The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (28 page)

Invisible Games

I enter your house by the chimney, though I am not Santa Claus. I float to your bedroom and, very close to your face, imitate the buzz of a mosquito. As you sleep you begin to swat in the darkness at a poor insect that does not exist.

When I tire of playing the mosquito, I uncover your legs and blow a breath of cold air that numbs your bones. You begin to shiver, you curl up, you tug at the blanket, your teeth begin to chatter, you cover your head with the pillow and even begin to sneeze sneezes not caused by your allergy.

Then I become a Piuran, Amazonian heat that soaks you in perspiration from head to toe. You look like a little wet chick, kicking the sheets to the floor, pulling off your pajama tops and bottoms. Until you are stark naked, sweating, sweating and panting like a bellows.

Then I become a feather and tickle you, on the soles of your feet, in your ear, under your arms. Hee hee, ha ha, ho ho, you laugh without waking up, making desperate faces and twisting to the right, the left, trying to ease the cramps caused by your laughter. Until, at last, you wake, frightened, not seeing me but sensing that someone is moving in the darkness.

When you get up to go to your study and spend time with your pictures, I lay traps for you. I move chairs and objects and tables from their place so that you will trip over them and shout “Owowowww!” rubbing your shins. Sometimes I hide your robe, your slippers. Sometimes I spill the glass of water you leave on the night table to drink when you wake up. How angry you are when you open your eyes and feel around for it and find it in the middle of a puddle on the floor!

This is how we do it, how we play with the men we love.

Yours, yours, yours,
A Phantom in Love

Beast in the Mirror

“I went off last night,” Doña Lucrecia said without thinking. Before fully realizing what she had said, she heard Fonchito: “Where to, Stepmamá?” She blushed to the roots of her hair, consumed by shame.

“I meant to say I couldn’t sleep a wink,” she lied, because for some time she had not enjoyed so deep a sleep, though one, it must be said, shaken by storms of desire and the phantoms of love. “I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m saying.”

The boy was concentrating again on a page in the book about the painter he adored, which displayed a photograph of Egon Schiele looking at himself in the large mirror in his studio. He was shown full-length, his hands in his pockets, his short hair uncombed, his slender boyish body encased in a white, high-collared shirt and tie, but no jacket, and his hands hidden, of course, in the pockets of a pair of trousers with the bottoms rolled as if he were about to wade across a river. Since he had arrived, Fonchito had done nothing but talk about that mirror, attempting over and over again to initiate a conversation about the photograph; but Doña Lucrecia, lost in her own thoughts and still caught up in the confused exaltation, the doubts and hopes that had dominated her since yesterday’s surprising development in her anonymous correspondence, had paid no attention. She looked at Fonchito’s head of golden curls and saw his profile, his solemn scrutiny of the photograph as if he were trying to wrench some secret from it. “He doesn’t realize, he didn’t understand.” Though one never knew with him. He had probably understood perfectly and was pretending he hadn’t so as not to increase her embarrassment.

Or, perhaps, “to go off” didn’t have the same meaning for the boy? She recalled that some time ago she and Rigoberto had engaged in one of those salacious conversations that the secret laws governing their lives permitted only at night and in bed during the prologue, main text, or epilogue of love. Her husband had assured her that the younger generation no longer used “to go off” but “to come,” a clear demonstration, even in the delicate realm of Venus, of the influence of English, for when gringos and gringas made love they “came” and didn’t go off anywhere, as Latins do. In any event, Doña Lucrecia had gone off, come, or finished (this was the verb she and Don Rigoberto had used during their ten years of marriage after agreeing never to refer to that beautiful conclusion to the erotic encounter as an uncivil, clinical “orgasm,” much less a dripping-wet, belligerent “ejaculation”) the night before, enjoying it intensely, with an acute, almost painful pleasure—she had awakened bathed in sweat, her teeth chattering, her hands and feet convulsed—dreaming that she had gone to the mysterious appointment indicated in the anonymous letter, following all the extravagant instructions, and in the end, after the most intricate routes along dark streets in both the center and outlying districts of Lima, she had been—wearing a blindfold, naturally—admitted to a house whose odor she recognized, led up a flight of stairs to the second floor—from the first moment she was certain it was the house in Barranco—undressed, and made to lie down on a bed that she also identified as their old one, until she felt herself held tightly, embraced, penetrated, and filled to overflowing by a body which, of course, was Rigoberto’s. They had finished—going off or coming—together, which did not happen to them very often. Both had thought it a positive sign, a happy omen for the new life opening before them following this abracadabraesque reconciliation. Then she woke, wet, languorous, confused, and had to struggle for some time before she could accept that her intense happiness had been only a dream.

