The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Well, well, I think I have caught a bit of a chill after all,” Don Rigoberto interrupted, standing so abruptly that the napkin on his lap fell to the floor. “I’d better follow your advice and lie down, Lucrecia. I don’t want to get one of those awful colds of mine.”

  He spoke, not looking at his wife but only at his son, who, when he saw him on his feet, stopped speaking, an alarmed expression on his face, as if he were anxious to help. Don Rigoberto did not look at Lucrecia as he passed her on his way to the stairs, though he was consumed by curiosity to know if she was still livid, or bright red perhaps, with indignation, surprise, uncertainty, unease, asking herself, as he was, whether what the boy had said and done was part of some plan or the work of chance, scheming and labyrinthine, frustrating and mean-spirited, the enemy of happiness. He realized he was dragging his feet like a broken old man and stood erect. He climbed the stairs at a brisk pace, as if to prove (to whom?) that he was still a vigorous man in his prime.

  Removing only his shoes, he lay on the bed, face up, and closed his eyes. His body was on fire with fever. He saw a symphony of blue spots in the darkness behind his eyelids and thought he could hear the belligerent buzzing of the wasps he had heard during their failed picnic that morning. A short while later, as if he had taken a powerful barbiturate, he fell asleep. Or did he pass out? He dreamed he had mumps and that Fonchito, a boy with a grown man’s voice and specialist’s air, warned him, “Watch out, Papá! This is a filtering virus, and if it travels down to your balls they’ll get as big as two tennis balls and will have to be pulled out. Like wisdom-come-too-late teeth!” He awoke gasping for breath, bathed in sweat—Doña Lucrecia had put a blanket over him—and realized that night had fallen. It was pitch-black, there were no stars in the sky, the fog hid the lights along the Seawalk in Miraflores. The door to the bathroom opened, and in the flood of light that poured into the darkened room, Doña Lucrecia appeared in her robe, ready for bed.

  “Is he a monster?” Don Rigoberto asked in anguish. “Does he realize what he’s doing, what he’s saying? Does he do what he does knowingly, weighing the consequences? Is that possible? Or is he simply a mischievous boy whose mischief turns out to be monstrous without his intending it to?”

  His wife dropped onto the foot of the bed.

  “I ask myself that question every day, many times a day,” she said, sighing dejectedly. “I don’t think he knows the answer either. Do you feel better? You’ve slept a couple of hours. I fixed you a hot lemonade, there in the thermos. Shall I pour you a glass? Listen, speaking of that, I never meant to keep anything from you, or not tell you that Fonchito visited me at the Olivar. It just kept slipping my mind, these two days have been so busy.”

  “Of course,” Don Rigoberto said quickly, with a wave of his hand. “Let’s not talk about it, please.”

  He stood, and murmuring, “This is the first time I’ve fallen asleep when it wasn’t my bedtime,” he walked to his dressing room. He took off his clothes; in a robe and slippers he went into the bathroom to perform his usual meticulous ablutions before retiring. He felt depressed, bewildered, with a buzzing in his head that seemed to portend a bad flu. He began to run warm water in the tub and poured in half a bottle of salts. As the tub was filling he flossed his teeth, brushed them, and with a tweezers plucked the new-grown hairs in his ears. How long was it since he had abandoned the habit of devoting one day a week to the specialized hygiene of each organ, in addition to his daily bath? Since his separation from Lucrecia. A year, more or less. He would resume that salutary weekly routine: Monday, ears; Tuesday, nose; Wednesday, feet; Thursday, hands; Friday, mouth and teeth. Et cetera. Lying in the bath, he felt less demoralized. He tried to guess if Lucrecia was already under the sheets, what nightgown she had put on, could she be naked? and for moments at a time he managed to eclipse the ominous presence from his mind: the little house by the Olivar de San Isidro, a childish figure standing at the door, a slim finger ringing the bell. A decision had to be made about the boy, once and for all. But what decision? All of them seemed unsuitable or impossible. After getting out of the tub and drying himself, he rubbed his body with cologne from the Floris shop in London; a colleague and friend at Lloyd’s periodically sent him their soaps, shaving creams, deodorants, talcs, and perfumes from there. He put on clean silk pajamas and left his robe hanging in the dressing room.

