Joaquín was the only son of a family that, in addition to being wealthy, had ties (dense forest of trees whose intertwining branches are titles and coats of arms) with the blue bloods of Spain and France. But the father of the future referee and drunkard had put patents of nobility aside and devoted his life to the modern ideal of multiplying his fortune many times over, in business enterprises that ranged from the manufacture of fine woolen textiles to the introduction of the cultivation of hot peppers as a cash crop in the Amazon region. The mother, a lymphatic madonna, a self-abnegating spouse, had spent her life paying out the money her husband made to doctors and healers (for she suffered from a number of diseases common to the upper class of society). The two of them had had Joaquín rather late in life, after having long prayed to God to give them an heir. His birth brought indescribable happiness to his parents, who, from his cradle days, dreamed of a future for him as a prince of industry, a king of agriculture, a magus of diplomacy, or a Lucifer of politics.
Was it out of rebellion, a stubborn refusal to accept this radiant social and chrematistic glory to which he was destined, that the child became a soccer referee, or was it due to some psychological shortcoming? No, it was the result of a genuine vocation. From his last baby bottle to the first fuzz on his upper lip he had, naturally, any number of governesses, imported from foreign countries: France, England. And teachers at the best private schools in Lima were recruited to teach him numbers and his ABC's. One after the other, all of them ended up giving up their fat salary, demoralized and hysterical in the face of the little boy's ontological indifference toward any sort of knowledge. At the age of eight he hadn't yet learned to add, and, as for the alphabet, was still learning, with the greatest of difficulty, to recite the vowels. He spoke only in monosyllables, was a quiet child who never misbehaved, and wandered from one room to the other of the mansion in La Perla, amid the countless toys imported from every corner of the globe to amuse him – German Meccano sets, Japanese trains, Chinese puzzles, Austrian tin soldiers, North American tricycles – looking as though he were bored to death. The one thing that seemed to bring him out of his Brahmanic torpor from time to time were the little cards with pictures of soccer players that came with boxes of Mar del Sur chocolates; he would paste them in fancy albums and spend hours on end looking at them with great interest.
Terrified at the idea that they had brought into this world an offspring who was the product of too rigid inbreeding, a hemophiliac and mentally defective, doomed to become a public laughingstock, the parents sought the aid of science. A series of illustrious disciples of Aesculapius were summoned to La Perla.
It was the city's number-one pediatrician, Dr. Alberto de Quinteros, the star of his profession, who shed the dazzling light of his knowledge on the boy's case and opened his tormented parents' eyes. 'He is suffering from what I call the hothouse malady,' he explained. 'Plants that don't grow outside in a garden, amid flowers and insects, become sickly and produce blossoms whose scent is nauseating. This child's gilded cage is making an imbecile of him. All his governesses and tutors should be dismissed and he should be enrolled in a school where he can associate with boys his own age. He'll be normal the day one of his schoolmates punches him in the nose!'
Prepared to make any and every sacrifice to decretinize him, the haughty couple agreed to allow Joaquincito to plunge into the plebeian outside world. The school they chose for him was, naturally, the most expensive one in Lima, that of the Padres de Santa María, and in order not to destroy all hierarchical distinctions, they had a school uniform made for him in the regulation colors, but in velvet.
The famous doctor's prescription produced noticeable results. Admittedly, Joaquín received unusually low grades, and (the lust for lucre that brought Luther) in order for him to pass his exams, his parents were obliged to make donations (stained-glass windows for the school chapel, wool surplices for the acolytes, sturdy desks for the little school for poor children, et cetera), but nonetheless the fact is that the boy became sociable and from that time on he occasionally appeared to be happy. And it was during this period that the first sign of his genius (his uncomprehending father called it a vice) manifested itself: an interest in soccer. When they were told that young Joaquín, their apathetic, monosyllabic offspring, was transformed into an energetic, garrulous creature the moment he put on soccer shoes, his parents were delighted. They immediately purchased a vacant lot adjoining their mansion in La Perla to turn it into a soccer field, of appreciable size, where Joaquincito could play to his heart's content.
