"When something is eating away at you inside, it's a good idea to talk about it," Doña Lucrecia proposed. "Don't you trust me? Tell me what's wrong, perhaps I can help you."
The startled boy looked into her eyes. He was blinking and seemed about to burst into tears. His temples were throbbing and Doña Lucrecia could see the fine blue veins in his neck.
"Well, it's just that I've been thinking," he said at last. He looked away and fell silent, having second thoughts about what he was going to say.
"About what, Fonchito? Go on, tell me. Why are you so worried about those two? Who are Adolf and Marie?"
"Egon Schiele's folks," said the boy, as if he were speaking about a classmate. "But it's not Señor Adolf I'm worried about, it's my papá."
"Rigoberto?"
"I don't want my papá to end up like him." The boyish face grew even more somber, and he made a strange gesture with his hand, as if he were frightening away a ghost. "It scares me and I don't know what to do. I didn't want to worry you. You still love my papá, don't you, Stepmamá?"
"Of course I do," she agreed, disconcerted. "I'm really confused now, Fonchito. What does Rigoberto have to do with the father of a painter who died on the other side of the world half a century ago?"
At first she had found it amusing and very typical of him, this strange game, this passion for the pictures and life of Egon Schiele, studying them, learning about them, identifying with the painter until he believed, or claimed to believe, he was the reincarnation of Egon Schiele, and like him would also die tragically, after a brief, brilliant career, at the age of twenty-eight. But now the game had gone too far.
"His father's fate is being repeated in my papá," Fonchito stammered, swallowing hard. "I don't want him to go crazy with syphilis like Señor Adolf, Stepmamá."
"But that's so foolish," she tried to reassure him. "First of all, lives aren't inherited or repeated. Where'd you ever get a silly idea like that?"
The boy's face contorted, and incapable of controlling himself, he burst into tears, his thin body shaken by sobs. Señora Lucrecia leaped from her chair, sat beside him on the carpet in the dining alcove, put her arms around him, kissed his hair and forehead, dried his tears with her handkerchief, and had him blow his nose. Fonchito held her tight. His chest heaved with deep sighs, and Doña Lucrecia felt his heart pounding.
"Calm down now, it's all right, don't cry, that's nothing but nonsense." She was smoothing his hair, kissing his hair. "Rigoberto is the healthiest, most sensible man I've ever known."
Egon Schiele's father was syphilitic and had died insane? Her curiosity piqued by Fonchito's constant allusions, Doña Lucrecia had gone to The Green House bookshop, just a few steps from her house, to learn more about Schiele, but she found no monographs, only a history of Expressionism that devoted no more than a chapter to him. She did not recall any mention at all of his family. The boy nodded, his lips pursed, his eyes half-closed. From time to time a shudder ran down his spine. But he was calmer, and without moving away, huddling against her, happy, one might almost say, to be sheltered in Doña Lucrecia's arms, he began to speak. Didn't she know the story of Señor Adolf Schiele? No, she didn't know it; she hadn't been able to find a biography of the painter. But Fonchito had read several in his papá's library and consulted the encyclopedia. A terrible story, Stepmamá. They said if you didn't know about Señor Adolf Schiele and Señora Marie Soukup, you couldn't understand Egon. Because their story hid the secret of his painting.
"All right, all right," said Doña Lucrecia, trying to depersonalize the subject. "Then what's the secret of his painting?"
"His papá's syphilis," replied the boy, with no hesitation. "The madness of poor Señor Adolf Schiele."
Biting her lip, Doña Lucrecia contained her laughter, not wishing to hurt the boy. She seemed to hear Dr. Rubio, an acquaintance of Don Rigoberto's who was an analyst, and very popular with her women friends ever since he began to undress during sessions—citing the example of Wilhelm Reich—in order to better interpret the dreams of his female patients. He would always say things like that at cocktail parties, and with the same conviction.
"But, Fonchito," she said, blowing on his forehead, for it gleamed with perspiration, "do you even know what syphilis is?"
"A venereal disease; that means it comes from Venus, the goddess of something or other," the boy confessed with disarming sincerity. "I couldn't find her in the dictionary. But I know where Señor Adolf caught it. Shall I tell you what happened?"
"Only if you calm down. And stop torturing yourself with absurd fantasies. You're not Egon Schiele and Rigoberto has nothing to do with his father, you silly goose."
The boy made no promises, he did not respond at all. For a time he remained silent, within her protective arms, his head resting on his stepmother's shoulder. When he began to tell her the story, he supplied a quantity of dates and details, as if he had been a witness to the events he was narrating. Or a protagonist, for he spoke with all the emotion of one who had experienced them personally. As if he had not been born in Lima at the end of the twentieth century but were Egon Schiele, a lad from the last generation of Austro-Hungarian subjects, the generation that would see the so-called Belle Epoque vanish in the catastrophe of the First World War, along with the Empire, that brilliant society—cosmopolitan, literary, musical, and artistic—which Rigoberto loved so dearly and about which he had instructed Doña Lucrecia so patiently during the early years of their marriage. (Now Fonchito was giving the lessons.) The generation of Mahler, Schoenberg, Freud, Klimt, Schiele. In the alarming account, and setting aside anachronisms and a certain childishness, a story was beginning to take shape. A village called Tulln, on the banks of the Danube, in the outskirts of Vienna (twenty-five kilometers away, he said), and the wedding, in the final years of the century, of the imperial railway official Adolf Eugen Schiele, a Protestant of German origin, just turned twenty-six, and Marie Soukup, a Catholic adolescent of Czech origin, seventeen years of age. A scandalous, unconventional marriage, due to the opposition of the bride's family. ("Was your family opposed to your marrying my papá?" "Not at all, they were delighted with Rigoberto.") It was a puritanical time and full of prejudices, wasn't it, Stepmamá? Yes, certainly. Why? Because Marie Soukup didn't know anything about life; she hadn't even been told how babies are made, the poor girl thought storks brought them from Paris. (His stepmamá couldn't have been that innocent when she married? No, Doña Lucrecia already knew all she had to know.) Marie was so innocent she didn't even know she was pregnant and thought her discomfort was caused by eating too many apples, which she loved. But that's getting ahead of the story. We have to go back to their honeymoon. That's where it all began.
"What happened on their honeymoon?"
"Nothing," said the boy, sitting up to blow his nose. His eyes were swollen, but he had lost his pallor and was involved, body and soul, in his story. "Marie was afraid. For the first three days she wouldn't let Señor Adolf touch her. The marriage was not consummated. What are you laughing at, Stepmamá?"
