The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Did you say cats?”

  “Little cats, I mean,” she mewed, striding resolutely around Don Rigoberto, who was reminded of a bull that has just emerged from the pen and is taking the bullfighter’s measure. “Kitty cats, pussycats, kittens. A dozen, maybe more.”

  They were frolicking on the red velvet bedspread. They pulled back and extended their little paws beneath the cone of brutal light that fell, like stardust, from the invisible ceiling onto the bed. The scent of musk filled the air, and baroque music, with its abrupt diapasons, came from the same corner as the dry, commanding voice.

  “Get undressed.”

  “Absolutely not,” Doña Lucrecia protested. “You want me there with those animals. I’d rather die, I can’t stand them.”

  “He wanted you to make love to him in the middle of all those kittens?” Don Rigoberto did not miss a single moment of Doña Lucrecia’s progress around the soft thick carpet. His heart awoke as the Barrancan night became less humid, more lively.

  “Imagine,” she replied softly, stopping for an instant and then resuming her circular pacing. “He wanted to see me naked in the middle of those cats. And I find them so disgusting! I get gooseflesh just thinking about it.”

  Don Rigoberto began to discern their shapes, his ears began to hear the weak mewing of the swarm of cats. Segregated by shadows, they began to appear, become corporeal, and on the fiery bedspread, beneath the shower of light, the gleams and reflections and dark contortions made him dizzy. He sensed that at the tips of those shifting limbs there was a suggestion of aqueous, curved, infant claws.

  “Come, come here,” the man in the corner ordered in a quiet voice. And at the same time he must have turned up the volume, because clavichords and violins swelled, assaulting his ears. Pergolesi! Don Rigoberto recognized the composer. He understood why that sonata had been chosen: the eighteenth century was not only the time of disguises and confusion of the sexes; it was also the century par excellence of cats. Hadn’t Venice always been a feline republic?

  “Were you naked by this time?” Listening to himself, he realized that desire was quickly taking control of his body.

  “Not yet. He undressed me, as always. Why do you ask when you know that’s what he likes best?”

  “And do you too?” he interrupted in a honeyed tone.

  Doña Lucrecia laughed, a little forced laugh.

  “It’s always nice to have a valet,” she whispered, inventing a charming modesty for herself. “Though this time it was different.”

  “Because of the cats?”

  “Of course because of the cats. They made me so nervous. My nerves were all on edge, Rigoberto.”

  And still, she had obeyed the order of the lover hidden in the corner. Docile, curious, aroused, she stood beside him and waited, not for a second forgetting the pack of felines knotted together, arching their backs, rolling over, licking with their tongues, displaying themselves in the obscene yellow circle that held them prisoner in the center of the flaming bedspread. When she felt his two hands on her ankles, moving down to her feet and removing her shoes, her breasts grew as taut as two bows. Her nipples hardened. Meticulously he removed her stockings, kissing, without haste and with great care, every inch of exposed skin. He murmured something that Doña Lucrecia thought at first were tender or vulgar words dictated by excitement.

  “But no, it was not a declaration of love, or any of the filthy things that sometimes occur to him.” She laughed again, the same little disbelieving laugh, and stopped within reach of Don Rigoberto’s hands. He did not attempt to touch her.

  “What, then,” he stammered, struggling with his recalcitrant tongue.

  “Explanations, a whole felinesque lecture,” and she laughed again between stifled little screams. “Did you know that the thing kittens like best in the world is honey? And that at their backsides they have a sac that produces perfume?”

  Don Rigoberto sniffed at the night with dilated nostrils.

  “Is that the scent you’re wearing? Isn’t that musk?”

  “It’s civet. Cat perfume. I’m covered with it. Does it bother you?”

  The story was slipping away from him, he was losing his hold on it, he had thought he was inside and now he found himself on the outside. Don Rigoberto did not know what to think.

  “And why had he brought the jars of honey?” he asked, fearing a game or a joke that would undermine the gravity of the ceremony.

  “To smear on you,” said the man, and he stopped kissing her. He continued to undress her; he had finished with her stockings, jacket, and blouse. Now he was unfastening her skirt. “I brought it from Greece, from the bees on Mount Hymettus. The honey that Aristotle speaks of. I saved it for you, thinking about tonight.”

