Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [171]
“She’s more popular than the Little Blessed One of Humay and El Señor de Luren—as can easily be seen from the number of people who come to her hermitage and her procession,” he said. “There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be declared a saint. You people who are from Lima, be active in her behalf and support her cause. It’s a just one, believe me.”
When we finally arrived, covered with dust from head to foot, in the broad treeless main square of Grocio Prado, we found out for ourselves how popular Melchorita was. Hordes of children and women surrounded the taxi and with much shouting and gesticulating offered to take us to see her hermitage, the house where she’d been born, the place where she’d mortified herself, where she’d worked her miracles, where she’d been buried, and tried to sell us pious images, prayers, scapulars, and medals with the Blessed One’s effigy. The driver had to convince them that we weren’t pilgrims or tourists before they would leave us in peace.
The municipal building, a tiny, wretched adobe hut with a tin roof, lay drowsing in the sun on one side of the square. It was closed.
“My pal will be along soon,” the driver said. “Let’s wait for him in the shade.”
We sat down on the sidewalk beneath the overhanging roof of the municipal building, and from there we could see that at the end of the straight dirt streets, lined with rickety little shacks and cane-stalk shanties and leading less than fifty yards in any direction, the farms and the desert began. Aunt Julia was sitting next to me, with her head leaning on my shoulder and her eyes closed. We’d been sitting there for half an hour, watching the pack drivers going past, on foot or on the backs of their burros, and the women going to fetch water from a little stream flowing by one corner, when an old man on horseback rode by.
“You waiting for Don Jacinto?” he asked, removing his big straw hat. “He’s gone to Ica to talk to the prefect and try to get his boy out of the military barracks. The soldiers came and took him away to do his service in the army. Don Jacinto won’t be back before nightfall.”
The driver proposed that we wait in Grocio Prado and spend the day visiting the Melchorita pilgrimage sites, but I insisted on trying our luck in other villages. After bargaining for some time, he finally agreed to stay with us till noon.
It was only nine in the morning when we began the rounds that took us through practically the entire province of Chincha, jouncing along mule paths, getting stuck on desert trails half buried in sand, approaching the sea at times and at others the foothills of the Andes. Just as we were entering El Carmen we had a blowout, and since the driver didn’t have a jack, the four of us had to hold the car up while he put the spare tire on. After midmorning, the sun, which had grown hotter and hotter and was now downright torture, heated the taxi up like a tin box and we were all dripping with sweat as though in a Turkish bath. The radiator began to steam and we had to fill a can with water to take with us so as to cool it off every so often.
We talked with three or four mayors of districts and as many deputy mayors of hamlets that at times consisted of no more than twenty shacks. They were simple rural types whom we had to hunt up at their little farms where they were at work in the fields, or in their little village shops where they were selling cooking oil and cigarettes to their constituents; we found one of them, the mayor of Sunampe, lying in a ditch sleeping off a hangover and had to shake him awake.