He smiled to reassure her. “Wait a minute,” he murmured, and as he stood, he picked up the book of reproductions, turned the pages as he looked for something, and placed the open book on her knees again. Doña Lucrecia saw a plate in color; against an ocher background a sinuous woman wore a carnival costume with zigzag stripes of green, red, yellow, and black. Her dark hair was under a kind of turban, she was barefoot, she looked out with a languid sadness in her large dark eyes, and her hands were raised over her head as if she were about to play castanets.
“Looking at that picture, I knew,” she heard Fonchito say with utter seriousness. “I knew I was him.”
She tried to laugh but failed. What was the kid up to? Trying to frighten her? He plays with me like a little kitten with a big mouse, she thought.
“Is that so? And what in this picture revealed to you that you’re the reincarnation of Egon Schiele?”
“You still don’t understand, Stepmamá,” Fonchito said with a laugh. “Look again, at each part. And you’ll see that even though he painted it in his studio in Vienna in 1914, Peru is here in this woman. Repeated five times.”
Señora Lucrecia examined the image again. From top to bottom. From bottom to top. Finally she noticed that on the multicolored clown costume of the barefoot model, there were five minute figures, at the height of both arms, on her right side, on her leg, and on the hem of her skirt. She raised the book to her eyes and examined the figures calmly. Well, it was true. They did look like Indian women. They were dressed like campesinas from Cuzco.
“That’s what they are, little Indian women from the Andes,” said Fonchito, reading her thoughts. “Do you see? Peru is there in Egon Schiele’s paintings. That’s how I knew. For me, it was a message.”
He continued speaking, showing off a prodigious knowledge of the painter’s life and work that left Doña Lucrecia with the impression of omniscience, and the suspicion of a scheme, a feverish ambush. “There’s an explanation, Stepmamá. The lady was named Frederike María Beer. She was the only person whose portrait was painted by the two greatest painters in Vienna at the time: Schiele and Klimt. The daughter of a very wealthy cabaret owner, she had been a great lady who helped artists and found buyers for their work. A little while before Schiele painted her, she traveled to Bolivia and Peru and brought home those little Indian rag dolls that she probably bought at some fair in Cuzco or La Paz. And Egon Schiele had the idea of painting them into her dress. I mean, it was no miracle that made five little Indian women appear in the painting. But, but…”
“But what?” Doña Lucrecia encouraged him, fascinated by Fonchito’s story, hoping for a great revelation.
“But nothing,” the boy added, with a weary gesture. “The Indians were placed there so that I would find them one day. Five little Peruvians in a painting by Schiele. Don’t you see?”
“Did they start talking to you? Did they say that you painted them eighty years ago? That you’ve been reincarnated?”
“Well, if you’re going to make fun of me, let’s talk about something else, Stepmamá.”
“I don’t like to hear you talking nonsense,” she said. “Or thinking nonsense, or believing nonsense. You are you, and Egon Schiele was Egon Schiele. You live here, in Lima, and he lived in Vienna at the beginning of the century. There’s no such thing as reincarnation. So unless you want me to get angry, don’t say stupid things anymore. Okay?”
The boy nodded reluctantly. His face looked very sad, but he did not dare to respond, because she had spoken with unusual severity. She tried to make peace.
“I want to read you something I’ve written,” she said softly, taking the rough draft of the letter from her pocket.
“You’ve answered my papá?” The boy was overjoyed and sat on the floor, craning his head forward.
Yes, last night. She didn’t know yet if she would send it. She couldn’t bear any more. Seven, that’s a lot of anonymous letters. And the writer was Rigoberto. Who else could it be? Who else could speak to her in that familiar, exalted way? Who else knew her so well? She had decided to end the farce. She wanted to know what he thought of her letter.
“Read it to me right now, Stepmamá,” the boy said impatiently. His eyes were shining and his face revealed enormous curiosity, as well as a hint, a hint of—Doña Lucrecia searched for the words—mischievous, even wicked, delight. Clearing her throat before she began, and not looking up until she had finished, Doña Lucrecia read:
Darling:
I’ve resisted the temptation of writing to you ever since I learned you were the author of the ardent letters that for the past two weeks have filled my house with flaming joy, nostalgia, and hope, and my heart and soul with the sweet fire that consumes without burning, the fire of love and desire joined in happy wedlock.
