Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  It all happened during the celebrations that, at least once a week, brought the people who lived round about the Plaza de Santa Ana together. When a baby was born or there was a wake (celebrating a happy event or healing a wound?)—pretexts were never lacking—revels were organized, in the garage of Chumpitaz the tailor, in the little back courtyard of the Lamas’ hardware store, in the alleyway where the Valentíns lived, that went on till dawn, accompanied by the strumming of guitars, the booming of cajones, the rhythmic clapping of hands, the voices of the tenors. As the couples, in fine fettle (fiery brandy and the aromatic viands of María Portal!), struck sparks on the tiles as they danced, Crisanto Maravillas watched the guitarists, the singers, the drummers, as if their words and sounds were something supernatural. And when the musicians took a break to have a smoke or a drink, the youngster reverently approached the guitars, stroked them very gently so as not to frighten them, strummed the six strings, and arpeggios were heard…

  It was soon evident that the cripple had an aptitude, a remarkable gift. Possessed of an unusually good ear, he could listen to any rhythm and repeat it immediately, and although his tiny hands were weak he could expertly accompany any sort of Peruvian music on the cajón. Whenever the musicians took time out to eat or drink, he learned the secrets of their guitars by himself and became their intimate friend. People in the neighborhood soon grew accustomed to seeing him play along with the other musicians at fiestas.

  His legs had grown no longer, and though he was now fourteen, he looked like an eight-year-old. He was very thin, for (a convincing sign of an artistic nature, a slenderness characteristic of those who are inspired) he suffered from a chronic lack of appetite, and if María Portal, with her military determination, had not been around to stuff him full of food, the young bard would have wasted away to nothing. Yet this frail creature did not know the meaning of the word “fatigue” when it came to music. The guitarists of the neighborhood would collapse on the floor, exhausted, after playing and singing for hours and hours, get cramps in their fingers, and become so hoarse they might have been mistaken for mutes, but the cripple would remain seated on a little chair with a straw bottom (little Japanese feet never quite touching the floor, tiny tireless fingers), drawing exquisite harmonies from the strings and singing as though the fiesta had just begun. He did not have a powerful voice; he would have been unable to emulate the prodigious feat of the celebrated Ezequiel Delfín, who, on singing certain waltzes in the key of G, shattered the windowpanes opposite him. But the lack of strength of his voice was compensated by his faultless intonation, his maniacal perfectionism, his richness of shading that never slighted or botched a note.

  Nonetheless, it was his talents as a composer rather than as an interpreter that were to make him famous. The fact that the young cripple of Los Barrios Altos knew how to compose Peruvian music as well as play it and sing it came to light one Saturday night during a tumultuous fiesta that filled the Callejón de Santa Ana with colored streamers, noisemakers, and confetti as the whole neighborhood celebrated the cook’s saint’s day. At midnight the musicians surprised the revelers by playing a polka that no one had ever heard before, with words in the form of a clever dialogue:

  ¿Cómo?

  Con amor, con amor, con amor

  ¿Qué haces?

  Llevo una flor, una flor, una flor

  ¿Donde?

  En el ojal, en el ojal, en el ojal

  ¿A quién?

  A María Portal, María Portal, María Portal…*

  The catchy rhythm made all those present feel an irresistible urge to dance, hop, skip, and the words amused and touched them. Everyone was consumed with curiosity: who had composed the polka? The musicians turned their heads and indicated that it was Crisanto Maravillas, who (modesty of the truly great) lowered his eyes. María Portal smothered him with kisses, Brother Valentín wiped away a tear, and the entire neighborhood rewarded the new composer with an ovation. In the city of La Perricholi, a creative artist had been born.

  Crisanto Maravillas’s career (if this pedestrian athletic term is the proper one to describe a mission bearing the stamp of—the divine afflatus?) was meteoric. Within the space of a few months, his songs were known all over Lima, and within a few years they had entered the memory and the heart of all Peru. He was not yet twenty when Abels and Cains alike conceded that he was the most beloved composer in the country. His waltzes enlivened the fiestas of the rich, were danced at the feasts of the middle class, and were the staple fare of the poor. The orchestras of the capital vied with each other as intrepreters of his music, and there was not a man or woman who, on deciding to embark upon the arduous career of a professional singer, did not include in his or her repertory the marvels of Maravillas. His compositions came out on records and circulated in song sheets, and in view of his vast following, radio programs and magazines were obliged to feature him regularly. In the popular imagination, in the gossip that made the rounds, the crippled composer of Los Barrios Altos became a legendary figure.

