Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [74]
Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui looked at his watch, saw that it was noon, told the half-dozen employees of Rodent Exterminators, Inc., that they could go out to lunch, and did not remind them to be back by three on the dot, not one minute later, since all of them knew full well that, in this company, lack of punctuality was sacrilege: those who were late were fined or even fired on the spot. Once they had left, Don Federico, as was his habit, double-locked the office himself, put on his mouse-gray hat, and headed down the crowded sidewalks of the Jirón Huancavelica to the parking lot where he kept his car (a Dodge sedan).
He was a man who aroused fear and dismal thoughts in the minds of others; a person had only to see him passing by on the street to note immediately that he was different from his fellows. He was in the prime of life, his fifties, and his distinguishing traits—a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—might have made him a Don Juan had he been interested in women. But Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui had devoted his entire existence to a crusade and allowed nothing and no one—with the exception of those hours that had necessarily to be set aside for sleeping, eating, and family life—to distract him from it. He had been waging this war for forty years now, his ultimate goal being the extermination of every last rodent in the land.
His acquaintances and even his wife and their four children did not know the reason behind this chimerical campaign. Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui kept it a secret but never forgot it: it haunted his memory day and night, a persistent nightmare from which he drew new strength, renewed hatred enabling him to persevere in this combat that some people considered preposterous, others repellent, and the rest commercial. At this very moment, as he entered the parking lot, checked with the eye of a condor whether the Dodge had been washed, started it, and waited precisely two minutes by his watch for the engine to warm up, his thoughts, moths hovering about flames in which they would burn their wings, went back yet again in time and space to the remote village of his childhood and the terror that had forged his destiny.
It had happened in the first decade of the century, when Tingo María was just a tiny dot on the map, a few cabins in a clearing surrounded by dense jungle. Adventurers abandoning the soft life of the capital with the dream of conquering virgin forest ended up there from time to time, after countless hardships. That was how the engineer Hildebrando Téllez had happened to come to the region, along with his young wife (in whose veins, as her name, Mayte, and surname, Unzátegui, proclaimed, Basque blood flowed) and their young son: Federico. The engineer had grandiose plans: cutting down trees, exporting precious woods for building mansions and making furniture for the affluent, growing pineapples, avocados, watermelon, custard apples, and eggfruit for the world’s exotic palates, and in time, steamboat service up and down the rivers of the Amazon basin. But the gods and men reduced these fires to ashes. Natural catastrophes—rains, plagues, floods—and human limitationsthe shortage of workers, the indolence and stupidity of the few he did have, alcohol, the scarcity of credit—wiped out all the pioneer’s vast projects, one after the other, so that, two years after his arrival in Tingo María, he was obliged to earn his living in a very modest, humble way, by growing sweet potatoes on a small farm up the Pendencia River. It was there, in a cabin built of logs and palm fronds, that on a stifling hot night rats ate alive María Téllez Unzátegui, the couple’s newborn daughter, as she lay in her crib without a mosquito netting.
The way the tragedy happened was both simple and horrible. The father and the mother were to stand as godparents at a baptism and would be spending the night on the other side of the river, attending the usual festivities in honor of such an occasion. They had left the farm in charge of the foreman, who lived,