The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  (If you think this letter is beginning to show signs of incoherence, think of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste: “The incoherence of a discourse depends on the listener. The spirit apparently is not conceived in a way that allows it to be incoherent with itself.”)

  Do you want to know the origin of the bilious antipatriotic outburst in this letter? A speech by the President of the Republic, reported this morning in the press, according to which he stated, as he was opening the Handicrafts Fair, that Peruvians have the patriotic obligation to admire the work of anonymous artisans who, centuries ago, modeled the clay vessels of Chavín, wove and dyed the fabrics of Paracas, or threaded together the feather capes of Nasca, the queros of Cuzco; as well as contemporary makers of Ayacuchan altarpieces, little bulls from Pucará, figures of the Infant Jesus, rugs from San Pedro de Cajas, cattail boats from Lake Titicaca, tiny mirrors from Cajamarca, because—I quote the Commander-in-Chief—“crafts are popular art par excellence, the supreme display of a people’s creativity and artistic skill, one of the great symbols and manifestations of the Fatherland, and none of the objects bears the individual signature of the artisan who made it because all of them bear the signature of the collectivity, of nationality.”

  If you are a man or woman of taste—that is, a lover of precision—you probably smiled at this artisanal-patriotic diarrhea from our Head of State. As for me, I find it, as you do, not only witless and vulgar but instructive as well. Now I know why I despise all the crafts of the world in general, and those of “my country” (I use the formula so that we understand each other) in particular. Now I know why my house has not seen and never will see a Peruvian pot, or a Venetian mask, or a Russian matriuska, or a little Dutch doll with braids and wooden shoes, or a miniature wooden bull, or a Gypsy girl dancing flamenco, or an Indonesian puppet with articulated joints, or a toy samurai, or an Ayacuchan altarpiece, or a Bolivian devil, or any figure or object of clay, wood, porcelain, stone, cloth, or bread manufactured serially, generically, and anonymously, usurping, despite the hypocritical modesty of calling itself popular art, the very nature of an artistic object, something that is the absolute domain of the private sphere, an expression of total individuality, and, consequently, the refutation and rejection of the abstract, the generic, everything that aspires to justify itself, directly or indirectly, in the name of an allegedly “social” lineage. Patriot, there is no impersonal art (and please don’t talk to me about Gothic cathedrals). Crafts are a primitive, amorphous, fetal expression of what one day—when particular individuals separated from the mass begin to put a personal stamp on these objects and pour into them an untransferable intimacy—may reach the category of art. That crafts flourish, prosper, and reign in a “nation” should not make anyone proud, least of all so-called patriots. For flourishing handicrafts—that manifestation of the generic—is a sign of backwardness or regression, an unconscious desire not to progress through a devastating whirlwind of frontiers, picturesque customs, local color, provincial differences, rustic spirit, toward civilization. I know that you, Señora Patriot, Señor Patriot, hate civilization, if not the word itself then its devastating content. That is your right. It is also my right to love and defend it against all odds, knowing that the battle is difficult and that I may find myself—the indications are countless—in the army of the defeated. It does not matter. This is the only form of heroism permitted to those of us who oppose obligatory heroism: to die signing our first and last names, to have a personal death.

  Let me say it, once and for all, and horrify you: the only “patria” I revere is the bed occupied by my wife, Lucrecia (“Noble lady, let your light, / Conquer my sightless, gloomy night,” Fray Luis de León dixit), her splendid body the only flag or banner capable of drawing me into fearful combat, and the only anthem that can move me to tears are the sounds emitted by that beloved flesh, her voice, her laugh, her weeping, her sighs, and, of course (cover your ears and nose), her hiccups, belches, farts, and sneezes. Can I or can I not be considered a true patriot, in my fashion?