  He loves her, thought Don Rigoberto, moved despite his jealousy.

  “No, you won’t,” Doña Lucrecia protested. “Absolutely not. That dirty stuff’s not for me.”

  Her defenses weakened by the contagious will of her lover, she spoke without authority, in the tone of one who knows she is defeated. Her body had begun to divert her thoughts from the high-pitched noises on the bed, had begun to quiver, to focus her attention on the man who had stripped away her last articles of clothing and, kneeling at her feet, continued his caresses. She allowed him to go on, attempting to abandon herself to the pleasure he gave her. His lips and hands left flames wherever they touched. The kittens were always there, grayish-green, lethargic or lively, wrinkling the bedspread. Meowing, frolicking. Pergolesi had subsided into a distant breeze, a sonorous swoon.

  “Smear your body with honey from the bees on Mount Hymettus?” Don Rigoberto repeated, spelling out each word.

  “So that the kittens would lick it off, can you imagine? Even though the damn things make me sick, even though I’m allergic to cats and can’t stand to touch sticky things (She never chewed gum, Don Rigoberto thought with gratitude) even with the tip of my finger. Can you imagine?”

  “It was a great sacrifice, you did it only because…”

  “Because I love you,” she interrupted. “You love me too, don’t you?”

  With all my heart, thought Don Rigoberto. His eyes were closed. He had finally reached the state of absolute lucidity he had been striving for. He could orient himself without difficulty in that labyrinth of dense shadows. Very clearly, with a touch of envy, he could see the skill of the man who, without hurrying or losing control of his fingers, freed Lucrecia of her slip, her bra, her panties, while his lips delicately kissed her satin skin, feeling the light granulation—from cold, uncertainty, apprehension, disgust, desire?—that enervated her, and the warm exhalations, summoned by his caresses, that appeared on those same parts of her body. When he felt on the tongue, teeth, and palate of the lover the curly thatch of hair, and the spicy aroma of her juices ascended to his brain, he began to tremble. Had he begun to apply the honey? Yes. With a painter’s fine brush? No. With a cloth? No. With his bare hands? Yes. Or rather, with each of his long, bony fingers and all the knowledge of a masseur. His fingers spread the crystalline substance on her skin—the sugary scent rose, cloying, through Don Rigoberto’s nostrils—and verified the consistency of thighs, shoulders, and breasts, pinched those hips, passed over those buttocks, penetrated and separated those puckered depths. The music of Pergolesi capriciously returned. It resounded, hiding Doña Lucrecia’s muffled protests and the agitation of the kittens, who could smell the honey and, guessing at what was going to happen, had begun leaping and yowling, running along the bedspread, their jaws open, impatient.

  “It was more hunger,” Doña Lucrecia corrected him.

  “Were you excited?” panted Don Rigoberto. “Was he naked? Did he put honey on his own body too?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Doña Lucrecia intoned. “He smeared me, he smeared himself, he had me smear his back where his hand couldn’t reach. Naturally those little games are very exciting. He isn’t made of wood, and you wouldn’t want me to be made of wood either, would you?”

/>   “Of course not,” Don Rigoberto agreed. “My darling.”

  “Naturally we kissed, we touched, we caressed,” his wife stated with precision. She had resumed her circular pacing, and Don Rigoberto’s ears could detect the whisper of ermine at each step. Did it inflame her, remembering? “I mean, without our leaving the corner. For a long while. Until he picked me up and carried me, all covered with honey, to the bed.”

