The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Did you infringe upon the human rights and freedom of your hairy neighbor when you climbed to her roof in order to pay admiring homage to the tufts under her arms? No doubt. Did you deserve to be punished in the name of social harmony? Oh my, of course you did. But you knew that and took the risk, prepared to pay the price for peeping at the overgrown armpits of your neighbors. I’ve already told you I cannot emulate your courageous extremes. My sense of the ridiculous and my contempt for heroics, not to mention my physical clumsiness, are too great, and I would never dare to climb someone else’s roof even for a glimpse, on a hairless body, of the roundest knees and most spherical elbows known to the female gender. My natural cowardice, which may be nothing more than an unhealthy legalistic instinct, leads me to find a propitious corner for my manias, phobias, and fetishes within the confines of what is commonly called the licit. Does this deprive me of a succulent treasure trove of lasciviousness? Of course. But what I do have is sufficient, as long as one derives the pleasure one should from it, which I attempt to do.

  May your three months be easy, and may your dreams behind bars be filled with forests of fleece, avenues of silky hair—black, blond, red—along which you gallop, swim, run, frantic with joy.

  Goodbye, my brother.

  The Professor’s Panties

  Don Rigoberto opened his eyes: there, draped between the third and fourth stairs, blue and shiny and edged in lace, provocative and poetic, were her panties, the professor’s panties. He trembled like one possessed. He had not slept despite spending a long time in the dark, lying in bed, listening to the murmur of the sea, lost in elusive fantasies. Until, suddenly, that phone had rung again, waking him with a violent start.

  “Hello, hello?”

  “Rigoberto, is that you?”

  He recognized the voice of the aging professor, though he spoke very quietly, covering the mouthpiece with his hand and muffling his words. Where were they? In an old university town. In what country? The United States. In which state? Virginia. What university? The state university, the beautiful school built in neoclassic style with rows of white columns and designed by Thomas Jefferson.

  “Is that you, Professor?”

  “Yes, yes, Rigoberto. But speak slowly. Forgive me for waking you.”

  “Not at all, Professor. How was your dinner with Professor Lucrecia? Have you finished?”

  The voice of the venerable jurist and philosopher, Nepomuceno Riga, broke into hieroglyphic stammering. Rigoberto realized that something serious had happened to his old teacher of Philosophy of Law at Catholic University in Lima, who had come to attend a symposium at the University of Virginia, where Rigoberto was doing graduate work (in legislation and insurance) and acting as his former teacher’s chauffeur and guide: he had taken him to visit Monticello, Jefferson’s home, now a museum, and to the historical sites of the Battle of Manassas.

  “Rigoberto, I apologize for imposing on you, but you’re the only person here I can trust. You were my student, I know your family, and you’ve been so kind these past few days…”

  “Please, Don Nepomuceno, don’t mention it,” the young Rigoberto said encouragingly. “Is something wrong?”

  Don Rigoberto sat up in bed, shaken by an anticipatory little laugh. It seemed to him that at any moment the bathroom door would open and the figure of Doña Lucrecia would be sketched there, surprising him with an exquisite pair of panties, in colors, or black or white, with embroidery, openings, silk trim, backstitched or smooth, the kind that covered just enough of her mound of Venus to emphasize it, and at the edges, peeking out to tempt him—wayward, coquettish—some stray pubic hairs. An undergarment like the one that lay so unexpectedly, as if it were a provocative object in a surrealist painting by the Catalonian Joan Ponc or the Romanian Victor Brauner, on the staircase which that good soul, that innocent spirit, Don Nepomuceno Riga, had to climb to reach his bedroom—Don Nepomuceno, who, in his memorable classes, the only ones worth remembering in seven dry-as-dust years studying law, would erase the blackboard with his tie.

  “It’s just that I don’t know what to do, Rigoberto. I find myself in an awkward situation. In spite of my age, I have absolutely no experience in these matters.”

  “In which matters, Professor? Tell me, don’t be embarrassed.”

