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By Root 1150 0

epithet “tightwad” fits her perfectly. She does not allow any boarder, for instance, to take a bath except on the first Friday of each month, and she has forced everyone staying at the pensión to adopt the Argentine habit—so widespread in the dwellings of that sister country—of flushing the toilet only once a day (she pulls the chain herself, just before going to bed), the hundred percent cause of that constant heavy, warm, fetid smell that pervades the Pensión Colonial and nauseates the boarders, especially in the beginning (with that typical female imagination that cooks up an answer for everything, she maintains that it makes them sleep better).

Señorita Rosa has (or rather had, since after the great nocturnal tragedy even this changed) the soul and the fingers of an artist. As a child, in Ayacucho, when the family was at its apogee (three stone houses and grazing land with sheep), she learned to play the piano and showed such talent that she even gave a recital in the municipal theater, attended by the mayor and the prefect, at which her parents, hearing the applause, wept with emotion. Encouraged by this glorious evening, at which Inca princesses also danced, the Berguas decided to sell everything they had and move to Lima so that their daughter could become a concert pianist. That was why they had purchased this huge old house (which they then rented out and sold off bit by bit), why they bought a piano, why they enrolled their gifted daughter at the National Conservatory. But the big lustful city soon shattered their provincial illusions. For the Berguas promptly discovered something that they would never have suspected: Lima was a den of a million sinners, and every one of them, without a single exception, was out to rape the inspired young girl from Ayacucho. At least that was what the adolescent with shining braided tresses recounted morning, noon, and night, her big round fear-filled eyes brimming with tears: her solfeggio teacher had leapt upon her, panting and snorting, and tried his best to consummate the sinful act using a pile of music scores as a mattress, the concierge of the conservatory had sidled up to her and asked her obscenely: “Would you like to be my hetaera?”, two boys in her class had invited her to go to the lavatory with them to watch them pee, the policeman on the corner whom she had asked for directions had confused her with someone else and tried to fondle her breasts, and the bus driver had pinched her nipple as she had handed him her fare… Determined to defend the integrity of that hymen which, in accordance with moral precepts of the highlands, as inflexible as marble, the young pianist ought to sacrifice only to her future lord and master, her lawfully wedded spouse, the Berguas withdrew her from the conservatory, arranged for her to take lessons from a young lady who came to the house, dressed Rosa like a nun, and forbade her to go out on the street unless the two of them were with her. Twenty-five years had gone by since then, and as a matter of fact her hymen is still intact and in place, but at this point this is no longer of any great moment, inasmuch as outside of this attraction—for which, moreover, modern young men have nothing but scorn—the ex-pianist (after the tragedy the private lessons were stopped and the piano sold in order to pay the hospital and the doctors) has no others to offer. She is stouter and dumpier and all hunched over now, and since she is always bundled up in anti-aphrodisiac tunics and hooded cloaks that hide her hair and her forehead, she looks more like a bulky walking parcel than a woman. She insists that men paw her, frighten her with filthy propositions, and try to rape her, but at this juncture, even her parents wonder whether these ideas of hers were ever more than fantasies.

But the really moving, tutelary figure of the Pensión Colonial is Don Sebastián Bergua, an old man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness. An old-fashioned man, one might safely say, he has inherited from his distant