In Praise of the Stepmother

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Thanks, Papa dear!” He put his arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “The motorcycle I wanted so badly! That’s super, Papa!”

  Don Rigoberto disentangled himself, laughing. He smoothed the boy’s touseled hair, in a discreetly affectionate gesture.

  “You have Lucrecia to thank for it,” he added. “She insisted that I buy you your motorcycle right away, without waiting till exams were over.”

  “I knew it!” the boy exclaimed. “She’s so good to me. Even better, I think, than my mama was.”

  “Your stepmother loves you a whole lot, my boy.”

  “And I love her lots,” the youngster declared immediately, in fervent tones. “Why wouldn’t I love her if she’s the best stepmother in the world!”

  Don Rigoberto took a sip of his whiskey and savored the taste of it: an agreeable fire ran down his tongue, his throat, and was now descending to his ribs. “Most pleasant lava,” he extemporized. Who had this pretty son of his inherited his looks from? His face seemed to be surrounded by a radiant halo and was brimming over with freshness and wholesomeness. Not from him, surely. Nor from his mother, since Eloísa, though attractive and charming, had never had features as delicate as that, or such bright eyes and such transparent skin, or those curly locks of purest gold. A cherub, an adorable child, an archangel in a First Communion holy picture. It would be better for him if some little thing marred his perfect good looks just a bit when he grew up: women don’t like doll-faced men.

  “You don’t know how happy it makes me that you get along so well with Lucrecia,” he added after a moment. “I can tell you now that it was something that scared me a whole lot when we got married. That the two of you wouldn’t be congenial, that you wouldn’t accept her. That would have been most unfortunate for the three of us. Lucrecia, too, was very much afraid. Now, when I see how well you get along together, those fears make me laugh. In fact, the two of you love each other so much that, every so often, I’m downright jealous, since it seems to me that your stepmother loves you more than she does me and that you, too, are fonder of her than you are of your father.”

  Alfonso burst out laughing, clapping his hands, and Don Rigoberto imitated him, amused at his son’s explosion of high spirits. A cat meowed somewhere in the distance. A car went past on the street with the radio turned up full blast, and for a few seconds they heard the trumpets and maracas of a song with a tropical beat. Then came the voice of Justiniana, humming in the pantry as she did a load of laundry in the washer.

  “What does orgasm mean, Papa?” the boy suddenly asked.

  Don Rigoberto was overtaken by a fit of coughing. He cleared his throat as he reflected: What should he answer? He did his best to assume a natural expression and managed not to smile.

  “Well, it’s not a bad word,” he explained warily. “Certainly not. It has to do with sex life, with sensual enjoyment. It might be said, perhaps, that it is the peak of physical pleasure. Something that not only humans experience but many species of animals as well. They’ll tell you about it in biology class, I’m sure. But, above all, don’t get the idea that it’s a dirty word. Where did you happen to come across it, my boy?”

  “I heard my stepmother say it,” Fonchito said. With an impish look, he raised a finger to his lips, enjoining him to secrecy. “I pretended I knew what it was. Don’t let on to her that you explained to me what it was, Papa.”

  “No, I won’t tell her,” Don Rigoberto murmured. He took another sip of whiskey and, intrigued, looked closely at Alfonso. What was hiding there in that rosy-faced little head, behind that unfurrowed brow? Heaven only knew. Didn’t they say that the soul of a child was a bottomless well? He thought: I mustn’t ask one question more. He thought: I must change the subject. But morbid curiosity or the instinctive attraction of danger got the better of him, and, pretending indifference, he asked: “You heard that word you mentioned from your stepmother? Are you sure?”

  The child nodded several times, with the same gay or roguish expression, or both at once. His cheeks were flushed and mischief twinkled in his eyes.

  “She told me she had had a really splendid orgasm,” he explained, in the eternally melodious voice of a nightingale. This time, Don Rigoberto’s whiskey slipped out of his hands; numb with surprise, he saw the glass roll onto the lead-colored figures in the carpet of his study. The boy immediately bent down to pick it up. He handed it back to him, murmuring: “A good thing it was almost empty. Can I get you another, Papa? I know just how you like it—I’ve seen how my stepmother does it.”

