The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (36 page)

Estrella was crying too, but hers were tears of joy. After her final gasp, during which Don Rigoberto felt a simultaneous jolt to every nerve ending in his body, she opened her mouth, released his nose, and fell back onto the blue-covered bed with a disarmingly pious exclamation: “Mother of God, I came so good!” And crossed herself in gratitude without the slightest sacrilegious intention.

“Sure, good for you, but you almost took off my nose and ears, you outlaw,” Don Rigoberto complained.

He was positive that Estrella’s caresses had turned his face into the face of Arcimboldo’s plant man, who had a tuberous carrot for a nose. With a growing sense of humiliation he saw, through the fingers of the hand he was using to rub his bruised and battered nose, that Rosaura-Lucrecia, without a shred of compassion or concern for him, was looking at the mulatta (serenely stretching on the bed) with curiosity, a pleased little smile floating across her face.

“So that’s what you like in men, Estrella?” she asked.

The mulatta nodded.

“It’s the only thing I do like,” she stated more precisely, panting and exhaling a dense, vegetal breath. “The rest they can stick where the sun never shines. Usually I hold back, I hide it because of what people might say. But tonight I let myself go. I’ve never seen ears and a nose like the ones on your man. You two made me feel right at home, sweetie.”

She looked Lucrecia up and down with the eyes of a connoisseur and seemed to approve. She extended one of her hands and placed her index finger on the left nipple—Don Rigoberto thought he could see the small wrinkled button harden—of Rosaura-Lucrecia and said, with a little laugh, “I knew you were a woman when we were dancing in the club. I could feel your tits, and I saw you didn’t know how to lead. I led you, not the other way around.”

“You hid it very well. I thought we had you fooled,” Doña Lucrecia congratulated her.

Still rubbing his well-caressed nose and offended ears, Don Rigoberto felt a new wave of admiration for his wife. How versatile and adaptable she could be! It was the first time in her life that Lucrecia was doing things like this—dressing like a man, visiting a tarts’ dive in a foreign country, going to a cheap hotel with a whore—and yet she did not show the slightest discomfort, unease, or annoyance. There she was, chatting so familiarly with the otolaryngological mulatta, as if they were equals who shared the same background and profession. They looked like two good friends gossiping during a break in their busy day. And how beautiful, how desirable she seemed! In order to savor the sight of his naked wife in the oily half-light, next to Estrella on the wretched bed with the blue spread, Don Rigoberto closed his eyes. She was lying on her side, her face resting on her left hand, in a state of abandon that highlighted the delicate spontaneity of her posture. Her skin looked much whiter in the dim light, her short hair blacker, the bush of pubic hair tinted with blue. And as he amorously followed the gentle meanders of her thighs and back, scaled her buttocks, breasts, and shoulders, Don Rigoberto began to forget his afflicted ears, his abused nose, as well as Estrella, the cheap little hotel where they had taken refuge, and Mexico City: Lucrecia’s body was colonizing his mind, displacing, eliminating every other image, consideration, or preoccupation.

Rosaura-Lucrecia and Estrella did not seem to notice—or, perhaps, they attributed no importance to it—when he mechanically began to remove his tie, jacket, shirt, shoes, socks, trousers, and shorts, tossing them onto the cracked green linoleum. Or even when he knelt at the foot of the bed and started to run his hands along his wife’s legs and kiss them deferentially. They were involved in their confidences and gossip, indifferent to him, as if they did not see him, as if he were a phantom.

I am, he thought, opening his eyes. His excitement remained, beating him about the legs without much conviction, without a shred of joy or decisiveness, like a rusted clapper striking an old bell made dissonant by time and routine in the little church with no parishioners.

And then memory brought back the profound displeasure—the bad taste in his mouth, really—caused in him by the sycophantic ending, so abjectly subservient to principles of authority and the immorality of reasons of state, in that work by Calderón de la Barca: the soldier who initiated the uprising against King Basilio, thanks to which Prince Segismundo comes to occupy the Polish throne, is condemned by the new, ignoble, ungrateful king to rot away for the rest of his life in the same tower where Segismundo had suffered, with the argument that—his notebook reproduced the ghastly lines—“the traitor is not needed once the treason is complete.”