From then on, every afternoon when classes let out, twenty-two pupils – the faces changed, but the number was always the same – could be seen getting off the Santa María bus on the foggy Avenida de las Palmeras to play soccer on the Hinostroza Bellmonts' field. After the game was over, the family always invited the players in for tea with chocolates, gelatine desserts, meringues, and ice cream. The wealthy parents rejoiced to see their little Joaquín panting happily each afternoon.
After a few weeks, however, Peru's pioneer hot-pepper grower noticed something odd. He had twice, three times, ten times found Joaquincito refereeing the game. With a whistle in his mouth and a little cap with a sun visor perched on his head, he would run after the players, call fouls, impose penalties. Although the boy seemed to have no complexes about fulfilling the role of referee rather than playing, the millionaire was incensed. He invited these boys to his house, stuffed them with sweets, allowed them to hobnob with his son as though they were equals, and then they had the nerve to foist the humble role of referee off on Joaquín? He very nearly opened his Dobermans' cages to give those insolent boys a good scare. But in the end he merely reprimanded them severely. To his surprise, the boys protested that they were not to blame and swore that Joaquín was the referee because he wanted to be, and the supposed injured party solemnly confirmed, taking God as his witness, that what they said was true. A few months later, consulting his memorandum book and the reports of his groundskeepers, the father found himself confronted with these statistics: of the 132 games played on his field, Joaquín Hinostroza Bailmont had not played in a single one and had refereed 132. Exchanging glances, the father and mother said to themselves subliminally that something wasn't right: how could this possibly be considered normal behavior? And again they called upon science for help.
It was the most renowned astrologer in the city, a man who read souls in the stars and mended the minds of his clients (he preferred to call them his 'friends') by means of the signs of the zodiac, Professor Lucio Assmule, who, after casting many horoscopes, interrogating the heavenly bodies, and absorbing himself in lunar meditation, pronounced his verdict, which, if perhaps not the most accurate one, was in any event the one most flattering to the parents.
'The child knows at the cellular level that he is an aristocrat, and faithful to his origins, he cannot tolerate the idea of being equal to the others,' he explained to them, removing his glasses – to ensure that the bright gleam of intelligence that appeared in his eyes on announcing a prediction would be all the more visible? 'He would rather be a referee than a player because the person who referees a match is the one in command. Did you think that Joaquincito was engaging in a sport out there on that green rectangle? You're wrong, altogether wrong. He is indulging an ancestral appetite for domination, singularity, and hierarchical distinction which undoubtedly is in his very blood.'
Sobbing for joy, the father smothered his son with kisses, declared himself a man blessed by heaven, and added a zero to the check in payment of the fee, already a princely sum, set by Professor Assmule. Convinced that this mania for refereeing his schoolmates' soccer matches stemmed from a driving will to power and a superiority complex that would one day make his son the master of the world (or, in the very worst of cases, of Peru), the industrialist frequently abandoned his multiple office of an afternoon in order (sentimental weakness of the lion whose eyes brim with tears on seeing its cub tear apart its first lamb) to come to his private stadium in La Perla to paternally rejoice at the sight of Joaquín, dressed in the splendid uniform he'd given him as a present, blowing the whistle on that bastard horde (the players?).
Ten years later, the disconcerted parents couldn't help wondering whether the astral prophecies might not have been too optimistic. Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont was now eighteen years old and had reached the last grade in his high school several years after the boys who'd been his classmates at the beginning, and it was only thanks to his family's philanthropy that he had managed to get that far. There were no signs anywhere of the genes of a conqueror of the world that, according to Lucio Assmule, were camouflaged beneath the innocent whim to referee soccer games, whereas, on the other hand, it was becoming terribly obvious that this son of aristocrats was a hopeless disaster when it came to anything but awarding free kicks. Judging by the things he said, he had an intelligence that placed him, Darwinianly speaking, somewhere between the oligophrenic and the monkey, and his lack of wit, of ambition, of interest in anything save his frantic activities as a referee, made him a profoundly dull person.
