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One day, after picking him up off the floor of a cheap bar in El Callao, taking him to the pensión in the center of town where he lived, wiping away the spittle and sawdust he was covered with, and putting him to bed, Sarita Huanca Salaverría revealed to him the secret of her life. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont thus learned (pallor of a man who has received the vampire’s kiss) that in her early youth there had been an accursed love and a conjugal catastrophe. In fact, between Sarita and her brother (Richard?) a tragic love affair had taken place that (cataracts of fire, a rain of poison on humanity) had led to her becoming pregnant. She had cleverly entered into matrimony with a suitor whom she had previously disdained (Red Antúnez? Luis Marroquín?), so that the child born of incest would not have a blot upon his name, but the happy young husband (the Devil sticking his tail in the pot and curdling the sauce) had discovered her trickery in time and repudiated the treacherous wife who had tried to pass off another man’s child as his. Forced to have an abortion, Sarita abandoned her family of noble lineage, her elegant residential district, her impressive name, and becoming a tramp, had acquired the personality and nickname of Virago in the vacant lots of Bellavista and La Perla. From that time on, she had sworn never again to give herself to a man and to live the rest of her life, for all practical purposes (except, alas, that of the production of spermatozoa?), as a male.

Learning of the tragedy, seasoned with sacrilege, the transgression of taboos, the trampling underfoot of civic morality and religious commandments, of Sarita Huanca Salaverría did not destroy Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont’s passionate love; on the contrary, it made it all the more intense. The man from La Perla even conceived the idea of curing Virago of her traumas and reconciling her with society and men; he wanted to make of her, once again, a very feminine young woman of Lima, a charming, flirtatious, piquant little rascal—like La Perricholi?

As his fame spread, he was asked to referee international matches in Lima and abroad, and received offers to work in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, which (patriotism of the scientist who turns down the computers of New York in order to go on experimenting with his tubercular guinea pigs in the laboratories of the Peruvian School of Medicine) he always refused; at the same time, his siege of the incestuous Sarita’s heart became more stubborn than ever.

And it seemed to him that he glimpsed certain signs (Apache smoke signals on the hills, tom-toms in the African rain forest) that Sarita Huanca Salaverría might yield. One afternoon, after coffee with croissants at the Haití, on the Plaza de Armas, he managed to hold the girl’s right hand between his for more than a minute (precisely: the chronometer in his referee’s head timed it). Shortly thereafter, there was an international match in which the team that had won the Peruvian championship confronted a band of assassins from a country of little renown (Argentina, or something like that?), who showed up on the playing field in cleated shoes, knee guards, and elbow patches which were really weapons to injure their adversary. Paying no attention to their arguments (as a matter of fact, they were telling the truth) that in their country that was how soccer was played (topping it off with torture and crime?), Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont ordered them off the field, with the result that the Peruvian team won a technical victory for lack of an opposing team. The referee, naturally, was carried out of the stadium in triumph on the shoulders of the crowd, and Sarita Huanca Salaverría, once they were alone (a burst of patriotic enthusiasm? sportive sentimentality?) threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Once, when he was taken ill (cirrhosis was insidiously, fatally mineralizing the liver of the Man of the Stadiums and beginning to cause him to suffer periodic crises), she took care of him, never once leaving his bedside, during the entire