Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

  But during the time that Seferino Huanca Leyva was a seminarian, it was not only his conviction that the Church ought to combat evil pugilistically that upset his superiors, but to an even greater degree his (disinterested?) belief that masturbation, in any way, shape, or form, should definitely not be included in the vast repertory of mortal sins. Despite repeated reprimands from his mentors, who, citing the Bible and countless papal bulls, fulminated against the sin of Onan, endeavored to show him the error of his ways, the son of Doña Angélica the abortionist, stubborn by nature even before the day he was born, roused his comrades to rebellion by night by assuring them that the manual act had been conceived by God to compensate ecclesiastics for their vow of chastity, or in any event to make it bearable. Sin, he argued, resides in the pleasure offered by a woman’s flesh, or (more perversely) the flesh of another, but why should there be any sin in the humble, solitary, unproductive relief offered by the conjoined efforts of one’s own imagination and one’s own fingers? In a composition read aloud in the class of the venerable Father Leoncio Zacarías, Seferino Huanca Leyva went so far as to suggest, through his interpretation of ambiguous episodes in the New Testament, that there were reasons for not rejecting as a mere wild hypothesis the possibility that Christ in person—perhaps after meeting Mary Magdalene?—might have fought against the temptation to commit an act of impurity by masturbatory means. Father Zacarías suffered a fainting spell and the protégé of the Basque pianist was very nearly expelled from the seminary for blasphemy.

  He repented, apologized, did the acts of penance imposed upon him, and ceased for a time to propagate those outlandish ideas of his that incensed his mentors and inflamed his fellow seminarians. Nonetheless, he did not cease to put them into practice as far as he himself was concerned, for very soon his confessors again heard him say, the moment he knelt before the creaking grilles of their confessionals: “This week I have been in love with the Queen of Sheba, Delilah, and the wife of Holofernes.” It was these infatuations that kept him from a journey abroad that would have enriched his mind. He had just been ordained, and since, despite his heterodox deliriums, Seferino Huanca Leyva had been an exceptionally hardworking student and no one ever doubted his intellectual brilliance, the Hierarchy decided to send him to the Gregorian University in Rome to study for a doctorate. The brand-new priest immediately announced his intention to do research (scholars who ruin their eyesight consulting the dusty manuscripts in the Vatican Library) on a thesis to be entitled: “On the solitary vice as the citadel of ecclesiastic chastity.” When his project was angrily rejected, he gave up the trip to Rome and went off to bury himself in the inferno of Mendocita, from which he was never to emerge.

  It was he himself who chose that district when he found out that all the priests in Lima feared it like the plague, not so much because of the concentration of microbes which had made its hieroglyphic topography of sandy footpaths and shacks of heterogeneous materials—cardboard, corrugated tin, straw matting, planks, rags, and newspapers—a laboratory of the most refined forms of infection and parasitosis, as because of the social violence that reigned in Mendocita. In those days, in fact, that section of the city was a University of Crime, particularly its most proletarian specialties: breaking and entering, prostitution, knife fights, con games of every variety, drug pushing, and pimping.

  In the space of a few days Father Seferino Huanca Leyva built with his own hands an adobe shack, leaving it with no door, furnished it with a broken-down secondhand bed and a straw mattress bought at La Parada, and announced that he would hold an open-air Mass at seven o’clock. He also let it be known that he would hear confessions from Monday to Saturday, women from two to six and men from seven to midnight, to prevent crowding. And he also announced that he intended to organize a class, from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, in which the children of the neighborhood would be taught the alphabet, arithmetic, and the catechism. But his enthusiasm was shattered to smithereens when it met with hard reality. The turnout for his morning Masses consisted of a handful of rheumy-eyed old men and women with moribund physical reflexes who sometimes inadvertently engaged in that impious practice typical of the people of a certain country (famous for its beef cattle and its tangos?) of letting farts and relieving their bladders and bowels with all their clothes on during the Office. As for confession in the afternoon and the school for children in the morning, not one soul turned up, even out of curiosity.

  What was the matter? The neighborhood faith healer, Jaime Concha, a robust former sergeant in the Guardia Civil who had turned in his uniform when headquarters had given him orders to execute a poor yellow man who had arrived in El Callao from some port in the Orient as a stowaway, and had since taken up the practice of folk medicine with such success that he had won the heart of all of Mendocita, had viewed the arrival of a possible competitor with such misgivings that he had organized a boycott in the parish.

