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By Root 1049 0

streets of Lima where Crisanto (artist whose talents were nourished by life itself?) found characters and subjects for his songs. His music—tradition, history, folklore, gossip—immortalized in melody the types and customs of the city. In the pits just off the Plaza del Cercado and in Santo Cristo, Maravillas and Father Gumercindo watched fighting cocks being trained for championship matches in the Coliseo de Sandia, and thus was born the marinera “Watch Out for the Cock the Color of Red Pepper, Mama” or they took the sun in the little square of Carmen Alto, where, seeing the puppeteer Monleón amusing everyone in the neighborhood with his little rag marionettes, Crisanto found the subject of the waltz “The Young Miss from Carmen Alto” (it begins: “Alas, my love, you have little fingers made of wire and a heart of straw”). It was also, doubtless, during these strolls through the old town that Crisanto came across the little old ladies in black shawls who appear in his waltz “Devout Little Lady, You Too Were a Woman Once,” and watched the adolescent street fights mentioned in the polka “The Urchins.”

Around six in the evening, the two friends would separate: the priest would return to his parish church to pray for the soul of the cannibal murdered in El Callao, and the bard would go to the garage of Chumpitaz the tailor. There, with the group of his intimates—Sifuentes the cajón drummer, Tiburcio the quijada player, Lucía Acémila the singer? Felipe and Juan Portocarrero the guitarists—he would rehearse new songs, work up arrangements, and as dusk was falling, somebody would bring out the fraternal bottle of pisco. And so, between musicmaking and conversation, rehearsing and a bit of alcohol, the hours went by. When it got dark, the group would go off to eat at one restaurant or another of the city, where the artist was always an honored guest. On other days, fiestas awaited them—birthdays, engagements, weddings—or dates at some club. They would make their way home at dawn and the bard’s friends would bid him goodbye at the door of the building where he lived. But once they had left and were home in their hovels sleeping, a misshapen little figure with a clumsy gait would emerge from the alleyway. A ghostly silhouette in the dawn fog and drizzle, he would make his way through the damp shadows and sit down in the deserted Plaza de Santa Ana on the stone bench opposite the convent of Las Descalzas. The cats of early morning would then hear the most deeply felt arpeggios ever to pour forth from an earthly guitar, the most ardent songs of love born of human inspiration. Those devout old ladies already abroad at that hour who sometimes spied him there, singing softly and weeping in front of the convent, spread the vicious rumor that, drunk with vanity, he had fallen in love with the Virgin herself, and serenaded her at daybreak.

Weeks, months, years went by. Crisanto Maravillas’s fame (destiny of a balloon that expands and rises, following the sun) spread, as did his music. No one, however, not even his intimate friend the parish priest Gumercindo Lituma, a former Guardia Civil brutally beaten by his wife and children (for raising rats?) who, as he convalesced, had heard the call of the Lord, guessed the story of Crisanto Maravillas’s inordinate passion for the cloistered Sister Fátima, who during all these years had been trotting from one chore to another on her way to sainthood. The chaste couple had not been able to exchange a single word since the day the Mother Superior (Sister Lucía Acémila?) discovered that the bard was a creature endowed with virility (despite what had occurred on that fateful morning in the chambers of the examining magistrate?). But down through the years they had had the happiness of seeing each other, though only with difficulty and at a distance. Once she became a nun, Sor Fátima, like her sisters in the convent, took her turn at prayer in the chapel, where the Carmelites kept a perpetual vigil, by twos, twenty-four hours a day. The nuns keeping vigil were separated from the public by a little wooden