"You must have been good and tight, Señora," Justiniana remarked in amusement. "We know you have no head for liquor."
"You're shameless, you were right there," Doña Lucrecia scolded her. "All excited at what might happen. Pouring the drinks, helping me dress up, laughing out loud while I was turning myself into a tart."
"A hooker," the maid echoed, touching up her rouge.
This is the craziest thing I've ever done in my life, thought Doña Lucrecia. Worse than what I did with Fonchito, worse than marrying a madman like Rigoberto. If I do this I'll be sorry till the day I die. And yet she was doing it. The red wig suited her perfectly—she had tried it on in the shop where she had ordered it—and its high, ornate piles of curls and ringlets seemed to be aflame. She barely recognized herself as that incandescent woman in her curled false eyelashes and tropical hoop earrings, heavily made up with fiery red lips larger than her real ones, and the beauty marks and blue eye shadow of a femme fatale in the style of a Mexican movie from the 1950s.
"Well, I'll be darned, I can't believe it, nobody would know it's you." An astonished Justiniana, her hand covering her mouth, examined her. "I don't know who you look like, Señora."
"A hooker, I guess," declared Doña Lucrecia.
The whiskey had its effect. The doubts of a few moments before evaporated and now, intrigued and amused, she observed her own transformation in the mirror in her room. Justiniana was more and more amazed as she handed her the articles of clothing laid out on the bed: the miniskirt that clung so tightly she could hardly move; the black stockings topped by red garters with gold ornaments; the glittering blouse that exposed her breasts down to the nipples. She helped her, too, to put on the silver spike-heeled shoes. Stepping back to look her over from top to bottom, bottom to top, she exclaimed again in stupefaction, "It's not you, Señora, it's someone else, another woman. Are you really going out like that?"
"Of course," Doña Lucrecia declared. "If I'm not back by morning, notify the police."
And without another word she called for a taxi from the Virgen del Pilar station and said to the driver, in an authoritative voice, "Hotel Sheraton." Two days ago, yesterday, this morning, as she prepared her outfit, she'd had her doubts. She had told herself she wouldn't go, wouldn't lend herself to this kind of spectacle, to what was surely a cruel joke; but once in the taxi she felt absolutely sure of herself, and determined to live out the adventure to its conclusion. And whatever happened would happen. She looked at her watch. The instructions said to come between eleven-thirty and midnight, and it was only eleven; she'd arrive early. Serene and somewhat removed because of the alcohol, she asked herself, as the taxi sped down the semideserted Zanjón expressway toward the center of the city, what she would do if someone recognized her at the Sheraton despite her disguise. She would deny what they saw, making her voice higher, using the honeyed, vulgar tone those women used: "Lucrecia? My name's Aída. She looks like me? A distant relative, maybe." She would lie with utter brazenness. Her fear had vanished totally. You're under a spell and have to play a whore for one night, she thought, pleased with herself. She noticed that the cabdriver was constantly raising his eyes to the rearview mirror to look at her.
Before going into the Sheraton, she put on the dark glasses with pearly-white frames that ended in a kind of trident, which she had bought that afternoon in a little shop on La Paz. She had chosen them for their coarse bad taste and because they were big enough to seem like a mask. She hurried across the lobby toward the bar, afraid that one of the uniformed bellboys, eyeing her scornfully, would ask who she was and what she wanted, or throw her out no questions asked because of her tawdry appearance. But no one approached her. She walked up the steps to the bar at an unhurried pace. The dim light restored the confidence she had almost lost in the glare of the entrance, that vast hall under the oppressive rectangle of the hotel, a prisonlike skyscraper of floors, walls, corridors, balustrades, and bedrooms. In the half-light, through a haze of cigarette smoke, she saw that only a few tables were occupied. She heard an Italian tune sung by a prehistoric singer—Domenico Modugno—that reminded her of an old movie with Claudia Cardinale and Vittorio Gassman. Silhouettes stood at the bar against a bluish-yellow background of glasses and rows of bottles. At one table voices rose in the strident early stages of drunkenness.
Once again she felt self-assured and certain of her ability to confront any unforeseen turn of events, and she crossed the room and claimed a bar stool. The mirror in front of her showed a grotesque figure that deserved tenderness, not revulsion or laughter. She could not have been more amazed when she heard the mestizo bartender, his hair stiff with pomade, wearing a vest several sizes too large and a string tie that seemed to be strangling him, say with loutish familiarity, "Order or get out."
She was about to make a scene, but thought better of it, and said to herself with satisfaction that his insolence proved the success of her disguise. And, testing her new affected, sugary voice, she said, "A Black Label on the rocks, if you don't mind."
He stared at her, dubious, trying to decide if she was serious. Finally he murmured, "On the rocks, right," and moved away. She thought that her disguise would have been complete if she had added a long cigarette holder. Then she would have asked him for a pack of Kool 100's and blown smoke rings toward the ceiling of winking stars.
The bartender brought the bill with the whiskey, and she did not protest this show of distrust either but paid, leaving no tip. She had barely taken her first sip when someone sat down beside her. She shuddered slightly. The game was turning serious. But no, it wasn't a man but a woman, fairly young, wearing pants and a dark sleeveless polo with a high neck. Her straight hair hung loose, and she had an impudent, rather common face, the kind that Egon Schiele's girls had.
"Hello." The thin Mirafloran voice sounded familiar. "Haven't we met?"
"I don't think so," Doña Lucrecia replied.
"I thought we had, I'm sorry," said the girl. "I really have a terrible memory. Do you come here often?"
"Once in a while," Doña Lucrecia said hesitantly. Did she know her?
"The Sheraton isn't as safe as it used to be," the girl lamented. She lit a cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of smoke that took some time to dissipate. "I heard they raided it on Friday."
Doña Lucrecia imagined herself pushed into a police van, taken to the station, charged with prostitution.
"Order or get out," the bartender warned her neighbor, threatening her with a raised finger.
"You go to hell, you stinking half-breed," the girl said, not even turning to look at him.
"You're always ready with the backtalk, Adelita," the bartender said with a smile, showing teeth that Doña Lucrecia was sure were green with tartar. "All right, go on. Make yourself at home. You know I have a soft spot for you, and you take advantage."
That was when Doña Lucrecia recognized her. Adelita, of course! Esthercita's daughter! Well, well, so this was the daughter of Esther the prude.
"Señora Esthercita's daughter?" Justiniana doubled over with laughter. "Adelita? Little Adelita? The daughter of Fonchito's godmother? Picking up tricks at the Sheraton? I can't swallow that, Señora. I can't swallow that even with Coca-Cola or champagne."
"Adelita in person, and you can't imagine what she was like," declared Doña Lucrecia. "Tough as nails. Using filthy language, moving as easily as a fish in water there at the bar. Like the oldest tart in Lima."
"And she didn't recognize you?"
"No, fortunately. But you haven't heard anything yet. We were sitting and talking when this man appeared, out of the blue. Adelita knew him, apparently."
He was tall, strong, a little heavy, a little drunk, a little of everything a man needs in order to feel fearless and in command. Wearing a suit and a loud tie with a pattern of diamonds and zigzags. Breathing like a bellows. He must have been about fifty. Placing himself between the two women, he put his arms around them both, and as if they were lifelong friends, he said by way of greeting, "Are you two coming to my suite? I have good booze and a little something for the nose. And lots of dollars for girls who know how to be nice."
Doña Lucrecia felt dizzy. The man's breath hit her in the face. He was so close to her that with the slightest movement he could have kissed her.
