The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Don Rigoberto began to laugh, and the dull gray afternoon lightened. At the bottom of the page, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste boasted: “Stupidity is not my strong suit” (La bêtise n’est pas mon fort). Lucky for him; Don Rigoberto had already spent a quarter of a century at the insurance company, surrounded by, submerged in, asphyxiated by stupidity, making him a specialist in the subject. Was Narciso simply an imbecile? Another piece of Limenian protoplasm that calls itself decent and proper? Yes. Which made him no less amiable when he set his mind to it. That night, for instance. There he sat, the indefatigable raconteur, his face closely shaven and sporting the deep tan of the leisured, expounding on an alkaloid plant, also called yohimbine, that had an illustrious history in herbalist tradition and natural medicine. It increased vasodilatation and stimulated the ganglia that control erective tissue, and it inhibited serotonin, which, in excessive amounts, inhibits the sexual appetite. He had the warm voice of an experienced seducer; his voice and gestures were in perfect harmony with the blue blazer, gray shirt, and dark silk scarf with white dots that encircled his neck. His exposition, interspersed with smiles, adroitly respected the line between information and insinuation, anecdote and fantasy, knowledge and hearsay, diversion and excitation. Suddenly Don Rigoberto noticed the gleam in the sea-green eyes of Ilse, the dark topaz eyes of Lucrecia. Had his pretentious Corsican brother aroused the ladies? Judging by their giggles, jokes, questions, the crossing and uncrossing of their legs, and the gaiety with which they emptied their glasses of Chilean wine (Concha y Toro), yes, he had. Why wouldn’t they experience the same stirring of the spirit as he? Did Narciso have his plan already prepared at this point in the evening? Of course, Don Rigoberto decreed.

  And therefore, with great skill, he did not give them a chance to catch their breath, or allow the conversation to move away from the Machiavellian course he had laid out for it. From yobimbine he moved on to Japanese fugu, the testicular fluid of a small fish which, in addition to being an extremely powerful seminal tonic, can also cause a grisly death by poison—which is how hundreds of lascivious Japanese perish every year—and recounted the icy fear with which he had taken it, on that shimmering night in Kyoto, from the hands of a geisha in a billowing kimono, not knowing if what awaited him at the end of those opiate mouthfuls were death rattles and rigor mortis or one hundred explosions of pleasure (it was the latter, reduced by one zero). Ilse, a statuesque blonde, a former stewardess on Lufthansa, a Peruvianized Valkyrie, celebrated her husband’s achievement with not a trace of retrospective jealousy. It was she who suggested (was she in on the plot?), after their floury dessert, that they conclude the evening with a drink at their house in La Planicie. Don Rigoberto said “Good idea” without a second thought, affected by the visible enthusiasm with which Lucrecia welcomed the proposal.

  Half an hour later they were settled in comfortable chairs in the hideous kitsch of Narciso and Isle’s living room—Peruvian ostentation and Prussian orderliness—surrounded by dried and stuffed beasts that impassively observed them with icy glass eyes as they drank whiskey in the indirect lighting, listening to songs by Nat “King” Cole and Frank Sinatra, and contemplating the tiles in the illuminated pool through the glass doors that led to the garden. Narciso continued to display his knowledge of aphrodisiacs with all the ease of the Great Richardi—Don Rigoberto sighed as he recalled the circuses of his childhood—pulling scarves from his top hat. Combining omniscience and exoticism, Narciso asserted that in southern Italy each male consumed a ton of sweet basil in the course of his lifetime, for tradition maintains that not only the flavor of pasta but the size of the penis depends on this aromatic herb, and that in India an ointment with a base of garlic and monkey secretions was sold in the markets—he gave it to his friends when they turned fifty—and when rubbed on the proper place produced erections in succession, like the sneezes of a person suffering from allergies. He inundated them with musings on the virtues of oysters, celery, Korean ginseng, sarsaparilla, licorice, pollen, truffles, and caviar, until Don Rigoberto began to suspect, after listening to him for more than three hours, that all the animal and vegetable products in the world were probably designed to foster that joining of bodies called physical love, copulation, sin, to which human beings (himself not excluded) attached so much importance.

