Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [57]
Suspecting (as has proved to be the case) that the aforesaid sect was a brotherhood of perverts, Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha demanded that they be taken to the site where the accused might be found. After considerable hesitation and discussion, the owner of “El Inti” personally took them to the spot where, he said, Tello might possibly be, since once, some time ago now, when the latter had been trying to convert him and his fellow mechanics at the garage, he had invited him to attend a ceremony there (an experience that had left the aforementioned Señor Príncipe entirely unmoved).
The latter had driven the two officers of the law to the area bounded by the Calle Maynas on one side and the Parque Martinetti on the other, a vacant lot where people who live in that neighborhood burn their garbage and where there is a little branch of the Rímac. And that, in fact, was where the Jehovah’s Witnesses were. Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha spied a dozen persons of various ages, male and female, standing waist-deep in the muddy waters, not in bathing suits but all dressed up: a number of the men were wearing ties, and one of them was even wearing a hat. Indifferent to the jokes, the gibes, the garbage tossed at them, and the other childish pranks of the people living nearby who had congregated on the riverbank to watch them, they were devoutly going on with a ceremony that to the two officers of the law appeared at first glance to be nothing less than an attempted murder by drowning. This is what they saw: as they fervently chanted strange hymns, the Witnesses, keeping a tight grip on the arms of an old man in a poncho and a wool cap, plunged him again and again into the filthy waters—as an intended sacrifice to their God? But when the two officers of the law, drawing their revolvers and getting their leggings all muddy, ordered them to cease their criminal act, the old man was the first to become thoroughly incensed, demanding that they withdraw and calling them strange names (such as “Romans” and “papists.”). The guardians of law and order were forced to resign themselves to waiting until the baptism was over to arrest Gumercindo Tello, whom they had managed to identify thanks to Señor Príncipe. The ceremony went on for a few minutes more, in the course of which the Witnesses continued to pray and immerse the old man being baptized until the latter began to roll his eyes, swallow water, and choke, whereupon the Witnesses decided to drag him back to shore, where they began congratulating him on the new life that, they said, had just begun for him.
It was at this juncture that the officers of the law arrested Gumercindo Tello. The mechanic did not offer the slightest resistance, made no attempt to escape, and gave no sign of being surprised at having been taken into custody, limiting himself to saying to the others as the Guardias put him in handcuffs: “Brothers, I’ll never forget you.” The Witnesses immediately began singing more hymns, gazing heavenward and turning up the whites of their eyes, and accompanied them in this fashion to Señor Príncipe’s car. The latter then drove the Guardias and their prisoner back to the commissariat of La Victoria, where the two officers bade him goodbye and thanked him for his services.
Inside the commissariat, Captain G. C. Enrique Soto asked the prisoner if he would like to dry his shoes and pants in the courtyard, and Gumercindo Tello replied that he was quite accustomed to going around in wet clothes because of the great number of conversions