"You all alone, honey?" the girl asked flirtatiously.
"What do you need anybody else for?" The man sucked in his lips, touching the pocket where he must have carried his wallet. "A hundred green ones apiece, okay? Paid in advance."
"If you don't have tens or fifties, I'll take soles," Adelita said immediately. "The hundred-dollar bills are always counterfeit."
"Okay, okay, I have fifties," the man promised. "Let's go, girls."
"I'm expecting someone," Doña Lucrecia apologized. "I'm sorry."
"Can't he wait?" the man said impatiently.
"I can't, really."
"If you want, just the two of us can go up," Adelita interrupted, taking him by the arm. "I'll be nice to you, honey."
But the man turned her down, disappointed.
"Not just you, no. Tonight I'm giving myself a present. My ponies won three races and the daily double. Want me to tell you what the present is? I'm going to do something that's been making me crazy for days. Know what it is?" He looked first at one and then the other, very seriously, loosening his collar, and then, without waiting for an answer, eagerly continued: "I'm going to fuck one while I eat the other. And watch them in the mirror, feeling each other up, kissing each other, while they sit on the throne. And I'll be the throne."
Egon Schiele's mirror, thought Señora Lucrecia. She felt less repelled by his vulgarity than by the pitiless glint in his eyes as he described his desire.
"Your eyes will pop out of your head if you look at so many things at once, honey." Adelita laughed, pretending to punch him.
"It's my fantasy. Thanks to the ponies, tonight it'll come true," he said proudly, by way of farewell. "Too bad you're busy, babe, I like your looks, even with all the war paint. Ciao, girls."
When he had disappeared among the tables—the bar was more crowded than before, the smoke denser, the sound of conversations louder, and now the music on the loudspeakers was a merengue by Juan Luis Guerra—Adelita leaned toward her with a dejected look on her face.
"Do you really have a date? With our friend there it would have been a bargain. What he said about the horses is a lie. He's a dealer, everybody knows him. And he comes right away, a hundred miles an hour. Premature ejaculation, they call it. So damn fast he hardly gets started sometimes. It was a present, honey."
Doña Lucrecia tried without success to put on a knowing smile. How could any daughter of Esther's be saying such things? A woman so fastidious, so rich, so vain, so elegant, so Catholic. Esthercita, Fonchito's god-mother. The girl went on with the self-assured remarks that astounded Doña Lucrecia.
"What a pain in the ass missing a chance to earn a hundred dollars in half an hour, more like fifteen minutes," she complained. "Going up with you to do that guy sounded good to me, I swear. It would have been over one two three. I don't know about you, but what I can't stand is doing those damn couples. The husband bug-eyed while you make the little woman hot. Honey, I hate those bitches! Dumb cunts always dying of embarrassment. They giggle, they're ashamed, you have to give them booze and plenty of stroking. Shit, I tell you it makes me sick to my stomach. Especially when they start to cry and feel sorry for what they did. I swear I could kill them. You waste half an hour, an hour with those broads. First they want to, then they don't, and you lose a lot of money. I don't have any patience for it, honey. It's happened to you, hasn't it?"
"Sure it has," Doña Lucrecia felt obliged to say, having to force each word out of her mouth. "Sometimes."
"Now, what's even worse is two guys, bosom buddies, pals, know what I mean?" Adelita said with a sigh. Her voice had changed and Doña Lucrecia thought that something awful must have been done to her by sadists, madmen, monsters. "They feel so macho when there are two of them. And they begin to ask for all the crazy shit. Blow jobs, the sandwich, up-the-ass. Why don't you ask your old lady for that one, babe? I don't know about you, honey, but as far as I'm concerned, up-the-ass is something I won't touch with a ten-foot pole. I don't like it. It's disgusting. And it hurts too. So I won't do it even for two hundred dollars. What about you?"
"The same goes for me," Doña Lucrecia declared. "It makes me sick and it hurts, just like you said. Up-the-ass is a killer, not for two hundred, not for a thousand."
"Well, for a thousand, who knows?" The girl laughed. "See? We're alike. Well, there's your date, I think. Let's see if next time the two of us can do that moron with his ponies. Ciao, have fun."
She moved away, leaving her seat free for the slender figure who was approaching. In the dim light Doña Lucrecia saw that he was young, with dark blond hair and boyish features and a vague resemblance to … to whom? Fonchito! A Fonchito with ten years added, whose eyes had hardened and whose body had lengthened and toughened. He wore an elegant blue suit, and the pink handkerchief in his jacket pocket was the same color as his tie.
"The inventor of the word 'individualism' was Alexis de Tocqueville," he said by way of greeting, in a harsh voice. "True or false?"
"True." Doña Lucrecia broke into a cold sweat: what was going to happen now? Determined to see it through to the end, she added, "I am Aldonza, the Andalusian from Rome. Whore, sorceress, and mender of maidenheads, at your service."
"The only thing I understand is whore," observed Justiniana, her head spinning at the words she was hearing. "Were you serious? How could you keep from laughing? Excuse the interruption, Señora."
"Follow me," said the newcomer, without a hint of humor. He moved like a robot.
Doña Lucrecia slid off the bar stool and could imagine the bartender's evil-minded glance as he watched her leave. She followed the blond young man, who moved quickly among the crowded tables, cutting through the smoke-filled atmosphere on his way to the exit. Then he crossed the corridor to the elevators. Doña Lucrecia saw him press the button for the twenty-fourth floor, and her heart skipped a beat and the pit of her stomach felt hollow because of how quickly the elevator rose. A door was opened as soon as they walked out into the hallway. They were in the foyer of an enormous suite: through the large picture window, a sea of lights with dark patches and banks of fog spread out at her feet.
"You can take off the wig and get undressed in the bathroom." The boy pointed to a room off the sitting room. But Doña Lucrecia could not take a step, for she was intrigued by that youthful face, the steely eyes, the tousled ringlets—she had thought his hair was blond, but it was light to medium brown—that fell on his forehead and were modeled by the cone of light from a lamp. How was it possible? He looked exactly like him.
"Do you mean Egon Schiele?" Justiniana interrupted. "The painter that Fonchito's so crazy about? That good-for-nothing who painted his models doing dirty stuff?"
"Why do you think I was so shocked? I mean him and no one else."
"I know I resemble him," the boy explained in the same serious, businesslike, dehumanized tone he had used with her from the first. "Is that why you're so disconcerted? All right, I resemble him. What about it? Or do you think I'm Egon Schiele come back to life? You're not that foolish, are you?"
"It's just that I'm dumbfounded by the resemblance," Doña Lucrecia acknowledged as she stared at him. "It's not just the face. It's your body too, thin, tall, rachitic. And your hands, they're so big. And the way you play with your fingers, hiding the thumbs. Exactly the same, identical to all the photographs of Egon Schiele. How is it possible?"
"Let's not waste any more time," the boy said coldly, with a look of irritation. "Take off that disgusting wig and those horrible earrings and beads. I'll wait for you in the bedroom. Come in naked."
There was something defiant and vulnerable in his face. He looked, thought Doña Lucrecia, like a spoiled, brilliant little boy who, in spite of his pranks and impudence, his audacity and insolence, needed his mamá very much. Was she thinking of Egon Schiele or Fonchito? Doña Lucrecia was absolutely certain that the boy prefigured what Rigoberto's son would be in a few years.
