Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (36 page)

“What was that you said?” the son of aristocrats shot back indignantly—thinking that at that very moment his mother was doubtless swallowing a pill, sipping a sedative potion, receiving a painful injection? “If you’re a man, I dare you to repeat it.”

“I’m not one, but I’ll repeat it,” Virago replied. And (honor of a Spartan woman capable of allowing herself to be burned alive rather than take back what she has said) she repeated the rude insult, embroidering it with gutter adjectives.

Joaquín tried to throw a punch at her, but it landed in thin air, and the next moment he found himself lying on the ground, knocked down by a roundhouse from Virago, who then fell on him, hitting him with her fists, feet, knees, elbows. And there on the ground (violent gymnastics on the canvas that end up resembling passionate embraces) he discovered—stupefied, erogenized, ejaculating—that his adversary was a woman. The emotion aroused in him by this wrestling match, along with its attendant unexpected turgescences, was so intense that it changed his life. After making his peace with her after the fight and learning that her name was Sarita Huanca Salaverría, he invited her then and there to go to the movies with him to see a Tarzan film, and a week later he proposed to her. Sarita’s refusal to become his wife, or even allow him to kiss her, drove Joaquín classically to drink and to cheap bars. Within a short time, he went from being a romantic drowning his troubles in whiskey to being a hopeless alcoholic capable of trying to quench his African thirst with kerosene.

What was it that awakened in Joaquín this passion for Sarita Huanca Salaverría? She was young, with the svelte physique of a banty rooster, a complexion tanned by exposure to the elements, hair cut in bangs like a
jeune premier
ballet dancer, and as a soccer player she wasn’t bad. All in all, her manner of dress, the things she did, the company she kept seemed very odd for a woman. Was it precisely this perhaps—a penchant for originality bordering on vice, a frantic tendency toward bizarre behavior—that made her so attractive to the aristocrat? The first time he took Virago to the run-down mansion in La Perla, his parents looked at each other in disgust once the two of them had left. The former millionaire summed up all his bitterness in a single phrase: “We’ve engendered not only an imbecile but a sexual pervert as well.”

Nonetheless, while Sarita Huanca Salaverría was responsible for Joaquín’s becoming an alcoholic, she served at the same time as the trampoline that catapulted him from his status as a referee of street games played with a ball made of rags to championship matches in the National Stadium.

Virago was not content merely to refuse the aristocrat’s passionate advances; she took great pleasure in making him suffer. She accepted his invitations to the movies, to soccer matches, to bullfights, to restaurants, she allowed him to shower her with expensive presents (on which her love-smitten suitor spent the last dregs of the family fortune?), but she did not permit Joaquín to speak to her of love. The moment he tried to tell her how much he loved her (timidity of a stripling who blushes and gets all choked up on paying compliments to a flower), Sarita Huanca Salaverría would rise to her feet in fury, insult him with a vulgarity worthy of Bajo el Puente, and demand to be taken home. It was then that Joaquín began to drink, going from one cheap bar to another, and mixing his drinks in order to obtain rapid and explosive effects. It was a common sight for his parents to see him coming home at the hour when night owls go to roost, stumbling through the rooms of the La Perla mansion, leaving behind him a trail of vomit. Just as he seemed about to dissolve in alcohol, a telephone call from Sarita would bring him back to life. He would get his hopes up once more and the infernal cycle would begin all over again. Consumed with bitterness, the man with the tic and his hypochondriac spouse died almost at the same time and were buried in a mausoleum in the Presbítero Maestro Cemetery. The tumbledown mansion in La Perla, what was left of the surrounding property, and all the other meager assets that still remained were handed over to creditors or confiscated by the state. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont was obliged to work for a living.

Considering the sort of person he was (his past deafeningly proclaimed that he would either die of consumption or end up begging on the streets), he did more than well for himself. What profession did he choose? Soccer referee! Goaded on by hunger and the desire to go on spoiling the disdainful Sarita, he began asking for a few
soles
from the urchins who asked him to referee their games, and on seeing that they managed to pay him by prorating the sum among themselves, two plus two are four and four and two are six, gradually raised his fees and began watching where his money went. As his skills on the soccer field became well known, he secured contracts for himself at junior competitions, and one day he boldly presented himself at the Association for Soccer Referees and Coaches and applied for membership. He passed the examinations with a brilliance that dizzied those who from that moment on he was able to refer to (conceitedly?) as his colleagues.

