His acquaintances and even his wife and their four children did not know the reason behind this chimerical campaign. Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui kept it a secret but never forgot it: it haunted his memory day and night, a persistent nightmare from which he drew new strength, renewed hatred enabling him to persevere in this combat that some people considered preposterous, others repellent, and the rest commercial. At this very moment, as he entered the parking lot, checked with the eye of a condor whether the Dodge had been washed, started it, and waited precisely two minutes by his watch for the engine to warm up, his thoughts, moths hovering about flames in which they would burn their wings, went back yet again in time and space to the remote village of his childhood and the terror that had forged his destiny.
It had happened in the first decade of the century, when Tingo María was just a tiny dot on the map, a few cabins in a clearing surrounded by dense jungle. Adventurers abandoning the soft life of the capital with the dream of conquering virgin forest ended up there from time to time, after countless hardships. That was how the engineer Hildebrando Téllez had happened to come to the region, along with his young wife (in whose veins, as her name, Mayte, and surname, Unzátegui, proclaimed, Basque blood flowed) and their young son: Federico. The engineer had grandiose plans: cutting down trees, exporting precious woods for building mansions and making furniture for the affluent, growing pineapples, avocados, watermelon, custard apples, and eggfruit for the world’s exotic palates, and in time, steamboat service up and down the rivers of the Amazon basin. But the gods and men reduced these fires to ashes. Natural catastrophes—rains, plagues, floods—and human limitationsthe shortage of workers, the indolence and stupidity of the few he did have, alcohol, the scarcity of credit—wiped out all the pioneer’s vast projects, one after the other, so that, two years after his arrival in Tingo María, he was obliged to earn his living in a very modest, humble way, by growing sweet potatoes on a small farm up the Pendencia River. It was there, in a cabin built of logs and palm fronds, that on a stifling hot night rats ate alive María Téllez Unzátegui, the couple’s newborn daughter, as she lay in her crib without a mosquito netting.
The way the tragedy happened was both simple and horrible. The father and the mother were to stand as godparents at a baptism and would be spending the night on the other side of the river, attending the usual festivities in honor of such an occasion. They had left the farm in charge of the foreman, who lived, along with the two farmhands, in a lean-to a long distance away from the boss’s cabin. The cabin was where Federico and his sister were to sleep. But when the weather was very hot, the little boy would often take his straw pallet down to the banks of the Pendencia, where the sound of the water lulled him to sleep. That was what he had done that night (and all the rest of his life was to reproach himself for having done so). He bathed himself in the river in the moonlight, lay down on his pallet, and fell asleep. In his dreams he seemed to hear a baby crying. But the sound was not loud enough or did not last a long enough time to awaken him. At dawn he felt sharp little teeth biting his foot. He opened his eyes and thought he would die, or rather, that he had died and was in Hell: he was surrounded by dozens of rats, writhing, twisting, stumbling over each other, jostling each other, and above all devouring everything within their reach. He leapt up from the pallet, grabbed a stick, and managed to alert the foreman and the farmhands by shouting at the top of his lungs. Among all of them, they were able to drive the colony of invaders off with torches, clubs, kicks. But when they entered the cabin all that was left of the baby (the piece de résistance of the famished rodents’ feast) was a little pile of bones.
