"Why are you laughing like that, Stepmamá?" the boy wanted to know, intrigued. Because from the time he had walked into the little house near the Olivar de San Isidro, Señora Lucrecia had been bursting into these unwarranted fits of laughter and devouring him with her eyes.
"Because of something a friend told me." Doña Lucrecia blushed. "I'm too embarrassed to ask you about it, but I'm dying to know if it's true."
"It must be some gossip about my papá."
"I'll tell you, even though it's very vulgar," Señora Lucrecia said decisively. "My curiosity is stronger than my good manners."
According to Teté, whose husband had been there and told her about it with a mixture of amusement and anger, it happened at one of those gatherings held every two or three months in Don Rigoberto's study. Men only, five or six childhood friends, acquaintances from school or the university or the neighborhood who continued to meet out of habit, and without enthusiasm, but who did not dare to break the ritual, perhaps because of the superstitious notion that if any one of them failed to attend, bad luck would befall the deserter, or even the entire group. And so they continued to see each other, although undoubtedly, like Rigoberto, they no longer enjoyed this bimonthly or trimonthly get-together when they would drink cognac, eat cheese turnovers, talk about those who had died, or discuss politics. Doña Lucrecia recalled that afterward Don Rigoberto's head would ache with boredom, and he would have to take a few drops of valerian. The incident had occurred at the last gathering, just a week ago. The friends—in their fifties or sixties, some of them about to retire—saw Fonchito come in, his blond hair tousled, his big blue eyes opened wide at seeing them there. The disorder of his school uniform added a touch of abandon to the beauty of his small person. The gentlemen smiled at him: Hello, Fonchito, how big you've gotten, how you've grown.
"Can't you say hello?" Don Rigoberto had gruffly admonished him.
"Yes, of course," replied the crystalline voice of her stepson. "But, Papá, please, if your friends want to hug me, tell them not to touch my bottom."
Señora Lucrecia burst into the fifth laughing fit of the afternoon.
"Did you really say something so outrageous, Fonchito?"
"But they pretend they're hugging me and all the while they never stop touching me there." The boy shrugged, not attributing too much importance to the subject. "I don't like anybody touching me there, not even as a joke, because then it itches. And whenever I itch I scratch so much I break out in a rash."
"Then it's true, you did say it." Señora Lucrecia passed from laughter to astonishment and back to laughter. "Obviously: Teté could never make up anything like that. And Rigoberto? How did he react?"
"His eyes were furious and he told me to go to my room and do my homework," said Fonchito. "Later, when they had gone, he really scolded me. And he took away my Sunday allowance."
"Those old men with their roving hands," exclaimed Señora Lucrecia, suddenly indignant. "It's disgusting. If I had ever caught them doing that, I would have thrown them out. And was your papá still so angry when you told him? But first, swear. Was it true? They touched your bottom? Could it be one of those strange things you think up?"
"Sure they touched me. Right here," and the boy showed her where, patting his buttocks. "Just like the priests at school. Why, Stepmamá? What is it about my backside that makes everybody want to touch it?"
Señora Lucrecia stared at him, trying to guess if he was lying.
"If it's true, then they have no shame, they're abusive," she exclaimed at last, still doubtful. "At school, too? Haven't you told Rigoberto, so that he can complain?"
The boy assumed a seraphic expression. "I don't want to give my papá anything else to worry about. Least of all now, when he's so sad."
Doña Lucrecia bent her head in confusion. This child was a master at saying things that made her feel bad. Well, if what he said was true, then good for him for making those dirty old men uncomfortable. Teté Barriga's husband had said that he and his friends could not move and did not dare to look at Rigoberto for a long while. Then they made jokes, though their faces were grim. In any event, enough about that. She moved on to something else. She asked Fonchito how things were going at school, if he wasn't getting into trouble at the academy when he left before classes were over, if he had gone to the movies, to a soccer game, to some party. But Justiniana, who came in with tea and biscuits, brought it up again. She had heard everything and began to give her opinion, and she had a lot to say. She was certain it was a lie: "Don't believe him, Señora. It was just more of that little devil's mischief to shame those gentlemen in front of Don Rigoberto. Don't you know him yet?" "If you didn't make such delicious sweet buns I'd be angry with you, Justita." Doña Lucrecia felt that she had been imprudent; by allowing her morbid curiosity to get the better of her—one never knew with Fonchito—perhaps she had awakened the beast. And, in effect, as Justiniana was gathering up the cups and saucers, the boy's question pierced her like the thrust of a sword.
"Why is it that grown-ups like children so much, Stepmamá?"
Justiniana slipped away, making a sound in her throat or stomach that could only be stifled laughter. Doña Lucrecia looked into Fonchito's eyes. She scrutinized them calmly, searching for a spark of malice or evil intention. No. What she saw was the luminous clarity of a diaphanous sky.
"Everybody likes children," she said hypocritically. "It's normal for a person to be affectionate with them. They're small, fragile, and sometimes very delicious."
She felt stupid, impatient to escape those great, still, limpid eyes that were resting on her.
"Egon Schiele liked them a lot," Fonchito said, nodding his agreement. "In Vienna, early in the century, there were so many abandoned little girls living on the streets. They begged in churches, in cafés."
"Just like Lima," she said, not knowing what she was saying. Once again she was overwhelmed by the sensation of being a fly lured, despite all her efforts, into the jaws of a spider.
"And he would go to Schonbrunn Park, where there were hundreds of them. He took them to his studio. He fed them and gave them money," Fonchito continued, inexorably. "Señor Paris von Güterlash, a friend whom Schiele painted—I'll show you his portrait in a minute—says there were always two or three girls from the street in his studio. They lived there at his expense. They would sleep or play while Schiele painted. Do you think there was anything wrong in that?"
"If he fed them and helped them, how could there be anything wrong?"
"But he made them get undressed and pose for him," the boy went on. There's no escape for me now, thought Doña Lucrecia. "Was it wrong for Egon Schiele to do that?"
"Well, I don't think so." His stepmother swallowed. "An artist needs models. Why have a nasty mind? Didn't Degas like to paint his little mice, the young dancers at the Opera in Paris? Well, young girls inspired Egon Schiele too."
Then why had he been arrested, accused of kidnapping a minor? Why was he sent to prison for circulating indecent pictures? And why had he been obliged to burn a drawing on the pretext that children had been exposed to indecency in his studio?
"I don't know why." She tried to calm him when she saw his agitation. "I don't know anything about Schiele, Fonchito. You're the one who knows everything about him. Artists are complicated people, your papá can explain it to you. They don't have to be saints. You shouldn't idealize them or demonize them. Their work is what matters, not their lives. Schiele's legacy is how he painted those girls, not what he did with them in his studio."
"He had them wear those colored stockings he liked so much," said Fonchito, putting the finishing touches on the story. "Sprawled on the sofa, on the floor. Alone or in pairs. Then he would climb a ladder so he could look down at them from a height. At the top of the ladder he would make a sketch; his notebooks have been published. My papá has the book. But it's in German. I could only look at the drawings, I couldn't read it."
"He climbed up a ladder? That's how he painted them?"