“The mirror was a gift to Schiele from his mother.” Fonchito’s voice returned her to her house, to a drab San Isidro, to the shouts of children kicking a soccer ball in the Olivar; the boy’s face was turned toward her. “He begged her and begged her to give it to him. Some people say he stole it from her. That he wanted it so much that one day he went to his mother’s house and just walked out with it. And finally she agreed and left it in his studio. His first one. He always kept it. He moved that mirror to every studio he ever had, until he died.”

“Why is the mirror so important?” Doña Lucrecia made an effort to show interest. “We know he was like Narcissus. The photograph proves it. Looking at himself, in love with himself, putting on a victim’s face. So the world would love and admire him just as he loved and admired himself.”

Fonchito burst into laughter.

“What an imagination, Stepmamá!” he exclaimed. “That’s why I like talking to you; you can think of things, just like I do. You can find a story in everything. We’re alike, aren’t we? I never get bored with you.”

“You don’t bore me either.” She blew him a kiss. “I told you what I think, now it’s your turn. Why are you so interested in the mirror?”

“I dream about that mirror,” Fonchito admitted. And, with a little Mephistophelian smile, he added, “It was very important to Egon. How do you think he painted a hundred self-portraits? With that mirror. And he used it to paint his models reflected in it. It wasn’t a whim. It was, it was…”

He made a face, searching, but Doña Lucrecia guessed it wasn’t words he lacked but a way to articulate a formless idea still gestating in that precocious little head. The boy’s passion for the painter, she was certain now, was pathological. But perhaps, for that very reason, it might also shape an exceptional future for Fonchito as an eccentric creator, an unconventional artist. If she kept the appointment and reconciled with Rigoberto, she would tell him so. “Do you like the idea of having a neurotic genius for a son?” And she would ask him if it wasn’t dangerous for the boy’s psychic health to identify so strongly with a painter like Egon Schiele, whose inclinations were so perverse. But then Rigoberto would reply: “What? Have you been seeing Fonchito? While we were separated? While I was writing you love letters, forgetting what had happened, forgiving what had happened, you were seeing him behind my back? The boy you corrupted by taking him to your bed?” My God, my God, what an idiot I’ve turned into, thought Doña Lucrecia. If she went to the appointment, the one thing she couldn’t do was mention Alfonso’s name even once.

“Hi, Justita,” he greeted the girl as she came into the dining alcove, looking neat as a pin in a starched apron and carrying the tea tray and the requisite toasted buns with butter and marmalade. “Don’t go, I want to show you something. Here, what do you see?”

“What else but more of that dirty stuff you like so much.” Justiniana’s darting eyes lingered on the book for a long time. “A fresh guy having a great time looking at two naked girls who are wearing stockings and hats and showing off for him.”

“That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?” exclaimed Fonchito with a triumphant air. He handed the book to Doña Lucrecia so that she could examine the full-page reproduction. “They’re not two models, it’s just one. Why do we see two, one from the front, the other from the back? Because of the mirror! Do you get it now, Stepmamá? The title explains everything.”

Schiele Painting a Nude Model Before the Mirror
, 1910 (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna), read Doña Lucrecia. As she examined the picture, intrigued by something she could not name except that it was not in the picture itself—it was a presence, or rather an absence—she halfheard Fonchito, who by now was in the state of growing excitement that talking about Schiele always brought him to. He was explaining to Justiniana that the mirror “is where we are when we look at the picture.” And that the model seen from the front wasn’t flesh and blood but an image in the mirror, while the painter and the model seen from the back were real and not reflections. Which meant that Egon Schiele had begun to paint Moa from the rear, in front of the mirror, but then, drawn by the part he did not see directly but only in projection, he decided to paint that too. And so, thanks to the mirror, he painted two Moas, who were really only one: the complete Moa, the two halves of Moa, the Moa no one could see in reality because “we only see what we have in front of us, not the part behind that front.” Did she understand why the mirror was so important to Egon Schiele?

“Don’t you think he’s missing something upstairs, Señora?” Justiniana said in an exaggerated way, touching her temple.

“I have for a long time,” Doña Lucrecia agreed. And then, in the same breath, she turned to Fonchito: “Who was this Moa?”

A Tahitian. She had come to Vienna and lived with a painter who was also a mime and a madman: Erwin Dominik Ose. The boy quickly turned pages and showed Doña Lucrecia and Justiniana several reproductions of the Tahitian Moa, dancing, draped in multicolored tunics through whose folds one could see small breasts with erect nipples, and, like two spiders crouching under her arms, the small tufts of hair in her armpits. She danced in cabarets, she was the muse of poets and painters, and in addition to posing for Egon, she had also been his lover.

