Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [142]
Father Seferino stipulated that within each catholic community the members of each sex were to enjoy the most democratic equality. The males were to address each other in the familiar form, and the females likewise, but in order to ensure that the differences in musculature, intelligence, and common sense established by God would not be forgotten, he advised the females to use the formal term of address when speaking to the males and as a sign of respect try not to look them straight in the eye. The tasks of cooking, sweeping, fetching water from the public fountain, killing cockroaches and rats, washing clothes, and other domestic chores were to be rotated and the money earned—through honest labor or in any other manner—by each member was to be turned over to the community down to the last penny, whereupon it would be redistributed in equal shares after communal expenses had been taken care of. The living quarters were not to have any inside partitions, so as to do away with the sinful habit of secrecy, and all the activities of everyday life, from evacuation of the bowels to sexual embrace, were to be carried out in full view of the others.
Even before the police and the army invaded Mendocita, with a cinematographic display of rifles, gas masks, and bazookas, and made the raid that kept men and women from the district shut up in police barracks for many days, not because of what they really were or had been (thieves, thugs, whores), but because they were subversives and dissidents, and Father Seferino was brought before a military tribunal and charged with establishing, under cover of his priestly functions, a bridgehead for Communism (he was acquitted, thanks to the influence exerted by his benefactress, the millionaire heiress Mayte Unzátegui), the experiment in archaic Christian communal living was already doomed.
Doomed, naturally, by the ecclesiastical authorities, who officially condemned it (grave warning number 233) on the grounds that it was highly suspect as a theory and insane as a practice (the facts, alas, proved that they were right), but doomed above all by the nature of the men and women of Mendocita, clearly allergic to collectivism. The number-one problem was the traffic in sex. In the stimulating promiscuity of the collective dormitories, under cover of the darkness, the most ardent fondlings, seminal rubbings, frictions took place from mattress to mattress, or outright rapes, acts of sodomy, impregnations, and as a consequence crimes of passion multiplied. Problem number two was theft: instead of doing away with the appetite for property, communal living exacerbated it to the point of madness. The members stole from each other even the fetid air they breathed. Rather than fraternally uniting the people of Mendocita, cohabitation made them mortal enemies. It was in this period of chaos and disorder that the social worker (Mayte Unzátegui?) announced that she was pregnant and ex-sergeant Lituma admitted that he was the father. With tears in his eyes, Father Seferino gave his Christian blessing to this union brought about by his socio-Catholic innovations. (People say that since then he sobs all night long and chants elegies to the moon.)
But almost immediately thereafter he was obliged to face an even worse catastrophe than that of having lost this Basque woman whom he had never managed to possess: the arrival in Mendocita of a formidable rival, the evangelical minister Don Sebastián Bergua. The latter was a man still in the flower of youth, athletic-looking, with strong biceps, who the moment he arrived announced that he proposed to win over to the true religion—the reformed church—all of Mendocita, including the Catholic priest and his three acolytes, within a period of six months. Don Sebastián (who before he became a minister had been—a gynecologist worth millions?) had the financial means to impress the people of the district: he had a brick house built for himself, paying the men in the neighborhood royally for the work they did on it, and began giving what he called “religious breakfasts,