The two minutes were up and Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui started off. In a serpentine of cars, he slowly made his way along the Avenida Tacna, intending to head off down Wilson and Arequipa to the Barranco district, where lunch was waiting for him. As he stopped for the red lights, he closed his eyes and felt, as he always did whenever he remembered that terrifying dawn, a burning, effervescent sensation, like acid bubbling inside him. Because, as folk wisdom has it, “misfortunes never come one at a time.” As a result of the tragedy, his mother, the young woman of Basque descent, contracted chronic hiccups, which brought on spasms, kept her from being able to eat, and struck other people as hilariously funny. She never again uttered a single word: only croaks and gurgles. She went about like that, with terror-stricken eyes, hiccuping constantly, wasting away, until she finally died of exhaustion a few months later. His father let himself go, lost all his ambition, all his energy, the habit of washing. When, out of sheer negligence, he lost the farm and it was sold at auction to pay off his creditors, he earned his living for a while as a raftsman, ferrying human passengers, goods, and animals from one shore of the Huallaga to the other. But one day when the river was in flood the current drove the raft into a clump of trees, completely destroying it, and he lost all interest in building another one. He took to the slopes of that pornographic mountain with maternal breasts and eager hips they call the Sleeping Beauty, built himself a refuge of leaves and stalks, let his hair and beard grow, and remained there for years, eating wild herbs and smoking leaves that make your head swim. When Federico, by then an adolescent, left the jungle, the ex-engineer was known in Tingo María as the Sorcerer and lived near the grotto of Las Pavas, cohabiting with three Indian women from Huánuco, who had borne him several half-wild children with round bellies.
Only Federico was able to confront the catastrophe creatively. That very morning, after having been whipped for leaving his sister alone in the cabin, the boy (who had become a man in the space of a few hours) had knelt beside the little mound of earth that was María’s tomb and swore to devote his life, to his last breath, to the annihilation of the murderous species. To seal his vow, he sprinkled the earth covering the little girl with drops of blood from the gashes left by the whip.
Forty years later, Don Federico Té11ez Unzátegui, the very exemplar of the single-mindedness of men of honor that moves mountains, could tell himself, as his sedan rolled down the avenues toward his frugal daily lunch, that he had proved that he was a man of his word. For in all those years it was probable that, thanks to his labors and his inspiration, the number of rodents that had perished in Peru exceeded the number of Peruvians born. Difficult work, involving many sacrifices and no rewards, that had made him a dour, inflexible, friendless man with odd habits. In the beginning, when he was still a child, the hardest part had been overcoming his feelings of repugnance toward the nasty gray creatures. His initial technique had been primitive: setting traps for them. With his pocket money he bought (at the Deep Sleep Mattress Shop and General Store on the Avenida Raimondi) one that he used as a model for making many others. He cut wood and wire to the proper size, assembled his traps, and set them out twice a day all over the farm. Sometimes the little creatures caught in them were still alive. Trembling with emotion, he would kill them by slowly burning them to death or torture them by stabbing them, mutilating them, putting their eyes out before doing them in.
But young as he was, his intelligence told him that if he gave in to such inclinations he would fail in the task he had set himself: his goal was quantitative, not qualitative. It was not a question of inflicting the greatest possible suffering on each individual enemy but of destroying the greatest possible number of enemies at one and the same time. With a clearheadedness and a strength of will remarkable at his tender years, he rooted out every last remaining trace of sentimentality within him and thereafter pursued his genocidal goal in accordance with impeccably objective criteria, coldly, statistically, scientifically. Stealing time from his studies at the Canadian Brothers’ School and from sleep (though not from recreation, since after the tragedy he no longer ever played), he perfected the traps, adding a blade to them that chopped the victims’ bodies to bits so that they never remained alive after being caught (not in order to spare them pain but in order not to have to waste time killing them off). He then built multifamily traps, with a b
road base, in which a fork with curved tines could simultaneously crush the father, the mother, and four little ones. Everyone in the region soon heard about his skills at rat killing, and little by little it ceased to be merely a penitence, a personal vendetta, and became a service to the community, for which he was paid very little, but a mere pittance was better than nothing. The boy was summoned to farms both near and far the moment there were signs of an invasion, and with the diligence of an omnipotent ant, he would rid them of every last rodent in a matter of a few days. They began to call upon his services in Tingo María as well, to clean out cabins, houses, offices, and the youngster had his moment of glory when the captain of the Guardia Civil gave him the job of ridding the commissariat of the rats that had overrun the building. He spent all the money he received building more traps in order to expand what naïve souls took to be his business—or his perversion. When the ex-engineer buried himself in the sexualoid tangle of jungle growth of the Sleeping Beauty, Federico, who had dropped out of school, began to complement his clean weapon, traps, with another, more cunning one: poisons.
