"I meant to say I couldn't sleep a wink," she lied, because for some time she had not enjoyed so deep a sleep, though one, it must be said, shaken by storms of desire and the phantoms of love. "I'm so tired I don't know what I'm saying."
The boy was concentrating again on a page in the book about the painter he adored, which displayed a photograph of Egon Schiele looking at himself in the large mirror in his studio. He was shown full-length, his hands in his pockets, his short hair uncombed, his slender boyish body encased in a white, high-collared shirt and tie, but no jacket, and his hands hidden, of course, in the pockets of a pair of trousers with the bottoms rolled as if he were about to wade across a river. Since he had arrived, Fonchito had done nothing but talk about that mirror, attempting over and over again to initiate a conversation about the photograph; but Doña Lucrecia, lost in her own thoughts and still caught up in the confused exaltation, the doubts and hopes that had dominated her since yesterday's surprising development in her anonymous correspondence, had paid no attention. She looked at Fonchito's head of golden curls and saw his profile, his solemn scrutiny of the photograph as if he were trying to wrench some secret from it. "He doesn't realize, he didn't understand." Though one never knew with him. He had probably understood perfectly and was pretending he hadn't so as not to increase her embarrassment.
Or, perhaps, "to go off" didn't have the same meaning for the boy? She recalled that some time ago she and Rigoberto had engaged in one of those salacious conversations that the secret laws governing their lives permitted only at night and in bed during the prologue, main text, or epilogue of love. Her husband had assured her that the younger generation no longer used "to go off" but "to come," a clear demonstration, even in the delicate realm of Venus, of the influence of English, for when gringos and gringas made love they "came" and didn't go off anywhere, as Latins do. In any event, Doña Lucrecia had gone off, come, or finished (this was the verb she and Don Rigoberto had used during their ten years of marriage after agreeing never to refer to that beautiful conclusion to the erotic encounter as an uncivil, clinical "orgasm," much less a dripping-wet, belligerent "ejaculation") the night before, enjoying it intensely, with an acute, almost painful pleasure—she had awakened bathed in sweat, her teeth chattering, her hands and feet convulsed—dreaming that she had gone to the mysterious appointment indicated in the anonymous letter, following all the extravagant instructions, and in the end, after the most intricate routes along dark streets in both the center and outlying districts of Lima, she had been—wearing a blindfold, naturally—admitted to a house whose odor she recognized, led up a flight of stairs to the second floor—from the first moment she was certain it was the house in Barranco—undressed, and made to lie down on a bed that she also identified as their old one, until she felt herself held tightly, embraced, penetrated, and filled to overflowing by a body which, of course, was Rigoberto's. They had finished—going off or coming—together, which did not happen to them very often. Both had thought it a positive sign, a happy omen for the new life opening before them following this abracadabraesque reconciliation. Then she woke, wet, languorous, confused, and had to struggle for some time before she could accept that her intense happiness had been only a dream.
"The mirror was a gift to Schiele from his mother." Fonchito's voice returned her to her house, to a drab San Isidro, to the shouts of children kicking a soccer ball in the Olivar; the boy's face was turned toward her. "He begged her and begged her to give it to him. Some people say he stole it from her. That he wanted it so much that one day he went to his mother's house and just walked out with it. And finally she agreed and left it in his studio. His first one. He always kept it. He moved that mirror to every studio he ever had, until he died."
"Why is the mirror so important?" Doña Lucrecia made an effort to show interest. "We know he was like Narcissus. The photograph proves it. Looking at himself, in love with himself, putting on a victim's face. So the world would love and admire him just as he loved and admired himself."
Fonchito burst into laughter.
"What an imagination, Stepmamá!" he exclaimed. "That's why I like talking to you; you can think of things, just like I do. You can find a story in everything. We're alike, aren't we? I never get bored with you."
"You don't bore me either." She blew him a kiss. "I told you what I think, now it's your turn. Why are you so interested in the mirror?"
"I dream about that mirror," Fonchito admitted. And, with a little Mephistophelian smile, he added, "It was very important to Egon. How do you think he painted a hundred self-portraits? With that mirror. And he used it to paint his models reflected in it. It wasn't a whim. It was, it was …"
He made a face, searching, but Doña Lucrecia guessed it wasn't words he lacked but a way to articulate a formless idea still gestating in that precocious little head. The boy's passion for the painter, she was certain now, was pathological. But perhaps, for that very reason, it might also shape an exceptional future for Fonchito as an eccentric creator, an unconventional artist. If she kept the appointment and reconciled with Rigoberto, she would tell him so. "Do you like the idea of having a neurotic genius for a son?" And she would ask him if it wasn't dangerous for the boy's psychic health to identify so strongly with a painter like Egon Schiele, whose inclinations were so perverse. But then Rigoberto would reply: "What? Have you been seeing Fonchito? While we were separated? While I was writing you love letters, forgetting what had happened, forgiving what had happened, you were seeing him behind my back? The boy you corrupted by taking him to your bed?" My God, my God, what an idiot I've turned into, thought Doña Lucrecia. If she went to the appointment, the one thing she couldn't do was mention Alfonso's name even once.
"Hi, Justita," he greeted the girl as she came into the dining alcove, looking neat as a pin in a starched apron and carrying the tea tray and the requisite toasted buns with butter and marmalade. "Don't go, I want to show you something. Here, what do you see?"
"What else but more of that dirty stuff you like so much." Justiniana's darting eyes lingered on the book for a long time. "A fresh guy having a great time looking at two naked girls who are wearing stockings and hats and showing off for him."
"That's what it looks like, doesn't it?" exclaimed Fonchito with a triumphant air. He handed the book to Doña Lucrecia so that she could examine the full-page reproduction. "They're not two models, it's just one. Why do we see two, one from the front, the other from the back? Because of the mirror! Do you get it now, Stepmamá? The title explains everything."
Schiele Painting a Nude Model Before the Mirror, 1910 (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna), read Doña Lucrecia. As she examined the picture, intrigued by something she could not name except that it was not in the picture itself—it was a presence, or rather an absence—she half-heard Fonchito, who by now was in the state of growing excitement that talking about Schiele always brought him to. He was explaining to Justiniana that the mirror "is where we are when we look at the picture." And that the model seen from the front wasn't flesh and blood but an image in the mirror, while the painter and the model seen from the back were real and not reflections. Which meant that Egon Schiele had begun to paint Moa from the rear, in front of the mirror, but then, drawn by the part he did not see directly but only in projection, he decided to paint that too. And so, thanks to the mirror, he painted two Moas, who were really only one: the complete Moa, the two halves of Moa, the Moa no one could see in reality because "we only see what we have in front of us, not the part behind that front." Did she understand why the mirror was so important to Egon Schiele?
