Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [38]
Snotnose handed him half a cup of coffee from the thermos. The black drank slowly, closing his eyes, and when he’d finished licked the aluminum cup, searching for the last few drops in the bottom, till it shone. Then he went along with them, quietly and peacefully, as they led him to the cell.
Lituma reread his report: attempted robbery, breaking and entering, indecent exposure. Lieutenant Jaime Concha had come back to his desk, and as his eyes wandered about the room, he suddenly said to Lituma with a happy smile, pointing to the pile of multicolored magazines: “Aha! Now I know who it is he reminds me of! The blacks in the Tarzan stories, the ones in Africa.”
Camacho and Arévalo had gone back to their Chinese checkers, and Lituma put his kepi back on and buttoned up his greatcoat. As he was going out the door, he heard the shrill cries of the pickpocket, who had just woken up and was protesting against his new cellmate: “Help! Save me! He’s going to rape me!”
“Shut your trap or we’ll be the ones who’ll rape you,” the lieutenant threatened. “Let me read my comic books in peace.”
From the street, Lituma could see that the black had stretched out on the floor, indifferent to the outcries from the pickpocket, a very thin Chinese who was scared to death. Imagine waking up and finding yourself face to face with a bogeyman like that, Lituma thought and laughed to himself, his massive bulk again turned to the wind, the drizzle, the darkness. With his hands in his pockets, the collar of his greatcoat turned up, his head lowered, he continued unhurriedly on his rounds. He went first to Chancre Street, where he found Corny Román leaning on the counter of the Happy Land, laughing at the jokes of Mourning Dove, the old fairy with dyed hair and false teeth tending bar there. He noted in his report that patrolman Román “gave signs of having drunk alcoholic beverages while on duty,” even though he knew full well that Lieutenant Concha, a man extremely tolerant of his own weaknesses and those of others, would look the other way. He left the port district then and strode up the Avenida Sáenz Peña, deader than a cemetery at this hour of the night. He had a terrible time finding Humberto Quispe, whose patrol area was the market district. The stalls were closed and there were fewer bums than usual sleeping curled up on sacks or newspapers underneath stairways and trucks. After several useless searches from one end of the area to the other, blowing the recognition signal countless times on his whistle, he finally located Quispe on the corner of Colón and Cochrane, helping a taxi driver whose skull had been cracked open by two thugs who had then robbed him. They took him to the public hospital to get his head sewed up and then went to have a bowl of fish-head soup at the first stall in the market to open up, that of Señora Gualberta, a fishwife. A cruising patrol car picked Lituma up on Sáenz Peña and gave him a lift to the fortress of Real Felipe, where Little Hands Rodríguez, the youngest Guardia Civil assigned to the Fourth Commissariat, was on patrol duty at the foot of the walls. He surprised him playing hopscotch, all by himself, in the darkness.
He was hopping gravely and intently from square to square, on one foot, on two, and on seeing the sergeant he immediately stood at attention. “Exercise helps keep you warm,” he said to him, pointing to the squares marked off in chalk on the sidewalk. “Didn’t you ever play hopscotch when you were a kid, sergeant?”
“I went in more for top spinning, and I was pretty good at kite flying,” Lituma replied.
Little Hands Rodrílguez told him of an incident that, he said, had made his shift that night an amusing