  Don Rigoberto shook his head. Had he heard rightly? Yes, of course: that was what his big ears were for. To hear things properly. His brain had begun to crackle like a bonfire. This conversation had gone too far and it must be cut off once and for all, if something imponderable and extremely grave were not to occur. For an instant, he had the vision of a beautiful house of cards collapsing. His mind was totally clear as to what he ought to do. Enough of this: let’s talk of something else. But this time, too, the siren song of the depths was more powerful than his reason and his good sense.

  “What figment of your imagination is this, Foncho?” He spoke very slowly, but even so, his voice trembled. “How can you have heard your stepmother say such a thing? That can’t be, my son.”

  The boy protested, vexed, with one hand upraised. “Oh, yes, it can, Papa. I certainly did hear her say it. And what’s more, I was the one she said it to. Just yesterday afternoon. I give you my word. Why would I lie? Have I ever lied to you?”

  “No, no, you’re right. You always tell the truth.”

  He was unable to control the malaise that had come over him like a fever. The uneasiness was a bumbling blowfly that kept bumping into his face, his arms, and he could neither swat it dead nor chase it away. He got to his feet and, walking slowly, went to fix himself another drink, something quite unlike him, since he never had more than one whiskey before dinner. When he returned to his chair, his eyes met Fonchito’s blue-green ones: they were following his evolutions about the study with their usual gentle gaze. They smiled at him, and making an effort, he returned the smile.

  “Ahem, ahem,” Don Rigoberto cleared his throat, after a few seconds of ominous silence. He did not know what to say. Could it be possible that Lucrecia had shared confidences of that sort with him, that she had talked to the child about what they did at night? Of course not, what nonsense. They were products of Fonchito’s imagination, something quite typical of his age: he was discovering wickedness, his sexual curiosity was surfacing, his awakening libido was prompting him to fantasize so as to bring conversations around to the fascinating taboo. Best to forget all that and dissolve the bad moment in trivial concerns.

  “Don’t you have homework for tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I’ve already done it,” the boy answered. “I had only one assignment, Papa. Free composition.”

  “Ah, I see. And what subject did you choose to write about?” Don Rigoberto persisted.

  The boy’s face flushed once again with innocent joy and Don Rigoberto suddenly felt a deerlike fear. What was happening? What was going to happen?

  “Well, about her, Papa, about who she was going to turn out to be,” Fonchito said, clapping his hands. “I called it ‘In Praise of the Stepmother.’ What do you think of that for a title?”

  “Very good. Just fine,” Don Rigoberto replied. And almost without thinking, with a hearty laugh that rang false, he added: “It sounds like the title of a little erotic novel.”

  “What does erotic mean?” the child asked gravely.

  “Having to do with physical love,” Don Rigoberto enlightened him. He was taking one sip of his drink after another, without noticing. “Certain words such as that take on their full meaning only with the passage of time, thanks to experience, something far more important than definitions. All that will come about little by little; there is no reason for you to be in a hurry, Fonchito.”

  “Whatever you say, Papa,” the child agree
d, blinking: his lashes were enormous and cast an iridescent violet-tinged shadow on his pupils.

  “Do you know what? I’d like to read that ‘Praise of the Stepmother.’ May I?”

  “Of course, Papa dear,” the child said enthusiastically. He leapt to his feet and went off at a run. “That way, if there’s a mistake anywhere, you’ll correct it for me.”

  In the few minutes that it took Fonchito to return, Don Rigoberto felt his malaise grow. Too much whiskey perhaps? No, what a thought. Did that pressure on his temples mean that he was becoming ill? At the office, there were several people down with the flu. No, that wasn’t it. Well, then, what was it? He remembered the verse from Faust that had moved him so deeply when he was a boy: “I love him who desires the impossible.” He would have liked that to be his motto in life, and, in a certain way, though secretly, he harbored the feeling that he had attained that ideal. Why, then, did he now have the distressing premonition that an abyss was opening at his feet? What sort of danger threatened? How? Where? He thought: It is absolutely impossible that Fonchito could have heard Lucrecia say: “I had a splendid orgasm.” An irresistible fit of laughter came over him and he laughed, though joylessly, with a painful grin that the glass of the bookcase full of erotica beamed back at him. There Alfonso was, with a notebook in his hand. He handed it to his father without a word, looking him straight in the eye, with that pure-blue gaze of his, so calm and candid that, as Lucrecia said, “it made people feel dirty.”