Now you were caught in the web, Lucrecia. The kid always managed it somehow. Now you didn't try to have him change the subject; you followed along, trapped. It's true, Stepmamá. He said his dream was to be a bird of prey. To paint the world from a height, to see it as a condor or buzzard saw it. And if you look closely, it was absolutely true. He would show her right now. He jumped up, rummaged in his portfolio from the academy, and a moment later he was crouching at her feet—as always, she was on the sofa and he on the floor—turning the pages of another voluminous book of Egon Schiele reproductions that he rested on his stepmother's knees. Did Fonchito really know all those things about the painter? How many of them were true? And why did he have this mania for Schiele? Had he heard things from Rigoberto? Was this painter her former husband's latest obsession? In any case, his description was accurate. Those sprawling girls and entwined lovers, those phantasmal cities without people or animals or cars, the houses crowded together and almost frozen along the banks of empty rivers, all appeared as if viewed from a height by a rapacious bird that soared above them with an all-encompassing, merciless eye. Yes, it was the perspective of a bird of prey. The angelic face smiled at her. "Didn't I tell you, Stepmamá?" She nodded in dismay. Behind those cherubic features, that innocence worthy of a religious painting, dwelled a subtle, precociously mature intelligence, its psychology as complex as Rigoberto's. And at that moment she realized what was on the page. Her face flared like a torch. Fonchito had left the book open to a watercolor in red tones and cream-colored spaces, with a mauve border, and only now did Doña Lucrecia pay attention to its subject: the artist himself in sharp outline, sitting, and between his open legs a naked girl with her back turned, holding on high, as if it were a flagpole, his gigantic virile member.
"This couple has also been painted from above," the crystalline voice informed her. "But how could he have done the sketch? He couldn't do it from the ladder, because he's the man sitting on the floor. You know that, don't you, Stepmamá?"
"I know it's a very obscene self-portrait," said Doña Lucrecia. "You'd better keep turning the pages, Foncho."
"It seems sad to me," the boy disagreed, with a good deal of conviction. "Look at Schiele's face. It's so discouraged, as if he couldn't bear any more of the sorrow he's feeling. He looks ready to cry. He was only twenty-one, Stepmamá. Why do you think he called this picture The Red Host?"
"You're better off not finding out, Mr. Know-it-all." Señora Lucrecia was becoming angry. "Is that what it's called? So besides being obscene, it's sacrilegious too. Turn the page or I'll tear it."
"But, Stepmamá," Fonchito reproached her, "you can't be like the judge who ordered Egon Schiele to destroy his picture. You can't be that unfair and prejudiced."
His indignation seemed genuine. His eyes flashed, the fine nostrils quivered, and even his ears had sharpened. Doña Lucrecia regretted what she had just said.
"Well, you're right, in painting, in art, you have to be broad-minded." She rubbed her hands nervously. "But you make me so angry, Fonchito. I never know if you do what you do and say what you say spontaneously, or if you intend something else. I never know if I'm with a child or a dirty, perverse old man hiding behind the face of the Infant Jesus."
The boy looked at her in bewilderment; his surprise seemed to well up from the deepest part of his being. He blinked, uncomprehending. Was she the one who was shocking the child with her suspicions? Of course not. And yet, when she saw Fonchito's eyes brimming with tears, she felt responsible.
"I don't even know what I'm saying," she murmured. "Forget it, I didn't say a thing. Come, give me a kiss, let's be friends."
The boy stood and threw his arms around her neck. Doña Lucrecia could feel the fragile form trembling, the delicate bones, the small body on the verge of adolescence, that age when boys could still be mistaken for girls.
"Don't be angry with me, Stepmamá," she heard him saying into her ear. "Correct me if I do something wrong, give me advice. I want to be just what you want me to be. But don't be angry."
"It's all right, I'm not angry anymore," she said. "Let's forget it."
His slim arms around her neck held her prisoner, and he spoke so slowly and softly that she could not understand what he was saying. But all her nerves registered the tip of the boy's tongue when, like a slender probe, it entered the opening of her ear and wet it with saliva. She resisted the impulse to move him away. A moment later, she felt his finely molded lips moving across her lobe with slow, tiny kisses. And now she did move him away gently—little shudders ran up and down her body—and found herself looking into his mischievous face.
"Did I tickle you?" He seemed to be boasting of a great feat. "Your whole body started to tremble. Did you feel an electric current, Stepmamá?"
She did not know what to say. Her smile was forced.
"I forgot to tell you." Fonchito himself saved her, returning to his usual spot in front of the sofa. "I started the job, on my papá."
"What job?"
"Making you two be friends again," the boy explained, gesticulating. "Do you know what I did? I told him I saw you coming out of the Church of the Virgen del Pilar, very elegant, on a gentleman's arm. And that you looked like newlyweds on their honeymoon."
"Why did you tell him lies?"
"To make him jealous. And I did. He got so nervous, Stepmamá!"
His laughter proclaimed a splendid joy in living. His papá had turned pale, and his eyes had bulged, though at first he didn't say anything. But his curiosity held the strings, and he was dying to know more, twitching like a puppet! To make things easier for him, Fonchito fired the first shot: "Do you think my Stepmamá is planning to marry again, Papá?"
Don Rigoberto's face turned bitter, and he snorted in a strange way before answering. "I don't know. You should have asked her yourself." And after some vacillation, making an effort to sound natural: "Who can tell. Did the gentleman seem to be more than a friend?"
"Well, I don't know," Fonchito said uncertainly, moving his head like the cuckoo in a clock. "They were arm in arm. The gentleman was looking at her just like in the movies. And she was very flirtatious with him."
"I could kill you, you're such a lying rascal." Señora Lucrecia threw one of the pillows and hit him in the head, and Fonchito reacted with a great show of fear. "You're a fake. You didn't tell him anything, you just like making fun of me."
"I swear by all that's holy, Stepmamá." The boy giggled and kissed his fingers as they sketched a cross.
"You're the worst cynic I've ever known." She tossed another pillow, and then she laughed too. "I can imagine what you'll be like when you grow up. God protect the poor innocent who falls in love with you."
The boy became serious, in one of those abrupt changes of mood that always disconcerted Doña Lucrecia. He folded his arms across his chest and, sitting like a Buddha, looked at her with some fear.
"You were joking, weren't you, Stepmamá? Or do you really think I'm bad?"
She stretched out her hand and stroked his hair.
"No, not bad, no," she said. "You're unpredictable. A little know-it-all with too much imagination, that's what you are."
"I want you two to make up," Fonchito interrupted, with an emphatic gesture. "That's why I told him that story. I have a plan."
"Since I'm one of the parties involved, at least let me give my approval."
"Well, it's just …" Fonchito wrung his hands. "It's not finished yet. You have to trust me, Stepmamá. I need to know some things about you. How you and my papá met, for instance. And how you got married."
