Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  On Sunday evening, ten minutes after her parents had gone off to the Cine Metropolitán, Sarita Huanca heard a knock at the door as she was doing her homework. She went to see who it was and found herself face to face with Gumercindo Tello. “What is it you want?” she asked him politely. Assuming the most innocent air imaginable, the rapist claimed that his portable stove had run out of fuel: it was too late to go out to buy more and he’d come to borrow just enough kerosene to prepare his evening meal (and promised to return what he’d borrowed the following day). Generous-hearted and naïve, little Sarita Huanca Salaverría invited the man in and showed him the can of kerosene sitting between the stove and the bucket that served as a toilet.

  (Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar smiled at this slip of the pen on the part of the officer of the law who had drawn up the complaint and thus inadvertently attributed to the Huanca Salaverrías the habit, so common among inhabitants of Buenos Aires, of attending to their calls of nature in a bucket located in the same room in which they eat and sleep.)

  Once he had contrived, by means of this stratagem, to get inside room H, the accused locked the door. He then got down on his knees and, joining his hands, began to murmur words of love to Sarita Huanca Salaverría, who only then began to be alarmed as to the outcome of this visit from her neighbor. In language that the young girl described as romantic, Gumercindo Tello urged her to accede to his desires. And what were these desires? That she remove all her clothes and allow herself to be fondled, kissed, and robbed of her maidenhead. Pulling herself together, Sarita Huanca emphatically rejected his propositions, reprimanded Gumercindo Tello, and threatened to call the neighbors. On hearing these words, the accused, abandoning his supplicating attitude, drew a knife from his clothes and threatened to stab the girl if she made the slightest outcry. Rising to his feet, he advanced toward Sarita, saying: “Come, come, off with all your clothes, my love,” and when, despite everything, she did not obey him, he gave her a hail of blows and kicks until she fell to the floor. And then as she lay there, so frightened that, according to the victim, her teeth chattered, the rapist tore all her clothes off, proceeded to unbutton his own as well, and fell upon her, perpetrating there on the floor the carnal act, which, due to the resistance offered by the girl, was accompanied by further blows, of which she still bore the traces in the form of bumps and bruises. Once his desires had been satisfied, Gumercindo Tello left room H, after advising Sarita Huanca Salaverría not to say a word about what had happened if she wanted to live to a ripe old age (and brandishing the knife to show that he meant what he said). On returning from the Metropolitán, the girl’s parents found their daughter with tears streaming down her face and her body ravaged. After caring for her injuries, they pleaded with her to tell them what had happened, but out of shame she refused to do so. And thus the entire night went by. The following morning, however, having somewhat recovered from the emotional shock of losing her maidenhead, the girl told her parents everything, and they immediately presented themselves at the commissariat of La Victoria to bring a complaint.

  Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar closed his eyes for a moment. He felt great pity for what had happened to the girl (despite his daily contact with crime, he had not grown callous), but he said to himself that, to all appearances, this was a case involving a prototypical crime, with nothing bizarre or mysterious about it, one minutely dealt with in the Penal Code, under the sections having to do with rape and abuse of a minor, along with the classic aggravating circumstances of premeditation, verbal and physical violence, and mental cruelty.

  The next document that he reread was the report of the officers of the law who had placed Gumercindo Tello under arrest.

  In accordance with instructions from their superior, Captain G. C. Enrique Soto, Guardias Civiles Alberto Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Huasi Tito Parinacocha had appeared at Number 12, Avenida Luna Pizarro, with a warrant for the arrest of the aforementioned Tello, but the individual in question was not at home. They learned from the neighbors that he was an automobile mechanic who worked at the “El Inti” Garage and Welding Shop, at the opposite end of the district, almost in the foothills of El Pino. The two officers of the law proceeded there immediately. At the garage, they were surprised to discover that Gumercindo Tello had just left, and were informed by the owner of the garage, Señor Carlos Príncipe, that he had asked for the day off to attend a baptism. When the Guardias questioned the other mechanics as to what church he might be found in, the latter exchanged sly glances and smiles. Señor Príncipe explained that Gumercindo Tello was not a Catholic, but a Jehovah’s Witness, and that in this religious sect the rite of baptism was not celebrated in church with a priest, but by giving the candidate for baptism a good ducking somewhere out of doors.

  Suspecting (as has proved to be the case) that the aforesaid sect was a brotherhood of perverts, Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha demanded that they be taken to the site where the accused might be found. After considerable hesitation and discussion, the owner of “El Inti” personally took them to the spot where, he said, Tello might possibly be, since once, some time ago now, when the latter had been trying to convert him and his fellow mechanics at the garage, he had invited him to attend a ceremony there (an experience that had left the aforementioned Señor Príncipe entirely unmoved).

