The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “If I had a man with ears and a nose like these, I’d really go wild. I’d be his slave,” exclaimed the mulatta, resting for a moment. “I’d make him happy no matter what he wanted. I’d lick the floor clean for him.”

  She was squatting on her heels, and her face was flushed and sweaty, as if she had been bending over a boiling pot of soup. Her whole body seemed to vibrate. As she spoke she greedily passed her tongue over the wet lips with which she had been interminably kissing, nibbling, and licking Don Rigoberto’s auditory and olfactory organs. He used the time to take in air and dry his ears with his handkerchief. Then he blew his nose with a good deal of noise.

  “This man is mine; I’m just lending him to you for the night,” said Rosaura-Lucrecia firmly.

  “But don’t these marvels belong to you?” asked Estrella, not paying the slightest attention to the dialogue. Her hands had taken hold of Don Rigoberto’s alarmed face, and her thick, determined lips were advancing again toward their prey.

  “Haven’t you even noticed? I’m not a man, I’m a woman,” an exasperated Rosaura-Lucrecia protested. “Look at me, at least.”

  But with a slight movement of her shoulders the mulatta ignored her and passionately continued her work. She had Don Rigoberto’s left ear in her large, hot mouth, and he, unable to control himself, laughed hysterically. In fact he was very nervous. He had a presentiment that at any moment Estrella would move from love to hate and tear off his ear in one bite. “If I’m earless, Lucrecia won’t love me anymore.” He grew sad. He heaved a deep, cavernous, gloomy sigh similar to those of the bearded Prince Segismundo, chained in his secret tower, as he demanded of heaven, with great strident shouts, what sin he had committed by being born.

  “That’s a stupid question,” Don Rigoberto said to himself. He had always despised the South American sport of self-pity, and from that point of view, the sniveling prince of Calderón de la Barca (a Jesuit, in all other respects), who presented himself to the audience moaning, “Ah, woe is me, most wretched of men,” had nothing that would appeal to the spectators or make them identify with him. Why, then, in his dream, had his phantoms structured the story by borrowing from La vida es sueño the names of Rosaura and Estrella and Rosaura’s masculine disguise? Perhaps because his life had become nothing but a dream since Lucrecia’s departure. Was he even alive during the gloomy, opaque hours he spent in the office discussing balances, policies, renewals, judgments, investments? His one corner of real life was provided by the night, when he fell asleep and the door of dreams was opened, which is what must have happened to Segismundo in his desolate stone tower in that dense forest. He too had discovered that true life, the rich, splendid life that yielded and bent to his will, was the life of lies, the life his mind and desires created—awake or asleep—to free him from his cell, allow him to escape the asphyxiating monotony of his confinement. The unexpected dream was not gratuitous after all: there was a kinship, an affinity, between the two miserable dreamers.

  Don Rigoberto remembered a joke in diminutives whose sheer stupidity had made him and Lucrecia giggle like two children: “A teeny-tiny elephant came to the edge of a teeny-tiny lake to drink, and a teeny-tiny crocodile bit off his teeny-tiny trunk. With teeny-tiny tears, the teeny-tiny pug-nosed elephant sobbed, ‘Is that your teeny-tiny idea of a goddamn joke?’”

  “Let go of my nose and I’ll give you anything you want,” he pleaded in terror, in a nasal Cantinflas voice, because Estrella’s teeny-tiny teeth were interfering with his breathing. “All the money you want. Let me go, please!”

  “Quiet, I’m coming,” stammered the mulatta, letting go for a second and then seizing Don Rigoberto’s nose again with her two rows of carnivorous teeth.

  A violent hippogriff, she came indeed, flying before the wind, shuddering from head to toe, while Don Rigoberto, drowning in panic, saw out of the corner of his eye that Rosaura-Lucrecia, distressed and disconcerted, sitting up in bed, had caught the mulatta around the waist and was trying to move her away, gently, without forcing, surely afraid that if she pulled too hard Estrella would bite off her husband’s nose in reprisal. They remained this way for a while, docile, joined together, while the mulatta reared and moaned and licked without restraint the nasal appendage of Don Rigoberto, who, in dark clouds of anxiety, recalled Bacon’s monstrous Man’s Head, a shocking canvas that had long obsessed him, and now he knew why: it was how Estrella’s jaws would leave him after she bit him. It was not the mutilation of his face that horrified him but a single question: Would Lucrecia still love an earless and noseless husband? Would she leave him?

