Once we’d located the municipal authority in question, I would get out of the taxi, accompanied sometimes by Pascual, sometimes by the driver, sometimes by Javier—we eventually learned by experience that the more of us there were, the more intimidated the mayor tended to be—to explain the situation. No matter what arguments I put forward, I would invariably see a look of mistrust come over the face, a gleam of alarm appear in the eye of the farmer, fisherman, or shopkeeper (the mayor of Chincha Baja introduced himself as a “healer”). Only two of them turned us down flat: the mayor of Alto Larán, an old man who went on loading his pack mules with bales of alfalfa as I talked with him, and informed us that he never married anyone who wasn’t from the village; and the mayor of San Juan de Yanac, a mestizo farmer who was terrified when he saw us, thinking we were the police coming to question him about some misdeed. When he found out what we wanted, he was furious. “No, not a chance, there’s something fishy going on if a white couple come to get married in this godforsaken village.” The others all gave us more or less the same excuses. The most common: the civil register had been lost or was filled up, and until they sent a new one from Chincha there was no way of registering deaths or births or marrying anybody at the town hall. It was the mayor of Chavín who came up with the most imaginative reply: he couldn’t marry us because he was too pressed for time; he had to go out right then and shoot a fox that had been killing two or three hens a night in the district. The one place we very nearly succeeded was Pueblo Nuevo. The mayor listened to us attentively, agreed, and said that exempting us from posting banns was going to cost us five hundred soles. He didn’t make any fuss about my age and apparently believed us when we assured him that the law had been changed and one now reached one’s majority at eighteen, not twenty-one. We had already taken our places in front of the plank laid across two barrels that served him as a desk (the municipal building in this hamlet was an adobe hut with a roof full of holes, through which we could see the sky), when the mayor began laboriously reading our papers, one word at a time. When he realized that Aunt Julia was Bolivian, it scared him off. We explained to him that this was no obstacle, that foreigners had the right to marry too, and offered him more money, but it was no use. “I don’t want to get into any trouble,” he said. “The fact that this young woman is Bolivian could be a very serious matter.”
We went back to Chincha around three in the afternoon, half dead from the heat, covered with dust, and depressed. On the outskirts of town, Aunt Julia began to cry. I hugged her, whispered in her ear that she mustn’t get upset, that I loved her, that we’d get married even if we had to visit every single village in Peru.
“I’m not crying because we can’t get married,” she said, trying to smile through her tears. “I’m crying because this whole thing is getting so ridiculous.”
None of the four of us was very hungry, so our lunch consisted of a cheese sandwich and a Coke that we downed standing up at a counter. Then we went off to take a rest. Despite our night without sleep and the frustrations of that morning, we still had the heart to make love, passionately, on the diamond-patterned quilt, in the murky light. From the bed we could see the faint feeble beams of sunlight that had managed to filter through a skylight with glass panes covered with grime. Immediately afterward, instead of getting up to join our accomplices in the dining room, we fell asleep. It was a fitful, anxious sleep, with intense rushes of desire that caused us to grope about for each other and caress each other instinctively, followed by bad dreams; we told each other about them when we woke up and learned that both of us had seen the faces of relatives in them, and Aunt Julia laughed when I told her that at one moment in my dreams I’d found myself living through one of Pedro Camacho’s recent catastrophes.
I was awakened