"Don't you think he's missing something upstairs, Señora?" Justiniana said in an exaggerated way, touching her temple.
"I have for a long time," Doña Lucrecia agreed. And then, in the same breath, she turned to Fonchito: "Who was this Moa?"
A Tahitian. She had come to Vienna and lived with a painter who was also a mime and a madman: Erwin Dominik Ose. The boy quickly turned pages and showed Doña Lucrecia and Justiniana several reproductions of the Tahitian Moa, dancing, draped in multicolored tunics through whose folds one could see small breasts with erect nipples, and, like two spiders crouching under her arms, the small tufts of hair in her armpits. She danced in cabarets, she was the muse of poets and painters, and in addition to posing for Egon, she had also been his lover.
"I guessed that from the start," remarked Justiniana. "That bandit always went to bed with his models after he painted them, we all know that."
"Sometimes before, and sometimes while he was painting them," Fonchito assured her calmly, approvingly. "Though not all of them. In his journal for 1918, the last year of his life, he mentions 117 models who visited his studio. Could he have gone to bed with so many in so short a time?"
"Not even if he contracted tuberculosis." Justiniana laughed. "Did he die of consumption?"
"He died of Spanish influenza at the age of twenty-eight," Fonchito explained. "That's how I'm going to die too, in case you didn't know."
"Don't say that even as a joke, it's bad luck," the girl reprimanded him.
"But something here doesn't fit," Doña Lucrecia interrupted.
She had taken the book of reproductions from the boy and was looking again, very carefully, at the drawing, with its sepia background and precise, thin lines, of the painter and the model duplicated ("or divided?") by the mirror, in which the intense, almost hostile eyes of Schiele seem to find their response in the melancholy, silken, flashing eyes of Moa, the dancer with blue-black lashes. Señora Lucrecia had been disturbed by something she had just identified. Ah yes, the hat glimpsed from the rear. Except for this detail, in everything else there was perfect correspondence between the two parts of the delicate, thrusting, sensual figure of the Tahitian with hair like spiders at her pubis and under her arms; once you were aware of the presence of the mirror, you recognized the two halves of the same person in the two figures observed by the artist. But not the hat. The figure seen from the rear wore something on her head which, from that perspective, did not seem to be a hat at all but something uncertain, unsettling, a sort of cowl, even, even, the head of a wild animal. That was it, some kind of tiger. In any case, nothing even remotely like the coquettish, feminine, charming little hat so flattering to the Moa seen from the front.
"How odd," the stepmother repeated. "In the rear view, the hat turns into a mask. The head of a beast."
"Like the one my papá asks you to put on in front of the mirror, Stepmamá?"
Doña Lucrecia's smile froze. Suddenly she understood the reason for the vague uneasiness that had engulfed her ever since the boy showed her Schiele Painting a Nude Model Before the Mirror.
"What is it, Señora?" Justiniana was looking at her. "You're so pale."
"Then it's you," she stammered, staring in disbelief at Fonchito. "You're sending me anonymous letters, you little hypocrite."
He was the one, of course he was. It had been in the letter before last, or the one before that. She didn't have to look for it; the sentence, with all its commas and periods, was etched in her memory: "You will undress before the mirror, except for your stockings, and hide your lovely head behind the mask of a wild animal, preferably a tigress or a lioness. You will thrust out your right hip, flex your left leg, rest your hand on your other hip, in the most provocative pose. I will be watching you, sitting in my chair, with my usual reverence." Isn't that exactly what she was looking at? The damn kid was playing with her! She seized the book of reproductions and, blind with fury, hurled it at Fonchito. The boy could not get out of the way in time. The book hit him full in the face, he screamed, and a startled Justiniana screamed too. With the impact, he fell back onto the carpet, holding his face and looking up at her, wide-eyed, from the floor. Doña Lucrecia did not think she had done anything wrong in losing her temper. She was too angry to regret anything. While the girl helped him to his feet, she continued to shout, beside herself with rage.
"You liar, you hypocrite, you fake. Do you think you have the right to play with me like that, when I'm a grown woman and you're nothing but a snot-nosed kid still wet behind the ears?"
"What's the matter, what did I do to you?" Fonchito stuttered, trying to free himself from Justita's arms.
"Calm down, Señora, you've hurt him; look, his nose is bleeding," said Justiniana. "And you be still, Foncho, and let me have a look."
"What, what did you do to me, you phony!" shouted an even angrier Doña Lucrecia. "You think it doesn't matter? Writing me anonymous letters? Making me think they came from your papá?"
"But I never sent you any anonymous letters," the boy protested, while the girl, on her knees, wiped the blood from his nose with a paper napkin. "Don't move, don't move, you're bleeding all over everything."
"Your damned mirror gave you away, and your damned Egon Schiele!" Doña Lucrecia was still shouting. "You thought you were so clever, didn't you? Well, you're not, fool. How do you know he asked me to put on an animal mask?"
"You told me, Stepmamá," Fonchito stammered, but fell silent when he saw Doña Lucrecia get to her feet. He protected his face with both hands, as if she were going to hit him.
"I never told you about the mask, you liar," his enraged stepmother exploded. "I'm going to bring you that letter, I'm going to read it to you. You're going to eat it, you're going to apologize. And I'll never let you set foot in this house again. Do you hear? Never!"
Like a bolt of lightning she shot past Justiniana and Fonchito, wild with indignation. But before going to the dressing table where she kept the anonymous letters, she went to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face and rub her temples with cologne. She could not calm down. This kid, this damn brat. Playing with her, yes, the little kitten with the big mouse. Sending her daring, elaborate letters to make her think they were from Rigoberto, encouraging her to hope for a reconciliation. What was he after? What scheme was he devising? Why the farce? For the fun, the sheer fun of manipulating her emotions, her life? He was perverse, sadistic. He enjoyed leading her on and then watching her crumbling hopes, her disillusionment.
She returned to her bedroom, still not herself, and did not have to look very long in her dressing-table drawer to find the letter. The seventh one. There was the sentence that had alerted her, more or less as she had remembered it: "… you will hide your lovely head behind the mask of a wild animal, preferably the tigress in heat in Rubén Darío's Azul … or a Sudanese lioness. You will thrust out your hip …" et cetera, et cetera. The Tahitian Moa in the drawing by Schiele, no more, no less. That precocious little troublemaker, that schemer. He'd had the gall to play out a whole drama about Schiele's mirror, even showing her the picture that betrayed him. She wasn't sorry she had thrown the book, even though it did give him a bloody nose. Good! Hadn't the little devil ruined her life? Because she had not been the seducer, though the difference in their ages condemned her. He, he had been the seducer. With his youth and cherubic face, he was Mephistopheles, Lucifer in person. But that was all over. She'd make him eat this anonymous letter, yes, and throw him out of the house. And he'd never come back, never interfere in her life again.
