Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel Read online

  “I found him in the new warehouse down at the harbor terminal, lieutenant,” he said. “He got in by kicking a hole in the wall. Should I make out an arrest report for robbery, for breaking and entering, for indecent exposure, or for all three?”

  The black had hunched over again as the lieutenant, Camacho, and Arévalo scrutinized him from head to foot.

  “Those aren’t smallpox scars, lieutenant,” Apple Dumpling said, pointing to the slash marks on his face and body. “They were made with a knife, incredible as that may seem.”

  “He’s the skinniest man I’ve ever seen in my life,” Snotnose said, looking at the naked black’s bones. “And the ugliest. Good lord, what kinky hair! And what enormous hands!”

  “We’re curious,” the lieutenant said. “Tell us your life story, black boy.”

  Sergeant Lituma had taken off his kepi and unbuttoned his greatcoat. Sitting at the typewriter, he was beginning to write up his report. He shouted over: “He doesn’t know how to talk, lieutenant. He just makes noises you can’t understand.”

  “Are you one of those guys who pretends to be nuts?” the lieutenant went on, more curious than ever. “We’re too old to fall for a trick like that, you know. Tell us who you are, where you come from, who your mama was.”

  “Or else we’ll teach you to talk all over again with a few good punches in the snout,” Apple Dumpling added. “To sing like a canary, Little Black Sambo.”

  “But if those are really knife scars, they must have cut him a good thousand times,” Snotnose said in amazement, taking another good look at the tiny slash marks crisscrossing the black’s face. “How is it possible for a man to get himself marked up like that?”

  “He’s freezing to death,” Apple Dumpling said. “His teeth are chattering like maracas.”

  “You mean his molars,” Snotnose corrected him, examining the man from very close up, as though he were an ant. “Can’t you see that he’s only got one front tooth, this elephant tusk here? Man, what a hideous-looking character: straight out of a nightmare.”

  “I think he’s got bats in his belfry,” Lituma said, without looking up from the typewriter. “Nobody in his right mind would go around like that in this cold, isn’t that so, lieutenant?”

  And at that moment the commotion made him look up: suddenly electrified by something, the black had pushed the lieutenant aside and darted like an arrow between Camacho and Arévalo. Not toward the street, however, but toward the Chinese-checkers table, and Lituma saw him grab up a half-eaten sandwich, stuff it into his mouth, and swallow it in a single ravenous, bestial gulp. As Arévalo and Camacho went for him and began cuffing him over the head, the black was downing the remains of the other sandwich on the table with the same ravenous haste.

  “Don’t hit him you guys,” the sergeant said. “Be charitable—offer him some coffee instead.”

  “This isn’t a welfare institution,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t know what the devil I’m going to do with this character.” He stood there looking at the black, who after wolfing down the sandwiches had taken his lumps from Snotnose and Apple Dumpling without batting an eye and was now lying quietly on the floor, panting softly. The lieutenant finally took pity on him and growled: “All right, then. Give him a little coffee and put him in the detention cell.”

  Snotnose handed him half a cup of coffee from the thermos. The black drank slowly, closing his eyes, and when he’d finished licked the aluminum cup, searching for the last few drops in the bottom, till it shone. Then he went along with them, quietly and peacefully, as they led him to the cell.

  Lituma reread his report: attempted robbery, breaking and entering, indecent exposure. Lieutenant Jaime Concha had come back to his desk, and as his eyes wandered about the room, he suddenly said to Lituma with a happy smile, pointing to the pile of multicolored magazines: “Aha! Now I know who it is he reminds me of! The blacks in the Tarzan stories, the ones in Africa.”

  Camacho and Arévalo had gone back to their Chinese checkers, and Lituma put his kepi back on and buttoned up his greatcoat. As he was going out the door, he heard the shrill cries of the pickpocket, who had just woken up and was protesting against his new cellmate: “Help! Save me! He’s going to rape me!”

  “Shut your trap or we’ll be the ones who’ll rape you,” the lieutenant threatened. “Let me read my comic books in peace.”