  Damned Onetti! Blessed Onetti

  Don Rigoberto awoke weeping (recently this had been happening fairly often). He had moved from sleep to wakefulness; in the dark his mind recognized the objects in his bedroom; his ears, the monotonous sea; his nostrils and the pores of his skin, the corrosive damp. But the horrible image, risen from some remote hiding place, was still there, swimming on the surface of his imagination, tormenting him just as it had a few moments earlier in the somnolence of his nightmare. “Stop crying, stupid.” But the tears ran down his cheeks and he sobbed, seized with fear. What if it were telepathy? What if he had received a message? If, in fact, yesterday, that very afternoon, like a worm at the heart of the apple, they had discovered the lump in her breast that foretold catastrophe and Lucrecia had immediately thought of him, trusted in him, turned to him to share her sorrow and anguish? It had been a call in extremis. The day of the surgery had been set. “We caught it in time,” the doctor declared, “on the condition we remove the breast, perhaps both breasts, immediately. I can almost, almost put my hand to the fire and say with certainty: it has not yet metastasized. On the condition we operate within a few hours, you will survive.” The miserable wretch had begun to sharpen his scalpel, a glint of sadistic pleasure in his eyes. And at that instant Lucrecia thought of him, fervently desired to speak to him, to tell him, to be listened to and consoled by him, to have him at her side. “My God, I will crawl like a worm to her feet and beg her forgiveness.” Don Rigoberto shuddered.

  The image of Lucrecia lying on an operating table, subjected to that monstrous mutilation, caused another sharp stab of anguish. Closing his eyes, holding his breath, he recalled her firm, robust, identical breasts, the dark corollas with their granulate skin, the nipples, wooed and moistened by his lips, gallantly, defiantly standing erect at the hour of love. How many minutes, hours, had he spent contemplating them, weighing them, kissing them, licking them, toying with them, caressing them, fantasizing that he had been transformed into a Lilliputian who scaled those rosy hills to reach the high tower at the summit, or into a newborn who, sucking the white sap of life, received from those breasts his first lessons in pleasure when barely out of the womb. He recalled how, on certain Sundays, he would sit on the wooden bench in the bathroom to watch Lucrecia in the tub, submerged in bubbles. She would wrap a towel around her head like a turban and proceed with her toilette, very conscientiously, granting him an occasional benevolent smile as she washed her body with the large yellow sponge that she soaked in the foamy water and passed over her shoulders, her back, her beautiful legs raised for a few seconds from the creamy depths. At those times it was her breasts that drew all his attention, attracted all the religious fervor of Don Rigoberto. They appeared on the surface of the water, the white dome and bluish nipples gleaming in the foaming bubbles, and from time to time, to please and reward him (the distracted caress of his mistress stroking the docile dog stretched at her feet, he thought, more calmly) Doña Lucrecia would hold them and, on the pretext of soaping and rinsing them a little more, caress them with the sponge. They were beautiful, they were perfect. Their roundness, firmness, and warmth would fulfill all the desires of a lustful god. “Now pass me the towel, be my valet,” she would say as she stood and rinsed her body with the hand shower. “If you’re very good, perhaps I’ll allow you to dry my back.” Her breasts were there, glowing in the darkness of his room as if illuminating his solitude. Could a villainous cancer savage those creatures that ennobled the condition of women, justified their deification by the troubadours, vindicated the Marian cult? Don Rigoberto felt his earlier despair turn to fury, a feeling of savage rebellion against the disease.

  And then he remembered. “Damned Onetti!” He burst into laughter. “Damned novel! Damned Santa María! Damned Gertrudis!” (Was that the character’s name? Gertrudis? Yes, that was it.) That’s where his nightmare came from, it had nothing to do with telepathy. He continued to laugh; he was liberated, excited, ecstat
ic. He decided, for a few moments, to believe in God (in one of his notebooks he had transcribed Quevedo’s sentence from El Buscón: “He was one of those men who believed in God out of courtesy”) in order to give thanks to someone because Lucrecia’s beloved breasts were still intact, safe from the ravages of cancer, and because the nightmare had been no more than a reminiscence of a novel whose terrible beginning had shaken him with horror during the first months of his marriage to Lucrecia, filling him with the fear that one day his bride’s delicious sweet breasts might fall victim to a surgical onslaught (the phrase appeared in his memory with all its obscene euphony: “ablation of the mammary”) similar to the one described, invented, rather, in the opening pages by Brausen, the narrator of the unsettling novel by that damned Onetti. “Thank you, God, for making it not true, for keeping her breasts safe and sound,” he prayed. And without putting on his slippers or robe he stumbled through the dark to his study to look at his notebooks. He was sure he had left some testimony to having read the disturbing novel that—why?—had risen from the depths of his unconscious to trouble his sleep tonight.

