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By Root 1170 0

at the beginning, and it was only thanks to his family’s philanthropy that he had managed to get that far. There were no signs anywhere of the genes of a conqueror of the world that, according to Lucio Assmule, were camouflaged beneath the innocent whim to referee soccer games, whereas, on the other hand, it was becoming terribly obvious that this son of aristocrats was a hopeless disaster when it came to anything but awarding free kicks. Judging by the things he said, he had an intelligence that placed him, Darwinianly speaking, somewhere between the oligophrenic and the monkey, and his lack of wit, of ambition, of interest in anything save his frantic activities as a referee, made him a profoundly dull person.

It is true, however, that insofar as his first vice was concerned (the second was alcohol), the boy displayed something that deserved to be called talent. His teratological impartiality (in the sacred space of the soccer field and the magic time of competition?) earned him a reputation as a referee among the students and teachers at Santa María, as did (hawk that from the clouds spies beneath the carob tree the rat that will be its lunch) his vision that permitted him to detect, infallibly, at any distance and from any angle, the sly kick in the shins given the center forward by the defensive half, or the vicious elbow blow dealt the goalie by the wing who jumped with him. His omniscient knowledge of the rules and the happy intuition that enabled him to fill in the gaps in the rule book with lightning decisions were also extraordinary. His fame soon spread beyond the walls of Santa María and the aristocrat of La Perla began to referee interscholastic games, district championships, and one day the news got around that—at the stadium in El Potao?—he had substituted for a referee in a second-division match.

Once he finished high school at Santa María, Joaquín’s bewildered parents were faced with a problem: his future. The idea of sending him to the university was painfully rejected, to spare the boy pointless humiliations and inferiority complexes and avoid further drains on the family fortune in the form of donations. An attempt to get him to learn foreign languages ended in a resounding failure. After a year in the United States and another in France, he had not picked up a single word of English or of French, and in the meantime his already rachitic Spanish became positively tubercular. When Joaquín returned to Lima, the manufacturer of woolen textiles finally resigned himself to the fact that his son would never have a degree after his name, and thoroughly disillusioned, put him to work in the tangled thickets of the many interlocking family enterprises. As might have been predicted, the results were catastrophic. Within two years, his acts or omissions had driven two spinning mills into bankruptcy, and put the most flourishing firm of the conglomerate—a road-construction company—deeply into debt, and the hot-pepper plantations in the jungle had had their entire crop eaten by insects, flattened by avalanches, engulfed by floods (thus proving that Joaquincito was a jinx). Stunned by his son’s immeasurable incompetence, his pride wounded, the father lost all his energy, became nihilistic, and neglected his various businesses so badly that in a short time they were bled white by greedy lieutenants, and he developed a laughable tic: sticking out his tongue and trying (inanely?) to lick his ear. Following in his wife’s footsteps, his nervousness and bouts of insomnia delivered him into the hands of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (Alberto de Quinteros? Lucio Assmule?), who soon relieved him of whatever good sense and money he had left.

His progenitors’ financial ruin and mental collapse did not drive Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont to the brink of suicide. He went on living in La Perla, in a ghostly mansion that little by little had faded, grown moldy, lost its gardens and soccer field (sold to pay off debts), been abandoned and invaded by filth and spiders. The young man spent his days refereeing the street games gotten