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To further complicate matters and contribute to keeping the city in suspense, the object of the crime, Don Sebastián Bergua, was in no condition to settle the question, for he was lingering between life and death in the public clinic on the Avenue Alfonso Ugarte. He was given copious blood transfusions, which brought many of his compatriots from the Tambo-Ayacucho Club to the very brink of tuberculosis, for the moment they heard about the tragedy they had rushed to the clinic to Doñate their blood, and these transfusions, plus serums, sutures, disinfections, bandages, nurses on duty at his bedside round the clock, surgeons who reset his bones, rebuilt his organs, and calmed his nerves, exhausted in the space of just a few weeks the last of the family’s financial resources (already vastly reduced by inflation and the galloping cost of living). The Berguas were therefore obliged to sell off their bonds at a ridiculously low price, to divide their property and rent it out in bits and pieces and hole up on the second floor, where they were now vegetating.

Don Sebastián managed to escape death, but in the beginning his recovery was apparently not complete enough to lay the suspicions of the police to rest. As a result of the knife wounds, the terror that he had undergone, or the moral sullying of his wife’s honor, he was left a mute (and, it was rumored, an idiot as well). He could not utter a single word, he looked at everything and everybody with the lethargic inexpressiveness of a tortoise, and his fingers, too, would not obey him, since he could not (would not?) answer in writing the questions put to him when the insane man’s case was tried.

The trial assumed major proportions and the City of Kings held its breath in suspense during the hearings. Lima, Peru—all of mestizo America?—followed the courtroom battle with passionate interest, the forensic disputes, the testimony and counter-testimony of the experts, the arguments of the public prosecutor and the attorney for the defense, a famous jurist who had come especially from Rome, the city of marble, to defend Lucho Abril Marroquín, because the latter was the husband of a little Italian girl who, besides being the legal expert’s compatriot, was also his daughter.

The country was divided into two opposing factions. Those convinced of the innocence of the medical detail man—all the newspapers—maintained that Don Sebastián had been the victim of a murder attempt on the part of his wife and offspring, in collusion with the judge from Ancachs, the little parish priest from Cajatambo, and the nursing students from Huanuco, their motives doubtless having been the inheritance and monetary gain. The Roman jurist imperially defended this view, affirming that, having become aware of the gentle madness of Lucho Abril Marroquín, the family and the boarders had hatched a plot to foist the blame for the crime on him (or perhaps to induce him to commit it?). And he continued to adduce arguments in support of this thesis, which the organs of the press then enlarged upon, applauded, and claimed were proven fact: could anyone in his right mind possibly believe that a man would receive fourteen, and perhaps fifteen, knife thrusts in respectful silence? And if, as was only logical to presume, Don Sebastián Bergua had howled in pain, could anyone in his right mind possibly believe that neither the wife, nor the daughter, nor the judge, nor the priest, nor the nurses had heard those cries, given the fact that the walls of the Pensión Colonial were made of canestalks and mud, mere flimsy partitions through which one could hear a mosquito buzzing or a scorpion running about? And how was it possible, given the fact that the young boarders from Huanuco were nursing students with good grades, that they had not managed to give the wounded man first aid and had merely waited, nothing daunted, for the ambulance to arrive while the gentleman lay bleeding to death? And how was it possible that not one of the six adults, seeing that the ambulance was delayed, had had the idea, which should have