The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (23 page)

“Of course. It’s what I must do, yes, you’re right. But I feel somewhat constrained. Thank you, my boy. I needn’t remind you to keep this in strictest confidence? For my sake, and especially for the sake of the professor’s reputation.”

“I’ll be as silent as a tomb, Don Nepomuceno. Don’t hesitate any longer. Go up those stairs, pick up the panties, and take them to her. Knock on her door and begin by making a joke about the surprise you found on your way up. It will all turn out wonderfully, you’ll see. You’ll always remember this night, Professor.”

Before the sound of the click that ended the conversation, Don Rigoberto heard a rumbling stomach and an anguished belch that the aged jurist could not suppress. How nervous and alarmed he must have been in the darkness of that living room filled with law books, in the potency of the Virginia spring night, torn between his hope for an adventure—the first in a lifetime of purely matrimonial and reproductive coitus?—and his cowardice disguised as rigorous ethical principles, religious convictions, and social prejudices. Which of the forces struggling in his spirit would emerge victorious? Would it be desire or fear?

Don Rigoberto, almost without realizing it, engrossed in what had become the totemic image of the panties left on Professor Lucrecia’s staircase, got out of bed and went to his study without turning on the light. His body avoided obstacles—the bench, the Nubian sculpture, pillows, the television set—with an ease acquired through assiduous practice, for since his wife’s departure not a night had gone by when sleeplessness did not drive him to leave his bed while it was still dark and seek, among his papers and scrawled notes, a balm for his nostalgia and solitude. His mind still fixed on the figure of the venerable jurist assailed by circumstance (embodied in the undergarment of a perfumed and voluptuous woman, which lay before him between two steps of a jurisprudential staircase) and forced into Hamletian uncertainty, but sitting now before the large wooden table in his study and leafing through his notebooks, Don Rigoberto gave a start when the golden cone of light from the lamp revealed the German proverb written at the top of the page:
Wer die Wahl hat
,
hat die Qual
(“Whoever must choose must suffer”). Extraordinary! Wasn’t this adage, copied from who knows where, a perfect depiction of the state of mind of poor, fortunate Don Nepomuceno Riga, tempted by that well-fleshed academic, Dr. Lucrecia?

His hands, turning the pages of another notebook, challenging chance to see if for a second time he could happen upon, or establish, a relationship between what he found and what he dreamed that would serve as fuel to his fantasy, suddenly stopped (“like the hands of a croupier setting the ball in motion on a spinning roulette wheel”), and he avidly leaned forward. Written on the page was his response to
Edith’s Diary
, by Patricia Highsmith.

He raised his head, disconcerted. He heard the furious waves at the foot of the cliff. Patricia Highsmith? The novelist who wrote about boring crimes committed by Mr. Ripley, an apathetic, unmotivated criminal, did not interest him in the least. He had always reacted with yawns (comparable to the ones produced in him by the popular
Tibetan Book of the Living and the Dead
) when this crime writer (helped along by Alfred Hitchcock movies) was all the rage a few years back among the hundred or so people who comprised the Limenian reading public. What was a hack writer for movie fans doing in his notebooks? He could not recall when or why he had written his comments on
Edith’s Diary
, a book he did not even remember.

“An excellent novel for understanding that fiction is a flight into the imaginary which emends life. Edith’s familial, political, and personal frustrations are not gratuitous; they are rooted in the reality that causes her the greatest suffering: her son Cliffie. Instead of showing him in her diary as he actually is—a weak failure of a boy who was not accepted at the university and does not know how to work—Cliffie breaks free of the original and, in the pages written by his mother, leads the life Edith wanted for him: he is a successful journalist married to a girl from a fine family, he has children and a good job, he is the kind of son who fills his mother with pride.

“But fiction is only a temporary remedy, for though it consoles Edith and takes her mind off her troubles, it removes her from life’s struggle, isolating her in a purely mental world. Relationships with her friends are weakened or ended; she loses her job and becomes destitute. Her death seems melodramatic, but from a symbolic point of view it has coherence; Edith moves physically to the place she had already occupied in life: unreality.

“The novel is constructed with deceptive simplicity, beneath which a dramatic context is depicted: the merciless struggle between reality and desire, those sisters who are bitter enemies separated by impassable distances except in the miraculous recesses of the human spirit.”