  Don Rigoberto read this excerpt in his notebook:

  What could have befallen

  my fantasy in sleep

  that I find myself now

  in this castle keep?

  Segismundo declaimed this when he awoke from the artificial sleep into which (with a mixture of opium, poppy, and henbane) King Basilio and old Clotaldo had plunged him when they mounted the ignoble farce, moving him from his prison tower to court to have him rule for a brief time and leading him to believe that the transition was also a dream. What happened to your fantasy as you slept, poor prince, he thought, is that they put you to sleep with drugs and killed you. For a moment they returned you to your true state, making you believe that you dreamed. And then you took the liberties one takes when he enjoys the impunity of dreams. You gave free rein to your desires, you threw a man off a balcony, you almost killed old Clotaldo and even King Basilio himself. And so they had the pretext they needed—you were violent, foul-tempered, base—to return you to the chains and solitude of your prison. Despite this, he envied Segismundo. He too, like the unfortunate prince condemned by mathematics and the stars to live in dreams so as not to die of imprisonment and solitude, was, he had written in the notebook, “a living skeleton,” an “animate corpse.” But unlike the prince, he had no King Basilio, no noble Clotaldo, to remove him from his abandonment and solitude, to put him to sleep with opium, poppy, and henbane and allow him to wake in the arms of Lucrecia. “Lucrecia, my Lucrecia,” he sighed, realizing that he was weeping. What a sniveler he had become this past year!

  Estrella was crying too, but hers were tears of joy. After her final gasp, during which Don Rigoberto felt a simultaneous jolt to every nerve ending in his body, she opened her mouth, released his nose, and fell back onto the blue-covered bed with a disarmingly pious exclamation: “Mother of God, I came so good!” And crossed herself in gratitude without the slightest sacrilegious intention.

  “Sure, good for you, but you almost took off my nose and ears, you outlaw,” Don Rigoberto complained.

  He was positive that Estrella’s caresses had turned his face into the face of Arcimboldo’s plant man, who had a tuberous carrot for a nose. With a growing sense of humiliation he saw, through the fingers of the hand he was using to rub his bruised and battered nose, that Rosaura-Lucrecia, without a shred of compassion or concern for him, was looking at the mulatta (serenely stretching on the bed) with curiosity, a pleased little smile floating across her face.

  “So that’s what you like in men, Estrella?” she asked.

  The mulatta nodded.

  “It’s the only thing I do like,” she stated more precisely, panting and exhaling a dense, vegetal breath. “The rest they can stick where the sun never shines. Usually I hold back, I hide it because of what people might say. But tonight I let myself go. I’ve never seen ears and a nose like the ones on your man. You two made me feel right at home, sweetie.”

  She looked Lucrecia up and down with the eyes of a connoisseur and seemed to approve. She extended one of her hands and placed her index finger on the left nipple—Don Rigoberto thought he could see the small wrinkled button harden—of Rosaura-Lucrecia and said, with a little laugh, “I knew you were a woman when we were dancing in the club. I could feel your tits, and I saw you didn’t know how to lead. I led you, not the other way around.”

  “You hid it very well. I thought we had you fooled,�
�� Doña Lucrecia congratulated her.

  Still rubbing his well-caressed nose and offended ears, Don Rigoberto felt a new wave of admiration for his wife. How versatile and adaptable she could be! It was the first time in her life that Lucrecia was doing things like this—dressing like a man, visiting a tarts’ dive in a foreign country, going to a cheap hotel with a whore—and yet she did not show the slightest discomfort, unease, or annoyance. There she was, chatting so familiarly with the otolaryngological mulatta, as if they were equals who shared the same background and profession. They looked like two good friends gossiping during a break in their busy day. And how beautiful, how desirable she seemed! In order to savor the sight of his naked wife in the oily half-light, next to Estrella on the wretched bed with the blue spread, Don Rigoberto closed his eyes. She was lying on her side, her face resting on her left hand, in a state of abandon that highlighted the delicate spontaneity of her posture. Her skin looked much whiter in the dim light, her short hair blacker, the bush of pubic hair tinted with blue. And as he amorously followed the gentle meanders of her thighs and back, scaled her buttocks, breasts, and shoulders, Don Rigoberto began to forget his afflicted ears, his abused nose, as well as Estrella, the cheap little hotel where they had taken refuge, and Mexico City: Lucrecia’s body was colonizing his mind, displacing, eliminating every other image, consideration, or preoccupation.

