“Can I ask you a question, lieutenant?” Lituma said.
“Go ahead. I don’t know if I can answer it, though.”
“How come the higher-ups have chosen me for this little job?”
“That I can tell you,” the lieutenant replied. “For two reasons. Because you were the one who captured him and it’s only right that the one who begins a caper should be the one who ends it. And secondly, because you’re the best Guardia Civil in this commissariat and perhaps in all of El Callao.”
“I’m honored by your compliment,” Lituma murmured, not pleased in the slightest.
“Our superiors know very well that this is a tough job, and that’s why they’ve entrusted it to you,” the lieutenant said. “You should feel proud that it’s you they’ve chosen from among the hundreds of Guardias stationed in Lima.”
“In other words, on top of everything else, I ought to thank them,” Lituma said, shaking his head in stupefaction. He thought the whole thing over for a moment, and then added in a low voice: “Does it have to be done right away?”
“This very instant,” the lieutenant answered in a fake-jovial tone of voice. “Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today.”
Now you know why you couldn’t get that black’s face out of your mind, Lituma thought.
“You want to take one of these guys with you to give you a hand?” he heard the lieutenant saying.
Lituma could feel Camacho and Arévalo sitting there petrified. A polar silence descended on the commissariat as the sergeant looked at the two Guardias and deliberately took his time choosing between them so as to make them squirm a little. Apple Dumpling, his fingers shaking, continued to look through the pile of traffic tickets, and Snotnose had bent over his desk to hide his face.
“I’ll take him,” Lituma said, pointing to Arévalo. He heard Camacho let out a deep breath and saw a sudden gleam of utter hatred appear in Apple Dumpling’s eyes that immediately told him the latter was mentally cursing his sergeant’s whore of a mother.
“I’ve got a terrible cold and I was just about to ask permission to stay inside tonight, lieutenant,” Arévalo stammered, trying to play dumb.
“Stop acting like an idiot and get your coat on,” Lituma broke in, walking past him without looking at him. “We’re leaving this minute.”
He went to the cell and unlocked the door. For the first time that day, he took a look at the black. They’d dressed him in a ragged pair of pants that just barely reached his knees, and covered his chest and back with a burlap bag with a hole cut out of it for his head. He was barefoot and calm; he looked Lituma in the eye, with neither fear nor joy. He was sitting on the floor, chewing something; instead of handcuffs, he had a rope tied around his wrists, long enough for him to be able to scratch himself or to eat. The sergeant made signs to him to stand up, but the black didn’t seem to understand. Lituma walked over to him, took him by the arm, and the man obediently got to his feet. He walked down the corridor ahead of Lituma, with the same indifference. Apple Dumpling Arévalo already had his greatcoat on and his scarf wound around his neck. Lieutenant Concha didn’t even turn around to watch them leave: he had his face buried in a Donald Duck (But he doesn’t realize he’s holding it upside down, Lituma thought). Camacho, on the other hand, gave them a smile of commiseration.
Once out on the street, the sergeant placed himself on the curb side, leaving the wall to Arévalo. The black walked along between the two of them, at the same pace, in long steady strides, still chewing.
“He’s been gnawing on that hunk of bread for almost two hours now,” Arévalo said. “When they brought him back from Lima tonight, we gave him all the stale rolls in the pantry, the ones that had gotten as hard as rocks. And he’s eaten every last one of them. Chewing like a grinder. He must be half starved to death, don’t you imagine?”
Duty first and sentiments later, Lituma was thinking. He mapped out the itinerary in his mind: up the Calle Carlos Concha to Contralmirante Mora and then down the avenue to the banks of the Rímac and along the river to the ocean. He calculated: three quarters of an hour to get there and back, an hour at most.
“It’s all your fault, sergeant,” Arévalo grumbled. “Who asked you to capture him anyway? When you realized he wasn’t a thief, you should have let him go. And now look at all the trouble you’ve gotten us into. Tell me something: do you go along with what the brass hats think? That this guy came here as a stowaway on a boat?”