"Now the hard part begins," she said to herself. She was sure that the boy who resembled Fonchito and Egon Schiele had double-locked the door, and that even if she wanted to, there was no escape from the suite. She would have to remain there the rest of the night. Along with the fear that had overwhelmed her, she was consumed with curiosity, and even a hint of arousal. Giving herself to this slender youngster with the cold, rather cruel expression would be like making love to a Fonchito-youth-almost-man, or to a rejuvenated and beautified Rigoberto, a Rigoberto-youth-almost-boy. The idea made her smile. The mirror in the bathroom reflected her relaxed, almost happy expression. She had trouble taking off her clothes. Her hands felt stiff, as if they had been in snow. Without the absurd wig, free of the miniskirt that had confined her, she could breathe freely. She kept on her panties and minimal black lace bra, and before walking out she fluffed and arranged her hair—she had been wearing a hairnet—pausing for a moment in the doorway. Again she felt panic. "I may not get out of here alive." But not even that fear made her regret coming here or acting out this cruel farce in order to please Rigoberto (or Fonchito?). When she walked into the sitting room, she saw that the boy had turned off all the lights in the room except for a small lamp in a far corner. Through the enormous window, thousands of fireflies were winking down below, in an inverted sky. Lima wore the disguise of a great city; the darkness wiped away its rags, its filth, even its bad smell. The soft music of harps, flutes, and violins washed over the shadows. As she walked, still apprehensive, toward the door the boy had indicated, she felt a new wave of excitement that stiffened her nipples ("Rigoberto likes that so much"). She moved silently across the thick-piled carpet and knocked on the closed door. It opened without a sound.
"And they were there, the ones from before?" exclaimed Justiniana, even more incredulous. "I can't believe it. Both of them? Adelita, Señora Esther's daughter?"
"And the man with the horses, the dealer, or whatever he was," Doña Lucrecia confirmed. "Yes, they were there. Both of them. In bed."
"And stark naked, of course." Justiniana giggled, raising a hand to her mouth and brazenly rolling her eyes. "Waiting for you, Señora."
The room seemed larger than usual for a hotel, even one in a luxury suite, but Doña Lucrecia could not make an exact estimate of its dimensions because only the lamp on one of the night tables was lit, and the circular light, reddened by the large, scorpion-colored shade, clearly illuminated only the couple lying in an embrace on the coal-black spread with the dark brownish markings that covered the king-size bed. The rest of the room lay in shadow.
"Come in, baby," the man welcomed her, waving a hand as he continued to kiss Adelita, whom he had partially mounted. "Have a drink. There's champagne on the table. And some coke in that silver snuffbox."
Her surprise at finding Adelita and the horse lover did not make her forget the slender young man with the cruel mouth. Where had he gone? Was he spying on them from the shadows?
"Hi, honey." Adelita's mischievous face appeared over the man's shoulder. "I'm glad you got rid of your date. Come on, hurry up. Aren't you cold? It's nice and warm in here."
She lost all her fear. She went to the table and poured a glass of champagne from a bottle resting in an ice bucket. And if she did a line of cocaine as well? As she sipped her drink in the semidarkness, she thought, It's magic or witchcraft. It can't be a miracle. The man was fatter than he had seemed in clothes; his pale body, spotted with moles, had rolls of fat around the middle, smooth buttocks, and very short legs covered with tufts of dark hair. Adelita, on the other hand, was even thinner than Lucrecia had thought; her body was long, lean, and dark, with an extremely narrow waist and protruding hipbones. She allowed herself to be kissed and embraced, and also embraced the horse-loving dealer, but though her gestures simulated enthusiasm, Doña Lucrecia noticed that she did not kiss him, and even avoided his mouth.
"Come on, come on, I can't hold out much longer," the man pleaded suddenly, vehemently. "My fantasy, my fantasy. It's now or never, girls!"
Though her earlier excitement had ebbed and she felt a certain revulsion, after she drained her glass, Doña Lucrecia obeyed. Going toward the bed, she again saw the archipelago of lights through the window, below and above her, in the hills where the distant Cordillera began. She sat on a corner of the bed, not fearful but bewildered and increasingly repelled. A hand grasped her arm, pulled her, forced her to lie beneath a small, soft body. She gave in, she did not resist, she was disheartened, demoralized, disillusioned. She told herself, over and over again, like an automaton: "You're not going to cry, Lucrecia, you're not going to cry." The man embraced her with his left arm and Adelita with his right, and his head pivoted from one to the other, kissing them on the neck, on the ears, searching for their mouths. Adelita's face was very close to hers; she was disheveled and flushed, and in her eyes she detected a mocking, cynical sign of complicity, urging her on. His lips and teeth pressed against hers, forcing her mouth open. His tongue slithered in like an asp.
"You're the one I want to fuck," she heard him beg as he nibbled and caressed her breasts. "Get on, get on. Hurry, I'm going to come."
She hesitated, but Adelita helped her mount him, and then she squatted too, passing one of her legs over him and adjusting her position so that his mouth was at her depilitated sex, where Doña Lucrecia saw no more than a sparse line of hair. At that moment, she felt herself impaled. Had that tiny, barely erect thing that seconds before had been rubbing against her legs grown so much when it entered her? Now it was a rod, a battering ram that raised her up, pierced her, wounded her with cataclysmic force.
"Kiss each other, kiss each other," the pony man was moaning. "I can hardly see you, damn it. We don't have a mirror!"
Drenched with perspiration from head to foot, stupefied, in pain, not opening her eyes, she stretched out her arms and searched for Adelita's face, but when she found her thin lips the girl, though she pressed them hard against Lucrecia's, kept them closed. They did not open even when she applied pressure with her tongue. And then, through the lashes of her half-closed eyes and the beads of sweat falling from her brow, she saw the young man with the steely eyes, above them, near the ceiling, balancing at the top of a ladder. Half-hidden by what seemed to be a lacquered screen that had Chinese characters on it, his ears attentive, his eyes ablaze, the small cruel mouth puckered, he was furiously drawing her, drawing them, with a long stick of charcoal on snow-white paper. He looked, in fact, like a bird of prey crouched at the top of the ladder, observing them, measuring them, putting on the finishing touches with long, energetic strokes, those fierce, sharp eyes darting back and forth from the pad to the bed, the bed to the pad, not paying attention to anything else, indifferent to the lights of Lima spread out beneath the window, and to his own virile member that had forced its way out of his trousers, popping the buttons, and stretched and grew like a balloon filling with air. A flying serpent, it hovered over her, contemplating her with its great Cyclopean eye. It did not surprise her or matter to her. She was riding, overflowing, intoxicated, grateful, full to the brim, thinking now of Fonchito, now of Rigoberto.
"Why are you still bouncing around, can't you see I've come?" whimpered the lover of horses. In the semidarkness his face looked ashen. He was pouting like a spoiled child. "Damned luck, the same thing always happens. Just when things get going, I come. I can't hold it back. No way, no way. I went to a specialist and he prescribed mud baths. Pure crap. They gave me a stomachache and made me puke. Massages. More crap. I went to a witch doctor in La Victoria and he put me in a tub with herbs that smelled like shit. What good did it do me? None at all. Now I come faster than I did before. Why do I have such rotten luck, damn it?"
He moaned and began to sob.
"Don't cry, compadre, didn't you have your fantasy?" Adelita consoled him, passing her leg again over the sniveler's head and lying beside him.