  Don Rigoberto put on his glasses and turned on the floor lamp. He began to read aloud the clear letters so carefully traced in black ink, but in the middle of the first sentence he fell silent. He went on reading to himself, moving his lips slightly and blinking frequently. Soon his lips stopped moving. They slowly gaped open, sagging at the corners, giving his entire face a dull, stupid expression. A little thread of saliva drooped from between his teeth and stained the lapels of his suit coat, though he did not appear to notice, since he did not wipe it away. His eyes moved from left to right, now rapidly, now slowly, and at times they went back from right to left, as if they had not understood correctly or as if they were unable to accept that what they had read was really written there on the page. Not once, as the slow, endless reading proceeded, did Don Rigoberto’s eyes leave the notebook to look at the child, who, doubtless, was still there in the same place, keeping a close watch on his reactions, waiting for him to finish reading and say and do what he ought to say and do. What ought he to say? What ought he to do? Don Rigoberto could feel that his hands were soaking wet. A few drops of sweat slid down his forehead onto the notebook and made the ink spread in formless blots. Swallowing hard, he managed to come up with the thought: Loving the impossible has a price that must be paid sooner or later.

  He made a supreme effort, closed the notebook, and looked up. Yes, there Fonchito was, watching him with his beautiful, beatific face. That’s what Lucifer must have looked like, he thought as he raised the empty glass to his mouth to take a swallow. From the tinkle of the crystal against his teeth he realized how badly his hand was trembling.

  “What does this mean, Alfonso?” he blurted. His back teeth, his tongue, his jaw hurt. He did not recognize his own voice.

  “What, Papa?”

  The boy looked at him as though he did not understand what had come over him.

  “What’s the meaning of these…fantasies?” he stammered, from amid the terrible confusion that was torturing his soul. “Have you gone mad, child? How could you have made up such filthy stories?”

  He fell silent because he did not know what else to say and felt disgusted and completely taken aback by what he had said. The radiance of the child’s face began to slowly fade as a sad expression came over it. He contemplated him, not understanding, with a vague look of pain in his eyes, and bewilderment as well, but not a shadow of fear.

  Finally, after a few seconds, Don Rigoberto heard him say what, amid the horror that froze his heart, he was waiting for him to say. “What do you mean, stories I made up, Papa? When everything I tell about is true, when it all happened just the way I say.”

  At that moment, so perfectly synchronized that he imagined it to have been determined by fate or by the gods, Don Rigoberto heard the front door open and Lucrecia’s melodious voice bid the butler good evening. He managed to come up with the thought that the splendid, original nocturnal world of dreams and desires given free rein that he had so carefully erected had just burst like a soap bubble. And, all of a sudden, his ruined fantasy desired, desperately, to be transmuted: he was a solitary being, chaste, freed of appetites, safe from all the demons of the flesh and sex. Yes, yes, that was how he was. The anchorite, the hermit, the monk, the angel, the archangel who blows the celestial trumpet and descends to the garden to bring the glad tidings to pure and pious maidens.

  “Hello there, my big cavalier and my little one!” Doña Lucrecia sang out from the doorway of the study.

  Her snow-white hand let loose flying kisses for father and son.

  Fourteen.

  The Rosy Youth

  The midday heat made me drowsy and I did not sense his arrival. But I opened my eyes and there he was, at my feet, in a rose-colored light. Was he really there? Yes, I did not dream him. He must have come in through the back door, which my parents had left open, or perhaps leapt over the garden wall, one that any lad can easily jump over.

