Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [55]
“A very good day to you, Your Honor,” he greeted the magistrate, bowing deeply from the waist.
“The same to you, Zelaya.” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar smiled affably. “And what does the day have in store for us?”
“Rape of a minor with mental violence as an aggravating circumstance,” the secretary replied, depositing a voluminous folder on the magistrate’s desk. “The accused, who lives in the Victoria district and has typical Lombrosian criminal features, denies the allegations against him. The principal witnesses are waiting outside in the corridor.”
“Before hearing them, I need to reread the police report and the plaintiff’s deposition,” the magistrate reminded him.
“They’ll wait as long as necessary,” the secretary replied, and left the room.
Beneath his solid juridical cuirass, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar had the soul of a poet. One reading of cold legal documents was all he required to remove the rhetorical crust of wherefores and whereases and Latin phrases and arrive at the facts themselves by way of his powers of imagination. Thus, reading the police report drawn up in La Victoria, he was able to reconstruct, in vivid detail, the events that had led to formal charges being brought against the accused. He saw the thirteen-year-old girl named Sarita Huanca Salaverría, a pupil at the Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera public-school complex, enter, on Monday last, the commissariat of this motley, parti-colored district. She arrived in tears and with bruises on her face, arms, and legs, accompanied by her parents, Don Casimiro Huanca Padrón and Doña Catalina Salaverría Melgar. This minor had been dishonored the evening before, in room H of the tenement located at Number 12, Avenida Luna Pizarro, by the accused, Gumercindo Tello, a tenant in the same building (room J). On overcoming her embarrassment, Sarita had revealed to the guardians of law and order, in a quavering voice, that her defloration had been the tragic end result of a long and secret pursuit to which she had been subjected by the rapist. For the past eight months, in fact—that is to say, ever since the day that he had come to install himself at Number 12, like some strange bird of ill omen—the latter had plagued Sarita Huanca by waylaying her where her parents or the other tenants couldn’t see and paying her indecent compliments or making bold advances (such as telling her: “I’d love to squeeze the lemons of your orchard” or: “One of these days I’m going to milk you”). From prophecies, Gumercindo Tello had gone on to overt acts, succeeding in his attempts, on a number of occasions, to fondle and kiss the pubescent girl, in the courtyard of the building at Number 12 or in nearby streets, as she was coming home from school or when she went out to run errands. Out of understandable timidity and a natural sense of modesty, the victim had not told her parents of this harassment.
On Sunday evening, ten minutes after her parents had gone off to the Cine Metropolitán, Sarita Huanca heard a knock at the door as she was doing her homework. She went to see who it was and found herself face to face with Gumercindo Tello. “What is it you want?” she asked him politely. Assuming the most innocent air imaginable, the rapist claimed that his portable stove had run out of fuel: it was too late to go out to buy more and he’d come to borrow just enough kerosene to prepare his evening meal (and promised to return what he’d borrowed the following