Apparently neither of them could see Egon Schiele, or his double, balancing a meter above them at the top of the ladder, who kept from falling and maintained his center of gravity thanks to that immense penis waving gently over the bed, displaying in the dim light its delicate rose-colored creases and the merry veins on its back. And they undoubtedly did not hear him either. She did, very clearly. Between clenched teeth he was repeating, like a harsh, belligerent mantra, "I am the most timid of men. I am divine."
"Take a rest, honey, what are you doing, the show's over," Adelita said to her affectionately.
"Don't let them leave, hit them if you have to. Don't let them go. Hit them, hit them hard, both of them!"
It was Fonchito, naturally. No, not the painter absorbed in the task of sketching them. It was the boy, her stepchild, Rigoberto's son. Was Rigoberto there too? Yes. Where? Somewhere, hidden in the shadows in that room of miracles. Lying still, feeling awkward, no longer excited, terrified, covering her breasts with her hands, Doña Lucrecia looked to the right, peered to the left. And at last she found them, reflected in a great oval mirror where she saw herself as well, repeated like one of Egon Schiele's models. The half-light did not dissolve them; instead, it revealed father and son, sitting next to each other—the former observing them with benevolent affection, the latter overexcited, his angelic face red with so much shouting—"Hit them, hit them"—on a settee that seemed like a box in a theater perching over the stage of the bed.
"You mean the señor and Fonchito were there too?" said Justiniana in a rather sharp tone of utter disbelief. "Now that's something nobody could believe."
"Sitting right there watching us." Doña Lucrecia nodded. "Rigoberto, very well-bred, understanding, tolerant. And the boy out of control, up to his usual mischief."
"I don't know about you, Señora," said Justiniana abruptly, cutting the narration short and getting to her feet, "but right now I need a cold shower. So I won't spend another sleepless night tossing and turning. I love having these conversations with you. But they leave me hot and bothered and charged with electricity. If you don't believe me, just put your hand here and see what a shock you'll get."
The Slimy Worm
Although I know all too well that you are a necessary evil without which communal life would not be livable, I must tell you that you represent everything I despise, in society and in myself. Because for more than a quarter of a century, Monday through Friday, from eight in the morning until six in the evening, with some ancillary activities (cocktail parties, seminars, inaugurations, conferences) which are impossible for me to avoid without risk to my livelihood, I too am a kind of bureaucrat though I work in the private, not the public sector. But, like you, and because of you, in the course of these twenty-five years my energy, time, and talent (I had some, once) have been swallowed up in large part by transactions, negotiations, applications, petitions, the procedures invented by you to justify the salary you earn and the desk where your rear end grows fat, leaving me barely a few crumbs of freedom to take certain initiatives and engage in work that may deserve to be called creative. I know that insurance (my professional field) and creativity are as far apart as the planets Saturn and Pluto in the vast reaches of space, but this distance would not be so vertiginous if you, regulationist hydra, red tapist caterpillar, king of seal-bearing documents, had not made it into an abyss. For even in the arid desert of insurers and underwriters the human imagination could play an enthusiastic part and derive intellectual stimulation and even pleasure if you, imprisoned in that dense chain mail of suffocating regulations—meant to lend an air of necessity to the bloated bureaucracy that gorges itself at the public trough and creates myriad alibis and justifications for its blackmail, bribery, trafficking, and theft—had not transformed the work of an insurance company into a mind-numbing routine similar to that followed by Jean Tinguely's complicated, hardworking machines, which move chains, pulleys, rods, blades, scoops, and pistons, and eventually give birth to a Ping-Pong ball (you don't know who Tinguely is, nor should you, though I am sure that if you ever happened to run across his creations, you would have taken every precaution to not understand, to trivialize the savage sarcasm aimed at you by the works of this sculptor, one of the few contemporary artists who understand me).
If I tell you that I started at the firm soon after receiving my law degree, in an insignificant position in the legal department, and that in the past quarter century I have moved up through the hierarchy to become a manager, a member of the Board of Directors, and the owner of a good share of stock in the company, you will say that under these circumstances I have nothing to complain about, that I suffer from ingratitude. Don't I live well? Don't I form part of the microscopic portion of Peruvian society that owns a home and a car, has the opportunity to vacation once or twice a year in Europe or the United States, and enjoys the kind of comfortable, secure life that is unthinkable, undreamable, for four-fifths of our compatriots? All this is true. It is also true that because of my successful career (isn't that what you people call it?) I have been able to fill my study with books, etchings, and paintings that protect me from rampant stupidity and vulgarity (that is, from everything you represent) and create an enclave of freedom and fantasy where every day or, rather, every night, I have been able to detoxify, shedding the thick crust of dulling conventionality, vile routine, castrating gregarious activities that you manufacture and that nourish you, and live, truly live and be myself, opening wide to the angels and demons that live inside me the iron-barred doors behind which—and you, you are to blame—they are obliged to hide for the rest of the day.
You will also say, "If you hate office routine so much, and letters and policies, legal reports and protocols, claims, permits, and allegations, then why did you not have the courage to shake it off and live your true life, the life of your fantasy and desires, not only at night but in the morning, afternoon, and evening too? Why did you give more than half your life to the bureaucratic animal that enslaves you and your angels and demons?" The question is pertinent—I have asked it many times—but so is my reply: "Because the world of fantasy, pleasure, and liberated desire, my only homeland, would not have survived unscathed subjected to the rigors of need, deprivation, economic worries, the stifling weight of debts and poverty. Dreams and desires are inedible. My existence would have been impoverished, would have become a caricature of itself." I am no hero, I am not a great artist, I lack genius, and consequently I would not have been able to console myself with the hope of a "work" that would outlive me. My aspirations and aptitudes do not go beyond knowing how to distinguish—in this I am superior to you, whose adventitious condition has reduced to less than nothing your sense of ethical and aesthetic discrimination—within the thicket of possibilities that surround me, between what I love and what I despise, what makes my life beautiful and what makes it ugly and besmirches it with stupidity, what exalts me and what depresses me, what gives me joy and what makes me suffer. Simply to be in a position to constantly differentiate among these contradictory options, I require the economic peace of mind provided by this profession so blemished by the culture of red tape, that noxious miasma produced by you as the worm produces slime, which has become the air the entire world now breathes. Fantasies and desires—mine, at least—demand a minimum of serenity and security to manifest themselves. Otherwise they would wither and die. If you wish to deduce from this that my angels and demons are defiantly bourgeois, that is absolutely true.
Earlier I mentioned the word "parasite," and you probably asked yourself if I, a lawyer who for the past twenty-five years has applied the science of jurisprudence—the most nourishing food for bureaucracy and the primary begetter of bureaucrats—to the specialty of insurance, have the right to use it disparagingly about anyone else. Yes, I do, but only because I also apply it to myself, my bureaucratic half. In fact, to make matters even worse, legal parasitism was my first area of specialization, the key that opened the doors of the La Perricholi Company—yes, that is its ridiculous South Americanized name—and got me my first few promotions. How could I avoid being the most ingenious tangler or disentangler of juridical arguments when I discovered in my first law class that so-called legality is, in great measure, an intricate jungle in which technicians of obfuscations, intrigues, formalisms, and casuistries would always come out ahead? And that the profession has nothing to do with truth and justice but deals exclusively with the fabrication of incontrovertible appearances, with sophistries and deceptions impossible to clarify. It is true, I have engaged in this essentially parasitic activity with the competence needed to reach the top, but I have never deceived myself. I have always been aware that I was a boil feeding on the defenselessness, vulnerability, and impotence of others. Unlike you, I make no claims to being a "pillar of society" (it is useless to refer you to the painting of that name by George Grosz: you don't know the painter, or, worse yet, you know him only for the splendid Expressionist asses he painted and not his lethal caricatures of your colleagues in the Weimar Republic): I know what I am and what I do, and I have as much or more contempt for that part of myself as I have for you. My success as an attorney is derived from this understanding—that the law is an amoral technique that serves the cynic who best controls it—and from my discovery, a precocious one as well, that in our country (in all countries?) the legal system is a web of contradictions in which each law, or ruling with the force of law, can be opposed by another, or many others, that amend or nullify it. Therefore all of us are always violating some law and transgressing in some way against the legal order (chaos, actually). Thanks to this labyrinth, you bureaucrats subdivide, multiply, reproduce, and regenerate at a dizzying pace. And we lawyers live and some of us—mea culpa—prosper.