  The latter had driven the two officers of the law to the area bounded by the Calle Maynas on one side and the Parque Martinetti on the other, a vacant lot where people who live in that neighborhood burn their garbage and where there is a little branch of the Rímac. And that, in fact, was where the Jehovah’s Witnesses were. Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha spied a dozen persons of various ages, male and female, standing waist-deep in the muddy waters, not in bathing suits but all dressed up: a number of the men were wearing ties, and one of them was even wearing a hat. Indifferent to the jokes, the gibes, the garbage tossed at them, and the other childish pranks of the people living nearby who had congregated on the riverbank to watch them, they were devoutly going on with a ceremony that to the two officers of the law appeared at first glance to be nothing less than an attempted murder by drowning. This is what they saw: as they fervently chanted strange hymns, the Witnesses, keeping a tight grip on the arms of an old man in a poncho and a wool cap, plunged him again and again into the filthy waters—as an intended sacrifice to their God? But when the two officers of the law, drawing their revolvers and getting their leggings all muddy, ordered them to cease their criminal act, the old man was the first to become thoroughly incensed, demanding that they withdraw and calling them strange names (such as “Romans” and “papists.”). The guardians of law and order were forced to resign themselves to waiting until the baptism was over to arrest Gumercindo Tello, whom they had managed to identify thanks to Señor Príncipe. The ceremony went on for a few minutes more, in the course of which the Witnesses continued to pray and immerse the old man being baptized until the latter began to roll his eyes, swallow water, and choke, whereupon the Witnesses decided to drag him back to shore, where they began congratulating him on the new life that, they said, had just begun for him.

  It was at this juncture that the officers of the law arrested Gumercindo Tello. The mechanic did not offer the slightest resistance, made no attempt to escape, and gave no sign of being surprised at having been taken into custody, limiting himself to saying to the others as the Guardias put him in handcuffs: “Brothers, I’ll never forget you.” The Witnesses immediately began singing more hymns, gazing heavenward and turning up the whites of their eyes, and accompanied them in this fashion to Señor Príncipe’s car. The latter then drove the Guardias and their prisoner back to the commissariat of La Victoria, where the two officers bade him goodbye and thanked him for his services.

  Inside the commissariat, Captain G. C. Enrique Soto asked the prisoner if he would like to dry his shoes and pants in the courtyard, and Gumercindo Tello replied that he was quite accustomed to going around in wet clothes because of the great number of c
onversions to the true faith that had taken place recently in Lima. The captain then proceeded forthwith to interrogate him, receiving the willing cooperation of the accused. Questioned as to his identity, he replied that his name was Gumercindo Tello, the son of Doña Gumercindo Tello, a native of Moquegua and now deceased, and of an unknown father, and that he too had probably been born in Moquegua, some twenty-five to twenty-eight years ago. With respect to this doubt as to his exact age, he explained that soon after he had been born his mother had handed him over to an orphans’ home for boys run in the aforementioned city by the papist sect, in whose aberrations, he said, he had been educated and from which he had happily freed himself at the age of fifteen or eighteen. He indicated that he had remained at the orphanage until that age, at which time the institution burned to the ground in a huge fire, in which all the records were destroyed as well; it was for this reason that he was not at all certain exactly how old he was. He explained that the fire had been a providential event in his life, since it had been on that occasion that he had met a pair of wise men journeying on foot from Chile to Lima, opening the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf to the truths of philosophy. He said further that he had come to Lima with this pair of wise men, whose names he declined to reveal, claiming that it was enough to know that they existed and there was no need to label them. He then stated that from then on he had divided his time between working as a mechanic (a trade that he had learned in the orphanage) and spreading knowledge of the truth. He said he had lived in Breña, in Vitarte, in Los Barrios Altos, and had moved to La Victoria eight months before because he had found employment in the “El Inti” Garage and Welding Shop, which was located a fair distance from his former domicile.