  Damned Onetti! Uruguayan? Argentine? From the Río de la Plata region in any case. How he had made him suffer. What curious paths memory took, what capricious curves, baroque zigzags, incomprehensible hiatuses. Why now, tonight, had the fiction come to mind after ten years when he had probably not thought of it even once? With the lamp in his study projecting its golden light onto the table, he hurriedly leafed through the pile of notebooks which, he calculated, corresponded to the period when he had read La vida breve. Onetti’s vita brevis. At the same time he continued to see, with increasing clarity, Lucrecia’s breasts, snowy, high, warm, in their nocturnal bed, in their morning bath, peeking through the folds of her nightgown or her silk wrap or the deep plunge of her neckline. And coming back, returning with the memory of the ghastly impact the original image had made on him, was the story of La vida breve as clear and sharp as if he had only just read it. Why La vida breve? Why tonight?

  He found it at last. Underlined, at the top of the page: La vida breve. And beneath that: “Superb architecture, highly refined, astute construction, prose and technique far superior to his impoverished characters and insipid plots.” Not a very enthusiastic sentence. Why, then, the agitation when he remembered it? Simply because his unconscious mind had associated the surgically removed breast of Gertrudis in the novel with the longed-for breasts of Lucrecia? With great clarity he could see the first scene, the image that had come back and shaken him so. In his sordid apartment an ordinary clerk in a public-relations agency in Buenos Aires, Juan María Brausen, the narrator, agonizes over the idea of the mutilating breast surgery undergone by his wife, Gertrudis, the night before or that very morning, as he hears, on the other side of the thin wall, the stupid chatter of his new neighbor, Queca, a former or still-active whore, and vaguely imagines the plot for a movie that had been requested by his friend and superior, Julio Stein. Here were the dreadful citations: “I thought of how difficult it would be to look without disgust at the new scar Gertrudis would have on her chest, round, complex, with red or pink venations that time would perhaps transform into a pale confusion the same color as the other scar, thin, flat, as brisk as a signature, that Gertrudis had on her belly and that I had traced so often with the tip of my tongue.” And this one, even more punishing, in which Brausen takes the bull by the horns and anticipates the only way he can really persuade his wife that the amputated breast did not matter: “Because the only convincing proof, the only source of joy and confidence I can give her is to turn on the light and raise and lower my face, rejuvenated by lust, over the mutilated breast, and kiss the spot and become wildly excited.”

  The man who writes sentences like these, sentences that after ten years can still make my hair stand on end and give me goose bumps like stalagmites, is a true creator, thought Don Rigoberto. He pictured himself naked, in bed with his wife, contemplating the almost invisible scar in the place where that goblet of warm flesh and silken curves had once reigned supreme, kissing it with exaggerated desire, pretending to an excitement, a passion he did not feel and would never feel again, and on his hair he recognized the hand—grateful? pitying?—of his beloved letting him know it was enough. There was no need to pretend. They, who each night had lived the truth of their desires and dreams down to the very marrow, why would they lie now, telling one another it did not matter when both of them knew it mattered tremendously, that the missing breast would continue to hover over all their successive nights? Damned Onetti!

  “You would have had the surprise of your life,” Doña Lucrecia laughed with the trill of an opera singer ready to go onstage. “As I did, when she told me. And even more so when I saw them. The surprise of your life!”

  “The enchanting breasts of the Algerian ambassador?” Don Rigoberto was astounded. “Reconstructed?”

  “The Algerian ambassador’s wife,” Doña Lucrecia corrected him. “Don’t play the fool, you know very well who I mean. You spent the whole night looking at them at the dinner in the French embassy.”