Don Rigoberto felt his teeth chatter, his palms perspire. Now he remembered the insignificant novel and the reason for his reflections. Would he, like Edith, eventually slide into ruin because he abused fantasy? But behind this melancholy hypothesis, the fragrant rose of the panties remained at the center of his consciousness. What had happened to Don Nepomuceno? What did he do and what dilemmas did he encounter after his telephone conversation with the young Rigoberto? Had he followed his student’s advice?

He began to tiptoe up the stairs in a relative darkness that permitted him to see bookshelves and the edges of furniture. On the second step he paused, leaned forward, grasped the precious object with stiff fingers—was it silk? linen?—brought it up to his face and buried his nose in it, like a small animal deciding if the strange object was edible. He closed his eyes and kissed it, feeling the beginnings of a vertigo that made him reel as he held on to the banister. He was determined, he would do it. He continued up the stairs, still on tiptoe, the panties in his hand, fearful he would be found out, as if a noise—the steps groaned slightly—might break the spell. His heart was pounding so hard that it crossed his mind how incredibly inopportune and stupid it would be if he were to suffer a heart attack just then. No, it was not an attack; it was curiosity and the sensation (unknown in his life) of tasting forbidden fruit that made his blood race through his veins. He had reached the hall, he was at the jurist’s door. He pressed his jaw with both hands, because his grotesquely chattering teeth would make a terrible impression on his hostess. Steeling himself (“summoning all his courage” whispered Don Rigoberto, trembling and dripping with perspiration) he knocked, very slowly. The door was ajar and it opened with a hospitable creak.

What the venerable professor of the Philosophy of Law saw from the carpeted threshold changed his ideas about the world, the human race—most certainly the law—and forced a moan of desperate pleasure from Don Rigoberto. A gold and indigo light (Van Gogh? Botticelli? Some Expressionist like Emil Nolde?) radiating from a round yellow moon in the starry Virginia sky fell, as if arranged by a demanding set designer or a skillful lighting technician, directly on the bed, its sole purpose to highlight the naked body of Dr. Lucrecia. Who could have imagined that the severe clothing she wore at her professor’s lectern, those tailored suits in which she expounded her arguments and made her motions at conferences, the waterproof capes she wrapped around herself in winter, concealed a body that would have been claimed by Praxiteles for its harmony, and Renoir for the sumptuous modeling of the flesh. She lay facedown, her head resting on her crossed arms, in a long, extended pose, but it was not her shoulders, morbid arms (“morbid in the Italian sense of the word,” Don Rigoberto specified, since he had no liking for the macabre but did relish softness), or curved back that drew the eyes of a dumbfounded Don Nepomuceno like a magnet. Not even her ample milky thighs or small rosy-soled feet. It was those firm spheres which, with a happy lack of shame, rose prominently like twin mountaintops (“the mist-shrouded peaks of mountain ranges in Japanese prints of the Meiji period,” Don Rigoberto made the association with satisfaction). But Rubens, Titian, Courbet, Ingres, Urculo, and a half-dozen other master painters of feminine posteriors also seemed to have banded together to give reality, consistency, abundance, and, at the same time, softness, delicacy, spirit, and a sensual vibration to that rump whose whiteness seemed opalescent in the semidarkness. Incapable of restraining himself, not knowing what he was doing, the bedazzled (“corrupted forever after?”) Don Nepomuceno took two steps and, when he reached the bed, fell to his knees. The old floorboards groaned.

“Excuse me, Doctor, I found something of yours on the stairs,” he stammered, feeling streams of saliva flowing out of the corners of his mouth.

He spoke so softly that not even he could hear what he was saying, or perhaps he moved his lips without making a sound. Neither his voice nor his presence had disturbed the jurist. She breathed quietly, rhythmically, in innocent sleep. But that pose, the fact that she was naked and had left her bedroom door open, had loosened her hair—black, straight, long—so that it swept across her shoulders and back, its blue-tinged darkness contrasting with the whiteness of her skin, could that be innocent? “No, no” was the judgment of Don Rigoberto. “No, no,” echoed the stupefied professor, moving his eyes along the undulating surface that, at her flanks, sank androse like a stormy sea of feminine flesh glorified by moonlight (“more like the oily light and shadow of Titian’s bodies,” Don Rigoberto amended) a few centimeters from his stunned face: Not innocent, not at all. I’m here because she planned it and brought me here.