  The vision was so clear, the definition of the image so explicit, that Don Rigoberto became fearful. “I may go blind.” Like those hippies during the psychedelic years, stimulated by the synesthesias of LSD, who defied the California sun until the rays burned their retinas and they were condemned to see life with their ears, their sense of touch, their imagination. There they were, smeared and dripping with honey and their own secretions, Hellenic in their nakedness and grace, advancing toward the cattish swarm. He was a medieval knight armed for battle and she a wood nymph, a ravished Sabine woman. She kicked her golden feet and protested, “I don’t want to, I don’t like it,” but her arms amorously encircled the neck of her raptor, her tongue struggled to enter his mouth, and she sipped his saliva with pleasure. “Wait, wait,” Don Rigoberto implored. An accommodating Doña Lucrecia stopped, and it was as if she had disappeared into those complicitous shadows while her husband evoked in memory the languid girl by Balthus (Nu avec chat), seated on a chair, her head voluptuously thrown back, one leg extended, the other bent, her slim heel resting on the edge of the chair, arm outstretched to stroke a cat that lies on the top of a dresser and, with half-closed eyes, calmly awaits his pleasure. Digging deeper, searching—in the book by the Dutch animalist Midas Dekkers?—he also recalled seeing but not paying much attention to the Rosalba by Botero (1968), an oil painting in which a small black feline, crouching on a nuptial bed, prepares to share sheets and mattress with a voluptuous, curly-haired prostitute who is finishing her cigarette; and a woodcut by Félix Vallotton (Languor, circa 1896?) in which a girl with vivacious buttocks, among flowered bolsters and a geometric quilt, scratches the erogenous neck of an aroused cat. Apart from these uncertain approximations, in the arsenal of his memory no image coincided with this one. He was childishly intrigued. His excitement had ebbed, without disappearing altogether; it appeared on the horizon of his body like one of those cold suns in a European autumn, his favorite season for traveling.

  “And?” he asked, returning to the reality of his interrupted dream.

  The man had placed Lucrecia beneath the cone of light, and firmly freeing himself from the arms that tried to hold him, ignoring her pleas, he stepped back. Like Don Rigoberto, he contemplated her from the darkness. It was an uncommon sight and, once he was past the initial discomfiture, incomparably beautiful. After moving away in fright to make room for her and observe her, crouching, uncertain, always on the alert—green sparks, yellow ones, tense little whiskers—the tiny animals sniffed at her and leaped onto that sweet prey. They scaled, laid siege to, and occupied the honeyed body, mewing with happiness. The noise wiped out the breathless protests, the stifled little laughs, the exclamations of Doña Lucrecia. Her arms crossed over her face to protect her mouth, eyes, and nose from their eager licking, and she was at their mercy. Don Rigoberto’s eyes followed the greedy, iridescent creatures, slipped with them along her breasts and hips, slid along her knees, stuck to her elbows, climbed along her thighs, indulged, like those little tongues, in the liquid sweetness forming pools on the full moon of her belly. The gleam of honey seasoned with the saliva of the cats gave her white body a semi-liquid appearance, and the little starts and shivers that traced the stepping and tumbling of the animals had something of the soft movements of bodies in water. Doña Lucrecia was floating, she was a living vessel cutting a wake through invisible waters. How beautiful she is! he thought. Her body with its firm breasts and generous hips, well-defined buttocks and thighs, was on the very edge of what he admired above all else in a feminine silhouette: the abundance that suggests but just avoids an undesirable obesity.

  “Open your legs, my love,” asked the faceless man.

  “Open them, open them,” pleaded Don Rigoberto.

  “They’re very small, they don’t bite, they won’t hurt you,” the man insisted.

  “Were you enjoying it?” asked Don Rigoberto.

  “No, no,” replied Doña Lucrecia, who had again resumed her hypnotic walking. The murmurous ermine reawakened his suspicions: was she naked beneath the fur? Yes, she was. “The tickling drove me crazy.”

  But in the end she had consented, and two or three felines rushed eagerly to lick the hidden backs of her thighs, the little drops of honey that sparkled on the silken black hairs of her mound of Venus. The chorus of licking tongues seemed like celestial music to Don Rigoberto. Pergolesi returned, faintly now, sweetly, moaning slowly. The firm body, licked clean, lay still, in deep repose. But Doña Lucrecia was not sleeping, for Don Rigoberto’s ears could detect the discreet eddies escaping, without her realizing it, from her depths.

  “Were you over your revulsion?” he inquired.

  “Of course not,” she replied. And, after a pause, with some humor: “But it didn’t matter so much anymore.”

  She laughed, this time with the open laugh she reserved for him on their nights of shared intimacy, the fantasy without awkwardness that made them happy. Don Rigoberto desired her with all the mouths of his body.

  “Take off the coat,” he pleaded. “Come, come to my arms, my queen, my goddess.”