It is true, however, that insofar as his first vice was concerned (the second was alcohol), the boy displayed something that deserved to be called talent. His teratological impartiality (in the sacred space of the soccer field and the magic time of competition?) earned him a reputation as a referee among the students and teachers at Santa Maria, as did (hawk that from the clouds spies beneath the carob tree the rat that will be its lunch) his vision that permitted him to detect, infallibly, at any distance and from any angle, the sly kick in the shins given the center forward by the defensive half, or the vicious elbow blow dealt the goalie by the wing who jumped with him. His omniscient knowledge of the rules and the happy intuition that enabled him to fill in the gaps in the rule book with lightning decisions were also extraordinary. His fame soon spread beyond the walls of Santa María and the aristocrat of La Perla began to referee interscholastic games, district championships, and one day the news got around that – at the stadium in El Potao? – he had substituted for a referee in a second-division match.
Once he finished high school at Santa María, Joaquín's bewildered parents were faced with a problem: his future. The idea of sending him to the university was painfully rejected, to spare the boy pointless humiliations and inferiority complexes and avoid further drains on the family fortune in the form of donations. An attempt to get him to learn foreign languages ended in a resounding failure. After a year in the United States and another in France, he had not picked up a single word of English or of French, and in the meantime his already rachitic Spanish became positively tubercular. When Joaquín returned to Lima, the manufacturer of woolen textiles finally resigned himself to the fact that his son would never have a degree after his name, and thoroughly disillusioned, put him to work in the tangled thickets of the many interlocking family enterprises. As might have been predicted, the results were catastrophic. Within two years, his acts or omissions had driven two spinning mills into bankruptcy, and put the most flourishing firm of the conglomerate – a road-construction company – deeply into debt, and the hot-pepper plantations in the jungle had had their entire crop eaten by insects, flattened by avalanches, engulfed by floods (thus proving that Joaquincito was a jinx). Stunned by his son's immeasurable incompetence, his pride wounded, the father lost all his energy, became nihilistic, and neglected his various businesses so badly that in a short time they were bled white by greedy lieutenants, and he developed a laughable tic: sticking out his tongue and trying (inanely?) to lick his ear. Following in his wife's footsteps, his nervousness and bouts of insomnia delivered him into the hands of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (Alberto de Quinteros? Lucio Assmule?), who soon relieved him of whatever good sense and money he had left.
His progenitors' financial ruin and mental collapse did not drive Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont to the brink of suicide. He went on living in La Perla, in a ghostly mansion that little by little had faded, grown moldy, lost its gardens and soccer field (sold to pay off debts), been abandoned and invaded by filth and spiders. The young man spent his days refereeing the street games gotten up by the homeless ragamuffins of the district, in the vacant lots separating La Perla from Bellavista. It was at one of these matches fought by rowdy urchins, right in the middle of a street, with a couple of stones serving as goals and lampposts as boundary markers, which Joaquín (arbiter elegantiarum, dressed in evening clothes, to dine in the middle of the jungle) refereed as though they were championship finals, that the son of aristocrats met the person who was to make him a star and a victim of cirrhosis of the liver: Sarita Huanca Salaverría?
He had seen her play several times in these street matches and had even penalized her repeatedly for her aggressive manner of charging her adversary. They called her Virago, but Joaquín had never suspected that this adolescent with the sallow complexion, dressed in blue jeans and a ragged sweater, and wearing a pair of old house slippers, was a female. He discovered this fact erotically. One day, after he had given her a penalty for what was unquestionably foul play (she'd scored a point by kicking the ball and the goalie at the same time), she'd responded by uttering a crude insult having to do with his mother.
