In Praise of the Stepmother

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  From that night on, she was certain that the clandestine meetings with the boy, however obscure and complicated, however difficult to explain, enriched her marital relation, taking it by surprise and thus giving it a fresh start. But what kind of morality is this, Lucrecia? she asked herself in astonishment. How is it possible that you’ve changed this way, at your age, overnight? She couldn’t understand it, and made no attempt to do so. She preferred to bow to this contradictory situation, in which her acts challenged and violated her principles as she pursued that intense, dangerous rapture that happiness had become for her. One morning, on opening her eyes, the phrase “I have won sovereignty” came to her. She felt fortunate and emancipated, but could not have said what it was that she had been freed from.

  Perhaps I don’t have the feeling I’m doing something bad because Fonchito doesn’t have that feeling either, she thought, stroking the child’s body with her fingertips. To him, it’s a game, a mischievous prank. And that’s all there is between us; nothing more. He’s not my lover. How could he be, at his age? What was he, then? Her little cupid, she told herself. Her spintria. The child whom Renaissance painters added to boudoir scenes so that, by contrast to their aura of purity, the love bout depicted would be the more ardent. Thanks to you, Rigoberto and I love and delight each other all the more, she thought, kissing him ever so lightly on the neck.

  “I could explain to you why that painting is a portrait of you—even though it makes me feel funny all over,” the youngster murmured, his head still buried in the pillows. “Would you like me to explain it to you, stepmother?”

  “Oh, yes, please do.” Doña Lucrecia fervently examined the sinuous little veins showing here and there just under his skin, like blue rivulets. “How can a painting in which there are no discernible figures, only geometric forms and colors, be my portrait?”

  The boy raised his head, with a roguish look on his face.

  “Just think about it and you’ll see. Remember what the painting looks like and what you look like. I can’t believe you won’t tumble to the answer right away. It’s as easy as pie! Guess what it is and I’ll give you a reward.”

  “Was it only this morning that you noticed that that painting was a portrait of me?” Doña Lucrecia asked, more and more intrigued.

  “You’re getting warmer and warmer,” the boy urged her on. “If you keep on the way you’re going, you’re bound to catch on to the answer. Oh, shame on you, stepmother!”

  He let out another peal of laughter and hid himself between the sheets again. A little bird had perched on the windowsill and had begun peeping. It was a strident, jubilant sound that speared the morning and seemed to be celebrating the world, life. You’re right to be happy, Doña Lucrecia thought. It’s a beautiful world, worth living in. Peep, little bird, peep.

  “So then, it’s your secret portrait,” Alfonsito murmured, drawing out each word and leaving mysterious pauses, seeking to create a theatrical effect. “What nobody knows or sees about you. Only me. And, oh yes, my papa, of course. If you don’t guess now, you never will, stepmother.”

  He stuck his tongue out at her and made a face as he observed her with that liquid blue gaze beneath whose innocent crystal-clear surface Doña Lucrecia sometimes seemed to divine something perverse, like those tentacled creatures that dwell in the depths of ocean paradises. Her cheeks burned. Was Fonchito really hinting at what she had just intuitively sensed? Or, rather, did the youngster understand the meaning of what he was hinting at? Only halfway, doubtless, in a vague, instinctive way, beyond his power of reason. Was childhood, then, that amalgam of vice and virtue, of sanctity and sin? She tried to remember whether she, like Fonchito, had been, at some time long before, at once pure and filthy, but it was a memory beyond all recall. She rested her cheek once more against the child’s tawny back and envied him. Oh, if only a person could always act with that half-conscious animal awareness with which he caressed her and made love to her, judging neither her nor himself! I hope you’re spared suffering when you grow up, sweetie, she silently wished him.

  “I think I’ve guessed,” she said, after a moment. “But I don’t dare tell you the answer, because, as it happens it’s something dirty, Alfonsito.”

  “Of course it is,” the youngster agreed, abashed. His cheeks were flaming red again. “But even if it’s dirty, it’s the truth, stepmother. That’s how you are, too; it’s not my fault. But what does it matter, since nobody will ever find out. Isn’t that so?” And, without transition, in one of those unexpected changes of tone and subject in which he appeared all of a sudden to ascend or descend many steps on the staircase of age, he added: “Isn’t it getting past time to go to the airport to pick up my papa? He’ll feel so bad if we’re not there to meet him.”

  What was happening between them had not changed in the slightest—as far as she could see, at any rate—Alfonso’s relationship to Don Rigoberto; it seemed to Doña Lucrecia that the boy loved his father just as much and even more perhaps than before, to judge from the proofs of affection he offered him. Nor did he appear to experience in his father’s presence the least uneasiness or give the least sign of a troubled conscience. “Things can’t be this simple, nor everything turn out this well,” she said to herself. And yet, thus far, they were just that simple, and everything was turning out exactly right. How much longer would this fantasy of perfect harmony last? She told herself once more that if she went about things intelligently and cautiously, nothing would intervene to shatter the dream-come-true that life had turned out to be for her. She was certain, moreover, that if this complicated situation went on, Don Rigoberto would be the fortunate beneficiary of her happiness. But, as always when she thought about this, a presentiment cast its shadow over the Utopia: things turn out this way only in novels and in the movies, woman. Be realistic: sooner or later, the whole thing will end badly. Reality is never as perfect as fiction, Lucrecia.