  Why, instead of lodging him at the Holiday Inn or the Hilton along with the other scholars attending the symposium, why had they arranged for Don Nepomuceno to stay at the home of the woman who taught International Law II? Surely out of deference to his prestige. Or because the two enjoyed a friendship based on their encounters at law schools throughout the world, and their presence at the same conferences, lectures, and round tables, or perhaps because they had collaborated on an erudite paper abounding in Latin phrases that appeared, with a profusion of notes and an oppressive bibliography, in a professional journal published in Buenos Aires, Tubingen, or Helsinki? Whatever the reason, the esteemed Don Nepomuceno, instead of staying in an impersonal windowed cubicle at the Holiday Inn, spent his nights in Professor Lucrecia’s comfortable, rusticmodern house, which Rigoberto knew quite well because this semester he was taking her seminar on International Law II and had gone several times to knock on her door and deliver his papers or return the dense treatises that she, very kindly, had lent him. Don Rigoberto closed his eyes and felt goose bumps as he once again saw the musical hips of the jurist’s well-proportioned, erect figure walking away from him.

  “Are you all right, Professor?”

  “Yes, yes, Rigoberto. Really, it’s very silly. You’re going to laugh at me. But, as I say, I have no experience. I’m bewildered and confused, my boy.”

  He did not have to say so; his voice quavered as if he were about to lose it and his words had to be pulled out with forceps. He must have been drenched in icy perspiration. Would he find the courage to tell him what had happened?

  “Well, just imagine. Tonight, when I returned from the cocktail party in our honor, Dr. Lucrecia prepared supper here in her house. Just for the two of us; yes, it was very considerate of her. An extremely pleasant meal, served with a bottle of wine. I’m not accustomed to alcohol, and so my befuddlement is probably due to the wine going to my head. A nice little California wine, apparently. Though rather strong, I must say.”

  “Stop beating about the bush, Professor, and tell me what happened.”

  “Wait, wait. Think of it, after supper and the bottle of wine, Professor Lucrecia insisted we drink cognac. I couldn’t refuse, of course, it would have been impolite. But I saw stars, my boy. It was liquid fire. I began to cough and even thought I might go blind. But something ridiculous happened instead. I fell asleep. Yes, yes, son, right in the chair, right in the living room that is also a library. And when I awoke, I don’t know how much later, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, the professor was not there. She must have gone to bed, I thought. And I prepared to do the same. And then, then, just think, as I was climbing the stairs, whoosh, out of the blue, right in front of my eyes, you can’t imagine what I saw. Panties! Yes, right in my path. Don’t laugh, my boy, because even if it is laughable, I’m terribly upset. I tell you, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Of course I’m not laughing, Don Nepomuceno. You don’t think that intimate article of clothing was there by accident?”

  “By accident? Not at all! Son, I may not be experienced, but I’m not in my dotage yet. She left it there ex professo, so that I would find it. Only she and I are under this roof. She put it there.”

  “But then, Professor, the best thing that can happen to a guest is happening to you. You’ve received an invitation from your hostess. It’s as clear as day.”

  The professor’s voice broke three times before he could articulate anything intelligible.

  “You think so, Rigoberto? Well, that’s what I thought too when I finally could think, after the shock. You’d call it an invitation, wouldn’t you? It can’t be accidental; this house is a paragon of order, like the professor herself. That garment was placed
there intentionally. Even its arrangement on the staircase is no accident, because it is highlighted and carefully displayed, I swear.”

  “The intent was to trip you up, if you’ll permit me the joke, Don Nepomuceno.”

  “Rigoberto, I’m laughing too, inside. Despite my confusion, I mean. That’s why I need your advice. What should I do? I never dreamed I’d find myself in a situation like this.”

  “What you should do is very clear, Professor. Don’t you like Dr. Lucrecia? She’s a very attractive woman; I think she is, and so do my classmates. She’s the best-looking woman on Virginia’s faculty.”

  “No doubt she is, nobody can deny it. She’s a very beautiful lady.”

  “Then don’t lose any more time. Go and knock on her door. Don’t you see? She’s waiting for you. Go before she falls asleep.”

