Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [157]
He had seen her play several times in these street matches and had even penalized her repeatedly for her aggressive manner of charging her adversary. They called her Virago, but Joaquín had never suspected that this adolescent with the sallow complexion, dressed in blue jeans and a ragged sweater, and wearing a pair of old house slippers, was a female. He discovered this fact erotically. One day, after he had given her a penalty for what was unquestionably foul play (she’d scored a point by kicking the ball and the goalie at the same time), she’d responded by uttering a crude insult having to do with his mother.
“What was that you said?” the son of aristocrats shot back indignantly—thinking that at that very moment his mother was doubtless swallowing a pill, sipping a sedative potion, receiving a painful injection? “If you’re a man, I dare you to repeat it.”
“I’m not one, but I’ll repeat it,” Virago replied. And (honor of a Spartan woman capable of allowing herself to be burned alive rather than take back what she has said) she repeated the rude insult, embroidering it with gutter adjectives.
Joaquín tried to throw a punch at her, but it landed in thin air, and the next moment he found himself lying on the ground, knocked down by a roundhouse from Virago, who then fell on him, hitting him with her fists, feet, knees, elbows. And there on the ground (violent gymnastics on the canvas that end up resembling passionate embraces) he discovered—stupefied, erogenized, ejaculating—that his adversary was a woman. The emotion aroused in him by this wrestling match, along with its attendant unexpected turgescences, was so intense that it changed his life. After making his peace with her after the fight and learning that her name was Sarita Huanca Salaverría, he invited her then and there to go to the movies with him to see a Tarzan film, and a week later he proposed to her. Sarita’s refusal to become his wife, or even allow him to kiss her, drove Joaquín classically to drink and to cheap bars. Within a short time, he went from being a romantic drowning his troubles in whiskey to being a hopeless alcoholic capable of trying to quench his African thirst with kerosene.
What was it that awakened in Joaquín this passion for Sarita Huanca Salaverría? She was young, with the svelte physique of a banty rooster, a complexion tanned by exposure to the elements, hair cut in bangs like a jeune premier ballet dancer, and as a soccer player she wasn’t bad. All in all, her manner of dress, the things she did, the company she kept seemed very odd for a woman. Was it precisely this perhaps—a penchant for originality bordering on vice, a frantic tendency toward bizarre behavior—that made her so attractive to the aristocrat? The first time he took Virago to the run-down mansion in La Perla, his parents looked at each other in disgust once the two of them had left. The former millionaire summed up all his bitterness in a single phrase: “We’ve engendered not only an imbecile but a sexual pervert as well.”
Nonetheless, while Sarita Huanca Salaverría was responsible for Joaquín’s becoming an alcoholic, she served at the same time as the trampoline that catapulted him from his status as a referee of street games played with a ball made of rags to championship matches in the National Stadium.
Virago was not content merely to refuse the aristocrat’s passionate advances; she took great pleasure in making him suffer. She accepted his invitations to the movies, to soccer matches, to bullfights, to restaurants,