Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

back, I was pissing inside wanting to laugh.”
    “I’m going to ask you something,” Santiago says. “Do I have the face of a son of a bitch?”
    “And I’m going to tell you something,” Popeye said. “Don’t you think her going out to buy the Coca-Cola for us was strictly hypocritical? As if she was letting herself go to see if we’d repeat what happened the other night.”
    “You’ve got a rotten mind, Freckle Face,” Santiago said.
    “What a question,” Ambrosio says. “Of course not, boy.”
    “O.K., so the breed girl is a saint and I’ve got a rotten mind,” Popeye said. “Let’s go to your house and listen to records, then.”
    “You did it for me?” Don Fermín asked. “For me, you poor black crazy son of a bitch?”
    “I swear you don’t, son.” Ambrosio laughs. “Are you making fun of me?”
    “Teté isn’t home,” Santiago said. “She went to an early show with some girl friends.”
    “Listen, don’t be a son of a bitch, Skinny,” Popeye said. “You’re lying, aren’t you? You promised, Skinny.”
    “You mean that sons of bitches don’t have the faces of sons of bitches, Ambrosio,” Santiago says.

3
     
     
    T HE L IEUTENANT DIDN’T YAWN once during the trip; he was talking about the revolution the whole time, explaining to the sergeant driving the jeep how now that Odría had taken power the Apristas would toe the mark, and smoking cigarettes that smelled like guano. They had left Lima at dawn and had only stopped once, in Surco, to show their pass to a patrol that was manning a roadblock on the highway. They entered Chincha at seven in the morning. There were no signs of the revolution there: the streets were alive with schoolchildren, there wasn’t a soldier to be seen on the corners. The Lieutenant leaped to the sidewalk, went into the café-restaurant called Mi Patria, heard on the radio the same communiqué with a military march in the background that he had been hearing for two days. Leaning on the counter, he asked for coffee and milk and a cream cheese sandwich. He asked the man who waited on him, wearing an undershirt and with a sour face, if he knew Cayo Bermúdez, a businessman in town. Was he going, the man rolled his eyes, to arrest him? Was that Bermúdez an Aprista? How could he be, he wasn’t involved in politics. That’s good, politics was for bums, not hardworking people, the Lieutenant was looking for him on a personal matter . He wouldn’t find him here, he never came here. He lived in a little yellow house behind the church. It was the only one that color, the other ones around were white or gray and there was also a brown one. The Lieutenant knocked on the door and waited and heard footsteps and a voice who is it.
    “Is Mr. Bermúdez in?” the Lieutenant asked.
    The door opened with a creak and a woman came forward: a fat Indian woman with a blackish face that was full of moles, yessir. The people in Chincha said if you could only see her now. Because she wasn’t bad-looking as a girl. Night and day, I tell you, what a change, yessir. Her hair was all messy, the woolen shawl that covered her shoulders looked like a burlap bag.
    “He’s not home.” She looked sideways with suspicious greedy little eyes. “What’s it about? I’m his wife.”
    “Will he be back soon?” The Lieutenant examined the woman with surprise, mistrust. “Can I wait for him?”
    She drew away from the door. Inside, the Lieutenant felt nauseous in the midst of the heavy furniture, the pots without flowers, the sewing machine and the walls with constellations of shadows or holes or flies. The woman opened a window, a tongue of sun came in. Everything was worn, there were too many things in the room. Boxes stacked up in the corners, piles of newspapers. The woman murmured an excuse and vanished into the dark mouth of a hallway. The Lieutenant heard a canary trilling somewhere. Was she really his wife? Yessir, his wife before God, of course she was, a story that shook