But she found only a dejected Justiniana in the dining alcove. She showed her the bloodstained napkin.
"He left crying, Señora. Not because of his nose. But because when you threw it at him you tore the book about that painter he likes so much. He's really sad, I can tell you."
"Go on, now you're feeling sorry for him." Señora Lucrecia dropped to the sofa, exhausted. "Don't you realize what he did to me? He, he's the one who sent me those anonymous letters."
"He swore he didn't, Señora. He swore by all that's holy that it was the señor who sent them."
"He's lying." Doña Lucrecia felt utterly exhausted. Was she going to faint? How she longed to go to bed, close her eyes, sleep for an entire week. "He gave himself away when he mentioned the mask and the mirror."
Justiniana came over to her and spoke almost in a whisper. "Are you sure you didn't read him that letter? That you didn't tell him about the mask? Fonchito is a clever little scamp, Señora. Do you think he'd let something so stupid trip him up?"
"I never read him that letter, I never told him about the mask," Doña Lucrecia declared. But at that same moment she began to have doubts.
Had she? Yesterday, or the day before? Her mind wandered so these days; ever since the flood of anonymous letters she had been lost in a forest of conjectures, speculations, suspicions, fantasies. Wasn't it possible? That she had told him, mentioned it, even read him that strange command to pose nude, wearing stockings and an animal mask, in front of a mirror? If she had, she had committed a grave injustice by insulting and hitting him.
"I can't take any more," she murmured, making an effort to hold back her tears. "I'm sick of it, Justita, sick of it. I probably told him and forgot. I don't know where my head is. Maybe I did. I want to leave this city, this country. Go where nobody knows me. Far away from Rigoberto and Fonchito. Because of those two I've fallen into a pit and I'll never climb out."
"Don't be sad, Señora." Justiniana put her hand on her shoulder, stroked her forehead. "Don't be bitter. And don't worry. There's a way, a very easy way, to find out if it's Fonchito or Don Rigoberto who's writing all that nonsense to you.
Doña Lucrecia looked up. The girl's eyes were flashing.
"Of course there is, Señora." She spoke with her hands, her eyes, her lips, her teeth. "Didn't the last letter arrange a date with you? That's the answer. Go where it says, do what it asks."
"Do you really think I'm going to do things that belong in a cheap Mexican movie?" Doña Lucrecia pretended to be shocked.
"And that's how you'll find out who's writing the letters," Justiniana concluded. "I'll go with you, if you like. So you won't feel so alone. And because I'm dying of curiosity too, Señora. Sonny or daddy? Which one can it be?"
She laughed with all her usual boldness and charm, and Doña Lucrecia finally began to smile as well. After all, perhaps this lunatic was right. If she kept the mysterious appointment, her doubts would be over at last.
"He won't show up, I'll be playing the fool again," she argued, not very convincingly, knowing deep down that she had made her decision. She would go, do every silly thing daddy or sonny asked. She'd go on playing the game that, willingly or not, she had been playing for so long.
"Shall I fix you a nice warm bath with salts, so you'll get over your temper?" Justiniana was extremely animated.
Doña Lucrecia nodded. Damn it, now she had the feeling she had been too hasty and very unfair to poor Fonchito.
Letter to the Reader of Playboy, or A Brief Treatise on Aesthetics
Since eroticism is the intelligent and sensitive humanization of physical love, and pornography its cheapening and degradation, I accuse you, reader of Playboy or Penthouse, frequenter of vile dens that show hard-core movies, and sex shops where you purchase electric vibrators, rubber dildos, and condoms adorned with rooster crests or archbishops' mitres, of contributing to the rapid regression to mere animal copulation of the one attribute granted to men and women that makes them most like gods (pagan ones, of course, who were neither chaste nor prudish regarding sexual matters, like the one we all know about).
You transgress openly each month when, aroused by the flames of your desires, you renounce the exercise of your own imagination and succumb to the municipal vice of permitting your most subtle drives, those of the carnal appetite, to be reined in by products that have been cloned, and by seeming to satisfy your sexual urges actually subjugate them, watering them down, serializing and constricting them in caricatures that vulgarize sex, strip it of originality, mystery, and beauty, and turn it into a farcical, ignoble affront to good taste. To let you know who your accuser is, perhaps I can clarify my thinking for you by stating (monogamist that I am, though looking kindly on adultery) that I consider the late and highly respected Israeli leader Doña Golda Meir, or the austere Señora Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, not one of whose hairs moved for the entire time she was Prime Minister, as more delectable sources of erotic desire than any of those interchangeable pimp's dolls, breasts swollen by silicone, pubises trimmed and dyed, the same fraud mass-produced out of a single mold, who, blending stupidity with the ridiculous, appear in the centerfold of Playboy, that enemy of Eros, wearing plush ears and a tail and flourishing their scepter as "Bunny of the Month."
My hatred for Playboy, Penthouse, and others of their ilk is not gratuitous. This kind of magazine symbolizes the corruption of sex, the disappearance of the beautiful taboos that once surrounded it and against which the human spirit could rebel, exercising individual freedom, affirming the singular personality of each human being, gradually creating the sovereign individual in the secret and discreet elaboration of rituals, actions, images, cults, fantasies, ceremonies which, by ethically ennobling the act of love and conferring aesthetic distinction upon it, progressively humanized it until it was transformed into a creative act. An act thanks to which, in the private intimacy of bedrooms, a man and a woman (I cite the orthodox formula, but clearly this also applies to a gentleman and a web-footed creature, two women, two or three men, and all imaginable combinations as long as the company does not exceed three individuals or, at most, two couples) could spend a few hours emulating Homer, Phidias, Botticelli, or Beethoven. I know you don't understand me, but that is not important; if you understood me, you would not be imbecilic enough to synchronize your erections and orgasms with the watch (surely solid gold and waterproof?) of a man named Hugh Hefner.
The problem is more aesthetic than ethical, philosophical, sexual, psychological, or political, though it goes without saying that such divisions are unacceptable to me because everything that matters is, in the long run, aesthetic. Pornography strips eroticism of its artistic content, favors the organic over the spiritual and mental, as if the central protagonists of desire and pleasure were phalluses and vulvas and these organs not mere servants to the phantoms that govern our souls, and segregates physical love from the rest of human experience. Eroticism, on the other hand, integrates it with everything we are, everything we have. Pornographer, while for you the only thing that counts when you make love is the same thing that counts for a dog, a monkey, or a horse—that is, to ejaculate—Lucrecia and I, go on, envy us, also make love when we are having breakfast, dressing, listening to Mahler, talking with friends, and contemplating the clouds or the sea.