  From the street, Lituma could see that the black had stretched out on the floor, indifferent to the outcries from the pickpocket, a very thin Chinese who was scared to death. Imagine waking up and finding yourself face to face with a bogeyman like that, Lituma thought and laughed to himself, his massive bulk again turned to the wind, the drizzle, the darkness. With his hands in his pockets, the collar of his greatcoat turned up, his head lowered, he continued unhurriedly on his rounds. He went first to Chancre Street, where he found Corny Román leaning on the counter of the Happy Land, laughing at the jokes of Mourning Dove, the old fairy with dyed hair and false teeth tending bar there. He noted in his report that patrolman Román “gave signs of having drunk alcoholic beverages while on duty,” even though he knew full well that Lieutenant Concha, a man extremely tolerant of his own weaknesses and those of others, would look the other way. He left the port district then and strode up the Avenida Sáenz Peña, deader than a cemetery at this hour of the night. He had a terrible time finding Humberto Quispe, whose patrol area was the market district. The stalls were closed and there were fewer bums than usual sleeping curled up on sacks or newspapers underneath stairways and trucks. After several useless searches from one end of the area to the other, blowing the recognition signal countless times on his whistle, he finally located Quispe on the corner of Colón and Cochrane, helping a taxi driver whose skull had been cracked open by two thugs who had then robbed him. They took him to the public hospital to get his head sewed up and then went to have a bowl of fish-head soup at the first stall in the market to open up, that of Señora Gualberta, a fishwife. A cruising patrol car picked Lituma up on Sáenz Peña and gave him a lift to the fortress of Real Felipe, where Little Hands Rodríguez, the youngest Guardia Civil assigned to the Fourth Commissariat, was on patrol duty at the foot of the walls. He surprised him playing hopscotch, all by himself, in the darkness.

  He was hopping gravely and intently from square to square, on one foot, on two, and on seeing the sergeant he immediately stood at attention. “Exercise helps keep you warm,” he said to him, pointing to the squares marked off in chalk on the sidewalk. “Didn’t you ever play hopscotch when you were a kid, sergeant?”

  “I went in more for top spinning, and I was pretty good at kite flying,” Lituma replied.

  Little Hands Rodrílguez told him of an incident that, he said, had made his shift that night an amusing one. He’d been patrolling along the Calle Paz Soldán, around midnight, when he’d spied a guy climbing through a window. Revolver in hand, he’d ordered the man to halt, but the guy had burst into tears, swearing he wasn’t a thief but a man whose wife insisted that he come in the house that way, in the dark and through the window. And why not through the door, like everybody else? “Because she’s half crazy,” the man whimpered. “It makes her more affectionate if she sees me entering the house like a thief—can you imagine? And other times she makes me threaten her with a knife to scare her, and even disguise myself as the Devil. And if I don’t do what she wants, she won’t give me so much as a kiss, sir.”

  “He saw that you were an inexperienced kid and handed you a real cock-and-bull story.” Lituma smiled.

  “It’s the absolute truth,” Little Hands insisted. “I knocked at the door, we went in, and the wife, an uppity little samba, said it was true and why shouldn’t she and her husband have the right to play their little game of robbers? The things you see in this job, eh, sergeant?”

  “You said it, kid,” Lituma agreed, thinking of the black.

  “On the other hand, a man would never get bored with a woman like that, sergeant,” Little Hands said, sm
acking his lips.

  He accompanied Lituma to the Avenida Buenos Aires, where the two of them separated. As the sergeant headed toward the boundary line of the Bellavista precinct—the Calle Vigil, the Plaza de la Guardia Chalaca—a long trek, usually the stretch where he first began to feel tired and sleepy, the sergeant remembered the black. Could he have escaped from the insane asylum? But Larco Herrera Asylum was such a long way away that some Guardia Civil or patrol car would have seen him and arrested him. And those scars? Could they really be from knife cuts? Damn, that would really hurt, like being slowly burned to death. How hideous—making one little tiny cut after another till the guy’s face was covered with them. Or could he have been born like that? It was still pitch-dark, but already there were signs of approaching dawn: cars, an occasional truck, silhouettes of early risers. You who’ve seen so many real oddballs—why are you so concerned about that guy you found stark-naked, the sergeant wondered. He shrugged: mere curiosity, a way of keeping his mind occupied till it was time to go off duty.