  This was when Narciso took him by the arm and led him away from the ladies on the pretext of showing him the latest piece in his collection of walking sticks (in addition to mounted animals, what else could this priapic beast, this walking phallus, collect but walking sticks?). The pisco sours, the wine and cognac, had all had their effect. Instead of walking, Don Rigoberto seemed to float into Narciso’s study, where, their pages uncut, naturally, the leatherbound volumes stood guard on the shelves: the Britannica, Ricardo Palma’s Peruvian Traditions, and the Durants’ History of Civilization, along with a paperback novel by Stephen King. Without any preliminaries, lowering his voice, Narciso spoke into his ear and asked if he remembered the tricks they had played on girls long ago in the boxes at the Leuro Cinema. What tricks? But before his brother could answer, he remembered. The switching game! The company lawyer would call it appropriating another person’s identity. Taking advantage of their resemblance, emphasizing it with identical clothes and haircuts, each passed himself off as the other in order to kiss and fondle—it was called “making out” in their neighborhood—his brother’s girlfriend for the duration of the movie.

  “Those were the days, Brother.” Don Rigoberto smiled, succumbing to nostalgia.

  “You thought they didn’t know, that they mixed us up,” Narciso recalled. “I could never convince you they did it because they liked the game.”

  “No, they didn’t know,” Rigoberto asserted. “They couldn’t have. The morality back then wouldn’t have permitted it. Lucerito and Chinchilla? So proper, always going to Mass and taking Communion? Never! They would have told their parents.”

  “Your concept of women is too angelic,” Narciso admonished him.

  “That’s what you think. The fact is, I’m just discreet, unlike you. But every moment I don’t devote to the obligations of earning a living, I invest in pleasure.”

  (And just then the notebook presented him with an appropriate quotation from Borges: “The duty of all things is to give joy; if they do not give joy they are either useless or harmful.” Don Rigoberto thought of a machista footnote: “Suppose we say women instead of things, then what?”)

  “We have only one life, Brother. You don’t get a second chance.”

  “After the matinees we would run to Huatica Boulevard, to the block where the French girls lived,” Don Rigoberto said dreamily. “In the days before AIDS, when all you got was a harmless bug and an easy cure.”

  “Those days aren’t over. They’re still here,” Narciso declared. “We haven’t died, and we’re not going to die. That decision is irrevocable.”

  His eyes flamed and his voice was mellow. Don Rigoberto realized that nothing he was hearing was spontaneous; a scheme lurked behind the clever reminiscing.

  “Would you care to tell me what you have in mind?” he asked, intrigued.

  “You know very well, my dear Corsican brother.” The fierce wolf brought his mouth to the great fluttering ear of Don Rigoberto. And without further maneuvering, he formulated his proposal: “The switching game. One more time. Today, right here, right now. Don’t you like Ilse? I like Lucrecia, a lot. We’ll do what we did with Lucerito and Chinchilla. Could there ever be jealousy between you and me? Let’s be young again, Brother!”

  In his Sunday solitude, Don Rigoberto’s heart beat faster. With surprise, emotion, curiosity, excitement? And, as he had that night, he felt the urge to kill Narciso.

  “We’re too old and too different now for our wives to be taken in,” he declared, drunk with astonishment.

  “There’s no need for them to be taken in,” Narciso replied, very sure of himself. “They’re modern women, they don’t need excuses. Leave it to me, tiger.�
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  I’ll never, never play the switching game at my age, thought Don Rigoberto without opening his mouth. The rising intoxication of a moment ago had dissipated. Damn! Narciso certainly was a man of action. He had already taken his arm and was hurrying him back to the room with the mounted animals, where, cordially gossiping, Ilse and Lucrecia were tearing apart a mutual friend whose recent face-lift had left her with eyes that would be wide-open forever (at least until she was buried or incinerated). And was already announcing that the moment had come to open a bottle of the special reserve Dom Pérignon that he saved for special occasions.