When I say aesthetic you may, perhaps, think—if pornography and thinking are compatible—that with this shortcut I fall into the trap of gregariousness, and, since values are generally shared, in this domain I am less myself and more the other, in short, a part of the tribe. I acknowledge that the danger exists, but I battle it unceasingly, day and night, defending my independence against all odds through the constant exercise of my freedom.
You can judge this for yourself by reading a small sample of my personal treatise on aesthetics (which I hope I do not share with many people, which is flexible, which is shaped and reshaped like clay in the hands of a skilled potter).
Everything brilliant is ugly. There are brilliant cities, like Vienna, Buenos Aires, and Paris; brilliant writers, like Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and John Updike; brilliant painters, like Andy Warhol, Matta, and Tàpies. Though all of them shine, for me they are dispensable. Without exception, all modern architects are brilliant, and for this reason architecture has been marginalized from art and transformed into a branch of advertising and public relations, and therefore it would be a good idea to reject architects en masse and have recourse only to masons, master builders, and the inspiration of laymen. There are no brilliant musicians, though composers like Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie struggled to achieve brilliance and almost succeeded. Cinema, a diversion like judo or wrestling, is post-artistic and does not deserve to be included in any considerations regarding aesthetics, despite a few Western anomalies (tonight I would save Visconti, Orson Welles, Buñuel, Berlanga, and John Ford) and one Japanese (Kurosawa).
Every person who writes "nuclearize," "I submit," "raise consciousness," "visualize," "societal," and, above all, "telluric," is a son/daughter of a bitch. As are those who use toothpicks in public, inflicting on their neighbors a repellent sight that defaces the landscape. As are those repulsive creatures who pull off pieces of bread and knead them into little balls that they leave on the table. Don't ask me why the perpetrators of these hideous acts are sons/daughters of bitches; such knowledge is intuited and assimilated through inspiration; infused, not studied. The same term applies, of course, to the mortal of any sex who, in an attempt to Castilianize drink, writes guisqui for whiskey, yinyerel for ginger ale, or jaibol for highball. These men/women should probably die, for I suspect their lives are superfluous.
The obligation of a film or a book is to entertain me. If I am distracted, if I begin to nod or fall asleep when I watch or read them, they have failed in their duty and are bad books, bad films. Conspicuous examples: The Man without Qualities, by Musil, and all the movies made by those charlatans called Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino.
With regard to painting and sculpture, my criterion for making an artistic judgment is very simple: everything I could paint or sculpt myself is shit. The only artists of value are those whose works, far beyond the reach of my creative mediocrity, I could not reproduce. This criterion has allowed me to determine, on first viewing, that all work by "artists" like Andy Warhol or Frida Kahlo is trash, and, on the contrary, even the quickest sketch by George Grosz, Chillida, or Balthus is a work of genius. In addition to this general rule, the obligation of a picture is to excite me (an expression I am not fond of but use because I like even less, since it introduces a comic element into something very serious, our Latin American allegory: "almost get me off"). If I like it but it leaves me cold, if my imagination is not overwhelmed by theatrical-copulatory desires and that tickling buzz in the testicles that precedes a tender new erection, then even if it is the Mona Lisa, The Man with His Hand on His Chest, Guernica, or The Night Watch, the picture holds no interest for me. And so you may be surprised to learn that in Goya, another sacred monster, I like only the little shoes with golden buckles, pointed heels, and satin adornments worn with white mesh stockings by the marquises in his oil paintings, and that in Renoir's paintings I look with benevolence (sometimes with pleasure) only on the pink behinds of his peasant girls and avoid his other bodies, above all those kewpie-doll faces and firefly-eyes that anticipate—vade retro!—the Playboy bunnies. In Courbet, I am interested in the lesbians and that gigantic posterior that made the prudish Empress Eugenie blush.
In my opinion, the obligation of music is to plunge me into a vertigo of pure sensation that makes me forget the most boring part of myself, the civil, municipal part, clears away preoccupations, isolates me in an enclave untouched by the sordid reality surrounding it, and in this way allows me to think clearly about the fantasies (generally erotic and always with my wife in the starring role) that make my existence bearable. Ergo, if the music makes its presence felt too strongly and, because I begin to like it too much or because it is very loud, distracts me from my own thoughts and demands and captures my attention—I quickly cite Gardel, Pérez Prado, Mahler, every merengue, and four-fifths of all operas—it is bad music and is banished from my study. This principle, of course, makes me love Wagner despite the trumpets and annoying English horns, and respect Schoenberg.
I hope these brief examples, which, naturally, I don't expect you to share with me (and I desire it even less), illustrate what I mean when I state that eroticism is a private game (in the highest sense given to the word by the great Johan Huizinga) in which only I and phantoms and other players can participate, and whose success depends on its secrecy and imperviousness to public curiosity, for this can lead only to its regimentation and perverse manipulation by forces that would nullify erotic play. Underarm hair on a woman disgusts me, but I respect the amateurs who persuade their companion, male or female, to water and cultivate it so that they may play there with lips and teeth until achieving ecstasy, howling in C major. But I absolutely cannot respect, cannot feel anything but pity for the poor shithead who bastardizes this whim of his phantom by buying—for example in one of the pornographic department stores sown all over Germany by the former aviatrix Beate Uhse—an artificial hairy armpit or pubis (made with "natural hair," boast the most expensive) sold in various shapes, sizes, flavors, and colors.
The legitimization and public acceptance of eroticism municipalizes it, nullifies it, debases it, turning it into pornography, that sad business which I define as eroticism for the poor in purse and spirit. Pornography is passive and collectivist, eroticism is creative and individual even when practiced in twos or threes (I repeat, I oppose raising the number of participants, so that these functions do not lose their inclination to be individualistic celebrations and exercises of sovereignty, and are not soiled by appearing to be meetings, sporting events, or circuses). Consequently, I can only laugh like a hyena at the arguments of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (see his interview with Allen Young in Consuls of Sodom) defending collective couplings in dimly lit bathhouses with the tall tale that such promiscuity is democratic and fair because the egalitarian darkness permits the ugly and the attractive, the skinny and the fat, the young and the old to have the same opportunities for pleasure. The absurd reasoning of a constructivist commissar! Democracy has to do only with the civil dimension of a person, while love—desire and pleasure—belongs, like religion, to the private sphere, where differences, not similarities to others, matter more than anything else. Sex cannot be democratic; it is elitist and aristocratic, and a certain amount of despotism (mutually agreed upon) tends to be indispensable. The collective copulations in dark pools recommended as erotic models by the Beat poet too closely resemble the intercourse of stallions and mares in pastures or the indiscriminate skirmishes of roosters and hens in noisy henhouses to be confused with the beautiful creation of animated fictions and carnal fantasies in which there is equal participation of body and spirit, imagination and hormones, the sublime and the base in the human condition, which is what eroticism means to this modest epicurean and anarchist concealed in the civil body of a man who insures property.
