When the latter discovered that she was pregnant, seeing as how she already had eight children and no husband and knew it was unlikely that any man would lead her to the altar, what with all those kids, she immediately called upon the services of Doña Angélica, a wise old woman who lived on the Plaza de la Inquisición and acted as midwife, but was even better known as a supplier of house guests for limbo (in plain words: an abortionist). However, despite the poisonous concoctions (her own urine, in which mice had been marinated) that Doña Angélica had Teresita drink, the fetus that was the consequence of the rape, with a stubbornness that was a portent of what his character would be, refused to detach itself from the maternal placenta and remained there, curled up like a screw thread, getting bigger and bigger and taking on a more and more definite form, until nine months after the fornicatory carnival, the laundress was necessarily obliged to give birth to him.
He was given the Christian name Seferino to please his godfather, a concierge at the Congressional Building who was named that, and his mother's two surnames. During his childhood, there was nothing that would have led one to guess he would one day become a priest, because what he liked most was not pious religious practices but spinning tops and flying kites. But from the very first, even before he knew how to talk, he gave every sign of having real character. The laundress followed a philosophy of education instinctively inspired by Sparta or Darwin that consisted of informing her offspring that if they wished to continue to exist in this jungle, they had to learn to bite and to be bitten, and that having milk to drink and food to eat was entirely their own concern once they'd reached the age of three, since by doing other people's washing ten hours a day and delivering it from one end of Lima to the other for another eight hours, she made just enough to feed herself and those of her children who had not yet arrived at the minimum age to fly on their own wings.
The rape-child gave proof of the same stubborn will to survive that had caused him to persist in living when in his mother's womb: he was able to feed himself by downing all the revolting refuse he collected from garbage cans, fighting with beggars and dogs over these filthy scraps. While his half brothers and half sisters died like flies of tuberculosis or food poisoning, or managed to live to adulthood though afflicted with rickets and psychic defects, thus only half passing the test, Seferino Huanca Leyva grew up in good health, physically robust and relatively sound mentally. When the laundress (a victim of hydrophobia?) was no longer able to work, it was Seferino who supported her, and later paid for a first-class funeral for her, conducted by the Guimet Undertaking Parlor, that El Chirimoyo regarded as the very best in the history of the neighborhood (by then he was the parish priest of Mendocita).
He was a precocious child who did all sorts of things to make himself a few pennies. As he learned to talk, he also learned to beg for alms from passersby on the Avenida Abancay, assuming the expression of a little gutter angel that melted the hearts of highborn ladies and loosened their purse strings. Later on, he was a shoe-shine boy, a kid who guarded parked cars, a street peddler hawking newspapers, emollients, nougat, an usher at the soccer stadium, a secondhand clothes peddler. Who would ever have predicted that this child with dirty fingernails, filthy bare feet, a head of hair full of nits, his clothes covered with mends and patches, and his torso squeezed into an old sweater much too small for him and full of holes would one day become the most controversial parish priest in all of Peru?
How he learned to read was a mystery, since he had never set foot in a school. People in El Chirimoyo said that his godfather, the concierge who worked in the Congressional Building, had taught him the alphabet and showed him how to spell out syllables, and that the rest came to him (children of the gutter who by sheer tenacity become Nobel Prize winners) by dint of a pure effort of will. Seferino Huanca Leyva was twelve years old, making the rounds of the city's great mansions asking for worn-out clothes and old shoes (which he then sold in tenement districts and slums), when he met the person who was to provide him with the material means that enabled him to become a saint: an owner of vast landed estates, Mayte Unzátegui, of Basque origin, of whom it was impossible to say which was greater – her fortune or her faith, the size of her holdings or her devotion to Nuestro Señor de Limpias. She was coming out of her Moorish-style mansion on the Avenida San Felipe, in Orrantia, and her chauffeur was holding the door of her Cadillac open for her, when the lady spied the product of the rape, standing in the middle of the street next to his pushcart full of old clothes that he had collected that morning. His abject poverty, his intelligent eyes, his features of a headstrong young wolf pleased her. She told him she would come visit him at dusk that evening.
