The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Earlier I mentioned the word “parasite,” and you probably asked yourself if I, a lawyer who for the past twenty-five years has applied the science of jurisprudence—the most nourishing food for bureaucracy and the primary begetter of bureaucrats—to the specialty of insurance, have the right to use it disparagingly about anyone else. Yes, I do, but only because I also apply it to myself, my bureaucratic half. In fact, to make matters even worse, legal parasitism was my first area of specialization, the key that opened the doors of the La Perricholi Company—yes, that is its ridiculous South Americanized name—and got me my first few promotions. How could I avoid being the most ingenious tangler or disentangler of juridical arguments when I discovered in my first law class that so-called legality is, in great measure, an intricate jungle in which technicians of obfuscations, intrigues, formalisms, and casuistries would always come out ahead? And that the profession has nothing to do with truth and justice but deals exclusively with the fabrication of incontrovertible appearances, with sophistries and deceptions impossible to clarify. It is true, I have engaged in this essentially parasitic activity with the competence needed to reach the top, but I have never deceived myself. I have always been aware that I was a boil feeding on the defenselessness, vulnerability, and impotence of others. Unlike you, I make no claims to being a “pillar of society” (it is useless to refer you to the painting of that name by George Grosz: you don’t know the painter, or, worse yet, you know him only for the splendid Expressionist asses he painted and not his lethal caricatures of your colleagues in the Weimar Republic): I know what I am and what I do, and I have as much or more contempt for that part of myself as I have for you. My success as an attorney is derived from this understanding—that the law is an amoral technique that serves the cynic who best controls it—and from my discovery, a precocious one as well, that in our country (in all countries?) the legal system is a web of contradictions in which each law, or ruling with the force of law, can be opposed by another, or many others, that amend or nullify it. Therefore all of us are always violating some law and transgressing in some way against the legal order (chaos, actually). Thanks to this labyrinth, you bureaucrats subdivide, multiply, reproduce, and regenerate at a dizzying pace. And we lawyers live and some of us—mea culpa—prosper.

  Well, even if my life has been the torment of Tantalus, a daily moral struggle between the bureaucratic rubble of my existence and the secret angels and demons of my being, you have not conquered me. Faced with what I do from Monday through Friday, from eight to six, I have always maintained sufficient irony to despise the job and despise myself for doing it, so that in the remaining hours I could make amends, redeem and in demnify myself, humanize myself (which, in my case, always means separating from the herd, the crowd). I can imagine the tingle running through you, the irritable curiosity with which you ask yourself, “And what does he do at night that immunizes him against me, that saves him from being what I am?” Do you want to know? Now that I am alone—separated from my wife, I mean—I read, look at my pictures, review and add to my notebooks with letters like this one, but, above all, I fantasize. I dream. I construct a better reality purged of all the scum and excrescences—you and your slime—which make the actual one so sinister and sordid that we wish for another. (I’ve spoken in the plural and I’m sorry; it won’t happen again.) In this other reality, you do not exist. All that exists is the woman I love and will love forever—the absent Lucrecia—my son, Alfonso, and a few variable, transitory secondary players who come and go like will-o’-the-wisps, spending only the time needed to be useful to me. Only when I am in that world, in that company, do I exist, for then I am joyful and content.

  Now, these strands of happiness would not be possible without the immense frustration, arid tedium, and crushing routine of my real life. In other words, without a life dehumanized by you, without everything you weave and unweave with all the machinery of power you possess. Do you understand now why I began by calling you a necessary evil? You thought, master of the stereotype and the commonplace, that I described you in this way because I believed that a society must function, must have at its disposal order, legality, services, authority, in order not to run aground on confusion. And you thought this regulatory Gordian knot, this saving, organizing mechanism of the anthill, was you, the necessary man. No, my awful friend. Without you, society would function much better than it does now. But without you here to prostitute, poison, and hack away at human freedom, I would not appreciate it nearly as much, my imagination would not soar as high, my desires would not be as powerful, for they are born in rebellion against you, as the reaction of a free, sensitive being against an entity who is the negation of sensitivity and free will. Which means that however one looks at this rocky terrain, without you I would be less free and less sensitive, my desires more pedestrian, my life emptier.

  I know you will not understand this either, but it does not matter at all if your puffy batrachian eyes never see this letter.