A flood of melancholy images made that day—eleven years ago, now—present in Doña Lucrecia's memory, when, at the crowded, boring party celebrating the silver wedding anniversary of her aunt and uncle, she had been introduced to the balding gentleman with the long, melancholy face, large ears, and assertive nose. He was about fifty; a matchmaking friend, a woman committed to marrying off everybody, told her about him: "Recently widowed, has a son, he's an executive at La Perricholi Insurance, a little eccentric but from a good family, and plenty of money." At first she noticed only Rigoberto's funereal appearance and reticence, and how unattractive he was. But beginning that same night, something attracted her to this man without physical charms; she had intuited something complicated and mysterious in his life. And ever since she was a girl, Doña Lucrecia had felt a fascination for standing on the edge of the cliff and looking down into the abyss, for keeping her balance on the railing at the side of the bridge. And the attraction had been confirmed when she agreed to have tea with him at La Tiendecita Blanca, attended a Philharmonic concert with him at the Colegio Santa Ursula, and, above all, when she entered his house for the first time. Rigoberto showed her his etchings, his art books, the notebooks that contained his secrets, and he explained to her how he updated his collection, condemning the books and pictures he replaced to the flames. She had been impressed listening to him, observing how courteously he treated her, his maniacal correctness. To the astonishment of her family and friends ("What are you waiting for to get married, Lucre? Prince Charming? You can't simply turn down every one of your suitors!"), when Rigoberto proposed ("Without ever having kissed me") she accepted immediately. She had never regretted it. Not for a day, not for a minute. It had been amusing, exciting, marvelous to discover her husband's world of manias, rituals, and fantasies, to share it with him, to build their private life together over a period of ten years. Until the absurd, mad, stupid story of what she had allowed to occur with her stepson. A baby who didn't even seem to remember now what had happened. She! The woman everyone thought so judicious, so cautious, so organized, the one who always calculated every step with so much good sense. How could she have had an adventure with a schoolboy! Her own stepchild! Rigoberto had been very decent, really, avoiding a scandal, asking only for a separation and providing the financial support that permitted her to live alone. Another man would have killed her, clenched his jaws in rage and thrown her out without a cent, pilloried her publicly as a corruptor of youth. How foolish to think that Rigoberto and she could be reconciled. He would continue to be mortally offended by what had happened; he would never forgive her. Once again she felt the slender arms twining about her neck.
"What made you so sad?" Fonchito comforted her. "Did I do something bad?"
"I suddenly thought of something, and I'm a sentimental person … I'm all right now."
"When I saw you getting like that, I was so scared!"
The boy kissed her again on the ear, with the same tiny kisses, finishing up his caresses by wetting her earlobe again with the tip of his tongue. Doña Lucrecia felt so depressed that she didn't even have the energy to push him away.
After a while she heard him saying, in a different tone of voice, "You too, Stepmamá?"
"What?"
"You're touching my backside too, just like my papá's friends and the priests at school. Golly! Why is everybody so interested in my bottom?"
Letter to a Rotarian
Friend, I know you were offended by my refusal to join the Rotary Club, for you are an officer and promoter of that institution. And I suspect you felt somewhat distrustful as well, not at all convinced that my reluctance to be a Rotarian in no way suggests that I am going to enroll in the Lions Club or the recently established Kiwanis Club of Peru, associations with which your organization competes implacably to win first place in good works, civic spirit, human solidarity, social welfare, and other things of that nature. Don't worry: I do not belong and will never belong to any of those clubs or associations, or to anything resembling them (the Boy Scouts, the Alumni of the Jesuits, the Masons, Opus Dei, et cetera). My hostility to associations is so radical that I have stopped being a member of the Automobile Club, not to mention the so-called social clubs that gauge the ethnicity and wealth of Limenians. Since the now distant days of my membership in Catholic Action, and because of it—for this was the experience that opened my eyes to the illusory nature of all social utopias and catapulted me to a defense of hedonism and the individual—I have contracted such a moral, psychological, and ideological revulsion toward all forms of gregarious servitude that—this is no joke—even the line at the movies makes me feel abused, diminished in my own freedom (at times, obviously, I cannot help joining the line), and reduced to the condition of mass-man. The only concession I remember making was in response to the threat of being overweight (I am convinced, like Cyril Connolly, that "obesity is a mental disease"), which led me to join a gym, where a brainless Tarzan made fifteen imbeciles sweat for an hour a day to the rhythm of his bellowing and engage in certain simian contractions that he called aerobics. This gymnastic torture confirmed all my prejudices against the herd-man.
Allow me, in this regard, to transcribe for you one of the many citations that fill my notebooks, for it is a marvelous synthesis of what I believe. The author Francisco Pérez de Antón is an Asturian world traveler currently residing in Guatemala: "A herd, as everyone knows, is composed of creatures deprived of speech and with fairly weak sphincters. It is a proven fact, moreover, that in times of confusion, the herd prefers servitude to disorder. Which is why those who behave like crazed nanny goats do not have leaders but great goatish assholes at their head. Something in this species must be contagious, since it is so common in the human herd to find someone who can lead the masses to the edge of the reef and, once there, make them jump into the water. Unless he decides to destroy a civilization, which is something he does fairly frequently." You will say it is paranoid to detect, behind a few benign men who meet for lunch once a week and discuss in which new district they ought to put up one of those limestone pillars with the metal plaque that reads THE ROTARY CLUB WELCOMES YOU, whose erection they all contribute to, an ominous devaluation of sovereign individual into mass-man. Perhaps I exaggerate. But I cannot be negligent. Since the world is moving so quickly toward complete disindividualization and the extinction of that historical accident, the rule of the free and sovereign individual, which a series of coincidences and circumstances made possible (for a limited number of people, naturally, in an even more limited number of countries), I am mobilized and combat-ready, with all my five senses, twenty-four hours a day, prepared to delay, as much as I can and in areas that concern me, this existential calamity. It is a battle to the death, it is total warfare; everything and everyone is involved. Those associations of overfed professionals, executives, and high-level bureaucrats who show up once a week to eat a regimented meal (stuffed potato, a small steak and rice, crêpes with blancmange, all washed down with a pleasant little Tacama Reserva red wine?) are a victory for definitive robotization and obscurantism, a great advance for the planned, the organized, the obligatory, the routinized, the collective, and an even greater retreat for the spontaneous, the inspired, the creative, and the original, which are conceivable only in the sphere of the individual.
Does what you've read lead you to suspect that beneath my drab appearance as a bourgeois in his fifties there lurks a bearded antisocial anarchist? Bingo! On the nose, brother. (I've made a joke, but it's not funny: that brother suggests the inevitable slap on the shoulder that goes along with it, the loathsome sight of two men, their guts swollen by beer and huge quantities of spicy foods, joining together, forming a collectivist society, renouncing their innermost phantoms, their unique selves.) It is true: I am antisocial to the best of my ability, which is, unfortunately, very limited, and I resist gregarization in everything that does not endanger my survival or my excellent standard of living. That's right. To be an individualist is to be an egotist (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness) but not an imbecile. As for the rest, I think imbecility is respectable if it is genetic, inherited, and not a chosen, deliberate stance. I'm afraid that being a Rotarian, or a Lion, Kiwanis, Mason, Boy Scout, or Opus Deist is (you'll forgive me) a cowardly vote in favor of stupidity.
I ought to explain this insult to you, and therefore I will soften it so that the next time company business brings us together, you won't punch me in the mouth (or kick me in the shins, a more appropriate form of aggression for people of our age). I don't know of a more accurate definition of the institutionalization of virtues and charitable feelings that these organizations represent than to call it an abdication of personal responsibility and a cheap way of acquiring a good "social" conscience (I put the word in quotation marks to emphasize how much I dislike it). In practical terms, the actions taken by you and your colleagues do not, in my opinion, help to diminish evil (or increase the good, if you prefer) to any appreciable degree. The principal beneficiaries of such collectivized generosity are you yourselves, beginning with your stomachs as you gobble down your weekly dinners, and your dirty minds, which during those evenings of fellowship (a horrifying concept!) regurgitate with pleasure, exchanging gossip and suggestive jokes, and cutting absent members to pieces. I am not opposed to such entertainments, nor, in principle, to anything that gives pleasure; but I am opposed to the hypocrisy of not proclaiming this right openly, of seeking pleasure that is concealed behind the hygienic excuse of responsible social action. Didn't you tell me, leering like a satyr and with a pornographic nudge, that another advantage of being a Rotarian was that every week the institution provided a first-class excuse for being out of the house without alarming one's wife? And here I offer another objection. Is it law or mere custom that excludes women from your ranks? I've never seen a skirt at any of the lunches you've inflicted on me. I'm certain that not all of you are faggots, which would be the only vaguely acceptable justification for the trouserism of Rotarians (Lions, Kiwanis, Boy Scouts, et cetera). My thesis is this: being a Rotarian is a pretext for having good male times free of the vigilance, servitude, or correct behavior that is, all of you claim, imposed by cohabitation with a woman. To me this seems as anticivilized as the paranoia of the recalcitrant feminists who have declared war between the sexes. My philosophy is that in those circumstances where one is unavoidably subjected to gregariousness—school, work, entertainment—the mixing of genders (and races, languages, customs, and beliefs) is a way to ameliorate the cretinization that the mob brings with it and to introduce an element of piquancy and mischief (I am a devoted practitioner of evil thoughts) to human relationships, something which, from my point of view, elevates those relationships aesthetically and morally. I will not say that for me they are one and the same thing, since you would not understand.
