Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [163]
Among the first victims of the Bajo el Puente holocaust were the introducers of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect in Peru: the man from Moquegua, Don Sebastián Bergua, his wife Margarita, and his daughter Rosa, the eminent flutist. The religious family lost their lives through what ought to have saved them: prudence. For the moment that the cannibal climbed the barrier, rushed out into the ring, and was about to be mangled to death by the bull, Don Sebastián Bergua, with furrowed brow and a dictatorial finger, had given his tribe the order: “Retreat.” It was motivated not by fear, a word unknown to the evangelist, but by good sense, the thought that neither he nor members of his family ought to appear to be involved in any sort of scandal and thus give his enemies a pretext for trampling the good name of his faith in the mud. And so the Berguas hurriedly abandoned their seats on the sunny side of the ring and were making their way down the grandstand steps to the exit when the tear-gas grenades went off. The three of them were standing, beatifically, in front of metal grille number 6, waiting for it to be raised, when they caught sight of the lachrymose crowd descending upon them from behind with a great roar. They had no time to repent of sins they had never committed before they were literally mashed to bits (turned into a puree, a human soup?) against the metal grille by the terrified multitude. A second before passing on to that other life that he denied existed, Don Sebastián managed to cry out, a stubborn, heterodox believer still: “Christ died on a tree, not on a cross!”
The death of the mentally unbalanced assailant who had attacked Don Sebastián Bergua with a knife and raped Doña Margarita and the concert artist was (would the expression be appropriate? ) less unfair. For, once the tragedy had begun, young Marroquín Delfín thought he spied his opportunity: amid the confusion, he would escape from the guard whom the Board of Prisons had ordered to accompany him in order that he might attend the historic bullfight, and flee from Lima, from Peru; once abroad, under another name, he would begin a new life of crime and madness. Illusions that turned to dust moments later when, at the gate of exit number 5 (Lucho? Ezequiel?) Marroquín Delfín and the prison guard Chumpitaz, who was holding him by the hand, had the dubious honor of forming part of the first row of taurophiles crushed to death by the crowd. (The intertwined fingers of the police officer and the medical detail man, though those of corpses, set tongues to wagging.)
The demise of Sarita Huanca Salaverría had at least the elegance of being less promiscuous. It was a case of a tremendous misunderstanding, of an erroneous evaluation of acts and intentions on the part of the authorities. When the incidents occurred, when she saw the cannibal gored to death, the smoke of the grenades, and heard the screams of the crowd as their bones shattered, the girl from Tingo María decided that (love-passion that takes all fear of death away) she should be at the side of the man she loved. Unlike the crowd, therefore, she descended into the bullring, and was thus saved from being trampled to death. This did not save her, however, from the eagle eye of Captain Lituma, who caught sight, amid the spreading clouds of tear gas, of an unidentified figure leaping over the barrier and rushing toward the torero (who, despite everything, went on inciting the bull to charge and making passes on his knees). Convinced that his obligation, so long as he had a single breath of life left in him, was to prevent the matador from being attacked, Captain Lituma drew his revolver and with three rapid shots in succession cut short the career and life of the woman