"Hearing you talk like an old man when you're still a little boy. Don't be angry, I'm very interested. All right, for the first three days of their marriage nothing, nothing at all, between Adolf and Marie."
"It's no laughing matter." Fonchito grew sad. "It's something to cry over. The honeymoon was in Trieste. In memory of their parents' trip, Egon Schiele and Gerti, his favorite sister, made an identical trip in 1906."
In Trieste, during the frustrated honeymoon, the tragedy began. Since his wife would not allow him to touch her—she would cry, kick and scratch him, make a huge scene every time he tried to get close enough to kiss her—Señor Adolf went out. Where did he go? To console himself with bad women. And in one of those places Venus infected him with syphilis. That was when the disease began to kill him, slowly. It made him lose his mind and brought misfortune to the entire family. A curse fell on the Schieles. Adolf, without realizing it, infected his wife when he was finally able to consummate the marriage, on the fourth day. And that was why Marie's first three pregnancies miscarried; and that was why Elvira died, the little girl who lived only ten short years. And that was why Egon was so weak and sickly. In fact, when he was a boy they thought he would die because he spent so much time seeing doctors. In the end, Doña Lucrecia could visualize him: a solitary child playing with his toy trains, drawing, drawing all the time in his school notebooks, in the margins of the Bible, even on pieces of papers he pulled from the trash.
"You see, you're nothing like him. You were the healthiest child in the world, according to Rigoberto. And you liked to play with planes, not trains."
Fonchito refused to joke. "Shall I finish the story or are you getting bored?"
She wasn't bored, she was enjoying it, less because of the vicissitudes of Austro-Hungarian characters at the turn of the century than for the passion with which Fonchito evoked them: trembling, moving his eyes and hands, using melodramatic inflections. The awful thing about the disease was that it came slowly and stealthily, and it brought disgrace to its victims. That was why Señor Adolf never acknowledged that he suffered from it. When his relatives advised him to see the doctor, he would protest: "I'm healthier than any of you." But he wasn't. He had begun to lose his mind. Egon loved him, they got on very well, he suffered when his father grew worse. Señor Adolf would sit down to play cards as if his friends had come for a visit, but he was all alone. He would deal the cards, chat with them, offer them cigarettes, and there was nobody sitting at the table in the house in Tulln. Marie, Melanie, and Gerti tried to make him see reality: "But, Papá, there's nobody here to talk to, to play cards with, don't you know that?" Egon would contradict them: "It's not true, Father, don't pay attention to them, here's the chief of police, the postmaster, the schoolteacher. Your friends are here with you, Father. I see them too, just like you." He didn't want to accept the fact that his father was hallucinating. Without warning Señor Adolf would put on his dress uniform, his cap with the gleaming visor, his boots shining like mirrors, and he would stand at attention on the railway platform. "What are you doing here, Father?" "I'm waiting to receive the Emperor and Empress, my son." He was completely mad. He couldn't go on working for the railway, he had to retire. The Schieles were so ashamed they moved from Tulln to a town where no one knew them: Klosterneuburg. In German it means: "new convent town." Señor Adolf grew worse, he forgot how to speak. He spent his days in his room, never saying a word. Did she see? Did she? Fonchito was suddenly overcome by an anguished agitation.
"Just like my papá," he cried, his voice breaking. "He comes home from the office and shuts himself in and doesn't talk to anybody. Not even me. Even on Saturdays and Sundays he does the same thing; the whole darn day in his study. When I try to talk to him, it's 'Yes,' 'No,' 'All right.' That's all he says."
Could he have syphilis? Was he going crazy? And for the same reason as Señor Adolf. Because he was left all alone when Señora Lucrecia went away. He went to one of those bad houses and Venus infected him. He didn't want his papá to die, Stepmamá!
He started to cry again, this time silently, to himself, covering his face, and this time it was harder for Doña Lucrecia to soothe him. She comforted him, what an absurd idea, she petted him, there was nothing wrong with Rigoberto, she cradled him, he was saner than Fonchito and her put together, she felt the tears from that rosy face dampening the bodice of her dress. After a good deal of fondling, she managed to calm him. Rigoberto liked to shut himself away with his pictures and books, with his notebooks, to read and listen to music, to write his citations and reflections. Didn't he know him yet? Hadn't he always been like that?
"No, not always." The boy denied this firmly. "Before, he used to tell me about the lives of the painters, he explained their pictures, he showed me things. And he read to me from his notebooks. With you he used to laugh, go out; he was normal. But he changed when you left. He became sad. Now he doesn't even care about my grades; he signs my report card without looking at it. The only thing he cares about is his study. He shuts himself in there for hours and hours. He'll go crazy, just like Señor Adolf. Maybe it's happened already."
The boy had thrown his arms around her neck and was resting his head on his stepmother's shoulder. In the Olivar there were children calling and playing as they did every afternoon when the schools let out and the boys from the area flocked to the park from countless street corners to smoke, hiding from their parents, and kick the ball, and flirt with the neighborhood girls. Why didn't Fonchito ever do those things?
"Do you still love my papá, Stepmamá?" The same question, this time full of apprehension, as if someone's life or death depended on her answer.
"I've already told you, Fonchito. I never stopped loving him. What's that have to do with anything?"
"He's the way he is because he misses you. Because he loves you, Stepmamá, and he hasn't gotten over your not living with us anymore."
"Things happened the way they happened." Doña Lucrecia struggled against a growing uneasiness.
"You're not thinking about getting married again, are you, Stepmamá?" the boy suggested timidly.
"The last thing I would ever do in this life is get married again. Never, never. Besides, Rigoberto and I aren't even divorced, we're only separated."
"Then you can make up," Fonchito exclaimed with relief. "When people fight, they can make up. I fight and make up every day with the kids at school. You could come back, Justita too. Everything would be the way it was before."
"And we could cure your papá's craziness," Doña Lucrecia thought. She was annoyed. Fonchito's fantasies no longer amused her. Wordless anger, bitterness, rancor overwhelmed her as her mind dusted off unpleasant memories. She took the boy by the shoulders and moved him away. She observed him, their faces close, indignant that those blue eyes, swollen and red, so innocently withstood her reproachful look. Could he really be so cynical? He wasn't even an adolescent yet. How could he talk about the break between her and Rigoberto as if it were not his affair, as if he had not been the cause of everything? Hadn't he arranged for Rigoberto to find out the whole story? His tear-streaked face, his artfully drawn features, pink lips, curly eyelashes, small firm chin, looked at her with virginal innocence.
