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By Root 989 0

the cover photo showed a beach with two female bathers clad only in that mere simulacrum of swimsuits that certain hetaerae dared to parade about in, when, with a sort of painful rending of his optic nerve and his mouth gaping open like a wolf’s howling at the moon, Don Federico recognized the two half-naked bathers with obscene smiles on their faces. He felt a sudden horror rivaling that which he had felt, in that early Amazon dawn on the banks of the Pendencia, on seeing, in a cradle black with rat dung, the scattered bones of his sister’s corpse. The traffic light had turned green; the cars behind him were honking. With fumbling fingers, he took out his wallet, paid for the licentious publication, shifted into first, and took off, and sensing that he was about to have a collision—the steering wheel was slipping out of his hands and the car was lurching violently—he braked and drew to a stop along the curb.

Sitting there trembling with indignation, he stared for several long minutes at the terrible evidence. There was no possible doubt: it was his daughters. Photographed, no doubt, without their being aware of it by a brazen paparazzo hidden among the other bathers, the girls were not looking at the camera; they appeared to be chatting together as they lay on the sands of a voluptuous beach that might be Agua Dulce or La Herradura. Little by little Don Federico recovered his breath; despite being absolutely crushed, he managed to think of the incredible series of happenstances: that a roving photographer should chance to snap a picture of Laura and Teresa, that an ignoble magazine should expose them to the view of this rotten world, that he should happen to see them… And so, by the workings of blind chance, there the awful truth was, spread out before his eyes in lurid color. So his daughters obeyed him, then, only when he was present; so, the minute he turned his back, with the collusion, doubtless, of their brothers and, alas—Don Federico felt a sudden stab of pain in his heart—of his own wife, they defied his orders and went to the beach, they took their clothes off and exhibited themselves. Tears streamed down his face. He took a closer look at their bathing suits: two minuscule bits of cloth whose function was not to hide anything but simply to catapult the imagination to the most perverted extremes. There they were, within full view of anyone and everyone: the legs, arms, bellies, shoulders, necks of Laura and Teresa. He felt indescribably ridiculous as the thought crossed his mind that he himself had never seen these extremities and members that were now displayed before the entire universe.

He dried his eyes and started the engine up again. He had calmed down on the surface, but a blazing fire was burning deep within him. As the sedan proceeded very slowly toward his little house on the Avenida Pedro de Osma, he told himself that since they went to the beach naked it was only natural to presume that in his absence they also went to parties, wore pants, hung around with men, sold their bodies—did they perhaps receive the men they lured into their beds under his very own roof? was it Doña Zoila who set the prices and collected the money? Ricardo and Federico Jr. probably were in charge of the unspeakable task of hustling up customers for their sisters. Gasping for breath, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui saw the whole horrifying cast assembled before his very eyes: your daughters, the whores; your sons, the pimps; and your wife, the madam.

His daily contact with violence—after all, he had killed off thousands upon thousands of living beings—had made Don Federico a man who could not be provoked without grave risk. One day an agronomist with pretensions to being an expert in nutrition had dared to state in his presence that, in view of the lack of beef cattle in Peru, it was necessary to intensify the raising of guinea pigs as a source of food for the nation. Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui politely reminded the bold planner that guinea pigs were first cousins to rats. The expert, not giving an inch, cited statistics,