And yet he could not derive from that theoretical conclusion sufficient strength to do what his reawakened instincts demanded: pass his fingertips along the satiny skin, rest his matrimonial lips on those hills and dales that he expected to be warm, fragrant, with a taste in which the sweet and salty coexisted but did not combine. Petrified with happiness, he could do nothing but look, look. After traveling back and forth many times between the head and feet of this miracle, passing over it again and again, his eyes stopped moving and rested, like the exquisite palate that does not need to taste any further after identifying the
ne plus ultra
of the wine cellar, on the independent spectacle of her spherical hindquarters. They stood out from the rest of her body like an emperor among his vassals, Zeus among the minor gods of Olympus. (“A happy union of nineteenth-century Courbet and the modern Urculo,” Don Rigoberto ennobled the scene with references.) The eminent professor, overwhelmed by emotion, observed and adored the prodigy in silence. What was he saying to himself? He was repeating the line from Keats (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”). What was he thinking? “And so these things do exist. Not only in evil thoughts, in art, in the fantasies of poets, but in real life. And so an ass like this is possible in flesh-and-blood reality, in women who inhabit the world of the living.” Had he ejaculated yet? Was he about to befoul his shorts? Not yet, though the jurist was aware of new sensations in his groin, an awakening, a roused caterpillar stretching. Was he thinking anything else? This: “And where else would it be but between the legs and torso of my old and respected colleague, this good friend with whom I corresponded so often regarding abstruse philosophical-juridical, ethical-legal, historical-methodological issues?” How was it possible that never, until tonight, not in any of the forums, lectures, symposia, seminars they had both attended and where they had conversed, discussed, and argued, he had never even suspected that those boxy suits, shaggy coats, lined capes, ant-colored raincoats hid a splendor like this? Who could have imagined that this lucid mind, this Justinian intelligence, this legal encyclopedia also possessed a body so overwhelming in its form and abundance? For a moment he imagined—did she see him, perhaps?—that, indifferent to his presence, liberated in the abandon of Morpheus, those serene mountains of flesh released a joyful, muffled little wind that burst under his nose and filled his nostrils with a pungent aroma. It did not make him laugh, it did not make him uncomfortable (It did not excite him either, thought Don Rigoberto). He felt acknowledged, as if, in some way, for intricate reasons difficult to explain (“like the theories of Kelsen that he clarified so well for us” was his comparison), the little fart was a kind of acquiescence shared with him by the splendid body that displayed so intimate an intimacy, the useless gases expelled by an intestinal serpent whose hollows he imagined as pink, moist, free of dross, as delicate and well modeled as the untrammeled buttocks just millimeters from his nose.

And then, in terror, he realized that Doña Lucrecia was awake, for though she had not moved, he heard her say, “What are you doing here, Professor?”

She did not seem angry, much less frightened. The voice was hers, of course, but charged with additional warmth. Something languid, insinuating, a musical sensuality. In his embarrassment, the jurist managed to wonder how his old colleague could have undergone so many magical tranformations in a single night.

“Forgive me, forgive me, Doctor. I implore you not to misinterpret my presence here. I can explain everything.”

“Didn’t the meal agree with you?” she asked reassuringly. She spoke with absolutely no irritation. “Would you like a glass of water and some bicarbonate?”

She turned her head slightly, and with her cheek still pillowed on her arm, her large eyes, shining through black strands of hair, observed him.

“I found something that belongs to you on the stairs, Doctor, and I came to give it to you,” the professor mumbled. He was still kneeling, and now he became aware of a sharp pain in his knees. “I knocked, but you did not answer. And since the door was ajar, I ventured in. I did not mean to wake you. I beg you not to take it the wrong way.”

She moved her head, nodding, forgiving him so gently, pitying his confusion. “Why are you crying, my dear friend? What’s wrong?”

Don Nepomuceno, defenseless in the face of her fond deference, the caressing cadence of her words, the affection in those eyes gleaming in the shadows, broke down. What until then had been only great silent tears rolling down his cheeks turned into resounding sobs, wrenching sighs, a cataract of slobber and snot that he tried to contain with his hands—in his disordered mental state he could not find his handkerchief, or even the pocket where he kept his handkerchief—while, in a strangled voice, he opened his heart to her.