  Who was he? I don’t know, but he was there, I’m certain, in this very corridor, kneeling at my feet. I saw him and heard him. He has just left. Or, should I say, vanished in thin air? Yes: kneeling at my feet. I don’t know why he knelt, but he didn’t do it to mock me. From the beginning he treated me so gently and so reverently and gave proof of such respect and humbleness toward me that the anxiety that overtook me on seeing an outsider so close at hand evaporated like dew in sunlight. How is it possible that I felt no apprehension on finding myself alone with a stranger? With someone who, moreover, entered the garden of my house I know not how. I don’t understand it. But all the time that the young man was here, speaking to me as one speaks to an important woman, not the modest young girl that I am, I felt more safeguarded than when my parents are at my side, or when I am in the Temple, on the Sabbath.

  How handsome he was! I ought not to use the word, but in all truth I had never seen such a harmonious and gentle being, so seemly, with such a subtle voice. I could scarcely look at him; each time my eyes alighted on his delicate cheeks, his candid brow, or the long lashes of his great eyes full of goodness and wisdom, I felt a warm dawn on my face. Can this be, if magnified throughout the body, what young girls feel when they fall in love? That warmth that does not come from outside but from within the body, from the depths of the heart? My girlfriends in the village often talk of this, I know, but when I draw near they fall silent, for they know that I am very shy and that certain subjects—this one, love, for instance—embarrass me so much that my face turns scarlet and I begin to stammer. Is it wrong to be that way? Esther says that, seeing how timid and bashful I am, I will never know what love is. And Deborah keeps trying to encourage me: “You have to be bolder, or your life will be a sad one.”

  Fra Angelico. The Annunciation (c. 1437), fresco, Monastery of San Marco, Florence

  But the rosy youth said that I am the chosen one, that, among all women, they have singled me out. Who? What for? Why? What good or bad thing have I done for someone to favor me? I know very well how unnoteworthy I am. In the village there are girls much more comely and hardworking, stronger, more intelligent, more courageous. Why would I be chosen, then? Because I get along well with everyone? Because of the affection with which I milk our little goat and the happiness I find in doing simple everyday tasks, such as cleaning the house, watering the garden, and preparing my parents’ food? I do not believe I have any other merits than those, if that is what they are, and not defects. Deborah once said to me: “You have no aspirations, Mary.” Perhaps that is true. What can I do if that is the way I was born: I like
life and the world seems beautiful to me just as it is. Perhaps that’s why they say I’m simple. Doubtless I am, since I have always avoided complications. But I do have certain ardent desires. I’d like it if my little nanny goat never died, for example. When she licks my hand, the thought comes to me that she will die one day, and pain grips my heart. It is not good to suffer. I would also like it if no one suffered.

  The young man said absurd things, but in such a melodious and sincere way that I didn’t dare laugh. That they would bless me and bless the fruit of my womb. That is what he said. Might he be a magician? Could he have been using those words as an incantation for or against something or someone? I couldn’t think how to ask him such a question. At those words of his, all I could do was stammer what I answer when my elders teach me a lesson or reprimand me: “Very well, I shall do as I ought, sire.” And I covered my belly with my hands in fright. Can “fruit of my womb” mean that I will have a child? How happy that would make me. I’d like it to be a son as sweet and mysterious as the young man who came to see me.

  I don’t know whether I should be happy or sad because of that visit. I have a presentiment that, after it, my life will change. In what way? Will it be to my good fortune or to my misfortune? Why, amid the joy I feel when I remember the sweet words of that young man, do I suddenly feel afraid, as if the earth were suddenly about to open and I were to see at my feet an abyss bristling with fearful monsters trying to force me to leap?

  He said very nice things, which sounded most pleasing, but difficult to understand. “Extraordinary destiny, supernatural destiny,” among others. What was he referring to? My nature, to the contrary, predisposes me to the ordinary, the everyday. Everything that draws attention or is out of place, any gesture or act that violates tradition or custom, stops me short and disconcerts me. When someone goes too far and makes a fool of himself in my presence, my face flames and I feel for him. I am comfortable only when others do not note my presence. “Mary is so unobtrusive she seems invisible,” Rachel, the girl next door, teases me. I like it when she says that. It’s true: to me, to pass unnoticed is to be happy.