The appearance of Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont—black uniform with white pinstripes, little green sun visor on his forehead, silver-plated whistle in his mouth—in the José Díaz National Stadium marked a red-letter day in the history of Peruvian soccer. A veteran sports reporter was to write: “With him, unbending justice and artistic inspiration entered our stadiums.” His rectitude, his impartiality, his quick and unerring eye for fouls and his adroitness at meting out exactly the right penalty, his authority (the players always lowered their eyes when they spoke to him, and addressed him as Don), and his physical fitness that enabled him to run for the entire ninety minutes of a match and never be more than ten meters from the ball, soon made him popular. As someone once put it in a speech, he was the only referee who was never disobeyed by the players or attacked by the spectators, and the only one who received an ovation from the grandstands after every match.

Were these talents and efforts due only to an exceptional professional conscience? This was a partial explanation, to be sure. But the most profound reason behind them was that Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont wanted most of all (the secret of a young man who triumphs in Europe but whose days are nonetheless filled with bitterness, because what he really wanted was the applause of his little village in the Andes) to impress Virago with his magic skills as a referee. They were still seeing each other, nearly every day, and scabrous popular gossip had it that they were lovers. In reality, despite his amorous stubbornness, which had remained undiminished throughout the years, the referee had not managed to overcome Sarita’s resistance.

One day, after picking him up off the floor of a cheap bar in El Callao, taking him to the
pensión
in the center of town where he lived, wiping away the spittle and sawdust he was covered with, and putting him to bed, Sarita Huanca Salaverría revealed to him the secret of her life. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont thus learned (pallor of a man who has received the vampire’s kiss) that in her early youth there had been an accursed love and a conjugal catastrophe. In fact, between Sarita and her brother (Richard?) a tragic love affair had taken place that (cataracts of fire, a rain of poison on humanity) had led to her becoming pregnant. She had cleverly entered into matrimony with a suitor whom she had previously disdained (Red Antúnez? Luis Marroquín?), so that the child born of incest would not have a blot upon his name, but the happy young husband (the Devil sticking his tail in the pot and curdling the sauce) had discovered her trickery in time and repudiated the treacherous wife who had tried to pass off another man’s child as his. Forced to have an abortion, Sarita abandoned her family of noble lineage, her elegant residential district, her impressive name, and becoming a tramp, had acquired the personality and nickname of Virago in the vacant lots of Bellavista and La Perla. From that time on, she had sworn never again to give herself to a man and to live the rest of her life, for all practical purposes (except, alas, that of the production of spermatozoa?), as a male.

Learning of the tragedy, seasoned with sacrilege, the transgression of taboos, the trampling underfoot of civic morality and religious commandments, of Sarita Huanca Salaverría did not destroy Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont’s passionate love; on the contrary, it made it all the more intense. The man from La Perla even conceived the idea of curing Virago of her traumas and reconciling her with society and men; he wanted to make of her, once again, a very feminine young woman of Lima, a charming, flirtatious, piquant little rascal—like La Perricholi?

As his fame spread, he was asked to referee international matches in Lima and abroad, and received offers to work in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, which (patriotism of the scientist who turns down the computers of New York in order to go on experimenting with his tubercular guinea pigs in the laboratories of the Peruvian School of Medicine) he always refused; at the same time, his siege of the incestuous Sarita’s heart became more stubborn than ever.