There was laughter in El Chirimoyo when Seferino Huanca Leyva announced that a lady in a big luxury car driven by a chauffeur in a blue uniform would be coming to see him after sunset. But when, at six o'clock, the Cadillac braked to a stop at the entrance to the alleyway and Doña Mayte Unzátegui, as elegant as a duchess, entered it and asked for Teresita, everyone was convinced (and dumfounded). Doña Mayte (one of those business-women who carefully calculate every moment of their time, including that required for menstruation) immediately made the laundress a proposal that caused her to shout for joy. Doña Mayte offered to pay for Seferino Huanca Leyva's education and give his mother a sum of ten thousand soles provided the boy became a priest.
It was thus that the rape-child came to be a student at Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo seminary in Magdalena del Mar. Unlike others, who first feel a sense of vocation and then act, Seferino Huanca Leyva discovered that he had been born to be a priest, after he had become a seminarian. He proved to be a pious and diligent student, a favorite of his teachers, and the pride and joy of Black Teresita and his benefactress. But while his grades in Latin, theology, and patristics attained lofty heights, and his religiosity was irreproachably manifested in the form of Masses said, prayers recited, and self-flagellations administered, from his adolescence onward he began to show symptoms of what, in the future, at the time of the heated debates that his daring acts gave rise to, his defenders were to call impetuousness motived by religious zeal and his detractors evidences of the delinquent and criminal influence of El Chirimoyo. Thus, for instance, before being ordained he began to propound to his fellow seminarians the thesis that it was necessary to revive the Crusades, to do battle with Satan once more, not only with the feminine weapons of prayer and sacrifice, but also with the virile (and, he assured them, far more effective) ones of punches, butting with the head, and, if circumstances so required, knives and guns.
His superiors, alarmed, hastened to combat these wild ideas. But Doña Mayte Unzátegui, on the other hand, warmly applauded them, and inasmuch as the latifundian philanthropist was helping to support a third of the seminarians, the reverend fathers (bitter pill that is swallowed for budgetary reasons) were obliged to overlook what was going on and close their ears to Seferino Huanca Leyva's theories. And they were not merely theories: they were confirmed by practice. On the days when the seminarians were allowed out to visit their homes, the boy from El Chirimoyo invariably returned at nightfall with some example of what he called armed preaching. Thus, one day, on seeing a drunken husband beating his wife on one of the tumultuous streets of his neighborhood, he had intervened and broken the bully's shinbones with a couple of good swift kicks, followed by a lecture on the proper behavior of the good Christian husband. Another day, having surprised a greenhorn pickpocket trying to rob an old woman in the Cinco Esquinas bus, he had knocked him out by clouting him over the head (and then personally taking him to the public emergency clinic to get his face sewed up). Finally, one day, having surprised a couple taking their pleasure together like animals in the tall grass of the Bosque de Matamula, he had whipped the two of them till the blood came, and made them swear on their knees, if they didn't want another whipping, that they'd go get married forthwith. But Seferino Huanca Leyva's real red-letter day (so to speak), insofar as his axiom 'Purity, like the alphabet, is best beaten into people's heads' was concerned, was the day on which he gave his tutor and Thomist-philosophy teacher, the gentle Father Alberto de Quinteros, a punch in the jaw, to the seminary chapel no less, because the latter, in a gesture of fraternity or an access of warm fellow feeling, had tried to kiss him on the mouth. A guileless, not at all spiteful man (he had come to the priesthood late in life, after earning fame and fortune as a psychologist who had first made a name for himself in a famous case in which he had cured a young doctor who had run over and killed his own daughter on the outskirts of Pisco), the Reverend Father Quinteros, on returning to the seminary from the hospital where they had stitched up the gash in his mouth and replaced with false ones the three teeth that had been knocked out, opposed the expulsion of Seferino Huanca Leyva, and he himself (with that generosity of great souls who turn the other cheek so often that they find their posthumous place on church altars) acted as sponsor of the rape-child at the Mass receiving him into the priesthood.
