The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [66]
Despite the fact that he took care of their correspondence, the townspeople never completely accepted the Lion. If his own father and mother could scarcely hide their shame at being his procreators and at one time tried to give him away, how could the men and women of Natuba have been expected to look upon this creature as belonging to the same species as they? The dozen Pardinas offspring who were his brothers and sisters wanted nothing to do with him, and it was common knowledge that he did not eat with them at the same table but at a wooden crate by himself. Hence, he knew neither paternal nor fraternal love (although he apparently had glimpses of another sort of love) nor friendship, for youngsters his age were afraid of him at first and later on repelled by him. They threw stones at him, spat on him, insulted him if he dared come near them to watch them play. He, for his part, moreover, rarely attempted to do so. From a very early age, his intuition or his unfailing intelligence told him that others would always be creatures who shunned him or were disagreeable to him, and would often even be his torturers, so that he had best remain apart from everyone. And that was what he did, at least until what happened at the irrigation ditch, and people saw him always warily keeping his distance, even at festivals and market fairs. When a Holy Mission came to Natuba, the Lion listened to the sermons from the rooftop of the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, like a cat. But even this strategy of withdrawal did not suffice to lay his fears to rest. The Gypsy’s Circus was the cause of one of his worst scares. It passed through Natuba twice a year with its caravan of monsters: acrobats, fortune-tellers, cantadores, clowns. On one of its visits, the Gypsy asked the horsebreaker and Dona Gaudência to let him take the Lion away with him as a circus hand. “My circus is the only place where he won’t attract attention, and he can make himself useful,” he told them. They agreed. The Gypsy took him off with him, but a week later the Lion had escaped and was back in Natuba. From that time on, every time the Gypsy’s Circus came to town, he was nowhere to be found.
What he feared, above all else, were drunks, those bands of cowhands who returned to town after a day’s work herding, branding, gelding, or cropping, dismounted, and hurried to Dona Epifânia’s tavern to quench their thirst. They would come out arm in arm, singing, staggering, happy at times, in a rage at others, and would go looking for him in the narrow back streets to amuse themselves at his expense or let off steam. He had developed an unusually acute sense of hearing and could tell from a long way away, from their boisterous laughter and their swear words, that they were coming, and then, hugging the walls and the façades of buildings so they wouldn’t catch sight of him, he would hop on home as fast as he could, or, if he was far from home, he would hide in the brush or on a rooftop till the danger was past. He didn’t always manage to escape them. Sometimes, by resorting to a trick—sending someone to tell him, for instance, that So-and-so was asking for him because he needed to draft a petition to be presented to the town magistrate—they would manage to trap him. And they would then torment him for hours, stripping him naked to see if he had other monstrosities hidden underneath his tunic in addition to the ones that were plainly visible, mounting him on a horse, or trying to mate him with a she-goat to see what sort of offspring this cross-breeding would produce.
As a point of honor rather than out of affection, Celestino Pardinas and other members of the family would intervene if they heard about what was happening and threaten the pranksters, and one time his older brothers lashed out with knives and shovels to rescue the scribe from a band of townspeople roaring drunk on cane brandy who had poured molasses over him, rolled him over and over in a garbage heap, and were leading him through the streets at the end of a rope as though he were an animal of an unknown species.