It is owned and run by the Berguas, a family of three that came to Lima from the stony Andean city of innumerable churches, Ayacucho, over thirty years ago and that here (O Manes of life) has gradually declined physically, economically, socially, and even psychically, and will doubtless give up the ghost in this City of Kings and be reincarnated as fish, birds, or insects.
Today the Pensión Colonial is undergoing a painful decadence, and its boarders are humble, insolvent persons, in the best of cases little provincial parish priests come to the capital to deal with some archiepiscopal formality or other, and in the worst of cases little peasant women with purplish cheeks and vicuña eyes who keep their few coins knotted in pink handkerchiefs and recite the rosary in Quechua. There are no servants in the pensión, of course, and Señora Margarita Bergua and her daughter, a forty-year-old spinster who answers to the perfumed name of Rosa, are saddled with all the work of making the beds, cleaning, doing the shopping, preparing the meals. Señora Margarita Bergua (as the diminutive ending of her name might indicate) is a skinny little runt of a woman, with more wrinkles than a raisin, who, curiously enough, smells of cats (there are no cats in the pensión). She works without stopping from dawn to dark, and as she harriedly hurries through the house, through life, her movements are spectacular, for one of her legs is eight inches shorter than the other and hence she wears an elevator-type shoe, with a wooden platform resembling the box of boys who shine shoes on the street, built for her many years ago by a skillful sculptor of altarpieces back in Ayacucho, which makes the floorboards shake as she drags it along. She has always been thrifty, but over the years this virtue has degenerated into an obsession, and today there is no denying the fact that the harsh epithet 'tightwad' fits her perfectly. She does not allow any boarder, for instance, to take a bath except on the first Friday of each month, and she has forced everyone staying at the pensión to adopt the Argentine habit – so widespread in the dwellings of that sister country – of flushing the toilet only once a day (she pulls the chain herself, just before going to bed), the hundred percent cause of that constant heavy, warm, fetid smell that pervades the Pensión Colonial and nauseates the boarders, especially in the beginning (with that typical female imagination that cooks up an answer for everything, she maintains that it makes them sleep better).
Señorita Rosa has (or rather had, since after the great nocturnal tragedy even this changed) the soul and the fingers of an artist. As a child, in Ayacucho, when the family was at its apogee (three stone houses and grazing land with sheep), she learned to play the piano and showed such talent that she even gave a recital in the municipal theater, attended by the mayor and the prefect, at which her parents, hearing the applause, wept with emotion. Encouraged by this glorious evening, at which Inca princesses also danced, the Berguas decided to sell everything they had and move to Lima so that their daughter could become a concert pianist. That was why they had purchased this huge old house (which they then rented out and sold off bit by bit), why they bought a piano, why they enrolled their gifted daughter at the National Conservatory. But the big lustful city soon shattered their provincial illusions. For the Berguas promptly discovered something that they would never have suspected: Lima was a den of a million sinners, and every one of them, without a single exception, was out to rape the inspired young girl from Ayacucho. At least that was what the adolescent with shining braided tresses recounted morning, noon, and night, her big round fear-filled eyes brimming with tears: her solfeggio teacher had leapt upon her, panting and snorting, and tried his best to consummate the sinful act using a pile of music scores as a mattress, the concierge of the conservatory had sidled up to her and asked her obscenely: 'Would you like to be my hetaera?', two boys in her class had invited her to go to the lavatory with them to watch them pee, the policeman on the corner whom she had asked for directions had confused her with someone else and tried to fondle her breasts, and the bus driver had pinched her nipple as she had handed him her fare … Determined to defend the integrity of that hymen which, in accordance with moral precepts of the highlands, as inflexible as marble, the young pianist ought to sacrifice only to her future lord and master, her lawfully wedded spouse, the Berguas withdrew her from the conservatory, arranged for her to take lessons from a young lady who came to the house, dressed Rosa like a nun, and forbade her to go out on the street unless the two of them were with her. Twenty-five years had gone by since then, and as a matter of fact her hymen is still intact and in place, but at this point this is no longer of any great moment, inasmuch as outside of this attraction – for which, moreover, modern young men have nothing but scorn – the ex-pianist (after the tragedy the private lessons were stopped and the piano sold in order to pay the hospital and the doctors) has no others to offer. She is stouter and dumpier and all hunched over now, and since she is always bundled up in anti-aphrodisiac tunics and hooded cloaks that hide her hair and her forehead, she looks more like a bulky walking parcel than a woman. She insists that men paw her, frighten her with filthy propositions, and try to rape her, but at this juncture, even her parents wonder whether these ideas of hers were ever more than fantasies.