A horrendous philosophy, a repugnant morality, he reflected, temporarily forgetting his beautiful naked wife, though he continued to caress her mechanically. The prince pardons Basilio and Clotaldo, his oppressors and torturers, and punishes the valiant anonymous soldier who incited the troops against the unjust ruler, freed Segismundo from his cave, and made him monarch because, more than anything else, it was necessary to defend obedience to established authority, to condemn the principle, the very notion, of rebellion against the sovereign. It was disgusting!

Did a work poisoned by an inhuman doctrine so opposed to freedom deserve to occupy and nourish his dreams, to populate his desires? And yet there had to be some reason why, on this particular night, these phantoms had taken full, exclusive possession of his dreaming. Again he looked through his notebooks, searching for an explanation.

Old Clotaldo called the pistol a “viper of metal,” and the disguised Rosaura asked herself “if sight does not suffer deceptions that fantasy creates/in the fainthearted light still left to day.” Don Rigoberto looked toward the sea. There, in the distance, on the line of the horizon, a fainthearted light announced the new day, the light that each morning violently destroyed the small world of illusion and shadows where he was happy (happy? No, where he was merely a little less unfortunate) and returned him to the prison routine he followed five days a week (shower, breakfast, office, lunch, office, dinner) with barely an opening for his inventions to seep through. A note in the margin—it said, “Lucrecia”—had an arrow pointing at some brief verses written on the page: “…joining/the costly finery of Diana, the armor/of Pallas.” The huntress and the warrior, combined in his beloved Lucrecia. Why not? But this evidently was not what had embedded the story of Prince Segismundo in the depths of his unconscious and materialized it in tonight’s fantasies. What, then?

“It cannot be that so many things/are contained within a single dream,” the Prince had said in amazement. “You are an idiot,” replied Don Rigoberto. “A single dream can contain all of life.” It moved him that Segismundo, transported under the effects of the drug from his prison to the palace, and asked what, in his return to the world, had made the greatest impression on him, should reply: “Nothing has surprised me,/for all was foreseen; but if one thing/in the world were to amaze, it would be/the beauty of women.” And he hadn’t even seen Lucrecia, he thought. He could see her now, splendid, supernatural, flowing across that blue spread, delicately purring as the tickling lips of her amorous husband kissed her underarms. The amiable Estrella had moved away, ceding to Don Rigoberto her place next to Rosaura-Lucrecia, sitting at the corner of the bed previously occupied by Don Rigoberto when she had labored so enthusiastically over his ears and nose. Discreet, motionless, not wanting to distract or interrupt them, she observed with sympathetic curiosity as they embraced, entwined, and began to make love.

“It’s a lie,” he said aloud, slamming the desk in his study. Life was not a dream, dreams were a feeble lie, a fleeting deception that provided only temporary escape from frustration and solitude in order that we might better appreciate, with more painful bitterness, the beauty and substantiality of real life, the life we ate, touched, drank, the rich life so superior to the simulacrum indulged in by conjured desire and fantasy. Devastated by anguish—day had come, the light of dawn revealed gray cliffs, a leaden sea, fat-bellied clouds, crumbling brickwork, a leprous pavement—he clung desperately to Lucrecia-Rosaura’s body, using these last few seconds to achieve an impossible pleasure, with the grotesque foreboding that at any moment, perhaps at the moment of ecstasy, he would feel the impetuous hands of the mulatta landing on his ears.

The Viper and the Lamprey

Thinking of you, I have read
The Perfect Wife
by Fray Luis de Leon, and understand, given the idea of matrimony he preached, why this fine poet preferred abstinence and an Augustinian habit to the nuptial bed. And yet, in those pages of good prose abounding in unintentional humor, I found this quotation from the blessed Saint Basil that fits like a glove on the ivory hand of can you guess which exceptional woman, model wife, and sorely missed lover?

The viper, an exceptionally fierce animal among serpents, diligently goes to wed the marine lamprey; having arrived, he whistles, as if signaling that he is there, thus calling her from the sea in order to engage her in conjugal embrace. The lamprey obeys, and with no fear couples with the venomous beast. What do I mean by this? What? That no matter how violent the husband, how savage his habits, the woman must endure, must not consent for any reason to be divided from him. Oh! He is a tyrant? But he is your husband! A drunkard? But the bonds of matrimony made you one with him. A harsh man, an unpleasant man! But your member, your principal member. And, so that the husband may also hear what he must: the viper, respectful of their coupling, sets aside his venom, and will you not abandon the inhuman cruelty of your nature in order to honor your marriage? This is from Basil
.