"You know better than anyone what happened," said Señora Lucrecia between clenched teeth, trying to keep her indignation from exploding. "You know very well why we separated. Don't pretend to be a good little boy who feels bad about that separation. You were as much to blame as me, maybe even more."
"That's exactly why, Stepmamá," Fonchito interrupted. "I made you fight, and that's why it's up to me to make you friends again. But you have to help me. You will, won't you? Say you will, Stepmamá."
Doña Lucrecia did not know how to answer; she wanted to slap him and kiss him at the same time. Her cheeks were hot. And to make matters worse, that impudent Fonchito, in an abrupt change of mood, seemed happy now. Suddenly he began to laugh.
"You're all red," he said, throwing his arms around her neck again. "Then the answer's yes. I love you so much, Stepmamá!"
"First you cry and now you're laughing," said Justiniana, appearing in the hallway. "Just what is going on here?"
"We have wonderful news," said the boy by way of greeting. "Shall we tell her, Stepmamá?"
"You're the one who has a screw loose, not Rigoberto," said Doña Lucrecia, hiding her embarrassment.
"Venus must have infected me with syphilis too." Fonchito laughed, looking away. And, in the same tone, he said to the girl, "My papá and my Stepmamá are going to make up, Justita! What do you think of that?"
Diatribe against the Sportsman
I understand that in summer you surf the rough waves of the Pacific and spend the winters skiing down the Chilean trails at Portillo, the Argentine trails at Bariloche (since the Peruvian Andes do not permit such affectations), that you sweat every morning doing aerobic exercises at the gym, or running around athletic tracks or parks or streets, encased in a thermal suit that squeezes your ass and belly like the old-fashioned corsets that asphyxiated our grandmothers, that you never miss a soccer game or the classic encounter between Alianza Lima and Universitario de Deportes or a boxing match for the South American, Latin American, North American, European, or World title, and that on these occasions, glued to the television set and making the show even more agreeable with beer, cuba libres, or whiskey on the rocks, you yell at the top of your lungs, turn red in the face, howl, wave your arms, or become depressed with every triumph or failure of your idols, as befits a loyal sports fan. More than enough reasons, Señor, to confirm my worst suspicions regarding the world in which we live, and to classify you as a brainless, mentally defective shithead. (I use the first and third terms as metaphors; the second is to be taken literally.)
Yes, it's true, in your atrophied intellect a light has come on: I consider the practice of sports in general, and the cult of sports in particular, as radical forms of the imbecility that brings human beings close to sheep, geese, and ants, three extreme examples of animal gregariousness. Control your wrestler's impulse to tear me to pieces and listen; in a moment we'll talk about the Greeks and the hypocritical mens sana in corpore sano. First, I should tell you that the only sports I do not find ridiculous are those of the table (excluding Ping-Pong) and the bed (including, of course, masturbation). As for the rest, contemporary culture has transformed them into obstacles to the development of spirit, sensibility, and imagination (and, consequently, of pleasure). And above all, of consciousness and individual freedom. In our time nothing, not even ideology and religion, has contributed so much to the rise of contemptible mass-man, a robot full of conditioned reflexes, or to the resurrection of the culture of the tattooed primate in a loincloth which lies concealed behind the façade of modernity, as the glorification of physical exercise and games by our society.
Now we can speak of the Greeks, so you won't pester me anymore about Plato and Aristotle. But I warn you, the spectacle of young Athenian boys smearing themselves with oils in the gymnasium before testing their physical dexterity, or hurling the discus and the javelin beneath the pure blue of the Aegean sky, will be of no help to you but will force you deeper into ignominy, you, a buffoon whose muscles have been hardened at the expense of a lowered testosterone level and a plummeting IQ. Only blows to the head with a soccer ball or the punches received in the boxing ring or the mind-numbing turn of the cyclist's wheels and the premature senile dementia (in addition to sexual dysfunction, incontinence, and impotence?) which they tend to provoke can explain the attempt to establish a direct line between the tunicked youths of Plato anointing themselves with resins after their sensual and philosophical physical displays and the drunken hordes roaring in the stands of modern stadiums (before setting them on fire) at contemporary soccer games, in which twenty-two clowns, depersonalized by garishly colored uniforms and running wildly after a ball on a grassy rectangle, serve as the pretext for exhibitions of collective insanity.
In Plato's day, sport was a means, not the end it has become in these municipalized times. It served to enrich human pleasure (masculine pleasure, since women did not engage in sports), stimulating and prolonging it with the representation of a beautiful, smooth, oiled, well-proportioned, harmonious body, inciting it with pre-erotic calisthenics and certain movements, postures, frictions, bodily exhibitions, exercises, dances, touches, inflaming desire until participants and spectators were catapulted into coupling. That these encounters were eminently homosexual neither adds to nor subtracts from my argument, nor does the fact that in the sexual realm Yours Truly is boringly orthodox and loves only women—indeed, only one woman—and is totally disinterested in active or passive pederasty. Understand me, I have no objections at all to what gays do. I am delighted that they enjoy themselves, and I support their campaigns against discriminatory laws. Beyond that I cannot go, for very practical reasons. Nothing related to what Quevedo called the "eye of the ass" gives me pleasure. Nature, or God, if He exists and wastes His time on these matters, has made that concealed aperture the most sensitive of all the orifices that pierce my body. Suppositories wound it, and the tip of the enema syringe makes it bleed (once, during a period of stubborn constipation, one was forced into me, and it was terrible), and so the idea that certain bipeds enjoy having a virile member inserted there fills me with horrified amazement. I am certain, in my case, that along with howls and screams, I would experience a true psychosomatic cataclysm if that aforementioned opening were to be penetrated by an erect penis, even if it were a Pygmy's. The only punch I ever threw in my life was aimed at a physician who, without warning and on the pretext of determining if I had appendicitis, attempted to commit upon my person a form of torture disguised by the scientific label "rectal examination." Despite this, I am theoretically in favor of human beings making love inside out, upside down, alone or in couples or in promiscuous collective (ugh!) matings in which men copulate with men, and women with women, and both with ducks, dogs, watermelons, bananas, cantaloupes, and every imaginable disgusting thing if it makes them agreeable to the pursuit of pleasure, not reproduction, an accident of sex which one must accept as a minor inconvenience but in no way sanctify as the justification for carnal joy (this imbecility on the part of the Church exasperates me as much as a basketball game). But I digress: the image of aging Hellenes, wise philosophers, august legislators, battle-scarred generals, or high priests frequenting gymnasiums in order to revive their libidos with the sight of youthful discus throwers, wrestlers, marathon runners, or javelin hurlers—that image moves me. The kind of sport that panders to desire I condone and would not hesitate to engage in if my health, age, sense of the ridiculous, and leisure time were to permit it.