  Fame and popularity did not turn the head of the unpretentious youngster, who greeted this adulation with a swanlike indifference. He left high school a year before graduating, in order to devote himself to his art. With the gratuities pressed on him for playing at fiestas, giving serenades, or composing acrostics, he was able to buy himself a guitar. The day it became his he was happy: he had found a confidant for his troubles, a companion for his loneliness, and a voice for his inspiration.

  He did not know how to read or write music, and never learned. He worked by ear, and by intuition. Once he had learned the melody, he sang it to the mestizo Blas Sanjinés, a teacher in the neighborhood, who set it down in notes on music paper. He never had the slightest desire to make a paying business of his talent: he never copyrighted his compositions or charged royalties for the use of them, and when friends came to him with the news that mediocrities from the lower depths of the artistic world were plagiarizing his melodies and his lyrics, he merely yawned in boredom. Despite this disinterest, he found himself earning a certain amount of money, sent to him by record companies or radio stations, or forced upon him by people who had asked him to play at a party. Crisanto gave all this income to his parents, and when they died (he was thirty years old at the time), he spent it with his friends. He never wanted to leave Los Barrios Altos, nor room H on the little alleyway where he had been born. Was this out of fidelity and affection toward his humble origins, out of love for the gutter? These feelings no doubt played a certain role. But above all it was because in this narrow back street he was only a stone’s throw from the offspring of consanguineous parents, whose name was Fátima, whom he had first met when she was a servant girl and who had now taken the veil and pronounced her vows of obedience, poverty, and (alas!) chastity as the bride of Christ.

  This had been, and still was, the secret of his life, the reason for that sadness that everyone (blindness of the multitude to the soul’s wounds) attributed to his withered legs and his dwarflike, asymmetrical physique. Moreover, thanks to this difformity that made him appear years younger, Crisanto had continued to accompany his mother to the religious citadel of the Discalced Carmelites, and he had been able to see the girl of his dreams at least once a week. Did Sister Fátima love the cripple as he loved her? There is no way of knowing. A hothouse flower, ignorant of the lubricious mysteries of the pollen of the fields, Fátima had acquired a conscience, feelings, grown from childhood to adolescence to adulthood in the aseptic world of the convent, surrounded by old women. Everything that had reached her ears, her eyes, her imagination had been rigorously filtered through the moral sifting-screen of the Order (the strictest of the strict). How could this creature who was virtue incarnate have guessed that what she believed belonged to God (love?) could also be a human interchange?

  But (water that flows down the mountainside to the sea, little calf that before opening its eyes seeks the teat to suck the white milk) perhaps she did love him. In any event, he was her friend, t
he only person her own age she knew, the only playmate she had ever had, if “play” is the proper word for the work they shared—sweeping floors, cleaning windowpanes, watering plants, lighting candles—as María Portal, the illustrious seamstress, taught the nuns the secret of her embroideries.

  But it is also true that the two of them, from childhood on, talked a great deal together during these years. Naïve dialogues—she was innocent; he was shy—in which (delicacy of lilies and spirituality of doves) they spoke to each other of love without the word ever crossing their lips, by way of interposed subjects, such as the pretty colors of Sister Fátima’s collection of pious images and the explanations that Crisanto gave her of what streetcars, automobiles, movies were. All this was recounted, for those who had ears to hear, in Maravillas’s songs dedicated to that mysterious woman whose name was never mentioned, save in the very famous waltz whose title so intrigued his admirers: “Fátima is the Virgin of Fátima.”

  Though he knew that he would never be able to take her out of the convent and make her his, Crisanto Maravillas was happy just seeing his muse a few hours each week. These brief encounters left him all the more profoundly inspired, and were thus responsible for the birth of his many mozamalas, yaravíes, festejos, and resbalosas. The second tragedy of his life (after his being born physically disabled) occurred the day when, by chance, the Mother Superior of Las Descalzas came upon him as he was emptying his bladder. Madre Lituma’s cheeks changed color several times and she was seized with an attack of the hiccups. She ran to ask María Portal how old her son was, and the seamstress confessed that, despite the fact that his height and build were those of a child of ten, he was past eighteen. Crossing herself, Mother Lituma forbade him ever to enter the convent again.