Why would you sign letters that you alone could write? Who has studied me, shaped me, invented me as you have? Who but you could speak of the little red marks under my arms, the pink tracery of nerves in the hidden spaces between my toes, that “puckered little mouth, bluish-gray, surrounded by a circle in miniature of happily wrinkled flesh to which one ascends by scaling the smooth marble columns of your legs’? Only you, my love.
From the first lines of the first letter, I knew it was you. And for that reason, before I finished reading it, I obeyed your instructions. I took off my clothes and posed for you, in front of the mirror, imitating Klimt’s Danaë. And once again, as on so many nights so profoundly missed in my present solitude, I soared with you through the realms of fantasy we explored together during the years we shared, years that are now, for me, a spring of consolation and life from which I drink again in memory in order to endure the empty routine that has replaced the adventure and plenitude I enjoyed at your side.
To the best of my ability I have followed every detail of the demands—no, the suggestions and requests—in your seven letters. I have dressed and undressed, put on costumes and masks, lain on my back, bent, straightened, squatted, and incarnated—body and soul—all the whims in your letters, for what greater pleasure do I have than to please you? For you, because of you, I have been Messalina and Leda, Mary Magdalene and Salome, Diana with her bow and arrows, the Naked Maja, chaste Susanna surprised by the lecherous elders, and, in the Turkish bath, the odalisque of Ingres. I have made love to Mars, Nebuchadnezzar, Sardanapalus, Napoleon, swans, satyrs, slaves both male and female; I have emerged from the sea like a siren and assuaged and inflamed the desires of Ulysses. I have been a marquise by Watteau, a nymph by Titian, a Virgin by Murillo, a Madonna by Piero della Francesca, a geisha by Fujita, a poor wretch by Toulouse-Lautrec. It was difficult for me to go up on my toes like a ballerina by Degas, and believe me, in order not to cheat you, I even attempted, at the cost of many muscle cramps, to turn myself into what you call the voluptuous Cubist cube by Juan Gris.
Playing with you again, even at a distance, has been good for me, and bad for me. Once more I felt that I was yours and you were mine. But when the game was over, my solitude intensified and I grew even sadder. Have we lost everything forever?
Since receiving the first letter, I have lived for the next one, consumed by doubts, attempting to guess your intentions. Did you want an answer? Or does sending letters without a signature mean that you do not wish to engage in dialogue but want me only to listen to your monologue? Last night, however, after obediently playing the industrious housewife by Vermeer, I decided to respond. Something in the dark depths of my being, something that you alone have touched, demanded that I set pen to paper. Have I done the right thing? Have I broken the unwritten law that prohibits the figure in a portrait from stepping out of the painting and speaking to the painter?
You, my darling, know the answer. Tell me what it is.
“Golly, what a letter,” said Fonchito. His enthusiasm seemed quite sincere. “Stepmamá, you love my papá very much!”
He was flushed and radiant, and, Doña Lucrecia also noticed—for the first time—even confused.
“I
’ve never stopped loving him. Not even when what happened happened.”
Fonchito immediately assumed the blank amnesiac expression that emptied his eyes, as he did whenever Doña Lucrecia referred in some way to that adventure. But she watched the pink drain from the boy’s cheeks, replaced by a pearly whiteness.
“Because even though you and I wish it hadn’t, and even though we never talk about it, what happened did happen. It can’t be erased,” said Doña Lucrecia, trying to look into his eyes. “And even though you stare at me as if you didn’t know what I was talking about, you remember everything as well as I do. And must regret it even more.”
She could not go on. Fonchito had begun to look at his hands again, moving them, imitating the exaggerated positions of Egon Schiele’s figures: holding them rigidly parallel at shoulder height, the thumbs hidden as if they had been amputated, or placing them over his head and well forward, as if he had just hurled a lance. Doña Lucrecia finally started to laugh.
“You’re not a devil, you’re a clown,” she exclaimed. “You ought to go into the theater.”
The boy laughed too, stretching, making faces, constantly playing with his hands. And without stopping any of his tricks, he surprised Doña Lucrecia with this remark: “Did you write the letter in a sappy style on purpose? Do you think, like my papá, that sappiness is inseparable from love?”
