The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “He has become a specialist in the field,” she told Don Rigoberto, for she was filled with excitement at her discovery.

  “For obvious reasons,” he deduced.

  Had that been part of Manuel’s strategy? Don Rigoberto’s large head nodded agreement in the small circle of light shed by the lamp. Naturally. To create a salacious intimacy, a complicity in forbidden areas that would subsequently allow him to beg for so bold a favor. He had confessed to her—feigning embarrassment and all the hesitations of a timid man? Of course—that ever since the brutal surgery he had been obsessed by the subject until it had become the central concern of his existence. He was now a great connoisseur and could speak for hours about it, touching on its historic, religious, physical, clinical, and psychoanalytic aspects. (Had the former cyclist ever heard of the Viennese and his couch? Before, no; afterward, yes; and he had even read something by him, though he did not understand a word.) In conversations that submerged them deeper and deeper into an affectionate association over the course of those apparently innocent meetings at teatime, Manuel explained to Lucrecia the difference between the eunuch, principally a Saracen variation practiced since the Middle Ages on the guardians of seraglios, which pitilessly removed phallus and testicles, rendering them chaste, and the castrato, a Western, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman version that consisted in removing only the jewels from the victim of the procedure—leaving the rest in place—for the purpose was not to keep him from copulating but simply to prevent the change that lowers the boy’s voice by an octave when he reaches adolescence. Manuel told Lucrecia the anecdote, which both had enjoyed, of the castrato Cortona, who wrote to Pope Innocent XI requesting permission to marry. He alleged that his castration had not damaged his ability to experience pleasure. His Holiness, who was in no way an innocent, wrote in the margin of the petition: “This time do a better job of castrating him.” (Those were real Popes, Don Rigoberto thought joyfully.)

  He, Manuel, the great motorcycle ace, inviting her to tea and posing as a modern man critical of the Church, had explained to Lucrecia that castration with no bellicose aim, with an artistic purpose, began to be practiced in Italy in the seventeenth century because of the ecclesiastic prohibition against women’s voices in religious ceremonies. This stricture created the need for a hybrid, a male with a feminized voice (a “caprine” or “falsetto” voice, “between vibrato and tremolo” was the expert Carlos Gómez Amat’s explanation in the notebook), something that could be fabricated by means of a surgery that Manuel described and documented between cups of tea and bites of pastry. There was the primitive method, submerging boys with good voices in icy water to control the bleeding and crushing their balls with grinding stones (“Oh, oh!” shouted Don Rigoberto, who had forgotten all about the rats and was having a wonderful time), and the sophisticated one; to wit: the surgeon-barber, anesthetizing the boy with laudanum, used his recently sharpened razor to make an incision in the groin, and pulled out the tender young jewels. What effects did the operation have on the boy singers who survived? Obesity, thoracic swelling, a strong, piercing voice, as well as an uncommon ability to hold a note; some castrati, such as Farinelli, could sing arias for more than a minute without taking a breath. In the serene darkness of the study, with the sound of the sea in the background, Don Rigoberto was listening, more diverted and curious than joyful, to the vibration of vocal cords prolonging the fine, high-pitched tone indefinitely, like a long wound in the Barrancan night. And now, yes, yes, he could smell Lucrecia.

  Manuel of the Prostheses, poisoned with death, he thought a short while later, content with his discovery. But he immediately realized he was quoting. Poisoned with death? As his hands searched through the notebook, his memory reconstructed the smoky, crowded club to which Lucrecia had dragged him on that extraordinary night. It had been one of his few memorable immersions in the nocturnal world of amusement in the foreign country, administratively his own, in which he sold insurance policies, against which he had built this enclave, and about which, as a result of discreet but monumental efforts, he had managed to learn very little. Here were the lyrics to the waltz “Desdén”:

  As scornful as the gods

  I will struggle for my fate,

  ignoring the coward voices

  of men poisoned with death.