Sex practiced Playboy-style (I return to this subject and will continue to do so until my death, or yours, stops me) eliminates two ingredients essential to Eros, as I understand it: risk and modesty. Let us be clear. The terrified little man on the bus who, conquering his shame and fear, opens his overcoat and for a few seconds offers the sight of his erect penis to the unwary matron whom fate has placed in front of him, is recklessly indecent. He does what he does knowing that the price of his fugitive whim can be a beating, a lynching, prison, and a scandal that would reveal to public opinion a secret he would prefer to take with him to the grave, condemning him to the status of reprobate, psychopath, and a menace to society. But he risks all this because the pleasure he receives from his minimal exhibitionism is inseparable from fear and his transgression against modesty. What an interstellar distance—precisely the distance that separates eroticism from pornography—separates him from the executive basted in French cologne, his wrist encircled by a Rolex (what other watch could it be?), who, in a trendy bar enlivened by the sound of the blues, opens the latest issue of Playboy and exhibits himself and the magazine, convinced he is displaying his penis to the world, showing himself as worldly, unprejudiced, modern, pleasure-seeking, in. The poor imbecile! He does not suspect that what he is exhibiting is the sign and seal of his servitude to the commonplace, to advertising and a deindividualizing fashion, his abdication of freedom, his renunciation of emancipation, by means of his personal phantoms, from the atavistic slavery of serialization.
For this reason I accuse you and the aforementioned magazine and others like it and all of you who read them—or even leaf through them—and with that miserable prefabricated pap nourish—I mean, kill—your libidos, of spearheading the great campaign, the manifestation of contemporary barbarism, to desacralize and banalize sex. Civilization hides and nuances sex in order to better enjoy it, surrounding it with rituals and rules that enrich it to an extent undreamed of by pre-erotic men and women, copulators, progenitors of offpring. After traveling a long, long road whose backbone, in a sense, was the progressive distillation of erotic play by an unexpected route—the permissive society, the tolerant culture—we have returned to our ancestral starting point: lovemaking has again become physical, semi-public, thoughtless gymnastics performed to the rhythm of stimuli created not by the unconscious mind and the soul but by market analysts, stimuli as stupid as the false cow's vagina passed under the noses of stabled bulls to make them ejaculate so that their semen can be collected and used for artificial insemination.
Go on, buy and read your latest Playboy, you living suicide, and bring your grain of sand to the creation of that world of ejaculating male and female eunuchs where imagination and secret phantoms will vanish as the pillars of love. For my part, I am going now to make love to the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra, both at the same time, in a play whose script I do not intend to share with anyone, least of all you.
A Tiny Foot
It is four in the morning, my darling Lucrecia, thought Don Rigoberto. As he did almost every day, he had risen in the mournful damp of dawn to celebrate the ritual he had monotonously repeated ever since Doña Lucrecia had gone to live near the Olivar de San Isidro: dreaming while awake, creating and re-creating his wife under the magic spell of those notebooks where his phantoms hibernated. And where, from the first day I met you, you have been queen and mistress.
And yet, unlike other desolate or ardent early mornings, today it was not enough for him to imagine and desire her, chat with her absence, love her with his fantasy and the heart she had never left; today he needed more material, more certain, more tangible contact. Today I could kill myself, he thought without anguish. And if he wrote to her? Finally answered her suggestive anonymous letters? The pen slipped from his fingers, he barely managed to catch it. No, he couldn't do it, and in any case, he wouldn't be able to send her the letter if he did.
In the first notebook he opened, an exceedingly opportune phrase leaped off the page and bit him: "My savage awakenings at dawn are always spurred on by an image of you, real or invented, which inflames my desire, maddens my nostalgia, suspends me in midair, and drives me to this study to defend myself against annihilation, finding sanctuary in the antidote of my notebooks, pictures, and books. This alone cures me." True. But today the usual remedy would not have the beneficial effect it had at other dawns. He felt bewildered, tormented. He had been awakened by a mixture of sensations: a generous rebelliousness, similar to the feeling that at the age of eighteen had led him to Catholic Action and filled his spirit with the missionary urge to change the world, armed with the Gospels, was confused with a melting nostalgia for an Asian woman's tiny foot glimpsed in passing over the shoulder of a passerby who stood beside him for a few moments while waiting for the red light to change at a midtown intersection, and with the appearance in his memory of an eighteenth-century French scribbler named Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne; he had only one of his books in his library—he would look for it and find it before the morning began—a first edition bought many years before in an antiquarian bookshop in Paris, costing him an arm and a leg. "What a hodgepodge."
On the surface, none of this had anything directly to do with Lucrecia. Why, then, this urgent need to communicate with her, to recount to her in minute detail every thought boiling inside him? I am lying, my love, he thought. Of course it has to do with you. Everything he did, including the stupid managerial tasks that kept him shackled eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, in an insurance company in downtown Lima, had a profound connection to Lucrecia and to no one else. But above all, and even more slavishly, his nights and the exaltations, fictions, and passions that filled them were, with chivalrous fidelity, dedicated to her. There was the proof—intimate, incontrovertible, painful—on each page of the notebooks he now leafed through.
Why had he thought about rebellions? The thing that had awakened him a few moments earlier was surely an intensification of that morning's indignant anger, his consternation when he read the newspaper article that Lucrecia must have read as well; in a cramped hand, he began to transcribe it onto the first blank page he found:
Wellington (Reuters). A twenty four-year-old teacher from New Zealand has been sentenced by a judge in this city to four years in prison for sexual assault after it was learned that she had been having carnal relations with a ten-year-old boy, a friend and classmate of her son's. The judge declared that he had given her the same sentence he would have imposed if a man had raped a girl of that age.
My love, my darling Lucrecia, please do not find in this even the shadow of a reproach for what happened between us, he thought. No distasteful allusion, nothing that might seem accusatory or vindictive. No. She ought to see exactly the opposite. Because when the few lines of this dispatch unfolded beneath his eyes this morning as he was taking the first sips of his bitter breakfast coffee (not because he drank it without sugar but because Lucrecia was not beside him and he could not talk over the news with her), Don Rigoberto felt no anguish or pain, much less gratitude or enthusiasm for the judge's statement. Rather, he felt the impetuous, startling solidarity of an adolescent attending a rally for that poor New Zealander so brutally punished because she had introduced the delights of Muslim heaven (the most carnal of those offered in the marketplace of religions, as far as he knew) to that fortunate boy.