“I wrote it imitating your papá’s style,” said Doña Lucrecia. “Exaggerating, trying to be solemn, high-toned, elevated. He likes that. Do you think it’s very sappy?”
“He’s going to love it,” Fonchito assured her, nodding several times. “He’ll read it and reread it, over and over again, locked away in his study. You’re not planning to sign it, are you, Stepmamá?”
In fact, she hadn’t thought about it.
“Should I send it to him anonymously?”
“Of course, Stepmamá,” the boy declared emphatically. “You have to play his game.”
Perhaps he was right. If he had sent letters without signing them, why shouldn’t she?
“You know all the tricks, kid,” she said, almost to herself. “Yes, that’s a good idea. I won’t sign it. But he’ll know exactly who wrote it.”
Fonchito pretended to applaud. He had stood and was getting ready to leave. Today there had been no toasted sweet buns because Justiniana had gone out. As always, he picked up the book of reproductions and put it in his bag, buttoned the gray shirt of his uniform and straightened his tie, observed by Lucrecia, who was amused to see him repeat the same actions every afternoon when he arrived and when he left. But now, unlike other times when he would say only, “Ciao, Stepmamá,” he sat very close to her on the sofa.
“I’d like to ask you something before I go. But I feel embarrassed.”
He was speaking in the thin, sweet, timid little voice he used when he wanted to awaken her benevolence or her compassion. And though Doña Lucrecia never lost the suspicion that it was pure farce, sooner or later it always did awaken her benevolence or her compassion.
“Nothing embarrasses you, so don’t tell me any stories or play the innocent,” she said, giving the lie to her harsh words with a caress and a tug on his ear. “Go on, ask.”
The boy turned and threw his arms around her neck. He buried his face in her shoulder.
“If I look at you I won’t be able to,” he whispered, lowering his voice into a barely audible murmur. “That puckered little mouth surrounded by wrinkles, in your letter, it’s not this one, is it, Stepmamá?”
Doña Lucrecia felt his cheek move away from hers, felt two thin lips travel down her face and rest against her own. Cold at first, they instantly came to life. She felt their pressure, felt them kissing her. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth: a wet little viper came to visit, strolled across her gums and palate, and ensnared her tongue. For a time she was out of time, blind, transformed into sensation, annihilated, transported, doing nothing, thinking nothing. But when she raised her arms to clasp Fonchito to her, the boy, in one of those sudden changes of mood that were his most distinctive trait, released her and moved away. Now he was leaving, waving goodbye. His expression was quite natural.
“If you like, write out a clean copy of your anonymous letter and put it in an envelope,” he said from the door. “Give it to me tomorrow and I’ll slip it into the mailbox at home without my papá seeing me. Ciao, Stepmamá.”
No Cattail Boat or Pucará Bull
I understand that the sight of the flag waving in the wind makes your heart beat faster, that the music and words of the national anthem produce the prickling in the veins and bristling of hairs called emotion. You do not associate the word “patria,” or “fatherland” (which you always capitalize), with the irreverent verses of the young Pablo Neruda:
Patria,
a melancholy word,
like thermometer or elevator
or with Dr. Johnson’s lethal sentence (“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”) but with heroic cavalry charges, swords embedded in the bosoms of enemy uniforms, bugle calls, the sound of guns and cannon fire not caused by bottles of champagne. You belong, apparently, to the mass of males and females who look with respect upon the statues of leaders that adorn public squares, deplore the fact that pigeons shit on them, and are capable of rising before dawn and waiting for hours on national holidays so you’ll find a good spot on the Campo de Marte for the armed forces parade, a sight that inspires you to appreciative comments sizzling with the words “martial,” “patriotic,” and “virile.” Sir, madam: crouching inside you is a rabid beast that constitutes a danger to humanity.
