Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [162]
Who was the imminent assailant? Was it perhaps that stowaway who had mysteriously arrived in El Callao and been caught by the night patrol? The same unfortunate wretch whom the authorities had euthanasiacally decided to shoot to death and whose life the sergeant (Concha?) had spared on a dark night? Neither Captain Lituma nor Sergeant Concha had time to check. Realizing that if they did not act at once, a national glory might be the victim of an attack on his life, the captain—superior and subordinate had a method of communicating with each other by blinking—ordered the sergeant to go into action. Without rising to his feet, Jaime Concha drew his revolver and fired the twelve bullets in it, every one of which lodged in different parts of the nudist’s body (at a distance of fifty yards). In this way the sergeant had finally complied (better late than never, as the old saying goes) with the orders he had been given, for, in fact, it was the stowaway of El Callao!
Seeing its idol’s potential murderer, whom an instant before it had hated, riddled with bullets was enough to cause the crowd (capricious whims of a fickle flirt, coquettishness of a changeable female) to side immediately with him, to transform him into a martyr, and to turn against the Guardia Civil. A collective hissing, booing, whistling that deafened the birds in the sky rose from the stands as the crowd voiced its protest at the sight of the black lying on the field bleeding to death from the twelve bullet holes. The sound of gunfire had disconcerted the players, but the Great Hinostroza (Téllez Unzátegui?), true to himself, had not allowed the match to be stopped, and went on with his brilliant refereeing, nimbly sidestepping the interloper’s corpse, deaf to the whistling from the stands, to which jeers, taunts, insults were now added. The first multicolored cushions were already sailing through the air, soon to become a veritable deluge raining down on Captain Lituma’s police detachment. The latter smelled a hurricane in the offing and decided to act quickly. He ordered his men to prepare to launch tear-gas bombs, his intention being to prevent at all costs a terrible bloodbath. And a few moments later, when the barriers around the ring had been breached at many points and here and there impassioned taurophiles bent on mayhem were rushing into the arena, he ordered his men to hurl a few grenades on the edges of the bullring. A few tears and coughing fits, he thought, would calm the enraged protestors down and peace would reign once again in the Plaza de Acho as soon as the wind had dispersed the chemical effluvia. He also ordered a group of four Guardias to surround Sergeant Jaime Concha, who had become the principal target of the hotheads: they were obviously determined to lynch him, even if they were obliged to confront the bull to do so.
But Captain Lituma was forgetting one essential fact: in order to keep out the spectators without tickets who were milling about outside the bullfight stadium and threatening to force their way in, he had ordered the gates and metal grilles blocking access to the stands to be lowered. When the Guardias Civiles, complying immediately with his orders, let fly with their tear-gas grenades and here and there, within a few seconds, pestilential fumes spread in the stands, the spectators’ reaction was to clear out instantly. Leaping to their feet in a panic, shoving, pushing as they covered their mouths with their handkerchiefs and tears began streaming from their eyes, they ran toward the exits. The human tide then realized that the way out was blocked by the metal gates and grilles hemming them in. Blocked? Only for a few seconds, until the front ranks of each column, transformed into ramrods by the pressure of those behind them, stove them in, knocked them down, ripped them apart, and tore them from their hinges. And thus the inhabitants of El Rímac who chanced to be strolling by the Plaza de Toros at