—Fray Luis de Leon, The Perfect Wife, Chapter III

Conjugally embrace this viper, dearly beloved lamprey.

A Happy Family

“The picnic wasn’t so disastrous after all,” said Don Rigoberto with a broad smile. “And it taught us a lesson: there’s no place like home. Especially if no place is the countryside.”

Doña Lucrecia and Fonchito applauded his witticism, and even Justiniana, who at that moment was bringing in the sandwiches—chicken, and avocado-with-egg-and-tomato—to which their lunch had been reduced because of the frustrated picnic, also burst into laughter.

“Now, my dear, I know what it means to think positively,” Doña Lucrecia congratulated him. “And to have constructive attitudes in the face of adversity.”

“And to make the best of a bad situation,” Fonchito said conclusively. “Bravo, Papá!”

“The fact is that nothing and nobody can cloud my happiness today.” Don Rigoberto nodded, contemplating the sandwiches. “Certainly not a miserable picnic. Not even an atomic bomb could make a dent. Well, cheers.”

With visible pleasure he drank some cold beer and took a bite of his chicken sandwich. The Chaclacayo sun had burned his forehead, face, and arms, which were reddened by its rays. He did seem very content, enjoying the improvised lunch. It had been his idea, the night before, for the entire family to have a Sunday picnic at Chaclacayo, to escape the fog and damp of Lima and enjoy good weather, in touch with nature, on the banks of the river. The idea surprised Doña Lucrecia, for she recalled the holy horror everything rural had always inspired in him, but she willingly agreed. Weren’t they beginning a second honeymoon? They would begin new habits too. That morning they left at nine—as planned—furnished with a good supply of drinks and a complete lunch, prepared by the cook, that included blancmange with crepes, Don Rigoberto’s favorite dessert.

The first thing to go wrong was the highway in the center of town; it was so crowded that they made very slow progress, when they could move at all, surrounded by trucks, buses, and all kinds of shabby vehicles that not only clogged the highway and brought traffic to a standstill for long periods of time but also belched out of their exhausts a thick black smoke and a stink of burning gasoline that made them dizzy. They were exhausted and flushed when they finally reached Chaclacayo after twelve o’clock.

Finding a clear space near the river turned out to be more difficult than they had imagined. Before taking the secondary road that would bring them close to the banks of the Rímac—as opposed to its appearance in Lima, out here it seemed a real river, broad and full, the water foaming and forming playful little waves when it ran into stones and rocky places—they had to make turn after turn that always brought them back to the damned highway. When, with the help of a kindly Chaclacayan, they found a turnoff that led down to the river, things got worse, not better. In that spot the Rimac was used as a garbage dump (as well as a urinal and outhouse) by local residents, who had tossed every imaginable kind of trash there—from papers and empty cans and bottles to rotting food, excrement, and dead animals—so that in addition to the depressing view, the place was tainted by an unbearable stench. Swarms of aggressive flies obliged them to cover their mouths with their hands. None of this appeared to conform to the pastoral expedition anticipated by Don Rigoberto. He, however, armed with unassailable patience and a crusader’s optimism that astounded his wife and son, persuaded his family not to let themselves be disheartened by difficult circumstances. They continued their search.

After some time, when it seemed they had found a more hospitable spot—that is, one free of foul smells and garbage—it was already taken by countless family groups who sat under beach umbrellas, ate pasta smeared with red sauces, and played tropical music at full volume on portable radios and cassette players. Don Rigoberto held sole responsibility for their next mistake, though his motive was sound: to find a little privacy and move away from the crowd of pasta eaters, who apparently could not conceive of leaving the city for a few hours without bringing along noise, that urban product
par excellence
. Don Rigoberto thought he had found the solution. As if he were a Boy Scout, he proposed that they take off their shoes, roll up their trousers, and wade a small stretch of river out to what looked like a tiny island of sand, rock, and sparse undergrowth which, by some miracle, was not overrun by the large Sunday collectivity. And that is what they did. Rather, that is what they began to do, carrying the bags of food and drink prepared by the cook for their rustic outing. Just a few meters from the idyllic little island, Don Rigoberto—the water came only to his knees, and until this point they had followed their route without incident—slipped on something cartilaginous. He lost his balance and sat down in the cool waters of the Rímac River, which, in and of itself, would have been of no importance considering the hot weather and how much he was perspiring if, at the same time, the picnic basket had not also gone down and, adding a comic touch to the accident, had not scattered everything it contained before coming to rest on the riverbed, strewing spicy ceviche, rice and duck, and crêpes with blancmange, along with the exquisite red-and-white-checkered cloth and napkins selected by Doña Lucrecia for the picnic, all across the turbulent waters that were already carrying them away toward Lima and the Pacific.