Yes, yes, my beloved Lucrecia. He was not pretending or lying or exaggerating. All day he had been aflame with the same indignation he had felt that morning at the judge's foolishness and its unfortunate symmetry with certain feminist doctrines. Could an adult male violating a prepubescent girl of ten, a punishable crime, be the same as a woman of twenty-four disclosing bodily joy and the miracles of sex to a ten-year-old boy already capable of timid erections and simple seminal emissions? If in the first case the presumption of violence against the victim by the victimizer was obligatory (even if the girl had sufficient use of reason to give her consent, she would still be the victim of physical aggression against her hymen), in the second it was simply inconceivable, for if copulation did take place it could happen only with the boy's enthusiastic acquiescence, without which the carnal act would not have been consummated. Don Rigoberto picked up his pen and wrote in a fever of rage: "Although I despise utopias and know they are catastrophic for human life, I now embrace this one: let all boys in this city be deflowered when they reach the age of ten by married women in their thirties, preferably their aunts, teachers, or godmothers." He breathed deeply, feeling somewhat relieved.
For the entire day he was tormented by the fate of that teacher from Wellington, feeling immense sympathy for the public condemnation she must have been exposed to, the humiliation and mockery she must have suffered in addition to losing her job and having that cacographic, electronic, and now digital obscenity, the press, the so-called media, treat her as a corruptor of youth, a degenerate. He was not lying to himself, he was not perpetrating a masochistic farce. "No, dear Lucrecia, I swear I'm not." Throughout the day and into the night the teacher's face, incarnated as the face of his ex-wife, had appeared to him many times. And now, now he felt a driving need to let her know ("to let you know, my love") of his regret and shame. For having been as insensitive, obtuse, inhuman, and cruel as that magistrate in Wellington, a city he would never set foot in except to lay fragrant red roses at the feet of that admired, admirable teacher who would pay for her generosity, her great heart, locked away with filicides, thieves, swindlers, and pickpockets (Anglophiles and Maori).
What would the teacher's feet be like? If I could obtain her photograph I would not hesitate to light candles and burn incense to her, he thought. He hoped and prayed her feet were as beautiful and delicate as Doña Lucrecia's, or the foot he had seen on the glossy page of Time magazine over the shoulder of a passerby one afternoon when he was stopped by a traffic light at the corner of La Colmena on his way to the Miguel Gray room at the Club Nacional, where he had a meeting with one of those necktied imbeciles who hold their meetings at the Club Nacional and provide a living for imbeciles like him who earn their bread insuring personal property and real estate. The vision lasted only a few seconds but was as illuminating, as bright, as convulsive and overwhelming as it must have been for that girl from Galilee when she had her vision of the winged Gabriel announcing the news that would inflict so many outrages upon the human race.
It was a tiny foot, viewed in profile, with a semicircular heel and a high instep rising proudly from an elegantly shaped sole and ending in meticulously modeled small toes, a feminine foot unblemished by calluses, rough spots, corns, or hideous bunions, a foot where nothing seemed inharmonious and nothing limited the perfection of the whole and the part, a small foot raised and apparently surprised by the alert photographer an instant before it came to rest on a soft carpet. Why Asian? Perhaps because the page it adorned advertised an airline from that part of the world—Singapore Airlines—or possibly because, in his limited experience, Don Rigoberto believed he could affirm that the women of Asia had the loveliest feet on the planet. He was shaken as he recalled the times he had kissed the delectable extremities of his beloved, calling them "little Filipino feet," "Malaysian heels," "Japanese insteps."
All day, in fact, along with his rage over the misfortunes of his new friend, the teacher from Wellington, the tiny feminine foot in the advertisement in Time had troubled his mind, and later had disturbed his sleep, unearthing from the depths of memory the recollection of Cinderella, a story told to him when he was a child, and it was precisely the detail of the heroine's emblematic slipper that only her tiny foot could wear which had awakened his first erotic fantasies ("Some wetness and a partial erection, if I must be technical," he said aloud, in the first good-humored impulse of the night). Had he ever discussed with Lucrecia his theory that the amiable Cinderella had undoubtedly done more than all the corrupt mountains of antierotic pornography produced in the twentieth century to create legions of male fetishists? He could not remember. A lapse in his matrimonial relationship that he must correct one day. His state of mind had improved considerably since he had awakened, filled with vexation and longing, dying of rage, solitude, and sorrow. For the past few moments he had even authorized—it was his way of not succumbing to the despair of each day—certain fantasies that had to do not with the eyes, hair, breasts, thighs, or hips of Lucrecia but exclusively with her feet. He now had beside him—it had been difficult to find on the shelves where it had been mislaid—that first edition, in three small volumes, of the novel by Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (in his own hand he had noted on an index card: 1734–1806), the only one he owned of the dozens and dozens badly written by that incontinent polygraph: Le Pied de Franchette ou l'orpheline française: Histoire intéressante et morale (Paris, Humblot Quillau, 1769, 2 parties en 3 volumes, 160–148–192 pages). Now I leaf through it, he thought. And now you appear, Lucrecia, barefoot or shod, in every chapter, page, word.
Only one thing in this overwrought scribbler deserved his sympathy and made him associate, in the middle of this misty night, Restif de la Bretonne with Lucrecia, while a thousand other things (well, perhaps not quite so many) made him forgettable, transitory, even unpleasant. Had he ever talked about him to her? Had his name ever come up in their nightly conjugal celebrations? Don Rigoberto could not remember. "But even if it is too late, my dearest, I present him to you, offer him, lay him at your feet (an appropriate turn of phrase)." He had been born into a time of great upheavals, the French eighteenth century, but it was unlikely that the good Nicolas-Edmé realized that the entire world around him was falling apart and being put back together again in the pendulum swings of the revolution, obsessed as he was with his own revolution, not the one in society, the economy, and the political regime—"the ones, in general, that get good press"—but the one that concerned him personally: the revolution in carnal desire. That is what he found sympathetic, what led him to buy the first edition of Le Pied de Franchette, a novel of cruel coincidences and comic iniquities, absurd entanglements and mindless exchanges, which any respectable literary critic or reader of good taste would find execrable but for Don Rigoberto had the high merit of exalting to deicidal extremes the right of the human being to rebel against the establishment for the sake of his desires, to change the world by making use of his fantasy even for the ephemeral duration of his reading or dreaming.
He read aloud what he had written in the notebook about Restif after reading Le Pied de Franchette: "I do not believe that this provincial, the son of peasants, an autodidact, despite his having attended a Jansenist seminary, who taught himself languages and doctrines, all of them badly, and earned his living as a typesetter and maker of books (in both senses of the word, for he wrote them and manufactured them, though he did the second more artfully than the first), ever suspected the transcendental importance his writings would have (symbolic and moral importance, not aesthetic) when, in his incessant explorations of poor working-class neighborhoods in Paris, which fascinated him, or the villages and countryside of France, which he documented like a sociologist, taking time away from his amorous entanglements—adulterous, incestuous, mercenary, but always orthodox, for homosexuality produced a Carmelite consternation in him—he wrote on the run, guided, horror of horrors, by inspiration, never correcting, in a prose that poured out of him overblown, vulgar, burdened with all the detritus of the French language, confused, repetitive, labyrinthine, conventional, cheap, bereft of ideas, insensitive, and—in a word that defines his style better than any other—underdeveloped."