Well, even if my life has been the torment of Tantalus, a daily moral struggle between the bureaucratic rubble of my existence and the secret angels and demons of my being, you have not conquered me. Faced with what I do from Monday through Friday, from eight to six, I have always maintained sufficient irony to despise the job and despise myself for doing it, so that in the remaining hours I could make amends, redeem and indemnify myself, humanize myself (which, in my case, always means separating from the herd, the crowd). I can imagine the tingle running through you, the irritable curiosity with which you ask yourself, "And what does he do at night that immunizes him against me, that saves him from being what I am?" Do you want to know? Now that I am alone—separated from my wife, I mean—I read, look at my pictures, review and add to my notebooks with letters like this one, but, above all, I fantasize. I dream. I construct a better reality purged of all the scum and excrescences—you and your slime—which make the actual one so sinister and sordid that we wish for another. (I've spoken in the plural and I'm sorry; it won't happen again.) In this other reality, you do not exist. All that exists is the woman I love and will love forever—the absent Lucrecia—my son, Alfonso, and a few variable, transitory secondary players who come and go like will-o'-the-wisps, spending only the time needed to be useful to me. Only when I am in that world, in that company, do I exist, for then I am joyful and content.
Now, these strands of happiness would not be possible without the immense frustration, arid tedium, and crushing routine of my real life. In other words, without a life dehumanized by you, without everything you weave and unweave with all the machinery of power you possess. Do you understand now why I began by calling you a necessary evil? You thought, master of the stereotype and the commonplace, that I described you in this way because I believed that a society must function, must have at its disposal order, legality, services, authority, in order not to run aground on confusion. And you thought this regulatory Gordian knot, this saving, organizing mechanism of the anthill, was you, the necessary man. No, my awful friend. Without you, society would function much better than it does now. But without you here to prostitute, poison, and hack away at human freedom, I would not appreciate it nearly as much, my imagination would not soar as high, my desires would not be as powerful, for they are born in rebellion against you, as the reaction of a free, sensitive being against an entity who is the negation of sensitivity and free will. Which means that however one looks at this rocky terrain, without you I would be less free and less sensitive, my desires more pedestrian, my life emptier.
I know you will not understand this either, but it does not matter at all if your puffy batrachian eyes never see this letter.
Bureaucrat, I curse you and thank you.
Dream Is a Life
Bathed in perspiration, not yet completely emerged from that narrow frontier where sleep and wakefulness were indistinguishable, Don Rigoberto could still see Rosaura, dressed in a jacket and tie, as she carried out his instructions: she approached the bar and leaned over the bare back of the flashy mulatta who had been flirting with her since she had seen them walk into that cheap hookers' club.
They were in Mexico City, weren't they? Yes, after a week in Acapulco, making a stop on their way home to Lima following a brief vacation. It had been Don Rigoberto's whim to dress Doña Lucrecia in men's clothes and then go with her to a whores' cabaret. Rosaura-Lucrecia was whispering something to the woman and smiling—Don Rigoberto saw with what authority she squeezed the bare arm of the mulatta, who looked at her with alert, malicious eyes—and finally led her out to dance. They were playing a mambo by Pérez Prado, of course—"El ruletero"—and on the narrow, smoky, crowded dance floor, where shadows were fitfully distorted by a reflector with colored lights, Rosaura-Lucrecia played her part very well: Don Rigoberto nodded approvingly. She did not seem a stranger in her men's clothing, or different in her garçon haircut, or uncomfortable leading her partner when they tired of doing their own steps and danced with their arms around each other. In an increasingly feverish state, Don Rigoberto, filled with grateful admiration for his wife, risked a stiff neck in order not to lose sight of them among the heads and shoulders of so many other people. When the out-of-tune but intrepid band moved from the mambo to a bolero—"Dos almas," which reminded him of Leo Marini—he felt that the gods were with him. Interpreting his secret desire, he saw Rosaura immediately press the mulatta to her, passing her arms around her waist and obliging the girl to place hers on her shoulders. Even if he could not make out the details in the half-light, he was sure that his beloved wife, the counterfeit male, had begun to kiss and gently bite the mulatta's neck, rubbing up against her belly and breasts like a true man spurred on by desire.
He was awake now, no doubt about it, but though all his senses were alert, the mulatta and Lucrecia-Rosaura were still there, in a close embrace, in a nighttime brothel crowd, in that harsh, cruel place where the gaudily made-up women displayed tropical rumps and the male patrons had drooping mustaches, fat cheeks, and the eyes of marijuana smokers. Ready to pull out their pistols and start shooting at the first false move? Because of this excursion to the lower depths of the Mexican night, Rosaura and I may lose our lives, he thought with a happy shudder. And he anticipated the headlines in the gutter press: DOUBLE HOMICIDE: BUSINESSMAN AND TRANSVESTITE WIFE MURDERED IN MEXICAN BROTHEL; MULATTA WAS BAIT, VICE THEIR DOWNFALL; UPPERCRUST LIMENIAN COUPLE KILLED IN MEXICO'S UNDERWORLD; WHITE-HOT SCANDAL: GO TOO FAR, PAY IN BLOOD. He brought up a chuckle as if it were a belch: "If they kill us, the worms can worry about the scandal."
He returned to the aforementioned club, where the mulatta and Rosaura, the counterfeit man, were still dancing. Now, to his joy, they were shamelessly caressing and kissing each other on the mouth. But wait: weren't the professionals reluctant to offer their lips to clients? Yes, but did any obstacle exist that Rosaura-Lucrecia could not overcome? How had she gotten the fleshy mulatta to open that huge mouth with its thick scarlet lips to receive the subtle visit of her serpentine tongue? Had she offered her money? Had she aroused her? It didn't matter how, what mattered was that her sweet, soft, almost liquid tongue was there in the mulatta's mouth, wetting it with her saliva and absorbing the saliva—which he imagined as thick and fragrant—of that lush woman.
And then he was distracted by a question: Why Rosaura? Rosaura was also a woman's name. If it was a question of disguising her completely, as he had disguised her body by dressing it in men's clothes, then Carlos, Juan, Pedro, or Nicanor would have been preferable. Why Rosaura? Almost without realizing it, he got out of bed, put on his robe and slippers, and went to his study. He did not need to see the clock to know that the light of dawn would soon appear, seeming to rise out of the sea. Did he know any flesh-and-blood Rosaura? He ransacked his memory, and the answer was a categorical no. She was, then, an imaginary Rosaura who had come tonight to appear in his dream about Lucrecia, to merge with her, leaving the forgotten pages of some novel, or some drawing, oil painting, or engraving he could not recall. In any case, the pseudonym was there, clinging to Lucrecia like the man's suit they had bought, laughing and whispering, that afternoon in a shop in the red-light district after he had asked Lucrecia if she would agree to concretize his fantasy and she—"as always, as always"—had said she would. Now Rosaura was a name as real as the couple who, arm in arm—the mulatta and Lucrecia were almost the same height—had stopped dancing and were approaching the table. He stood to greet them and ceremoniously offered his hand to the mulatta.
