• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1161 0

him to visit the Hermitage of Saint Rose of Lima, where he saw him toss a gold piece in the well and ask a secret favor, and on a certain torrid summer Sunday he invited him to have an orange sherbet in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín. Because he was so quiet and melancholy, the young man seemed elegant to Don Sebastián. Was he suffering from some mysterious malady of soul or body that was causing him to waste away, some love wound that could not be stanched? Ezequiel Delfín was as silent as the grave about himself, and when on occasion, with all due precaution, the Berguas had offered him a shoulder to cry on and asked him why he always kept so much to himself, being such a young man, why he never went to a party, a movie, why he never laughed, why he so often heaved a deep sigh, with his eyes staring into empty space, he merely blushed and, stammering an apology, ran to shut himself up in the bathroom, where he sometimes spent hours on end, maintaining that he was suffering from constipation. He came and went on his travels in connection with his job, like a veritable sphinx—the family never even managed to find out what sort of company he worked for, what products he sold—and here in Lima, when he wasn’t out on the road, he spent his time shut up in his room (reading his Bible or absorbed in his devotions?). Because they were born matchmakers, and because they felt sorry for him, Doña Margarita and Don Sebastián urged him to come downstairs and hear Rosita practice “as a diversion,” and he obediently did so: sitting motionless in a corner of the living room, he would listen attentively and applaud politely when she finished. He often accompanied Don Sebastián to morning Mass, and during Holy Week of that year he did the Stations of the Cross with the Berguas. He already seemed like a member of the family at that point.

Hence, the day that Ezequiel, who had just returned from a trip to the North, suddenly burst into sobs in the middle of lunch, startling the other boarders—a justice of the peace from Ancachs, a parish priest from Cajatambo, and two girls from Huanuco who were studying nursing—and spilled the meager portion of lentils that had just been served him onto the table, the Berguas were very concerned. The three of them took him up to his room Don Sebastián lent him his handkerchief, Doña Margarita made him a cup of verbena-and-mint tea, and Rosa covered his feet with a blanket. Ezequiel Delfín calmed down after a few minutes, apologized for “his weakness,” explained that he’d been very nervous lately, that he didn’t know why but very often these days, at any hour of the day and no matter where he happened to be, he’d burst into tears all of a sudden. Covered with shame, in a voice that was almost a whisper, he revealed to them that he was often overcome by fits of terror, he would lie awake all night till dawn, all curled up in a ball and dripping with cold sweat, thinking of ghosts and filled with self-pity because he was so lonely. His confession brought tears to Rosa’s eyes, and her little lame mother crossed herself. Don Sebastián offered to sleep there in the same bedroom with the terrified young man to comfort and reassure him. Ezequiel Delfín kissed Don Sebastián’s hands in gratitude.

An extra bed was set up in the room and diligently made up by Doña Margarita and her daughter. Don Sebastián was then in the prime of life, his fifties, and was in the habit of doing fifty abdominals before getting into bed (he did his exercises before going to bed at night, instead of after getting up in the morning, so as to distinguish himself from the vulgar in this regard as well), but in order not to disturb Ezequiel, he skipped them that night. The nervous young man had retired early, after downing a lovingly prepared bowl of chicken-giblet broth and assuring them that the company of Don Sebastián had already put his mind at rest and that he was sure he’d sleep like a top.

The details of what happened that night were never to be erased from the memory of the gentleman from Ayacucho: they were to haunt him, awake