  He had no difficulty finding Zárate, a Guardia Civil who’d served with him in Ayacucho. He found him with his report already made out and signed: one traffic accident, nobody hurt, nothing important. Lituma told him about the black, and the only part that Zárate thought was funny was the bit about the sandwiches. He was a demon stamp collector and, as he accompanied the sergeant for a few blocks, began telling him how he’d managed, just that morning, to come by some triangular stamps from Ethiopia, with lions and snakes, in green, red, and blue, a very rare issue, for which he’d swapped five Argentine stamps not worth anything at all.

  “But which they’ll doubtless think are worth a whole lot,” Lituma interrupted.

  Zárate’s mania, which ordinarily he put up with good-naturedly, irritated him tonight and he was happy when they separated. A faint blue light was dawning in the sky and the buildings of El Callao, ghostly, grayish, rusty, teeming, loomed up out of the darkness. Hurrying along almost at a trot, the sergeant counted the blocks he still had to go before reaching the commissariat. But this time, he admitted to himself, he was hurrying not so much because he was tired after the long night and all the walking he’d done but because he was eager to see the black again. It’s almost as if you believed the whole thing was a dream and the darky doesn’t really exist, Lituma.

  But he did indeed exist: he was there, sleeping curled up in a ball on the floor of the cell. The pickpocket had fallen asleep at the other end, with a fearful expression on his face still. The others were asleep, too: Lieutenant Concha with his head resting on a pile of comic books, and Camacho and Arévalo shoulder to shoulder on the bench in the entryway. Lituma stood staring at the black for a long time: his ribs sticking out, his kinky hair, his mouth with the thick lips, his thousand scars, his body shivering from head to foot. Where in the world have you come from, darky? he thought.

  He finally went to hand in his report to the lieutenant, who opened red, puffy eyes. “Another damned shift that’s just about over,” he said, his mouth as dry as dust. “One day less to serve in the corps, Lituma.”

  And one day less to live, too, the sergeant thought. He clicked his heels together smartly and left. It was six in the morning and he was free. As usual, he went to the market to Doña Gualberta’s to have a bowl of steaming-hot soup, meat pies, beans with rice, and a custard, and then to the little room where he lived, in the Calle Colón. He had trouble getting to sleep, and the minute he finally did, he began dreaming about the black man. He saw him surrounded by red, green, and blue lions and snakes, in the heart of Abyssinia, with a top hat, boots, and an animal tamer’s whip. The wild beasts did tricks to the rhythm of his cracking whip, and a crowd sitting amid the jungle vines, the tree trunks, and the thick foliage enlivened by the songs of birds and the screams of monkeys applauded him madly. But instead of bowing to the audience, the black got down on his knees, stretched out his hands in a gesture of supplication, tears welled up in his eyes, and his big thick-lipped mouth opened and from it there came pouring out, in an anguished, tumultuous rush, his gibberish, his absurd music.

  Lituma woke up around three in the afternoon, in a bad humor and very tired, despite having slept seven hours. They must have taken him to Lima by now, he thought. As he washed his face like a cat and got dressed, he followed the black’s trajectory in his mind’s eye: the nine o’clock patrol car would have come to pick him up, they’d have given him a rag to cover himself with, they’d have taken him to the prefecture and opened a file on him, they’d have put him in the cell for prisoners awaiting trial, and there he’d be this minute, in that dark hole, among bums, sneak thieves, muggers, and troublemakers picked up in the last twenty-four hours, shivering from the cold and dying of hunger, scratching his lice.

  It was a gray, humid day; people were moving about in the fog like fish in dirty water, and Lituma walked, slowly and pensively, over to Doña Gualberta’s to eat lunch: two rolls with cream cheese and a coffee.