All human activity that does not contribute, even indirectly, to testicular and ovarian arousal, to the meeting of sperm and egg, is contemptible. For instance, the selling of insurance, to which you and I have devoted the past thirty years, or misogynistic Rotary luncheons. As well as everything that distracts us from the truly essential purpose of human life, which, in my opinion, is to satisfy desires. I see no other reason for our being here, spinning like slow tops in a gratuitous universe. We can sell insurance, as you and I have done—and with a fair amount of success, for we have achieved notable positions in our respective companies—because we must provide food, clothing, shelter, and enough income to permit us to have and gratify desires. There is no other valid reason for selling insurance policies, or for building dams, castrating cats, or taking shorthand. I can hear you now: Suppose, unlike this lunatic Rigoberto, a man finds selling insurance against fire, theft, or sickness a fulfilling and pleasurable activity? What if attending Rotary luncheons and making small financial contributions to put up signs along highways that read SPEED KILLS is the fulfillment of his most burning desires and makes him just as happy, no more and no less, as you are when you leaf through your collection of pictures and books not suitable for young ladies or engage in the mental masturbation of writing soliloquies in your notebooks? Does not each person have a right to his own desires? Yes, he does. But if a human being's dearest desires (the most beautiful word in the dictionary) consist of selling insurance and joining the Rotary Club (or related groups), then that biped is an asshole. Agreed: this describes 90 percent of the human race. I see, insurance man, that you are beginning to understand.
You cross yourself for so little cause? Your sign of the cross moves me on to another subject, which is actually the same one. What part does religion play in this polemic? Is it also slapped in the face by this renegade from Catholic Action, this former fervent reader of Saint Augustine, Cardinal Newman, Saint John of the Cross, and Jean Guitton? Yes and no. If I am anything in these matters, I am agnostic. Suspicious of the atheist and the believer, I am in favor of people having and practicing a faith, for if not, they would have no spiritual life at all and savagery would increase. Culture—art, philosophy, all secular intellectual and artistic activity—cannot fill the spiritual vacuum left by the death of God and the eclipse of the transcendent life, except in a very small minority (of which I am a part). That vacuum makes people more destructive and bestial than they normally would be. While I am in favor of faith, religions generally make me want to hold my nose, because all of them imply processional herdism and the abdication of spiritual independence. All of them restrict human freedom and attempt to rein in desire. I acknowledge that from an aesthetic point of view, religions—Catholicism, perhaps, more than any other, with its beautiful cathedrals, rituals, liturgies, ceremonies, representations, iconographies, music—are usually superb sources of pleasure that delight the eye and the sensibility, spark the imagination, and purge us of evil thoughts. But in each of them there always lurks a censor, a commissar, a fanatic, an inquisitor's flames and pincers. It is also true that without their prohibitions, sins, and moral fulminations, desires—especially sexual desire—would not have achieved the refinement they have reached at certain times. Consequently—and this is not theoretical but practical—as the result of a modest personal survey of limited scope, I affirm that people make love much better in religious countries than in secular ones (better in Ireland than in England, in Poland than in Denmark), better in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones (better in Spain or Italy than in Germany or Sweden), and that women who have been educated in nuns' academies are a thousand times more imaginative, bold, and delicate than those who have studied at secular schools (Roger Vailland has theorized about this in Le Regard froid). Lucrecia would not be the Lucrecia who has filled me with a happiness I can never repay, both day and night (but especially at night) over the past ten years, if her childhood and youth had not been in the hands of extremely strict Sisters of the Sacred Heart, whose teachings included the warning that, for a little girl, it was a sin to sit with one's knees apart. Throughout history these sacrificed slaves to the lord, with their exacerbated susceptibility and casuistry in matters of love, have educated whole dynasties of Messalinas. My blessings on them!
Well, then. Where does that leave us? I don't know where it leaves you, my dear colleague (to use another vomitous term). As for me, I am left with my contradictions, which are, after all, also a source of pleasure for an intractable and unclassifiable spirit like mine. Opposed to the institutionalization of feelings and faith, but in favor of feelings and faith. On the margins of churches, but curious about them, and envious, I diligently make use of what they can offer to enrich my world of phantoms. I tell you that I am an undisguised admirer of those princes of the Church who were capable, on the highest level, of conjoining their purple vestments and their sperm. I look through my notebooks and find, as an example, the cardinal about whom the virtuous Azorín wrote: "A refined skeptic, he privately laughed at the farce through which his person moved, and was regularly astounded at the unending human stupidity that provided money to maintain the stupendous spectacle." Is this not practically a portrait in miniature of the famous Cardinal de Bernis, the eighteenth-century French ambassador to Italy who, while in Venice, shared two lesbian nuns with Giacomo Casanova (vide his Memoirs), and in Rome entertained the Marquis de Sade, not knowing who he was, when the latter, a fugitive from France because of his libertine excesses, was traveling through Italy, with a false identity, as the Count of Mazan?
But I see you are yawning because the names I am firing at you—Ayn Rand, Vailland, Azorín, Casanova, Bernis, Sade—are, for you, incomprehensible noises, and so I will conclude this letter (and don't worry, I won't send it, either).
I wish you many luncheons and plaques, Rotarian.
The Scent of Widows
In the damp night that was agitated by a churning sea, Don Rigoberto awoke with a start, bathed in sweat: the innumerable rats of the Temple of Karniji, summoned by the merry bells of the Brahmins, were gathering for their evening meal. The enormous cauldrons, the metal dishes and wooden bowls, had already been filled with bits of meat or the milky syrup that was their favorite food. From every hole in the marble walls, openings that had been made for them by the pious monks and furnished with handfuls of straw for their comfort, thousands of gray rodents greedily left their nests. Falling over one another, they raced to the containers and dove in to lick the sweet syrup, nibble at the pieces of meat, and, most exquisite of all, to tear mouthfuls of calluses and corns from bare feet with their white incisors. The priests let them do as they wished, pleased to contribute, with their excess skin, to the pleasure of the rats, who were the incarnations of deceased men and women.
The temple had been built for them five hundred years earlier in this northern corner of Rajasthan, in India, as a homage to Lakhan, the son of the goddess Karniji, a handsome youth who was transformed into a plump rat. From that time on, behind the imposing construction of silver-plated doors, marble floors, majestic walls and domes, the spectacle took place twice a day. There was the head Brahmin, Chotu-Dan, hidden beneath dozens of gray animals who climbed over his shoulders, arms, legs, back, to get to the great cauldron of syrup, for he sat on the edge. But what turned Don Rigoberto's stomach and almost made him vomit was the smell. Dense, enveloping, more pungent than mule droppings, the wind from the garbage dump, or putrefying carrion, the stink of the gray horde was now inside him. It traveled beneath his skin, in his veins and in the secretions from his glands, it soaked into the cracks in his cartilage, the marrow of his bones. His body had been turned into the temple of Karniji. "I am saturated with the smell of rats," he said in horror.