But during the time that Seferino Huanca Leyva was a seminarian, it was not only his conviction that the Church ought to combat evil pugilistically that upset his superiors, but to an even greater degree his (disinterested?) belief that masturbation, in any way, shape, or form, should definitely not be included in the vast repertory of mortal sins. Despite repeated reprimands from his mentors, who, citing the Bible and countless papal bulls, fulminated against the sin of Onan, endeavored to show him the error of his ways, the son of Doña Angélica the abortionist, stubborn by nature even before the day he was born, roused his comrades to rebellion by night by assuring them that the manual act had been conceived by God to compensate ecclesiastics for their vow of chastity, or to any event to make it bearable. Sin, he argued, resides in the pleasure offered by a woman's flesh, or (more perversely) the flesh of another, but why should there be any sin in the humble, solitary, unproductive relief offered by the conjoined efforts of one's own imagination and one's own fingers? In a composition read aloud in the class of the venerable Father Leoncio Zacarías, Seferino Huanca Leyva went so far as to suggest, through his interpretation of ambiguous episodes in the New Testament, that there were reasons for not rejecting as a mere wild hypothesis the possibility that Christ in person – perhaps after meeting Mary Magdalene? – might have fought against the temptation to commit an act of impurity by masturbatory means. Father Zacarías suffered a fainting spell and the protégé of the Basque pianist was very nearly expelled from the seminary for blasphemy.
He repented, apologized, did the acts of penance imposed upon him, and ceased for a time to propagate those outlandish ideas of his that incensed his mentors and inflamed his fellow seminarians. Nonetheless, he did not cease to put them into practice as far as he himself was concerned, for very soon his confessors again heard him say, the moment he knelt before the creaking grilles of their confessionals: 'This week I have been in love with the Queen of Sheba, Delilah, and the wife of Holofernes.' It was these infatuations that kept him from a journey abroad that would have enriched his mind. He had just been ordained, and since, despite his heterodox deliriums, Seferino Huanca Leyva had been an exceptionally hardworking student and no one ever doubted his intellectual brilliance, the Hierarchy decided to send him to the Gregorian University in Rome to study for a doctorate. The brand-new priest immediately announced his intention to do research (scholars who ruin their eyesight consulting the dusty manuscripts in the Vatican Library) on a thesis to be entitled: 'On the solitary vice as the citadel of ecclesiastic chastity.' When his project was angrily rejected, he gave up the trip to Rome and went off to bury himself in the inferno of Mendocita, from which he was never to emerge.
It was he himself who chose that district when he found out that all the priests in Lima feared it like the plague, not so much because of the concentration of microbes which had made its hieroglyphic topography of sandy footpaths and shacks of heterogeneous materials – cardboard, corrugated tin, straw matting, planks, rags, and newspapers – a laboratory of the most refined forms of infection and parasitosis, as because of the social violence that reigned in Mendocita. In those days, in fact, that section of the city was a University of Crime, particularly its most proletarian specialties: breaking and entering, prostitution, knife fights, con games of every variety, drug pushing, and pimping.
In the space of a few days Father Seferino Huanca Leyva built with his own hands an adobe shack, leaving it with no door, furnished it with a broken-down secondhand bed and a straw mattress bought at La Parada, and announced that he would hold an open-air Mass at seven o'clock. He also let it be known that he would hear confessions from Monday to Saturday, women from two to six and men from seven to midnight, to prevent crowding. And he also announced that he intended to organize a class, from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, in which the children of the neighborhood would be taught the alphabet, arithmetic, and the catechism. But his enthusiasm was shattered to smithereens when it met with hard reality. The turnout for his morning Masses consisted of a handful of rheumy-eyed old men and women with moribund physical reflexes who sometimes inadvertently engaged in that impious practice typical of the people of a certain country (famous for its beef cattle and its tangos?) of letting farts and relieving their bladders and bowels with all their clothes on during the Office. As for confession in the afternoon and the school for children in the morning, not one soul turned up, even out of curiosity.
What was the matter? The neighborhood faith healer, Jaime Concha, a robust former sergeant in the Guardia Civil who had turned in his uniform when headquarters had given him orders to execute a poor yellow man who had arrived in El Callao from some port in the Orient as a stowaway, and had since taken up the practice of folk medicine with such success that he had won the heart of all of Mendocita, had viewed the arrival of a possible competitor with such misgivings that he had organized a boycott in the parish.