This work allowed him to earn his own living at an age when other boys are still spinning tops. But it also turned him into an outcast. People would call him in to get rid of their hordes of scampering rodents, but they never invited him to sit down at table with them and never had a kind word to say to him. If this hurt his feelings, he did not let it show; on the contrary, it almost seemed to please him that his fellows found him repellent. He was an unsociable, taciturn adolescent; no one could boast of ever having made him laugh, or even seen him laugh, and his one passion seemed to be killing the filthy creatures that were his enemy. He charged people only a modest fee for his work, and moreover waged campaigns ad honorem, in the dwellings of poor folk, appearing on their doorstep with his gunnysack full of traps and his vials of poison the moment he learned that the enemy had set up camp there. In addition to killing the lead-colored vermin, a technique that the lad kept tirelessly perfecting, there was the problem of getting rid of the dead bodies, the part of the whole business that families, housewives, or maidservants found most repugnant. Federico expanded his commercial enterprise by hiring the village idiot, a cross-eyed hunchback who lived at the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, who for a pittance collected the remains of the victims and took them off to burn them behind the Coliseo Abad or offer them as a feast to the dogs, cats, pigs, and vultures of Tingo María.
What a long time had gone by since then! As he stopped at the red light on the corner of the Avenida Javier Prado, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui said to himself that he had undoubtedly come up in the world since the days when, a raw youth still, he went up and down the muddy streets of Tingo María from sunup to sundown, followed by the idiot, waging his war against the murderers of his little sister María with his craftsmanship and skill as his only weapon. He was scarcely past childhood then, had nothing but the clothes on his back, and one helper at most. Thirty-five years later, he was the head of a vast technico-commercial enterprise, with branches in every city in Peru, with fifteen trucks in its motor pool and seventy-eight experts in the fumigation of ratholes, the compounding of poisons, and the installation of traps. The latter operated on the front lines—the streets, houses, and fields of the entire country—wholeheartedly devoted to searching out, surrounding, and annihilating the enemy, and receiving orders, advice, and logistic support from the headquarters staff over which he presided (the six technocrats who had just gone out to lunch). But in addition to this constellation, Don Federico had enlisted the aid of two laboratories in his crusade, by signing contracts with them (that were practically subsidies) for constant experimentation with new poisons, a crucial tactic in view of the enemy’s prodigious capacity for acquiring immunity: after two or three campaigns, the toxics became obsolete, simply a source of food for the creatures they were intended to kill. Moreover, Don Federico—who at this moment shifted into first as the light turned green, and continued on his way toward the residential districts along the seashore—had set up a scholarship whereby Rodent Exterminators, Incorporated sent a newly graduated chemist to the University of Baton Rouge each year to do advanced research on rat poisons.
It had been precisely this concern—placing science at the service of his religion—that, twenty years before, had impelled Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui to marry. Being only human after all, he had one day begun to conceive the idea of a dense phalanx of males, scions of his very own blood and spirit, in whom he would inculcate, from their earliest days at their mother’s breast, his fury toward the disgusting rodent breed, and who, having received an exceptional upbringing and education, would continue his mission, perhaps even beyond the borders of their native land. The image of six, seven Téllezes with doctorates from top-ranking institutions who would repeat and perpetuate in aeternum the vow that he had sworn, impelled him, a man who was marital inappetency incarnate, to have recourse to a matrimonial agency, which, in return for a somewhat excessive fee, supplied him with a twenty-five-year-old spouse, perhaps not a raving beauty—she had several teeth missing and, like those little ladies from the region irrigated by that supposedly silvery stream that goes by the (hyperbolic) name of the Río de la Plata, great rolls of fat around her waist and at the backs of her knees—but nonetheless possessed of the three qualities he had demanded: perfect health, an intact hymen, and high fertility.