He leaped from the bed in his pajamas, not putting on his robe but only his slippers, and ran to his study to see if by leafing through a book, looking at an engraving, listening to music, or scribbling in his notebooks, other images would come to exorcise the remnants of his nightmare.
He was in luck. In the first notebook he opened, a scientific citation explained the variety of anopheles mosquito whose most outstanding characteristic is detecting the odor of their females at incredible distances. I am one of them, he thought, dilating his nostrils and sniffing. Right now, if I wish to, I can smell Lucrecia asleep near the Olivar de San Isidro, and clearly differentiate her scalp hair from that on her underarms and her pubis. But he discovered another smell—benign, literary, pleasant, fanciful—that began to dispel, as the dawn breeze dissipates nocturnal mists, the rattish stench of his dream. A holy, theological, extremely elegant smell emitted by Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life in the translation by Quevedo: "Lamps that use aromatic oil give off a gentler odor when their light is dimmed. In the same way, widows whose love has been pure in marriage exhale a precious, aromatic odor of the virtue of chastity when their light, that is, their husband, is dimmed by death." That aroma of chaste widows, the impalpable melancholy of their bodies condemned to physical soliloquy, the nostalgic emanation of their unsatisfied desires, aroused him. His nostrils flared diligently, trying to reconstruct, detect, extract from the atmosphere some trace of its presence. The mere idea of a widow's scent filled him with suspense. The remains of the nightmare evaporated, he felt wide awake, his spirit recovered its healthy confidence. And led him to think why?—of Klimt's women floating among rivers of stars, those perfumed women with their dissolute faces—there was Goldfish, the many-colored fish-female, and Danaë, feigning sleep and exhibiting with great simplicity an ass as curvaceous as a guitar. No painter ever knew how to paint the odor of women as well as this decadent Viennese; his volatile, bending women had always entered his mind through his eyes and nose simultaneously. (Speaking of which, wasn't it time to begin to worry about the excessive interest another Viennese, Egon Schiele, held for Fonchito? Perhaps, but not just now.)
Had Lucrecia's body begun to give off that saintly Salesian odor when they separated? If so, she still loved him. For that odor, according to Saint Francis de Sales, bore witness to a fidelity in love that transcended the grave. That would mean she had not replaced him. Yes, she was still a "widow." The rumors, breaches of faith, accusations that had reached him—including the gossip about Fonchito—regarding Lucrecia's newfound lovers, were slander. His heart rejoiced as he furiously sniffed all around him. Was it there? Had he detected it? Was that the odor of Lucrecia? No. It was the scent of the night, the dampness, the books, oils, woods, fabrics, and leathers in the study.
Closing his eyes, he attempted to retrieve from the past, from nothingness, the nocturnal odors he had breathed in during those ten years, aromas that had given him so much pleasure, perfumes that had protected him from the surrounding pestilence and ugliness. He was overcome by depression. Some lines by Neruda came to console him as he turned another page in the same notebook:
And to see you urinate, in the dark, at the back of the house, as if you were pouring out a slender, tremulous, silvery, obstinate stream of honey, I would give up, many times over, this choir of shades I possess, and the clang of useless swords that echoes in my soul …
Wasn't it extraordinary that the poem those lines were taken from is called "Widower's Tango"? Without transition he caught a glimpse of Lucrecia sitting on the toilet, and listened to the merry splash of her pee in the bottom of the bowl that received it with tinkling gratitude. Of course, silent, squatting in the corner, absorbed, mystically concentrating, listening and smelling, there too was the happy beneficiary of that emission, that liquid concert: Manuel of the Prostheses! But at that moment Gulliver appeared, saving the Empress of Lilliput from her burning palace with his foaming piss. He thought of Jonathan Swift, who lived obsessed by the contrast between physical beauty and hideous bodily functions. The notebook recalled how, in his most famous poem, a lover explains with these verses why he decided to leave his lady:
Nor wonder how I lost my wits;
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits
"What a stupid man" was his judgment. Lucrecia also shat, and this, rather than degrading her, enhanced her in his eyes and nostrils. For a few seconds, with the first smile of the night on his face, his memory inhaled the vapors reminiscent of the passage of his former wife through the bathroom. Though now the sexologist Havelock Ellis intruded, whose most secret joy, according to the notebook, was to listen to his beloved passing water, and who proclaimed in his correspondence that the happiest day of his life had been the one on which his compliant wife, in the shelter of her full Victorian skirts, irreverently urinated for him among unwitting passersby at the feet of Admiral Nelson, under the eyes of the monumental stone lions on Trafalgar Square.
But Manuel had not been a poet like Neruda, a moralist like Swift, a sexologist like Ellis. Merely a castrato. Or, perhaps, a eunuch? An abysmal difference between the two kinds of inability to fecundate. One still had a penis and an erection, the other had lost the instrument and its reproductive function and displayed a smooth, curved, feminine pubis. Which was Manuel? A eunuch. How could Lucrecia have granted that to him? Generosity, curiosity, compassion? Or vice and morbidity? Or all of them combined? She had known him before his famous accident, when Manuel was winning motorcycling championships wearing a shining helmet and a plastic face protector, straddling a mechanical steed made of tubes, levers, and wheels, always with a Japanese name (Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Yamaha), catapulting himself forward with the noise of a deafening fart in a cross-country race—it was called a motorcross—though he also participated in idiocies named Trail and Enduro, this last competition suspiciously reminiscent of the Albigensians—at two or three hundred kilometers an hour. Flying across ditches, climbing hills, agitating stretches of sand, leaping over rocks or chasms, Manuel won trophies and had his picture in the papers uncorking bottles of champagne with models who kissed him on the cheek. Until, in one of those displays of pure stupidity, he flew through the air after racing like a shooting star up a treacherous hill; waiting for him on the other side was not, as he incautiously believed, an easy slope of cushioning sand but a rocky precipice. He was hurled into it, shouting an old-fashioned obscenity—Oh shit!—as he plummeted astride his metal charger into the depths, and seconds later he reached bottom in a resounding clamor of bones and pieces of metal being crushed, broken, and impaled. A miracle! His head was whole; his teeth intact; his vision and hearing not damaged at all; the use of his limbs somewhat painful because of broken bones and torn, bruised muscles. The liability was compensatorily concentrated in his genitals, which monopolized most of the damage. Nuts, bolts, and sharp points perforated his testicles despite the elastic supporter that guarded them, and turned them into a hybrid substance, somewhere between taffy and ratatouille, while the stalk of his virility was sliced at the root by some cutting material that perhaps—the ironies of life—did not come from the cycle of his loves and triumphs. What, then, had castrated him? The heavy, sharply pointed crucifix he wore to invoke divine protection when he perpetrated his motorcycling feats.
