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By Root 1133 0

Pacheco’s jaw, leave the Stud blind in one eye, Strong-Arm Pedrito impotent, He-Man Sampedri a slavering idiot, and Muscleman Huambachano black and blue all over. During this campaign worthy of Don Quixote, he was ambushed one night and cut to ribbons with knives; his assailants, believing they’d done him in, left him lying in the mud for starving dogs to devour. But the life force of the Darwinian young man was stronger than the rusty knife blades that stabbed him, and he survived, though he bore for the rest of his life, it is true—marks of steel on the body and face of a man that lustful women find exciting—the half-dozen scars that, after the trial, were responsible for the commitment to a psychiatric institution, as an incurable madman, of the ringleader of his attackers, that native of Arequipa with the Biblical first name and the maritime surname, Ezequiel Delfín.

The priest’s sacrifices and efforts bore the fruits he had hoped for, and Mendocita, to everyone’s amazement, was freed of every last one of its pimps. Father Seferino was the idol of the women in the neighborhood; from that time on, they came in throngs to Mass and went to confession every week. To make the profession that earned them their daily bread less hard on them, Father Seferino invited a doctor from Acción Cató1ica to come to the district to give them advice on sexual prophylaxis and instruct them in practical ways of detecting the presence of the gonococcus, in their client or in themselves, before it was too late. In cases in which the birth-control techniques that Mayte Unzátegui taught them proved ineffective, Father Seferino brought a disciple of Doña Angélica’s in from El Chirimoyo to Mendocita to dispatch to limbo the tadpoles of love for sale. The grave warning that he received from the ecclesiastical authorities when they discovered that the priest was recommending the use of condoms and diaphragms and was in favor of abortions was his thirteenth.

The fourteenth came as a result of the so-called trade school that he had the audacity to set up. In it, experts of the district, in delightful informal talks (an anecdote here, an anecdote there, beneath the overcast skies or the occasional stars of the Lima night), taught novices with virgin police records various ways of making a living. They could learn, for instance, the exercises that turn fingers into intelligent, extremely discreet intruders capable of slipping into the innermost recesses of any purse, pocket, wallet, or briefcase and recognizing, amid all the heterogeneous objects inside, the booty they covet. They could discover how, with the patience of a good craftsman, any wire can take the place of the most baroque key to open a door, and how the ignition of different makes of cars can be started if, perchance, one does not happen to be the owner of the vehicle. Lessons were given on how to snatch jewelry on the streets, on foot or on a bicycle, how to scale walls and break windows of houses without making a sound, how to do plastic surgery on any object that suddenly changed owner, and how to get out of various Lima jails without the authorization of the chief of police. Even such arts and crafts as the manufacture of knives and—rumors born of envy?—the distilling of cocaine from coca paste were taught in this school, which finally earned Father Seferino the friendship and fellowship of the men of Mendocita, as well as his first run-in with the police of La Victoria, who took him down to headquarters one night and threatened to bring him to trial and get him put behind bars as a Gray Eminence of crime. He was rescued from that fate, naturally, by his influential benefactress.

Even this early on, Father Seferino had become a popular figure, receiving a great deal of publicity in newspapers and magazines and on the radio. His innovations were the object of heated discussion. There were those who regarded him as a protosaint, a forerunner of the new batch of priests who were to revolutionize the Church, and there were those who were convinced that he was a fifth columnist of Satan