Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [121]
After having been detained in Lima for three months, the little parish priest from Cajatambo—who had come to the capital intending to stay only four days to arrange to procure a new Christ for the church in his village because rowdy urchins had decapitated with their slingshots the one that had been there before—terrified at the prospect of being found guilty of attempted murder and spending the rest of his days in prison, had a heart attack and died. His death electrified public opinion and had disastrous consequences for the defense; the newspapers now turned their backs on the imported jurist, accused him of being a casuist, a practitioner of bel canto, a colonialist, a strange migratory bird from other shores, and of having caused the death of a good shepherd with his sibylline, anti-Christian insinuations, and the judges (docility of reeds bending with journalistic winds) disqualified him on the grounds that he was a foreigner, deprived him of the right to plead before the country’s tribunals, and, in a decision that the newspapers hailed with nationalist ruffles and flourishes, ordered him deported to Italy as an undesirable alien.
The death of the little priest from Cajatambo saved the mother and the daughter and the boarders from probable prison sentences for attempted murder and criminal conspiracy. As the press and public opinion shifted radically, the public prosecutor also began to sympathize with the Berguas, and accepted, as he had at the beginning, the mother’s and daughter’s version of events. Lucho Abril Marroquín’s new attorney, a native-born jurist, adopted an entirely different strategy: he conceded that his client had committed the crimes, but argued that he could in no way be held responsible for his acts, since he was suffering from paropsis and rachitis brought on by anemia, along with schizophrenia and other tendencies pertaining to the domain of mental pathology, as eminent psychiatrists corroborated in amiable depositions. As definite proof that the defendant was mentally deranged, they pointed to the fact that, among the four women in the Pensión Colonial, he had chosen the oldest one and the only one who was crippled. During the final summation by the public prosecutor (dramatic climax that deifies actors and makes spectators shiver with excitement), Don Sebastián, who up to that point had sat silent and bleary-eyed in his wheelchair, as though the trial had nothing to do with him, slowly raised one hand and with eyes suddenly red from the effort, anger, or humiliation, pointed fixedly, for an entire minute as timed by a chronometer (dixit a journalist), at Lucho Abril Marroquín. The gesture was judged to be as extraordinary as though the equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar had broken into a gallop… The court accepted all the arguments of the public prosecutor, and Lucho Abril Marroquín was shut up in the insane asylum.
The Bergua family never got back on its feet again. Its moral and material downfall dated from this period. Ruined by grasping medical and legal practitioners, they were forced to give up the private piano lessons (and as a consequence the ambition to make Rosa a world-famous concert artist) and reduce their standard of living to extremes that bordered on such pernicious habits as fasting and closing their eyes to filth. The enormous old house grew even older, and little by little dust accumulated everywhere, spiders invaded it, and termites devoured it; its clients became fewer and fewer, and it became a lower- and lower-class pensión, finally reaching the point of taking in maids and street porters. It touched bottom the day a beggar came knocking at the door, asking the shocking question: “Is this the Colonial Flophouse?”
And so, as the days, the months, followed one upon the other, thirty years went by.
The Bergua family appeared to have become habituated to its mediocrity,