got them after a Homeric discussion with Genaro Sr., boldly threatening to quit if he refused to let me have the time off), and organized my escape from Lima. On Saturday night Javier returned with good news. The mayor was a congenial young guy, and when Javier and Pascual had told him the whole story, he’d laughed and applauded our plans to elope. “How romantic!” he’d commented. He’d kept the papers and assured them, “just between us,” that there would be a way of getting around posting the banns as well.

On Sunday I phoned Aunt Julia to inform her that I’d found our kindhearted idiot of a mayor, that we’d elope the following day at eight o’clock in the morning, and that at noon we’d be husband and wife.

Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont,
who was destined to bring stadium crowds to their feet, not by making goals or blocking penalty kicks but by making memorable decisions as a referee at soccer matches, and whose thirst for alcohol was to leave traces and debts in many a Lima bar, was born in one of those residences that mandarins had built for them thirty years ago, in La Perla, with the aim of turning that vast empty tract of land into the Copacabana of Lima (an aim that miscarried due to the dampness, which—punishment of the camel that stubbornly insists on passing through the eye of the needle—ravaged the throats and bronchia of the Peruvian aristocracy).

Joaquín was the only son of a family that, in addition to being wealthy, had ties (dense forest of trees whose intertwining branches are titles and coats of arms) with the blue bloods of Spain and France. But the father of the future referee and drunkard had put patents of nobility aside and devoted his life to the modern ideal of multiplying his fortune many times over, in business enterprises that ranged from the manufacture of fine woolen textiles to the introduction of the cultivation of hot peppers as a cash crop in the Amazon region. The mother, a lymphatic madonna, a self-abnegating spouse, had spent her life paying out the money her husband made to doctors and healers (for she suffered from a number of diseases common to the upper class of society). The two of them had had Joaquín rather late in life, after having long prayed to God to give them an heir. His birth brought indescribable happiness to his parents, who, from his cradle days, dreamed of a future for him as a prince of industry, a king of agriculture, a magus of diplomacy, or a Lucifer of politics.

Was it out of rebellion, a stubborn refusal to accept this radiant social and chrematistic glory to which he was destined, that the child became a soccer referee, or was it due to some psychological shortcoming? No, it was the result of a genuine vocation. From his last baby bottle to the first fuzz on his upper lip he had, naturally, any number of governesses, imported from foreign countries: France, England. And teachers at the best private schools in Lima were recruited to teach him numbers and his ABC’s. One after the other, all of them ended up giving up their fat salary, demoralized and hysterical in the face of the little boy’s ontological indifference toward any sort of knowledge. At the age of eight he hadn’t yet learned to add, and, as for the alphabet, was still learning, with the greatest of difficulty, to recite the vowels. He spoke only in monosyllables, was a quiet child who never misbehaved, and wandered from one room to the other of the mansion in La Perla, amid the countless toys imported from every corner of the globe to amuse him—German Meccano sets, Japanese trains, Chinese puzzles, Austrian tin soldiers, North American tricycles—looking as though he were bored to death. The one thing that seemed to bring him out of his Brahmanic torpor from time to time were the little cards with pictures of soccer players that came with boxes of Mar del Sur chocolates; he would paste them in fancy albums and spend hours on end looking at them with great interest.

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 rejected, 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.