Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [138]
The way in which Father Seferino Huanca Leyva succeeded in attracting the youngsters of Mendocita (flies that smell honey, pelicans that spy fish) to his once-scorned school was highly unorthodox and brought him his first grave warning from the ecclesiastical authorities. He let it be known that, for every week they attended his classes, the children would receive a little colored picture as a reward. This bait would not have been sufficient to lure the eager crowd of ragamuffins that it did had the euphemistic “little colored pictures” offered by the son of El Chirimoyo not been in reality pictures of naked women whom it was difficult to mistake for virgins. To those mothers of his little pupils who expressed their surprise at his pedagogical methods, the priest solemnly explained that, however incredible it might seem, the “little pictures” would keep their offspring from being tempted by impure flesh and make them less obstreperous, more docile, and drowsier.
To win over the girls of the neighborhood, he took advantage of the inclinations that made woman the first Biblical sinner and enlisted the services of Mayte Unzátegui, who was also placed on the parish staff and given the title of assistant. Mayte Unzátegui (wisdom that only twenty years as madam in the brothels of Tingo María can bring) succeeded in winning the hearts of the little girls by giving them courses that they found great fun: how to paint their lips and cheeks and eyelids without having to buy makeup in stores, how to pad out their breasts and hips and bottoms with cotton, pillows, and even newspapers, how to do the dances that were the latest rage: the rumba, the huaracha, the porro, the mambo. When the Visitor from the Hierarchy came to inspect the parish and saw the whole bunch of impudent brats in the girls’ section of the school taking turns wearing the only pair of spike-heeled shoes in the neighborhood and waggling their behinds provocatively under the magisterial supervision of the former bawdyhouse mistress, he rubbed his eyes in utter disbelief. Finally, on recovering his powers of speech, he asked Father Seferino if he had founded an Academy for Prostitutes.
“The answer is yes,” Black Teresita’s son, a man who had no fear of words, replied. “Since they’ll be forced to take up that profession one day in any case, they can at least be talented at it.”
(It was this episode that led to his receiving the second grave warning from the ecclesiastical authorities.)
But it is not true, as rumors spread by his detractors had it, that Father Seferino was the number-one pimp of Mendocita. He was merely a realistic man, who knew life like the palm of his hand. He did not encourage prostitution, but, rather, tried to make it more decent and fought valiant battles to keep the women who earned their living by selling their bodies (all the women in Mendocita between the ages of twelve and sixty) from contracting gonorrhea and being exploited by their procurers. The eradication of the twenty-some pimps of the district (and, in certain cases, their rehabilitation) was a heroic labor in the field of public health and social welfare that earned Father Seferino a number of knife wounds and the congratulations of the mayor of La Victoria. To achieve this end, he applied his philosophy of armed preaching. Using Jaime Concha as a town crier, he spread the word that the law and religion forbade men to live like parasites off inferior beings, and that consequently any male in the district who exploited females would be forced to confront his fists. He was thus obliged to break Greaseball