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By Root 1014 0

flesh of another, but why should there be any sin in the humble, solitary, unproductive relief offered by the conjoined efforts of one’s own imagination and one’s own fingers? In a composition read aloud in the class of the venerable Father Leoncio Zacarías, Seferino Huanca Leyva went so far as to suggest, through his interpretation of ambiguous episodes in the New Testament, that there were reasons for not rejecting as a mere wild hypothesis the possibility that Christ in person—perhaps after meeting Mary Magdalene?—might have fought against the temptation to commit an act of impurity by masturbatory means. Father Zacarías suffered a fainting spell and the protégé of the Basque pianist was very nearly expelled from the seminary for blasphemy.

He repented, apologized, did the acts of penance imposed upon him, and ceased for a time to propagate those outlandish ideas of his that incensed his mentors and inflamed his fellow seminarians. Nonetheless, he did not cease to put them into practice as far as he himself was concerned, for very soon his confessors again heard him say, the moment he knelt before the creaking grilles of their confessionals: “This week I have been in love with the Queen of Sheba, Delilah, and the wife of Holofernes.” It was these infatuations that kept him from a journey abroad that would have enriched his mind. He had just been ordained, and since, despite his heterodox deliriums, Seferino Huanca Leyva had been an exceptionally hardworking student and no one ever doubted his intellectual brilliance, the Hierarchy decided to send him to the Gregorian University in Rome to study for a doctorate. The brand-new priest immediately announced his intention to do research (scholars who ruin their eyesight consulting the dusty manuscripts in the Vatican Library) on a thesis to be entitled: “On the solitary vice as the citadel of ecclesiastic chastity.” When his project was angrily rejected, he gave up the trip to Rome and went off to bury himself in the inferno of Mendocita, from which he was never to emerge.

It was he himself who chose that district when he found out that all the priests in Lima feared it like the plague, not so much because of the concentration of microbes which had made its hieroglyphic topography of sandy footpaths and shacks of heterogeneous materials—cardboard, corrugated tin, straw matting, planks, rags, and newspapers—a laboratory of the most refined forms of infection and parasitosis, as because of the social violence that reigned in Mendocita. In those days, in fact, that section of the city was a University of Crime, particularly its most proletarian specialties: breaking and entering, prostitution, knife fights, con games of every variety, drug pushing, and pimping.

In the space of a few days Father Seferino Huanca Leyva built with his own hands an adobe shack, leaving it with no door, furnished it with a broken-down secondhand bed and a straw mattress bought at La Parada, and announced that he would hold an open-air Mass at seven o’clock. He also let it be known that he would hear confessions from Monday to Saturday, women from two to six and men from seven to midnight, to prevent crowding. And he also announced that he intended to organize a class, from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, in which the children of the neighborhood would be taught the alphabet, arithmetic, and the catechism. But his enthusiasm was shattered to smithereens when it met with hard reality. The turnout for his morning Masses consisted of a handful of rheumy-eyed old men and women with moribund physical reflexes who sometimes inadvertently engaged in that impious practice typical of the people of a certain country (famous for its beef cattle and its tangos?) of letting farts and relieving their bladders and bowels with all their clothes on during the Office. As for confession in the afternoon and the school for children in the morning, not one soul turned up, even out of curiosity.

What was the matter? The neighborhood faith healer, Jaime Concha, a robust former sergeant in the Guardia