  It was very nearly a mortal blow for the bard of the Plaza de Santa Ana, who was immediately taken ill with a romantic malady defying diagnosis. He remained bedridden for many days—extremely high fevers, melodious fits of delirium—as doctors and faith healers tried unguents and spells to bring him out of his coma. When he finally rose from his sickbed, he was a specter and could barely stand up. But (could it have been otherwise?) being cruelly separated from his beloved proved beneficial to his art: his music became so tenderly sentimental that it brought tears to the eye, and his lyrics became dramatically virile. Crisanto Maravillas’s great love songs date from these years. Each time his friends, singing along with his sweet melodies, listened to those heartbreaking words that spoke of an imprisoned young girl, a little goldfinch in a cage, a little wild dove caught in a trap, a plucked flower hidden from sight in the Temple of the Lord, and of a grief-stricken man loving from a distance, without hope, they asked themselves: “Who is she?” And (curiosity that was Eve’s undoing) they tried to guess which of the women who besieged the bard was the heroine in question.

  For, despite his dwarflike stature and his ugliness, the women of Lima were as though bewitched by the magic spell of Crisanto Maravillas’s charms. White women with fortunes in the bank, little mestizo demimondaines, mulatresses from the slums, young girls who were just learning to live or older women who were straying yet again from the path of virtue showed up at modest room H, on the pretext of seeking his autograph. They made eyes at him, gave him little presents, flattered him, wheedled, suggested places where they might meet, or made out-and-out advances on the spot. Was it because these women, like those of a certain country that displays its pretentiousness in the very name of its capital (favorable winds, good weather, healthy air?), habitually sought out deformed men, due to a stupid prejudice whereby they are deemed to be better, matrimonially speaking, than normal men? No, in this case it was because the splendor of his art surrounded the homunculus of the Plaza de Santa Ana with a spiritual aura that either blinded them to his wretched physical appearance or made him seem all the more desirable because of it.

  Crisanto Maravillas (gentleness of the invalid recovering from tuberculosis) politely discouraged these advances and subtly hinted to the women soliciting his favors that they were wasting their time. On such occasions he would utter an esoteric phrase that unleashed an indescribable whirlwind of gossip round about him: “I believe in fidelity and am a little Portuguese shepherd boy.”

  The life he led in those days was the bohemian one of gypsies of the spirit. He arose around noon and usually had breakfast with the parish priest of the Church of Santa Ana, a former examining magistrate in whose chambers a Quaker (Don Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar?) had mutilated himself to prove that he was innocent of a crime of which he had been accused (having killed a black stowaway who had arrived in the country in the hold of a passenger liner from Brazil?). Profoundly moved by this incident, Dr. Don Gumercindo Tello had thereupon exchanged his judge’s robes for a priest’s cassock. The story of the mutilation was immortalized by Crisanto Maravillas in a festejo for guitar, quijada, and cajón, entitled “Blood Absolves Me.”

  The bard and Father Gumercindo were in the habit of walking together through these streets of Lima where Crisanto (artist whose talents were nourished by life itself?) found characters and subjects for his songs. His music—tradition, history, folklore, gossip—immortalized in melody the types and customs of the city. In the pits just off the Plaza del Cercado and in Santo Cristo, Maravillas and Father Gumercindo watched fighting cocks being trained for championship matches in the Coliseo de Sandia, and thus was born the marinera “Watch Out for the Cock the Color of Red Pepper, Mama” or they took the sun in the little square of Carmen Alto, where, seeing the puppeteer Monleón amusing everyone in the neighborhood with his little rag marionettes, Crisanto found the subject of the waltz “The Young Miss from Carmen Alto” (it begins: “Alas, my love, you have little fingers made of wire and a heart of straw”). It was also, doubtless, during these strolls through the old town that Crisanto came across the little old ladies in black shawls who appear in his waltz “Devout Little Lady, You Too Were a Woman Once,” and watched the adolescent street fights mentioned in the polka “The Urchins.”