'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.
In view of the magnitude of this concentration of the populace, the authorities had taken precautions. The most famous brigade of the Guardia Civil, the one which, in the space of a few months (heroism and self-sacrifice, boldness and urbanity) had cleared every last lawbreaker and malefactor out of El Callao, was brought to Lima to ensure security and civil behavior in the stands and on the playing field. Its chief, the celebrated Captain Lituma, the terror of crime, walked feverishly about the stadium and made the rounds of the gates and the adjacent streets, checking to make sure that the patrol squads were at their proper stations and issuing inspired orders to his doughty adjutant, Sergeant Jaime Concha.
Amid the roaring crowd in the western grandstand when the starting whistle blew, battered and bruised and almost unable to breathe, were, in addition to Sarita Huanca Salaverría, who (masochism of the victim fallen head over heels in love with the man who has raped her) never missed one of the matches that Joaquín refereed, the venerable Don Sebastián Bergua, risen only recently from the bed of pain on which he lay as a result of the knife wounds he had received at the hands of the medical detail man Luis Marroquín Bellmont (who was in the northern grandstand of the stadium, by very special permission of the Board of Prisons?), his wife Margarita, and his daughter Rosa, now completely recovered from the bites inflicted upon her – O accursed Amazon dawn – by a pack of rats.
There was nothing to foreshadow the impending tragedy when Joaquín Hinostroza (Tello? Delfín) – who, as usual, had been obliged to make the tour of the stadium to acknowledge the applause – alert and agile, blew the starting whistle. On the contrary, the match proceeded in an enthusiastic, courteous atmosphere: the players' passes, the fans' applause acclaiming the forwards' shots for the net and the goalkeepers' blocks. From the very first moment, it was evident that the oracles would be fulfilled: the teams were evenly matched and the play fair but hard. More creative than ever, Joaquín Hinostroza (Abril?) glided across the turf as though on roller skates, never getting in the players' way and invariably placing himself at the very best angle, and his decisions, stern but just, prevented (heat of battle that turns a contest into a brawl) the match from degenerating into violence. But (limits of the human condition) not even a saintly Jehovah's Witness could prevent the fulfillment of what destiny (impassivity of the fakir, British phlegm) had plotted.
The irreversible infernal mechanism began to function in the second half, when the score was tied 1–1 and the spectators found themselves with no voice left and their palms burning. Captain Lituma and Sergeant Concha said to each other, naïvely, that everything was going very well: not a single incident – a robbery, a fight, a lost child – had occurred to spoil the afternoon.
But at precisely 4:13 p.m., the fifty thousand spectators saw the totally unexpected happen, before their very eyes. From the most crowded section of the southern grandstand, an apparition suddenly emerged – black, thin, very tall, one enormous tooth – nimbly scaled the fence, and rushed out onto the playing field uttering incomprehensible cries. The people in the stands were less surprised to see that the man was nearly naked – all he had on was a tiny loincloth – than they were to see that his body was covered, from head to foot, with scars. A collective gasp shook the stands; everyone realized that the tattooed man intended to kill the referee. There could be no doubt of it: the shrieking giant was running straight toward the idol of the world of soccer (Gumercindo Hinostroza Delfín?), who, totally absorbed in his art, had not seen him and was going on modeling the match.
Who was the imminent assailant? Was it perhaps that stowaway who had mysteriously arrived in El Callao and been caught by the night patrol? The same unfortunate wretch whom the authorities had euthanasiacally decided to shoot to death and whose life the sergeant (Concha?) had spared on a dark night? Neither Captain Lituma nor Sergeant Concha had time to check. Realizing that if they did not act at once, a national glory might be the victim of an attack on his life, the captain – superior and subordinate had a method of communicating with each other by blinking – ordered the sergeant to go into action. Without rising to his feet, Jaime Concha drew his revolver and fired the twelve bullets in it, every one of which lodged in different parts of the nudist's body (at a distance of fifty yards). In this way the sergeant had finally complied (better late than never, as the old saying goes) with the orders he had been given, for, in fact, it was the stowaway of El Callao!