You are living ballast that has dragged down civilization since the time of the tattooed, pierced cannibal with his phallic sheath, the pre-rational magician who stamped on the ground to bring rain and devoured the heart of his adversary to steal his power. In fact, behind your speeches and banners exalting this piece of geography blemished with boundary stones and arbitrary borders in which you see the personification of a superior form of history and social metaphysics, there is only an astute aggiornamento of the ancient primitive fear of separating from the tribe, of no longer being part of the mass, of becoming an individual, and a nostalgic longing for that ancestor for whom the world began and ended within the boundaries of the familiar, the clearing in the forest, the dark cave, the high plateau, the tiny enclave where sharing language, magic, confusion, customs, and, above all, ignorance and fear with his group gave him courage and made him feel protected against thunder, lightning, beasts, and the other tribes of this planet. Though centuries have passed since those distant times, and because you wear a jacket and tie or put on a tight skirt and have your face-lifts in Miami, you believe yourself far superior to that ancestor wearing a treebark loincloth and adornments dangling from lips and nose, you are he and she is you. The umbilical cord that connects you across the centuries is called terror of the unknown, hatred for what is different, rejection of adventure, panic at the thought of freedom and the responsibility it brings to invent yourself each day, a vocation for servitude to the routine and the gregarious, a refusal to decollectivize so that you will not be obliged to face the daily challenge of individual sovereignty. In ancient times, the defenseless eater of human flesh, submerged in metaphysical and physical ignorance regarding everything that happened around him, had a certain justification for refusing to be independent, creative, and free; in our day, when everything and more that needs to be known is already known, there is no valid reason for insisting on being a slave and an irrational being. You may think this judgment severe, even extremist, when applied to something that for you is simply a virtuous, idealistic feeling of solidarity and love for one’s native land and one’s memories (“the land and its dead,” according to the French anthropoid Maurice Barrès), the frame of environmental and cultural references without which a human being feels empty. I assure you this may be one side of the patriotic coin, but the other side of the exaltation of one’s own is the denigration of what
belongs to someone else, the desire to humiliate and defect others, those who are different from you because they have another skin color, another language, another god, even another way of dressing, another diet.
Patriotism, which actually seems to be a benevolent form of nationalism—for “patria” seems more ancient, deep-rooted, and respectable than “nation,” that ridiculous politico-administrative contrivance manufactured by statists greedy for power and intellectuals in search of a master, that is, a Maecenas, that is, a pair of prebendal tits to suck on—is a dangerous but effective excuse for the countless wars that have devastated the planet, for despotic impulses that have sanctified the domination of the weak by the strong, and for an egalitarian smoke screen whose noxious fumes, indifferent to human beings, clone them and impose on them, under the guise of something essential and irremediable, the most accidental of common denominators: one’s place of birth. Behind patriotism and nationalism there always burns the malignant fiction of collectivist identity, that ontological barbed wire which attempts to congregate “Peruvians,” “Spaniards,” “French,” “Chinese,” et cetera, in inescapable and unmistakable fraternity. You and I know that these categories are simply abject lies that throw a mantle of oblivion over countless diversities and incompatibilities, and attempt to abolish centuries of history and return civilization to those barbaric times preceding the creation of individuality, not to mention rationality and freedom: three things that are inseparable, make no mistake.
And therefore, when anyone says in my hearing, “the Chinese,” “the blacks,” “the Peruvians,” “the French,” “women,” or any similar expression proposing to define human beings by membership in a collective of any kind rather than viewing that as a passing circumstance, I want to pull out a pistol—bang bang—and fire. (This is a figure of speech, of course; I’ve never held a weapon in my hand and never will, and have shot off nothing but semen, ejaculations to which I make claim with patriotic pride.) My individualism does not lead me, obviously, to a praise of the sexual soliloquy as the most perfect form of pleasure; in this area I am inclined toward dialogues between two persons, three at most, and of course, I declare myself a bitter enemy of the promiscuous partouse, which, in the realm of the bed and fornication, is tantamount to political and social collectivism. Unless the sexual monologue is practiced when one is not alone—in which case it becomes a highly baroque dialogue—as illustrated in the small watercolor and charcoal sketch by Picasso (1902-1903) that you may view at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, in which Sr. D. Ángel Fernández de Soto, fully dressed and smoking a pipe, and his distinguished wife, naked except for stockings and shoes, drinking a glass of champagne and sitting on her spouse’s knees, engage in reciprocal masturbation; a picture, incidentally, that with no desire to offend anyone (least of all Picasso), I consider superior to Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Page 21