Mario Vargas Llosa - The Discreet Hero

Feeling her heart pound, Mabel remained silent. Above the heads of the two police and at the foot of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she saw her face reflected in the mirror and was surprised at how pale she looked. She was as white as one of those phantoms in horror movies.

“I’m going to ask you to listen to me without getting nervous or scared,” Captain Silva said after a long silence. He spoke softly, lowering his voice, as if he were going to tell her a secret. “Because even though it may not seem like it, this private arrangement we’re going to make, I repeat, it’s for your own good.”

“Tell me once and for all what’s going on. What is it that you want?” Mabel managed to say, choking. The captain’s evasiveness and hypocritical circumspection were irritating her. “Say what you’ve come to say. I’m not a fool. Let’s not waste any more time, señor.”

“We’ll get to the point then, Mabel,” said the chief, transformed. Suddenly his good manners and respectful behavior disappeared. He raised his voice and looked at her now very seriously, with an impertinent, superior air. To make matters worse, he began to address her with the familiar tú . “I’m very sorry for you, but we know everything. Just what I said, Mabelita. Everything, every little thing, every last little thing. For example, we know that for a good long time you’ve not only had Don Felícito Yanaqué as a lover but someone else too. Better looking and younger than the old man in the hat and vest who pays for this house.”

“How dare you!” Mabel protested, turning a violent red. “I won’t permit it! What slander!”

“You’d better let me finish before you get so mouthy.” Captain Silva’s emphatic voice and threatening manner stopped her dead. “Afterward you can say whatever you want and cry as much as you like and even stamp your feet, if the spirit moves you. Right now, just keep quiet. I have the floor and you button your lip. Understood, Mabelita?”

Maybe she’d have to leave Piura. But the idea of living alone in a strange city — she’d only left this city to go to Sullana, Lobitos, Paita, and Yacila, she’d never crossed the boundaries of the department either to the north or to the south, she’d never gone up to the sierra — demoralized her. What would she do all alone in a place without family or friends? She’d have less protection than she did here. Would she spend her time waiting for Felícito to come to visit her? She’d live in a hotel, be bored morning and night, watching television for hours on end, if there even was television, and waiting, waiting. And she didn’t like feeling that a police officer, a man or a woman, was always watching her steps, taking notes on whom she talked to, whom she said hello to, who approached her. More than protected, she felt spied on, and the feeling, instead of reassuring her, made her tense and insecure.

Captain Silva stopped talking for a moment to calmly light a cigarette. Unhurriedly, he exhaled a large mouthful of smoke that hung in the air and saturated the room with the biting odor of tobacco.

“You’ll probably say, Mabel, that the police aren’t interested in your private life, and you’d be right,” the chief continued, dropping his ash on the floor and adopting an air that was part philosophical, part bullying. “But what concerns us is not whether you have two or ten lovers, but that you’ve been crazy enough to conspire with one of them to extort Don Felícito Yanaqué, the poor old man who, besides everything else, really loves you. What an ungrateful girl you’ve turned out to be, Mabelita!”

“What a thing to say!” She was on her feet and now, quivering, indignant, she too raised her voice, as well as a fist. “I won’t say another word without a lawyer. Let me tell you, I know my rights. I…”

How stubborn Felícito was! Mabel never would have imagined that the old man was prepared to die rather than give money to the extortionists. He seemed so meek, so understanding, and then suddenly he displayed an iron will to all of Piura. The day after she was freed, she and Felícito had a long conversation. At one point Mabel unexpectedly asked him, point-blank, “If the kidnappers had said they’d kill me if you didn’t give them the money, would you have let them kill me?”

“Now you see it didn’t happen that way, love,” the trucker stammered, very uncomfortable.

“Answer me honestly, Felícito,” she insisted. “Would you have let them kill me?”

“And afterward I would’ve killed myself,” he conceded, his voice breaking and his expression so pathetic she took pity on him. “Forgive me, Mabel. But I’ll never pay an extortionist. Not even if they kill me or the thing I love most in this world, which is you.”

“But you told me yourself that all your colleagues in Piura do it,” Mabel replied.

“And lots of businessmen and entrepreneurs too, it seems,” Felícito acknowledged. “The truth is I learned that only now, through Vignolo. It’s their business. I’m not criticizing them. Each man knows what he’s doing and how to defend his interests. But I’m not like them, Mabel. I can’t do it. I can’t betray my father’s memory.”

And then the trucker, with tears in his eyes, began to talk about his father to a surprised Mabel. Never, in all the years they’d been together, had she heard him refer to his parent so emotionally. With feeling, with tenderness, just like when they were intimate in bed and he said sweet things to her as he caressed her. He’d been a very humble man, a sharecropper, a Chulucano from the countryside, and then, here in Piura, a porter, a municipal garbage collector. He never learned to read or write, he went barefoot most of his life, something you noticed when they left Chulucanas and came to the city so that Felícito could go to school. Then he had to wear shoes and you could see how strange it felt to him when he walked and how his feet hurt when he had them on. He wasn’t a man who showed his love by hugging and kissing his son, or saying those affectionate things parents say to their kids. He was severe, hard, even ready with his fists when he got angry. But he’d shown him he loved him by making him study, by dressing him and feeding him, even when he had nothing to put on his own back or in his own mouth, by sending him to a school for drivers so that Felícito could learn to drive and get his license. Thanks to that illiterate sharecropper, Narihualá Transport existed. His father might have been poor but he was a great man because of his upstanding spirit, because he never harmed anyone, or broke the law, or felt rancor toward the woman who abandoned him, leaving him with a newborn to bring up. If all of that about sin and evil and the next life was true, he had to be in heaven now. He didn’t even have time to do any evil, he spent his life working like a dog in the worst-paying jobs. Felícito remembered seeing him drop with fatigue at night. But even so, he never let anyone walk all over him. According to him, that was the difference between a man who was worth something and a man who was worth only a rag. That had been the advice he gave him before he died in a bed with no mattress in the Hospital Obrero: “Never let anybody walk all over you, son.” Felícito had followed the advice of the father who, because they had no money, he couldn’t even bury in a niche; he couldn’t stop them from tossing him into a common grave.

“Do you see, Mabel? It’s not the five hundred dollars the crooks are asking for. That’s not the point. If I give it to them, they’d be walking all over me, turning me into a rag. Tell me you understand, honey.”

Mabel hadn’t really understood, but hearing him say those things made an impression on her. Only now, after being with him for so long, did she realize that behind his insignificant appearance — a little man, so thin, so small — Felícito had a cast-iron character and a bulletproof will. It was true, he’d let himself be killed before he gave in.