  “You’re in a strange mood today, Lituma,” Doña Gualberta, a little old woman who knew a thing or two about life, said. “Money troubles or love troubles?”

  “I’m thinking about a darky I found last night,” the sergeant said, testing his coffee with the tip of his tongue. “He’d broken into a warehouse down at the harbor terminal.”

  “And what’s so strange about that?” Doña Gualberta asked.

  “He was stark-naked, full of scars, with a head of hair as matted as a jungle, and doesn’t know how to talk,” Lituma explained. “Where can a character like that be from anyway?”

  “From Hell.” The old woman laughed as he paid the bill.

  Lituma walked down to the Plaza Grau to meet Pedralbes, a petty officer in the navy. They’d known each other for years, ever since the days when the sergeant was just a private in the Guardia Civil and Pedralbes an able-bodied seaman and both of them were stationed in Pisco. After that, their respective careers had separated them for almost ten years, and then, in the last two years, brought them back together again. They were in the habit of spending their days off-duty together, and Lituma felt like one of the family at the Pedralbes house. They went off today to La Punta, to the club for seamen and petty officers, to have a beer and play toad-in-the-hole. The sergeant told him straightway the story of the black, and Pedralbes immediately came up with an explanation. “He’s a savage from Africa who got here as a stowaway on a boat. He hid aboard all during the crossing and when the ship docked at El Callao he slipped into the water in the dark of night and entered Peru illegally.”

  It was as though the sun had just come out: suddenly everything was plain as day to Lituma.

  “You’re right, that’s exactly how it was,” he said, clacking his tongue and clapping his hands. “He’s come from Africa. Of course: it all fits. Once the ship docked here in El Callao, they made him get off for some reason. So as not to pay for his passage, because they discovered him in the hold, to get rid of him.”

  “They didn’t hand him over to the authorities because they knew they wouldn’t let him into the country,” Pedralbes said, filling in the details of the story. “They forced him to get off the ship: shift for yourself, you jungle savage.”

  “In other words, that darky doesn’t even know where he is,” Lituma said. “And those strange sounds he keeps making aren’t those of a madman but of a savage; that is to say, the sounds of his own language.”

  “It’s as though they put you on a plane and you landed on Mars, old pal,” Pedralbes said helpfully.

  “How clever we are,” Lituma said. “We’ve just discovered that darky’s whole life story.”

  “You mean how clever I am,” Pedralbes protested. “And what will they do with the guy now?”

  Who knows? Lituma thought. They played six games of toad-in-the-hole and the sergeant won four, so Pedralbes had to pay for their beers. Then they walked over to the Calle Chanchamayo, where Pedralbes lived, in a little house with bars over the windows. Domitila, Pedralbe
s’s wife, was just finishing feeding the three children, and the minute she saw the two of them come in, she put the littlest one to bed and ordered the other two not to even peek so much as their noses through the door. She fixed her hair a little, linked arms with the two of them, and they went out to see an Italian movie at the Cine Porteno, on Sáenz Peña. Lituma and Pedralbes didn’t like the movie at all, but she said she’d even go back and see it again. They walked back to the Calle Chanchamayo—the kids had all gone to sleep—and Domitila warmed up some olluquitos con charqui—potatoes and dried salt meat—for their supper. It was ten-thirty when Lituma left. He arrived at the Fourth Commissariat exactly at the hour he was to go on duty: eleven on the dot.

  Lieutenant Jaime Concha didn’t even give him time to catch his breath; he called him aside and, out of the blue, gave him specific orders, in a couple of Spartan sentences that left Lituma dizzy and made his ears ring. “The higher-ups know what they’re doing,” the lieutenant assured him, clapping him on the back encouragingly. “They have their reasons, and we just have to go along with them. Our superiors are never wrong, isn’t that so, Lituma?”

  “Yes, of course,” the sergeant stammered.

  Apple Dumpling and Snotnose were pretending to be terribly busy. Out of the corner of his eye, Lituma saw Apple Dumpling carefully inspecting traffic tickets as though they were photographs of naked women, and Snotnose was arranging, disarranging, and then rearranging things on his desk.