  “No, we still have time enough, my love. It’s more than two hours still before the plane from Piura is due in. Provided it’s on schedule.”

  “Well then, I’m going to sleep for a while. I feel so lazy.” The youngster yawned. Leaning to one side, he sought the heat of Doña Lucrecia’s body and lay his head on her shoulder. A moment later, he purred in a muffled voice: “Do you think if I get highest honors over everyone at the end of the school year, my papa will buy me the motorcycle I asked him for?”

  “Yes, he’ll buy it for you,” she answered, hugging him gently, cooing to him as to a newborn babe. “If he doesn’t, don’t worry. I’ll buy it for you.”

  As Fonchito slept, breathing slowly—she could feel, like echoes in her body, his symmetrical heartbeats—Doña Lucrecia, immersed in a peaceful drowsiness, stayed still so as not to awaken him. Half dissolved in dreams, her mind wandered amid a parade of images, but every so often one of them swam into focus in her consciousness, surrounded by a suggestive halo: the painting in the living room. What the boy had told her worried her a little and filled her with a mysterious malaise, for in that childish fantasy were hints of unsuspected depths and a morbid acuteness of insight.

  Later, after getting up and eating breakfast, while Alfonsito took a shower, she went down to the living room and stood contemplating the Szyszlo for a long time. It was as if she had never seen it before, as if the painting, like a serpent or a butterfly, had changed appearance and nature. That little boy is something to be taken seriously, she thought, troubled. What other surprises might lie hidden in that little head of a Hellenic demigod? That night, after picking Don Rigoberto up at the airport and listening to his account of the trip, they opened the presents he had brought back for her and the boy (as he did on every trip), and told him how pleased they were with them: cream custard, whistles, and two finely woven straw hats from Catacaos. Then the three of them had dinner together, like a happy family.

  The couple retired to their bedroom at an early hour. Don Rigoberto’s ablutions were briefer than usual. On joining each other in bed onc
e more, husband and wife embraced passionately, as after a prolonged separation (in reality, just three days and two nights). That was how it had always been, ever since they’d been married. But after the initial caracoles in the darkness, when, faithful to the nightly liturgy, Don Rigoberto expectantly murmured: “Aren’t you going to ask me who I am?” he heard this time an answer that broke the tacit pact: “No. You ask me, instead.” There was an astonished pause, like a freeze frame in a film. But a few seconds later Don Rigoberto, a respecter of ritual, caught on and inquired eagerly: “Who, then, are you, darling?” “The woman in the painting in the living room, the abstract painting,” she replied. There was another pause, a little laugh, half annoyed and half disappointed, a long electric silence. “This is no time to…” he started to say in a threatening voice. “I’m not joking,” Doña Lucrecia interrupted him, closing his mouth with her lips. “That’s who I am and I don’t know why you haven’t realized it before.” “Help me, my love,” he said, perking up, coming to life again, moving. “Explain to me. I want to understand.” She explained and he understood.

  Much later, as, after talking and laughing together, they prepared to take their rest, exhausted and happy, Don Rigoberto kissed his wife’s hand with deep emotion:

  “How much you’ve changed, Lucrecia. Not only do I love you with all my heart and soul now. I also admire you. I’m certain I have a great deal to learn from you still.”

  “At forty, people learn lots of things,” she said tersely, caressing him. “Sometimes, Rigoberto, now for instance, it seems to me that I’m being born again. And that I’ll never die.”

  Was that what sovereignty was?

  Twelve.

  Labyrinth of Love

  At first, you will not see me or hear me, but you must be patient and keep looking. With perseverance and without preconceptions, freely and with desire, look. With your imagination unleashed and your penis ready and willing—preferably erect—look. One enters there as the novice nun enters the cloister or the lover the cavern of his beloved: resolutely, without petty calculations, giving everything, demanding nothing, and in one’s soul the certainty that it is forever. Only on that condition, very gradually, the surface of dark purples and violets will begin to move, to become iridescent, to take on meaning and reveal itself to be what it in truth is, a labyrinth of love.

  The geometrical figure in the middle band, at the exact center of the painting, that flat silhouette of a three-legged pachyderm, is an altar, a tabernacle, or if your mind is allergic to religious symbolism, a stage set. An exciting ceremony, with delightful and cruel reverberations, has just taken place, and what you see are its vestiges and its consequences. I know this because I have been the fortunate victim; the inspiration, the actress as well. Those reddish patches on the feet of the diluvial form are my blood and your sperm flowing forth and coagulating. Yes, my treasure, what is lying on the ceremonial stone (or, if you prefer, the pre-Hispanic stage prop), that viscous creature with mauve wounds and delicate membranes, black hollows and glands that discharge gray pus, is myself. Understand me: myself, seen from inside and from below, when you calcine me and express me. Myself, erupting and overflowing beneath your attentive libertine gaze of a male who has officiated with competence and is now contemplating and philosophizing.

