In Praise of the Stepmother

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  But that does not mean that I have no dreams and lack feelings. It’s just that I have never felt attracted by the extraordinary. My girlfriends leave me openmouthed with astonishment when I hear them: they would like to travel, to have many servants, to marry a king. Such fantasies frighten me. What would I do in other lands, among people different from mine, hearing other languages? And what a lamentable queen I would make, since I lose my voice and my hands tremble when someone I do not know is listening to me. What I ask of life is an upright husband, healthy children, and a peaceful existence, without hunger and without fear. What did that young man mean by “extraordinary, supernatural destiny”? My shyness kept me from answering him as I should have: “I am not prepared for that, I’m not the one you are speaking of. Go visit beautiful Deborah instead, or Judith, who is so determined, or go to the house of Rachel, the intelligent one. How can you announce to me that I shall be queen of men? How can you say that they will pray to me in all tongues and that my name will traverse the centuries as stars wheel across the sky? You have the wrong girl and the wrong house, sire. I am far too humble to be so exalted. I almost don’t exist.”

  Before leaving, the youth leaned down and kissed the hem of my tunic. For a second I saw his back: it had a rainbow on it, as though the wings of a butterfly had alighted there.

  He is gone now and has left my head full of doubts. Why did he address me as señora if I am still an unmarried girl? Why did he call me queen? Why did I discover a gleam of tears in his eyes when he prophesied that I would suffer? Why did he call me mother if I am a virgin? What is happening? What is going to become of me after this visit?

  Epilogue

  “Don’t you ever feel remorse, Fonchito?” Justiniana suddenly asked. She was picking up, folding, and placing on a chair the clothes that the youngster was offhandedly taking off and then tossing her way with basketball passes. His crystalline voice was astonished. “For what, Justita?”

  Leaning over to pick up a pair of argyles with garnet-red and green diamonds, she spied him in the mirror over the bureau: Alfonso had just sat down on the edge of the bed and was putting on his pajama pants, first bending his legs, then stretching them out. Justiniana saw his slender white feet with pink heels peek out the bottom of the pants legs and his ten toes wriggle as though doing exercises. Finally her eyes met his, and he beamed her a smile.

  “Don’t look at me that way, as though butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, Foncho,” she said, straightening up. She rubbed the small of her back and sighed, looking at the boy in puzzlement. She sensed that, once again, anger was about to get the better of her. “I’m not her. You can’t buy me, or fool me with that angelic smile of yours. Tell me the truth, for once. Don’t you feel the least remorse? Not even one little twinge?”

  Alfonso hooted with laughter, flinging his arms wide open, and let himself fall backward onto the bed. He kicked his legs in the air, passing and receiving an imaginary basketball. It was a hearty, eloquent laugh, without a trace of mockery or malice as far as Justiniana could tell. Lord, she thought, who can possibly understand this cheeky little brat?

  “I swear to God I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the child exclaimed, sitting upright and sealing the oath by kissing his crossed fingers with conviction. “Or are you asking me a riddle, Justita?”

  “Get in bed, so you don’t catch cold. I don’t feel at all like taking care of you.”

  Alfonso immediately obeyed her. He leapt up, raised the bedcovers, slid nimbly between the sheets, and settled the pillow behind his back. Then he sat there, gazing up at the girl with a pampered, spoiled look in his eyes, as though about to receive a reward. His hair fell over his forehead and his big blue eyes gleamed in the semidarkness in which they found themselves, for the light from the little bedside lamp extended no farther than his cheeks. His lipless mouth was half open, revealing a row of gleaming white teeth he had just finished brushing.

  “I’m talking about Doña Lucrecia, you little devil, as you know very well, so don’t play dumb,” she said. “Aren’t you sorry for what you did to her?”

  “Oh, her,” the child exclaimed, disappointed, as though the subject were too obvious and too boring to be of interest to him. He shrugged and added without the slightest hesitation: “Why should I be sorry? If she’d been my mama, I might have been. But was she?”

  There was no animosity or anger, either in his tone of voice or in his face; but the indifference was the very thing that irked Justiniana.

  “You fixed things so that your papa would throw her out of this house like a dog,” she murmured in a dull, sad voice, with her head turned the other way, her eyes staring at the gleaming parquet floor. “You lied, first to her and then to him. You fixed things so they’d separate, when they were so happy. She must be the most wretched woman in the world now, on account of you. And Don Rigoberto, too. Since he separated from your stepmother, he’s like a lost soul. Can’t you see how much he’s aged in just a few days? Doesn’t that give you the least remorse, either? And he’s turned into a pious hypocrite and a prude, the like of which I’ve never seen. That’s what happens when people sense that they’re at death’s door. And all because of you, you devil!”