But the really moving, tutelary figure of the Pensión Colonial is Don Sebastián Bergua, an old man with a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness. An old-fashioned man, one might safely say, he has inherited from his distant ancestors, those Spanish conquistadors the brothers Bergua, natives of the mountain heights of Cuenca who came to Peru with Pizarro, not so much that tendency to indulge in excesses that led them to garrote hundreds of Incas (apiece) and to get a comparable number of vestals of El Cuzco pregnant, as their simon-pure Catholicism and their bold conviction that gentlemen of ancient lineage can live on their investments and on rapine, but not by the sweat of their brow. Since childhood, he had gone to Mass every day, taken Communion each Friday in homage to El Señor de Limpias, to whom he was fervently devoted, and he had flagellated himself or worn a hair shirt at least three days out of every month. His aversion to work, a base occupation fit only for Argentines, had always been so extreme that he even refused to make the rounds of his properties to collect the rents that were his means of livelihood, and once he had settled in Lima, he had never bothered to drop by the bank to collect the interest on the bonds in which he'd invested his money. Such duties, practical matters that females are capable of handling, had always devolved upon the diligent Margarita and, once the girl had grown up, on the ex-pianist as well.
Up until the tragedy that cruelly hastened the decline in the Berguas' fortunes, a curse visited upon a family whose very name will be forgotten, Don Sebastián's life in the capital had been that of a scrupulous Christian gentleman. He was in the habit of arising at a late hour of the morning, not out of laziness, but so as not to be obliged to eat his breakfast with the boarders – he did not hold humble folk in contempt yet he believed in the necessity of maintaining social and, above all, racial, distances – and eating a frugal repast, then going to Mass. Possessed of an inquiring mind permeable to history, he was in the habit of visiting different churches from one morning to the next – San Agustín, San Pedro, San Francisco, Santo Domingo – so that as he fulfilled his Christian duty to worship God he might at the same time delight his senses by contemplating the masterworks of colonial faith; moreover, these reminiscences of the past sculpted in stone transported his spirit to the days of the Conquest and the Colony – so much more colorful than the monotonous gray present – in which he would have preferred to live as a daring captain or a pious destroyer of idols. Steeped in his fantasies of the past, Don Sebastián would make his way back along the busy streets of the downtown area – rigid and reserved in his neat black suit, his shirt with gleaming, stiffly starched detachable collar and cuffs, and his turn-of-the-century patent-leather shoes – to the Pensión Colonial, where, comfortably settled in a rocking chair facing the balcony with its jalousies – so much in keeping with his nostalgia for the days of La Perrichola – he would spend the rest of the morning reading the newspapers half-aloud to himself (even the advertisements) so as to know what was going on in the world. Ever-faithful to the traditions of his forebears, after lunch – which he was obliged to share with the boarders, toward whom his manner was nonetheless unfailingly courteous – he observed the quintessentially Spanish rite of the siesta. On awakening, he once again donned his black suit, his starched shirt, his gray hat, and strolled down to the Tambo-Ayacucho Club, an institution on the Jirón Cailloma frequented by many friends and acquaintances from his lovely Andean homeland. Playing dominoes, stud poker, ombre, exchanging small talk about politics and sometimes – being as human as the next man – gossip about subjects not fit for the ears of young girls, he saw dusk descend and night fall. He then walked back at a leisurely pace to the Pensión Colonial, ate his soup and his pot-au-feu alone in his room, listened to one program or another on the radio, and went to sleep, at peace with his conscience and with God.