  “Can I take that liberty? Knock on her door, just like that?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Where would I be? In the living room, at the foot of the stairs. Why do you think I’m talking so quietly? So I just go up and knock on her door? Just like that?”

  “Don’t waste a second. She’s left you a sign, you can’t pretend not to understand. Above all, if you like her. Because she appeals to you, doesn’t she, Professor?”

  “Of course. It’s what I must do, yes, you’re right. But I feel somewhat constrained. Thank you, my boy. I needn’t remind you to keep this in strictest confidence? For my sake, and especially for the sake of the professor’s reputation.”

  “I’ll be as silent as a tomb, Don Nepomuceno. Don’t hesitate any longer. Go up those stairs, pick up the panties, and take them to her. Knock on her door and begin by making a joke about the surprise you found on your way up. It will all turn out wonderfully, you’ll see. You’ll always remember this night, Professor.”

  Before the sound of the click that ended the conversation, Don Rigoberto heard a rumbling stomach and an anguished belch that the aged jurist could not suppress. How nervous and alarmed he must have been in the darkness of that living room filled with law books, in the potency of the Virginia spring night, torn between his hope for an adventure—the first in a lifetime of purely matrimonial and reproductive coitus?—and his cowardice disguised as rigorous ethical principles, religious convictions, and social prejudices. Which of the forces struggling in his spirit would emerge victorious? Would it be desire or fear?

  Don Rigoberto, almost without realizing it, engrossed in what had become the totemic image of the panties left on Professor Lucrecia’s staircase, got out of bed and went to his study without turning on the light. His body avoided obstacles—the bench, the Nubian sculpture, pillows, the television set—with an ease acquired through assiduous practice, for since his wife’s departure not a night had gone by when sleeplessness did not drive him to leave his bed while it was still dark and seek, among his papers and scrawled notes, a balm for his nostalgia and solitude. His mind still fixed on the figure of the venerable jurist assailed by circumstance (embodied in the undergarment of a perfumed and voluptuous woman, which lay before him between two steps of a jurisprudential staircase) and forced into Hamletian uncertainty, but sitting now before the large wooden table in his study and leafing through his notebooks, Don Rigoberto gave a start when the golden cone of light from the lamp revealed the German proverb written at the top of the page: Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual (“Whoever must choose must suffer”). Extraordinary! Wasn’t this adage, copied from who knows where, a perfect depiction of the state of mind of poor, fortunate Don Nepomuceno Riga, tempted by that well-fleshed academic, Dr. Lucrecia?

  His hands, turning the pages of another notebook, challenging chance to see if for a second time he could happen upon, or establish, a relationship between what he found and what he dreamed that would serve as fuel to his fantasy, suddenly stopped (“like the hands of a croupier setting the ball in motion on a spinning roulette wheel”), and he avidly leaned forward. Written on the page was his response to Edith’s Diary, by Patricia Highsmith.

  He raised his head, disconcerted. He heard the furious waves at the foot of the cliff. Patricia Highsmith? The novelist who wrote about boring crimes committed by Mr. Ripley, an apathetic, unmotivated criminal, did not interest him in the least. He had always reacted with yawns (comparable to the ones produced in him by the popular Tibetan Book of the Living and the Dead) when this crime writer (helped along by Alfred Hitchcock movies) was all the rage a few years back among the hundred or so people who comprised the Limenian reading public. What was a hack writer for movie fans doing in his notebooks? He could not recall when or why he had written his comments on Edith’s Diary, a book he did not even remember.

  “An excellent novel for understanding that fiction is a flight into the imaginary which emends life. Edith’s familial, political, and personal frustrations are not gratuitous; they are rooted in the reality that causes her the greatest suffering: her son Cliffie. Instead of showing him in her diary as he actually is—a weak failure of a boy who was not accepted at the university and does not know how to work—Cliffie breaks free of the original and, in the pages written by his mother, leads the life Edith wanted for him: he is a successful journalist married to a girl from a fine family, he has children and a good job, he is the kind of son who fills his mother with pride.

