It is true
that I have asked Mario Poggi, the renowned psychologist of Peru, over to my
house for lunch, that he had served a long term of person time for strangling
one of his patients to death, the very one, infamous one they call the “The
Butcher of Lima,” and it is true on several occasions I have purchased some of
his art work, to help him live, his credentials as a professional have been
taken away from him. Matter of fact, he
even had me talk to one of his patients once—better said, counsel him once.
And yet I hope to show by this short
narrative that perhaps he is not the murderer we all claim him to be; or the
madman he is so often referred to by the media, and the many people I’ve talked
to.
Was he the murderer of the Butcher of
Lima? Who killed half dozen victims? If so, who was madder, him or the Butcher?
I do hope some of my readers will weigh this statement. Correlate it with the
known facts, and ask: which horror is worse; his or the Butcher of Lima’s?
Perhaps there is madness in both, even
the courts were at their wits’ end to account for that last terrible
killing—Poggi’s murder; yet all of Lima, all 7.5 million inhabitants were
frightened of the Butcher, until Mario Poggi the prison psychologist, was
accused of stepping behind a chair, and pulling off his belt, and strangling
him to death, as the Butcher of Lima, had done so many times to his victims,
without an ounce of remorse.
They tried weekly to concoct a theory, a
ghastly jest to warn other behavior science helpers to do the right thing, and
perhaps a little pressure from the good Samaritans called: Human Right groups, that feel, even if the
truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible, the servant of the
people must be punished.
So it is said, he murdered the Butcher
while in custody at a mental ward, while in prison, under Poggi’s care, but had
you asked Poggi, I do believe he would have told you, and he did say so on
occasions, and inferred to me: he avenged the dead, the ones the Butcher
killed, and the ones he was going to kill. But you see he didn’t give the
Butcher a chance to name the new victims, whom he would have put onto his
list—after he had gotten out of prison.
What Poggi was really saying is: he
stopped the purge; he did not allow the Butcher’s lawers to loosen untold
terrors on all of Lima again.
There are many color zones of shadows
close to our daily paths, some are black, others grey, some white and not
visible. Sometimes evil, good evil, if there is such a thing, might come under
a greyer zone in the color spectrum—perhaps, white, unseen, passed through;
when that occurs the person who is aware, and knowledgeable, usable and
available, must strike before reckoning befalls humanity—; you see, the
Government does this more often than not, more than anyone, it is called: in
the Interest of National Security. It must be done you see, before a city whole
or perhaps whole nation, suffers the consequences—again and again and again.
This of course cannot be seen by the naked eye, or the naked mind.
I have known Poggi now for a number of
years, perhaps ten in all, he is most phenomenal, a scholar, also, perhaps
having a strange secretive inner life: as a younger person, with imagination
that gave him freedom.
At any rate, his adult learning was with
the intention of doing good I do believe, not bizarre things as he ended up
doing; his odd genius developed a remarkable sensation, a sinister ill-regard
for a greatly retarded killer. But society said: you are equal to the
Butcher—figuratively speaking that is, but he never shaped any tragedy beyond
killing the killer—if indeed that is a tragedy: that is the big difference,
where the Butcher was in a world of forbidden necrophagous, or perhaps equal:
necrophilia and necromancy (feeding on corpses, fascination
with death, communicating with spirits).
When Boggi talked to me his voice was
soft, and light, and his somewhat now dull life, perhaps better said,
unexercised life gave him stoutness, more so than a paunchiness, and now past
middle age. He was not in good health,
yet still a handsome face, green hair, notable gallant, a shyness to him which
brought him to a closer seclusion. Still fairly well-known, I was perhaps one
of his better and less critical friends, and we talked an inexhaustible quarry
of vital theoretical topics, ate a good lunch, coffee a little wine, and
whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his innocence or guilt, he was
injured by some odd psychological woe, perhaps affliction, for doing society
good in a bad way.
As we talked and after he left and we
met again several times—along with meeting his wife and daughter, he seemed to
feel some sort of bizarre exhilaration as if he escaped from some unseen
bondage, he began to mingle more despite his heavy blackmail from society and
the courts, and from others for his crime.
The last time I saw him, he looked as if
he was on drugs, he had gotten a divorce, and was no longer seeing his child—to
my knowledge; his look and his mind told me: there were no more countless
matters to be adjusted; philosophically speaking.
#967 (9-26-2012)
Note: the author
communicated with Mario Poggi between 2002 and 2010 perhaps
on a dozen occasions. The sketch is by the author, D. L. Siluk,
taken from a sculpture he purchased by Mario Poggi, in 2005.
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