Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [77]
What a long time had gone by since then! As he stopped at the red light on the corner of the Avenida Javier Prado, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui said to himself that he had undoubtedly come up in the world since the days when, a raw youth still, he went up and down the muddy streets of Tingo María from sunup to sundown, followed by the idiot, waging his war against the murderers of his little sister María with his craftsmanship and skill as his only weapon. He was scarcely past childhood then, had nothing but the clothes on his back, and one helper at most. Thirty-five years later, he was the head of a vast technico-commercial enterprise, with branches in every city in Peru, with fifteen trucks in its motor pool and seventy-eight experts in the fumigation of ratholes, the compounding of poisons, and the installation of traps. The latter operated on the front lines—the streets, houses, and fields of the entire country—wholeheartedly devoted to searching out, surrounding, and annihilating the enemy, and receiving orders, advice, and logistic support from the headquarters staff over which he presided (the six technocrats who had just gone out to lunch). But in addition to this constellation, Don Federico had enlisted the aid of two laboratories in his crusade, by signing contracts with them (that were practically subsidies) for constant experimentation with new poisons, a crucial tactic in view of the enemy’s prodigious capacity for acquiring immunity: after two or three campaigns, the toxics became obsolete, simply a source of food for the creatures they were intended to kill. Moreover, Don Federico—who at this moment shifted into first as the light turned green, and continued on his way toward the residential districts along the seashore—had set up a scholarship whereby Rodent Exterminators, Incorporated sent a newly graduated chemist to the University of Baton Rouge each year to do advanced research on rat poisons.
It had been precisely this concern—placing science at the service of his religion—that, twenty years before, had impelled Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui to marry. Being only human after all, he had one day begun to conceive the idea of a dense phalanx of males, scions of his very own blood and spirit, in whom he would inculcate, from their earliest days at their mother’s breast, his fury toward the disgusting rodent breed, and who, having received an exceptional upbringing and education, would continue his mission, perhaps even beyond the borders of their native land. The image of six, seven Téllezes with doctorates from top-ranking institutions who would repeat and perpetuate in aeternum the vow that he had sworn, impelled him, a man who was marital inappetency incarnate, to have recourse to a matrimonial agency, which, in return for a somewhat excessive fee, supplied him with a twenty-five-year-old spouse, perhaps not a raving beauty—she had several teeth missing and, like those little ladies from the region irrigated by that supposedly silvery stream that goes by the (hyperbolic) name of the Río de la Plata, great rolls of fat around her waist and at the backs of her knees—but nonetheless possessed of the three qualities he had demanded: perfect health, an intact hymen, and high fertility.
Doña Zoila Saravia Durán was a girl from Huánuco whose family, by one of those turns of the wheel of fortune that are life’s favorite game, had come down