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By Root 1166 0

week that he remained in the Hospital Carrión, and one night Joaquín saw her shed tears (for him?). All this encouraged him, and continually thinking up new arguments, he proposed to her every day. But it was to no avail. Sarita Huanca Salaverría attended all the matches that he interpreted (the sportswriters were now comparing his refereeing to conducting a symphony), she accompanied him when he went abroad, and she had even moved to the Pensión Colonial, where Joaquín lived with his sister the pianist and his aged parents. She refused, however, to allow this fraternity to cease to be chaste and turn into joyous lovemaking. The uncertainty (daisy with an infinite number of petals to be torn off) continued little by little to aggravate Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont’s alcoholism, to the point where eventually he was more often drunk than sober.

Alcohol was the Achilles’ heel of his professional life, the millstone around his neck that, according to those in the know, kept him from being invited to Europe to referee. How to explain, on the other hand, how a man who drank as much as he did was able to practice a profession demanding such taxing physical effort? The fact is that (enigmas paving the path of history) he pursued both vocations at the same time, and from his thirtieth year on, they overlapped: Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont began refereeing matches drunk as a skunk and continued to referee them in his mind afterwards in bars.

Alcohol did not dull his talents: it neither blurred his vision nor lessened his authority nor set back his career. It is quite true that every so often he was overcome by an attack of the hiccups in the middle of a match, and that (calumnies that poison the air and stab genuine merit in the back) there were those who swore that once, overcome by Saharan thirst, he grabbed a bottle of liniment out of the hands of a medical attendant hurrying out onto the field to aid a player and gulped it down as though it were cold water. But such episodes—a collection of picturesque anecdotes, the mythology that surrounds genius—in no way hindered his triumphant march to fame and glory.

And so, amid the thundering applause of the crowd in the stadium and the penitential drinking bouts whereby he endeavored to drown his remorse (inquisitor’s pincers that dig about in living flesh, the rack that breaks bones) in his soul of a missionary of the true faith (Jehovah’s Witnesses?) for having impulsively raped, on a mad night in his youth, a minor from La Victoria (Sarita Huanca Salaverría?), Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont reached the prime of life; his fifties. He was a man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness, who had climbed to the heights of his profession.

It was at this juncture that Lima became the site of the most important soccer event of the half century, the final match of the South American Championship series, between two teams who in the semifinals had each overwhelmingly defeated their opponents: Bolivia and Peru. Although tradition recommended that a referee from a neutral country be chosen to preside over this match, the two teams, and (chivalry of the Altiplano, Andean nobility, Aymara point of honor) the foreigners in particular, insisted that the famous Joaquín Hinostroza Marroquín referee the match. And since players, substitutes, and coaches threatened to strike if this demand was not granted, the Federation finally agreed and the Jehovah’s Witness was given the mission of presiding over this match that everyone prophesied would be a memorable one.

The stubborn gray clouds of Lima lifted that Sunday, permitting the sun’s warm rays to shine down upon the contest. Many people had spent the night in line in the open air, hoping to be able to buy tickets (even though everyone knew they had been sold out for a month). From dawn on, all around the National Stadium, swarms of people milled about looking for scalpers and prepared to commit every imaginable crime in order to get in. Two hours before the match, the stadium was so jam-packed