Doña Zoila Saravia Durán was a girl from Huánuco whose family, by one of those turns of the wheel of fortune that are life’s favorite game, had come down in the world from the provincial aristocracy to the subproletariat of the capital. She had received her education at the free school run by the Salesian Mothers—for reasons of conscience or as publicity?—next door to their school for paying pupils, and like all her schoolmates had come to suffer from an Argentine complex as she grew up; in her case it took the form of meekness, silence, and gluttony. She had spent her life working as a classroom monitor for the Salesian Mothers, and her vague, undefined status as such—was she a servant? a worker? a salaried employee?—aggravated the servile insecurity that caused her to acquiesce and nod her head like a docile cow in any and every situation. When she was left an orphan at the age of twenty-four, she finally worked up the courage to visit, after much hesitation and painful soul-searching, the matrimonial agency that put her in touch with the man who was to be her lord and master. Due to the lack of erotic experience of both spouses, the consummation of the marriage was an extremely slow process, a serial in which, between false starts and impulses gone astray, fiascos due to faulty aim or precocious emission or the wrong position, the chapters followed one upon the other, the suspense mounted, and the stubborn hymen remained unperforated. Paradoxically, in view of the fact that they were an extremely virtuous couple, Doña Zoila first lost her virginity (not out of vice but due, rather, to mere blind chance and the newlyweds’ lack of practice) heterodoxically; that is to say, sodomitically.
Apart from this fortuitous abomination, the couple’s life had been a model of moral rectitude. Doña Zoila was a conscientious, hardworking, thrifty wife, and doggedly determined to respect her husband’s principles (which certain people chose to call eccentricities). She had never objected, for instance, to Don Federico’s strict injunction against the use of hot water (since, according to him, it sapped one’s will and caused head colds), despite the fact that even after twenty years she still turned purple from the cold on entering the shower. She had never failed to comply with the clause of the family code (unwritten but engraved upon the memory of each of its members) decreeing that no one was to sleep more than five hours a night so as not to encourage indolence, even though their crocodile yawns made the windowpanes quiver when the alarm clock went off every morning at 5 a.m. She had accepted with resignation her husband’s ukase that movies, dancing, theater, radio were to be excluded as permissible forms of family entertainment, on the grounds that they were immoral, and that meals in restaurants, travel, and any sort
of fanciful caprice with regard to bodily attire or household furnishings was likewise forbidden as being too great a strain on the budget. It was only with respect to her one sin, gluttony, that she had been incapable of obeying the master of the house. Meat, fish, and rich desserts with whipped cream had very often appeared on the menu. This was the one and only area in his conjugal life in which Don Federico had been unable to impose his will: a strictly vegetarian diet.
But Doña Zoila had never made any attempt to indulge in her vice in secret, behind her husband’s back, and as the latter’s sedan entered the coquettish Miraflores district, he told himself that his wife’s forthrightness in this respect, while it might not have redeemed her sin, made it at most a venial one. When her irrepressible appetites were more powerful than her spirit of obedience, she devoured her beefsteak with onions, or her sole with hot peppers, or her apple pie with whipped cream before his very eyes, her cheeks beet-red with shame, and resigned beforehand to the punishment that would be meted out to her for that particular transgression. She had never objected to the sanctions he imposed. If (on account of a grilled steak or a chocolate bar) Don Federico forbade her to speak for three days, she herself stuffed a gag in her mouth so as not to disobey even in her sleep, and if the penalty was twenty spanks on her bare bottom, she hastened to undo her skirt and get the arnica out.
No, Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui said to himself as he cast an absentminded glance at the gray (a color he detested) Pacific Ocean beyond the seawall of Miraflores that his sedan had just started across, when everything was said and done, Doña Zoila hadn’t disappointed him. His great failure in life was his children. What an enormous difference between the bold vanguard of princes of extermination that he had dreamed of and the four offspring that God and his gluttonous wife had inflicted upon him.