The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “The mirror was a gift to Schiele from his mother.” Fonchito’s voice returned her to her house, to a drab San Isidro, to the shouts of children kicking a soccer ball in the Olivar; the boy’s face was turned toward her. “He begged her and begged her to give it to him. Some people say he stole it from her. That he wanted it so much that one day he went to his mother’s house and just walked out with it. And finally she agreed and left it in his studio. His first one. He always kept it. He moved that mirror to every studio he ever had, until he died.”

  “Why is the mirror so important?” Doña Lucrecia made an effort to show interest. “We know he was like Narcissus. The photograph proves it. Looking at himself, in love with himself, putting on a victim’s face. So the world would love and admire him just as he loved and admired himself.”

  Fonchito burst into laughter.

  “What an imagination, Stepmamá!” he exclaimed. “That’s why I like talking to you; you can think of things, just like I do. You can find a story in everything. We’re alike, aren’t we? I never get bored with you.”

  “You don’t bore me either.” She blew him a kiss. “I told you what I think, now it’s your turn. Why are you so interested in the mirror?”

  “I dream about that mirror,” Fonchito admitted. And, with a little Mephistophelian smile, he added, “It was very important to Egon. How do you think he painted a hundred self-portraits? With that mirror. And he used it to paint his models reflected in it. It wasn’t a whim. It was, it was…”

  He made a face, searching, but Doña Lucrecia guessed it wasn’t words he lacked but a way to articulate a formless idea still gestating in that precocious little head. The boy’s passion for the painter, she was certain now, was pathological. But perhaps, for that very reason, it might also shape an exceptional future for Fonchito as an eccentric creator, an unconventional artist. If she kept the appointment and reconciled with Rigoberto, she would tell him so. “Do you like the idea of having a neurotic genius for a son?” And she would ask him if it wasn’t dangerous for the boy’s psychic health to identify so strongly with a painter like Egon Schiele, whose inclinations were so perverse. But then Rigoberto would reply: “What? Have you been seeing Fonchito? While we were separated? While I was writing you love letters, forgetting what had happened, forgiving what had happened, you were seeing him behind my back? The boy you corrupted by taking him to your bed?” My God, my God, what an idiot I’ve turned into, thought Doña Lucrecia. If she went to the appointment, the one thing she couldn’t do was mention Alfonso’s name even once.

  “Hi, Justita,” he greeted the girl as she came into the dining alcove, looking neat as a pin in a starched apron and carrying the tea tray and the requisite toasted buns with butter and marmalade. “Don’t go, I want to show you something. Here, what do you see?”

  “What else but more of that dirty stuff you like so much.” Justiniana’s darting eyes lingered on the book for a long time. “A fresh guy having a great time looking at two naked girls who are wearing stockings and hats and showing off for him.”

  “That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?” exclaimed Fonchito with a triumphant air. He handed the book to Doña Lucrecia so that she could examine the full-page reproduction. “They’re not two models, it’s just one. Why do we see two, one from the front, the other from the back? Because of the mirror! Do you get it now, Stepmamá? The title explains everything.”

  Schiele Painting a Nude Model Before the Mirror, 1910 (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna), read Doña Lucrecia. As she examined the picture, intrigued by something she could not name except that it was not in the picture itself—it was a presence, or rather an absence—she halfheard Fonchito, who by now was in the state of growing excitement that talking about Schiele always brought him to. He was explaining to Justiniana that the mirror “is where we are when we look at the picture.” And that the model seen from the front wasn’t flesh and blood but an image in the mirror, while the painter and the model seen from the back were real and not reflections. Which meant that Egon Schiele had begun to paint Moa from the rear, in front of the mirror, but then, drawn by the part he did not see directly but only in projection, he decided to paint that too. And so, thanks to the mirror, he painted two Moas, who were really only one: the complete Moa, the two halves of Moa, the Moa no one could see in reality because “we only see what we have in front of us, not the part behind that front.” Did she understand why the mirror was so important to Egon Schiele?

  “Don’t you think he’s missing something upstairs, Señora?” Justiniana said in an exaggerated way, touching her temple.

  “I have for a long time,” Doña Lucrecia agreed. And then, in the same breath, she turned to Fonchito: “Who was this Moa?”