Apprised of this by an informer (the ex-sorceress of Mendocita, Doña Mayte Unzátegui, a Basque with indigo-blue blood in her veins who had come down in the world and been dethroned as queen and sovereign of the neighborhood by Jaime Concha), Father Seferino Huanca Leyva realized (joys that blur men's eyes and inflame their hearts) that the right moment had come at last to put his theory of armed preaching into practice. He went up and down the streets swarming with flies, shouting at the top of his lungs like a circus barker to announce that at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, in the vacant lot where neighborhood soccer matches were held, he and the faith healer would prove with their fists which of the two of them was the better man. When the muscular Jaime Concha appeared at Father Seferino's adobe hut to ask the priest whether this meant he was being challenged to a punching match, the only answer of the man from El Chirimoyo was to ask the sergeant in an icy voice whether he would prefer a knife fight to one with their bare fists. The ex-sergeant went away holding his sides with laughter and explaining to the neighbors that in the days when he'd been a Guardia Civil he used to kill vicious dogs he encountered on the street with one rap on their heads with his bare knuckles.
The fight between the priest and the healer caused extraordinary excitement, and not only all of Mendocita, but also La Victoria, El Porvenir, El Cerro San Cosme, and El Agustino came to watch it. Father Seferino turned up wearing trousers and a sports shirt and crossed himself before the fight, which was short but spectacular. The man from El Chirimoyo was physically less powerful than the ex-Guardia Civil, but trickier. The moment the fight started, he threw a handful of hot pepper powder in his opponent's eyes ('Where I come from, anything goes in a fight,' he was later to explain to his fans), and when the giant (Goliath done in by one clever shot from David's sling) began to stagger about, unable to see, he weakened him with a series of kicks in the privates till he doubled over. Without giving him a chance to catch his breath, he then launched into a frontal attack aimed at his face, a hail of both rights and lefts, changing his style only after he'd knocked him to the ground. He finished off the massacre as he lay there, by stamping on his ribs and his belly. Howling with pain and shame, Jaime Concha admitted defeat. Amid the applause, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva fell to his knees and prayed devoutly, his face turned heavenward and his hands crossed on his breast.
This episode –which even got into the newspapers and which upset the archbishop – began to win Father Seferino the sympathies of his still-potential parishioners. From that time on, the morning Masses were better attended and a number of sinners, especially female ones, asked to make their confession, though naturally these rare cases were not enough to fill up even a tenth of the vast schedule that the optimistic parish priest – making a rough estimate of the capacity for sin of the inhabitants of Mendocita – had set up. Another thing that was well received in the neighborhood and won him new clients was his behavior toward Jaime Concha after the latter's humiliating defeat. Father Seferino himself helped the neighbor women put Mercurochrome and arnica on him, and informed him that he would not boot him out of Mendocita, that on the contrary (generosity of Napoleons who offer champagne and their daughter in marriage to the general whose army they have just wiped out) he was prepared to keep him on in the parish by appointing him sacristan. The healer was authorized to continue to provide philters for friendship and enmity, the evil eye and love, but at moderate prices that the priest himself would set, and the one thing he was forbidden to do was concern himself with questions having to do with the soul. He was also permitted to continue his practice as a bonesetter and treat those who dislocated a member or had pains in their joints, on condition that he not try to care for people suffering from other ailments, who were to be referred to the public clinic.
The way in which Father Seferino Huanca Leyva succeeded in attracting the youngsters of Mendocita (flies that smell honey, pelicans that spy fish) to his once-scorned school was highly unorthodox and brought him his first grave warning from the ecclesiastical authorities. He let it be known that, for every week they attended his classes, the children would receive a little colored picture as a reward. This bait would not have been sufficient to lure the eager crowd of ragamuffins that it did had the euphemistic 'little colored pictures' offered by the son of El Chirimoyo not been in reality pictures of naked women whom it was difficult to mistake for virgins. To those mothers of his little pupils who expressed their surprise at his pedagogical methods, the priest solemnly explained that, however incredible it might seem, the 'little pictures' would keep their offspring from being tempted by impure flesh and make them less obstreperous, more docile, and drowsier.
To win over the girls of the neighborhood, he took advantage of the inclinations that made woman the first Biblical sinner and enlisted the services of Mayte Unzátegui, who was also placed on the parish staff and given the title of assistant. Mayte Unzátegui (wisdom that only twenty years as madam in the brothels of Tingo María can bring) succeeded in winning the hearts of the little girls by giving them courses that they found great fun: how to paint their lips and cheeks and eyelids without having to buy makeup in stores, how to pad out their breasts and hips and bottoms with cotton, pillows, and even newspapers, how to do the dances that were the latest rage: the rumba, the huaracha, the porro, the mambo. When the Visitor from the Hierarchy came to inspect the parish and saw the whole bunch of impudent brats in the girls' section of the school taking turns wearing the only pair of spike-heeled shoes in the neighborhood and waggling their behinds provocatively under the magisterial supervision of the former bawdyhouse mistress, he rubbed his eyes in utter disbelief. Finally, on recovering his powers of speech, he asked Father Seferino if he had founded an Academy for Prostitutes.
