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By Root 1065 0

little while before and wisps of vapor rose from it. On the table were three lighted candles, and we could make out by their dim glow a Peruvian flag pinned up with thumbtacks and a framed photograph of the President of the Republic on the whitewashed walls. The mayor was a stout, impassive man of about fifty; he was laboriously writing the entry in the register with an old-fashioned nib pen that he dipped into a wide-mouthed inkwell after each sentence. He greeted Aunt Julia and me with a bow. I calculated that, at the rate at which he was writing, it had no doubt taken him more than an hour to make the entry. When he finished, he said without budging from his chair: “There have to be two witnesses.”

Javier and Pascual stepped forward, but only the latter was accepted by the mayor, since Javier was a minor. I went out to have a word with the driver, who had stayed behind in the taxi; he agreed to be our witness if I would pay him a hundred soles. He was a skinny mestizo, with a gold tooth; on the trip to Grocio Prado he’d smoked one cigarette after another and hadn’t spoken a single word.

When the mayor showed him where he was to sign his name, he shook his head sadly. “What a shame,” he said, in a regretful tone. “Who ever heard of a wedding without even one miserable bottle to drink to the health of the bride and groom? I can’t be a party to a thing like that.” He gave us a pitying look and added as he went out the door: “Wait a second for me.”

Folding his arms, the mayor closed his eyes and appeared to be falling asleep. Aunt Julia, Pascual, Javier, and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do. I finally made up my mind to go out onto the street and hunt up another witness.

“That’s not necessary. He’ll be back,” Pascual said, keeping me from leaving. “What’s more, he was quite right to say what he did. We should have thought of the wedding toast. That sambo’s shown us all up.”

“All this takes steady nerves,” Aunt Julia whispered, grabbing my hand. “Don’t you feel as if you were holding up a bank and the police were going to come bursting in any minute?”

The taxi driver was gone for a good ten minutes that seemed like ten years, but finally he came back clutching two bottles of wine. The ceremony could now continue. Once the witnesses signed, the mayor had Julia and me sign, opened a copy of the Civil Code, and bringing it closer to one of the candles, read us, as slowly as he had written the entry in the register, the articles appertaining to conjugal obligations and duties. He then handed us a certificate and announced that we were man and wife. We kissed each other and then the witnesses and the mayor embraced us. The driver uncorked the bottles of wine with his teeth. There were no glasses, so we drank straight out of the bottle, passing it from hand to hand after each swallow. On the ride back to Chincha—all of us were both happy and relieved—Javier made a disastrous attempt to whistle the Wedding March.

After paying the taxi driver, we walked over to the Plaza de Armas so that Javier and Pascual could catch a jitney back to Lima. There was one that would be leaving in an hour, so we had time to eat dinner at El Sol de Chincha. During the meal, we decided on a plan. As soon as Javier got back to Miraflores, he would go to my Aunt Olga’s and Uncle Lucho’s to take the family’s temperature and then would telephone us. Aunt Julia and I would go back to Lima the following morning. Pascual would have to invent a good excuse to justify his not having shown up for more than two days at the radio station.

We left the two of them at the jitney stop and went back to the Hotel Sudamericano, chattering away like an old married couple. Aunt Julia was feeling a little queasy and thought it was the wine we’d drunk in Grocio Prado. I told her that it had tasted like a superb vintage to me, but I didn’t tell her that it was the first time in my life that I’d ever drunk wine.

Eighteen.

The bard of Lima, Crisanto Maravillas, was born in the old city, in a little alleyway off the Plaza de Santa Ana from the rooftops