  Doña Lucrecia was already in bed. She had turned off the lights in the room except for the lamp on her night table. Outside, the sea crashed against the cliffs of Barranco, and the wind howled in lugubrious lament. He felt his heart pounding as he slipped under the sheets, next to his wife. A gentle aroma of fresh herbs, of flowers wet with dew, of spring, entered his nostrils and reached his brain. Almost levitating with the tension he felt, he could detect his wife’s thigh just millimeters from his left leg. In the scant, indirect light he saw that she was wearing a pink silk nightgown with spaghetti straps and a lace edging, through which he could see her breasts. He sighed, and was transformed. Impetuous, liberating desire filled his body and seeped out of his pores. He felt dizzy, intoxicated by his wife’s perfume.

  And then, intuiting this, Doña Lucrecia stretched out her hand, turned off the small lamp, and in the same movement turned toward him and embraced him. A sigh escaped his lips as he felt Doña Lucrecia’s body, which he eagerly embraced, press against him, arms and legs enfolding him. He, in turn, kissed her neck, her hair, murmuring words of love. But when he began to strip and to remove his wife’s nightgown, Doña Lucrecia whispered words into his ear that had the effect of a cold shower.

  “He first came to see me six months ago. He showed up one afternoon, with no warning, at the house near the Olivar. And from then on he visited me constantly, after school, slipping away from the painting academy. Three, even four times a week. He had tea with me, stayed for an hour or two. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you yesterday, the day before yesterday. I was going to. I swear I was going to.”

  “I beg you, Lucrecia,” Don Rigoberto implored. “You don’t have to tell me anything. By what you hold most dear. I love you.”

  “I want to tell you. Now, right now.”

  She was still holding him, and when her husband searched for her mouth, she opened it and kissed him avidly. She helped him to take off his pajamas and remove her nightgown. But then, as he was caressing her and moving his lips along her hair, her ears, her cheeks, her neck, she spoke again: “I didn’t go to bed with him.”

  “I don’t want to know anything, my love. Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “Yes, now. I didn’t go to bed with him, but wait. Not because of any virtue in me, but because of him. If he had asked, if he had made the slightest suggestion, I would have done it. With the greatest of pleasure, Rigoberto. Many afternoons I felt sick because I hadn’t. You won’t hate me? I have to tell you the truth.”

  “I’ll never hate you. I love you. My darling, my dear wife.”

  But she interrupted with another confession: “And the truth is that if he doesn’t leave this house, if he goes on living with us, it will happen again. I’m sorry, Rigoberto. It’s better that you know. I have no defenses against that boy. I don’t want it to happen, I don’t want to make you suffer the way you suffered before. I know you suffered, my love. But there’s no reason for me to lie. He has a power, something, I don’t know what it is. If he gets the idea into his head again, I’ll do it. I won’t be able to stop. Even if it destroys our marriage, this time forever. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth, Rigoberto. The raw truth.”

  His wife had begun to cry. The last shreds of his excitement disappeared. He embraced her, deeply troubled.

  “Everything you’re telling me I know all too well,” he said softly, fondling her. “What can I do? Isn’t he my son? Where will I send him? To whom? He’s still very young. Don’t you think I’ve thought about it? When he’s older, of course. But let him finish school, at least. Doesn’t he say he wants to be a painter? Fine.
He’ll study art. In the United States. In Europe. Let him go to Vienna. Doesn’t he love Expressionism? He’ll go to the academy where Schiele studied, the city where Schiele lived and died. But how can I send him away now, at his age?”

  Doña Lucrecia pressed against him, entwined her legs with his, attempted to rest her feet on her husband’s.

  “I don’t want you to send him away,” she whispered. “I realize he’s only a boy. I never could tell if he knows how dangerous he is, the catastrophes he can provoke with his beauty, that sly, terrible intelligence of his. I’m telling you only because, because it’s true. With him, we’ll always be in danger, Rigoberto. If you don’t want it to happen again, then watch me, guard me, hover over me. I never want to go to bed with anybody but you, my dear husband. I love you so much, Rigoberto. You don’t know how I’ve needed you, how I’ve missed you.”