“Just go ahead and laugh, don’t hold back, I won’t be angry,” said Don Rigoberto to his wife and son, who, as they helped him to his feet, were making grotesque faces in an effort to suppress their howls of laughter. The people on shore, seeing him soaked from head to toe, were laughing too.

Inclined toward heroism (for the first time in his life?), Don Rigoberto suggested they persevere and stay on, claiming that the Chaclacayo sun would dry him before they knew it. Doña Lucrecia was categorical. That she would not do, he could catch pneumonia, they were going back to Lima. And they did, defeated, but not despairing. And laughing affectionately at poor Don Rigoberto, who had taken off his trousers and drove in his shorts. It was almost five when they reached the house in Barranco. While Don Rigoberto showered and changed, Doña Lucrecia, with the help of Justiniana, who had just returned from her day off—the butler and cook would not be back until later that night—prepared chicken and avocado-with-tomato-and-egg sandwiches for their belated and eventful lunch.

“Since you made up with my stepmamá you’ve become so good, Papá.”

Don Rigoberto moved the half-eaten sandwich away from his mouth. He grew thoughtful. “Are you serious?”

“Very serious,” the boy replied, turning toward Doña Lucrecia. “Isn’t it true, Stepmamá? For two days he hasn’t grumbled or complained about anything, he’s always in a good mood and saying nice things. Isn’t that being good?”

“It’s only been two days,” Doña Lucrecia said with a laugh. But then, becoming serious and looking tenderly at her husband, she added, “In fact, he always was very good. It’s just taken you a while to realize it, Fonchito.”

“I don’t know if I like being called good,” Don Rigoberto reacted at last, his expression apprehensive. “All the good people I’ve known were pretty imbecilic. As if they were good because they lacked imagination and desire. I hope I’m not becoming more of an imbecile than I already am simply because I feel happy.”

“No danger of that.” Señora Lucrecia put her face close to her husband’s and kissed him on the forehead. “You may be everything else in the world, but not that.”

She looked very beautiful, her cheeks colored by the Chaclacayo sun, her shoulders and arms bare in a light dress of flowered percale that gave her a fresh, healthy air. How lovely, how youthful, thought Don Rigoberto, delighting in his wife’s slender throat and the charming curve of one of her ears where a stray lock of hair curled, having escaped the ribbon—the same yellow as the espadrilles she had worn on the outing—that held her hair at the nape of her neck. Eleven years had gone by, and she looked younger and more attractive than on the day he met her. And this health and physical beauty that defied time, where were they best reflected? “In her eyes,” he answered his own question. Eyes that changed color from pale gray to dark green to soft black. Now they looked very light under her long, dark lashes, and animated by a merry, almost flashing sparkle. Unaware that she was the object of contemplation, his wife ate her second avocado-with-egg-and-tomato sandwich with good appetite, and from time to time took sips of cold beer that left her lips wet. Was it happiness, this feeling that overwhelmed him? This grateful admiration and desire he felt for Lucrecia? Yes. Don Rigoberto wished with all his heart that the hours till nightfall would fly by. Once again they would be alone and he would hold in his arms his adored wife, here, in flesh and blood, at last.

“The only thing that sometimes makes me think I’m not so similar to Egon Schiele is that he liked the country a lot, and I don’t at all,” said Fonchito, speaking a thought he’d begun to turn over in his mind some time before. “I’m a lot like you that way, Papá. I don’t like seeing trees and cows either.”

“That’s why our picnic turned out topsy-turvy,” Don Rigoberto philosophized. “Nature’s revenge against two of her enemies. What did you say about Egon Schiele?”

“I said that the only way I don’t resemble him is that he liked the country and I don’t,” Fonchito explained. “He paid a price for loving nature. They arrested him and put him in prison for a month, and he nearly lost his mind. If he had stayed in Vienna, it never would have happened.”

“You’re very well informed about the life of Egon Schiele, Fonchito,” Don Rigoberto said in surprise.