  A Tahitian. She had come to Vienna and lived with a painter who was also a mime and a madman: Erwin Dominik Ose. The boy quickly turned pages and showed Doña Lucrecia and Justiniana several reproductions of the Tahitian Moa, dancing, draped in multicolored tunics through whose folds one could see small breasts with erect nipples, and, like two spiders crouching under her arms, the small tufts of hair in her armpits. She danced in cabarets, she was the muse of poets and painters, and in addition to posing for Egon, she had also been his lover.

  “I guessed that from the start,” remarked Justiniana. “That bandit always went to bed with his models after he painted them, we all know that.”

  “Sometimes before, and sometimes while he was painting them,” Fonchito assured her calmly, approvingly. “Though not all of them. In his journal for 1918, the last year of his life, he mentions 117 models who visited his studio. Could he have gone to bed with so many in so short a time?”

  “Not even if he contracted tuberculosis.” Justiniana laughed. “Did he die of consumption?”

  “He died of Spanish influenza at the age of twenty-eight,” Fonchito explained. “That’s how I’m going to die too, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Don’t say that even as a joke, it’s bad luck,” the girl reprimanded him.

  “But something here doesn’t fit,” Doña Lucrecia interrupted.

  She had taken the book of reproductions from the boy and was looking again, very carefully, at the drawing, with its sepia background and precise, thin lines, of the painter and the model duplicated (“or divided?”) by the mirror, in which the intense, almost hostile eyes of Schiele seem to find their response in the melancholy, silken, flashing eyes of Moa, the dancer with blue-black lashes. Señora Lucrecia had been disturbed by something she had just identified. Ah yes, the hat glimpsed from the rear. Except for this detail, in everything else there was perfect correspondence between the two parts of the delicate, thrusting, sensual figure of the Tahitian with hair like spiders at her pubis and under her arms; once you were aware of the presence of the mirror, you recognized the two halves of the same person in the two figures observed by the artist. But not the hat. The figure seen from the rear wore something on her head which, from that perspective, did not seem to be a hat at all but something uncertain, unsettling, a sort of cowl, even, even, the head of a wild animal. That was it, some kind of tiger. In any case, nothing even remotely like the coquettish, feminine, charming little hat so flattering to the Moa seen from the front.

  “How odd,” the stepmother repeated. “In the rear view, the hat turns into a mask. The head of a beast.”

  “Like the one my papá asks you to put on in front of the mirror, Stepmamá?”

  Doña Lucrecia’s smile froze. Suddenly she understood the reason for the vague uneasiness that had engulfed her ever since the boy showed her Schiele Painting a Nude Model Before the Mirror.

  “What is it, Señora?” Justiniana was looking at her. “You’re so pale.”

  “Then it’s you,” she stammered, staring in disbelief at Fonchito. “You’re sending me anonymous letters, you little hypocrite.”

  He was the one, of course he was. It had been in the letter before last, or the one before that. She didn’t have to look for it
; the sentence, with all its commas and periods, was etched in her memory: “You will undress before the mirror, except for your stockings, and hide your lovely head behind the mask of a wild animal, preferably a tigress or a lioness. You will thrust out your right hip, flex your left leg, rest your hand on your other hip, in the most provocative pose. I will be watching you, sitting in my chair, with my usual reverence.” Isn’t that exactly what she was looking at? The damn kid was playing with her! She seized the book of reproductions and, blind with fury, hurled it at Fonchito. The boy could not get out of the way in time. The book hit him full in the face, he screamed, and a startled Justiniana screamed too. With the impact, he fell back onto the carpet, holding his face and looking up at her, wide-eyed, from the floor. Doña Lucrecia did not think she had done anything wrong in losing her temper. She was too angry to regret anything. While the girl helped him to his feet, she continued to shout, beside herself with rage.

  “You liar, you hypocrite, you fake. Do you think you have the right to play with me like that, when I’m a grown woman and you’re nothing but a snot-nosed kid still wet behind the ears?”

  “What’s the matter, what did I do to you?” Fonchito stuttered, trying to free himself from Justita’s arms.

  “Calm down, Señora, you’ve hurt him; look, his nose is bleeding,” said Justiniana. “And you be still, Foncho, and let me have a look.”

  “What, what did you do to me, you phony!” shouted an even angrier Doña Lucrecia. “You think it doesn’t matter? Writing me anonymous letters? Making me think they came from your papá?”

