Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [153]
“They looked at me like something the cat dragged in, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d called me a whore to my face,” she said indignantly. “I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from telling them to go you know where. I held my temper for my sister’s sake, and for ours too, so as not to make things worse than they are already. How’s everything going, Varguitas?”
“Monday, first thing,” I assured her. “You should say you’re postponing your flight to La Paz for a day. I’ve got everything almost ready.”
“Don’t worry too much about finding that obliging mayor,” Aunt Julia said. “I’m so furious now I don’t give a damn. Even if you don’t find one, we’ll run away together anyway.”
“Why don’t the two of you get married in Chincha, Don Mario?” I heard Pascual say the minute I hung up. Seeing how dumfounded I was, he turned beet-red: “It’s not that I’m a busybody who’s trying to stick my nose in your affairs. We couldn’t help overhearing the two of you, that’s all, and naturally we tumbled to what was going on. I’m just trying to help. The mayor of Chincha’s my cousin and he’ll marry you on the spot, with or without papers, whether you’re of age or not.”
Everything was miraculously resolved that very day. Javier and Pascual went to Chincha by bus that afternoon, with all the papers and instructions to get everything all set for Monday. As they were off doing that, I went with my cousin Nancy to rent the one-room studio apartment in Miraflores, asked for three days off from work (I got them after a Homeric discussion with Genaro Sr., boldly threatening to quit if he refused to let me have the time off), and organized my escape from Lima. On Saturday night Javier returned with good news. The mayor was a congenial young guy, and when Javier and Pascual had told him the whole story, he’d laughed and applauded our plans to elope. “How romantic!” he’d commented. He’d kept the papers and assured them, “just between us,” that there would be a way of getting around posting the banns as well.
On Sunday I phoned Aunt Julia to inform her that I’d found our kindhearted idiot of a mayor, that we’d elope the following day at eight o’clock in the morning, and that at noon we’d be husband and wife.
Sixteen.
Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont, who was destined to bring stadium crowds to their feet, not by making goals or blocking penalty kicks but by making memorable decisions as a referee at soccer matches, and whose thirst for alcohol was to leave traces and debts in many a Lima bar, was born in one of those residences that mandarins had built for them thirty years ago, in La Perla, with the aim of turning that vast empty tract of land into the Copacabana of Lima (an aim that miscarried due to the dampness, which—punishment of the camel that stubbornly insists on passing through the eye of the needle—ravaged the throats and bronchia of the Peruvian aristocracy).
Joaquín was the only son of a family that, in addition to being wealthy, had ties (dense forest of trees whose intertwining branches are titles and coats of arms) with the blue bloods of Spain and France. But the father of the future referee and drunkard had put patents of nobility aside and devoted his life to the modern ideal of multiplying his fortune many times over, in business enterprises that ranged from the manufacture of fine woolen textiles to the introduction of the cultivation of hot peppers as a cash crop in the Amazon region. The mother, a lymphatic madonna, a self-abnegating spouse, had spent her life paying out the money her husband made to doctors and healers (for she suffered from a number of diseases common to the upper class of society). The two of them had had Joaquín rather late in life, after having long prayed to God to give them an heir. His birth brought indescribable happiness to his parents, who, from his cradle days, dreamed of a future for him as a prince of industry, a king of agriculture, a magus of diplomacy,