“That’s what Pedralbes thinks, too,” Lituma said. “It’s possible. Otherwise, how the devil do you explain how an outlandish-looking character like this, with that hair and those scars and naked as a jaybird and talking that gibberish of his, happens to pop up all of a sudden in the port of El Callao? They must be right.”
The echo of the Guardias’ two pair of boots resounded in the dark street; the sambo’s bare feet made no sound at all.
“If it were up to me, I’d have left him in prison,” Arévalo went on. “Because a savage from Africa isn’t to blame if he’s a savage from Africa, sergeant.”
“But it’s for that very reason that he can’t stay in prison,” Lituma murmured. “You heard the lieutenant: prison is for thieves, murderers, bandits. What legal grounds would the state have for keeping him in prison?”
“Well, they ought to send him back to his own country, then,” Arévalo growled.
“And how the devil do you find out what country he’s from?” Lituma said, raising his voice. “You heard the lieutenant. They tried at headquarters in Lima to talk to him in all languages: English, French, Italian even. But he doesn’t talk languages: he’s a savage.”
“In other words, you approve of our having to take him out someplace and shoot him because he’s a savage,” Apple Dumpling Arévalo muttered angrily.
“I’m not saying I approve,” Lituma murmured. “I’m just repeating what the lieutenant said the higher-ups said. Don’t be an ass.”
They started down the Avenida Contralmirante Mora just as the bells of Nuestra Señora del Carmen de la Legua struck twelve, a lugubrious tolling to Lituma’s ear. He strode along resolutely, looking straight ahead, but every so often, despite himself, his head turned to his left and he stole a quick glance at the black. He saw him, for the space of a second, walking through the feeble cone of light at the foot of a lamppost, and each time he looked exactly the same: still stolidly moving his jaw up and down, striding along in step with the two of them, without the slightest sign of anxiety. The only thing in this world that seems to matter to him is chewing, Lituma thought. And a moment later: He’s a man condemned to death who doesn’t know he is. And almost immediately thereafter: There’s no doubt about it, he’s a savage.
And at that point he heard Arévalo say: “Even so, why don’t our superiors just let him go free to get along as best he can?” he groused. “Just let him be another bum, along with all the others there are in Lima. One more, one less—what the hell would it matter?”
“You heard the lieutenant,” Lituma answered. “The Guardia Civil can’t encourage the breaking of the law. And if you let this character loose in the middle of the city, the only way he can survive is to steal. Or else he’ll just die like a dog. We’re really doing him a favor. He’ll kick off in a second if we shoot him. That’s better than dying slowly, inch by inch, from hunger, cold, loneliness, sadness.”
But Lituma could feel that what he was saying wasn’t at all convincing, and on hearing his own voice he had the sensation that he was listening to another person speaking.
“Be that as it may, let me say just one thing,” he heard Apple Dumpling protest. “I don’t like this job at all, and you played a dirty trick on me when you picked me.”
“Listen, do you think I like it?” Lituma murmured. “And don’t you think my superiors played a dirty trick on me by picking me?”
They walked past the Naval Arsenal just as a siren blew, and as they crossed the vacant lot along the dry dock, a dog came out of the shadows an
d barked at them. They walked along in silence, hearing their boots clatter on the sidewalk, the sound of the sea only a short distance away, feeling in their nostrils the damp salty air.
“Gypsies camped out on this vacant lot last year,” Apple Dumpling burst out all of a sudden, his voice breaking. “They put up tents and gave a circus show. They told fortunes and did magic tricks. But the mayor made us chase them out because they didn’t have a city license.”
Lituma didn’t answer. He suddenly felt sorry, not only for the black, but for Apple Dumpling and the gypsies as well.
“And are we going to leave his dead body lying there on the beach for the pelicans to peck to bits?” Apple Dumpling almost sobbed.
“We’re going to leave it at the garbage dump so the city sanitation trucks will find it, take it to the morgue, and give it to the med school for students to autopsy,” Lituma said angrily. “You heard the instructions, Arévalo; don’t make me repeat them.”
