Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [168]
I tried to persuade him to come with us, I joked with him, I buttered him up, I pleaded with him, but there was nothing doing: he had appointments, work to do, his family was waiting for him. He showed us to the door, assuring us that the whole thing could be taken care of in a couple of minutes in Tambo de Mora.
We found an old beat-up taxi right in front of the city hall and arranged with the driver to take us to Tambo de Mora. During the ride, as Javier and Pascual were talking about the mayor and Javier was saying that he was the worst cynic he’d ever met in his life and Pascual was trying to lay all the blame on the secretary, the taxi driver spoke up and put in his two cents’ worth, calling the burgomaster of Chincha all sorts of nasty names and adding that all he cared about in life was shady business deals and graft. Aunt Julia and I sat holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, and every so often I would whisper in her ear that I loved her.
We arrived in Tambo de Mora at dusk, and from the beach we saw a fiery disk sinking into the sea, in a cloudless sky with myriad stars just beginning to come out. We wandered about the two dozen shacks built of cane stalks daubed with mud that constituted the village, amid boats with hulls staved in and fishing nets full of holes stretched out between stakes to be mended. We could smell fresh fish and the sea. Half-naked little black kids surrounded us, eating us alive with questions: who were we, where did we come from, what did we want to buy? We finally found the mayor’s shack. His wife, a black keeping a hot fire burning in a brazier with a straw fan, wiping the sweat from her forehead with her other hand, told us that her husband was still out fishing. Looking up at the sky, she added that he’d be back in any minute now. We went down to the little beach to wait for him, and for an hour, sitting on a dead tree trunk, we watched the boats come back in, the day’s work over, the fishermen laboriously beach them on the sand, their wives chop the heads off the fish and gut them, right there on the beach, doing their best to hold off the hungry dogs. Martín was the last to come in. It was dark now and the moon had risen.
He was a black with gray hair and an enormous belly, a waggish, talkative sort who, despite the cool night air, was wearing nothing but an old pair of pants that clung to his skin. We greeted him as though he were a being descended from heaven, helped him beach his boat, and escorted him home. As we made our way through the village by the dim light of the cooking fires inside the villagers’ shacks without doors, we explained the reason for our visit.
Baring his big horse-teeth, he burst out laughing. “No way, pals, you’re going to have to hunt up some other dummy to fry you that kettle of fish,” he said in his deep, melodious voice. “I helped pull off another little trick like that and nearly got a bullet through my head for my trouble.”
He then told us how, a few weeks before, in order to do the mayor of Chincha a favor, he’d overlooked the fact that banns hadn’t been posted and married a young couple. Four days later, who should show up, beside himself with rage, but the husband of the “fiancée” (“A girl born in the village of Cachiche, where all the women have brooms and fly on them at night,” he said); she’d been married for two years, and her husband threatened to kill the pander who had dared to lawfully wed the adulterous pair.
“My colleague in Chincha knows all the tricks—he’s such a clever devil he’ll be going straight to Heaven one of these days,” he joked, slapping his big belly gleaming with little drops of sea water. “Every time something rotten comes his way, he sends it to Martín the fisherman as a present, and let the nigger get rid of the corpse. Take my word for it, he’s a crafty one!”
There was no way of talking him into changing his mind. He refused even to have a look at our papers, and countered every argument that Javier, Pascual, and I could think of—Aunt Julia didn’t say a word but couldn’t