  Bureaucrat, I curse you and thank you.

  Dream Is a Life

  Bathed in perspiration, not yet completely emerged from that narrow frontier where sleep and wakefulness were indistinguishable, Don Rigoberto could still see Rosaura, dressed in a jacket and tie, as she carried out his instructions: she approached the bar and leaned over the bare back of the flashy mulatta who had been flirting with her since she had seen them walk into that cheap hookers’ club.

  They were in Mexico City, weren’t they? Yes, after a week in Acapulco, making a stop on their way home to Lima following a brief vacation. It had been Don Rigoberto’s whim to dress Doña Lucrecia in men’s clothes and then go with her to a whores’ cabaret. Rosaura-Lucrecia was whispering something to the woman and smiling—Don Rigoberto saw with what authority she squeezed the bare arm of the mulatta, who looked at her with alert, malicious eyes—and finally led her out to dance. They were playing a mambo by Pérez Prado, of course—“El ruletero”—and on the narrow, smoky, crowded dance floor, where shadows were fitfully distorted by a reflector with colored lights, Rosaura-Lucrecia played her part very well: Don Rigoberto nodded approvingly. She did not seem a stranger in her men’s clothing, or different in her garçon haircut, or uncomfortable leading her partner when they tired of doing their own steps and danced with their arms around each other. In an increasingly feverish state, Don Rigoberto, filled with grateful admiration for his wife, risked a stiff neck in order not to lose sight of them among the heads and shoulders of so many other people. When the out-of-tune but intrepid band moved from the mambo to a bolero—“Dos almas,” which reminded him of Leo Marini—he felt that the gods were with him. Interpreting his secret desire, he saw Rosaura immediately press the mulatta to her, passing her arms around her waist and obliging the girl to place hers on her shoulders. Even if he could not make out the details in the half-light, he was sure that his beloved wife, the counterfeit male, had begun to kiss and gently bite the mulatta’s neck, rubbing up against her belly and breasts like a true man spurred on by desire.

  He was awake now, no doubt about it, but though all his senses were alert, the mulatta and Lucrecia-Rosaura were still there, in a close embrace, in a nighttime brothel crowd, in that harsh, cruel place where the gaudily made-up women displayed tropical rumps and the male patrons had drooping mustaches, fat cheeks, and the eyes of marijuana smokers. Ready to pull out their pistols and start shooting at the first false move? Because of this excursion to the lower depths of the Mexican night, Rosaura and I may lose our lives, he thought with a happy shudder. And he anticipated the headlines in the gutter press: DOUBLE HOMICIDE: BUSINESSMAN AND TRANSVESTITE WIFE MURDERED IN MEXICAN BROTHEL; MULATTA WAS BAIT, VICE THEIR DOWNFALL; UPPERCRUST LIMENIAN COUPLE KILLED IN MEXICO’S UNDERWORLD; WHITE-HOT SCANDAL: GO TOO FAR, PAY IN BLOOD. He brought up a chuckle as if it were a belch: “If they kill us, the worms can worry about the scandal.”

  He returned to the aforementioned club, where the mulatta and Rosaura, the counterfeit man, were still
dancing. Now, to his joy, they were shamelessly caressing and kissing each other on the mouth. But wait: weren’t the professionals reluctant to offer their lips to clients? Yes, but did any obstacle exist that Rosaura-Lucrecia could not overcome? How had she gotten the fleshy mulatta to open that huge mouth with its thick scarlet lips to receive the subtle visit of her serpentine tongue? Had she offered her money? Had she aroused her? It didn’t matter how, what mattered was that her sweet, soft, almost liquid tongue was there in the mulatta’s mouth, wetting it with her saliva and absorbing the saliva—which he imagined as thick and fragrant—of that lush woman.