  Rosaura-Lucrecia and Estrella did not seem to notice—or, perhaps, they attributed no importance to it—when he mechanically began to remove his tie, jacket, shirt, shoes, socks, trousers, and shorts, tossing them onto the cracked green linoleum. Or even when he knelt at the foot of the bed and started to run his hands along his wife’s legs and kiss them deferentially. They were involved in their confidences and gossip, indifferent to him, as if they did not see him, as if he were a phantom.

  I am, he thought, opening his eyes. His excitement remained, beating him about the legs without much conviction, without a shred of joy or decisiveness, like a rusted clapper striking an old bell made dissonant by time and routine in the little church with no parishioners.

  And then memory brought back the profound displeasure—the bad taste in his mouth, really—caused in him by the sycophantic ending, so abjectly subservient to principles of authority and the immorality of reasons of state, in that work by Calderón de la Barca: the soldier who initiated the uprising against King Basilio, thanks to which Prince Segismundo comes to occupy the Polish throne, is condemned by the new, ignoble, ungrateful king to rot away for the rest of his life in the same tower where Segismundo had suffered, with the argument that—his notebook reproduced the ghastly lines—“the traitor is not needed once the treason is complete.”

  A horrendous philosophy, a repugnant morality, he reflected, temporarily forgetting his beautiful naked wife, though he continued to caress her mechanically. The prince pardons Basilio and Clotaldo, his oppressors and torturers, and punishes the valiant anonymous soldier who incited the troops against the unjust ruler, freed Segismundo from his cave, and made him monarch because, more than anything else, it was necessary to defend obedience to established authority, to condemn the principle, the very notion, of rebellion against the sovereign. It was disgusting!

  Did a work poisoned by an inhuman doctrine so opposed to freedom deserve to occupy and nourish his dreams, to populate his desires? And yet there had to be some reason why, on this particular night, these phantoms had taken full, exclusive possession of his dreaming. Again he looked through his notebooks, searching for an explanation.

  Old Clotaldo called the pistol a “viper of metal,” and the disguised Rosaura asked herself “if sight does not suffer deceptions that fantasy creates/in the fainthearted light still left to day.” Don Rigoberto looked toward the sea. There, in the distance, on the line of the horizon, a fainthearted light announced the new day, the light that each morning violently destroyed the small world of illusion and shadows where he was happy (happy? No, where he was merely a little less unfortunate) and returned him to the prison routine he followed five days a week (shower, breakfast, office, lunch, office, dinner) with barely an opening for his inventions to seep through. A note in the margin—it said, “Lucrecia”—had an arrow pointing at some brief verses written on the page: “…joining/the costly finery of Diana, the armor/of Pallas.” The huntress and the warrior, combined in his beloved Lucrecia. Why not? But this evidently was not what had embedded the story of Prince Segismundo in the depths of his unconscious and materialized it in tonight’s fantasies. What, then?

  “It cannot be that so many things/are contained within a single dream,” the Prince had said in amazement. “You are an idiot,” replied Don Rigoberto. “A single dream can contain all of life.” It moved him that Segismundo, transported under the effects of the drug from his prison to the palace, and asked what, in his return to the world, had made the greatest impression on him, should reply: “Nothing has surprised me,/for all was foreseen; but if one thing/in the world were to amaze, it would be/the beauty of women.” And he hadn’t even seen Lucrecia, he thought. He could see her now, splendid, supernatural, flowing across that blue spread, delicately purring as the tickling lips of her amorous husband kissed her underarms. The amiable Estrella had moved away, ceding to Don Rigoberto her place next to Rosaura-Lucrecia, sitting at the corner of the bed previously occupied by Don Rigoberto when she had labored so enthusiastically over his ears and nose. Discreet, motionless, not wanting to distract or interrupt them, she observed with sympathetic curiosity as they embraced, entwined, and began to make love.