“You can’t imagine,” Doña Lucrecia interjected. “He knows by heart everything he did, said, wrote, everything that happened to him in his twenty-eight years. He knows all the paintings, drawings, engravings, their titles and dates too. He even thinks he’s the reincarnation of Egon Schiele. I swear, it frightens me.”

Don Rigoberto did not laugh. He nodded, as if pondering this information with the greatest care, but, in fact, he was concealing the sudden appearance in his mind of a tiny worm, the stupid curiosity that was the mother of all vices. How did Lucrecia know that Fonchito knew so much about Egon Schiele? Schiele! he thought. A perverse variant of Expressionism whom Oskar Kokoschka rightly called a pornographer. He found himself possessed by a visceral, biting, bilious hatred for Egon Schiele. Blessed be the Spanish influenza that carried him off. How did Lucrecia know that Fonchito thought he was this misbegotten hack spawned in the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that, just as fortunately, had been carried off by deceit? Worst of all, unaware she was sinking into the fetid waters of self-incrimination, Doña Lucrecia continued to torture him.

“I’m glad the subject has come up, Rigoberto. I’ve wanted to talk to you about this for a long time; I even thought of writing to you. The boy’s mania for that painter has me very worried. Yes, Fonchito. Why don’t the three of us talk it over? Who can give you better advice than your father? I’ve already said it several times. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your passion for Egon Schiele. But it’s becoming an obsession. You don’t mind if the three of us discuss it, do you?”

“I don’t think my papá’s feeling very well, Stepmamá” was all that Fonchito would say, with an innocence that Don Rigoberto took as a further affront.

“My God, how pale you are. You see? I told you so. That little dip in the river has made you sick.”

“It’s nothing, nothing,” Don Rigoberto vaguely reassured his wife in a strangled voice. “Too big a mouthful and I choked. A bone, I think. It’s gone down, I’m all right now. I’m fine, don’t worry.”

“But you’re trembling,” Doña Lucrecia said in alarm, touching his forehead. “You’ve caught a cold, I knew it. A nice hot cup of tea and a couple of aspirin, right now. I’ll get it for you. No, don’t say anything. And straight to bed, no arguments.”

Not even the word “bed” could raise Don Rigoberto’s spirits, for in just a few minutes his mood had changed from vital joy and enthusiasm to bewildered demoralization. He saw Doña Lucrecia hurrying to the kitchen. Fonchito’s transparent glance made him uneasy, and to break the silence he said, “Schiele was arrested because he went to the country?”

“Not because he went to the country, what an idea,” his son said, bursting into laughter. “Because he was accused of immorality and seduction. In a little village called Neulengbach. It never would have happened if he had stayed in Vienna.”

“Really? Tell me about it,” Don Rigoberto urged, aware that he was trying to gain time, though he didn’t know for what. Instead of the glorious, sunny splendor of the past two days, his state of mind was now a disastrous storm with heavy rain, thunder, lightning. Calling on a remedy that had worked on other occasions, he tried to calm himself by mentally listing mythological figures. Cyclops, sirens, Lestrigons, lotus-eaters, Circes, Calypsos. He got no further.

It happened in the spring of 1912, in the month of April, to be exact, the boy rambled on. Egon and his lover Wally (a nickname: her real name was Valeria Neuzil) were out in the country, in a rented cottage on the outskirts of the village whose name was so difficult to pronounce. Neulengbach. Egon would frequently paint outdoors, taking advantage of the good weather. And one afternoon a young girl appeared and struck up a conversation with him. They talked, that was all. The girl returned several times. Until one stormy night, when she showed up soaking wet and announced to Wally and Egon that she had run away from home. They tried to change her mind, you’ve done a bad thing, go home, but she said no, no, let me at least spend the night with you. They agreed. The girl slept with Wally; Egon Schiele was in another room. The next day…But the return of Doña Lucrecia, carrying a steaming infusion of lemon verbena and two aspirin, interrupted Fonchito’s story, which, as a matter of fact, Don Rigoberto had barely heard.

“Drink it all up while it’s nice and hot,” Doña Lucrecia pampered him. “And take the two aspirin. Then beddy-byes. I don’t want you to catch a cold, baby.”

Don Rigoberto felt—his great nostrils inhaled the garden fragrance of the lemon verbena—his wife’s lips resting for a few moments on the sparse hairs at the top of his skull.