  And then he was distracted by a question: Why Rosaura? Rosaura was also a woman’s name. If it was a question of disguising her completely, as he had disguised her body by dressing it in men’s clothes, then Carlos, Juan, Pedro, or Nicanor would have been preferable. Why Rosaura? Almost without realizing it, he got out of bed, put on his robe and slippers, and went to his study. He did not need to see the clock to know that the light of dawn would soon appear, seeming to rise out of the sea. Did he know any flesh-and-blood Rosaura? He ransacked his memory, and the answer was a categorical no. She was, then, an imaginary Rosaura who had come tonight to appear in his dream about Lucrecia, to merge with her, leaving the forgotten pages of some novel, or some drawing, oil painting, or engraving he could not recall. In any case, the pseudonym was there, clinging to Lucrecia like the man’s suit they had bought, laughing and whispering, that afternoon in a shop in the red-light district after he had asked Lucrecia if she would agree to concretize his fantasy and she—“as always, as always”—had said she would. Now Rosaura was a name as real as the couple who, arm in arm—the mulatta and Lucrecia were almost the same height—had stopped dancing and were approaching the table. He stood to greet them and ceremoniously offered his hand to the mulatta.

  “Hello, hello, delighted to meet you, please have a seat.”

  “I’m dying of thirst,” said the mulatta, fanning herself with both hands. “Shall we order something?”

  “Whatever you want, baby,” Rosaura-Lucrecia said, caressing her chin and calling a waiter. “You order, go ahead.”

  “A bottle of champagne,” the mulatta said with a triumphant smile. “Is your name really Rigoberto? Or is that your alias?”

  “That’s my name. Pretty unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Very unusual.” The mulatta nodded, looking at him as if instead of eyes she had two coals burning in her round face. “Well, original at least. You’re pretty original too, and that’s the truth. Want to know something? I’ve never seen ears and a nose like yours. My God, they’re enormous! Can I touch them? Will you let me?”

  The mulatta’s request—she was tall and curvaceous, with incandescent eyes, a long neck, strong shoulders, and a burnished skin set off by her canary-yellow dress with its deeply plunging neckline—left Don Rigoberto speechless, incapable of even responding with a joke to what appeared to be a serious request. Lucrecia-Rosaura came to his rescue.

  “Not yet, baby,” she said to the mulatta, pinching her ear. “When we’re alone, in the room, you can touch anything of his you want.”

  “The three of us are going to be alone in a room?” the mulatta asked with a laugh, rolling her eyes beneath their silken false lashes. “Thanks for letting me know. And what will I do with the two of you, my angels? I don’t like odd numbers. I’m sorry. I’ll call a friend and then we can be two couples. But me alone with two men? Not on your life.”

  However, when the waiter brought the bottle of what he called champagne but was in reality a sweetish spumante with hints of turpentine and camphor, the mulatta (she said her name was Estrella) seemed to become more enthusiastic about the idea of spending the rest of the night with the disparate pair, and she made jokes, laughing boisterously and distributing playful slaps between Don Rigoberto and Rosaura-Lucrecia. From time to time, like a refrain, she would laugh about “the gentleman’s ears and nose” and stare at them, her fascination charged with a mysterious covetousness.

  “With ears like that you must hear more than normal people,” she said. “And smell more with that nose than ordinary men do.”

  Probably, thought Don Rigoberto. What if it were true? What if he, thanks to the munificence of those organs, heard more and had a more acute sense of smell than other people? He did not like the comic turn the story was taking—his desire, inflamed only a moment ago, was fading, and he could not revive it, for Estrella’s jokes obliged him to move his attention away from Lucrecia-Rosaura and the mulatta to concentrate on his outsized auditory and nasal instruments. He tried to abbreviate certain stages, skipping over the bargaining with Estrella that lasted as long as the bottle of supposed champagne, the arrangements to have the mulatta leave the club—a token had to be purchased with a fifty-dollar bill—the rattling taxi afflicted with the tremors of tertian fever, their registering at the filthy hotel—CIELITO LINDO said the red-and-blue neon sign on its façade—and the negotiation with the squint-eyed clerk, who was picking his nose, to let them occupy only one room. It cost Don Rigoberto another fifty dollars to calm his fears that there might be a police raid and the establishment would be fined for renting one bedroom to three people.

  As they crossed the threshold of the room, and in the dim light of a single lightbulb saw the king-size bed covered with a bluish spread, and next to it a washstand, a basin with water, a towel, a roll of toilet paper, and a chipped chamber pot—the squint-eyed clerk had just left, handing over the key and closing the door behind him—Don Rigoberto remembered: Of course! Rosaura! Estrella! He slapped his forehead, relieved. Naturally! Those names came from the performance in Madrid of La vida es sueño, Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream. And once again he felt, bubbling up from the bottom of his heart like a spring of clear water, a tender feeling of gratitude toward the depths of memory from which there endlessly poured forth surprises, images, phantoms, and suggestions to give body, backdrop, and storyline to the dreams with which he defended himself against his solitude, the absence of Lucrecia.