And it seemed to him that he glimpsed certain signs (Apache smoke signals on the hills, tom-toms in the African rain forest) that Sarita Huanca Salaverría might yield. One afternoon, after coffee with croissants at the Haití, on the Plaza de Armas, he managed to hold the girl’s right hand between his for more than a minute (precisely: the chronometer in his referee’s head timed it). Shortly thereafter, there was an international match in which the team that had won the Peruvian championship confronted a band of assassins from a country of little renown (Argentina, or something like that?), who showed up on the playing field in cleated shoes, knee guards, and elbow patches which were really weapons to injure their adversary. Paying no attention to their arguments (as a matter of fact, they were telling the truth) that in their country that was how soccer was played (topping it off with torture and crime?), Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont ordered them off the field, with the result that the Peruvian team won a technical victory for lack of an opposing team. The referee, naturally, was carried out of the stadium in triumph on the shoulders of the crowd, and Sarita Huanca Salaverría, once they were alone (a burst of patriotic enthusiasm? sportive sentimentality?) threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Once, when he was taken ill (cirrhosis was insidiously, fatally mineralizing the liver of the Man of the Stadiums and beginning to cause him to suffer periodic crises), she took care of him, never once leaving his bedside, during the entire week that he remained in the Hospital Carrión, and one night Joaquín saw her shed tears (for him?). All this encouraged him, and continually thinking up new arguments, he proposed to her every day. But it was to no avail. Sarita Huanca Salaverría attended all the matches that he interpreted (the sportswriters were now comparing his refereeing to conducting a symphony), she accompanied him when he went abroad, and she had even moved to the Pensión Colonial, where Joaquín lived with his sister the pianist and his aged parents. She refused, however, to allow this fraternity to cease to be chaste and turn into joyous lovemaking. The uncertainty (daisy with an infinite number of petals to be torn off) continued little by little to aggravate Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont’s alcoholism, to the point where eventually he was more often drunk than sober.

Alcohol was the Achilles’ heel of his professional life, the millstone around his neck that, according to those in the know, kept him from being invited to Europe to referee. How to explain, on the other hand, how a man who drank as much as he did was able to practice a profession demanding such taxing physical effort? The fact is that (enigmas paving the path of history) he pursued both vocations at the same time, and from his thirtieth year on, they overlapped: Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont began refereeing matches drunk as a skunk and continued to referee them in his mind afterwards in bars.

Alcohol did not dull his talents: it neither blurred his vision nor lessened his authority nor set back his career. It is quite true that every so often he was overcome by an attack of the hiccups in the middle of a match, and that (calumnies that poison the air and stab genuine merit in the back) there were those who swore that once, overcome by Saharan thirst, he grabbed a bottle of liniment out of the hands of a medical attendant hurrying out onto the field to aid a player and gulped it down as though it were cold water. But such episodes—a collection of picturesque anecdotes, the mythology that surrounds genius—in no way hindered his triumphant march to fame and glory.

And so, amid the thundering applause of the crowd in the stadium and the penitential drinking bouts whereby he endeavored to drown his remorse (inquisitor’s pincers that dig about in living flesh, the rack that breaks bones) in his soul of a missionary of the true faith (Jehovah’s Witnesses?) for having impulsively raped, on a mad night in his youth, a minor from La Victoria (Sarita Huanca Salaverría?), Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont reached the prime of life; his fifties. He was a man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness, who had climbed to the heights of his profession.

It was at this juncture that Lima became the site of the most important soccer event of the half century, the final match of the South American Championship series, between two teams who in the semifinals had each overwhelmingly defeated their opponents: Bolivia and Peru. Although tradition recommended that a referee from a neutral country be chosen to preside over this match, the two teams, and (chivalry of the Altiplano, Andean nobility, Aymara point of honor) the foreigners in particular, insisted that the famous Joaquín Hinostroza Marroquín referee the match. And since players, substitutes, and coaches threatened to strike if this demand was not granted, the Federation finally agreed and the Jehovah’s Witness was given the mission of presiding over this match that everyone prophesied would be a memorable one.

The stubborn gray clouds of Lima lifted that Sunday, permitting the sun’s warm rays to shine down upon the contest. Many people had spent the night in line in the open air, hoping to be able to buy tickets (even though everyone knew they had been sold out for a month). From dawn on, all around the National Stadium, swarms of people milled about looking for scalpers and prepared to commit every imaginable crime in order to get in. Two hours before the match, the stadium was so jam-packed there wasn’t room for a fly. Several hundred citizens of the great country to the south (Bolivia?), come to Lima from their limpid mountain heights by plane, by car, and on foot, had banded together in the eastern grandstand. The wild cheers and locomotives of visitors and natives had raised the excitement in the stadium to fever pitch as the crowd waited for the teams to appear on the field.