There is another instance, even further removed from our cultural environment (I don't know why I include you in this fraternity since, as a result of soccer's kicks and blows to the head, cycling's sweaty exertions, karate's throws to the ground, you have been excluded from it), when sport also has an excuse. And that is when a human being, by engaging in it, transcends his animal nature, touches the sacred, and rises to a plane of intense spirituality. If you insist on our using the dangerous word "mystic," then so be it. Obviously such cases, by this time extremely rare—an exotic reminiscence is the warlike sacrifice of the Japanese sumo wrestler, fed from childhood on a fierce vegetarian diet that elephantizes him and condemns him to die, his heart bursting, before the age of forty, and to spend his life trying not to be expelled by another mountain of flesh exactly like him from the small magic circle to which his life is confined—cannot be compared to those idols of the mob that post-industrial society calls "martyrs to sport." Where is the heroism in being turned to mush at the wheel of a racing car propelled by motors that do all the work for humans, in regressing from a thinking being to a mental defective with brains and testicles mangled by the practice of intercepting goals or striving to achieve them, just so that maddened crowds can be desexed by ejaculations of collective egotism at each point scored? For contemporary man, the physical exercises and skills called sports bring him no closer to the sacred and the religious; they distance him from the spirit, and brutalize him by catering to his most ignoble instincts: tribalism, machismo, the will to dominate, the dissolution of the individual ego in an amorphous gregariousness.
I know of no lie more base than the phrase taught to children: "A sound mind in a sound body." Who ever said that a sound mind is a desirable goal? In this case, "sound" means stupid, conventional, unimaginative, and unmischievous, the vulgar stereotype of established morality and official religion. Is that a "sound" mind? It is the mind of a conformist, a pious old woman, a notary, an insurance salesman, an altar boy, a virgin, a Boy Scout. That is not health, it is an impairment. A rich, independent mental life demands curiosity, mischief, fantasy, and unsatisfied desires, which is to say a "dirty" mind, evil thoughts, and the blossoming of forbidden images and appetites that stimulate exploration of the unknown, renovation of the known, and systematic disrespect toward received ideas, common knowledge, and current values.
Furthermore, it is not even true that engaging in sports in our day creates sound minds in the banal sense of the word. Just the opposite occurs, and you know that better than anyone, for in order to win the hundred-meter dash on Sunday you would put arsenic and cyanide in your competitor's soup, swallow every vegetable, chemical, or magical drug to guarantee your victory, corrupt or blackmail the judges, devise medical or legal schemes to disqualify your rivals, and live hounded by your neurotic fixation on the victory, the record, the medal, the dais; this has turned you, the professional sportsman, into an artificial creation of the media, an antisocial, nervous, hysterical psychopath, the polar opposite of that sociable, generous, altruistic, "healthy" individual to which imbeciles wish to allude when they still dare to use the expression "sportsmanship" in the sense of a noble athlete filled with civic virtues, when, in fact, what lurks behind the phrase is a potential assassin willing to kill referees, murder all the fans of the other team, devastate the stadiums and cities that house them, and bring about the final apocalypse, not for the high artistic purpose that led to the burning of Rome by the poet Nero, but so that his club can win a fake silver cup or he can see his eleven idols carried to a rostrum, flagrantly ridiculous in their shorts and striped undershirts, their hands to their chests and their eyes shining as they sing the national anthem!
The Corsican Brothers
On that oppressive Sunday afternoon in winter, in his study that looked out on an overcast sky and dull, rat-gray sea, Don Rigoberto anxiously leafed through his notebooks searching for ideas to fire his imagination. The first one he came across, by the poet Philip Larkin, "Sex is too good to share with anyone else," reminded him of the many versions in art of the young Narcissus delighting in his own reflection in a pool, and of the recumbent hermaphrodite in the Louvre. But, inexplicably, this depressed him. On other occasions he had agreed with the philosophy that placed the responsibility for his pleasure exclusively on his own shoulders. Was it correct? Had it ever been correct? The truth was that even at its purest moments his solitude had been for two, a rendezvous that Lucrecia never failed to keep. A faint stirring in his spirit gave rise to new hope: she would not fail this time, either. Larkin's thesis corresponded perfectly to the saint (another page in the notebook) described by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians: Saint Cubert was so distrustful of women that when he spoke to any of them, even the future Saint Ebba, he spent "the following hours in darkness, in prayer, submerged in water to the neck." So many colds and bouts of pneumonia for a faith that condemned the believer to a Larkinian solitary pleasure.
As if he were walking on live coals, he hurried past a page on which Azorín recalled that "caprice is derived from capra, a she-goat." He paused, fascinated, at the description by the diplomat Alfonso de la Serna of the Farewell Symphony by Haydn, "in which each musician, as his part ended, put out the candle that lit his music stand and stole away until only one violin was left to play the final, solitary melody." Wasn't that a coincidence? Wasn't that a mysterious joining, as if following a secret order, of the solo voice of Haydn's violin with the pleasure-seeking egotist Philip Larkin, who believed that sex was too important to share?
And yet he, though he elevated sex to the highest level, had always shared it, even during this, his time of bitterest solitude. And then, out of the blue, he was reminded of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., playing double roles in the film that had so disquieted his childhood: The Corsican Brothers. Of course, he had never shared sex with anyone as deeply as he had with Lucrecia. But he had also shared it, as a child, youth, and adult, with his own Corsican brother—Narciso?—with whom he had always gotten along so well despite the differences in their natures. And yet those risqué games and deceptions devised and enjoyed by the brothers did not correspond to the ironic sense in which the poet-librarian used the verb "to share." Turning page after page, he happened upon The Merchant of Venice:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils
(Act V, Scene 1)
"The man who has no music in his soul/And is not moved by harmonies of sweet sounds/Is likely to commit intrigue, fraud, and treason," he translated freely. Narciso had no music at all, was cut off, body and soul, from the charms of Melpomene, and could not distinguish between Haydn's Farewell Symphony and Pérez Prado's "Mambo Number 5." Was Shakespeare correct in decreeing that an ear deaf to the most abstract of the arts made his brother a potential schemer, swindler, and fraud? Well, perhaps it was true. The amiable Narciso had not been a model of virtue, civic, private, or theological, and would reach an advanced age boasting, like Bishop Harold (whose citation was it? The reference had been devoured by the sibylline Limenian damp, or the labors of a moth) on his deathbed, that he had practiced all the deadly sins with the regularity of his beating heart or the ringing of church bells in his bishopric. If that had not been his moral nature, Narciso never would have dared that night to suggest to his Corsican brother—Don Rigoberto could sense in his deepest being the stirrings of the Shakespearean music which he believed he carried inside himself—the daring exchange. And so they took shape before his eyes, sitting side by side in that room in the house in La Planicie that was a monument to kitsch and a blasphemous provocation to every society for the protection of animals, bristling as it was with embalmed tigers, buffalo, rhinos, and deer—Lucrecia next to Ilse, Narciso's blond wife, on the night of their adventure. The Bard was right: a deaf ear for music was a symptom (or the cause?) of a base soul. No, one could not generalize, for then one would have to conclude that their insensitivity to music had turned Jorge Luis Borges and André Breton into Judas and Cain, when it was well known that both had been very fine people, for writers.
