Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [135]
His superiors, alarmed, hastened to combat these wild ideas. But Doña Mayte Unzátegui, on the other hand, warmly applauded them, and inasmuch as the latifundian philanthropist was helping to support a third of the seminarians, the reverend fathers (bitter pill that is swallowed for budgetary reasons) were obliged to overlook what was going on and close their ears to Seferino Huanca Leyva’s theories. And they were not merely theories: they were confirmed by practice. On the days when the seminarians were allowed out to visit their homes, the boy from El Chirimoyo invariably returned at nightfall with some example of what he called armed preaching. Thus, one day, on seeing a drunken husband beating his wife on one of the tumultuous streets of his neighborhood, he had intervened and broken the bully’s shinbones with a couple of good swift kicks, followed by a lecture on the proper behavior of the good Christian husband. Another day, having surprised a greenhorn pickpocket trying to rob an old woman in the Cinco Esquinas bus, he had knocked him out by clouting him over the head (and then personally taking him to the public emergency clinic to get his face sewed up). Finally, one day, having surprised a couple taking their pleasure together like animals in the tall grass of the Bosque de Matamula, he had whipped the two of them till the blood came, and made them swear on their knees, if they didn’t want another whipping, that they’d go get married forthwith. But Seferino Huanca Leyva’s real red-letter day (so to speak), insofar as his axiom “Purity, like the alphabet, is best beaten into people’s heads” was concerned, was the day on which he gave his tutor and Thomist-philosophy teacher, the gentle Father Alberto de Quinteros, a punch in the jaw, in the seminary chapel no less, because the latter, in a gesture of fraternity or an access of warm fellow feeling, had tried to kiss him on the mouth. A guileless, not at all spiteful man (he had come to the priesthood late in life, after earning fame and fortune as a psychologist who had first made a name for himself in a famous case in which he had cured a young doctor who had run over and killed his own daughter on the outskirts of Pisco), the Reverend Father Quinteros, on returning to the seminary from the hospital where they had stitched up the gash in his mouth and replaced with false ones the three teeth that had been knocked out, opposed the expulsion of Seferino Huanca Leyva, and he himself (with that generosity of great souls who turn the other cheek so often that they find their posthumous place on church altars) acted as sponsor of the rape-child at the Mass receiving him into the priesthood.
But during the time that Seferino Huanca Leyva was a seminarian, it was not only his conviction that the Church ought to combat evil pugilistically that upset his superiors, but to an even greater degree his (disinterested?) belief that masturbation, in any way, shape, or form, should definitely not be included in the vast repertory of mortal sins. Despite repeated reprimands from his mentors, who, citing the Bible and countless papal bulls, fulminated against the sin of Onan, endeavored to show him the error of his ways, the son of Doña Angélica the abortionist, stubborn by nature even before the day he was born, roused his comrades to rebellion by night by assuring them that the manual act had been conceived by God to compensate ecclesiastics for their vow of chastity, or in any event to make it bearable. Sin, he argued, resides in the pleasure offered by a woman’s flesh, or (more perversely) the