  “It’s true, they were lovely,” Don Rigoberto admitted with a blush. And as he caressed, kissed, and looked with devotion on the breasts of Doña Lucrecia, he tempered his enthusiasm with a compliment: “But not as lovely as yours.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, ruffling his hair. “What can I do, they’re better than mine. Smaller, but perfect. And firmer.”

  “Firmer?” Don Rigoberto had begun to swallow nervously. “I didn’t know you had seen her naked. Or touched her breasts.”

  An auspicious silence fell, though it did coexist with the thunder of waves breaking against the cliffs down below, beneath the study.

  “I have seen her naked, and I have touched them.” His wife spelled it out for him, very slowly. “You don’t care, do you? But that’s not the point. The point is, they’ve been reconstructed. Really.”

  And now Don Rigoberto remembered that the women in La vida breve—Queca, Gertrudis, Elena Sala—wore silken girdles over their panties to control their waistlines and display better figures. What was the date of that novel by Onetti? Women didn’t wear girdles anymore. He had never seen Lucrecia in a silken girdle. Or dressed as a pirate, a nun, a jockey, a clown, a butterfly, or a flower. But he had seen her as a Gypsy, wearing a scarf on her head, large hoops in her ears, a peasant blouse, a full multicolored skirt, and strings of beads around her neck and arms. He remembered that he was alone, in the damp Barranco dawn, separated from Lucrecia for nearly a year, and he became saturated with the hideous novelistic pessimism of Juan María Brausen. He felt, too, what he read in the notebook: “the unforgettable certainty that nowhere is there a woman, a friend, a house, a book, not even a vice, that can make me happy.” It was this awful solitude, not the scene of Gertrudis’s cancerous breast, that had disinterred the novel from his unconscious; now he had sunk into a solitude as bitter as Brausen’s, a pessimism as black.

  “What does that mean, reconstructed?” he dared to ask after a long, uneasy parenthesis.

  “It means she had cancer and they were removed,” Doña Lucrecia informed him with surgical brutality. “Then they were gradually reconstructed at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Six operations. Can you imagine? One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. It took three years. But they made them more perfect than before. They even made nipples, with little wrinkles and everything. Identical. I can tell you that because I saw them. Because I touched them. You don’t care, do you, my love?”

  “Of course not,” Don Rigoberto quickly replied. But his haste betrayed him, as did the changes in the timbre, resonance, and implications of his voice. “Could you tell me when? Where?”

  “When I saw them?” Doña Lucrecia put him off with professional skill. “Where I touched them?”

  “Yes, yes,” he pleaded, no longer observing the forms. “Only if you want to. Only if you think you can tell me, of course.”

  “Of course!” Don Rigoberto gave a start
. He understood. It wasn’t the emblematic breast, or the narrator’s essential pessimism in La vida breve; it was the astute means Juan María Brausen had found to save himself that had provoked the sudden resurrection, the return of Zorro, Tarzan, or d’Artagnan, after ten years. Of course! Blessed Onetti! He smiled, relieved, almost happy. The memory had come back not to drown him but to help him or, as Brausen said when describing his own feverish imagination, to save him. Isn’t that what he said when he transported himself out of the real Buenos Aires and into the invented Santa María, and fantasized a corrupt physician, Díaz Grey, who accepted money for injecting the mysterious Elena Sala with morphine? Didn’t he say that this transposition, this move, this carefully elaborated act, this recourse to fiction, saved him? Here it was, in his notebook: “A Chinese puzzle box. In Onetti’s work of fiction his invented character, Brausen, invents a fiction in which there is a doctor, Díaz Grey, based on himself, and a woman, Elena Sala, based on Gertrudis (though her breasts are still whole), and the fiction is more than the plot for a movie requested by Julio Stein; confronting reality with dream is his defense against reality, his way of annihilating the horrible truth of his life with the beautiful lie of fiction.” He was overjoyed, ecstatic at his discovery. He felt as if he were Brausen, he felt redeemed and safe, and then another citation from his notebook, below the ones from La vida breve, troubled him. It was from “If,” the poem by Kipling: “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master.”