His brother Narciso was not a devil, merely an adventurer. Endowed with a diabolical aptitude for deriving enormous profits from his wanderlust and his taste for everything forbidden, secret, and exotic. But as he was also a mythomaniac, it was difficult to know what was true and what was fantasy in the tales of his travels with which he would hold his listeners spellbound at the (sinister) hour of gala dinners, wedding banquets, or cocktail parties, the stages for his great narrative performances. For example, Don Rigoberto had never entirely believed that he had made a good part of his fortune smuggling contraband—rhinoceros horns, leopard testicles, and the penises of walruses and seals (the first two from Africa, the last from Alaska, Greenland, and Canada)—to the prosperous nations of Asia. Body parts worth their weight in gold in Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and even Communist China, for connoisseurs considered them powerful aphrodisiacs and infallible remedies for impotence. On that night, in fact, while the Corsican brothers and the two sisters-in-law, Ilse and Lucrecia, were having an apéritif before supper in the Costa Verde restaurant, Narciso had entertained them with a wild story about aphrodisiacs (in it he was both hero and victim) that took place in Saudi Arabia, where he swore—backed up by precise geographical details and unpronounceable Arabic names full of guttural consonants—he had almost been decapitated in the public square in Riyadh when it was discovered that he had smuggled in a bag filled with Captagon tablets (acetophenetidin hydrochloride) to maintain the sexual potency of the lustful sheik Abdelaziz Abu Amid, who was fairly worn out by his four legitimate wives and the eighty-two concubines in his harem, and who paid him in gold for the shipment of amphetamines.
"And yobimbine?" asked Ilse, cutting off her husband's story just at the moment when he was appearing before a tribunal of turbaned ulemas. "Does it produce the effect they say in everybody who tries it?"
Losing no time, his handsome brother—without a trace of envy Don Rigoberto recalled how, after being indistinguishable as children and adolescents, adulthood began to differentiate between them, and now Narciso's ears seemed normal in comparison to the spectacular wings that he sported, and Narciso's straight, modest nose was no match for the corkscrew, or anteater's snout, with which he sniffed at life—launched into an erudite peroration on yohimbine (called yobimbine in Peru because of the lazy phonetic tendencies of the natives, for whom an aspirated h demanded greater buccal effort than a b). Narciso's lecture continued through their apéritifs—pisco sours for the gentlemen and cold white wine for the ladies—and the meal of shellfish and rice and crêpes with blancmange, and as far as he was concerned, it had the tingling effect of foreplay. At that moment—the caprices of chance—the notebook furnished him with the Shakespearean indication that turquoise stones change color to warn whoever is wearing them of imminent danger (again, The Merchant of Venice). Was he speaking seriously? Did he know or was he inventing knowledge in order to create the psychological climate, the amoral ambiance that would favor his subsequent proposals? He had not asked and he never would, for at this point, what did it matter?
Don Rigoberto began to laugh, and the dull gray afternoon lightened. At the bottom of the page, Valéry's Monsieur Teste boasted: "Stupidity is not my strong suit" (La bêtise n'est pas mon fort). Lucky for him; Don Rigoberto had already spent a quarter of a century at the insurance company, surrounded by, submerged in, asphyxiated by stupidity, making him a specialist in the subject. Was Narciso simply an imbecile? Another piece of Limenian protoplasm that calls itself decent and proper? Yes. Which made him no less amiable when he set his mind to it. That night, for instance. There he sat, the indefatigable raconteur, his face closely shaven and sporting the deep tan of the leisured, expounding on an alkaloid plant, also called yohimbine, that had an illustrious history in herbalist tradition and natural medicine. It increased vasodilatation and stimulated the ganglia that control erective tissue, and it inhibited serotonin, which, in excessive amounts, inhibits the sexual appetite. He had the warm voice of an experienced seducer; his voice and gestures were in perfect harmony with the blue blazer, gray shirt, and dark silk scarf with white dots that encircled his neck. His exposition, interspersed with smiles, adroitly respected the line between information and insinuation, anecdote and fantasy, knowledge and hearsay, diversion and excitation. Suddenly Don Rigoberto noticed the gleam in the sea-green eyes of Ilse, the dark topaz eyes of Lucrecia. Had his pretentious Corsican brother aroused the ladies? Judging by their giggles, jokes, questions, the crossing and uncrossing of their legs, and the gaiety with which they emptied their glasses of Chilean wine (Concha y Toro), yes, he had. Why wouldn't they experience the same stirring of the spirit as he? Did Narciso have his plan already prepared at this point in the evening? Of course, Don Rigoberto decreed.
And therefore, with great skill, he did not give them a chance to catch their breath, or allow the conversation to move away from the Machiavellian course he had laid out for it. From yobimbine he moved on to Japanese fugu, the testicular fluid of a small fish which, in addition to being an extremely powerful seminal tonic, can also cause a grisly death by poison—which is how hundreds of lascivious Japanese perish every year—and recounted the icy fear with which he had taken it, on that shimmering night in Kyoto, from the hands of a geisha in a billowing kimono, not knowing if what awaited him at the end of those opiate mouthfuls were death rattles and rigor mortis or one hundred explosions of pleasure (it was the latter, reduced by one zero). Ilse, a statuesque blonde, a former stewardess on Lufthansa, a Peruvianized Valkyrie, celebrated her husband's achievement with not a trace of retrospective jealousy. It was she who suggested (was she in on the plot?), after their floury dessert, that they conclude the evening with a drink at their house in La Planicie. Don Rigoberto said "Good idea" without a second thought, affected by the visible enthusiasm with which Lucrecia welcomed the proposal.