'The answer is yes,' Black Teresita's son, a man who had no fear of words, replied. 'Since they'll be forced to take up that profession one day in any case, they can at least be talented at it.'
(It was this episode that led to his receiving the second grave warning from the ecclesiastical authorities.)
But it is not true, as rumors spread by his detractors had it, that Father Seferino was the number-one pimp of Mendocita. He was merely a realistic man, who knew life like the palm of his hand. He did not encourage prostitution, but, rather, tried to make it more decent and fought valiant battles to keep the women who earned their living by selling their bodies (all the women in Mendocita between the ages of twelve and sixty) from contracting gonorrhea and being exploited by their procurers. The eradication of the twenty-some pimps of the district (and, in certain cases, their rehabilitation) was a heroic labor in the field of public health and social welfare that earned Father Seferino a number of knife wounds and the congratulations of the mayor of La Victoria. To achieve this end, he applied his philosophy of armed preaching. Using Jaime Concha as a town crier, he spread the word that the law and religion forbade men to live like parasites off inferior beings, and that consequently any male in the district who exploited females would be forced to confront his fists. He was thus obliged to break Greaseball Pacheco's jaw, leave the Stud blind in one eye, Strong-Arm Pedrito impotent, He-Man Sampedri a slavering idiot, and Muscleman Huambachano black and blue all over. During this campaign worthy of Don Quixote, he was ambushed one night and cut to ribbons with knives; his assailants, believing they'd done him in, left him lying in the mud for starving dogs to devour. But the life force of the Darwinian young man was stronger than the rusty knife blades that stabbed him, and he survived, though he bore for the rest of his life, it is true – marks of steel on the body and face of a man that lustful women find exciting – the half-dozen scars that, after the trial, were responsible for the commitment to a psychiatric institution, as an incurable madman, of the ringleader of his attackers, that native of Arequipa with the Biblical first name and the maritime surname, Ezequiel Delfín.
The priest's sacrifices and efforts bore the fruits he had hoped for, and Mendocita, to everyone's amazement, was freed of every last one of its pimps. Father Seferino was the idol of the women in the neighborhood; from that time on, they came in throngs to Mass and went to confession every week. To make the profession that earned them their daily bread less hard on them, Father Seferino invited a doctor from Acción Católica to come to the district to give them advice on sexual prophylaxis and instruct them in practical ways of detecting the presence of the gonococcus, in their client or in themselves, before it was too late. In cases in which the birth-control techniques that Mayte Unzátegui taught them proved ineffective, Father Seferino brought a disciple of Doña Angelica's in from El Chirimoyo to Mendocita to dispatch to limbo the tadpoles of love for sale. The grave warning that he received from the ecclesiastical authorities when they discovered that the priest was recommending the use of condoms and diaphragms and was in favor of abortions was his thirteenth.
The fourteenth came as a result of the so-called trade school that he had the audacity to set up. In it, experts of the district, in delightful informal talks (an anecdote here, an anecdote there, beneath the overcast skies or the occasional stars of the Lima night), taught novices with virgin police records various ways of making a living. They could learn, for instance, the exercises that turn fingers into intelligent, extremely discreet intruders capable of slipping into the innermost recesses of any purse, pocket, wallet, or briefcase and recognizing, amid all the heterogeneous objects inside, the booty they covet. They could discover how, with the patience of a good craftsman, any wire can take the place of the most baroque key to open a door, and how the ignition of different makes of cars can be started if, perchance, one does not happen to be the owner of the vehicle. Lessons were given on how to snatch jewelry on the streets, on foot or on a bicycle, how to scale walls and break windows of houses without making a sound, how to do plastic surgery on any object that suddenly changed owner, and how to get out of various Lima jails without the authorization of the chief of police. Even such arts and crafts as the manufacture of knives and – rumors born of envy? – the distilling of cocaine from coca paste were taught in this school, which finally earned Father Seferino the friendship and fellowship of the men of Mendocita, as well as his first run-in with the police of La Victoria, who took him down to headquarters one night and threatened to bring him to trial and get him put behind bars as a Gray Eminence of crime. He was rescued from that fate, naturally, by his influential benefactress.
