Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [176]
It seemed at one point that he would become as religious as his father (who, in addition to his worship of El Señor de Limpias, had spent his life carrying various Christs and Virgins in processions and wearing the habit of a number of different orders), since for years he was a faithful acolyte in the churches round about the Plaza de Santa Ana. As he was diligent, had all the responses down pat, and appeared to be the soul of innocence, the priests in the neighborhood closed their eyes to the fact that his movements were so slow and clumsy and frequently summoned him to serve Mass, ring the little bell during Holy Week reenactments of the Via Crucis, or bear the censer in processions. Seeing him enveloped in his acolyte’s surplice, which was always too big for him, and hearing him recite the responses with devotion, in good Latin, at the altars of Las Trinitarias, San Andrés, El Carmen, La Buena Muerte, and the little church of Cocharcas (for he was summoned even by the priests of that distant quarter), María Portal, who would have wished her son a tempestuous career as a soldier, an adventurer, an irresistible Don Juan instead, repressed a sigh. But the king of the Brotherhood of Lima, Valentín Maravillas, felt his heart swell with pride at the thought that this child of his own flesh and blood seemed destined to become a priest.
But they were all mistaken: the boy did not have a religious vocation. He was possessed of an intense inner life and had found no answer as to where, how, by what means he might nourish his sensibility. His precocious thirst for poetry, his hunger for spirituality were assuaged by the atmosphere of sputtering candles, burning incense and prayers, statues covered with ex-votos, responses and rites, crosses and genuflexions.
María Portal gave the Discalced Carmelite nuns a helping hand with their domestic labors and their pastrymaking and hence was one of the rare persons allowed inside the strictly cloistered convent. The famous cook took Crisanto with her, and as the boy grew (in age, not in stature), the nuns became so accustomed to seeing him (a mere object, a tattered rag, a little half-being, a human trinket) that they allowed him to wander about the cloister as María Portal and the good sisters prepared the celestial pastries, the quivering custards, the snow-white meringues, the floating-island puddings, and the marzipan that they then sold to earn money for the missions in Africa. And that was how Crisanto Maravillas, at the age of ten, learned what love was…
The young girl who instantly attracted him was named Fátima; she was his own age and in the feminine universe of the Discalced Carmelites she fulfilled the humble duties of a domestic servant. When Crisanto Maravillas saw her for the first time, she was just finishing washing down the flagstone walkways of the cloister and was about to water the lilies and roses in the garden. She was a slip of a girl who, despite the fact that she was bundled up in a shapeless burlap garment full of holes and had all her hair tucked up under a bit of coarse cotton cloth like a coif, was unable to conceal her origins: an ivory complexion, dark blue circles under her eyes, an arrogant chin, slender ankles. She was (aristocratic tragedies envied by the vulgar) a foundling. She had been abandoned one winter night, wrapped in a sky-blue blanket, in the convent turn-box on the Calle Junín, along with a message in elegant handwriting blurred by teardrops: “I am the offspring of an accursed love, the despair of an honorable family, and I could not live within society without being a continual guilty reminder of the sin of the parents who brought me into this world. Since they have the same father and the same mother, they are prevented from loving each other, from