  Around six in the evening, the two friends would separate: the priest would return to his parish church to pray for the soul of the cannibal murdered in El Callao, and the bard would go to the garage of Chumpitaz the tailor. There, with the group of his intimates—Sifuentes the cajón drummer, Tiburcio the quijada player, Lucía Acémila the singer? Felipe and Juan Portocarrero the guitarists—he would rehearse new songs, work up arrangements, and as dusk was falling, somebody would bring out the fraternal bottle of pisco. And so, between musicmaking and conversation, rehearsing and a bit of alcohol, the hours went by. When it got dark, the group would go off to eat at one restaurant or another of the city, where the artist was always an honored guest. On other days, fiestas awaited them—birthdays, engagements, weddings—or dates at some club. They would make their way home at dawn and the bard’s friends would bid him goodbye at the door of the building where he lived. But once they had left and were home in their hovels sleeping, a misshapen little figure with a clumsy gait would emerge from the alleyway. A ghostly silhouette in the dawn fog and drizzle, he would make his way through the damp shadows and sit down in the deserted Plaza de Santa Ana on the stone bench opposite the convent of Las Descalzas. The cats of early morning would then hear the most deeply felt arpeggios ever to pour forth from an earthly guitar, the most ardent songs of love born of human inspiration. Those devout old ladies already abroad at that hour who sometimes spied him there, singing softly and weeping in front of the convent, spread the vicious rumor that, drunk with vanity, he had fallen in love with the Virgin herself, and serenaded her at daybreak.

  Weeks, months, years went by. Crisanto Maravillas’s fame (destiny of a balloon that expands and rises, following the sun) spread, as did his music. No one, however, not even his intimate friend the parish priest Gumercindo Lituma, a former Guardia Civil brutally beaten by his wife and children (for raising rats?) who, as he convalesced, had heard the call of the Lord, guessed the story of Crisanto Maravillas’s inordinate p
assion for the cloistered Sister Fátima, who during all these years had been trotting from one chore to another on her way to sainthood. The chaste couple had not been able to exchange a single word since the day the Mother Superior (Sister Lucía Acémila?) discovered that the bard was a creature endowed with virility (despite what had occurred on that fateful morning in the chambers of the examining magistrate?). But down through the years they had had the happiness of seeing each other, though only with difficulty and at a distance. Once she became a nun, Sor Fátima, like her sisters in the convent, took her turn at prayer in the chapel, where the Carmelites kept a perpetual vigil, by twos, twenty-four hours a day. The nuns keeping vigil were separated from the public by a little wooden grille, and though its openings were very small, people on both sides were able to see each other through it. This explained in large part the stubborn religiosity of the bard of Lima that had often made him the victim of the mocking jokes of those in his neighborhood, taunts which he answered by composing the pious tondero “Yes, I Am a Believer.”

  Crisanto, it is true, spent a great deal of his time in the Carmelite chapel. He would enter several times a day, cross himself, and cast a glance at the grille. If—with beating heart, racing pulse, shivers up and down his spine—he recognized Sister Fátima through the little square openings in the wooden grille, kneeling at one of the prie-dieus perpetually occupied by silhouettes in white habits, he would immediately fall to his knees on the colonial tiles. He placed himself in an oblique position (his physique was a help in this respect, for it was not easy to tell whether one was seeing him full-face or in profile), which allowed him to give the impression that he was looking at the altar, when in reality his eyes were fixed on the long veils, the snowy starched folds enveloping the body of his beloved. From time to time Sister Fátima (breaths that the athlete takes to redouble his efforts) interrupted her prayers, raised her eyes toward the altar (ruled off in squares?), and thereupon recognized Crisanto’s shadowy interposed silhouette. An imperceptible smile would then appear on the little nun’s niveous face and a tender sentiment would be revived in her delicate heart on catching sight of her childhood friend. Their eyes would meet and in those few seconds (Sister Fátima would feel obliged to lower hers) they told each other—things that would have made even the angels in Heaven blush? Because, yes, it was quite true—this young girl who had been miraculously saved from being crushed to death by the wheels of the car driven by the medical detail man Lucho Abril Marroquín, which had knocked her down one sunny morning on the outskirts of Pisco when she was not yet five years old, and who had become a nun in thanks to the Virgin of Fátima, had with the passage of time come, within her solitary cell, to love the bard of Los Barrios Altos with a sincere heart.