Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [170]
“I swear to heaven we’ll find a mayor,” Pascual said. “I’ll refuse to admit I was born in the province of Chincha if we can’t get you married somewhere in these parts tomorrow. My word of honor.”
“Do they need a mayor to marry them?” the driver said, pricking up his ears. “Have you abducted the little lady? Why didn’t you tell me before—don’t you trust me? I’d have taken you to Grocio Prado. The mayor there is a pal of mine and he’d have married you on the spot.”
I proposed that we go on to Grocio Prado then and there, but he dissuaded me. The mayor probably wasn’t in the village at this hour, but out at his little farm, an hour’s ride from town by burro. It was best to wait till the next day. We made arrangements with the driver to come by to pick us up at eight the following morning, and I offered him a fat tip if he’d put in a good word for us with his buddy.
“Of course I will,” he said, reviving our spirits. “You’ll be married in the village of the Blessed Melchorita—what more could you ask?”
The dining room at the Hotel Sudamericano was just about to close, but Javier persuaded the waiter to have them fix us something to eat. He brought us Cokes and plates of fried eggs with warmed-up rice that we barely touched. Suddenly, halfway through the meal, we realized that we were talking almost in whispers, like conspirators, and we burst into hysterical laughter. As we were leaving for our respective rooms—Pascual and Javier had planned to go back to Lima that same day after the wedding, but as things hadn’t gone as expected, they were staying on and in order to save money were sharing a room—we saw half a dozen men, some of them in boots and riding pants, come into the dining room and shout for beers. Their drunken voices, their boisterous laughter, their clinking glasses, their stupid jokes, their vulgar toasts, and later on their belches and vomiting were the background music of our wedding night. Despite the bureaucratic frustration of the day, it was an intense and beautiful wedding night, during which, in that old bed that screeched like a cat as we embraced and was no doubt crawling with fleas, we made love several times, with a fire reborn again and again, and as our hands and lips taught us to know each other and give each other pleasure, we told each other that we loved each other, that we would never lie to, cheat on, or leave each other. When they knocked on our door—we’d asked them to wake us at seven—the drunks had just shut up and we were still lying there awake, naked and curled up together on the quilt with the green diamond pattern, dizzy and drowsy with pleasure, looking at each other gratefully.
Our morning toilette, in the common bathroom of the Hotel Sudamericano, was a heroic feat. The shower appeared not to have ever been used before, water spurted from the rusty shower head in all directions except that of the bather, and great quantities of a blackish liquid came out before the water ran clear. There were no bath towels, just a dirty rag for people’s hands, so we had to dry ourselves with the bed sheets. But we were happy and excited and the inconveniences amused us. We found Javier and Pascual, already dressed, in the dining room, sallow-faced with sleep, looking disgustedly at the catastrophic state the place had been left in by the drunks of the night before: broken glasses, cigarette butts, pools of vomit and spit on which a hotel employee was throwing pails of sawdust, and a terrible smell. We went out to have our morning coffee down the street, in a little café from which we could see the tall leafy trees in the square. It was an odd sensation, coming from the gray fog of Lima, to see the day beginning with bright hot sunshine and a cloudless sky. When we got back to the hotel, the taxi driver was there waiting for us.
On the trip to Grocio Prado, along a dusty stretch of road that led past vineyards and cotton plantations and from which we could see the dark skyline of the Andes looming up in the distance on the other side of the desert, the driver, in a sudden fit of talkativeness