  Without the guitar, the drum, and the syncopated voice of the singer, some of the lugubrious, narcissistic audacity of the bardic composer was lost. But even without music, the inspired vulgarity and mysterious philosophy were still present. Who had composed this “classic” Peruvian waltz, which is how Lucrecia described it when he had asked the question. He found out: the man was from Chiclaya and his name was Miguel Paz. He imagined an untamed Peruvian who wandered through the night with a scarf around his neck and a guitar on his shoulder, who sang serenades and woke in folkloric dives surrounded by sawdust and vomit, his throat raw from singing all night. Wild, in any case. Vallejo and Neruda together had not produced anything comparable to those lines, and what’s more, you could dance to them. He chuckled suddenly and recaptured Manuel of the Prostheses, who had been getting away from him.

  It had been after many late-afternoon conversations watered with tea, and after having poured his encyclopedic information regarding Turkish and Egyptian eunuchs and Neapolitan and Roman castrati all over Doña Lucrecia, that the ex-motorcyclist (“Manuel of the Prostheses, Perpetual Peepee, the Wet One, the Leaker, the Capped Cock, the Piss Bag,” Don Rigoberto improvised, his mood improving as each second passed) had made his move.

  “And what was your reaction when he told you?”

  On the television in their bedroom they had just watched Senso, a beautiful Stendhalian melodrama by Visconti, and Don Rigoberto was holding his wife on his lap, she in her nightdress and he in pajamas.

  “I was speechless,” replied Doña Lucrecia. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “If he told you wringing his hands and weeping, it must be. Why would he lie?”

  “Of course, he had no reason to,” she purred, writhing. “If you keep on kissing my neck that way, I’ll scream. What I don’t understand is why he would tell me.”

  “It was the first step.” Don Rigoberto’s mouth moved up her warm throat until it reached her ear, which he kissed as well. “The next step will be to ask you to let him watch you, or at least listen to you.”

  “He told me because it was good for him to share his secret.” Doña Lucrecia tried to move him away, and Don Rigoberto’s pulse beat wildly. “Knowing that I know made him feel less alone.”

  “Do you want to bet that at your next tea he’ll proposition you?” Her husband insisted on kissing her ear very slowly.

  “I’d leave his house and slam the door behind me.” Doña Lucrecia twisted in his arms, deciding to kiss him too. “And never go back.”

  She had done neither. Manuel of the Prostheses had made his request with so much servile humility, and so many victim’s tears and excuses and apologies, that she had not had the courage (or the desire?) to offend him. Had she said, “Have you forgotten that I’m a decent married woman?” No. Or even: “You are abusing our friendship and destroying the good opinion I had of you”? Not that either. She had simply calmed Manuel, who, pale and ashamed, begged her not to take it the wrong way, or be angry with him, or deprive him of her precious friendship. It was a highly strategic and successful move, for Lucrecia took pity on so much psychodrama and had tea with him again—Don Rigoberto felt acupuncture needles in his temples—and eventually gave him what he wanted. The man poisoned with death listened to that silvery music, was intoxicated by the liquid arpeggio. Just listening? Couldn’t he have been watching too?

  “I swear he wasn’t,” Doña Lucrecia protested, huddling against him and talking into his chest. “In absolute darkness. That was my condition. And he met it. He saw nothing. He heard.”

  In exactly the same position they had watched a video of Carmina Burana, taped at the Berlin Opera with the Peking Chorus, and
conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

  “That may be,” replied Don Rigoberto, his imagination inflamed by the vibrant Latin of the choir (could there be castrati among the choir members with their almond-shaped eyes?). “But it may also be that Manuel has developed his vision to an extraordinary degree. And even though you didn’t see him, he saw you.”

  “If you start conjecturing, everything is possible,” Doña Lucrecia argued, though without too much conviction. “But if he did look, there was hardly anything to see.”