  “But I never sent you any anonymous letters,” the boy protested, while the girl, on her knees, wiped the blood from his nose with a paper napkin. “Don’t move, don’t move, you’re bleeding all over everything.”

  “Your damned mirror gave you away, and your damned Egon Schiele!” Doña Lucrecia was still shouting. “You thought you were so clever, didn’t you? Well, you’re not, fool. How do you know he asked me to put on an animal mask?”

  “You told me, Stepmamá,” Fonchito stammered, but fell silent when he saw Doña Lucrecia get to her feet. He protected his face with both hands, as if she were going to hit him.

  “I never told you about the mask, you liar,” his enraged stepmother exploded. “I’m going to bring you that letter, I’m going to read it to you. You’re going to eat it, you’re going to apologize. And I’ll never let you set foot in this house again. Do you hear? Never!”

  Like a bolt of lightning she shot past Justiniana and Fonchito, wild with indignation. But before going to the dressing table where she kept the anonymous letters, she went to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face and rub her temples with cologne. She could not calm down. This kid, this damn brat. Playing with her, yes, the little kitten with the big mouse. Sending her daring, elaborate letters to make her think they were from Rigoberto, encouraging her to hope for a reconciliation. What was he after? What scheme was he devising? Why the farce? For the fun, the sheer fun of manipulating her emotions, her life? He was perverse, sadistic. He enjoyed leading her on and then watching her crumbling hopes, her disillusionment.

  She returned to her bedroom, still not herself, and did not have to look very long in her dressing-table drawer to find the letter. The seventh one. There was the sentence that had alerted her, more or less as she had remembered it: “…you will hide your lovely head behind the mask of a wild animal, preferably the tigress in heat in Rubén Darío’s Azul…or a Sudanese lioness. You will thrust out your hip…” et cetera, et cetera. The Tahitian Moa in the drawing by Schiele, no more, no less. That precocious little troublemaker, that schemer. He’d had the gall to play out a whole drama about Schiele’s mirror, even showing her the picture that betrayed him. She wasn’t sorry she had thrown the book, even though it did give him a bloody nose. Good! Hadn’t the little devil ruined her life? Because she had not been the seducer, though the difference in their ages condemned her. He, he had been the seducer. With his youth and cherubic face, he was Mephistopheles, Lucifer in person. But that was all over. She’d make him eat this anonymous letter, yes, and throw him out of the house. And he’d never come back, never interfere in her life again.

  But she found only a dejected Justiniana in the dining alcove. She showed her the bloodstained napkin.

  “He left crying, Señora. Not because of his nose. But because when you threw it at him you tore the book about that painter he likes so much. He’s really sad, I can tell you.”

  “Go on, now you’re feeling sorry for him.” Señora Lucrecia dropped to the sofa, exhausted. “Don’t you realize what he did to me? He, he’s the one who sent me those anonymous letters.”

  “He swore he didn’t, Señora. He swore by all that’s holy that it was the señor who sent them.”

  “He’s lying.” Doña Lucrecia felt utterly exhausted. Was she going to faint? How she longed to go to bed, close her eyes, sleep for an entire week. “He gave himself away when he mentioned the mask and the mirror.”

  Justiniana came over to her and spoke almost in a whisper. “Are you sure you didn’t read him that letter? That you didn’t tell him about the mask? Fonchito is a clever little scamp, Señora. Do you think he’d let something so stupid trip him up?”

  “I never read him that letter, I never told him about the mask,” Doña Lucrecia declared. But at that same moment she began to have doubts.

  Had she? Yesterday, or the day before? Her mind wandered so these days; ever since the flood of anonymous letters she had been lost in a forest of conjectures, speculations, suspicions, fantasies. Wasn’t it possible? That she had told him, mentioned it, even read him that strange command to pose nude, wearing stockings and an animal mask, in front of a mirror? If she had, she had committed a grave injustice by insulting and hitting him.

  “I can’t take any more,” she murmured, making an effort to hold back her tears. “I’m sick of it, Justita, sick of it. I probably told him and forgot. I don’t know where my head is. Maybe I did. I want to leave this city, this country. Go where nobody knows me. Far away from Rigoberto and Fonchito. Because of those two I’ve fallen into a pit and I’ll never climb out.”