The skilled surgeons in Miami mended his bones, straightened what had been bent and bent what had been straightened, sewed on what had been torn away, and constructed artificial genitals, using bits of flesh taken from his gluteal muscle. It was always stiff, but that was pure show, a framework of skin over a plastic prosthesis. "Lots of smoke and no fire, or to be mathematically precise, a shell with no nuts" was Don Rigoberto's savage formulation. He could use it only to urinate, not even voluntarily but each time he drank any fluid, and since poor Manuel had no way to keep that constant flow of liquid from wetting the seat of his pants, he had to wear over it, like a grotesque little hat, a plastic bag to collect his water. Except for this inconvenience, the eunuch led a very normal life and—every madman has his madness—still served the cause of motorcycles.
"Are you going to visit him again?" Don Rigoberto asked, somewhat put out.
"He's invited me for tea, and you know he's a good friend and I feel very sorry for him," Doña Lucrecia explained. "But if it bothers you, I won't go."
"Go, go by all means," he said apologetically. "You'll tell me about it afterward?"
They had know each other since childhood. They were from the same neighborhood and had been in love in school, when being in love meant holding hands on Sundays after eleven o'clock Mass as they walked in the Parque Central in Miraflores, or in the smaller Parquecito Salazar following a swooning movie matinee of kisses and some timid, well-bred touching in the orchestra seats. And they had been sweethearts when Manuel was performing his racing feats and had his picture on the sports pages, and pretty girls were dying for him. When his flirtatiousness became too much for her, Lucrecia broke the engagement. They stopped seeing one another until the accident. She visited him in the hospital and brought him a box of Cadbury's. They re-established a relationship, a friendship, nothing more—that is what Don Rigoberto believed until he discovered the liquid truth—which continued after Doña Lucrecia's marriage.
From time to time Don Rigoberto had caught glimpses of him through the show windows of his flourishing dealership in new and used motorcycles imported from the United States and Japan (alongside the hieroglyphics of Japanese names there now stood the American Harley-Davidson and Triumph, and the Germanic BMW), which was located on the expressway just before Javier Prado. He no longer participated as a racer in any championships, but with obvious sadomasochism he maintained his connection to the sport as a promoter and patron of those vicarious massacres and butcheries. Don Rigoberto would see him on television newscasts, lowering a ridiculous checked flag with the air of someone who was starting the First World War, or standing at the starting or finishing lines at races, or handing the winner a cup covered in fake silver. The move from participant to sponsor of events assuaged—according to Lucrecia—the addictive attraction the castrato felt for these gleaming motorcycles.
And the other? The other absence? Did something or someone assuage that too? On the afternoons when they would have tea and cakes and conversation, Manuel maintained remarkable discretion regarding the matter, which Lucrecia, of course, was never imprudent enough to mention. Their talks were exchanges of news, reminiscences of a Miraflores childhood, a San Isidro youth, and of old friends from the neighborhood who married, unmarried, remarried, fell ill, had children, and occasionally died; they were sprinkled with comments on recent events: the latest film or record, the latest dance craze, a marriage or a catastrophic breakup, a recently uncovered fraud, or the latest scandal concerning drugs, adultery, or AIDS. Until one day—Don Rigoberto's hands quickly turned the pages of the notebook, trying to track down a citation that would correspond to the sequence of sharp images moving through his fevered mind—Doña Lucrecia had discovered his secret. Had she really discovered it? Or had Manuel arranged for her to believe that, when in fact she simply fell into the trap he had prepared for her? The truth is that one day, drinking tea in his house in La Planicie, which was surrounded by eucalyptus and laurels, Manuel lured Lucrecia into his bedroom. The pretext? To show her a photograph of a volleyball game at San Antonio Academy taken many years earlier. Once there, she was surprised beyond all measure. An entire bookcase of volumes dedicated to the chilling subject of castration and eunuchs! A specialized library! In every language, above all in those not understood by Manuel, who had mastered only Spanish, in its Peruvian, or, more accurately, its Mirafloran and San Isidran variant. And a collection of records and CD's that approximated or simulated the voices of castrati!
"He has become a specialist in the field," she told Don Rigoberto, for she was filled with excitement at her discovery.
"For obvious reasons," he deduced.
Had that been part of Manuel's strategy? Don Rigoberto's large head nodded agreement in the small circle of light shed by the lamp. Naturally. To create a salacious intimacy, a complicity in forbidden areas that would subsequently allow him to beg for so bold a favor. He had confessed to her—feigning embarrassment and all the hesitations of a timid man? Of course—that ever since the brutal surgery he had been obsessed by the subject until it had become the central concern of his existence. He was now a great connoisseur and could speak for hours about it, touching on its historic, religious, physical, clinical, and psychoanalytic aspects. (Had the former cyclist ever heard of the Viennese and his couch? Before, no; afterward, yes; and he had even read something by him, though he did not understand a word.) In conversations that submerged them deeper and deeper into an affectionate association over the course of those apparently innocent meetings at teatime, Manuel explained to Lucrecia the difference between the eunuch, principally a Saracen variation practiced since the Middle Ages on the guardians of seraglios, which pitilessly removed phallus and testicles, rendering them chaste, and the castrato, a Western, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman version that consisted in removing only the jewels from the victim of the procedure—leaving the rest in place—for the purpose was not to keep him from copulating but simply to prevent the change that lowers the boy's voice by an octave when he reaches adolescence. Manuel told Lucrecia the anecdote, which both had enjoyed, of the castrato Cortona, who wrote to Pope Innocent XI requesting permission to marry. He alleged that his castration had not damaged his ability to experience pleasure. His Holiness, who was in no way an innocent, wrote in the margin of the petition: "This time do a better job of castrating him." (Those were real Popes, Don Rigoberto thought joyfully.)
He, Manuel, the great motorcycle ace, inviting her to tea and posing as a modern man critical of the Church, had explained to Lucrecia that castration with no bellicose aim, with an artistic purpose, began to be practiced in Italy in the seventeenth century because of the ecclesiastic prohibition against women's voices in religious ceremonies. This stricture created the need for a hybrid, a male with a feminized voice (a "caprine" or "falsetto" voice, "between vibrato and tremolo" was the expert Carlos Gómez Amat's explanation in the notebook), something that could be fabricated by means of a surgery that Manuel described and documented between cups of tea and bites of pastry. There was the primitive method, submerging boys with good voices in icy water to control the bleeding and crushing their balls with grinding stones ("Oh, oh!" shouted Don Rigoberto, who had forgotten all about the rats and was having a wonderful time), and the sophisticated one; to wit: the surgeon-barber, anesthetizing the boy with laudanum, used his recently sharpened razor to make an incision in the groin, and pulled out the tender young jewels. What effects did the operation have on the boy singers who survived? Obesity, thoracic swelling, a strong, piercing voice, as well as an uncommon ability to hold a note; some castrati, such as Farinelli, could sing arias for more than a minute without taking a breath. In the serene darkness of the study, with the sound of the sea in the background, Don Rigoberto was listening, more diverted and curious than joyful, to the vibration of vocal cords prolonging the fine, high-pitched tone indefinitely, like a long wound in the Barrancan night. And now, yes, yes, he could smell Lucrecia.
Manuel of the Prostheses, poisoned with death, he thought a short while later, content with his discovery. But he immediately realized he was quoting. Poisoned with death? As his hands searched through the notebook, his memory reconstructed the smoky, crowded club to which Lucrecia had dragged him on that extraordinary night. It had been one of his few memorable immersions in the nocturnal world of amusement in the foreign country, administratively his own, in which he sold insurance policies, against which he had built this enclave, and about which, as a result of discreet but monumental efforts, he had managed to learn very little. Here were the lyrics to the waltz "Desdén":
As scornful as the gods
I will struggle for my fate,
ignoring the coward voices
of men poisoned with death.