  But he was distracted by the vision that at precisely this instant had doubled. The invisible man was no longer invisible. His long, oiled body silently infiltrated the image. Now he was there too. Dropping onto the red cover, he embraced Doña Lucrecia. The screeching of the kittens squashed between the lovers and struggling to escape with bulging eyes, wide-open jaws, tongues hanging out, hurt Don Rigoberto’s eardrums. He covered his ears, but he could still hear them. And though he closed his eyes, he saw the man covering Doña Lucrecia. He seemed to sink into the robust white hips that received him with pleasure. He kissed her with the avidity displayed by the kittens when they licked her, and he moved on her, with her, imprisoned by her arms. Doña Lucrecia’s hands clenched his back, and her raised legs fell on his and her proud feet rested on his calves, one of Don Rigoberto’s most erogenous zones. He sighed, struggling to control an overwhelming desire to cry. He caught sight of Doña Lucrecia slipping away toward the door.

  “Will you come back tomorrow?” he asked anxiously.

  “And the day after and the day after that,” the silent, vanishing figure replied. “Have I even left?”

  The kittens, recovered from their surprise, returned to their duties and dispensed with the final drops of honey, indifferent to the couple’s fierce struggles.

  The Name Fetishist

  I have a name fetish, and your name captivates me and drives me mad. Rigoberto! It is virile, it is elegant, it is Bronzinian, it is Italian. When I say it quietly, just for myself, a shiver snakes all the way down my spine and these rosy heels that God (or Nature if you prefer, unbeliever!) gave me turn to ice. Rigoberto! A laughing cascade of transparent waters. Rigoberto! The yellow joy of a goldfinch celebrating the sun. Wherever you may be, I am there too. Silent and loving, I am there. Do you sign a bill of exchange or a promissory note with the four syllables of your name? I am the dot over the i, the tail of the g, the little horns on each side of the t. The spot of ink on your thumb. Do you appease the heat with a glass of mineral water? I am the tiny bubble that refreshes your palate, the cube of ice that makes your viper-tongue shiver. I, Rigoberto, am the laces in your shoes, the cherry-extract lozenge you take each night to prevent constipation. How do I know this detail of your gastroenterological life? She who loves, knows, and considers everything that concerns her love as worthwhile knowledge, sanctifying the most trivial aspect of his person. Before your portrait I cross myself and pray. To learn about your life I have your name, the numerology of the Cabalists, the divinat
ory arts of Nostradamus. Who am I? One who loves you as the foam loves the wave and the cloud the rosy dawn. Seek, seek and find me, beloved.

  Yours, yours, yours,

  The Name Fetishist

  II

  Egon Schiele’s Things

  “Why are you so interested in Egon Schiele?” asked Doña Lucrecia.

  “It makes me sad that he died so young and that they put him in prison,” Fonchito replied. “His pictures are really beautiful. I spend hours looking at them in my papá’s books. Don’t you like them, Stepmamá?”

  “I don’t recall them very well. Except for the poses. The bodies are strained and twisted, aren’t they?”

  “And I like Schiele because, because…” The boy interrupted her, as if he were about to reveal a secret. “I’m afraid to tell you, Stepmamá.”

  “You know how to say things very well when you want to, so don’t play the fool.”

  “Because I have a feeling that I’m like him. That I’m going to have a tragic life, like his.”

  Doña Lucrecia laughed out loud. But then a feeling of uneasiness came over her. How did the boy ever think up an idea like that? Fonchito continued to look at her, very seriously. After a while, making an effort, he smiled. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the dining alcove; he was still wearing the blue jacket and gray tie of his uniform but had taken off the peaked cap, which lay beside him along with his book bag and the portfolio and box of pencils from the academy. Just then, Justiniana came in with the tea tray. Fonchito welcomed her with glee.

  “Toasted sweet buns with butter and marmalade.” He clapped his hands, suddenly freed from care. “What I love best in the whole world. You remembered, Justita!”

  “I didn’t fix this for you, it’s for the señora,” Justiniana lied, pretending severity. “Not even a burned crumb for you.”

  She began to serve the tea, arranging the cups on the coffee table in the living room. In the Olivar some boys were playing soccer, and their enthusiastic silhouettes could be seen through the curtains; inside the house they could hear, in muted form, their curses, resounding kicks, and shouts of triumph. Soon it would be dark.