Why, then, after so severe a judgment, was he wasting the dawn recalling this aesthetic imperfection, a crude scribbler who, to make matters worse, even plied the ugly trade of informer? The notebook overflowed with information about him. He had produced nearly two hundred books, all of them unreadable as literature. Why, then, did he persist in bringing him close to Doña Lucrecia, his polar opposite, perfection made woman? Because, he answered himself, no one but this uncouth intellectual could have understood his midday emotion on glimpsing so fleetingly, in a magazine advertisement, the Asian girl's tiny swift foot that tonight had brought him the memory of, the desire for, the queenly feet of Lucrecia. No, no one but Restif, amateur and supreme adept of the cult that an abominable race of psychologists and psychoanalysts preferred to call fetishism, could have understood him, accompanied him, counseled him in this homage and act of gratitude to those adored feet. "Thank you, my beloved Lucrecia"—he prayed fervently—"for the hours of pleasure they have given me since I first discovered them on the beach at Pucusana and kissed them beneath the water and the waves." Overcome with emotion, Don Rigoberto once again felt the salty, agile toes wriggling inside the grotto of his mouth, and his retching because of the seawater he had swallowed.
Yes, that was Don Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne's predilection: the feminine foot. And, by extension and "affinity," as an alchemist would say, everything that clothes and covers it: stocking, shoe, sandal, boot. With the spontaneity and innocence of what he was, a rustic who migrated to the city, he practiced and proclaimed his predilection for that delicate extremity and its wrappings without a trace of shame; with the fanaticism of the convert, in his innumerable writings he replaced the real world with a fictitious one as monotonous, predictable, chaotic, and stupid as the first, except that in the one shaped by his bad prose and monothematic singularity, what shone brilliantly, what stood out and unleashed the passions of men, was not the charming faces of ladies, their cascading hair, graceful waists, ivory necks, or haughty bosoms but, inevitably and exclusively, the beauty of their feet. (If he were still alive, it occurred to him, Don Rigoberto would take his friend Restif, with Lucrecia's consent, of course, to the little house by the Olivar and, hiding the rest of her body, show him her feet enclosed in a pair of darling granny boots and even permit him to remove her shoes. How would this forebear have reacted? With a transport of ecstasy? With trembling and howling? Rushing forward, like a happy bloodhound, tongue hanging out, nostrils dilated, to smell and lick the delicacy?
Although he wrote so badly, wasn't he to be respected as a man who paid so much reverence to pleasure and defended his phantom with such conviction and coherence? Wasn't the good Restif, despite his indigestible prose, "one of us"? Of course he was. That is why he had appeared tonight in his dream, drawn by that furtive little Burmese or Singaporean foot, to accompany him through the dawn. A sudden feeling of demoralization gripped Don Rigoberto. The cold penetrated his bones. How he wished at this moment that Lucrecia could know all the repentance and pain tormenting him because of the stupidity, or obstinate incomprehension, that had driven him a year ago to behave just as the ignoble judge in Wellington across the sea had when he sentenced that teacher, that friend ("She is also one of us") to four years in prison for having allowed that fortunate child, that New Zealander Fonchito, to glimpse—no, to inhabit—heaven. "Instead of suffering, instead of reproaching you, I should have thanked you, adorable nursemaid." He did so now, in a dawn filled with resounding, turbulent waves and an invisible, corrosive drizzle, seconded by an obliging Restif, whose little novel deliciously entitled Le Pied de Franchette, and stupidly subtitled ou l'orpheline française: Histoire intéressante et morale (after all, there was good reason to call it moral), he held on his lap and caressed with both hands, like a pair of beautiful feet.
When Keats wrote, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (the citation reappeared constantly in every notebook he opened), was he thinking of Doña Lucrecia's feet? Yes, though the unhappy man did not know it. And, when Restif de la Bretonne wrote and printed (at the same speed, probably) Le Pied de Franchette, in 1769, at the age of thirty-five, he too had been inspired, from the future, by a woman who would come into the world nearly two centuries later, in a barbarous region of America called (seriously?) Latin. Thanks to his commentaries in the notebook, Don Rigoberto began to remember the plot of the little novel. As conventional and predictable as could be, written with his feet (no, this he should not think or say), the true protagonist was not the beautiful adolescent orphan Franchette Florangis but the maddening feet of Franchette Florangis, and this elevated and individualized the novel, giving it the wisdom and persuasiveness of a true work of art. The opalescent feet of the young Franchette caused unimaginable disturbances, ignited unimaginable passions. Her tutor, Monsieur Apatéon, a foolish old man who loved to buy exquisite shoes for them and took advantage of any excuse to caress them, was so inflamed by his pupil's feet that he even tried to rape her, the daughter of his dearest friend. They turned the painter Dolsans, a decent young man who was smitten from the first time he saw them encased in little green slippers adorned with a golden flower, into a desperate madman full of criminal designs who lost his life because of them. The fortunate young man, the wealthy Lusanville, before his arms and mouth ever held the beautiful girl of his dreams, took solace in one of her shoes which he, another amateur, had stolen. Every living male who saw them—financiers, merchants, landowners, noblemen, plebeians—succumbed to their charms, pierced by the arrows of carnal love and prepared to do anything to possess them. And therefore the narrator was correct when he stated the words that Don Rigoberto had transcribed: "Le joli pied les rendait tous criminels." Yes, yes, those tiny feet made them all criminals. The slippers, sandals, boots, shoes of the beautiful Franchette, those magical objects, moved through the story and illuminated it with a dazzling, seminal light.
Though stupid people might speak of perversion, he, and Lucrecia of course, could understand Restif, celebrate his having the audacity, the lack of shame, to display to others his right to be different, to remake the world in his own image. Hadn't they done the same, he and Lucrecia, every night for ten years? Hadn't they disarranged and rearranged life according to their desires? Would they ever do so again? Or would all of it remain confined to the past, along with the images that memory treasures in order not to succumb to the despair of the real, the actual?
On this night-dawn, Don Rigoberto felt like one of the men driven mad by Franchette's foot. His life was empty; each night, each dawn, he replaced Lucrecia's absence with phantoms, but they were not enough to console him. Was there any solution? Was it too late to turn back and correct the error? Couldn't a Supreme Court or Constitutional Tribunal in New Zealand revoke the sentence of the obtuse magistrate in Wellington and pardon the teacher? Couldn't an unprejudiced New Zealander governor declare an amnesty and even present her with a civilian heroine's medal to honor her demonstrated sacrifices for the sake of youth? Couldn't he go to the little house by the Olivar de San Isidro and tell Lucrecia that stupid human justice had been wrong, had condemned her with no right to do so, and give her back her honor and the freedom to … to? To what? He hesitated, but went forward the best he could.