“I heard them, but I can’t get used to the idea that we have to kill him like this, in cold blood,” Apple Dumpling said a few moments later. “And you can’t get used to it either, no matter how hard you try. I can tell by your voice that you don’t approve of this order either.”
“Our duty isn’t to approve of the order but to carry it out,” the sergeant said in a faint voice. And then, after a pause, speaking even more slowly: “You’re right, of course. I don’t approve of it either. I’m obeying because it’s necessary to obey.”
At that moment they came to the end of the pavement, the avenue, the streetlights, and began to walk through the pitch-black shadows on soft ground. A thick, almost solid stench enveloped them. They were in the garbage dump along the banks of the Rímac, very close to the sea, in the rectangular area between the beach, the riverbed, and the avenue, where every morning, beginning at seven, the Sanitation Department trucks came to dump the refuse from Bellavista, La Perla, and El Callao and where, beginning around about the same hour, a horde of kids, grown men and women, and oldsters began to paw through the piles of filth in search of objects of value, and to fight with the seabirds, the buzzards, the stray dogs for the edible remains of food mixed in with the garbage. They were very close to that wasteland now, heading toward Ventanilla, toward Ancón, and the long line of El Callao fish-meal factories.
“This is the best place,” Lituma said. “All the garbage trucks pass this way.”
The sound of the sea was very loud now. Manzanita stopped and the black stopped too. The Guardias had turned their flashlights on and were examining, in the flickering light, the face crisscrossed with tiny scars, imperturbably chewing.
“The worst of it is that he doesn’t have any reflexes or intuitions about things,” Lituma murmured. “Anybody else would realize what’s about to happen and be terrified, try to escape. What gets me is how calm he is, how much he trusts us.”
“I’ve got an idea, sergeant.” Arévalo’s teeth were chattering as though he were freezing. “Let’s allow him to escape. We’ll say we killed him and then, well, think up some sort of story to explain how come there’s no corpse…”
Lituma had drawn his revolver and was removing the safety catch.
“Are you daring to suggest to me that I disobey my superior’s orders and then lie to them on top of it?” the sergeant boomed, his voice shaking. His right hand pointed the gun barrel at the black’s temple.
But two, three, several seconds went by and he didn’t shoot. Would he do so? Would he obey? Would the shot ring out? Would the dead body of the mysterious immigrant roll over onto the heap of unidentifiable rotting garbage? Or would his life be spared, would he flee, blindly, wildly, along the beaches beyond the city, as an irreproachable sergeant stood there, amid the putrid stench and the surge of the waves, confused and sad at heart at having failed to do his duty? How would this tragedy of El Callao end?
Five.
Lucho Gatica’s visit to Lima was described by Pascual in our news bulletins as “an unforgettable artistic occasion and a four-star event in the history of Peruvian radio broadcasting.” His appearance on the airwaves of Panamericana cost me a story and an almost new shirt and tie, and caused me to stand Aunt Julia up for the second time. Before the Chilean bolero singer arrived in town, I’d seen countless photographs and laudatory articles about him in the papers (“Unpaid publicity, the very best kind,” Genaro Jr. said), but I didn’t really realize how famous he was till I noticed the huge crowd of women lined up in the Calle Belén hoping to get passes to the broadcast. Since the auditorium of the station was small—a hundred seats or so—only a few lucky women managed to get the precious passes. On the night of the broadcast there was such a big crowd outside the doors of Panamericana that Pascual and I had to get up to our shack by way of the building next door, which opened onto the same rooftop terrace as our building. We prepared the seven o’clock bulletin, but there was no way of getting it down to the second floor.
“There’s a whole shitload of women blocking the stairway, the door, and the elevator,” Pascual told me. “I tried to get through, but they took me for a gate crasher.”
I phoned Genaro Jr., who was beside himself with joy.
“There’s still an hour to go before Lucho’s broadcast, and the crowd outside has already stopped traffic along the Calle Belén. All Peru is tuned in to Radio Panamericana at this moment.”