  A few minutes later they heard the foaming little explosion, and the four of them were toasting one another with that pale ambrosia. The bubbles going down his esophagus provoked in Don Rigoberto’s spirit an idea associated with the topic that had been monopolized all night by his Corsican brother: had Narciso laced the joyful champagne they were drinking with one of the countless aphrodisiacs he said he smuggled and about which he claimed expertise? Because the laughter and bravado of Lucrecia and Ilse were increasing, seeming to favor bold moves, and even he, who five minutes earlier had felt paralyzed, confused, shocked, angered by the proposal—and yet had not had the courage to reject it—now viewed the idea with less indignation, as if it were one of those irresistible temptations that, in his Catholic youth, had driven him to commit the sins he would later describe so contritely in the confessional. Through wisps of smoke—was his Corsican brother the one who was smoking?—and the savage fangs of an Amazonian lion, he saw his sister-in-law’s long white legs, crossed, carefully depilitated, and set off by the tigerskin rug in the living room—zoo—mortuary. Excitement manifested itself as a discreet itch low in his belly. And he could see her knees, rounded and satiny, the kind French gallantry called polies, indicating solid depths, undoubtedly wet, beneath her brown pleated skirt. Desire coursed through his body. Amazed at himself, he thought, After all, why not? Narciso had asked Lucrecia to dance, and with their arms around one another they began to sway, slowly, next to the wall hung with deer antlers and bear heads. Jealousy seasoned (but did not replace or destroy) his evil thoughts with a bittersweet flavor. He did not vacillate; he leaned over, took away the glass that Ilse was holding in her hand, and drew her toward him: “Care to dance, dear sister-in-law?” His brother had put on a series of slow boleros, of course.

  He felt a pang in his heart when, through the locks of the Valkyrie’s hair, he saw his Corsican brother and Lucrecia dancing cheek to cheek. His arms encircling her waist, and hers around his neck. How long had these intimacies been going on? He could recall nothing like it in ten years of marriage. Yes, that evil wizard Narciso must have spiked the drinks. While he was lost in speculation, his right arm had been drawing his sister-in-law closer to him. And she did not resist. When he felt the brush of her thighs against his, their bellies touching, Don Rigoberto told himself, not without uneasiness, that now nothing, and no one, could prevent his approaching erection. And, in fact, it came upon him at the very moment he felt Ilse’s cheek against his. When the music ended it affected him like the bell during a pitiless boxing match. “Thank you, my beautiful Brunhilde,” and he kissed his sister-in-law’s hand. And, tripping over gruesome heads filled with stucco or papier-mâché, he moved toward the spot where Lucrecia and Narciso—with chagrin? reluctantly?—were disengaging. He took his wife in his arms and murmured pointedly, “Dear wife, may I have this dance?” He led her to the darkest corner of the room. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Narciso and Ilse were also embracing and, in a concerted movement, had begun to kiss.

  Holding the suspiciously languid body of his wife very close, his erection was reborn; now it pressed without prudery against the form he knew so well. Their lips were touching as he whispered, “Do you know what Narciso proposed?”

  “I can imagine,” replied Lucrecia with a naturalness that Don Rigoberto found as unsettling as her use of a verb neither of them had ever said in their conjugal intimacy. “He wants you to fuck Ilse while he fucks me?”

  He longed to hurt her; instead, he kissed her, assailed by one of those moments of impassioned effusiveness to which he often gave way. Transfixed, feeling that he might begin to cry, he whispered that he loved and wanted her and could never thank her for the happiness she had brought him. “Yes, yes, I love you,” he said aloud. “With all my dreams, Lucrecia.” The gray Barrancan Sunday brightened, the solitude of his study softened. Don Rigoberto noticed that a tear had fallen from his cheek and blurred a very appropriate quotation from the Valéryan (valerian and Valéry, what a happy union) Monsieur Teste, which defined his own relationship to love: “Tout ce qui m’était facile m’était indifférent etpresque ennemi.”

