Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [180]
It was very nearly a mortal blow for the bard of the Plaza de Santa Ana, who was immediately taken ill with a romantic malady defying diagnosis. He remained bedridden for many days—extremely high fevers, melodious fits of delirium—as doctors and faith healers tried unguents and spells to bring him out of his coma. When he finally rose from his sickbed, he was a specter and could barely stand up. But (could it have been otherwise?) being cruelly separated from his beloved proved beneficial to his art: his music became so tenderly sentimental that it brought tears to the eye, and his lyrics became dramatically virile. Crisanto Maravillas’s great love songs date from these years. Each time his friends, singing along with his sweet melodies, listened to those heartbreaking words that spoke of an imprisoned young girl, a little goldfinch in a cage, a little wild dove caught in a trap, a plucked flower hidden from sight in the Temple of the Lord, and of a grief-stricken man loving from a distance, without hope, they asked themselves: “Who is she?” And (curiosity that was Eve’s undoing) they tried to guess which of the women who besieged the bard was the heroine in question.
For, despite his dwarflike stature and his ugliness, the women of Lima were as though bewitched by the magic spell of Crisanto Maravillas’s charms. White women with fortunes in the bank, little mestizo demimondaines, mulatresses from the slums, young girls who were just learning to live or older women who were straying yet again from the path of virtue showed up at modest room H, on the pretext of seeking his autograph. They made eyes at him, gave him little presents, flattered him, wheedled, suggested places where they might meet, or made out-and-out advances on the spot. Was it because these women, like those of a certain country that displays its pretentiousness in the very name of its capital (favorable winds, good weather, healthy air?), habitually sought out deformed men, due to a stupid prejudice whereby they are deemed to be better, matrimonially speaking, than normal men? No, in this case it was because the splendor of his art surrounded the homunculus of the Plaza de Santa Ana with a spiritual aura that either blinded them to his wretched physical appearance or made him seem all the more desirable because of it.
Crisanto Maravillas (gentleness of the invalid recovering from tuberculosis) politely discouraged these advances and subtly hinted to the women soliciting his favors that they were wasting their time. On such occasions he would utter an esoteric phrase that unleashed an indescribable whirlwind of gossip round about him: “I believe in fidelity and am a little Portuguese shepherd boy.”
The life he led in those days was the bohemian one of gypsies of the spirit. He arose around noon and usually had breakfast with the parish priest of the Church of Santa Ana, a former examining magistrate in whose chambers a Quaker (Don Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar?) had mutilated himself to prove that he was innocent of a crime of which he had been accused (having killed a black stowaway who had arrived in the country in the hold of a passenger liner from Brazil?). Profoundly moved by this incident, Dr. Don Gumercindo Tello had thereupon exchanged his judge’s robes for a priest’s cassock. The story of the mutilation was immortalized by Crisanto Maravillas in a festejo for guitar, quijada, and cajón, entitled “Blood Absolves Me.”
The bard and Father Gumercindo were in the habit of walking together through these