Half an hour later they were settled in comfortable chairs in the hideous kitsch of Narciso and Ilse's living room—Peruvian ostentation and Prussian orderliness—surrounded by dried and stuffed beasts that impassively observed them with icy glass eyes as they drank whiskey in the indirect lighting, listening to songs by Nat "King" Cole and Frank Sinatra, and contemplating the tiles in the illuminated pool through the glass doors that led to the garden. Narciso continued to display his knowledge of aphrodisiacs with all the ease of the Great Richardi—Don Rigoberto sighed as he recalled the circuses of his childhood—pulling scarves from his top hat. Combining omniscience and exoticism, Narciso asserted that in southern Italy each male consumed a ton of sweet basil in the course of his lifetime, for tradition maintains that not only the flavor of pasta but the size of the penis depends on this aromatic herb, and that in India an ointment with a base of garlic and monkey secretions was sold in the markets—he gave it to his friends when they turned fifty—and when rubbed on the proper place produced erections in succession, like the sneezes of a person suffering from allergies. He inundated them with musings on the virtues of oysters, celery, Korean ginseng, sarsaparilla, licorice, pollen, truffles, and caviar, until Don Rigoberto began to suspect, after listening to him for more than three hours, that all the animal and vegetable products in the world were probably designed to foster that joining of bodies called physical love, copulation, sin, to which human beings (himself not excluded) attached so much importance.
This was when Narciso took him by the arm and led him away from the ladies on the pretext of showing him the latest piece in his collection of walking sticks (in addition to mounted animals, what else could this priapic beast, this walking phallus, collect but walking sticks?). The pisco sours, the wine and cognac, had all had their effect. Instead of walking, Don Rigoberto seemed to float into Narciso's study, where, their pages uncut, naturally, the leatherbound volumes stood guard on the shelves: the Britannica, Ricardo Palma's Peruvian Traditions, and the Durants' History of Civilization, along with a paperback novel by Stephen King. Without any preliminaries, lowering his voice, Narciso spoke into his ear and asked if he remembered the tricks they had played on girls long ago in the boxes at the Leuro Cinema. What tricks? But before his brother could answer, he remembered. The switching game! The company lawyer would call it appropriating another person's identity. Taking advantage of their resemblance, emphasizing it with identical clothes and haircuts, each passed himself off as the other in order to kiss and fondle—it was called "making out" in their neighborhood—his brother's girlfriend for the duration of the movie.
"Those were the days, Brother." Don Rigoberto smiled, succumbing to nostalgia.
"You thought they didn't know, that they mixed us up," Narciso recalled. "I could never convince you they did it because they liked the game."
"No, they didn't know," Rigoberto asserted. "They couldn't have. The morality back then wouldn't have permitted it. Lucerito and Chinchilla? So proper, always going to Mass and taking Communion? Never! They would have told their parents."
"Your concept of women is too angelic," Narciso admonished him.
"That's what you think. The fact is, I'm just discreet, unlike you. But every moment I don't devote to the obligations of earning a living, I invest in pleasure."
(And just then the notebook presented him with an appropriate quotation from Borges: "The duty of all things is to give joy; if they do not give joy they are either useless or harmful." Don Rigoberto thought of a machista footnote: "Suppose we say women instead of things, then what?")
"We have only one life, Brother. You don't get a second chance."
"After the matinees we would run to Huatica Boulevard, to the block where the French girls lived," Don Rigoberto said dreamily. "In the days before AIDS, when all you got was a harmless bug and an easy cure."
"Those days aren't over. They're still here," Narciso declared. "We haven't died, and we're not going to die. That decision is irrevocable."
His eyes flamed and his voice was mellow. Don Rigoberto realized that nothing he was hearing was spontaneous; a scheme lurked behind the clever reminiscing.
"Would you care to tell me what you have in mind?" he asked, intrigued.
"You know very well, my dear Corsican brother." The fierce wolf brought his mouth to the great fluttering ear of Don Rigoberto. And without further maneuvering, he formulated his proposal: "The switching game. One more time. Today, right here, right now. Don't you like Ilse? I like Lucrecia, a lot. We'll do what we did with Lucerito and Chinchilla. Could there ever be jealousy between you and me? Let's be young again, Brother!"
In his Sunday solitude, Don Rigoberto's heart beat faster. With surprise, emotion, curiosity, excitement? And, as he had that night, he felt the urge to kill Narciso.
"We're too old and too different now for our wives to be taken in," he declared, drunk with astonishment.
"There's no need for them to be taken in," Narciso replied, very sure of himself. "They're modern women, they don't need excuses. Leave it to me, tiger."
I'll never, never play the switching game at my age, thought Don Rigoberto without opening his mouth. The rising intoxication of a moment ago had dissipated. Damn! Narciso certainly was a man of action. He had already taken his arm and was hurrying him back to the room with the mounted animals, where, cordially gossiping, Ilse and Lucrecia were tearing apart a mutual friend whose recent face-lift had left her with eyes that would be wide-open forever (at least until she was buried or incinerated). And was already announcing that the moment had come to open a bottle of the special reserve Dom Pérignon that he saved for special occasions.
A few minutes later they heard the foaming little explosion, and the four of them were toasting one another with that pale ambrosia. The bubbles going down his esophagus provoked in Don Rigoberto's spirit an idea associated with the topic that had been monopolized all night by his Corsican brother: had Narciso laced the joyful champagne they were drinking with one of the countless aphrodisiacs he said he smuggled and about which he claimed expertise? Because the laughter and bravado of Lucrecia and Ilse were increasing, seeming to favor bold moves, and even he, who five minutes earlier had felt paralyzed, confused, shocked, angered by the proposal—and yet had not had the courage to reject it—now viewed the idea with less indignation, as if it were one of those irresistible temptations that, in his Catholic youth, had driven him to commit the sins he would later describe so contritely in the confessional. Through wisps of smoke—was his Corsican brother the one who was smoking?—and the savage fangs of an Amazonian lion, he saw his sister-in-law's long white legs, crossed, carefully depilitated, and set off by the tigerskin rug in the living room–zoo–mortuary. Excitement manifested itself as a discreet itch low in his belly. And he could see her knees, rounded and satiny, the kind French gallantry called polies, indicating solid depths, undoubtedly wet, beneath her brown pleated skirt. Desire coursed through his body. Amazed at himself, he thought, After all, why not? Narciso had asked Lucrecia to dance, and with their arms around one another they began to sway, slowly, next to the wall hung with deer antlers and bear heads. Jealousy seasoned (but did not replace or destroy) his evil thoughts with a bitter-sweet flavor. He did not vacillate; he leaned over, took away the glass that Ilse was holding in her hand, and drew her toward him: "Care to dance, dear sister-in-law?" His brother had put on a series of slow boleros, of course.
