Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [155]
After a few weeks, however, Peru’s pioneer hot-pepper grower noticed something odd. He had twice, three times, ten times found Joaquincito refereeing the game. With a whistle in his mouth and a little cap with a sun visor perched on his head, he would run after the players, call fouls, impose penalties. Although the boy seemed to have no complexes about fulfilling the role of referee rather than playing, the millionaire was incensed. He invited these boys to his house, stuffed them with sweets, allowed them to hobnob with his son as though they were equals, and then they had the nerve to foist the humble role of referee off on Joaquín? He very nearly opened his Dobermans’ cages to give those insolent boys a good scare. But in the end he merely reprimanded them severely. To his surprise, the boys protested that they were not to blame and swore that Joaquín was the referee because he wanted to be, and the supposed injured party solemnly confirmed, taking God as his witness, that what they said was true. A few months later, consulting his memorandum book and the reports of his groundskeepers, the father found himself confronted with these statistics: of the 132 games played on his field, Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont had not played in a single one and had refereed 132. Exchanging glances, the father and mother said to themselves subliminally that something wasn’t right: how could this possibly be considered normal behavior? And again they called upon science for help.
It was the most renowned astrologer in the city, a man who read souls in the stars and mended the minds of his clients (he preferred to call them his “friends”) by means of the signs of the zodiac, Professor Lucio Assmule, who, after casting many horoscopes, interrogating the heavenly bodies, and absorbing himself in lunar meditation, pronounced his verdict, which, if perhaps not the most accurate one, was in any event the one most flattering to the parents.
“The child knows at the cellular level that he is an aristocrat, and faithful to his origins, he cannot tolerate the idea of being equal to the others,” he explained to them, removing his glasses—to ensure that the bright gleam of intelligence that appeared in his eyes on announcing a prediction would be all the more visible? “He would rather be a referee than a player because the person who referees a match is the one in command. Did you think that Joaquincito was engaging in a sport out there on that green rectangle? You’re wrong, altogether wrong. He is indulging an ancestral appetite for domination, singularity, and hierarchical distinction which undoubtedly is in his very blood.”
Sobbing for joy, the father smothered his son with kisses, declared himself a man blessed by heaven, and added a zero to the check in payment of the fee, already a princely sum, set by Professor Assmule. Convinced that this mania for refereeing his schoolmates’ soccer matches stemmed from a driving will to power and a superiority complex that would one day make his son the master of the world (or, in the very worst of cases, of Peru), the industrialist frequently abandoned his multiple office of an afternoon in order (sentimental weakness of the lion whose eyes brim with tears on seeing its cub tear apart its first lamb) to come to his private stadium in La Perla to paternally rejoice at the sight of Joaquín, dressed in the splendid uniform he’d given him as a present, blowing the whistle on that bastard horde (the players?).
Ten years later, the disconcerted parents couldn’t help wondering whether the astral prophecies might not have been too optimistic. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont was now eighteen years old and had reached the last grade in his high school several years after the boys who’d been his classmates