  Fernando de Szyszlo. Road to Mendieta 10 (1977), acrylic on canvas, private collection

  Because you are there too, dearest. Looking at me as though autopsying me, eyes that look in order to see and the alert mind of an alchemist who exhaustively studies the phosphorescent formulas of pleasure. The one on the left, standing erect in the compartment with the dark brown glints, the one with the Saracen crescents on his head, draped in a mantle of live quills transmuted into a totem, the one with the spurs and the bright red feathers, the one with his back to me who is observing me: who could it be but you? You have just sat up and turned yourself into a curious onlooker. An instant ago you were blind and on your knees between my thighs, kindling my fires like a groveling, diligent servant. Now you are taking your pleasure watching me take mine and reflecting. Now you know me for what I am. Now you would like to dissolve me in a theory.

  Are we without shame? We are whole and free, rather, and as earthly as we can possibly be. They have removed our epidermises and melted our bones, bared our viscera and our cartilage, exposed to the light everything that during Mass or during amorous rites we celebrated together, grew, sweated, and excreted. They have left us without secrets, my love. That woman is what I am, slave and master, your offering. Slit open like a turtledove by love’s knife. I: cracked apart and pulsing. I: slow masturbation. I: flow of musk. I: labyrinth and sensation. I: magic ovary, semen, blood, and morning dew. That is my face for you, at the hour of the senses. I am that when, for you, I shed my everyday skin and my feast-day one. That may perhaps be my soul. Yours.

  Time has been suspended, naturally. There we shall not grow old or die. Illuminated by a moon that our intoxication has tripled, we will take our pleasure in that half twilight that already is raping the night. The real moon is the one in the center, as deep black as a raven’s wing; the ones that escort it, the color of cloudy wine, a fiction.

  Altruistic sentiments, metaphysics and history, neutral reasoning, good intentions and charitable deeds, solidarity with the species, civic idealism, sympathy toward one’s fellow have also been done away with; all humans who are not you and me have been blotted out. Everything that might have distracted us or impoverished us at the hour of supreme egoism that the hour of love is has disappeared. Here, as is true as well of the monster and the god, nothing restrains or inhibits us.

  This triadic abode—three feet, three moons, three spaces, three little windows, and three dominant colors—is the homeland of pure instinct and of the imagination that serves it, just as your serpentine tongue and your sweet saliva have both served me and used me. We have lost name and surname, face and hair, our air of respectability and our civil rights. But we have gained the power of magic, mystery, and bodily enjoyment. We were a woman and a man and now we are ejaculation, orgasm, and a fixed idea. We have become sacred and obsessive.

  Our knowledge of each other is total. You are I and you, and you and I am you. Something as perfect and simple as a soaring swallow or the law of gravitation. Vice-ridden perversity—to put it in words in which we do not believe, words we both hold in contempt—is represented by those three exhibitionistic spectators in the upper left-hand corner. They are our eyes, the contemplation that we so eagerly practice—as you are now doing—the essential stripping bare that each one demands of the other in the love feast, and that fusion which can express itself adequately only by traumatizing syntax: I give yourself to me, you masturbate myself for you, let’s you and me suck our selves.

  Now leave off looking. Now close your eyes. Now, without opening them, look at me and look at yourself the way we were shown in that picture that so many look at and so few see. You now know that, even before we knew each other, loved each other, and married, someone, brush in hand, anticipated what horrendous glory we would be changed into by the happiness we learned to invent, each and every day and night of the morrow.

  Thirteen.

  Bad Words

  “Isn’t stepmother here?” Fonchito asked, disappointed.

  “She’ll be back shortly,” Don Rigoberto answered, hurriedly clapping shut Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Nude, lying open on his lap. With a brusque start of surprise, he returned to Lima, to his house, to his study, from the damp female vapors of Ingres’s crowded Turkish Bath, in which he had been immersed. “She’s gone off to play bridge with her lady friends. Come in, come in, Fonchito. Let’s talk for a while.”

  The boy accepted the invitation with a nod of his head, his face wreathed in smiles. He came into the room and sat down on the edge of the big olive-colored leather easy chair, beneath the twenty-three hardbound volumes of the “Maîtres de l’amour” series, edited, with a preface, by Guillaume Apollinaire.

/>   “Tell me how things are going at Santa María,” his father encouraged him, as, hiding the book from sight behind his back, he crossed the room to replace it in the locked case where he kept his erotic treasures. “Are you keeping up with your studies all right? Are you having any trouble with English?”

  He was doing very well and the teachers were very nice, Papa. He understood everything and had long conversations in English with Father Mackey; he was sure he’d be first in his class this year. He might even win the school prize for excellence.

  Don Rigoberto beamed with satisfaction. Really, the boy brought him nothing but happiness. A model son; a good student, obedient, affectionate. He’d been lucky with him.

  “Would you like a Coca-Cola?” he asked him. He had just poured himself two fingers of whiskey and was getting out ice. He handed Alfonso his glass and sat down beside him. “I must tell you something, son. I am very pleased with you and you can count on getting the motorcycle you asked me for. It’ll be yours next week.”

  The youngster’s eyes lighted up. He broke into a radiant smile.