He felt a pang in his heart when, through the locks of the Valkyrie's hair, he saw his Corsican brother and Lucrecia dancing cheek to cheek. His arms encircling her waist, and hers around his neck. How long had these intimacies been going on? He could recall nothing like it in ten years of marriage. Yes, that evil wizard Narciso must have spiked the drinks. While he was lost in speculation, his right arm had been drawing his sister-in-law closer to him. And she did not resist. When he felt the brush of her thighs against his, their bellies touching, Don Rigoberto told himself, not without uneasiness, that now nothing, and no one, could prevent his approaching erection. And, in fact, it came upon him at the very moment he felt Ilse's cheek against his. When the music ended it affected him like the bell during a pitiless boxing match. "Thank you, my beautiful Brunhilde," and he kissed his sister-in-law's hand. And, tripping over gruesome heads filled with stucco or papier-mâché, he moved toward the spot where Lucrecia and Narciso—with chagrin? reluctantly?—were disengaging. He took his wife in his arms and murmured pointedly, "Dear wife, may I have this dance?" He led her to the darkest corner of the room. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Narciso and Ilse were also embracing and, in a concerted movement, had begun to kiss.
Holding the suspiciously languid body of his wife very close, his erection was reborn; now it pressed without prudery against the form he knew so well. Their lips were touching as he whispered, "Do you know what Narciso proposed?"
"I can imagine," replied Lucrecia with a naturalness that Don Rigoberto found as unsettling as her use of a verb neither of them had ever said in their conjugal intimacy. "He wants you to fuck Ilse while he fucks me?"
He longed to hurt her; instead, he kissed her, assailed by one of those moments of impassioned effusiveness to which he often gave way. Transfixed, feeling that he might begin to cry, he whispered that he loved and wanted her and could never thank her for the happiness she had brought him. "Yes, yes, I love you," he said aloud. "With all my dreams, Lucrecia." The gray Barrancan Sunday brightened, the solitude of his study softened. Don Rigoberto noticed that a tear had fallen from his cheek and blurred a very appropriate quotation from the Valéryan (valerian and Valéry, what a happy union) Monsieur Teste, which defined his own relationship to love: "Tout ce qui m'était facile m'était indifférent et presque ennemi."
Before sadness could overpower him, or the warm feeling of just a moment ago sink completely into corrosive melancholy, he made an effort, and half-closing his eyes and forcing himself to concentrate, he returned to the room filled with animals and the night heavy with smoke—did Narciso smoke? did Ilse?—to dangerous mixtures of champagne, cognac, whiskey, music, and the relaxed ambiance that enveloped them, no longer divided into two stable and precise couples as they had been at the start of the evening before they went to eat dinner at the Costa Verde restaurant, but intermingled, precarious couples who separated and came together again with an ease that matched the amorphous atmosphere as changeable as the shape in a kaleidoscope. Had the light been turned off? A while ago. By Narciso, of course. The room with its dead beasts was faintly illuminated by the light from the pool, allowing only glimpses of shadows, silhouettes, anonymous contours. His Corsican brother prepared his ambushes well. Don Rigoberto's body and spirit had become dissociated; while his spirit wandered, attempting to discover if it would take the game suggested by Narciso to its ultimate consequences, his body, confident and free of scruples, was already engaged in play. Which one was he caressing as he pretended to dance and stood swaying in place, sensing vaguely that the music was stopping and starting periodically? Lucrecia or Ilse? He did not want to know. What a pleasurable sensation to have welded to him that female form whose breasts he could feel, deliciously, through his shirt, whose firm neck his lips nibbled slowly as they advanced toward an ear whose opening the tip of his tongue greedily explored. No, that cartilage or small bone was not Lucrecia's. He raised his eyes and tried to penetrate the shadows of the corner where he recalled seeing Narciso dancing just a moment before.
"They went up a while ago." Ilse's voice sounded vague and bored in his ear. He could even detect a touch of mockery.
"Where?" he asked stupidly, immediately embarrassed by his stupidity.
"Where do you think?" Ilse replied, with a perverse little laugh and German humor. "To look at the moon? Or take a piss? Have any ideas, Brother-in-law?"
"You never see the moon in Lima," Don Rigoberto stammered, releasing Ilse and moving away from her. "You can hardly see the sun in summer. It's the damn fog."
"Narciso has wanted Lucre for a long time." Ilse put him back on the rack, not giving him a chance to catch his breath; she spoke as if it had nothing to do with her. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed, you're not a moron."
His intoxication had dissipated, along with his excitement. He began to perspire. Silently, idiotically, he was asking himself how Lucrecia could have consented so easily to the machinations of his Corsican brother, when he was shaken once again by Ilse's small, insidious voice.
"Are you a little jealous, Rigo?"
"Well, yes, I am," he acknowledged. And then more frankly: "In fact, I'm very jealous."
"I was too, at first," she said, as if it were just another banal remark during a bridge game. "You get used to it, like watching the rain."
"All right, all right," he said, disconcerted. "Do you mean that you and Narciso often play the switching game?"
"Every three months," Ilse replied with Prussian precision. "Not really often. Narciso says that if you don't want this kind of adventure to lose its charm, you can only do it once in a while. Always with carefully chosen people. Because if it becomes trivialized it's no fun anymore."
He must have taken off her clothes by now, he thought. Now he's holding her in his arms. Was Lucrecia kissing and caressing his Corsican brother with the same avidity? He was still trembling as if he had Saint Vitus' dance when Ilse's next question passed through him like an electric shock: "Would you like to see them?"
She had brought her face close to speak. His sister-in-law's long blond hair was in his mouth and eyes.
"Are you serious?" he murmured in astonishment.
"Would you like to?" she insisted, brushing his ear with her lips.
"Yes, yes," he agreed. He felt as if his bones were melting, as if he were evaporating.