Seeing its idol's potential murderer, whom an instant before it had hated, riddled with bullets was enough to cause the crowd (capricious whims of a fickle flirt, coquettishness of a changeable female) to side immediately with him, to transform him into a martyr, and to turn against the Guardia Civil. A collective hissing, booing, whistling that deafened the birds in the sky rose from the stands as the crowd voiced its protest at the sight of the black lying on the field bleeding to death from the twelve bullet holes. The sound of gunfire had disconcerted the players, but the Great Hinostroza (Téllez Unzátegui?), true to himself, had not allowed the match to be stopped, and went on with his brilliant refereeing, nimbly sidestepping the interloper's corpse, deaf to the whistling from the stands, to which jeers, taunts, insults were now added. The first multicolored cushions were already sailing through the air, soon to become a veritable deluge raining down on Captain Lituma's police detachment. The latter smelled a hurricane in the offing and decided to act quickly. He ordered his men to prepare to launch tear-gas bombs, his intention being to prevent at all costs a terrible bloodbath. And a few moments later, when the barriers around the ring had been breached at many points and here and there impassioned taurophiles bent on mayhem were rushing into the arena, he ordered his men to hurl a few grenades on the edges of the bullring. A few tears and coughing fits, he thought, would calm the enraged protestors down and peace would reign once again in the Plaza de Acho as soon as the wind had dispersed the chemical effluvia. He also ordered a group of four Guardias to surround Sergeant Jaime Concha, who had become the principal target of the hotheads: they were obviously determined to lynch him, even if they were obliged to confront the bull to do so.
But Captain Lituma was forgetting one essential fact: in order to keep out the spectators without tickets who were milling about outside the bullfight stadium and threatening to force their way in, he had ordered the gates and metal grilles blocking access to the stands to be lowered. When the Guardias Civiles, complying immediately with his orders, let fly with their teargas grenades and here and there, within a few seconds, pestilential fumes spread in the stands, the spectators' reaction was to clear out instantly. Leaping to their feet in a panic, shoving, pushing as they covered their mouths with their handkerchiefs and tears began streaming from their eyes, they ran toward the exits. The human tide then realized that the way out was blocked by the metal gates and grilles hemming them in. Blocked? Only for a few seconds, until the front ranks of each column, transformed into ramrods by the pressure of those behind them, stove them in, knocked them down, ripped them apart, and tore them from their hinges. And thus the inhabitants of El Rímac who chanced to be strolling by the Plaza de Toros at four-thirty that Sunday afternoon witnessed a barbarous and most unusual spectacle: suddenly, amid deathly crackling flames, the doors of the Plaza de Acho burst asunder and began to spit out mangled corpses which (troubles never come singly) were also being trampled underfoot by the panicked crowd escaping through the blood-soaked breaches.
Among the first victims of the Bajo el Puente holocaust were the introducers of the Jehovah's Witnesses sect in Peru: the man from Moquegua, Don Sebastián Bergua, his wife Margarita, and his daughter Rosa, the eminent flutist. The religious family lost their lives through what ought to have saved them: prudence. For the moment that the cannibal climbed the barrier, rushed out into the ring, and was about to be mangled to death by the bull, Don Sebastían Bergua, with furrowed brow and a dictatorial finger, had given his tribe the order: 'Retreat.' It was motivated not by fear, a word unknown to the evangelist, but by good sense, the thought that neither he nor members of his family ought to appear to be involved in any sort of scandal and thus give his enemies a pretext for trampling the good name of his faith in the mud. And so the Berguas hurriedly abandoned their seats on the sunny side of the ring and were making their way down the grandstand steps to the exit when the tear-gas grenades went off. The three of them were standing, beatifically, in front of metal grille number 6, waiting for it to be raised, when they caught sight of the lachrymose crowd descending upon them from behind with a great roar. They had no time to repent of sins they had never committed before they were literally mashed to bits (turned into a puree, a human soup?) against the metal grille by the terrified multitude. A second before passing on to that other life that he denied existed, Don Sebastián managed to cry out, a stubborn, heterodox believer still: 'Christ died on a tree, not on a cross!'