Even this early on, Father Seferino had become a popular figure, receiving a great deal of publicity in newspapers and magazines and on the radio. His innovations were the object of heated discussion. There were those who regarded him as a protosaint, a forerunner of the new batch of priests who were to revolutionize the Church, and there were those who were convinced that he was a fifth columnist of Satan whose mission was to undermine the House of Peter from within. Mendocita (thanks to him or through his fault?) became a tourist attraction: the curious, the devout, reporters, snobs ventured into the former paradise of the underworld to see, touch, interview, or ask Father Seferino for his autograph. This publicity divided the Church: one faction considered it beneficial to the cause, and the other, harmful.
When Father Seferino Huanca Leyva triumphantly announced, on the occasion of a procession in honor of El Señor de Limpias – whose cult he had introduced in Mendocita, where it had caught on like wildfire – that there was not a single living child in the parish, including those born in the last ten hours, who had not been baptized, the faithful were filled with pride and the Hierarchy, after its many admonitions, for once sent him its congratulations.
On the other hand, however, he provoked a scandal when, on the occasion of the feast of the patron saint of Lima, St. Rosa, he announced in an open-air sermon he delivered in the vacant-lot soccer field of Mendocita that within the boundaries of his dusty parish there was not a single couple whose union had not been sanctified before God and the altar of his adobe shack. In stupefaction, since they knew very well that in the ex-Empire of the Incas the most solid and most respected institution – outside of the Church and the army – was concubinage, the prelates of the Peruvian Church came (dragging their feet?) to confirm the truth of this extraordinary claim with their own eyes. What they found as they nosed about the promiscuous households of Mendocita left them appalled and with an aftertaste of cheapened sacraments in their mouths. They found Father Seferino's explanations abstruse and full of incomprehensible slang (the son of El Chirimoyo had forgotten the pure Castilian of his seminary days after his many years in the slums and adopted all the barbarisms and solecisms of the underworld argot of Mendocita), and it was the ex-faith healer and ex-Guardia Civil, Lituma, who explained to them the system used to abolish concubinage. It was sacrilegiously simple. It consisted of Christianizing, before the Gospels, all couples who had taken up with each other or were about to do so. After having taken their pleasure together for the first time, they hastened to their beloved priest to have him marry them in due and proper form, and Father Seferino, without bothering them with impertinent questions, conferred the sacrament upon them. And since this system resulted in people in the neighborhood getting married several times without having been left a widower between spouses (aeronautical speed with which the couples of the district broke up, exchanged partners, and formed new couples), Father Seferino repaired the damages thus caused, insofar as sin was concerned, through the purifying sacrament of confession. (He had explained this by citing a proverbial phrase that, in addition to being heretical, was vulgar: 'One love bite hides another.') Forbidden such practices, admonished, very nearly slapped in the face by the archbishop, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva also celebrated a sort of anniversary thanks to this entire episode: grave warning number 100.
Thus, amid bold innovations and much-publicized reprimands, the object of heated controversy, loved by some and reviled by others, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva 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, whose conviction, since his auroral days as a young seminarian, that imaginary love was not a sin but on the contrary a powerful bodyguard for chastity, had in fact been sufficient to keep him pure, when there arrived in Mendocita (serpent in Paradise that takes on the voluptuous, luxuriant, lustfully resplendent forms of the female) a pervert named Mayte Unzátegui who claimed to be a social worker (in reality she was – a woman after all? – a prostitute).
