Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [154]
Was it out of rebellion, a stubborn refusal to accept this radiant social and chrematistic glory to which he was destined, that the child became a soccer referee, or was it due to some psychological shortcoming? No, it was the result of a genuine vocation. From his last baby bottle to the first fuzz on his upper lip he had, naturally, any number of governesses, imported from foreign countries: France, England. And teachers at the best private schools in Lima were recruited to teach him numbers and his ABC’s. One after the other, all of them ended up giving up their fat salary, demoralized and hysterical in the face of the little boy’s ontological indifference toward any sort of knowledge. At the age of eight he hadn’t yet learned to add, and, as for the alphabet, was still learning, with the greatest of difficulty, to recite the vowels. He spoke only in monosyllables, was a quiet child who never misbehaved, and wandered from one room to the other of the mansion in La Perla, amid the countless toys imported from every corner of the globe to amuse him—German Meccano sets, Japanese trains, Chinese puzzles, Austrian tin soldiers, North American tricycles—looking as though he were bored to death. The one thing that seemed to bring him out of his Brahmanic torpor from time to time were the little cards with pictures of soccer players that came with boxes of Mar del Sur chocolates; he would paste them in fancy albums and spend hours on end looking at them with great interest.
Terrified at the idea that they had brought into this world an offspring who was the product of too rigid inbreeding, a hemophiliac and mentally defective, doomed to become a public laughingstock, the parents sought the aid of science. A series of illustrious disciples of Aesculapius were summoned to La Perla.
It was the city’s number-one pediatrician, Dr. Alberto de Quinteros, the star of his profession, who shed the dazzling light of his knowledge on the boy’s case and opened his tormented parents’ eyes. “He is suffering from what I call the hothouse malady,” he explained. “Plants that don’t grow outside in a garden, amid flowers and insects, become sickly and produce blossoms whose scent is nauseating. This child’s gilded cage is making an imbecile of him. All his governesses and tutors should be dismissed and he should be enrolled in a school where he can associate with boys his own age. He’ll be normal the day one of his schoolmates punches him in the nose!”
Prepared to make any and every sacrifice to decretinize him, the haughty couple agreed to allow Joaquincito to plunge into the plebeian outside world. The school they chose for him was, naturally, the most expensive one in Lima, that of the Padres de Santa María, and in order not to destroy all hierarchical distinctions, they had a school uniform made for him in the regulation colors, but in velvet.
The famous doctor’s prescription produced noticeable results. Admittedly, Joaquín received unusually low grades, and (the lust for lucre that brought Luther) in order for him to pass his exams, his parents were obliged to make donations (stained-glass windows for the school chapel, wool surplices for the acolytes, sturdy desks for the little school for poor children, et cetera), but nonetheless the fact is that the boy became sociable and from that time on he occasionally appeared to be happy. And it was during this period that the first sign of his genius (his uncomprehending father called it a vice) manifested itself: an interest in soccer. When they were told that young Joaquín, their apathetic, monosyllabic offspring, was transformed into an energetic, garrulous creature the moment he put on soccer shoes, his parents were delighted. They immediately purchased a vacant lot adjoining their mansion in La Perla to turn it into a soccer field, of appreciable size, where Joaquincito could play to his heart’s content.
From then on, every afternoon when classes let out, twenty-two pupils—the faces changed, but the number was always the same—could be seen getting off the Santa