  “I know, my love, I know.”

  Don Rigoberto turned her onto her back and positioned himself over her. Doña Lucrecia too seemed to have regained her desire—there were no more tears on her cheeks, her body was hot, her breathing heavy—and as soon as she felt him on top of her she parted her legs and let him enter. Don Rigoberto closed his eyes and gave her a long, deep kiss, immersed in total surrender, happy once more. Fitting perfectly, touching and rubbing from head to foot, their perspiration mixing, they rocked slowly, rhythmically, prolonging their pleasure.

  “In fact, you’ve gone to bed with many people all year,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” she purred, as if speaking with her belly from some secret gland. “How many? Who? Where?”

  “A zoological lover who put you into bed with cats”—“How awful, that’s disgusting,” his wife protested weakly. “A love of your youth, a scientist who took you to Paris and Venice and who sang when he came…”

  “I want details,” Doña Lucrecia gasped, speaking with difficulty. “All of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me.”

  “That asshole Fito Cebolla almost raped you, and Justiniana too. You saved her from his raging lust. And ended up making love to her in this very bed.”

  “Justiniana? In this bed?” Doña Lucrecia laughed. “Life is so strange. Well, because of Fonchito, one afternoon I almost made love to Justiniana in San Isidro. The only time my body betrayed you, Rigoberto. But my imagination has done it a thousand times. As has yours.”

  “My imagination has never betrayed you. But tell me, tell me,” and her husband accelerated the rocking, the swaying.

  “I’ll tell you later, you go first. Who? How? Where?”

  “With a twin brother of mine whom I invented, a Corsican brother, in an orgy. With a castrated motorcyclist. You were a law professor in Virginia, and you corrupted a saintly jurist. You made love to the wife of the Algerian ambassador in a steambath. Your feet maddened a French fetishist of the eighteenth century. The night before our reconciliation, we were in a Mexican brothel with a mulatta who pulled off one of my ears in a single bite.”

  “Don’t make me laugh, you fool, not now,” Doña Lucrecia protested. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you stop me.”

  “I’m coming too. Let’s come together. I love you.”

  Moments later, when they were calm, he on his back, she curled at his side with her head on his shoulder, they resumed their conversation. Outside, along with the crash of the sea, the night was disturbed by the shrieks and howls of cats fighting or in heat, and, at intervals, the blare of car horns and the roar of motors.

  “I’m the happiest man in the world,” said Don Rigoberto.

  She nestled against him demurely. “Will it last? Will we make our happiness last?”

  “It can’t last,” he said gently. “All happiness is fleeting. An exception, a contrast. But we have to rekindle it from time to time, not allow it to go out. Blowing, blowing on the little flame.”

  “I’ll start exercising my lungs right now,” Doña Lucrecia exclaimed. “I’ll make them like bellows. And when it begins to go out, I’ll puff out a blast of wind that will make it grow bigger and bigger. Phhhhewwww! Phhhhewwww!”

  They lay silent, in each other’s arms. His wife was so still that Don Rigoberto thought she had fallen asleep. But her eyes were open.

  “I always knew we would reconcile,” he said into her ear. “I wanted to, tried to, for months. But I didn’t know where to begin. And then your letters began to arrive. You read my thoughts, my love. You’re better than I am.”

  His wife’s body stiffened. But it immediately relaxed again.

  “An ingenious idea, those letters,” he went on. “The anonymous letters, I mean. A baroque scheme, a brilliant strategy. To pretend I was sending you anonymous letters so you would have an excuse to write to me. You’re always surprising me, Lucrecia. I thought I knew you, but no. I never would have imagined your sweet head involved in machinations and tangled schemes. They turned out well, didn’t they? Lucky for me.”

  There was another long silence in which Don Rigoberto counted the beats of his wife’s heart, which sounded in counterpoint and at times were confused with his own.

