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By Root 1103 0

’s—an author whom I had just discovered at that time. I devoted to the story all the spare moments left me by the news bulletins at Panamericana, the university, and coffee breaks at the Bransa, and I also wrote at my grandparents’ house, during my lunch hours and at night. During that week, I didn’t drop in at any of my uncles’ houses for the midday meal, skipped my usual visits to my girl cousins’, and didn’t go to the movies even once. I wrote and then tore up what I wrote, or rather, the moment I’d written a sentence it struck me as absolutely dreadful and I began all over again. I was thoroughly convinced that a slip of my pen or a mistake in spelling was never a mere happenstance but rather a reminder, a warning (from my subconscious, God, or some other being) that the sentence simply wouldn’t do at all and had to be rewritten. Pascual protested: “Good Lord, if the Genaros discover how much paper you’ve wasted, they’ll take it out of our salary.” Finally, one Thursday, it seemed to me that the story was finished. It was a monologue five pages long: at the very end, the reader discovered that the narrator was the Devil himself. I read “The Qualitative Leap” to Javier in my shack, after the noon Panamericana newscast.

“It’s first-rate, old pal,” he said approvingly, applauding. “But is it really possible to write about the Devil nowadays? Why not write a realistic story? Why not do away with the Devil altogether and make the whole thing a series of incidents involving fake “pishtacos”? Or, alternatively, an outright fantastic tale, with all the ghostly apparitions you like. But no devils, because that smacks of religion, of hypocritical piety, of all kinds of things that are terribly old hat these days.”

When he left, I tore “The Qualitative Leap” to bits, tossed it into the wastebasket, decided to forget all about “pishtacos,” and went to have lunch at my Uncle Lucho’s. I learned there that there was apparently a budding romance between Aunt Julia and a man I’d never met but had heard a lot about: Adolfo Salcedo, the owner of a large estate and the senator from Arequipa—a distant family relation.

“Fortunately, Julia’s new suitor has piles of money, a high social standing, and lots of influence, plus honest intentions toward her,” my Aunt Olga commented. “He’s asked for her hand in marriage.”

“Unfortunately, Don Adolfo’s fifty and hasn’t yet done a thing to prove that that terrible thing his wife accused him of was false,” Uncle Lucho retorted. “If your sister marries him, she’s either going to have to live in chastity or take to adultery.”

“That whole story about him and Carlota is a typical bit of slanderous Arequipa gossip,” Aunt Olga argued. “Adolfo gives every appearance of being a real man.”

I knew that “whole story” about the senator and Doña Carlota very well, since it had been the subject of another short story of mine that Javier’s praise had caused me to consign to the wastebasket. The marriage of Don Adolfo and Doña Carlota had been the talk of the entire south of the Republic, since both of them owned huge tracts of land in Puno and the pooling of their holdings would thus create yet another enormous landed estate. The two of them had done things in the grand manner: a wedding ceremony in the splendid Church of Yanahuara attended by guests from all over Peru, followed by a Pantagruelian banquet. During the second week of their honeymoon, the bride had upped and left her spouse somewhere or other, returned all by herself to Arequipa to the scandal of everyone, and announced, to everyone’s stupefaction, that she was about to appeal to Rome for a formal annulment of their marriage.

Adolfo Salcedo’s mother had met Doña Carlota one Sunday after eleven o’clock Mass, and right there in the middle of the portico of the cathedral had asked her to her face, in utter fury: “Why did you abandon my poor son as you did, you shameless creature?”

With a superbly haughty wave of her hand, Doña Carlota had answered in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Because, señora, the only use to which your son puts that