  “But fiction is only a temporary remedy, for though it consoles Edith and takes her mind off her troubles, it removes her from life’s struggle, isolating her in a purely mental world. Relationships with her friends are weakened or ended; she loses her job and becomes destitute. Her death seems melodramatic, but from a symbolic point of view it has coherence; Edith moves physically to the place she had already occupied in life: unreality.

  “The novel is constructed with deceptive simplicity, beneath which a dramatic context is depicted: the merciless struggle between reality and desire, those sisters who are bitter enemies separated by impassable distances except in the miraculous recesses of the human spirit.”

  Don Rigoberto felt his teeth chatter, his palms perspire. Now he remembered the insignificant novel and the reason for his reflections. Would he, like Edith, eventually slide into ruin because he abused fantasy? But behind this melancholy hypothesis, the fragrant rose of the panties remained at the center of his consciousness. What had happened to Don Nepomuceno? What did he do and what dilemmas did he encounter after his telephone conversation with the young Rigoberto? Had he followed his student’s advice?

  He began to tiptoe up the stairs in a relative darkness that permitted him to see bookshelves and the edges of furniture. On the second step he paused, leaned forward, grasped the precious object with stiff fingers—was it silk? linen?—brought it up to his face and buried his nose in it, like a small animal deciding if the strange object was edible. He closed his eyes and kissed it, feeling the beginnings of a vertigo that made him reel as he held on to the banister. He was determined, he would do it. He continued up the stairs, still on tiptoe, the panties in his hand, fearful he would be found out, as if a noise—the steps groaned slightly—might break the spell. His heart was pounding so hard that it crossed his mind how incredibly inopportune and stupid it would be if he were to suffer a heart attack just then. No, it was not an attack; it was curiosity and the sensation (unknown in his life) of tasting forbidden fruit that made his blood race through his veins. He had reached the hall, he was at the jurist’s door. He pressed his jaw with both hands, because his grotesquely chattering teeth would make a terrible impression on his hostess. Steeling himself (“summoning all his courage” whispered Don Rigoberto, trembling and dripping with perspiration) he knocked, very slowly. The door was ajar and it opened with a hospitable creak.

  What the venerable professor of the Philosophy of Law saw from the carpeted threshold changed his ideas about the world, the human race—most certainly the law—and forced a moan of desperate pleasure from Don Rigoberto. A gold and indigo light (Van Gogh? Botticelli? Some Expressionist like Emil Nolde?) radiating from a
round yellow moon in the starry Virginia sky fell, as if arranged by a demanding set designer or a skillful lighting technician, directly on the bed, its sole purpose to highlight the naked body of Dr. Lucrecia. Who could have imagined that the severe clothing she wore at her professor’s lectern, those tailored suits in which she expounded her arguments and made her motions at conferences, the waterproof capes she wrapped around herself in winter, concealed a body that would have been claimed by Praxiteles for its harmony, and Renoir for the sumptuous modeling of the flesh. She lay facedown, her head resting on her crossed arms, in a long, extended pose, but it was not her shoulders, morbid arms (“morbid in the Italian sense of the word,” Don Rigoberto specified, since he had no liking for the macabre but did relish softness), or curved back that drew the eyes of a dumbfounded Don Nepomuceno like a magnet. Not even her ample milky thighs or small rosy-soled feet. It was those firm spheres which, with a happy lack of shame, rose prominently like twin mountaintops (“the mist-shrouded peaks of mountain ranges in Japanese prints of the Meiji period,” Don Rigoberto made the association with satisfaction). But Rubens, Titian, Courbet, Ingres, Urculo, and a half-dozen other master painters of feminine posteriors also seemed to have banded together to give reality, consistency, abundance, and, at the same time, softness, delicacy, spirit, and a sensual vibration to that rump whose whiteness seemed opalescent in the semidarkness. Incapable of restraining himself, not knowing what he was doing, the bedazzled (“corrupted forever after?”) Don Nepomuceno took two steps and, when he reached the bed, fell to his knees. The old floorboards groaned.