But all that was before. Today Don Sebastián never sets foot in the street, never changes his attire – which consists, day and night alike, of a brick-colored pair of pajamas, a blue bathrobe, wool socks, and alpaca slippers – and since the tragedy he has never again uttered a complete sentence. He no longer goes to Mass, no longer reads the newspapers. When he is feeling well, the longtime boarders (once they discovered that every man in the world was a satyr, the owners of the Pensión Colonial took in only females or decrepit males whose sexual appetites had – as was obvious at first glance – dwindled away due to illness or old age) see him wandering like a ghost through the dark, centuries-old rooms, his eyes blank, unshaven, his hair unkempt and full of dandruff, or see him swaying slowly back and forth in his rocking chair, mute and dazed, for hours on end. He no longer eats either breakfast or lunch with the boarders, for (fear of appearing ridiculous in the eyes of others that haunts aristocrats even in the poorhouse) Don Sebastián is unable to lift his spoon to his mouth and his wife and daughter must feed him. When he is feeling poorly, the boarders do not see him: the venerable old man stays in bed, with the door of his room locked. But they hear him: they hear his bellows, his sighs, his moans or screams that shake the windowpanes. Newcomers to the Pensión Colonial are surprised to discover that during these crises, as the descendant of conquistadors howls, Doña Margarita and Señiorita Rosa go on sweeping, tidying up, cooking, serving at table, and conversing as though nothing were happening. These boarders think them heartless, cold as ice, indifferent to the suffering of a husband, a father. To those curious and impertinent recent arrivals who, pointing to the closed door, dare to ask: 'Is Don Sebastián feeling ill?' Señora Margarita's answer is a grudging: 'There's nothing wrong with him, he's remembering a bad scare he had, he'll be over it soon.' And, in fact, two or three days later the crisis is over and Don Sebastián emerges from his room and is seen once again in the halls and rooms of the Pensión Bayer, pale and thin amid the spiderwebs, with a terrified look on his face.
What was this tragedy exactly? Where, when, how did it occur?
It all began with the arrival at the Pensión Colonial, twenty years before, of a young man with sad eyes dressed in the attire of a disciple of Our Lord of Miracles. He was a traveling salesman, born in Arequipa, suffering from chronic constipation, whose first name was that of a prophet and whose last name was that of a fish – Ezequiel Delfín (Dolphin) – and despite his youth he was taken in as a boarder because the physical signs of his spirituality (extreme emaciation, a deep pallor, delicate bones) and his evident religiosity – in addition to wearing a dark purple tie, breast-pocket handkerchief, and armband, he had a Bible hidden in his baggage, and a scapular peeked out of the folds of his garments – appeared to be a guarantee against any attempt on his part to sully the virtue of the pubescent girl.
And, in fact, in the beginning young Ezequiel Delfín brought nothing but satisfaction to the Bergua family. He had no appetite and nice manners, he paid his pensión bills promptly, and was given to such charming gestures as bringing Doña Margarita bunches of violets from time to time, offering Don Sebastián a carnation for his buttonhole, and giving Rosa musical scores and a metronome on her birthday. His shyness, which prevented him from ever speaking to a person without having first been spoken to, and in such a case, of always speaking in a soft voice and with lowered eyes, never looking directly at the person, and his refined behavior and vocabulary greatly pleased the Berguas, who soon became very fond of their boarder, and perhaps in their heart of hearts (a family won over for life to the philosophy of the lesser evil) they began to entertain the notion of eventually promoting him to the elevated status of son-in-law.
