Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [182]
Crisanto, it is true, spent a great deal of his time in the Carmelite chapel. He would enter several times a day, cross himself, and cast a glance at the grille. If—with beating heart, racing pulse, shivers up and down his spine—he recognized Sister Fátima through the little square openings in the wooden grille, kneeling at one of the prie-dieus perpetually occupied by silhouettes in white habits, he would immediately fall to his knees on the colonial tiles. He placed himself in an oblique position (his physique was a help in this respect, for it was not easy to tell whether one was seeing him full-face or in profile), which allowed him to give the impression that he was looking at the altar, when in reality his eyes were fixed on the long veils, the snowy starched folds enveloping the body of his beloved. From time to time Sister Fátima (breaths that the athlete takes to redouble his efforts) interrupted her prayers, raised her eyes toward the altar (ruled off in squares?), and thereupon recognized Crisanto’s shadowy interposed silhouette. An imperceptible smile would then appear on the little nun’s niveous face and a tender sentiment would be revived in her delicate heart on catching sight of her childhood friend. Their eyes would meet and in those few seconds (Sister Fátima would feel obliged to lower hers) they told each other—things that would have made even the angels in Heaven blush? Because, yes, it was quite true—this young girl who had been miraculously saved from being crushed to death by the wheels of the car driven by the medical detail man Lucho Abril Marroquín, which had knocked her down one sunny morning on the outskirts of Pisco when she was not yet five years old, and who had become a nun in thanks to the Virgin of Fátima, had with the passage of time come, within her solitary cell, to love the bard of Los Barrios Altos with a sincere heart.
Crisanto Maravillas had resigned himself to not marrying his beloved carnally, to merely communicating with her in this subliminal fashion in the chapel. But he never resigned himself to the thought—cruel for a man whose only beauty was his art—that Sister Fátima was not able to hear his music, those songs that she unwittingly inspired. He suspected (a certainty for anyone who cast one glance at the thick fortified walls of the convent) that the serenades which, risking pneumonia, he had been offering her each morning at dawn for twenty years never reached the ears of his beloved. One day Crisanto Maravillas began to incorporate religious and mystical themes in his repertory: the miracles of Saint Rose of Lima, the (zoological?) feats of Saint Martin of Porres, stories of the martyrs, and maledictions of Pontius Pilate followed songs celebrating humble folkways. His success among the masses was in no way diminished thereby, and at the same time he attracted a new legion of fanatical admirers: priests and monks, nuns, Acción Católica. Peruvian music, ennobled, perfumed with incense, enriched by sacred themes, began to leap over the walls that had imprisoned it in drawing rooms and clubs and be heard in places where it would previously have been inconceivable: churches, processions, retreat houses, seminaries.
This clever plan took him ten years to carry out, but in the end it was successful. The convent of Las Descalzas could not refuse the offer it received one day: the bard beloved by all the parish, the poet of church gatherings, the musician of the Stations of the Cross offered to give in its chapel and cloisters a song recital to raise money for African missionaries. The archbishop of Lima (wisdom clad in purple, and ear of a connoisseur) sent word that he authorized the performance and that, for a few hours, he would