She maintained that she had worked with selfless devotion in the wilds of Tingo María, ridding the bellies of the natives of parasites, and had fled from there, very annoyed and upset, because a pack of carnivorous rats had devoured her son. She was of Basque, and hence aristocratic, descent. Despite the fact that her turgescent horizons and gelatinous jiggling when she walked ought to have alerted him to the danger, Father Seferino Huanca Leyva committed (attraction of the abyss that has seen monolithic virtues succumb) the insane error of taking her on as an assistant, believing that, as she claimed, her aim was to save souls and kill parasites. In reality, she wanted to lead him into sin. She put her program for so doing into practice, coming to live in the adobe hovel, sleeping on a makeshift bed separated from him by a ridiculous little curtain which, moreover, was transparent. At night, by candlelight, on the pretext that they made her sleep better and kept her in good physical health, the temptress did exercises. But was Swedish gymnastics the proper term for that Thousand and One Nights harem dance that the Basque woman performed, standing in one spot waggling her hips, shaking her shoulders, wriggling her legs, and coiling her arms, a spectacle that the panting ecclesiastic witnessed through the little curtain lighted by the flickering candle as though watching a disturbing Chinese shadow play? And later, as everyone in Mendocita lay silently sleeping, Mayte Unzátegui, on hearing the creaking of the bed on the other side of the curtain, had the audacity to ask, in a mellifluous voice: 'Are you having trouble getting to sleep, Father dear?'
It is quite true that, in order to conceal her evil designs, the beautiful corruptress worked twelve hours a day, giving vaccinations and treating scabies, disinfecting hovels and taking oldsters out for airings. But she did so dressed in shorts, with her legs and shoulders and arms and midriff exposed, maintaining that she'd fallen into the habit of going about that way in the jungle. Father Seferino continued to exercise his creative ministry, but he grew noticeably thinner, had dark circles under his eyes, kept constantly looking about to see where Mayte Unzátegui was, and on spying her passing by, his mouth fell open and a little stream of venial saliva wet his lips. It was at this time that he took to going about with his hands in his pockets night and day, and his sacristan, the ex-abortionist Doña Angélica, prophesied that at any moment now he would begin spitting up the blood of galloping consumption.
Would the pastor succumb to the evil spell of the social worker, or would his debilitating antidotes enable him to ward it off? Would his counterremedies lead him to the insane asylum, to the grave? In a sporting spirit, the parishioners of Mendocita followed this contest and began making wagers, with fixed time limits and a wide range of allergic outcomes on which the bettor could place his money: the Basque woman would be made pregnant by priest-seed, the man from El Chirimoyo would kill her to kill temptation, or he would defrock himself and marry her. But life itself, naturally, beat everyone at the game by using a marked card.
Arguing that the Church must return to its earliest days, to the pure and simple Church of the Gospels, when all believers lived together and shared their earthly possessions, Father Seferino initiated an energetic campaign to restore true communal life in Mendocita – a veritable laboratory of Christian experimentation. Couples were to become part of communities of fifteen to twenty members who would share the work, the maintenance, and the domestic tasks of the collectivity between them, and would live together in dwellings remodeled to house these new nuclei of social life that would replace the traditional couple. Father Seferino set the example, enlarging his adobe hut and installing in it, in addition to the social worker, his two sacristans: Lituma the ex-sergeant and Doña Angélica the ex-abortionist. This micro-commune was the first one to be set up in Mendocita, and was to serve as a model for those to follow.
Father Seferino stipulated that within each catholic community the members of each sex were to enjoy the most democratic equality. The males were to address each other in the familiar form, and the females likewise, but in order to ensure that the differences in musculature, intelligence, and common sense established by God would not be forgotten, he advised the females to use the formal term of address when speaking to the males and as a sign of respect try not to look them straight in the eye. The tasks of cooking, sweeping, fetching water from the public fountain, killing cockroaches and rats, washing clothes, and other domestic chores were to be rotated and the money earned – through honest labor or in any other manner – by each member was to be turned over to the community down to the last penny, whereupon it would be redistributed in equal shares after communal expenses had been taken care of. The living quarters were not to have any inside partitions, so as to do away with the sinful habit of secrecy, and all the activities of everyday life, from evacuation of the bowels to sexual embrace, were to be carried out in full view of the others.
Even before the police and the army invaded Mendocita, with a cinematographic display of rifles, gas masks, and bazookas, and made the raid that kept men and women from the district shut up in police barracks for many days, not because of what they really were or had been (thieves, thugs, whores), but because they were subversives and dissidents, and Father Seferino was brought before a military tribunal and charged with establishing, under cover of his priestly functions, a bridgehead for Communism (he was acquitted, thanks to the influence exerted by his benefactress, the millionaire heiress Mayte Unzátegui), the experiment in archaic Christian communal living was already doomed.