"Hello, hello, delighted to meet you, please have a seat."
"I'm dying of thirst," said the mulatta, fanning herself with both hands. "Shall we order something?"
"Whatever you want, baby," Rosaura-Lucrecia said, caressing her chin and calling a waiter. "You order, go ahead."
"A bottle of champagne," the mulatta said with a triumphant smile. "Is your name really Rigoberto? Or is that your alias?"
"That's my name. Pretty unusual, isn't it?"
"Very unusual." The mulatta nodded, looking at him as if instead of eyes she had two coals burning in her round face. "Well, original at least. You're pretty original too, and that's the truth. Want to know something? I've never seen ears and a nose like yours. My God, they're enormous! Can I touch them? Will you let me?"
The mulatta's request—she was tall and curvaceous, with incandescent eyes, a long neck, strong shoulders, and a burnished skin set off by her canary-yellow dress with its deeply plunging neckline—left Don Rigoberto speechless, incapable of even responding with a joke to what appeared to be a serious request. Lucrecia-Rosaura came to his rescue.
"Not yet, baby," she said to the mulatta, pinching her ear. "When we're alone, in the room, you can touch anything of his you want."
"The three of us are going to be alone in a room?" the mulatta asked with a laugh, rolling her eyes beneath their silken false lashes. "Thanks for letting me know. And what will I do with the two of you, my angels? I don't like odd numbers. I'm sorry. I'll call a friend and then we can be two couples. But me alone with two men? Not on your life."
However, when the waiter brought the bottle of what he called champagne but was in reality a sweetish spumante with hints of turpentine and camphor, the mulatta (she said her name was Estrella) seemed to become more enthusiastic about the idea of spending the rest of the night with the disparate pair, and she made jokes, laughing boisterously and distributing playful slaps between Don Rigoberto and Rosaura-Lucrecia. From time to time, like a refrain, she would laugh about "the gentleman's ears and nose" and stare at them, her fascination charged with a mysterious covetousness.
"With ears like that you must hear more than normal people," she said. "And smell more with that nose than ordinary men do."
Probably, thought Don Rigoberto. What if it were true? What if he, thanks to the munificence of those organs, heard more and had a more acute sense of smell than other people? He did not like the comic turn the story was taking—his desire, inflamed only a moment ago, was fading, and he could not revive it, for Estrella's jokes obliged him to move his attention away from Lucrecia-Rosaura and the mulatta to concentrate on his outsized auditory and nasal instruments. He tried to abbreviate certain stages, skipping over the bargaining with Estrella that lasted as long as the bottle of supposed champagne, the arrangements to have the mulatta leave the club—a token had to be purchased with a fifty-dollar bill—the rattling taxi afflicted with the tremors of tertian fever, their registering at the filthy hotel—CIELITO LINDO said the red-and-blue neon sign on its façade—and the negotiation with the squint-eyed clerk, who was picking his nose, to let them occupy only one room. It cost Don Rigoberto another fifty dollars to calm his fears that there might be a police raid and the establishment would be fined for renting one bedroom to three people.
As they crossed the threshold of the room, and in the dim light of a single lightbulb saw the king-size bed covered with a bluish spread, and next to it a washstand, a basin with water, a towel, a roll of toilet paper, and a chipped chamber pot—the squint-eyed clerk had just left, handing over the key and closing the door behind him—Don Rigoberto remembered: Of course! Rosaura! Estrella! He slapped his forehead, relieved. Naturally! Those names came from the performance in Madrid of La vida es sueño, Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream. And once again he felt, bubbling up from the bottom of his heart like a spring of clear water, a tender feeling of gratitude toward the depths of memory from which there endlessly poured forth surprises, images, phantoms, and suggestions to give body, backdrop, and storyline to the dreams with which he defended himself against his solitude, the absence of Lucrecia.
"Let's get undressed, Estrella," Rosaura was saying, standing up and then sitting down. "You'll have the surprise of your life, so get ready."
"I won't take off my dress if I can't touch your friend's nose and ears first," replied Estrella, utterly serious now. "I don't know why, but I want to touch them so much it's killing me."
This time, instead of anger, Don Rigoberto felt flattered.
Doña Lucrecia and he had seen the play in Madrid on their first trip to Europe a few months after they were married, a performance of La vida es sueño so old-fashioned that open laughter could be heard in the darkened theater. The tall skinny actor who played Prince Segismundo was so bad, so clearly overwhelmed by the role, and his voice so affected, that the spectator—"well, this spectator," Don Rigoberto was more precise—felt inclined to look favorably upon his cruel, superstitious father, King Basilio, for keeping him, throughout his childhood and youth, chained like a wild beast in a solitary tower, fearful that if his son came to the throne the cataclysms predicted by the stars and his learned mathematicians would come true. The entire performance had been ghastly, dreadful, clumsy. And yet Don Rigoberto recalled with absolute clarity that the appearance in the first scene of the young Rosaura dressed as a man, and later, with a sword at her waist, ready to go into battle, had touched his soul. And now he was sure he had been tempted several times since then by the desire to see Lucrecia attired in boots, plumed hat, a soldier's tunic, at the hour of love. La vida es sueño! Though the performance was awful, the director unspeakable, the actors even worse, it was not only that one actress who had lived on in memory and often inflamed his senses. Something in the work intrigued him as well, because—his recollection was unequivocal—it had led him to read the play. He must still have his notes from that reading. Down on all fours on the rug in the study, Don Rigoberto looked through and discarded one notebook after another. Not this one, or this one. It had to be this one. That was the year.
"I'm naked, honey," said Estrella the mulatta. "Now let me touch your ears and nose. Don't make me beg. Don't make me suffer, don't be mean. Can't you see I'm dying to do it? Just this one favor, baby, and I'll make you happy."
She had a full, abundant body, shapely though somewhat flabby in the belly, with splendid breasts that barely sagged and Renaissance rolls of flesh at her hips. She did not even seem to notice that Rosaura-Lucrecia, who had also undressed and lay on the bed, was not a man but a beautiful woman with well-delineated curves. The mulatta had eyes only for him, or rather, for his ears and nose, which she now—Don Rigoberto had sat on the edge of the bed to facilitate the operation—caressed avidly, furiously. Her ardent fingers desperately kneaded, pressed, and pinched, first his ears, then his nose. He closed his eyes in anguish because he sensed that very soon the fingers on his nose would provoke one of those allergic attacks that would not stop until he had sneezed—lascivious number—sixty-nine times. His Mexican adventure, inspired by Calderón de la Barca, would end in a grotesque outburst of nasal excess.
Yes, this was it—Don Rigoberto brought the notebook into the light of the lamp: a page of quotations and comments he had made as he read the play, its title at the top of the page: La vida es sueño (1638).