Don Sebastián in particular became very attached to him: did he perhaps see in this well-bred traveling salesman that son that his diligent crippled wife had been unable to bear him? One afternoon in December he took him to visit the Hermitage of Saint Rose of Lima, where he saw him toss a gold piece in the well and ask a secret favor, and on a certain torrid summer Sunday he invited him to have an orange sherbet in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín. Because he was so quiet and melancholy, the young man seemed elegant to Don Sebastián. Was he suffering from some mysterious malady of soul or body that was causing him to waste away, some love wound that could not be stanched? Ezequiel Delfín was as silent as the grave about himself, and when on occasion, with all due precaution, the Berguas had offered him a shoulder to cry on and asked him why he always kept so much to himself, being such a young man, why he never went to a party, a movie, why he never laughed, why he so often heaved a deep sigh, with his eyes staring into empty space, he merely blushed and, stammering an apology, ran to shut himself up in the bathroom, where he sometimes spent hours on end, maintaining that he was suffering from constipation. He came and went on his travels in connection with his job, like a veritable sphinx – the family never even managed to find out what sort of company he worked for, what products he sold – and here in Lima, when he wasn't out on the road, he spent his time shut up in his room (reading his Bible or absorbed in his devotions?). Because they were born matchmakers, and because they felt sorry for him, Doña Margarita and Don Sebastián urged him to come downstairs and hear Rosita practice 'as a diversion,' and he obediently did so: sitting motionless in a corner of the living room, he would listen attentively and applaud politely when she finished. He often accompanied Don Sebastián to morning Mass, and during Holy Week of that year he did the Stations of the Cross with the Berguas. He already seemed like a member of the family at that point.
Hence, the day that Ezequiel, who had just returned from a trip to the North, suddenly burst into sobs in the middle of lunch, startling the other boarders – a justice of the peace from Ancachs, a parish priest from Cajatambo, and two girls from Huanuco who were studying nursing – and spilled the meager portion of lentils that had just been served him onto the table, the Berguas were very concerned. The three of them took him up to his room, Don Sebastián lent him his handkerchief, Doña Margarita made him a cup of verbena-and-mint tea, and Rosa covered his feet with a blanket. Ezequiel Delfin calmed down after a few minutes, apologized for 'his weakness,' explained that he'd been very nervous lately, that he didn't know why but very often these days, at any hour of the day and no matter where he happened to be, he'd burst into tears all of a sudden. Covered with shame, in a voice that was almost a whisper, he revealed to them that he was often overcome by fits of terror: he would lie awake all night till dawn, all curled up in a ball and dripping with cold sweat, thinking of ghosts and filled with self-pity because he was so lonely. His confession brought tears to Rosa's eyes, and her little lame mother crossed herself. Don Sebastián offered to sleep there in the same bedroom with the terrified young man to comfort and reassure him. Ezequiel Delfin kissed Don Sebastián's hands in gratitude.
An extra bed was set up in the room and diligently made up by Doña Margarita and her daughter. Don Sebastián was then in the prime of life, his fifties, and was in the habit of doing fifty abdominals before getting into bed (he did his exercises before going to bed at night, instead of after getting up in the morning, so as to distinguish himself from the vulgar in this regard as well), but in order not to disturb Ezequiel, he skipped them that night. The nervous young man had retired early, after downing a lovingly prepared bowl of chicken-giblet broth and assuring them that the company of Don Sebastián had already put his mind at rest and that he was sure he'd sleep like a top.
The details of what happened that night were never to be erased from the memory of the gentleman from Ayacucho: they were to haunt him, awake or asleep, till the end of his days, and – who knows? – they were perhaps to continue to torment him in his next reincarnation. He had turned the light out at an early hour, had heard the regular breathing of the sensitive young man in the bed next to him, and, pleased and relieved, had thought to himself: He's dropped off to sleep. He felt himself getting sleepier and sleepier too, and had heard the bells of the cathedral and the uproarious laughter of a drunk somewhere off in the distance. Then he had fallen asleep and peacefully dreamed the most pleasant and reassuring of dreams: in a castle with a pointed tower, on whose walls were hung shields, titles of nobility, parchments with heraldic flowers and family trees tracing his ancestral lineage back to Adam, the Lord of Ayacucho (he himself!) was receiving abundant tribute and fervent homage from hordes of lice-ridden Indians who were thus simultaneously feeding his coffers and his vanity.
