• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1009 0

probable that, thanks to his labors and his inspiration, the number of rodents that had perished in Peru exceeded the number of Peruvians born. Difficult work, involving many sacrifices and no rewards, that had made him a dour, inflexible, friendless man with odd habits. In the beginning, when he was still a child, the hardest part had been overcoming his feelings of repugnance toward the nasty gray creatures. His initial technique had been primitive: setting traps for them. With his pocket money he bought (at the Deep Sleep Mattress Shop and General Store on the Avenida Raimondi) one that he used as a model for making many others. He cut wood and wire to the proper size, assembled his traps, and set them out twice a day all over the farm. Sometimes the little creatures caught in them were still alive. Trembling with emotion, he would kill them by slowly burning them to death or torture them by stabbing them, mutilating them, putting their eyes out before doing them in.

But young as he was, his intelligence told him that if he gave in to such inclinations he would fail in the task he had set himself: his goal was quantitative, not qualitative. It was not a question of inflicting the greatest possible suffering on each individual enemy but of destroying the greatest possible number of enemies at one and the same time. With a clearheadedness and a strength of will remarkable at his tender years, he rooted out every last remaining trace of sentimentality within him and thereafter pursued his genocidal goal in accordance with impeccably objective criteria, coldly, statistically, scientifically. Stealing time from his studies at the Canadian Brothers’ School and from sleep (though not from recreation, since after the tragedy he no longer ever played), he perfected the traps, adding a blade to them that chopped the victims’ bodies to bits so that they never remained alive after being caught (not in order to spare them pain but in order not to have to waste time killing them off). He then built multifamily traps, with a broad base, in which a fork with curved tines could simultaneously crush the father, the mother, and four little ones. Everyone in the region soon heard about his skills at rat killing, and little by little it ceased to be merely a penitence, a personal vendetta, and became a service to the community, for which he was paid very little, but a mere pittance was better than nothing. The boy was summoned to farms both near and far the moment there were signs of an invasion, and with the diligence of an omnipotent ant, he would rid them of every last rodent in a matter of a few days. They began to call upon his services in Tingo María as well, to clean out cabins, houses, offices, and the youngster had his moment of glory when the captain of the Guardia Civil gave him the job of ridding the commissariat of the rats that had overrun the building. He spent all the money he received building more traps in order to expand what naïve souls took to be his business—or his perversion. When the ex-engineer buried himself in the sexualoid tangle of jungle growth of the Sleeping Beauty, Federico, who had dropped out of school, began to complement his clean weapon, traps, with another, more cunning one: poisons.

This work allowed him to earn his own living at an age when other boys are still spinning tops. But it also turned him into an outcast. People would call him in to get rid of their hordes of scampering rodents, but they never invited him to sit down at table with them and never had a kind word to say to him. If this hurt his feelings, he did not let it show; on the contrary, it almost seemed to please him that his fellows found him repellent. He was an unsociable, taciturn adolescent; no one could boast of ever having made him laugh, or even seen him laugh, and his one passion seemed to be killing the filthy creatures that were his enemy. He charged people only a modest fee for his work, and moreover waged campaigns ad honorem, in the dwellings of poor folk, appearing on their doorstep with his gunnysack full of traps