  “Let’s get undressed, Estrella,” Rosaura was saying, standing up and then sitting down. “You’ll have the surprise of your life, so get ready.”

  “I won’t take off my dress if I can’t touch your friend’s nose and ears first,” replied Estrella, utterly serious now. “I don’t know why, but I want to touch them so much it’s killing me.”

  This time, instead of anger, Don Rigoberto felt flattered.

  Doña Lucrecia and he had seen the play in Madrid on their first trip to Europe a few months after they were married, a performance of La vida es sueño so old-fashioned that open laughter could be heard in the darkened theater. The tall skinny actor who played Prince Segismundo was so bad, so clearly overwhelmed by the role, and his voice so affected, that the spectator—“well, this spectator,” Don Rigoberto was more precise—felt inclined to look favorably upon his cruel, superstitious father, King Basilio, for keeping him, throughout his childhood and youth, chained like a wild beast in a solitary tower, fearful that if his son came to the throne the cataclysms predicted by the stars and his learned mathematicians would come true. The entire performance had been ghastly, dreadful, clumsy. And yet Don Rigoberto recalled with absolute clarity that the appearance in the first scene of the young Rosaura dressed as a man, and later, with a sword at her waist, ready to go into battle, had touched his soul. And now he was sure he had been tempted several times since then by the desire to see Lucrecia attired in boots, plumed hat, a soldier’s tunic, at the hour of love. La vida es sueño! Though the performance was awful, the director unspeakable, the actors even worse, it was not only that one actress who had lived on in memory and often inflamed his senses. Something in the work intrigued him as well, because—his recollection was unequivocal—it had led him to read the play. He must still have his notes from that reading. Down on all fours on the rug in the study, Don Rigoberto looked through and discarded one notebook after another. Not this one, or this
one. It had to be this one. That was the year.

  “I’m naked, honey,” said Estrella the mulatta. “Now let me touch your ears and nose. Don’t make me beg. Don’t make me suffer, don’t be mean. Can’t you see I’m dying to do it? Just this one favor, baby, and I’ll make you happy.”

  She had a full, abundant body, shapely though somewhat flabby in the belly, with splendid breasts that barely sagged and Renaissance rolls of flesh at her hips. She did not even seem to notice that Rosaura-Lucrecia, who had also undressed and lay on the bed, was not a man but a beautiful woman with well-delineated curves. The mulatta had eyes only for him, or rather, for his ears and nose, which she now—Don Rigoberto had sat on the edge of the bed to facilitate the operation—caressed avidly, furiously. Her ardent fingers desperately kneaded, pressed, and pinched, first his ears, then his nose. He closed his eyes in anguish because he sensed that very soon the fingers on his nose would provoke one of those allergic attacks that would not stop until he had sneezed—lascivious number—sixty-nine times. His Mexican adventure, inspired by Calderón de la Barca, would end in a grotesque outburst of nasal excess.

  Yes, this was it—Don Rigoberto brought the notebook into the light of the lamp: a page of quotations and comments he had made as he read the play, its title at the top of the page: La vida es sueño (1638).

  The first two citations, taken from speeches by Segismundo, affected him like the lashes of a whip: “Nothing to me seems right/if it counters my delight.” And the other: “And I know that I am/compounded of beast and man.” Was there a cause-and-effect relationship between the two quotations he had transcribed? Was he compounded of man and beast because nothing that opposed his pleasure seemed right? Perhaps. But when he read the play after their trip, he was not the old, tired, solitary, dejected man he had become, desperately seeking refuge in his fantasies so as not to go mad or commit suicide; he was a happy fifty-year-old brimming with life who, in the arms of his bride, his second wife, was discovering that joy existed, that it was possible to construct, at the side of his beloved, a singular citadel fortified against the stupidity, the ugliness, the mediocrity, and the routine where he spent the rest of his day. Why had he felt the need to make these notes as he read a work that, at the time, had no bearing on his personal situation? Or did it?