  The accused admitted that during this period he had lived in the building at Number 12, Avenida Luna Pizarro, as a tenant. He also admitted that he was acquainted with the Huanca Salaverría family, to whom, he said, he had proposed enlightening discussions and excellent reading matter on several occasions, to no avail however since they, like the other tenants of the building, were badly intoxicated by Roman heresies. Confronted with the name of his alleged victim, little Sarita Huanca Salaverría, he said he remembered her and intimated that, given the tender age of the person in question, he had not lost hope of setting her on the right path some day. Apprised at that point of the details of the charge that had been brought against him, Gumercindo Tello manifested great surprise, emphatically denying the accusation and then a moment later (feigning a mental disturbance with an eye to establishing the grounds for his future defense?) bursting into joyous laughter and saying that this was God’s way of putting him to the test in order to measure his faith and his spirit of sacrifice. He added that now he understood why he had not been called up for military service, an occasion that he had been awaiting impatiently so as to preach by example, refusing to wear a uniform and swear allegiance to the flag, these being attributes of Satan. Captain G. C. Enrique Soto then asked him if that meant he was against Peru, to which the accused replied that that wasn’t what he was talking about at all, that he was referring only to matters having to do with religion. And he thereupon proceeded to explain to Captain Soto and the guards, in fervent tones, that Christ was not God but His Witness and that the papists were lying when they maintained that he had been crucified since what had really happened was that he’d been nailed to a tree and that the Bible proved it. In this regard he counseled them to read The Watchtower, a bimonthly that for the price of two soles shed light on this subject and other aspects of culture and provided wholesome entertainment. Captain Soto shut him up, pointing out to him that it was forbidden to advertise commercial products within the commissariat. And he adjured him to reveal where he had been and what he had been doing the evening before during the hours when Sarita Huanca Salaverría swore that she had been raped and assaulted by him. Gumercindo Tello stated that he had spent the entire evening, as was his habit every night, alone in his room, absorbed in meditation on the Trunk and the fact that, contrary to what certain people maintained, it was not true that all men would be brought back to life on the day of the Last Judgment, a fact that proved the mortality of the soul. On being reprimanded a second time, the accused apologized and said he wasn’t deliberately disobeying the captain’s orders, but that he couldn’t keep himself from trying at every moment to bring a little light to others, inasmuch as it made him despair to see the utter darkness amid which other people lived. And he stated that he did not remember having seen Sarita Huanca Salaverría at any time that evening or later that night, and asked that the record show that despite his having been slandered by the girl he bore her no ill will and was even grateful to her because he suspected that, through her, God had been testing the strength of his faith. Seeing that it was not going to be possible to obtain from Gumercindo Tello any more precise details concerning the charges brought against him, Captain G. C. Enrique Soto brought his interrogation of him to an end and transferred the accused to the detention cell in the Palace of Justice, in order that the examining magistrate might proceed with his investigation of the case in due and proper form.

  Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar closed the folder containing the dossier of the accused and, amid the morning din of justice being done, reflected. Jehovah’s Witnesses? He knew their kind only too well. Not many years before, a man making his way about the world on a bicycle had knocked at the door of his house and offered him a copy of The Watchtower, which, in a moment of weakness, he had accepted. From that moment on, with astral punctuality, the Witness had laid siege to his house, at all hours of the day and night, insisting on enlightening him, inundating him with pamphlets, books, magazines of all sizes and descriptions having to do with any number of subjects, until, finding himself incapable of putting a stop to the Witness’s unwelcome visits by virtue of such civilized methods as persuasion, earnest entreaties, and stern lectures, the magistrate had finally called the police. So the rapist was one of these irrepressible proselytizers. This case was beginning to be an interesting one, Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar said to himself.

  It was only midmorning and the magistrate, distractedly fingering the long, sharp letter opener with the Tiahuanaco handle on his desk, a token of the affection of his superiors, colleagues, and subordinates (who had presented him with it on the day of his twenty-fifth anniversary in the legal profession), called his secretary into his chambers and told him to show in the deponents in the case.

  The two Guardias Civiles, Cusicanqui Apéstegui and Tito Parinacocha, entered first, and in respectful tones confirmed the circumstances under which they had arrested Gumercindo Tello, noting also for the record that the latter, despite having denied the charges brought against him, had been altogether cooperative, though a bit tiresome due to his religious mania. Dr. Zelaya, his glasses sliding up and down the bridge of his nose, took down their testimony word for word as they spoke.

  The parents of the minor entered next, a couple whose advanced age surprised the magistrate: how could this pair of doddering oldsters have engendered a daughter only thirteen years before? Toothless and rheumy-eyed, the father, Don Isaías Huanca, immediately confirmed the statements concerning him as set down in the police report and then inquired, in an urgent tone of voice, whether Señor Tello was going to marry Sarita. He had barely put this question to the magistrate when Señora Salaverría de Huanca, a little woman with a wizened face, approached Dr. Don Barreda y Zaldívar, kissed his hand, and in a pleading voice implored him to be kind enough to force Señor Tello to take Sarita to the altar. The magistrate had great difficulty explaining to this elderly couple that the duties and powers conferred upon him by virtue of his high office did not include those of matchmaker. To all appearances, the girl’s parents were far more interested in marrying their daughter off than in seeing the man who had deflowered her brought to justice, scarcely mentioning the rape and then only when urged to do so, and wasting a great deal of time enumerating Sarita’s virtues, as though offering her for
sale.

  As he smiled to himself, the thought occurred to the magistrate that these humble peasants—it was obvious that they were from the Andes and had lived close to the soil—made him feel like an acrimonious father refusing to give his son his permission to marry. He did his best to make them think the matter through clearly: how could they possibly want to marry their daughter off to a man capable of raping a helpless girl? But they kept interrupting, insisting Sarita would be a model wife, even though she was scarcely more than a child she already knew how to cook and sew and all the rest, the two of them were far along in years and didn’t want to leave her a defenseless orphan when they died, Señor Tello seemed to be a responsible, hardworking man, he had admittedly gone too far with Sarita the other night, but on the other hand they had never seen him drunk, he was very respectful, he left for work very early every morning with his toolbox and his bundle of little magazines that he peddled from house to house. Wasn’t a young man who worked that hard to make a living a good match for Sarita? And with outstretched hands the two oldsters implored the magistrate: “Have pity on us and help us, Your Honor.”