I asked him whether, given the circumstances, we should skip the seven and eight o’clock bulletins, but resourceful as ever, he came up with the idea of having us dictate them over the phone to the announcers downstairs. We did so, and in the hour between the two, Pascual listened, enraptured, to Lucho Gatica’s voice on the radio and I reread the fourth version of my story about the eunuch-senator, which I’d finally ended up calling, in the manner of a Gothic horror tale, “The Ruined Face.” At nine on the dot we heard the end of the program, the voice of Martínez Morosini bidding Lucho Gatica goodbye and the applause from the audience that this time wasn’t canned but real.
Ten seconds later the telephone rang and I heard Genaro Jr.’s voice say in alarm: “Get down here, any way you can. Things are getting out of hand.”
We had a terrible time making a hole in the solid wall of women jammed together on the stairway, whom Jesusito, the corpulent doorman stationed at the entrance to the auditorium, was holding back. Pascual kept shouting: “Ambulance corps! Ambulance corps! We’re coming to get somebody who’s been hurt!” The women, young ones for the most part, looked at us indifferently or smiled, but didn’t move aside and we had to push them out of the way. Once inside, we were greeted by a disconcerting spectacle: the celebrated artist was demanding police protection. He was a short little man, livid and filled with hatred toward his female admirers. The dynamic impresario was trying to calm him down, telling him that calling in the police would make a very bad impression, that this horde of girls was a tribute to his talent. But the celebrity was not at all swayed by that line of argument. “I know their kind all too well,” he said, half terrified and half enraged. “They begin by asking for an autograph and end up scratching and biting.”
We laughed, but reality bore out his predictions. Genaro Jr. decided that we should wait half an hour, thinking that Lucho’s admirers would eventually get bored and go away. At ten-fifteen (I had a date with Aunt Julia to go to the movies), we’d gotten tired of waiting for them to get tired and made up our minds to leave. Genaro Jr., Pascual, Jesusito, Martínez Morosini and I linked arms and formed a circle round the celebrity, whose already pale face positively blanched the moment we opened the door. We managed to get down the first steps with no great damage done, by pushing and shoving with our elbows, knees, heads, and chests against the sea of females, who for the moment were content to applaud, sigh, and stretch out their hands to touch their idol—who, with a fixed smile on his marble-white face, kept muttering under his breath: “Careful, fellows, don’t let go of each others’ arms.” But we fell victim to an all-out attack. They grabbed us
by our clothes and tugged, and screaming at the top of their lungs reached for their idol with their fingernails to tear off pieces of his shirt and suit. When, after ten minutes of nearly being smothered or crushed to death, we finally fought our way to the exit, I thought we were about to let go of each other and had a vision: the little bolero singer was snatched away from us and torn limb from limb by his admirers before our very eyes. This didn’t happen, but when we put him in Genaro Sr.’s car—he’d been waiting at the wheel for an hour and a half—Lucho Gatica and his iron guard had been transformed into survivors of a catastrophe. They had yanked my tie off and my shirt was in shreds; they had torn Jesusito’s uniform and stolen his cap; and Genaro Jr. had a big purple bruise on his forehead where he’d been clouted with a handbag. The star was unhurt, but the only items of his attire that had remained intact were his shoes and his undershorts. The next morning, as we were taking our ten o’clock break at the Bransa, I told Pedro Camacho about the amazing feats of Lucho Gatica’s horde of admirers. He wasn’t at all surprised. “My dear young friend,” he said to me philosophically, with a faraway look in his eyes, “music too touches the soul of the multitude.”
As I had been struggling to defend the physical integrity of Lucho Gatica, Señora Agradecida, the charwoman, had cleaned the shack upstairs and thrown in the trash the fourth version of my story about the senator. Instead of being upset, I felt as though I’d been freed of a weight and took the whole thing as having been a warning from the gods. When I told Javier that I wasn’t going to rewrite it yet again, he congratulated me for having come to that decision rather than trying to persuade me to change my mind.
Aunt Julia found my story of my experience as a bodyguard terribly amusing. Since the night of the furtive kisses in the Bolívar Grill, we’d been seeing each other almost every day. The day after Uncle Lucho’s birthday, I’d dropped by the house unexpectedly, and luckily Aunt Julia was there alone.