  What is life? Confusion.

  What is life? Illusion,

  a shadow, a fiction;

  its greatest goods are small,

  life is a dream, and all

  our dreams another dream.

  “It’s a lie,” he said aloud, slamming the desk in his study. Life was not a dream, dreams were a feeble lie, a fleeting deception that provided only temporary escape from frustration and solitude in order that we might better appreciate, with more painful bitterness, the beauty and substantiality of real life, the life we ate, touched, drank, the rich life so superior to the simulacrum indulged in by conjured desire and fantasy. Devastated by anguish—day had come, the light of dawn revealed gray cliffs, a leaden sea, fat-bellied clouds, crumbling brickwork, a leprous pavement—he clung desperately to Lucrecia-Rosaura’s body, using these last few seconds to achieve an impossible pleasure, with the grotesque foreboding that at any moment, perhaps at the moment of ecstasy, he would feel the impetuous hands of the mulatta landing on his ears.

  The Viper and the Lamprey

  Thinking of you, I have read The Perfect Wife by Fray Luis de Leon, and understand, given the idea of matrimony he preached, why this fine poet preferred abstinence and an Augustinian habit to the nuptial bed. And yet, in those pages of good prose abounding in unintentional humor, I found this quotation from the blessed Saint Basil that fits like a glove on the ivory hand of can you guess which exceptional woman, model wife, and sorely missed lover?

  The viper, an exceptionally fierce animal among serpents, diligently goes to wed the marine lamprey; having arrived, he whistles, as if signaling that he is there, thus calling her from the sea in order to engage her in conjugal embrace. The lamprey obeys, and with no fear couples with the venomous beast. What do I mean by this? What? That no matter how violent the husband, how savage his habits, the woman must endure, must not consent for any reason to be divided from him. Oh! He is a tyrant? But he is your husband! A drunkard? But the bonds of matrimony made you one with him. A harsh man, an unpleasant man! But your member, your principal member. And, so that the husband may also hear what he must: the viper, respectful of their coupling, sets aside his venom, and will you not abandon the inhuman cruelty of your nature in order to honor your marriage? This is from Basil.

  —Fray Luis de Leon, The Perfect Wife, Chapter III

  Conjugally embrace this viper, dearly beloved lamprey.

  Epilogue
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  A Happy Family

  “The picnic wasn’t so disastrous after all,” said Don Rigoberto with a broad smile. “And it taught us a lesson: there’s no place like home. Especially if no place is the countryside.”

  Doña Lucrecia and Fonchito applauded his witticism, and even Justiniana, who at that moment was bringing in the sandwiches—chicken, and avocado-with-egg-and-tomato—to which their lunch had been reduced because of the frustrated picnic, also burst into laughter.

  “Now, my dear, I know what it means to think positively,” Doña Lucrecia congratulated him. “And to have constructive attitudes in the face of adversity.”

  “And to make the best of a bad situation,” Fonchito said conclusively. “Bravo, Papá!”

  “The fact is that nothing and nobody can cloud my happiness today.” Don Rigoberto nodded, contemplating the sandwiches. “Certainly not a miserable picnic. Not even an atomic bomb could make a dent. Well, cheers.”

  With visible pleasure he drank some cold beer and took a bite of his chicken sandwich. The Chaclacayo sun had burned his forehead, face, and arms, which were reddened by its rays. He did seem very content, enjoying the improvised lunch. It had been his idea, the night before, for the entire family to have a Sunday picnic at Chaclacayo, to escape the fog and damp of Lima and enjoy good weather, in touch with nature, on the banks of the river. The idea surprised Doña Lucrecia, for she recalled the holy horror everything rural had always inspired in him, but she willingly agreed. Weren’t they beginning a second honeymoon? They would begin new habits too. That morning they left at nine—as planned—furnished with a good supply of drinks and a complete lunch, prepared by the cook, that included blancmange with crepes, Don Rigoberto’s favorite dessert.