Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [102]
These instructions admittedly proved difficult to follow in the beginning, and when he passed one of them on the street, neither the latter nor he himself knew whether that hand laid on the little one’s childish head was meant as a chastisement or as a clumsy pat. But with the self-assurance that comes with practice, he little by little overcame his timidity and ancestral inhibitions, growing bolder, bettering his score, taking the initiative, and after a few weeks, as the “Exercises” predicted, he noted that the cuffs on the head that he dealt out on street corners, the pinches that left bruises, the kicks that caused the recipients to howl in pain, were no longer a duty he took upon himself for moral and theoretical reasons, but a sort of pleasure. He enjoyed seeing little boys who went around selling lottery tickets burst into tears when they walked up to him to offer him a lucky number and to their surprise got their ears soundly boxed, and it excited him as much as watching a bullfight when the boy guide of a blind woman, who had approached him with his tin alms saucer tinkling in the morning air, fell to the ground rubbing the shin on which a good swift kick had just landed. The “Practical Exercises” were risky, but realizing that at heart he was fearless and foolhardy, this spurred him on rather than dissuading him. Not even on the day that he stamped on a soccer ball till it burst and was pursued with sticks and stones by a pack of pygmies did his determination falter.
Thus, during the weeks that the treatment lasted, he committed a great many of those acts that (mental laziness that turns people into idiots) are ordinarily referred to as evil deeds. He decapitated the dolls with which, in public parks, nursemaids entertained them; he snatched lollipops, toffee, caramels that little girls were about to put in their mouths and trampled them underfoot or threw them to dogs; he hung about circuses, children’s matinees, and puppet theaters, and pulled braids and ears, pinched little arms and legs and behinds till his fingers turned numb, and, naturally, made use of the age-old stratagem of sticking his tongue out at them and making faces, and talked to them at length, till his voice grew hoarse or gave out altogether, of the Bogeyman, the Big Bad Wolf, the Policeman, the Skeleton, the Witch, the Vampire, and other characters created by the imagination of adults to frighten them.
But (a snowball that on rolling down the mountainside turns into an avalanche) one day Lucho Abril Marroquín gave himself such a scare that he rushed to Dr. Acémila’s office, taking a taxi so as to get there sooner. The moment he entered her austere consultation room, in a cold sweat, his voice trembling, he exclaimed: “I very nearly pushed a little girl under the wheels of the San Miguel streetcar. At the very last instant I restrained myself because I saw a policeman.” And sobbing like one of them, he cried: “I was just on the point of becoming a criminal, Doctor!”
“You’ve already been a criminal, young man, have you forgotten?” the lady psychologist reminded him, stressing each syllable. And after looking him up and down, she announced, in a satisfied tone of voice: “You’re cured.”
Lucho Abril Marroquín suddenly remembered then (a blinding flash of light in the darkness, a shower of shooting stars falling into the sea) that he had arrived in—a taxi! He was about to fall on his knees but the lady savant stopped him. “No one licks my hands except my Great Dane. Enough of these effusions! You may go now, for new friends are awaiting me. You will be receiving my bill shortly.”
“It’s true: I’m cured!” the medical detail man kept joyously repeating to himself: during the last week he had slept seven hours a night, and instead of nightmares he had had pleasant dreams in which he was lying on exotic