Suddenly – had fifteen minutes or three hours gone by? – something that could have been a noise, a presentiment, the faltering footfalls of a spirit, awakened him. In the darkness relieved only by a dim streak of light from the street filtering through the slit between the curtains, he managed to make out a silhouette rising from the bed next to his and silently floating toward the door. Still half asleep, he presumed that the constipated young man was going to the bathroom to try to move his bowels, or that he was feeling bad again, and asked in a low voice: 'Ezequiel, are you all right?' Instead of an answer, he heard, very clearly, the bolt on the door being slid home (it was rusty and creaked). He did not understand, sat halfway up, and slightly alarmed, asked again: 'Is anything the matter, Ezequiel? Can I help you?' He then was suddenly aware that the young man (cat-men so lightfooted they seem to be everywhere at once) had come back across the room and was now standing right next to his bed, blocking the little streak of light from the window. 'Ezequiel, please answer me, what's the matter with you?' he murmured, fumbling about in the dark for the switch of the bedside lamp. At that instant he received the first knife thrust, the deepest jab of all, the one that sank into his chest as though it were butter and pierced a collarbone. He was certain he had screamed, cried for help, and as he tried to defend himself, to free himself of the sheets tangled round his feet, he was surprised that neither his wife nor his daughter nor any of the other boarders came running to his aid. But in fact no one heard anything at all. Later, as the police and the judge reconstructed the gruesome assault, they had all been amazed that Don Sebastián had not been able to disarm the criminal, since he was so robust and Ezequiel so frail. They had no way of knowing that in the bloody shadows the medical detail man had appeared to be possessed of a supernatural strength: Don Sebastián had managed to give only imaginary cries and try to guess the trajectory of the next knife thrust in order to ward it off with his hands.
He received fourteen or fifteen of them (the doctors were of the opinion that the gaping wound in his left buttock might have been – extraordinary coincidences that turn a man's hair white in a single night and make a person believe in God – the result of two blows in exactly the same place), evenly distributed all over his body, with the exception of his face, which – a miracle owed to El Señor de Limpias, as Doña Margarita thought, or to Saint Rose of Lima, as the latter's namesake claimed? – had not received so much as a scratch. The knife, as was learned later, belonged to the Berguas, a razor-sharp blade eight inches long that had mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen a week before and that left the body of the man from Ayacucho with more holes and gashes than that of a hired ruffian.
To what did he owe the fact that he didn't die? To chance, to God's mercy, and (above all) to an even greater quasi-tragedy. No one had heard anything; with fourteen – fifteen – knife wounds in his body, Don Sebastián had just lost consciousness and was slowly bleeding to death in the darkness; and the impulsive young man might have crept down to the street and disappeared forever. But, like so many famous men in history, a strange caprice was his undoing. Once his victim had ceased to resist him, Ezequiel Delfin threw the knife down and instead of getting dressed got undressed. As naked as the day he was born, he opened the door, crossed the hall, entered Doña Margarita Bergua's room, and without further explanation flung himself on her bed with the unmistakable intention of fornicating with her. Why her? Why try to rape a lady of admittedly noble ancestry, but also in her fifties, with one leg shorter than the other, short and dumpy and, in a word, according to any known aesthetic criteria, undeniably and irredeemably ugly? Why not have attempted, rather, to pluck the forbidden fruit of the adolescent pianist, who, besides being a virgin, had vim, vigor, and vitality, raven hair, and alabaster skin? Why not try to steal into the secret seraglio of the nursing students from Huanuco, who were in their twenties and probably had firm, delectable flesh? It was these humiliating circumstances that led the Judiciary to accept the argument of the attorney for the defense that Ezequiel Delfin was mentally unbalanced and commit him to Larco Herrera instead of sending him to prison.