  Her odor was there, no doubt about it: corporeal, intimate, with marine touches and fruity reminiscences. Closing his eyes, he breathed it in avidly, his nostrils very wide. I am smelling the soul of Lucrecia, he thought, deeply moved. The merry splash of the stream in the bowl did not dominate this aroma; it barely colored with a physiological tint what was an exhalation of hidden glandular humors, cartilaginous exudations, secretions of muscles, which were condensed and confused in a thick, valiant, domestic discharge. It reminded Don Rigoberto of the most distant moments of his childhood—a world of diapers and talcum, vomit and excrement, cologne and sponges soaked in warm water, a prodigal tit—and of nights entwined with Lucrecia. Ah yes, how well he understood the mutilated motorcyclist. But it was not necessary to emulate Farinelli or undergo a prosthetic procedure to assimilate that culture, convert to that religion, and, like the poisoned Manuel, like Neruda’s widower, like so many anonymous aesthetes of hearing, smell, fantasy (he thought of the Prime Minister of India, the nonagenarian Rarji Desai, who, when he read his speeches, paused to take little sips of his own pee; “Ah, if it had only been his wife’s!”), who felt themselves transported to heaven as they watched and heard the squatting or sitting beloved creature interpret that ceremony, in appearance so trivial and functional, of emptying a bladder, who elevated it into spectacle, intoamorous dance, the prologue or epilogue (for the mutilated Manuel, a substitute) to the act of love. Don Rigoberto’s eyes filled with tears. He rediscovered the fluid silence of the Barrancan night, the solitude in which he found himself, surrounded by mindless engravings and books.

  “Lucrecia beloved, for the sake of all you hold dear,” he pleaded, kissing the unbound hair of the woman he loved, “urinate for me too.”

  “First, I have to make certain that with all the doors and windows closed, the bathroom is totally dark,” said Doña Lucrecia, with a lawyer’s meticulous attention to detail. “When the time comes, I’ll call you. You’ll come in without any noise, so as not to disturb me. You’ll sit in the corner. You won’t move or say a word. By then, the four glasses of water will begin to have their effect. Not one exclamation, not one sigh, not the slightest movement, Manuel. Otherwise I’ll leave and never set foot in this house again. You can stay in your corner while I wipe myself and straighten my dress. As I walk out, you will crawl over and kiss my feet in gratitude.”

  Had he done that? Surely he had. He would have crawled to her along the tiled floor and brought his mouth to her shoes in doglike gratitude. Then he would wash his hands and face, and with damp eyes join Lucrecia in the living room to tell her, so unctuously, that he could not find the words, she had done so much for him, his happiness was immeasurable. And, showering her with praise, he would tell her that in reality he had been this way from the time he was a boy, not only since his leap over the precipice. The accident had allowed him to adopt as his only source of pleasure what had once produced so much shame that he had hidden it from others and himself. It had all begun when he was very young, when he slept in his little sister’s room and the nanny would get up at midnight to pass water. She didn’t bother to close the door; he could hear the murmuring, crystalline splash of her stream very clearly, a lullaby that made him feel like an angel in heaven. It was the most beautiful, the most musical, the most tender memory of his childhood. She understood, didn’t she? The magnificent Lucrecia understood everything. Nothing in the tangled labyrinth of human desires shocked her. Manuel knew this; that is why he admired her and why he dared to make his request. If the tragedy on the motorcycle had not occurred, he never would have asked. Because until his cycle’s flight into the rocky abyss, his life, as far as love and sex were concerned, had been a nightmare. What truly excited him was something he never had the courage to ask of decent girls but had negotiated onlywith prostitutes. And even though he paid for it, he had endured so many humiliations, so much laughter and mockery, so many contemptuous or ironic glances that inhibited him and made him feel like dirt.

  That was the reason he had broken off with all those girls. All of them had failed to give him the extraordinary gift that Doña Lucrecia had just granted him: the stream of her piss. Sympathetic laughter shook Don Rigoberto. The poor wretch! Who could have imagined that the star of the motorcross, the man who rode steel, surrounded by statuesque beauties who came and laughed and fell in love with the sports hero, did not want to caress them or undress them, kiss them or penetrate them: he only wanted to listen to them piss. And the noble, the magnanimous Lucrecia had peed for the mutilated Manuel! That micturation would remain etched in his memory like the heroic deeds in history books, like the miracles in the lives of the saints. Dear Lucrecia! Lucrecia, so indulgent toward human frailties! Lucrecia, a Roman name that meant fortunate! Lucrecia? His hands rapidly turned the pages of the notebook and the reference soon appeared:

  “Lucrecia, Roman matron renowned for her beauty and virtue. Ravaged by Sextus Tarquin, son of King Tarquin the Proud. After telling her father and husband of the crime and urging them to avenge her, she took her life in their presence, plunging a dagger into her breast. Lucrecia’s suicide precipitated the expulsion of the Kings of Rome and the founding of the Republic in 509 B.C. The figure of Lucrecia came to symbolize modesty and chastity, and, above all, the virtuous wife.”