  Apprised of this by an informer (the ex-sorceress of Mendocita, Doña Mayte Unzátegui, a Basque with indigo-blue blood in her veins who had come down in the world and been dethroned as queen and sovereign of the neighborhood by Jaime Concha), Father Seferino Huanca Leyva realized (joys that blur men’s eyes and inflame their hearts) that the right moment had come at last to put his theory of armed preaching into practice. He went up and down the streets swarming with flies, shouting at the top of his lungs like a circus barker to announce that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, in the vacant lot where neighborhood soccer matches were held, he and the faith healer would prove with their fists which of the two of them was the better man. When the muscular Jaime Concha appeared at Father Seferino’s adobe hut to ask the priest whether this meant he was being challenged to a punching match, the only answer of the man from El Chirimoyo was to ask the sergeant in an icy voice whether he would prefer a knife fight to one with their bare fists. The ex-sergeant went away holding his sides with laughter and explaining to the neighbors that in the days when he’d been a Guardia Civil he used to kill vicious dogs he encountered on the street with one rap on their heads with his bare knuckles.

  The fight between the priest and the healer caused extraordinary excitement, and not only all of Mendocita, but also La Victoria, El Porvenir, El Cerro San Cosme, and El Agustino came to watch it. Father Seferino turned up wearing trousers and a sports shirt and crossed himself before the fight, which was short but spectacular. The man from El Chirimoyo was physically less powerful than the ex-Guardia Civil, but trickier. The moment the fight started, he threw a handful of hot pepper powder in his opponent’s eyes (“Where I come from, anything goes in a fight,” he was later to explain to his fans), and when the giant (Goliath done in by one clever shot from David’s sling) began to stagger about, unable to see, he weakened him with a series of kicks in the privates till he doubled over. Without giving him a chance to catch his breath, he then launched into a frontal attack aimed at his face, a hail of both rights and lefts, changing his style only after he’d knocked him to the ground. He finished off the massacre as he lay there, by stamping on his ribs and his belly. Howling with pain and shame, Jaime Concha admitted defeat. Amid the applause, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva fell to his knees and prayed devoutly, his face turned heavenward and his hands crossed on his breast.

  This episode—which even got into the newspapers and which upset the archbishop—began to win Father Seferino the sympathies of his still-potential parishioners. From that time on, the morning Masses were better attended and a number of sinners, especially female ones, asked to make their confession, though naturally these rare cases were not enough to fill up even a tenth of the vast schedule that the optimistic parish priest—making a rough estimate of the capacity for sin of the inhabitants of Mendocita—had set up. Another thing that was well received in the neighborhood and won him new clients was his behavior toward Jaime Concha after the latter’s humiliating defeat. Father Seferino himself helped the neighbor women put Mercurochrome and arnica on him, and informed h
im that he would not boot him out of Mendocita, that on the contrary (generosity of Napoleons who offer champagne and their daughter in marriage to the general whose army they have just wiped out) he was prepared to keep him on in the parish by appointing him sacristan. The healer was authorized to continue to provide philters for friendship and enmity, the evil eye and love, but at moderate prices that the priest himself would set, and the one thing he was forbidden to do was concern himself with questions having to do with the soul. He was also permitted to continue his practice as a bonesetter and treat those who dislocated a member or had pains in their joints, on condition that he not try to care for people suffering from other ailments, who were to be referred to the public clinic.

  The way in which Father Seferino Huanca Leyva succeeded in attracting the youngsters of Mendocita (flies that smell honey, pelicans that spy fish) to his once-scorned school was highly unorthodox and brought him his first grave warning from the ecclesiastical authorities. He let it be known that, for every week they attended his classes, the children would receive a little colored picture as a reward. This bait would not have been sufficient to lure the eager crowd of ragamuffins that it did had the euphemistic “little colored pictures” offered by the son of El Chirimoyo not been in reality pictures of naked women whom it was difficult to mistake for virgins. To those mothers of his little pupils who expressed their surprise at his pedagogical methods, the priest solemnly explained that, however incredible it might seem, the “little pictures” would keep their offspring from being tempted by impure flesh and make them less obstreperous, more docile, and drowsier.

  To win over the girls of the neighborhood, he took advantage of the inclinations that made woman the first Biblical sinner and enlisted the services of Mayte Unzátegui, who was also placed on the parish staff and given the title of assistant. Mayte Unzátegui (wisdom that only twenty years as madam in the brothels of Tingo María can bring) succeeded in winning the hearts of the little girls by giving them courses that they found great fun: how to paint their lips and cheeks and eyelids without having to buy makeup in stores, how to pad out their breasts and hips and bottoms with cotton, pillows, and even newspapers, how to do the dances that were the latest rage: the rumba, the huaracha, the porro, the mambo. When the Visitor from the Hierarchy came to inspect the parish and saw the whole bunch of impudent brats in the girls’ section of the school taking turns wearing the only pair of spike-heeled shoes in the neighborhood and waggling their behinds provocatively under the magisterial supervision of the former bawdyhouse mistress, he rubbed his eyes in utter disbelief. Finally, on recovering his powers of speech, he asked Father Seferino if he had founded an Academy for Prostitutes.