On receiving the unexpected amorous visit from the young man, Señora Margarita Bergua realized that something very serious was happening. She was a realistic woman and had no illusions as to her charms. 'Even in my dreams, nobody tried to rape me, so I knew immediately that that stark-naked man was either utterly mad or a criminal,' she declared. And so she defended herself like an enraged lioness: in her testimony she swore by the Virgin Mary that the impetuous intruder had been incapable of inflicting so much as a kiss upon her – and in addition to keeping her honor from being outraged, she had saved her husband's life. For as she fought off the pervert with tooth and nail, elbow and knee, she let out screams and shouts (real ones, in her case) that awoke her daughter and the other boarders. Rosa, the judge from Ancachs, the parish priest from Cajatambo, and the student nurses from Huanuco managed between them to overpower the exhibitionist and tie him up, and then all of them ran to look for Don Sebastián: was he still alive?
It took them nearly an hour to get an ambulance to take him to Arzobispo Loayza Hospital, and it was nearly three hours before the police arrived to rescue Lucho Abril Marroquín from the clutches of the young pianist, who, beside herself with fury (because of the wounds inflicted upon her father? because of the offense to her mother's honor? because perhaps – a human soul with turbid flesh and poisonous secret recesses – of the affront to herself?), was trying to scratch his eyes out and drink his blood. At the police station, the young medical detail man, recovering his usual gentle manner and soft-spoken voice, blushing out of sheer timidity as he spoke, roundly denied the evidence. The Berguas and the boarders were slandering him: he had never attacked anyone, he had never attempted to rape any woman, certainly not a cripple like Margarita Bergua, a lady who, because of her many kindnesses and thoughtful attentions, was – after, naturally, his own wife, that young woman with Italian eyes and musical knees and elbows who came from the country of love and song – the person whom he loved and respected more than anyone else in this world. His serenity, his courtesy, his meekness, the splendid character references given him by his superiors and co-workers at the Bayer Laboratories, the lily-whiteness of his police record, made the guardians of law and order hesitate. Could it be that (fathomless magic spell of deceptive appearances) all this was a plot cooked up by the wife and daughter of the victim and the other boarders against this sensitive young man? The fourth power of the state looked upon this hypothesis with favor and ordered the record to so show.
To further complicate matters and contribute to keeping the city in suspense, the object of the crime, Don Sebastián Bergua, was in no condition to settle the question, for he was lingering between life and death in the public clinic on the Avenue Alfonso Ugarte. He was given copious blood transfusions, which brought many of his compatriots from the Tambo-Ayacucho Club to the very brink of tuberculosis, for the moment they heard about the tragedy they had rushed to the clinic to donate their blood, and these transfusions, plus serums, sutures, disinfections, bandages, nurses on duty at his bedside round the clock, surgeons who reset his bones, rebuilt his organs, and calmed his nerves, exhausted in the space of just a few weeks the last of the family's financial resources (already vastly reduced by inflation and the galloping cost of living). The Berguas were therefore obliged to sell off their bonds at a ridiculously low price, to divide their property and rent it out in bits and pieces and hole up on the second floor, where they were now vegetating.
Don Sebastián managed to escape death, but in the beginning his recovery was apparently not complete enough to lay the suspicions of the police to rest. As a result of the knife wounds, the terror that he had undergone, or the moral sullying of his wife's honor, he was left a mute (and, it was rumored, an idiot as well). He could not utter a single word, he looked at everything and everybody with the lethargic inexpressiveness of a tortoise, and his fingers, too, would not obey him, since he could not (would not?) answer in writing the questions put to him when the insane man's case was tried.