  Before sadness could overpower him, or the warm feeling of just a moment ago sink completely into corrosive melancholy, he made an effort, and half-closing his eyes and forcing himself to concentrate, he returned to the room filled with animals and the night heavy with smoke—did Narciso smoke? did Ilse?—to dangerous mixtures of champagne, cognac, whiskey, music, and the relaxed ambiance that enveloped them, no longer divided into two stable and precise couples as they had been at the start of the evening before they went to eat dinner at the Costa Verde restaurant, but intermingled, precarious couples who separated and came together again with an ease that matched the amorphous atmosphere as changeable as the shape in a kaleidoscope. Had the light been turned off? A while ago. By Narciso, of course. The room with its dead beasts was faintly illuminated by the light from the pool, allowing only glimpses of shadows, silhouettes, anonymous contours. His Corsican brother prepared his ambushes well. Don Rigoberto’s body and spirit had become dissociated; while his spirit wandered, attempting to discover if it would take the game suggested by Narciso to its ultimate consequences, his body, confident and free of scruples, was already engaged in play. Which one was he caressing as he pretended to dance and stood swaying in place, sensing vaguely that the music was stopping and starting periodically? Lucrecia or Ilse? He did not want to know. What a pleasurable sensation to have welded to him that female form whose breasts he could feel, deliciously, through his shirt, whose firm neck his lips nibbled slowly as they advanced toward an ear whose opening the tip of his tongue greedily explored. No, that cartilage or small bone was not Lucrecia’s. He raised his eyes and tried to penetrate the shadows of the corner where he recalled seeing Narciso dancing just a moment before.

  “They went up a while ago.” Ilse’s voice sounded vague and bored in his ear. He could even detect a touch of mockery.

  “Where?” he asked stupidly, immediately embarrassed by his stupidity.

  “Where do you think?” Ilse replied, with a perverse little laugh and German humor. “To look at the moon? Or take a piss? Have any ideas, Brother-in-law?”

  “You never see the moon in Lima,” Don Rigoberto stammered, releasing Ilse and moving away from her. “You can hardly see the sun in summer. It’s the damn fog.”

  “Narciso has wanted Lucre for a long time.” Ilse put him back on the rack, not giving him a chance to catch his breath; she spoke as if it had nothing to do with her. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, you’re not a moron.”

  His intoxication had dissipated, along with his excitement. He began to perspire. Silently, idiotically, he was asking himself how Lucrecia could have consented so easily to the machinations of his Corsican brother, when he was shaken once again by Ilse’s small, insidious voice.

  “Are you a little jealous, Rigo?”

  “Well, yes, I am,” he acknowledged. And then more frankly: “In fact, I’m very jealous.”

  “I was too, at first,” she said, as if it were just another banal remark during a bridge game. “You get used to it, like watching the rain.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, disconcerted. “Do you mean that you and Narciso often play the switching game?”

  “Every three months,” Ilse replied with Prussian precision. “Not really often. Narci
so says that if you don’t want this kind of adventure to lose its charm, you can only do it once in a while. Always with carefully chosen people. Because if it becomes trivialized it’s no fun anymore.”

  He must have taken off her clothes by now, he thought. Now he’s holding her in his arms. Was Lucrecia kissing and caressing his Corsican brother with the same avidity? He was still trembling as if he had Saint Vitus’ dance when Ilse’s next question passed through him like an electric shock: “Would you like to see them?”

  She had brought her face close to speak. His sister-in-law’s long blond hair was in his mouth and eyes.

  “Are you serious?” he murmured in astonishment.

  “Would you like to?” she insisted, brushing his ear with her lips.

  “Yes, yes,” he agreed. He felt as if his bones were melting, as if he were evaporating.

  She grasped his right hand. “Nice and slow, very quiet,” she ordered. She led him, floating, to the winding wrought-iron staircase that led to the bedrooms. It was dark, as was the hallway, though the corridor did receive some illumination from the floodlights in the garden. The deep pile of the carpet muffled their steps; they moved forward on tiptoe. Don Rigoberto felt his heart racing. What awaited him? What would he see? His sister-in-law stopped and whispered another order into his ear: “Take off your shoes,” as she leaned over to remove hers. Don Rigoberto obeyed. He felt ridiculous without his shoes, like a thief in his stockinged feet, with Ilse leading him by the hand along the dim corridor as if he were Fonchito. “Don’t make noise, you’ll ruin everything,” she said, standing still. He nodded, like a robot. Ilse started to walk again, opened a door, and had him go in ahead of her. They were in the bedroom, separated from the bed by a brick half-wall with regularly spaced diamond-shaped openings that allowed them to see the bed. It was extremely wide and theatrical. In the cone of light that fell from a ceiling fixture, he saw his Corsican brother and Lucrecia, fused together, moving rhythmically. The sound of their panting, like a quiet dialogue, reached him.