  “Don’t be sad, Señora.” Justiniana put her hand on her shoulder, stroked her forehead. “Don’t be bitter. And don’t worry. There’s a way, a very easy way, to find out if it’s Fonchito or Don Rigoberto who’s writing all that nonsense to you.”

  Doña Lucrecia looked up. The girl’s eyes were flashing.

  “Of course there is, Señora.” She spoke with her hands, her eyes, her lips, her teeth. “Didn’t the last letter arrange a date with you? That’s the answer. Go where it says, do what it asks.”

  “Do you really think I’m going to do things that belong in a cheap Mexican movie?” Doña Lucrecia pretended to be shocked.

  “And that’s how you’ll find out who’s writing the letters,” Justiniana concluded. “I’ll go with you, if you like. So you won’t feel so alone. And because I’m dying of curiosity too, Señora. Sonny or daddy? Which one can it be?”

  She laughed with all her usual boldness and charm, and Doña Lucrecia finally began to smile as well. After all, perhaps this lunatic was right. If she kept the mysterious appointment, her doubts would be over at last.

  “He won’t show up, I’ll be playing the fool again,” she argued, not very convincingly, knowing deep down that she had made her decision. She would go, do every silly thing daddy or sonny asked. She’d go on playing the game that, willingly or not, she had been playing for so long.

  “Shall I fix you a nice warm bath with salts, so you’ll get over your temper?” Justiniana was extremely animated.

  Doña Lucrecia nodded. Damn it, now she had the feeling she had been too hasty and very unfair to poor Fonchito.

  Letter to the Reader of Playboy, or A Brief Treatise on Aesthetics

  Since eroticism is the intelligent and sensitive humanization of physical love, and pornography its cheapening and degradation, I acc
use you, reader of Playboy or Penthouse, frequenter of vile dens that show hard-core movies, and sex shops where you purchase electric vibrators, rubber dildos, and condoms adorned with rooster crests or archbishops’ mitres, of contributing to the rapid regression to mere animal copulation of the one attribute granted to men and women that makes them most like gods (pagan ones, of course, who were neither chaste nor prudish regarding sexual matters, like the one we all know about).

  You transgress openly each month when, aroused by the flames of your desires, you renounce the exercise of your own imagination and succumb to the municipal vice of permitting your most subtle drives, those of the carnal appetite, to be reined in by products that have been cloned, and by seeming to satisfy your sexual urges actually subjugate them, watering them down, serializing and constricting them in caricatures that vulgarize sex, strip it of originality, mystery, and beauty, and turn it into a farcical, ignoble affront to good taste. To let you know who your accuser is, perhaps I can clarify my thinking for you by stating (monogamist that I am, though looking kindly on adultery) that I consider the late and highly respected Israeli leader Doña Golda Meir, or the austere Señora Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, not one of whose hairs moved for the entire time she was Prime Minister, as more delectable sources of erotic desire than any of those interchangeable pimp’s dolls, breasts swollen by silicone, pubises trimmed and dyed, the same fraud mass-produced out of a single mold, who, blending stupidity with the ridiculous, appear in the centerfold of Playboy, that enemy of Eros, wearing plush ears and a tail and flourishing their scepter as “Bunny of the Month.”

  My hatred for Playboy, Penthouse, and others of their ilk is not gratuitous. This kind of magazine symbolizes the corruption of sex, the disappearance of the beautiful taboos that once surrounded it and against which the human spirit could rebel, exercising individual freedom, affirming the singular personality of each human being, gradually creating the sovereign individual in the secret and discreet elaboration of rituals, actions, images, cults, fantasies, ceremonies which, by ethically ennobling the act of love and conferring aesthetic distinction upon it, progressively humanized it until it was transformed into a creative act. An act thanks to which, in the private intimacy of bedrooms, a man and a woman (I cite the orthodox formula, but clearly this also applies to a gentleman and a web-footed creature, two women, two or three men, and all imaginable combinations as long as the company does not exceed three individuals or, at most, two couples) could spend a few hours emulating Homer, Phidias, Botticelli, or Beethoven. I know you don’t understand me, but that is not important; if you understood me, you would not be imbecilic enough to synchronize your erections and orgasms with the watch (surely solid gold and waterproof?) of a man named Hugh Hefner.