Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [140]
When Father Seferino Huanca Leyva triumphantly announced, on the occasion of a procession in honor of El Señor de Limpias—whose cult he had introduced in Mendocita, where it had caught on like wildfire—that there was not a single living child in the parish, including those born in the last ten hours, who had not been baptized, the faithful were filled with pride and the Hierarchy, after its many admonitions, for once sent him its congratulations.
On the other hand, however, he provoked a scandal when, on the occasion of the feast of the patron saint of Lima, St. Rosa, he announced in an open-air sermon he delivered in the vacant-lot soccer field of Mendocita that within the boundaries of his dusty parish there was not a single couple whose union had not been sanctified before God and the altar of his adobe shack. In stupefaction, since they knew very well that in the ex-Empire of the Incas the most solid and most respected institution—outside of the Church and the army—was concubinage, the prelates of the Peruvian Church came (dragging their feet?) to confirm the truth of this extraordinary claim with their own eyes. What they found as they nosed about the promiscuous households of Mendocita left them appalled and with an aftertaste of cheapened sacraments in their mouths. They found Father Seferino’s explanations abstruse and full of incomprehensible slang (the son of El Chirimoyo had forgotten the pure Castilian of his seminary days after his many years in the slums and adopted all the barbarisms and solecisms of the underworld argot of Mendocita), and it was the ex-faith healer and ex-Guardia Civil, Lituma, who explained to them the system used to abolish concubinage. It was sacrilegiously simple. It consisted of Christianizing, before the Gospels, all couples who had taken up with each other or were about to do so. After having taken their pleasure together for the first time, they hastened to their beloved priest to have him marry them in due and proper form, and Father Seferino, without bothering them with impertinent questions, conferred the sacrament upon them. And since this system resulted in people in the neighborhood getting married several times without having been left a widower between spouses (aeronautical speed with which the couples of the district broke up, exchanged partners, and formed new couples), Father Seferino repaired the damages thus caused, insofar as sin was concerned, through the purifying sacrament of confession. (He had explained this by citing a proverbial phrase that, in addition to being heretical, was vulgar: “One love bite hides another.”) Forbidden such practices, admonished, very nearly slapped in the face by the archbishop, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva also celebrated a sort of anniversary thanks to this entire episode: grave warning number 100.
Thus, amid bold innovations and much-publicized reprimands, the object of heated controversy, loved by some and reviled by others, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva reached the prime of life: his fifties. He was a man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness, whose conviction, since his auroral days as a young seminarian, that imaginary love was not a sin but on the contrary a powerful bodyguard for chastity, had in fact been sufficient to keep him pure, when there arrived in Mendocita (serpent in Paradise that takes on the voluptuous, luxuriant, lustfully resplendent forms of the female) a pervert named Mayte Unzátegui who claimed to be a social worker (in reality she was—a woman after all?—a prostitute).
She maintained that she had worked with selfless devotion in the wilds of