Without the guitar, the drum, and the syncopated voice of the singer, some of the lugubrious, narcissistic audacity of the bardic composer was lost. But even without music, the inspired vulgarity and mysterious philosophy were still present. Who had composed this "classic" Peruvian waltz, which is how Lucrecia described it when he had asked the question? He found out: the man was from Chiclaya and his name was Miguel Paz. He imagined an untamed Peruvian who wandered through the night with a scarf around his neck and a guitar on his shoulder, who sang serenades and woke in folkloric dives surrounded by sawdust and vomit, his throat raw from singing all night. Wild, in any case. Vallejo and Neruda together had not produced anything comparable to those lines, and what's more, you could dance to them. He chuckled suddenly and recaptured Manuel of the Prostheses, who had been getting away from him.
It had been after many late-afternoon conversations watered with tea, and after having poured his encyclopedic information regarding Turkish and Egyptian eunuchs and Neapolitan and Roman castrati all over Doña Lucrecia, that the ex-motorcyclist ("Manuel of the Prostheses, Perpetual Peepee, the Wet One, the Leaker, the Capped Cock, the Piss Bag," Don Rigoberto improvised, his mood improving as each second passed) had made his move.
"And what was your reaction when he told you?"
On the television in their bedroom they had just watched Senso, a beautiful Stendhalian melodrama by Visconti, and Don Rigoberto was holding his wife on his lap, she in her nightdress and he in pajamas.
"I was speechless," replied Doña Lucrecia. "Do you think it's possible?"
"If he told you wringing his hands and weeping, it must be. Why would he lie?"
"Of course, he had no reason to," she purred, writhing. "If you keep on kissing my neck that way, I'll scream. What I don't understand is why he would tell me."
"It was the first step." Don Rigoberto's mouth moved up her warm throat until it reached her ear, which he kissed as well. "The next step will be to ask you to let him watch you, or at least listen to you."
"He told me because it was good for him to share his secret." Doña Lucrecia tried to move him away, and Don Rigoberto's pulse beat wildly. "Knowing that I know made him feel less alone."
"Do you want to bet that at your next tea he'll proposition you?" Her husband insisted on kissing her ear very slowly.
"I'd leave his house and slam the door behind me." Doña Lucrecia twisted in his arms, deciding to kiss him too. "And never go back."
She had done neither. Manuel of the Prostheses had made his request with so much servile humility, and so many victim's tears and excuses and apologies, that she had not had the courage (or the desire?) to offend him. Had she said, "Have you forgotten that I'm a decent married woman?" No. Or even: "You are abusing our friendship and destroying the good opinion I had of you"? Not that either. She had simply calmed Manuel, who, pale and ashamed, begged her not to take it the wrong way, or be angry with him, or deprive him of her precious friendship. It was a highly strategic and successful move, for Lucrecia took pity on so much psychodrama and had tea with him again—Don Rigoberto felt acupuncture needles in his temples—and eventually gave him what he wanted. The man poisoned with death listened to that silvery music, was intoxicated by the liquid arpeggio. Just listening? Couldn't he have been watching too?
"I swear he wasn't," Doña Lucrecia protested, huddling against him and talking into his chest. "In absolute darkness. That was my condition. And he met it. He saw nothing. He heard."
In exactly the same position they had watched a video of Carmina Burana, taped at the Berlin Opera with the Peking Chorus, and conducted by Seiji Ozawa.
"That may be," replied Don Rigoberto, his imagination inflamed by the vibrant Latin of the choir (could there be castrati among the choir members with their almond-shaped eyes?). "But it may also be that Manuel has developed his vision to an extraordinary degree. And even though you didn't see him, he saw you."
"If you start conjecturing, everything is possible," Doña Lucrecia argued, though without too much conviction. "But if he did look, there was hardly anything to see."
Her odor was there, no doubt about it: corporeal, intimate, with marine touches and fruity reminiscences. Closing his eyes, he breathed it in avidly, his nostrils very wide. I am smelling the soul of Lucrecia, he thought, deeply moved. The merry splash of the stream in the bowl did not dominate this aroma; it barely colored with a physiological tint what was an exhalation of hidden glandular humors, cartilaginous exudations, secretions of muscles, which were condensed and confused in a thick, valiant, domestic discharge. It reminded Don Rigoberto of the most distant moments of his childhood—a world of diapers and talcum, vomit and excrement, cologne and sponges soaked in warm water, a prodigal tit—and of nights entwined with Lucrecia. Ah yes, how well he understood the mutilated motorcyclist. But it was not necessary to emulate Farinelli or undergo a prosthetic procedure to assimilate that culture, convert to that religion, and, like the poisoned Manuel, like Neruda's widower, like so many anonymous aesthetes of hearing, smell, fantasy (he thought of the Prime Minister of India, the nonagenarian Rarji Desai, who, when he read his speeches, paused to take little sips of his own pee; "Ah, if it had only been his wife's!"), who felt themselves transported to heaven as they watched and heard the squatting or sitting beloved creature interpret that ceremony, in appearance so trivial and functional, of emptying a bladder, who elevated it into spectacle, into amorous dance, the prologue or epilogue (for the mutilated Manuel, a substitute) to the act of love. Don Rigoberto's eyes filled with tears. He rediscovered the fluid silence of the Barrancan night, the solitude in which he found himself, surrounded by mindless engravings and books.
"Lucrecia beloved, for the sake of all you hold dear," he pleaded, kissing the unbound hair of the woman he loved, "urinate for me too."
"First, I have to make certain that with all the doors and windows closed, the bathroom is totally dark," said Doña Lucrecia, with a lawyer's meticulous attention to detail. "When the time comes, I'll call you. You'll come in without any noise, so as not to disturb me. You'll sit in the corner. You won't move or say a word. By then, the four glasses of water will begin to have their effect. Not one exclamation, not one sigh, not the slightest movement, Manuel. Otherwise I'll leave and never set foot in this house again. You can stay in your corner while I wipe myself and straighten my dress. As I walk out, you will crawl over and kiss my feet in gratitude."
Had he done that? Surely he had. He would have crawled to her along the tiled floor and brought his mouth to her shoes in doglike gratitude. Then he would wash his hands and face, and with damp eyes join Lucrecia in the living room to tell her, so unctuously, that he could not find the words, she had done so much for him, his happiness was immeasurable. And, showering her with praise, he would tell her that in reality he had been this way from the time he was a boy, not only since his leap over the precipice. The accident had allowed him to adopt as his only source of pleasure what had once produced so much shame that he had hidden it from others and himself. It had all begun when he was very young, when he slept in his little sister's room and the nanny would get up at midnight to pass water. She didn't bother to close the door; he could hear the murmuring, crystalline splash of her stream very clearly, a lullaby that made him feel like an angel in heaven. It was the most beautiful, the most musical, the most tender memory of his childhood. She understood, didn't she? The magnificent Lucrecia understood everything. Nothing in the tangled labyrinth of human desires shocked her. Manuel knew this; that is why he admired her and why he dared to make his request. If the tragedy on the motorcycle had not occurred, he never would have asked. Because until his cycle's flight into the rocky abyss, his life, as far as love and sex were concerned, had been a nightmare. What truly excited him was something he never had the courage to ask of decent girls but had negotiated only with prostitutes. And even though he paid for it, he had endured so many humiliations, so much laughter and mockery, so many contemptuous or ironic glances that inhibited him and made him feel like dirt.
