Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [143]
Father Seferino naturally resorted at this point to armed preaching. He challenged Don Sebastián Bergua to fisticuffs to prove which of the two of them was the true servant of God. Weakened by his excessive practice of the Exercise of Onan that had enabled him to resist the temptations of the Devil, the man from El Chirimoyo was k.o.’d by Don Sebastián Bergua’s second punch; for twenty years the latter had done calisthenics and boxed for an hour a day (in the Remigius Gymnasium in San Isidro?). It was not his having lost two incisors and been left with his nose permanently flattened that plunged Father Seferino into despair, but rather, the humiliation of being beaten at his own game and noting that with each passing day he was losing more parishioners to his adversary.
But (bold men who grow even bolder in the face of danger, and firm believers in the old saying, “For a terrible ill, a worse remedy”) one day the man from El Chirimoyo mysteriously brought to his adobe hut several jerry cans full of a liquid which he hid from the gaze of the curious (but which any sensitive nose would have immediately recognized as kerosene). That night, when everyone in Mendocita was fast asleep, accompanied by his faithful Lituma, he boarded up the doors and windows of the brick house from the outside, using thick planks and big stout nails. Don Sebastián Bergua was sleeping the sleep of the just, dreaming of an incestuous nephew who, repenting having raped his sister, ended up a papist priest in a Lima slum: Mendocita? He was unable to hear Lituma’s hammer blows which transformed the Evangelical temple Into a rat trap because Doña Angélica, the ex-midwife, on orders from Father Seferino, had given him a thick anesthetic potion. Once the Mission was hermetically sealed, the man from El Chirimoyo personally sprinkled it with kerosene. Then he crossed himself, lit a match, and was on the point of throwing it. But something caused him to hesitate. Ex-sergeant Lituma, the social worker, the ex-abortionist, the dogs of Mendocita saw him standing there, tall and gaunt, beneath the stars, with a look of torment in his eyes, holding the lighted match between his fingers, pondering whether he should roast his enemy to death.
Would he do so? Would he toss the match? Would Father Seferino Huanca Leyva turn the Mendocita night into a raging inferno? Would he thus ruin an entire life devoted to religion and the common good? Or would he blow out the little flame that was burning his fingertips, open the doors of the brick house, and fall to his knees to beg the Evangelical minister’s forgiveness? How would this parable of the slums end?
Fifteen.
The first person I talked to about my having proposed to Aunt Julia was not Javier but Nancy. After my telephone conversation with Aunt Julia, I called my cousin and suggested that we go to the movies together. But we ended up instead at El Patio, a bar-and-grill in Miraflores on the Calle San Martín and a favorite hangout of wrestlers that Max Aguirre, the Luna Park promoter, brought to Lima. The establishment—located in a small two-story building designed to house middle-class tenants that thoroughly detested being turned into a bar—was empty when we arrived, and we were able to have a quiet conversation as I consumed my tenth cup of coffee of the day and Nancy had a Coca-Cola.
The minute we sat down, I began to think up various ways of breaking the news to her gently. But she was the one who started the conversation, bursting with news she couldn’t wait to tell me. The night before, there had been a family meeting at Aunt Hortensia’s, attended by a dozen relatives, to discuss “the affair.” At this gathering, it had been decided that Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga would ask Aunt Julia to go back