Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [161]
In view of the magnitude of this concentration of the populace, the authorities had taken precautions. The most famous brigade of the Guardia Civil, the one which, in the space of a few months (heroism and self-sacrifice, boldness and urbanity) had cleared every last lawbreaker and malefactor out of El Callao, was brought to Lima to ensure security and civil behavior in the stands and on the playing field. Its chief, the celebrated Captain Lituma, the terror of crime, walked feverishly about the stadium and made the rounds of the gates and the adjacent streets, checking to make sure that the patrol squads were at their proper stations and issuing inspired orders to his doughty adjutant, Sergeant Jaime Concha.
Amid the roaring crowd in the western grandstand when the starting whistle blew, battered and bruised and almost unable to breathe, were, in addition to Santa Huanca Salaverría, who (masochism of the victim fallen head over heels in love with the man who has raped her) never missed one of the matches that Joaquín refereed, the venerable Don Sebastián Bergua, risen only recently from the bed of pain on which he lay as a result of the knife wounds he had received at the hands of the medical detail man Luis Marroquín Bellmont (who was in the northern grandstand of the stadium, by very special permission of the Board of Prisons?), his wife Margarita, and his daughter Rosa, now completely recovered from the bites inflicted upon her—O accursed Amazon dawn—by a pack of rats.
There was nothing to foreshadow the impending tragedy when Joaquín Hinostroza (Tello? Delfín)—who, as usual, had been obliged to make the tour of the stadium to acknowledge the applause—alert and agile, blew the starting whistle. On the contrary, the match proceeded in an enthusiastic, courteous atmosphere: the players’ passes, the fans’ applause acclaiming the forwards’ shots for the net and the goalkeepers’ blocks. From the very first moment, it was evident that the oracles would be fulfilled: the teams were evenly matched and the play fair but hard. More creative than ever, Joaquín Hinostroza (Abril?) glided across the turf as though on roller skates, never getting in the players’ way and invariably placing himself at the very best angle, and his decisions, stern but just, prevented (heat of battle that turns a contest into a brawl) the match from degenerating into violence. But (limits of the human condition) not even a saintly Jehovah’s Witness could prevent the fulfillment of what destiny (impassivity of the fakir, British phlegm) had plotted.
The irreversible infernal mechanism began to function in the second half, when the score was tied 1–1 and the spectators found themselves with no voice left and their palms burning. Captain Lituma and Sergeant Concha said to each other, naïvely, that everything was going very well: not a single incident—a robbery, a fight, a lost child—had occurred to spoil the afternoon.
But at precisely 4:13 p.m., the fifty thousand spectators saw the totally unexpected happen, before their very eyes. From the most crowded section of the southern grandstand, an apparition suddenly emerged—black, thin, very tall, one enormous tooth—nimbly scaled the fence, and rushed out onto the playing field uttering incomprehensible cries. The people in the stands were less surprised to see that the man was nearly naked—all he had on was a tiny loincloth—than they were to see that his body was covered, from head to foot, with scars. A collective gasp shook the stands; everyone realized that the tattooed man intended to kill the referee. There could be no doubt of it: the shrieking giant was running straight toward the idol of the world of soccer