“I guessed that from the start,” remarked Justiniana. “That bandit always went to bed with his models after he painted them, we all know that.”

“Sometimes before, and sometimes while he was painting them,” Fonchito assured her calmly, approvingly. “Though not all of them. In his journal for 1918, the last year of his life, he mentions 117 models who visited his studio. Could he have gone to bed with so many in so short a time?”

“Not even if he contracted tuberculosis.” Justiniana laughed. “Did he die of consumption?”

“He died of Spanish influenza at the age of twenty-eight,” Fonchito explained. “That’s how I’m going to die too, in case you didn’t know.”

“Don’t say that even as a joke, it’s bad luck,” the girl reprimanded him.

“But something here doesn’t fit,” Doña Lucrecia interrupted.

She had taken the book of reproductions from the boy and was looking again, very carefully, at the drawing, with its sepia background and precise, thin lines, of the painter and the model duplicated (“or divided?”) by the mirror, in which the intense, almost hostile eyes of Schiele seem to find their response in the melancholy, silken, flashing eyes of Moa, the dancer with blue-black lashes. Señora Lucrecia had been disturbed by something she had just identified. Ah yes, the hat glimpsed from the rear. Except for this detail, in everything else there was perfect correspondence between the two parts of the delicate, thrusting, sensual figure of the Tahitian with hair like spiders at her pubis and under her arms; once you were aware of the presence of the mirror, you recognized the two halves of the same person in the two figures observed by the artist. But not the hat. The figure seen from the rear wore something on her head which, from that perspective, did not seem to be a hat at all but something uncertain, unsettling, a sort of cowl, even, even, the head of a wild animal. That was it, some kind of tiger. In any case, nothing even remotely like the coquettish, feminine, charming little hat so flattering to the Moa seen from the front.

“How odd,” the stepmother repeated. “In the rear view, the hat turns into a mask. The head of a beast.”

“Like the one my papá asks you to put on in front of the mirror, Stepmamá?”

Doña Lucrecia’s smile froze. Suddenly she understood the reason for the vague uneasiness that had engulfed her ever since the boy showed her
Schiele Painting a Nude Model Before the Mirror
.

“What is it, Señora?” Justiniana was looking at her. “You’re so pale.”

“Then it’s you,” she stammered, staring in disbelief at Fonchito. “You’re sending me anonymous letters, you little hypocrite.”

He was the one, of course he was. It had been in the letter before last, or the one before that. She didn’t have to look for it; the sentence, with all its commas and periods, was etched in her memory: “You will undress before the mirror, except for your stockings, and hide your lovely head behind the mask of a wild animal, preferably a tigress or a lioness. You will thrust out your right hip, flex your left leg, rest your hand on your other hip, in the most provocative pose. I will be watching you, sitting in my chair, with my usual reverence.” Isn’t that exactly what she was looking at? The damn kid was playing with her! She seized the book of reproductions and, blind with fury, hurled it at Fonchito. The boy could not get out of the way in time. The book hit him full in the face, he screamed, and a startled Justiniana screamed too. With the impact, he fell back onto the carpet, holding his face and looking up at her, wide-eyed, from the floor. Doña Lucrecia did not think she had done anything wrong in losing her temper. She was too angry to regret anything. While the girl helped him to his feet, she continued to shout, beside herself with rage.

“You liar, you hypocrite, you fake. Do you think you have the right to play with me like that, when I’m a grown woman and you’re nothing but a snot-nosed kid still wet behind the ears?”

“What’s the matter, what did I do to you?” Fonchito stuttered, trying to free himself from Justita’s arms.

“Calm down, Señora, you’ve hurt him; look, his nose is bleeding,” said Justiniana. “And you be still, Foncho, and let me have a look.”

“What, what did you do to me, you phony!” shouted an even angrier Doña Lucrecia. “You think it doesn’t matter? Writing me anonymous letters? Making me think they came from your papá?”

“But I never sent you any anonymous letters,” the boy protested, while the girl, on her knees, wiped the blood from his nose with a paper napkin. “Don’t move, don’t move, you’re bleeding all over everything.”

“Your damned mirror gave you away, and your damned Egon Schiele!” Doña Lucrecia was still shouting. “You thought you were so clever, didn’t you? Well, you’re not, fool. How do you know he asked me to put on an animal mask?”

“You told me, Stepmamá,” Fonchito stammered, but fell silent when he saw Doña Lucrecia get to her feet. He protected his face with both hands, as if she were going to hit him.

“I never told you about the mask, you liar,” his enraged stepmother exploded. “I’m going to bring you that letter, I’m going to read it to you. You’re going to eat it, you’re going to apologize. And I’ll never let you set foot in this house again. Do you hear? Never!”