Doomed, naturally, by the ecclesiastical authorities, who officially condemned it (grave warning number 233) on the grounds that it was highly suspect as a theory and insane as a practice (the facts, alas, proved that they were right), but doomed above all by the nature of the men and women of Mendocita, clearly allergic to collectivism. The number-one problem was the traffic in sex. In the stimulating promiscuity of the collective dormitories, under cover of the darkness, the most ardent fondlings, seminal rubbings, frictions took place from mattress to mattress, or outright rapes, acts of sodomy, impregnations, and as a consequence crimes of passion multiplied. Problem number two was theft: instead of doing away with the appetite for property, communal living exacerbated it to the point of madness. The members stole from each other even the fetid air they breathed. Rather than fraternally uniting the people of Mendocita, cohabitation made them mortal enemies. It was in this period of chaos and disorder that the social worker (Mayte Unzátegui?) announced that she was pregnant and ex-sergeant Lituma admitted that he was the father. With tears in his eyes, Father Seferino gave his Christian blessing to this union brought about by his socio-Catholic innovations. (People say that since then he sobs all night long and chants elegies to the moon.)
But almost immediately thereafter he was obliged to face an even worse catastrophe than that of having lost this Basque woman whom he had never managed to possess: the arrival in Mendocita of a formidable rival, the evangelical minister Don Sebastián Bergua. The latter was a man still in the flower of youth, athletic-looking, with strong biceps, who the moment he arrived announced that he proposed to win over to the true religion – the reformed church – all of Mendocita, including the Catholic priest and his three acolytes, within a period of six months. Don Sebastián (who before he became a minister had been – a gynecologist worth millions?) had the financial means to impress the people of the district: he had a brick house built for himself, paying the men in the neighborhood royally for the work they did on it, and began giving what he called 'religious breakfasts,' to which he invited, free of charge, those who attended his Bible talks and learned certain hymns by heart. Seduced by his eloquence and his baritone voice, or by the coffee with milk and bread with cracklings that went with them, the people of Mendocita began to desert Catholic adobe for Evangelical brick.
Father Seferino naturally resorted at this point to armed preaching. He challenged Don Sebastién Bergua to fisticuffs to prove which of the two of them was the true servant of God. Weakened by his excessive practice of the Exercise of Onan that had enabled him to resist the temptations of the Devil, the man from El Chirimoyo was k.o.'d by Don Sebastián Bergua's second punch; for twenty years the latter had done calisthenics and boxed for an hour a day (in the Remigius Gymnasium in San Isidro?). It was not his having lost two incisors and been left with his nose permanently flattened that plunged Father Seferino into despair, but rather, the humiliation of being beaten at his own game and noting that with each passing day he was losing more parishioners to his adversary.
But (bold men who grow even bolder in the face of danger, and firm believers in the old saying, 'For a terrible ill, a worse remedy') one day the man from El Chirimoyo mysteriously brought to his adobe hut several jerry cans full of a liquid which he hid from the gaze of the curious (but which any sensitive nose would have immediately recognized as kerosene). That night, when everyone in Mendocita was fast asleep, accompanied by his faithful Lituma, he boarded up the doors and windows of the brick house from the outside, using thick planks and big stout nails. Don Sebastáan Bergua was sleeping the sleep of the just, dreaming of an incestuous nephew who, repenting having raped his sister, ended up a papist priest in a Lima slum: Mendocita? He was unable to hear Lituma's hammer blows which transformed the Evangelical temple into a rat trap because Doña Angélica, the ex-midwife, on orders from Father Seferino, had given him a thick anesthetic potion. Once the Mission was hermetically sealed, the man from El Chirimoyo personally sprinkled it with kerosene. Then he crossed himself, lit a match, and was on the point of throwing it. But something caused him to hesitate. Ex-sergeant Lituma, the social worker, the ex-abortionist, the dogs of Mendocita saw him standing there, tall and gaunt, beneath the stars, with a look of torment in his eyes, holding the lighted match between his fingers, pondering whether he should roast his enemy to death.
Would he do so? Would he toss the match? Would Father Seferino Huanca Leyva turn the Mendocita night into a raging inferno? Would he thus ruin an entire life devoted to religion and the common good? Or would he blow out the little flame that was burning his fingertips, open the doors of the brick house, and fall to his knees to beg the Evangelical minister's forgiveness? How would this parable of the slums end?
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