That was the reason he had broken off with all those girls. All of them had failed to give him the extraordinary gift that Doña Lucrecia had just granted him: the stream of her piss. Sympathetic laughter shook Don Rigoberto. The poor wretch! Who could have imagined that the star of the motorcross, the man who rode steel, surrounded by statuesque beauties who came and laughed and fell in love with the sports hero, did not want to caress them or undress them, kiss them or penetrate them: he only wanted to listen to them piss. And the noble, the magnanimous Lucrecia had peed for the mutilated Manuel! That micturation would remain etched in his memory like the heroic deeds in history books, like the miracles in the lives of the saints. Dear Lucrecia! Lucrecia, so indulgent toward human frailties! Lucrecia, a Roman name that meant fortunate! Lucrecia? His hands rapidly turned the pages of the notebook and the reference soon appeared:
"Lucrecia, Roman matron renowned for her beauty and virtue. Ravaged by Sextus Tarquin, son of King Tarquin the Proud. After telling her father and husband of the crime and urging them to avenge her, she took her life in their presence, plunging a dagger into her breast. Lucrecia's suicide precipitated the expulsion of the Kings of Rome and the founding of the Republic in 509 B.C. The figure of Lucrecia came to symbolize modesty and chastity, and, above all, the virtuous wife."
It is she, it is she, thought Don Rigoberto. His wife could provoke historical cataclysms and live in perpetuity as a symbol. Of the virtuous wife? If one understood virtue in a non-Christian sense, of course. What other wife would have shared her husband's imaginings as devotedly as she? None. And Fonchito? Well, better to skirt that quicksand. In the end, hadn't it all stayed within the family? Would she have done the same as the Roman matron when she was violated by Sextus Tarquin? An icicle pierced Don Rigoberto's heart. With a grimace of horror he struggled to banish the image of Lucrecia lying on the floor, her heart pierced by a dagger. To exorcise it, he brought back the motorcyclist aroused by the flow from female bladders. Only female? Or male bladders too? Did he also get an erection at the sight of a spouting gentleman?
"Never," Manuel declared immediately, in so sincere a voice that Doña Lucrecia believed him.
Well, it wasn't entirely true that his life had been nothing but a nightmare because of his need (what name should be used to avoid calling it a vice?). Bringing color to the desert landscape of unsatisfied desires and frustrations, there were healing, effervescent moments, modest compensations for his anguish, almost always provided by chance. For example, the laundress whose face Manuel remembered with the same affection one feels when recalling the aunts, grandmothers, or godmothers most closely connected to the warmth of childhood. She came to wash clothes several times a week. She must have suffered from cystitis, because she was constantly running from the laundry room or the ironing board to the little servants' bathroom next to the pantry. And the boy Manuel was always there, alert, hiding in the garret, his face flat against the floor, his ears straining. The concert would come, the noisy, copious waterfall, a genuine flood. That woman had a bladder the size of a soccer ball, a living reservoir, given the strength, abundance, frequency, and sonority of her urination. Once—Doña Lucrecia saw the pupils of the motorcyclist with the prosthesis dilate greedily—once Manuel had seen her. Yes, seen. All right, not completely. In an act of daring he had climbed the garden trellis up to the skylight of the little servants' bathroom, and for a few glorious seconds, as he dangled in midair, he could see the bushy hair, the shoulders, the legs in woolen stockings, the flat shoes of the woman sitting on the toilet and passing her water with noisy indifference. Ah, what bliss!
And there had also been the American, blond, tanned, slightly masculine, always in boots and a cowboy hat, who came to participate in the tour of the Andes. She was so bold a motorcyclist that she almost won. But what Manuel remembered was not so much her skill on the machine (a Harley-Davidson, of course) as her forwardness and lack of prudery, which allowed her, at the rest stops, to share sleeping quarters with the other drivers and bathe in front of them if there was only one bathroom, and even go into the lavatory and do what she had to and not care if there were several motorcyclists in the same room, on the other side of a thin partition. What days those were! Manuel had lived in a state of chronic excitement, his lost organ in prolonged erection, listening to the emancipated Sandy Canal relieving herself of fluids, which transformed the race into an interminable fiesta for him. But neither the laundress nor Sandy nor any of the casual or mercenary experiences in his mythology could compare to this one, this superlative grace, this liquefying manna with which Doña Lucrecia had made him feel like a god.
Don Rigoberto smiled in satisfaction. There was no rat nearby. The temple of Karniji, its Brahmins, armies of rodents, and pots of syrup were on the other side of oceans, continents, jungles. He was here, alone, in the night that was drawing to a close, in his refuge of pictures and notebooks. There were signs of dawn along the horizon. Today, too, he would be yawning in the office. Did he smell anything? The widow odor had dissipated. Did he hear anything? The waves and, almost lost in the sound they made, the tinkle of a lady pissing.
"I," he thought, smiling, "am a man who washes his hands before, not after, he urinates."
A Superlative Menu
I know you like to eat just small quantities of food that is nice and healthy, but tasty, and I am ready to please you at a beautifully set table as well.
Bright and early in the morning I'll go to market and buy the freshest milk, a hot, crusty bread straight out of the oven, and the juiciest orange. I'll wake you with the prettiest breakfast tray, the most fragrant flower, the sweetest kiss. "Here is your lovely juice without seeds, your delicious toast with yummy strawberry marmalade, and your wonderful coffee with milk and absolutely no sugar, my darling señor."
For your lunch, a salad and some yogurt, just the way you like it. I'll rinse the crispy lettuce leaves until they sparkle, and I'll cut the red ripe tomatoes artistically, taking my inspiration from the pictures in your library. I'll dress them with a sprinkle of vinegar, just a touch of oil, a few drops of my saliva, and my own tears instead of salt.
And every single night, one of your favorites (I have marvelous menus for the whole blessed year, with absolutely no repetitions). Olluco root with wonderful sun-dried charqui, a perfect puree of green beans, special Indian fricassee, a spicy casserole of mashed potato, savory tripe-and-potato stew, a mouth-watering ragout of pork and kid in wine sauce, tender beefsteak Chorrillan-style, a fabulous ceviche of corvina, rich prawn stew, or phenomenal prawns Limenian-style, a magnificent rice and duck, luscious smothered rice, a delectable refried rice-and-bean omelet, spectacular stuffed chicken with garlic. But I had better stop so I won't make you hungry. And, naturally, your choice of fine red wine or refreshing, ice-cold beer.
For dessert, sweet pineapple fritters, scrumptious Limenian ladyfingers, fabulous deep-fried crullers with honey, fantastic honey-drizzled crêpes, delicious doughnuts, memorable nun's breath, marvelous marzipan, terrific twisted pastry, sensational meringues, superb golden honey candies, Doña Pepa's outstanding almond nougat, lip-smacking blue-corn pudding, and unforgettable fig turnovers with rich ricotta cheese.
Will you accept me as your gourmet cook? I'm exceptionally clean, for I take a nice bath at least twice a day. I don't chew gum, or smoke cigarettes, or have hairy underarms, and my lovely hands and feet are as perfect as my beautiful breasts and buttocks. I will work all the hours needed to keep your taste buds and tummy happy. If necessary, I will also dress you, undress you, wash you, shave you, trim your nails, and wipe your ass when you make number two. At night I'll warm you with my very own body so that you feel no nasty chill in your bed. In addition to preparing your meals, I will be your humble valet, your hot little stove, your first-class razor, your super-sharp scissors, and your downy-soft toilet paper.
Will you take me on, my darling señor?
Yours, yours, all yours,
The Stupendous Cook Without Bunions
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