Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [79]
No, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui said to himself as he cast an absentminded glance at the gray (a color he detested) Pacific Ocean beyond the seawall of Miraflores that his sedan had just started across, when everything was said and done, Doña Zoila hadn’t disappointed him. His great failure in life was his children. What an enormous difference between the bold vanguard of princes of extermination that he had dreamed of and the four offspring that God and his gluttonous wife had inflicted upon him.
Their first two children had both been boys. But then came a rude blow. The thought had never even crossed his mind that Doña Zoila might give birth to girls. The first one had been a disappointment, something that might be attributed to mere chance. But when his wife’s fourth pregnancy also produced a creature without a visible penis or testicles, Don Federico, terrified at the prospect of continuing to engender incomplete beings, drastically eliminated the possibility that a momentary whim might lead to his begetting more offspring (by replacing the big double bed in their room by twin beds). He didn’t hate females; but, quite simply, since he was neither an erotomaniac nor a gourmand, what possible use did he have for persons whose greatest aptitudes were for fornicating and cooking? His one reason for reproducing had been to perpetuate his crusade. This hope had gone up in smoke with the arrival of Teresa and Laura, since Don Federico was not one of those modernists who stoutly maintain that a female, in addition to a clitoris, also has brains and can work side by side with males as their equal. Furthermore, he was deeply distressed by the possibility that his family name might be trampled in the mud. Didn’t statistics prove, ad nauseam, that ninety-five percent of women have been, are, or will be whores? In order to make certain that his daughters would end up among the five percent of virtuous females, Don Federico had organized their lives in rigorous detail: no low necklines at any time, dark stockings and long-sleeved smocks and sweaters both winter and summer, no nail polish, lipstick, rouge, eye makeup, no bangs, braids, ponytails, or any of the other bait that girls use to hook boys; no sports or diversions that might bring them into proximity with males, such as going to the beach or attending birthday parties. Infractions of these rules always met with corporal punishment.
But it was not only the intrusion of females among his descendants that had discouraged him. His sons—Ricardo and Federico Jr.—had not inherited their father’s virtues. They were weak-willed and lazy, given to useless activities (such as chewing gum and playing soccer), and they had not shown the slightest signs of enthusiasm when Don Federico explained what a glorious future lay in store for them. When, during vacations, he sent them out to work with the first-line combatants in order to train them, they proved to be slackers and took their places on the battlefield with obvious repugnance. And once he even overheard them muttering obscenities about his life’s work and confessing quite frankly that they were ashamed of their father. He had immediately shaved their heads like convicts, naturally, yet this did not in any way relieve the feeling of betrayal aroused in him by this conspiratorial conversation. Don Federico no longer entertained any illusions. He knew that, once he was dead or had grown feeble with age, Ricardo and Federico Jr. would stray from the path he had traced for them, would change professions (choosing some other with greater chrematistic attractions), and knew that his work—like a certain famous symphony—would remain unfinished.
It was at that precise moment that Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, to his physical and psychical misfortune, spied the magazine that a news vendor was thrusting through the windows of the sedan, its lurid cover gleaming in the bright morning sun. His face contorted in a grimace of disgust on noting that