The first two citations, taken from speeches by Segismundo, affected him like the lashes of a whip: "Nothing to me seems right/if it counters my delight." And the other: "And I know that I am/compounded of beast and man." Was there a cause-and-effect relationship between the two quotations he had transcribed? Was he compounded of man and beast because nothing that opposed his pleasure seemed right? Perhaps. But when he read the play after their trip, he was not the old, tired, solitary, dejected man he had become, desperately seeking refuge in his fantasies so as not to go mad or commit suicide; he was a happy fifty-year-old brimming with life who, in the arms of his bride, his second wife, was discovering that joy existed, that it was possible to construct, at the side of his beloved, a singular citadel fortified against the stupidity, the ugliness, the mediocrity, and the routine where he spent the rest of his day. Why had he felt the need to make these notes as he read a work that, at the time, had no bearing on his personal situation? Or did it?
"If I had a man with ears and a nose like these, I'd really go wild. I'd be his slave," exclaimed the mulatta, resting for a moment. "I'd make him happy no matter what he wanted. I'd lick the floor clean for him."
She was squatting on her heels, and her face was flushed and sweaty, as if she had been bending over a boiling pot of soup. Her whole body seemed to vibrate. As she spoke she greedily passed her tongue over the wet lips with which she had been interminably kissing, nibbling, and licking Don Rigoberto's auditory and olfactory organs. He used the time to take in air and dry his ears with his handkerchief. Then he blew his nose with a good deal of noise.
"This man is mine; I'm just lending him to you for the night," said Rosaura-Lucrecia firmly.
"But don't these marvels belong to you?" asked Estrella, not paying the slightest attention to the dialogue. Her hands had taken hold of Don Rigoberto's alarmed face, and her thick, determined lips were advancing again toward their prey.
"Haven't you even noticed? I'm not a man, I'm a woman, an exasperated Rosaura-Lucrecia protested. "Look at me, at least."
But with a slight movement of her shoulders the mulatta ignored her and passionately continued her work. She had Don Rigoberto's left ear in her large, hot mouth, and he, unable to control himself, laughed hysterically. In fact he was very nervous. He had a presentiment that at any moment Estrella would move from love to hate and tear off his ear in one bite. "If I'm earless, Lucrecia won't love me anymore." He grew sad. He heaved a deep, cavernous, gloomy sigh similar to those of the bearded Prince Segismundo, chained in his secret tower, as he demanded of heaven, with great strident shouts, what sin he had committed by being born.
"That's a stupid question," Don Rigoberto said to himself. He had always despised the South American sport of self-pity, and from that point of view, the sniveling prince of Calderón de la Barca (a Jesuit, in all other respects), who presented himself to the audience moaning, "Ah, woe is me, most wretched of men," had nothing that would appeal to the spectators or make them identify with him. Why, then, in his dream, had his phantoms structured the story by borrowing from La vida es sueño the names of Rosaura and Estrella and Rosaura's masculine disguise? Perhaps because his life had become nothing but a dream since Lucrecia's departure. Was he even alive during the gloomy, opaque hours he spent in the office discussing balances, policies, renewals, judgments, investments? His one corner of real life was provided by the night, when he fell asleep and the door of dreams was opened, which is what must have happened to Segismundo in his desolate stone tower in that dense forest. He too had discovered that true life, the rich, splendid life that yielded and bent to his will, was the life of lies, the life his mind and desires created—awake or asleep—to free him from his cell, allow him to escape the asphyxiating monotony of his confinement. The unexpected dream was not gratuitous after all: there was a kinship, an affinity, between the two miserable dreamers.
Don Rigoberto remembered a joke in diminutives whose sheer stupidity had made him and Lucrecia giggle like two children: "A teeny-tiny elephant came to the edge of a teeny-tiny lake to drink, and a teeny-tiny crocodile bit off his teeny-tiny trunk. With teeny-tiny tears, the teeny-tiny pug-nosed elephant sobbed, 'Is that your teeny-tiny idea of a goddamn joke?'"
"Let go of my nose and I'll give you anything you want," he pleaded in terror, in a nasal Cantinflas voice, because Estrella's teeny-tiny teeth were interfering with his breathing. "All the money you want. Let me go, please!"
"Quiet, I'm coming," stammered the mulatta, letting go for a second and then seizing Don Rigoberto's nose again with her two rows of carnivorous teeth.
A violent hippogriff, she came indeed, flying before the wind, shuddering from head to toe, while Don Rigoberto, drowning in panic, saw out of the corner of his eye that Rosaura-Lucrecia, distressed and disconcerted, sitting up in bed, had caught the mulatta around the waist and was trying to move her away, gently, without forcing, surely afraid that if she pulled too hard Estrella would bite off her husband's nose in reprisal. They remained this way for a while, docile, joined together, while the mulatta reared and moaned and licked without restraint the nasal appendage of Don Rigoberto, who, in dark clouds of anxiety, recalled Bacon's monstrous Man's Head, a shocking canvas that had long obsessed him, and now he knew why: it was how Estrella's jaws would leave him after she bit him. It was not the mutilation of his face that horrified him but a single question: Would Lucrecia still love an earless and noseless husband? Would she leave him?
Don Rigoberto read this excerpt in his notebook:
What could have befallen
my fantasy in sleep
that I find myself now
in this castle keep?
Segismundo declaimed this when he awoke from the artificial sleep into which (with a mixture of opium, poppy, and henbane) King Basilio and old Clotaldo had plunged him when they mounted the ignoble farce, moving him from his prison tower to court to have him rule for a brief time and leading him to believe that the transition was also a dream. What happened to your fantasy as you slept, poor prince, he thought, is that they put you to sleep with drugs and killed you. For a moment they returned you to your true state, making you believe that you dreamed. And then you took the liberties one takes when he enjoys the impunity of dreams. You gave free rein to your desires, you threw a man off a balcony, you almost killed old Clotaldo and even King Basilio himself. And so they had the pretext they needed—you were violent, foul-tempered, base—to return you to the chains and solitude of your prison. Despite this, he envied Segismundo. He too, like the unfortunate prince condemned by mathematics and the stars to live in dreams so as not to die of imprisonment and solitude, was, he had written in the notebook, "a living skeleton," an "animate corpse." But unlike the prince, he had no King Basilio, no noble Clotaldo, to remove him from his abandonment and solitude, to put him to sleep with opium, poppy, and henbane and allow him to wake in the arms of Lucrecia. "Lucrecia, my Lucrecia," he sighed, realizing that he was weeping. What a sniveler he had become this past year!
Estrella was crying too, but hers were tears of joy. After her final gasp, during which Don Rigoberto felt a simultaneous jolt to every nerve ending in his body, she opened her mouth, released his nose, and fell back onto the blue-covered bed with a disarmingly pious exclamation: "Mother of God, I came so good!" And crossed herself in gratitude without the slightest sacrilegious intention.
"Sure, good for you, but you almost took off my nose and ears, you outlaw," Don Rigoberto complained.
He was positive that Estrella's caresses had turned his face into the face of Arcimboldo's plant man, who had a tuberous carrot for a nose. With a growing sense of humiliation he saw, through the fingers of the hand he was using to rub his bruised and battered nose, that Rosaura-Lucrecia, without a shred of compassion or concern for him, was looking at the mulatta (serenely stretching on the bed) with curiosity, a pleased little smile floating across her face.
"So that's what you like in men, Estrella?" she asked.
The mulatta nodded.
"It's the only thing I do like," she stated more precisely, panting and exhaling a dense, vegetal breath. "The rest they can stick where the sun never shines. Usually I hold back, I hide it because of what people might say. But tonight I let myself go. I've never seen ears and a nose like the ones on your man. You two made me feel right at home, sweetie."
