Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [64]
“Well then, the concrete facts,” Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar pressed him. “Describe to me, with neither morbid delectation nor jeremiads, how you raped her.”
But the Witness had burst into sobs, covering his face with his hands. The magistrate remained unmoved. He was accustomed to the sudden cyclothymic shifts of mood of accused criminals he was interrogating and knew how to take advantage of them to ascertain the facts. Seeing Gumercindo Tello sitting there with his head bowed, shaking from head to foot, his hands wet with tears, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar said to himself, with the solemn pride of the professional noting the effectiveness of his technique, that the accused had reached that climactic emotional state in which, no longer capable of dissimulating, he would eagerly, spontaneously, abundantly confess to the truth.
“Facts, facts,” he insisted. “Facts, positions, words spoken, acts performed. Come on, be brave and tell all!”
“The trouble is, I don’t know how to lie, Your Honor,” Gumercindo Tello stammered between hiccups. “I’m prepared to suffer the consequences, whatever they may be—insults, prison, dishonor. But I can’t lie! I never learned how, I’m incapable of it!”
“There, there, that very fact does you honor,” the judge exclaimed with an encouraging gesture. “Prove it to me. Come on, tell me, how did you rape her?”
“That’s the whole problem,” the Witness said in a desperate tone of voice, swallowing hard. “I didn’t rape her!”
“I’m going to tell you something, Señor Tello,” the magistrate said, pronouncing each word slowly and distinctly, in the deceptively bland voice of a sly, contemptuous serpent. “You’re a false Jehovah’s Witness! An impostor!”
“I didn’t touch her, I never talked to her alone, I didn’t even see her yesterday,” Gumercindo Tello bleated like a lamb.
“A cynic, a fake, a spiritual prevaricator,” the judge declared in a stern, cold voice. “If Justice and Morality don’t matter to you, at least respect that God whose name is so often on your lips. Think of how He is watching you at this very moment, how revolted He must be to hear you lie.”
“I have never offended that child—neither by my thought nor by my gaze,” Gumercindo Tello repeated in heartrending accents.
“You threatened her, beat her, raped her,” the magistrate thundered. “With your filthy lust, Señor Tello.”
“With-my-fil-thy-lust?” the Witness repeated, like a man hit over the head with a hammer.
“That’s right, with your filthy lust,” the magistrate reiterated, and then, after a deliberately dramatic pause: “With your sinful penis!”
“With-my-sin-ful-pe-nis?” the accused stammered in a faltering voice, staring at him in utter astonishment. “My-sin-ful-pe-nis-did-you-say?”
Looking frantically about him in wild-eyed amazement, his gaze darted from the secretary to the judge, from the floor to the ceiling, from the chair to the desk, lingering on the papers, dossiers, blotters lying on top of it. Then suddenly his eyes lit up, caught by the artistic pre-Hispanic glint of the Tiahuanaco letter opener, and before the judge or the secretary could stop him, Gumercindo Tello made a lunge for it and grabbed it by the handle. He did not make a single threatening gesture with it: quite to the contrary, he clasped it to his breast like a mother cradling her child and stood looking at the two petrified men with a reassuring, kindly, sad expression in his eyes.
“You offend me by thinking I might harm you,” he said in the tone of voice of a penitent.
“You won’t be able to escape, you fool,” the judge warned him, collecting himself. “The Palace of Justice is full of guards; they’ll kill you.”
“Me, try to escape?” the mechanic asked sarcastically. “How little you know me, Your Honor.”
“Can’t you see that you’re giving yourself away?” the magistrate persisted. “Give me back the letter opener.”
“I borrowed it from you to prove my innocence,” Gumercindo Tello calmly explained.
The judge and the secretary looked at each other. The accused had risen to his feet. There was a Nazarene expression on his