  “The answer is yes,” Black Teresita’s son, a man who had no fear of words, replied. “Since they’ll be forced to take up that profession one day in any case, they can at least be talented at it.”

  (It was this episode that led to his receiving the second grave warning from the ecclesiastical authorities.)

  But it is not true, as rumors spread by his detractors had it, that Father Seferino was the number-one pimp of Mendocita. He was merely a realistic man, who knew life like the palm of his hand. He did not encourage prostitution, but, rather, tried to make it more decent and fought valiant battles to keep the women who earned their living by selling their bodies (all the women in Mendocita between the ages of twelve and sixty) from contracting gonorrhea and being exploited by their procurers. The eradication of the twenty-some pimps of the district (and, in certain cases, their rehabilitation) was a heroic labor in the field of public health and social welfare that earned Father Seferino a number of knife wounds and the congratulations of the mayor of La Victoria. To achieve this end, he applied his philosophy of armed preaching. Using Jaime Concha as a town crier, he spread the word that the law and religion forbade men to live like parasites off inferior beings, and that consequently any male in the district who exploited females would be forced to confront his fists. He was thus obliged to break Greaseball Pacheco’s jaw, leave the Stud blind in one eye, Strong-Arm Pedrito impotent, He-Man Sampedri a slavering idiot, and Muscleman Huambachano black and blue all over. During this campaign worthy of Don Quixote, he was ambushed one night and cut to ribbons with knives; his assailants, believing they’d done him in, left him lying in the mud for starving dogs to devour. But the life force of the Darwinian young man was stronger than the rusty knife blades that stabbed him, and he survived, though he bore for the rest of his life, it is true—marks of steel on the body and face of a man that lustful women find exciting—the half-dozen scars that, after the trial, were responsible for the commitment to a psychiatric institution, as an incurable madman, of the ringleader of his attackers, that native of Arequipa with the Biblical first name and the maritime surname, Ezequiel Delfín.

  The priest’s sacrifices and efforts bore the fruits he had hoped for, and Mendocita, to everyone’s amazement, was freed of every last one of its pimps. Father Seferino was the idol of the women in the neighborhood; from that time on, they came in throngs to Mass and went to confession every week. To make the profession that earned them their daily bread less hard on them, Father Seferino invited a doctor from Acción Cató1ica to come to the district to give them advice on sexual prophylaxis and instruct them in practical ways of detecting the presence of the gonococcus, in their client or in themselves, before it was too late. In cases in which the birth-control techniques that Mayte Unzátegui taught them proved ineffective, Father Seferino brought a disciple of Doña Angélica’s in from El Chirimoyo to Mendocita to dispatch to limbo the tadpoles of love for sale. The grave warning that he received from the ecclesiastical authorities when they discovered that the priest was recommending the use of condoms and diaphragms and was in favor of abortions was his thirteenth.

  The fourteenth came as a result of the so-called trade school that he had the audacity to set up. In it, experts of the district, in delightful informal talks (an anecdote here, an anecdote there, beneath the overcast skies or the occasional stars of the Lima night), taught novices with virgin police records various ways of making a living. They could learn, for instance, the exercises that turn fingers into intelligent, extremely discreet intruders capable of slipping into the innermost recesses of any purse, pocket, wallet, or briefcase and recognizing, amid all the heterogeneous objects inside, the booty they covet. They could discover how, with the patience of a good craftsman, any wire can take the place of the most baroque key to open a door, and how the ignition of different makes of cars can be started if, perchance, one does not happen to be the owner of the vehicle. Lessons were given on how to snatch jewelry on the streets, on foot or on a bicycle, how to scale walls and break windows of houses without making a sound, how to do plastic surgery on any object that suddenly changed owner, and how to get out of various Lima jails without the authorization of the chief of police. Even such arts and crafts as the manufacture of knives and—rumors born of envy?—the distilling of cocaine from coca paste were taught in this school, which finally earned Father Seferino the friendship and fellowship of the men of Mendocita, as well as his first run-in with the police of La Victoria, who took him down to headquarters one night and threatened to bring him to trial and get him put behind bars as a Gray Eminence of crime. He was rescued from that fate, naturally, by his influential benefactress.

  Even this early on, Father Seferino had become a popular figure, receiving a great deal of publicity in newspapers and magazines and on the radio. His innovations were the object of heated discussion. There were those who regarded him as a protosaint, a forerunner of the new batch of priests who were to revolutionize the Church, and there were those who were convinced that he was a fifth columnist of Satan whose mission was to undermine the House of Peter from within. Mendocita (thanks to him or through his fault?) became a tourist attraction: the curious, the devout, reporters, snobs ventured into the former paradise of the underworld to see, touch, interview, or ask Father Seferino for his aut
ograph. This publicity divided the Church: one faction considered it beneficial to the cause, and the other, harmful.