Mario Vargas Llosa - The Discreet Hero

“I couldn’t sleep all night,” the driver added. “The hours went by and I got more and more scared, I’ll tell you. More and more. First the scare the twins gave me, now this. That’s why I called you, Don Rigoberto. And right after we spoke, I heard on RPP that Señora Armida had disappeared, that she’d been kidnapped. That’s why I’m still shaking.”

Don Rigoberto patted his shoulder.

“You’re too good a person, Narciso, that’s why you get scared so often. And now you’re involved again in a fine mess. You’ll have to go to the police and tell them this story, I’m afraid.”

“No way, Don Rigoberto,” replied the driver with determination. “I don’t know where Armida has gone or why. If something’s happened to her, they’ll look for a fall guy. You should realize that I’m the perfect fall guy. Don Ismael’s ex-driver, the señora’s pal. And to top it all off, I’m black. I’d have to be crazy to go to the police.”

“He’s right,” thought Don Rigoberto. “If Armida doesn’t show up, Narciso will end up paying the piper.”

“Okay, you’re probably right,” he said. “Don’t tell anybody what you’ve told me. Let me think. Then we’ll see what advice I can give you, after I mull it over. Besides, Armida may turn up at any moment. Call me tomorrow like you did today, at breakfast time.”

He dropped Narciso off in the parking lot of La Rosa Náutica and returned to his house in Barranco. He drove directly into the garage to avoid the reporters who were still crowded around the entrance to the building. Twice as many as before.

Doña Lucrecia and Justiniana were still glued to the television, watching the news with a look of astonishment. They listened to his story openmouthed.

“The richest woman in Peru running away with a small bag in a rundown bus, like some pauper heading for nowhere,” Don Rigoberto concluded. “The soap opera isn’t over, it goes on and on and gets harder to understand every day.”

“I understand very well,” exclaimed Doña Lucrecia. “She was sick of everything: lawyers, reporters, hyenas, gossips. She wanted to disappear. But where?”

“Where else but Piura,” said Justiniana, very sure of what she was saying. “She’s Piuran and even has a sister there, named Gertrudis, I think.”

“She hasn’t even cried once,” thought Felícito Yanaqué. And in fact, she hadn’t. But Gertrudis did stop speaking. She hadn’t opened her mouth, at least not with him or Saturnina, the servant. Maybe she spoke to her sister Armida, who, ever since her unannounced arrival in Piura, had been sleeping in the room where Tiburcio and Miguel slept when they were boys, before they left home to live on their own.

Gertrudis and Armida spent long hours there, behind closed doors, and it was impossible that in all that time they hadn’t exchanged a single word. But since the previous afternoon, when Felícito returned from Adelaida’s place and told his wife the police had discovered that the spider extortionist was Miguel, and that their son had already been arrested and confessed to everything, Gertrudis had stopped speaking. She didn’t open her mouth again in front of him (Felícito, of course, hadn’t mentioned Mabel at all). But Gertrudis’s eyes had flared and filled with anguish, and she’d clasped her hands as if praying. Felícito had seen her in that posture all the times they’d been together in the last twenty-four hours. As he summarized the story the police had told him, leaving out Mabel’s name, his wife didn’t ask him anything or comment at all or respond to the few questions he asked her. She continued to sit in the semidarkness of the television room, mute, turned in on herself like a piece of furniture, looking at him with those brilliant, suspicious eyes, her hands crossed, as immobile as a pagan idol. Then, when Felícito warned her that the news would be made public very soon, reporters would swarm around the house like flies, and she shouldn’t open the door or answer a call from any newspaper, radio, or television reporter, she stood, still without a word, and went to her sister’s room. It surprised Felícito that Gertrudis hadn’t attempted to see Miguel immediately at the police station or in prison. Like her silence, was her mute strike only for him? She must have spoken to Armida, because that night at dinner, when Felícito greeted his sister-in-law, she seemed to know what had happened.

“I’m very sorry to be a bother just when the two of you are having such a difficult time,” she said, shaking his hand, an elegant lady whom he resisted calling sister-in-law. “It’s just that I had nowhere else to go. It’ll be for only a few days, I promise. Please forgive my invading your home like this, Felícito.”

He couldn’t believe his eyes. This lady, so attractive, so well dressed, wearing such beautiful jewelry, was Gertrudis’s sister? She looked much younger, and her clothes, shoes, rings, earrings, and watch were those of a rich woman who lived in a big house with gardens and a swimming pool in El Chipe, not someone who’d come out of El Algarrobo, that seedy boardinghouse in a Piuran slum.

That night at dinner, Gertrudis didn’t touch a mouthful and didn’t say a word. Saturnina removed her plates of angel-hair broth and chicken and rice, untasted. All afternoon and well into the night there was endless knocking at the door, and the telephone didn’t stop ringing, even though no one opened the door or picked up the receiver. From time to time Felícito peeked through the curtains: Those crows hungry for carrion were still there with their cameras, crowded together on the sidewalk and in the roadway of Calle Arequipa, waiting for someone to come out so they could attack. Saturnina, who didn’t live in, was the only one who came out, rather late at night, and Felícito saw her defend herself against the assault, raising her arms, shielding her face from the lightning bolts of the flashbulbs, and starting to run.

Alone in the living room, he watched the local news on television and listened to news reports on the radio. Miguel appeared on the screen, looking serious, his hair uncombed, in handcuffs, dressed in a tracksuit and basketball sneakers; and then Mabel, without cuffs, looking in fear at the bursts of light from the cameras. In his heart Felícito was grateful that Gertrudis had taken refuge in her bedroom and wasn’t beside him, watching the news programs that morbidly emphasized that his mistress, named Mabel, whom he’d set up in a house in the Castilla district, had deceived him with his own son and conspired to commit extortion, sending the famous spider letters and setting fire to Narihualá Transport.

He saw and heard it all with a sinking heart and perspiring hands, feeling the warning signs of another attack of vertigo like the one that had made him pass out at Adelaida’s, yet at the same time he had the curious sensation that this was very distant and strange and had nothing to do with him. He didn’t even feel involved when his own image appeared on the screen while the announcer spoke of his dear Mabel (calling her his “paramour”), his son Miguel, and his transport company. It was as if he’d been separated from himself; the Felícito Yanaqué of the television images and radio news was someone else who had usurped his name and face.

After he was already in bed, unable to sleep, he heard Gertrudis’s footsteps in the adjoining bedroom. He looked at the clock: almost one. As far as he could recall, his wife never stayed up so late. He couldn’t sleep, he was awake all night, sometimes thinking, but most of the time his mind was a blank, attentive to his heartbeat. At breakfast, Gertrudis continued her silence; all she had was a cup of tea. Not long afterward, Josefita, called by Felícito, came to report what was happening at the office, to receive instructions, and to take down the letters he dictated. She brought a message from Tiburcio, who was in Tumbes. When he heard the news, he’d called the house several times but no one answered. He drove the bus on that route, and as soon as he reached Piura he would come straight to see his parents. Felícito’s secretary seemed so disturbed by the news that he almost didn’t recognize her; she avoided looking him in the eye, and the only comment she made was how annoying the reporters were, they’d driven her crazy the night before at the office, and now they’d surrounded her when she came to the house and wouldn’t let her near the door for a long time, though she shouted at them that she had nothing to say, didn’t know anything, was only Señor Yanaqué’s secretary. They asked the most impertinent questions, but of course she hadn’t said a word. When Josefita left, Felícito saw through the window how she was assaulted again by the men and women with tape recorders and cameras crowded on the sidewalks of Calle Arequipa.