  It is she, it is she, thought Don Rigoberto. His wife could provoke historical cataclysms and live in perpetuity as a symbol. Of the virtuous wife? If one understood virtue in a non-Christian sense, of course. What other wife would have shared her husband’s imaginings as devotedly as she? None. And Fonchito? Well, better to skirt that quicksand. In the end, hadn’t it all stayed within the family? Would she have done the same as the Roman matron when she was violated by Sextus Tarquin? An icicle pierced Don Rigoberto’s heart. With a grimace of horror he struggled to banish the image of Lucrecia lying on the floor, her heart pierced by a dagger. To exorcise it, he brought back the motorcyclist aroused by the flow from female bladders. Only female? Or male bladders too? Did he also get an erection at the sight of a spouting gentleman?

  “Never,” Manuel declared immediately, in so sincere a voice that Doña Lucrecia believed him.

  Well, it wasn’t entirely true that his life had been nothing but a nightmare because of his need (what name should be used to avoid calling it a vice?). Bringing color to the desert landscape of unsatisfied desires and frustrations, there were healing, effervescent moments, modest compensations for his anguish, almost always provided by chance. For example, the laundress whose face Manuel remembered with the same affection one feels when recalling the aunts, grandmothers, or godmothers most closely connected to the warmth of childhood. She came to wash clothes several times a week. She must have suffered from cystitis, because she was constantly running from the laundry room or the ironing board to the little servants’ bathroom next to the pantry. And the boy Manuel was always there, alert, hiding in the garret, his face flat against the floor, his ears straining. The concert would come, the noisy, copious waterfall, a genuine flood. That woman had a bladder the size of a soccer ball, a living reservoir, given the strength, abundance, frequency, and sonority of her urination. Once—Doña Lucrecia saw the pupils of the motorcyclist with the prosthesis dilate greedily—once Manuel had seen her. Yes, seen. All right, not completely. In an act of daring he had climbed the garden trellis up to the skylight of the little servants’ bathroom, and for a few glorious seconds, as he dangled in midair, he could see the bushy hair, the shoulders, the legs i
n woolen stockings, the flat shoes of the woman sitting on the toilet and passing her water with noisy indifference. Ah, what bliss!

  And there had also been the American, blond, tanned, slightly masculine, always in boots and a cowboy hat, who came to participate in the tour of the Andes. She was so bold a motorcyclist that she almost won. But what Manuel remembered was not so much her skill on the machine (a Harley-Davidson, of course) as her forwardness and lack of prudery, which allowed her, at the rest stops, to share sleeping quarters with the other drivers and bathe in front of them if there was only one bathroom, and even go into the lavatory and do what she had to and not care if there were several motorcyclists in the same room, on the other side of a thin partition. What days those were! Manuel had lived in a state of chronic excitement, his lost organ in prolonged erection, listening to the emancipated Sandy Canal relieving herself of fluids, which transformed the race into an interminable fiesta for him. But neither the laundress nor Sandy nor any of the casual or mercenary experiences in his mythology could compare to this one, this superlative grace, this liquefying manna with which Doña Lucrecia had made him feel like a god.

  Don Rigoberto smiled in satisfaction. There was no rat nearby. Thetemple of Karniji, its Brahmins, armies of rodents, and pots of syrup were on the other side of oceans, continents, jungles. He was here, alone, in the night that was drawing to a close, in his refuge of pictures and notebooks. There were signs of dawn along the horizon. Today, too, he would be yawning in the office. Did he smell anything? The widow odor had dissipated. Did he hear anything? The waves and, almost lost in the sound they made, the tinkle of a lady pissing.