Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [134]
He was a precocious child who did all sorts of things to make himself a few pennies. As he learned to talk, he also learned to beg for alms from passersby on the Avenida Abancay, assuming the expression of a little gutter angel that melted the hearts of highborn ladies and loosened their purse strings. Later on, he was a shoeshine boy, a kid who guarded parked cars, a street peddler hawking newspapers, emollients, nougat, an usher at the soccer stadium, a secondhand clothes peddler. Who would ever have predicted that this child with dirty fingernails, filthy bare feet, a head of hair full of nits, his clothes covered with mends and patches, and his torso squeezed into an old sweater much too small for him and full of holes would one day become the most controversial parish priest in all of Peru?
How he learned to read was a mystery, since he had never set foot in a school. People in El Chirimoyo said that his godfather, the concierge who worked in the Congressional Building, had taught him the alphabet and showed him how to spell out syllables, and that the rest came to him (children of the gutter who by sheer tenacity become Nobel Prize winners) by dint of a pure effort of will. Seferino Huanca Leyva was twelve years old, making the rounds of the city’s great mansions asking for worn-out clothes and old shoes (which he then sold in tenement districts and slums), when he met the person who was to provide him with the material means that enabled him to become a saint: an owner of vast landed estates, Mayte Unzátegui, of Basque origin, of whom it was impossible to say which was greater—her fortune or her faith, the size of her holdings or her devotion to Nuestro Señor de Limpias. She was coming out of her Moorish-style mansion on the Avenida San Felipe, in Orrantia, and her chauffeur was holding the door of her Cadillac open for her, when the lady spied the product of the rape, standing in the middle of the street next to his pushcart full of old clothes that he had collected that morning. His abject poverty, his intelligent eyes, his features of a headstrong young wolf pleased her. She told him she would come visit him at dusk that evening.
There was laughter in El Chirimoyo when Seferino Huanca Leyva announced that a lady in a big luxury car driven by a chauffeur in a blue uniform would be coming to see him after sunset. But when, at six o’clock, the Cadillac braked to a stop at the entrance to the alleyway and Doña Mayte Unzátegui, as elegant as a duchess, entered it and asked for Teresita, everyone was convinced (and dumfounded). Doña Mayte (one of those businesswomen who carefully calculate every moment of their time, including that required for menstruation) immediately made the laundress a proposal that caused her to shout for joy. Doña Mayte offered to pay for Seferino Huanca Leyva’s education and give his mother a sum of ten thousand soles provided the boy became a priest.
It was thus that the rape-child came to be a student at Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo seminary in Magdalena del Mar. Unlike others, who first feel a sense of vocation and then act, Seferino Huanca Leyva discovered that he had been born to be a priest, after he had become a seminarian. He proved to be a pious and diligent student, a favorite of his teachers, and the pride and joy of Black Teresita and his benefactress. But while his grades in Latin, theology, and patristics attained lofty heights, and his religiosity was irreproachably manifested in the form of Masses said, prayers recited, and self-flagellations administered, from his adolescence onward he began to show symptoms of what, in the future, at the time of the heated debates that his daring acts gave rise to, his defenders were to call impetuousness motived by religious