Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [39]
“He saw that you were an inexperienced kid and handed you a real cock-and-bull story.” Lituma smiled.
“It’s the absolute truth,” Little Hands insisted. “I knocked at the door, we went in, and the wife, an uppity little samba, said it was true and why shouldn’t she and her husband have the right to play their little game of robbers? The things you see in this job, eh, sergeant?”
“You said it, kid,” Lituma agreed, thinking of the black.
“On the other hand, a man would never get bored with a woman like that, sergeant,” Little Hands said, smacking his lips.
He accompanied Lituma to the Avenida Buenos Aires, where the two of them separated. As the sergeant headed toward the boundary line of the Bellavista precinct—the Calle Vigil, the Plaza de la Guardia Chalaca—a long trek, usually the stretch where he first began to feel tired and sleepy, the sergeant remembered the black. Could he have escaped from the insane asylum? But Larco Herrera Asylum was such a long way away that some Guardia Civil or patrol car would have seen him and arrested him. And those scars? Could they really be from knife cuts? Damn, that would really hurt, like being slowly burned to death. How hideous—making one little tiny cut after another till the guy’s face was covered with them. Or could he have been born like that? It was still pitch-dark, but already there were signs of approaching dawn: cars, an occasional truck, silhouettes of early risers. You who’ve seen so many real oddballs—why are you so concerned about that guy you found stark-naked, the sergeant wondered. He shrugged: mere curiosity, a way of keeping his mind occupied till it was time to go off duty.
He had no difficulty finding Zárate, a Guardia Civil who’d served with him in Ayacucho. He found him with his report already made out and signed: one traffic accident, nobody hurt, nothing important. Lituma told him about the black, and the only part that Zárate thought was funny was the bit about the sandwiches. He was a demon stamp collector and, as he accompanied the sergeant for a few blocks, began telling him how he’d managed, just that morning, to come by some triangular stamps from Ethiopia, with lions and snakes, in green, red, and blue, a very rare issue, for which he’d swapped five Argentine stamps not worth anything at all.
“But which they’ll doubtless think are worth a whole lot,” Lituma interrupted.
Zárate’s mania, which ordinarily he put up with good-naturedly, irritated him tonight and he was happy when they separated. A faint blue light was dawning in the sky and the buildings of El Callao, ghostly, grayish, rusty, teeming, loomed up out of the darkness. Hurrying along almost at a trot, the sergeant counted the blocks he still had to go before reaching the commissariat. But this time, he admitted to himself, he was hurrying not so much because he was tired after the long night and all the walking he’d done but because he was eager to see the black again. It’s almost as if you believed the whole thing was a dream and the darky doesn’t really exist, Lituma.
But he did indeed exist: he was there, sleeping curled up in a ball on the floor of the cell. The pickpocket had fallen asleep at the other end, with a fearful expression on his face still. The others were asleep, too: Lieutenant Concha with his head resting on a pile of comic books, and Camacho and Arévalo shoulder to shoulder