Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [133]
“My sister talked to me at lunchtime,” she said in a gloomy voice. “She told me the scandal’s too serious for the family to ignore, that your parents are coming down to scratch my eyes out. She asked me to go back to Bolivia. What can I do? I have to go away, Varguitas.”
“Will you marry me?” I asked her.
She gave a hollow little laugh.
“I’m serious,” I insisted.
“Are you really asking me to marry you?” Aunt Julia laughed again, more amused this time.
“Is it yes or no?” I asked. “Hurry up and decide—Pascual and Big Pablito are just coming in.”
“Are you asking me to marry you to show your family you’re grown up now?” Aunt Julia asked me affectionately.
“There’s that, too,” I granted.
Fourteen.
The story of the Reverend Father Don Seferino Huanca Leyva, that parish priest of the dung heap adjacent to the soccer-mad district of La Victoria known as Mendocita, began half a century ago, one night during the carnival season, when a young man of good family, who enjoyed mingling with the rabble, raped a carefree laundress, Black Teresita—in a Chirimoyo alleyway.
When the latter discovered that she was pregnant, seeing as how she already had eight children and no husband and knew it was unlikely that any man would lead her to the altar, what with all those kids, she immediately called upon the services of Doña Angélica, a wise old woman who lived on the Plaza de la Inquisición and acted as midwife, but was even better known as a supplier of houseguests for limbo (in plain words: an abortionist). However, despite the poisonous concoctions (her own urine, in which mice had been marinated) that Doña Angélica had Teresita drink, the fetus that was the consequence of the rape, with a stubbornness that was a portent of what his character would be, refused to detach itself from the maternal placenta and remained there, curled up like a screw thread, getting bigger and bigger and taking on a more and more definite form, until nine months after the fornicatory carnival, the laundress was necessarily obliged to give birth to him.
He was given the Christian name Seferino to please his godfather, a concierge at the Congressional Building who was named that, and his mother’s two surnames. During his childhood, there was nothing that would have led one to guess he would one day become a priest, because what he liked most was not pious religious practices but spinning tops and flying kites. But from the very first, even before he knew how to talk, he gave every sign of having real character. The laundress followed a philosophy of education instinctively inspired by Sparta or Darwin that consisted of informing her offspring that if they wished to continue to exist in this jungle, they had to learn to bite and to be bitten, and that having milk to drink and food to eat was entirely their own concern once they’d reached the age of three, since by doing other people’s washing ten hours a day and delivering it from one end of Lima to the other for another eight hours, she made just enough to feed herself and those of her children who had not yet arrived at the minimum age to fly on their own wings.
The rape-child gave proof of the same stubborn will to survive that had caused him to persist in living when in his mother’s womb: he was able to feed himself by downing all the revolting refuse he collected from garbage cans, fighting with beggars and dogs over these filthy scraps. While his half brothers and half sisters died like flies of tuberculosis or food poisoning, or managed to live to adulthood though afflicted with rickets and psychic defects, thus only half passing the test, Seferino Huanca Leyva grew up in good health, physically robust and relatively sound mentally. When