She grasped his right hand. "Nice and slow, very quiet," she ordered. She led him, floating, to the winding wrought-iron staircase that led to the bedrooms. It was dark, as was the hallway, though the corridor did receive some illumination from the flood-lights in the garden. The deep pile of the carpet muffled their steps; they moved forward on tiptoe. Don Rigoberto felt his heart racing. What awaited him? What would he see? His sister-in-law stopped and whispered another order into his ear: "Take off your shoes," as she leaned over to remove hers. Don Rigoberto obeyed. He felt ridiculous without his shoes, like a thief in his stockinged feet, with Ilse leading him by the hand along the dim corridor as if he were Fonchito. "Don't make noise, you'll ruin everything," she said, standing still. He nodded, like a robot. Ilse started to walk again, opened a door, and had him go in ahead of her. They were in the bedroom, separated from the bed by a brick half-wall with regularly spaced diamond-shaped openings that allowed them to see the bed. It was extremely wide and theatrical. In the cone of light that fell from a ceiling fixture, he saw his Corsican brother and Lucrecia, fused together, moving rhythmically. The sound of their panting, like a quiet dialogue, reached him.
"You can sit down," Ilse indicated. "Here, on the sofa."
He did as he was told. He stepped back and dropped beside his sister-in-law on what must have been a long couch strewn with pillows and placed so that the person sitting there would not miss any part of the show. What did this mean? A chuckle escaped Don Rigoberto: "My Corsican brother is more baroque than I imagined." His mouth was dry.
Their expert positioning and perfect joining made it seem as if the couple had been making love their entire lives. The two bodies never separated; with each new posture, legs, elbows, shoulders, hips seemed to find an even better fit, and as the moments passed, each partner seemed to derive even deeper pleasure from the other. There were the beautiful full curves, the wavy jet-black hair of his beloved, the raised buttocks that made one think of a gallant promontory defying the assault of a wild sea. "No," he said to himself. Rather, the splendid rump in the gorgeous photograph La Prière, by Man Ray (1930). He searched through his notebooks and in a few minutes was contemplating the image. His heart sank as he recalled the times when Lucrecia had posed like this for him, in their nocturnal intimacy, sitting back on her heels, both hands supporting the hemispheres of her buttocks. Nor did he find any dissonance in the comparison to another image by Man Ray that his notebook offered next to the first, for the musical back of Kikí de Montparnasse (1925) was precisely the one displayed by Lucrecia as she twisted and turned. The deep inflections of her hips held him in rapt suspense for a few seconds. But the hairy arms encircling that body, the legs holding down those thighs and spreading them, were not his, nor was that face—he could not make out Narciso's features—moving now along Lucrecia's back, scrutinizing it millimeter by millimeter, the partially open mouth indecisive about where to land and what to kiss. In Don Rigoberto's agitated mind there flashed the image of two trapeze artists at the circus, the Human Eagles, who flew and were united in midair—they worked without a net—after performing acrobatic feats ten meters above the ground. Lucrecia and Narciso were just as skilled, just as perfect, just as suited to one another. He was overcome by a tripartite feeling (admiration, envy, and jealousy) and tears of emotion again rolled down his cheeks. He noticed that Ilse's hand was professionally exploring his fly.
"I don't believe it, this doesn't excite you at all," he heard her say without lowering her voice.
Don Rigoberto detected a startled movement in the bed. They had heard, of course; they could no longer pretend not to know they were being observed. They remained motionless; Doña Lucrecia's profile turned toward the openwork wall, but Narciso kissed her again and drew her back into the battle of love.
"Forgive me, Ilse," he whispered. "I'm disappointing you, and I'm sorry. But I—how shall I put it—I'm monogamous. I can make love only to my wife."
"Of course you are." Ilse laughed affectionately, and so loudly that now, under the light, Doña Lucrecia's tousled head escaped the embrace of his Corsican brother, and Don Rigoberto saw her large, startled eyes looking in fright toward the place where he and Ilse were sitting. "Just like your sweet Corsican brother. Narciso likes making love only to me. But he needs appetizers, apéritifs, prologues. He's not as uncomplicated as you."
She laughed again, and Don Rigoberto felt her moving away as she stroked his thinning hair with the kind of caress teachers give little boys who are good. He could not believe his eyes: when had Ilse taken off her clothes? There were her things on the sofa, and there she was, athletic, naked from head to foot, striding through the darkness toward the bed just as her remote ancestors, the Valkyries, strode through forests in their horned helmets hunting down bears, tigers, and men. At precisely that moment Narciso moved away from Lucrecia, ran toward the middle of the room—his face revealed indescribable happiness—and opened his arms to receive her with an animal roar of approval. And there she was now, the rejected, recanted Lucrecia withdrawing to the far side of the bed, fully aware that from now on she was not needed, looking to the left and right, searching for someone who could tell her what to do. Don Rigoberto felt pity. Without saying a word, he called her name. He watched her get out of bed on tiptoe so as not to disturb the happy couple, find her clothes on the floor, partially dress, and walk to where he was waiting for her with open arms. She huddled against his chest, trembling.
"Do you understand any of it, Rigoberto?" he heard her ask.
"Only that I love you," he replied, holding her close. "I've never seen you so beautiful. Come, come with me."
"What a pair of Corsican brothers." He heard the Valkyrie laughing in the distance, against a background of a wild boar's savage bellowing and Wagnerian trumpets.
Winged Lion Harpy
Where are you? In the Hall of Grotesques in the Museum of the Austrian Baroque on the Lower Belvedere in Vienna.
What are you doing there? You are carefully studying one of Jonas Drentwett's female creatures that bring fantasy and glory to its walls.
Which one? The one that stretches her long neck in order to better display her bosom and reveal the beautiful, sharply pointed breast with the ruddy nipple that all living beings would come to suck if you had not reserved it.
For whom? For your lover at a distance, the reconstructor of your identity, the painter who unmakes and makes you at will, your waking dreamer.
What must you do? Learn the creature by heart and emulate her in the privacy of your bedroom, preparing for the night when I will come. Do not be discouraged because you do not have a tail, or the talons of a bird of prey, or because you are not in the habit of walking on all fours. If you truly love me, you will have a tail and talons, you will walk on all fours, and gradually, through the constancy and tenacity demanded by feats of love, you will cease to be Lucrecia of the Olivar and will become the Mythological Lucrecia, Lucrecia the Winged Lion Harpy, Lucrecia who has come to my heart and my desire from the legends and myths of Greece (with a stopover at the Roman frescoes from which Jonas Drentwett copied you).
Are you like her now? With your rump tucked in, your bosom haughty, your head aloft? Do you feel how the feline tail begins to appear, the red-tinted pointed wings begin to grow? What you still lack, the diadem for your brow, the topaz necklace, the girdle of gold and precious stones where your tender bosom will rest, these will be brought to you, as a token of adoration and reverence, by one who adores you above all other things real or nonexistent.
The Lover of Harpies
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