She looked Lucrecia up and down with the eyes of a connoisseur and seemed to approve. She extended one of her hands and placed her index finger on the left nipple—Don Rigoberto thought he could see the small wrinkled button harden—of Rosaura-Lucrecia and said, with a little laugh, "I knew you were a woman when we were dancing in the club. I could feel your tits, and I saw you didn't know how to lead. I led you, not the other way around."
"You hid it very well. I thought we had you fooled," Doña Lucrecia congratulated her.
Still rubbing his well-caressed nose and offended ears, Don Rigoberto felt a new wave of admiration for his wife. How versatile and adaptable she could be! It was the first time in her life that Lucrecia was doing things like this—dressing like a man, visiting a tarts' dive in a foreign country, going to a cheap hotel with a whore—and yet she did not show the slightest discomfort, unease, or annoyance. There she was, chatting so familiarly with the otolaryngological mulatta, as if they were equals who shared the same background and profession. They looked like two good friends gossiping during a break in their busy day. And how beautiful, how desirable she seemed! In order to savor the sight of his naked wife in the oily half-light, next to Estrella on the wretched bed with the blue spread, Don Rigoberto closed his eyes. She was lying on her side, her face resting on her left hand, in a state of abandon that highlighted the delicate spontaneity of her posture. Her skin looked much whiter in the dim light, her short hair blacker, the bush of pubic hair tinted with blue. And as he amorously followed the gentle meanders of her thighs and back, scaled her buttocks, breasts, and shoulders, Don Rigoberto began to forget his afflicted ears, his abused nose, as well as Estrella, the cheap little hotel where they had taken refuge, and Mexico City: Lucrecia's body was colonizing his mind, displacing, eliminating every other image, consideration, or preoccupation.
Rosaura-Lucrecia and Estrella did not seem to notice—or, perhaps, they attributed no importance to it—when he mechanically began to remove his tie, jacket, shirt, shoes, socks, trousers, and shorts, tossing them onto the cracked green linoleum. Or even when he knelt at the foot of the bed and started to run his hands along his wife's legs and kiss them deferentially. They were involved in their confidences and gossip, indifferent to him, as if they did not see him, as if he were a phantom.
I am, he thought, opening his eyes. His excitement remained, beating him about the legs without much conviction, without a shred of joy or decisiveness, like a rusted clapper striking an old bell made dissonant by time and routine in the little church with no parishioners.
And then memory brought back the profound displeasure—the bad taste in his mouth, really—caused in him by the sycophantic ending, so abjectly subservient to principles of authority and the immorality of reasons of state, in that work by Calderón de la Barca: the soldier who initiated the uprising against King Basilio, thanks to which Prince Segismundo comes to occupy the Polish throne, is condemned by the new, ignoble, ungrateful king to rot away for the rest of his life in the same tower where Segismundo had suffered, with the argument that—his notebook reproduced the ghastly lines—"the traitor is not needed once the treason is complete."
A horrendous philosophy, a repugnant morality, he reflected, temporarily forgetting his beautiful naked wife, though he continued to caress her mechanically. The prince pardons Basilio and Clotaldo, his oppressors and torturers, and punishes the valiant anonymous soldier who incited the troops against the unjust ruler, freed Segismundo from his cave, and made him monarch because, more than anything else, it was necessary to defend obedience to established authority, to condemn the principle, the very notion, of rebellion against the sovereign. It was disgusting!
Did a work poisoned by an inhuman doctrine so opposed to freedom deserve to occupy and nourish his dreams, to populate his desires? And yet there had to be some reason why, on this particular night, these phantoms had taken full, exclusive possession of his dreaming. Again he looked through his notebooks, searching for an explanation.
Old Clotaldo called the pistol a "viper of metal," and the disguised Rosaura asked herself "if sight does not suffer deceptions that fantasy creates/in the fainthearted light still left to day." Don Rigoberto looked toward the sea. There, in the distance, on the line of the horizon, a fainthearted light announced the new day, the light that each morning violently destroyed the small world of illusion and shadows where he was happy (happy? No, where he was merely a little less unfortunate) and returned him to the prison routine he followed five days a week (shower, breakfast, office, lunch, office, dinner) with barely an opening for his inventions to seep through. A note in the margin—it said, "Lucrecia"—had an arrow pointing at some brief verses written on the page: "… joining/the costly finery of Diana, the armor/of Pallas." The huntress and the warrior, combined in his beloved Lucrecia. Why not? But this evidently was not what had embedded the story of Prince Segismundo in the depths of his unconscious and materialized it in tonight's fantasies. What, then?
"It cannot be that so many things/are contained within a single dream," the Prince had said in amazement. "You are an idiot," replied Don Rigoberto. "A single dream can contain all of life." It moved him that Segismundo, transported under the effects of the drug from his prison to the palace, and asked what, in his return to the world, had made the greatest impression on him, should reply: "Nothing has surprised me,/for all was foreseen; but if one thing/in the world were to amaze, it would be/the beauty of women." And he hadn't even seen Lucrecia, he thought. He could see her now, splendid, supernatural, flowing across that blue spread, delicately purring as the tickling lips of her amorous husband kissed her underarms. The amiable Estrella had moved away, ceding to Don Rigoberto her place next to Rosaura-Lucrecia, sitting at the corner of the bed previously occupied by Don Rigoberto when she had labored so enthusiastically over his ears and nose. Discreet, motionless, not wanting to distract or interrupt them, she observed with sympathetic curiosity as they embraced, entwined, and began to make love.
What is life? Confusion.
What is life? Illusion,
a shadow, a fiction;
its greatest goods are small,
life is a dream, and all
our dreams another dream.
"It's a lie," he said aloud, slamming the desk in his study. Life was not a dream, dreams were a feeble lie, a fleeting deception that provided only temporary escape from frustration and solitude in order that we might better appreciate, with more painful bitterness, the beauty and substantiality of real life, the life we ate, touched, drank, the rich life so superior to the simulacrum indulged in by conjured desire and fantasy. Devastated by anguish—day had come, the light of dawn revealed gray cliffs, a leaden sea, fat-bellied clouds, crumbling brickwork, a leprous pavement—he clung desperately to Lucrecia-Rosaura's body, using these last few seconds to achieve an impossible pleasure, with the grotesque foreboding that at any moment, perhaps at the moment of ecstasy, he would feel the impetuous hands of the mulatta landing on his ears.
The Viper and the Lamprey
Thinking of you, I have read The Perfect Wife by Fray Luis de León, and understand, given the idea of matrimony he preached, why this fine poet preferred abstinence and an Augustinian habit to the nuptial bed. And yet, in those pages of good prose abounding in unintentional humor, I found this quotation from the blessed Saint Basil that fits like a glove on the ivory hand of can you guess which exceptional woman, model wife, and sorely missed lover?
The viper, an exceptionally fierce animal among serpents, diligently goes to wed the marine lamprey; having arrived, he whistles, as if signaling that he is there, thus calling her from the sea in order to engage her in conjugal embrace. The lamprey obeys, and with no fear couples with the venomous beast. What do I mean by this? What? That no matter how violent the husband, how savage his habits, the woman must endure, must not consent for any reason to be divided from him. Oh! He is a tyrant? But he is your husband! A drunkard? But the bonds of matrimony made you one with him. A harsh man, an unpleasant man! But your member, your principal member. And, so that the husband may also hear what he must: the viper, respectful of their coupling, sets aside his venom, and will you not abandon the inhuman cruelty of your nature in order to honor your marriage? This is from Basil.
—Fray Luis de León, The Perfect Wife, Chapter III
Conjugally embrace this viper, dearly beloved lamprey.
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