  “I’d like us to take a trip,” he digressed a little while later, feeling that he was succumbing to sleep. “Somewhere far away, totally exotic. Where we don’t know anybody and nobody knows us. Iceland, for example. Maybe at the end of the year. I can take a week, ten days. Would you like that?”

  “I’d rather go to Vienna,” she said, stumbling over the words—because she was tired? feeling the languor that love always caused in her? “And see Egon Schiele’s work, visit the places where he worked. For all these months I haven’t done anything but hear about his life, his paintings, his drawings. And now my curiosity is piqued. Doesn’t Fonchito’s fascination with this painter surprise you? You’ve never liked Schiele very much, as far as I know. So why does he?”

  He shrugged. He didn’t have the slightest idea where that passion might have sprung from.

  “Well then, in December we’ll go to Vienna,” he said. “To listen to Mozart and see the Schieles. I never liked him, it’s true, but perhaps now I’ll start to. If you like him, I’ll like him. I don’t know where Fonchito’s enthusiasm comes from. Are you falling asleep? I’m keeping you up with my talking. Good night, love.”

  She murmured “Good night,” turned on her side, and pressed her back against her husband’s chest; he turned on his side as well, flexing his legs so that she seemed to be sitting on his knees. This is how they had slept for the ten years before their separation. And how they had slept since the day before yesterday. Don Rigoberto passed an arm over Lucrecia’s shoulder and rested one hand on her breast, clasping her waist with the other.

  The cats in the vicinity had stopped their fighting, or their lovemaking. The last horn and raucous motor had long since fallen silent. Warm, and warmed by the nearness of the beloved body so close to his, Don Rigoberto had the sensation that he was floating, gliding, moved by a pleasant inertia through tranquil, delicate waters, or, perhaps, through deep, empty space on his way to the icy stars. How many more days or hours would it last without shattering, this sensation of plenitude, of harmonious calm, of equilibrium with life? As if responding to his silent question, he heard Doña Lucrecia: “How many anonymous letters did you receive, Rigoberto?”

  “Ten,” he replied with a start. “I thought you were asleep. Why do you ask?”

  “I received ten from you, too,” she said, not moving. “That’s called love by symmetry, I guess.”

  Now it was he who tensed. “Ten letters from me? I never wrote to you, not once. Not anonymous letters, or signed ones, either.”

  “I know,” she said, sighing deeply. “You’re the one who doesn’t know. You’re the one whose head is in the clouds. Now do you understand? I didn’t send you any anonymous letters either. Only one letter. But I’ll bet that one, the only genuine one, never reached you.”

  Two, three, five seconds passed without his speaking or moving. The only sound cam
e from the sea, but it seemed to Don Rigoberto that the night had filled with furious tomcats and she-cats in heat.

  “You’re not joking, are you?” he said at last, knowing very well that Doña Lucrecia had spoken with absolute seriousness.

  She did not answer. She remained as still and silent as he, for another long while. What a short time it had lasted, how brief that overwhelming happiness. There it was again, harsh and cruel, Rigoberto, real life.

  “If you can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep,” he finally proposed, “maybe we could try to straighten this out, the way other people count sheep. We’d better do it now, once and for all. If you agree, if you want to. Because if you’d rather forget it, we’ll forget it. We won’t talk about those letters again.”

  “You know very well we’ll never be able to forget them, Rigoberto,” his wife declared, with a trace of weariness. “Let’s do now what you and I both know we’ll eventually do anyway.”

  “All right, then,” he said, sitting up. “We’ll read them.”

  The temperature had dropped, and before they went to the study they put on their robes. Doña Lucrecia brought the thermos of hot lemonade for her husband’s supposed cold. Before showing one another their respective letters, they drank some warm lemonade from the same glass. Don Rigoberto had kept his anonymous letters in the last of his notebooks, which still had blank pages free of commentaries and annotations; Doña Lucrecia had hers in a portfolio, tied with a thin purple ribbon. They found that the envelopes were identical as well as the paper, the kind of envelopes and paper that sold for four reales in little Chinese grocery stores. But the writing was different. And, of course, the letter from Doña Lucrecia, the only authentic one, was not among them.