Was this a utopia? A utopia like the ones also fantasized by the fetishist Restif de la Bretonne? No, no, for those of Don Rigoberto, when, borne away by the languid sweetness of a mind at play, he sometimes gave himself over to them, were private utopias incapable of infringing on the free will of others. Couldn't these be legitimate utopias, very different from the collective ones, the rabid enemies of freedom, the ones that always carried in them the seed of catastrophe?
This had been the weak and dangerous side of Nicolas-Edmé as well: a disease of the age, to which he had succumbed, as had so many of his contemporaries. Because the appetite for social utopias, the great legacy of the Enlightenment together with new horizons and bold vindications of the right to pleasure, had also brought historical apocalypses. Don Rigoberto remembered none of this; his notebooks did. They contained the accusatory data, the implacable fulminations.
In Restif, the refined devotee of tiny feet and women's shoes—"May God bless him for that, if He exists"—there was also a dangerous, messianic thinker (a cretin if one wished to judge him harshly, a misguided dreamer if one preferred to spare his life), a reformer of institutions, a savior from social ills who, among the mountains of paper he scribbled, dedicated a few hills and highlands to erecting those prisons, his public utopias, whose purpose was to regulate prostitution and impose happiness on whores (the hideous enterprise appeared in a book with the deceptively attractive title of Le Pornographe), improve the operation of theaters and the behavior of actors (Le Mimographe), organize the life of women by assigning them duties and setting limits on them so that there would be harmony between the sexes (this fearsome aberration also bore a title that seemed to promise pleasure—Les Gynographes—when it actually proposed stocks and chains for freedom). Much more ambitious and threatening, of course, had been his attempt to regulate—to suffocate, in fact—the behavior of the human race (L'Andrographe) and introduce an intrusive, sharpedged legal system that would attack intimacy and put an end to free initiative and the free disposition of human desires: Le Thermographe. In the face of these interventionist excesses worthy of a secular Torquemada, Restif's regulatory madness seemed mere child's play, causing him to recommend a total reform of orthography (Glossographe). He had collected these utopias in a book he called Idées singulières (1769), which they undoubtedly were, but in the sinister, criminal interpretation of the notion of singularity.
The sentence inscribed in the notebook was unappealable, and Don Rigoberto agreed with it: "There is no doubt that if this diligent printer, writer of documents, and refined amateur of feminine pedal appendages had ever attained political power, he would have turned France, and perhaps all of Europe, into a well-disciplined concentration camp in which a fine mesh of prohibitions and obligations would have vaporized the last trace of freedom. Fortunately, he was too much of an egotist to lust after power, concentrating instead on reconstructing human reality in fiction, reshaping it to suit his desires, so that, as in Le Pied de Franchette, the supreme value, the greatest aspiration of the male biped was not to perform heroic feats of military conquest, or achieve sainthood, or discover the secrets of matter and life, but consisted instead of that delectable, delicious, divine as the ambrosia that nourished the gods on Olympus, tiny, feminine foot." Like the one Don Rigoberto had seen in the advertisement in Time, which reminded him of Lucrecia's feet and held him here, in the first light of morning, sending his beloved this bottle that he would throw into the sea, hoping it would find her, knowing very well it would not, for how could something that did not exist, something shaped by the evanescent brush of his dreams, ever reach her?
Don Rigoberto, his eyes closed, had just asked himself this desperate question when, as his lips murmured the amorously vocative "Ah, Lucrecia!" his left arm knocked one of the notebooks to the floor. He picked it up and glanced at the page it had opened to in the fall. He gave a start: chance provided marvelous details, as he and his wife had often had occasion to discover in their flirtatious pursuits. What had he found? Two notes, written many years ago. The first, a forgettable reference to a small, anonymous, turn-of-the-century engraving of Mercury ordering the nymph Calypso to free Odysseus—with whom she had fallen in love and whom she was holding prisoner on her island—and allow him to continue his voyage back to Penelope. And the second, how marvelous, an impassioned reflection on: "The delicate fetishism of Johannes Vermeer, who, in Diana and Her Companions, pays plastic tribute to that scorned member of the female body by showing a nymph given over to the amorous task of using a sponge to wash—or rather, caress—Diana's foot, while another nymph, in sweet abandon, caresses hers. Everything is subtle and carnal, imbued with a delicate sensuality masked by the perfection of the forms and the soft mist that bathes the scene, endowing the figures with the magical unreality that you possess, Lucrecia, every night in flesh and blood, as does your phantom when you visit my dreams." How true, how real, how relevant.
And if he were to answer her anonymous letters? And if he actually were to write to her? And if he were to knock on her door this very afternoon, as soon as he had completed the last turn on the treadmill of his insuring and managerial servitude? And if, as soon as he saw her, he were to fall to his knees and humble himself, kissing the ground she walked on, begging her forgiveness and calling her, until he made her laugh, "My beloved nursemaid," "My teacher from New Zealand," "My Franchette," "My Diana"? Would she laugh? Would she throw herself into his arms and, offering him her lips, make him feel her body, let him know that everything lay behind them, that they could begin again to build, all by themselves, their secret utopia?
Tiger Stew
With you I have a Hawaiian romance in which you dance the hula-hula for me on nights when the moon is full, wearing little bells on your hips and ankles, imitating Dorothy Lamour.
And an Aztec romance in which I sacrifice you to coppery, avid gods, serpentine and feathered, at the top of a pyramid made of rust-streaked stones, surrounded by the teeming, impenetrable jungle.
An Eskimo romance in freezing igloos illuminated by torches burning whale blubber, and a Norwegian one in which we love each other on skis, racing a hundred kilometers an hour down the slopes of a white mountain erupting in totems with runic inscriptions.
My conceit tonight, beloved, is modernist, bloodthirsty, and African.
You will undress before the mirror, keeping on your black stockings and red garters, and conceal your beautiful head beneath the mask of a wild animal, preferably the tigress in heat in Rubén Darío's Azul …, or a Sudanese lioness.
You will thrust out your right hip, flex your left leg, rest your hand on the opposite hip, in the most savage, provocative pose.
Sitting in my chair, and lashed to its back, I will be looking at you and adoring you with my customary servility.
I will not move even an eyelash, I will not scream as you sink your claws into my eyes and your white fangs tear out my throat and you devour my flesh and slake your thirst with my enamored blood.
Now I am inside you, now I am you, beloved who feeds on me, your stew.
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