The trial assumed major proportions and the City of Kings held its breath in suspense during the hearings. Lima, Peru – all of mestizo America? – followed the courtroom battle with passionate interest, the forensic disputes, the testimony and counter-testimony of the experts, the arguments of the public prosecutor and the attorney for the defense, a famous jurist who had come especially from Rome, the city of marble, to defend Lucho Abril Marroquín, because the latter was the husband of a little Italian girl who, besides being the legal expert's compatriot, was also his daughter.
The country was divided into two opposing factions. Those convinced of the innocence of the medical detail man – all the newspapers – maintained that Don Sebastián had been the victim of a murder attempt on the part of his wife and offspring, in collusion with the judge from Ancachs, the little parish priest from Cajatambo, and the nursing students from Huanuco, their motives doubtless having been the inheritance and monetary gain. The Roman jurist imperially defended this view, affirming that, having become aware of the gentle madness of Lucho Abril Marroquín, the family and the boarders had hatched a plot to foist the blame for the crime on him (or perhaps to induce him to commit it?). And he continued to adduce arguments in support of this thesis, which the organs of the press then enlarged upon, applauded, and claimed were proven fact: could anyone in his right mind possibly believe that a man would receive fourteen, and perhaps fifteen, knife thrusts in respectful silence? And if, as was only logical to presume, Don Sebastián Bergua had howled in pain, could anyone in his right mind possibly believe that neither the wife, nor the daughter, nor the judge, nor the priest, nor the nurses had heard those cries, given the fact that the walls of the Pensión Colonial were made of canestalks and mud, mere flimsy partitions through which one could hear a mosquito buzzing or a scorpion running about? And how was it possible, given the fact that the young boarders from Huanuco were nursing students with good grades, that they had not managed to give the wounded man first aid and had merely waited, nothing daunted, for the ambulance to arrive while the gentleman lay bleeding to death? And how was it possible that not one of the six adults, seeing that the ambulance was delayed, had had the idea, which should have been obvious even to an oligophrenic, of going to get a taxi, since there was a taxi stand right down the street from the Pensión Colonial on the nearest corner? Wasn't all this odd, devious, revealing?
After having been detained in Lima for three months, the little parish priest from Cajatambo – who had come to the capital intending to stay only four days to arrange to procure a new Christ for the church in his village because rowdy urchins had decapitated with their slingshots the one that had been there before – terrified at the prospect of being found guilty of attempted murder and spending the rest of his days in prison, had a heart attack and died. His death electrified public opinion and had disastrous consequences for the defense; the newspapers now turned their backs on the imported jurist, accused him of being a casuist, a practitioner of bel canto, a colonialist, a strange migratory bird from other shores, and of having caused the death of a good shepherd with his sibylline, anti-Christian insinuations, and the judges (docility of reeds bending with journalistic winds) disqualified him on the grounds that he was a foreigner, deprived him of the right to plead before the country's tribunals, and, in a decision that the newspapers hailed with nationalist ruffles and flourishes, ordered him deported to Italy as an undesirable alien.
The death of the little priest from Cajatambo saved the mother and the daughter and the boarders from probable prison sentences for attempted murder and criminal conspiracy. As the press and public opinion shifted radically, the public prosecutor also began to sympathize with the Berguas, and accepted, as he had at the beginning, the mother's and daughter's version of events. Lucho Abril Marroquín's new attorney, a native-born jurist, adopted an entirely different strategy: he conceded that his client had committed the crimes, but argued that he could in no way be held responsible for his acts, since he was suffering from paropsis and rachitis brought on by anemia, along with schizophrenia and other tendencies pertaining to the domain of mental pathology, as eminent psychiatrists corroborated in amiable depositions. As definite proof that the defendant was mentally deranged, they pointed to the fact that, among the four women in the Pensión Colonial, he had chosen the oldest one and the only one who was crippled. During the final summation by the public prosecutor (dramatic climax that deifies actors and makes spectators shiver with excitement), Don Sebastián, who up to that point had sat silent and bleary-eyed in his wheelchair, as though the trial had nothing to do with him, slowly raised one hand and with eyes suddenly red from the effort, anger, or humiliation, pointed fixedly, for an entire minute as timed by a chronometer (dixit a journalist), at Lucho Abril Marroquín. The gesture was judged to be as extraordinary as though the equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar had broken into a gallop … The court accepted all the arguments of the public prosecutor, and Lucho Abril Marroquín was shut up in the insane asylum.
