Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [31]
I took Aunt Julia out onto the floor for the next piece and cautioned her that I didn’t know how to dance, but as they were playing a very slow blues number, I turned out to be a fairly decent partner. We danced the next few pieces, too, and gradually got farther and farther away from Uncle Lucho’s and Aunt Olga’s table. Just as the orchestra stopped playing and Aunt Julia started to step away from me, I held her back and planted a kiss on her cheek, very close to her lips. She looked at me in astonishment, as though she’d witnessed a miracle. There was a break as another orchestra took over, and we were obliged to return to the table. The minute we sat down, Aunt Julia began to joke with Uncle Lucho about being fifty, the age at which males reached their second youth and started to become dirty old men. Every so often she darted a quick glance in my direction, as though to make sure I was really there, and from the look in her eyes, it was plain that she couldn’t get over the fact that I’d kissed her. Aunt Olga was tired now and wanted us to leave, but I insisted on having one more dance. “Our intellectual’s becoming perverted,” Uncle Lucho remarked, and dragged Aunt Olga out for one last turn around the dance floor. I followed with Aunt Julia, and as we danced, there wasn’t a peep out of her—for the first time. When Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga were out of sight amid the crowd of couples on the dance floor, I held her tighter and snuggled up cheek-to-cheek with her. “Listen, Marito,” I heard her murmur disconcertedly, but I interrupted her by whispering in her ear: “I forbid you to call me Marito ever again—I’m not a little kid any more.” She drew her face away to look at me and tried to force herself to smile, and at that point, almost automatically, I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. Our lips barely touched, but she was not expecting any such thing, and this time she was so surprised she stopped dancing for a moment. She was absolutely dumfounded now: standing there wide-eyed and openmouthed. When the piece ended, Uncle Lucho paid the check and we left. As we drove back to Miraflores—Aunt Julia and I were sitting in the back seat—I took her hand, gave it an affectionate squeeze, and held it in mine. She didn’t draw it away, but she was obviously still bowled over and didn’t once open her mouth. As I got out of the car at my grandfather’s, I suddenly wondered how many years older she was than me.
Four.
In the El Callao night, damp and dark as a wolf’s mouth, Sergeant Lituma turned up the collar of his greatcoat, rubbed his hands together, and prepared to do his duty. He was a man in the prime of life, his fifties, whom the entire Civil Guard respected; he had served in commissariats in the roughest districts without complaining, and his body still bore scars of the battles he had waged against crime. The prisons of Peru were full of malefactors whom he had clapped in handcuffs. He had been cited as an exemplary model in orders of the day, praised in official speeches, and twice decorated: but these honors had not altered his modesty, no less great than his courage and his honesty. He had been working out of the Fourth Commissariat of El Callao for a year now, and for the past three months he had been assigned the toughest duty that can fall to the lot of a sergeant in the port district: night patrol.
The distant bells of the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen de la Legua struck midnight, and punctual as always, Sergeant Lituma—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—began his rounds, leaving behind him the old wooden headquarters building of the Fourth Commissariat, a blaze of light amid the darkness. He imagined the scene inside in his mind’s eye: Lieutenant Jaime Concha would be reading Donald Duck,