The death of the mentally unbalanced assailant who had attacked Don Sebastián Bergua with a knife and raped Doña Margarita and the concert artist was (would the expression be appropriate?) less unfair. For, once the tragedy had begun, young Marroquín Delfín thought he spied his opportunity: amid the confusion, he would escape from the guard whom the Board of Prisons had ordered to accompany him in order that he might attend the historic bullfight, and flee from Lima, from Peru; once abroad, under another name, he would begin a new life of crime and madness. Illusions that turned to dust moments later when, at the gate of exit number 5 (Lucho? Ezequiel?) Marroquín Delfín and the prison guard Chumpitaz, who was holding him by the hand, had the dubious honor of forming part of the first row of taurophiles crushed to death by the crowd. (The intertwined fingers of the police officer and the medical detail man, though those of corpses, set tongues to wagging.)
The demise of Sarita Huanca Salaverría had at least the elegance of being less promiscuous. It was a case of a tremendous misunderstanding, of an erroneous evaluation of acts and intentions on the part of the authorities. When the incidents occurred, when she saw the cannibal gored to death, the smoke of the grenades, and heard the screams of the crowd as their bones shattered, the girl from Tingo María decided that (love-passion that takes all fear of death away) she should be at the side of the man she loved. Unlike the crowd, therefore, she descended into the bullring, and was thus saved from being trampled to death. This did not save her, however, from the eagle eye of Captain Lituma, who caught sight, amid the spreading clouds of tear gas, of an unidentified figure leaping over the barrier and rushing toward the torero (who, despite everything, went on inciting the bull to charge and making passes on his knees). Convinced that his obligation, so long as he had a single breath of life left in him, was to prevent the matador from being attacked, Captain Lituma drew his revolver and with three rapid shots in succession cut short the career and life of the woman possessed by love: Sarita fell dead at the very feet of Gumercindo Bellmont.
The man from La Perla was the only one, amid all the victims of that Greek afternoon, to die a natural death – if it is possible to describe as natural the phenomenon, unheard of in these prosaic times, of a man dying of heart failure on seeing his beloved lying dead at his feet. He fell to the ground alongside Sarita, and the two of them, with their last breath, managed to embrace and thus enter, clasped in each other's arms, the dark night of hapless lovers (such as a certain Romeo and Juliet?) …
And then the peace officer with the immaculate service record, sadly contemplating the fact that, despite his experience and sagacity, not only had the peace been disturbed but the Plaza de Acho and environs had been turned into a cemetery of unburied corpses, used his last remaining bullet to (old sea dog who goes down with his ship to the bottom of the ocean) blow his brains out and bring his biography to a (manly but not brilliant) end. The moment they saw their chief take his life, the morale of the Guardias fell apart; forgetting discipline, esprit de corps, love for the institution, they thought only of shedding their uniforms, hiding in the civilian clothes they tore off the corpses, and escaping. A number of them succeeded in doing so. But not Jaime Concha, whom the survivors first castrated, then hanged with his own leather chest belt from the crosspiece of the bull-pen door. And there the decent chap who read Uncle Donalds, the diligent centurion remained, dangling back and forth beneath the sky of Lima, which (as if wishing to be in keeping with what had happened?) had become filled with roiling clouds and begun to rain down its usual winter drizzle …
Would this story end thus, in Dantesque slaughter? Or, like the Phoenix (the Hen?), would it be reborn from its ashes in the form of new episodes and recalcitrant characters? What would the outcome of this taurine tragedy be?
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