The Bergua family never got back on its feet again. Its moral and material downfall dated from this period. Ruined by grasping medical and legal practitioners, they were forced to give up the private piano lessons (and as a consequence the ambition to make Rosa a world-famous concert artist) and reduce their standard of living to extremes that bordered on such pernicious habits as fasting and closing their eyes to filth. The enormous old house grew even older, and little by little dust accumulated everywhere, spiders invaded it, and termites devoured it; its clients became fewer and fewer, and it became a lower- and lower-class pensión, finally reaching the point of taking in maids and street porters. It touched bottom the day a beggar came knocking at the door, asking the shocking question: 'Is this the Colonial Flophouse?'
And so, as the days, the months, followed one upon the other, thirty years went by.
The Bergua family appeared to have become habituated to its mediocrity, when suddenly something happened (an atomic bomb that early one morning totally destroys Japanese cities) that caused a flurry of excitement in the pensión. It had been years since the radio had worked, and years since the tight family budget had permitted the purchase of a daily newspaper. News of the outside world thus reached the Berguas' ears only rarely and indirectly, by way of the comments and the gossip of their uncultured guests.
But that afternoon (what an odd twist of fate) a truck driver from Castrovirreina let out a burst of vulgar laughter, accompanied by a greenish gob of spit, muttered: 'That nut is really the limit!' and flung down on the badly scratched little table in the parlor the copy of Ultima Hora that he had just been reading. The ex-pianist picked it up and leafed through it. Suddenly (cheeks as deathly pale as a woman who has just been the victim of a vampire's kiss) she ran to her room, shouting for her mother to come at once. The two of them read and reread the crumpled news item together, and then, taking turns, they read it again, at the top of their voices, to Don Sebastián, who beyond the shadow of a doubt understood, for he immediately underwent one of those dramatic crises of his that caused him to hiccup violently, break into a sweat, burst into loud sobs, and writhe like a man possessed.
What was this piece of news that so alarmed this crepuscular family?
At dawn the day before, in a crowded ward of the Victor Larco Herrero Psychiatric Hospital, in Magdalena del Mar, a ward of the state who had spent so many long years behind those walls that he should have been pensioned off by now had slit the throat of a male nurse with a scalpel, strung up a catatonic old man who slept in the bed next to his, thus causing him to strangle to death, and escaped to the city by athletically leaping over the wall of La Costanera. His behavior was most surprising, since he had always been remarkably peaceable and had never shown the least sign of being in an ugly mood and never been heard even to raise his voice. His one and only noteworthy occupation, in thirty years, had been to officiate at imaginary Masses in honor of El Señor de Limpias and to distribute invisible hosts to nonexistent communicants. Before making his escape from the hospital, Lucho Abril Marroquín – who had just reached the most distinguished age given a man to enjoy on this earth: his fiftieth birthday – had penned a most polite farewell letter: 'I am very sorry, but I find myself obliged to flee these precincts. A fire awaits me in an old house in Lima, where a crippled woman whose passion blazes like a torch and her family mortally offend God. I have been assigned the mission of extinguishing the flames.'
Would he do so? Would he extinguish these flames? Would this man, come to life once again from the depths of the years, appear for the second time to plunge the Berguas in horror as he had now plunged them into terror? What fate lay in store for this panic-stricken family from Ayacucho?
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