  She turned toward the boy in sudden fright, thinking that she had said more than was prudent. After what had happened, she didn’t trust anything or anybody in this house. Fonchito’s head had moved toward her, the golden cone of lamplight surrounding it like a crown. He seemed dumbfounded.

  “But I didn’t do anything, Justita,” he stammered, his eyes blinking, and she could see his Adam’s apple wobbling in his throat like an edgy little animal. “I never lied to anybody, least of all to my papa.”

  Justiniana felt her face burning.

  “You lied to everybody, Foncho!” she said in a loud, clear voice. But she fell silent immediately, clapping her hand over her mouth, for at that moment the sound of water running in the washbasin upstairs reached her ears. Don Rigoberto had begun his nightly ablutions, which, since Doña Lucrecia’s departure, were much less prolonged. He went to bed at an early hour every night now and could no longer be heard humming songs from operettas as he made his toilet. When Justiniana spoke again, she did so in a low voice, reprimanding the boy with her index finger: “And you lied to me, too, naturally. To think that I swallowed that story that you were going to kill yourself because Doña Lucrecia didn’t love you.”

  And now, for the first time, the boy’s face suddenly showed signs of indignation.

  “It wasn’t a lie,” he said, seizing her arm and shaking her. “It was true, or as good as true. If my stepmother went on treating me the way she did back then, I would have killed myself. I swear I would have, Justita!”

  The girl jerked her arm away and left the bedside. “Don’t swear in vain, or God may punish you,” she murmured.

  She went over to the window, and as she parted the curtains, she noticed that stars were shining here and there in the sky. She stood there looking at them in surprise. How odd to see those little twinkling lights instead of the usual dull fog. When she turned around, the boy had picked up a book from the night table and, adjusting the pillow to fit comfortably behind his back, was settling down to read. He gave every appearance of being, once again, calm and contented, at peace with his conscience and the world.

  “Just tell me one thing, Fonchito.”

  Upstairs, the water was running in the washbasin with an even, steady murmur, and on the roof two cats wailed, fighting or fornicating.

  “What, Justita?”

  “Did you plan the whole thing from the beginning? That pantomime of loving her so much, that business of climbing up on the roof to spy on her as she bathed, the letter threatening to kill yourself. Was it all just a big story you made up? Just so she’d love you and then, after that, you’d be able to go to your papa and claim she was corrupting you?”

  The boy put the book back down on the night table, marking his place with a pencil. His face was d
isarmed by a hurt look.

  “I never said she was corrupting me, Justita!” he exclaimed, shocked, flailing the air with one of his hands. “You’re making that up. Don’t try to trick me. My papa was the one who said she was corrupting me. All I did was write that composition, telling about what we did. The truth, that is. None of it was a lie. It’s not my fault he threw her out. Maybe what he said was true. She might have been corrupting me. If my papa said that, it must be so. Why are you so concerned about it? Would you rather have gone off with her than stay here in this house?”

  Justiniana leaned back against the bookshelf where Alfonso kept his tales of adventure, his school pennants and diplomas and class photos. She half closed her eyes and thought: I should have left some time ago, it’s true.

  Since Doña Lucrecia’s departure, she had had a foreboding that some sort of danger lay in wait for her here, and was on edge all the time, with the constant feeling that if she let down her guard even for a moment, she, too, would fall into a trap and come out of it in worse shape than the stepmother. It had been imprudent of her to confront the boy that way. She would never do so again, because even if Fonchito was still a child as far as age went, he really wasn’t one, but instead someone more perverse and devious than all the grown men she knew. Yet, even so, looking at that sweet little face, those doll’s features, who would ever have thought it.

  “Are you mad at me about something?” she heard him say contritely.

  “No, I’m not,” she answered, heading toward the door. “Don’t read very long. You’ve school tomorrow. Good night.”

  “Justita.”

  She turned to look at him, one hand already on the doorknob.

  “What?”

  “Please don’t be mad at me.” He looked at her with pleading eyes, batting his long eyelashes; he beseeched her with his mouth puckered in a half pout and the dimples in his cheeks pulsing. “I love you lots. But you hate me. Isn’t that so, Justita?”

  His voice sounded as though he were about to burst into tears.

  “I don’t hate you, silly. Why would I?”

  Upstairs, the water continued to run, with a uniform sound, interrupted by brief spasms, and from time to time Don Rigoberto’s footsteps could be heard as well, going from one side of the bathroom to the other.

  “If you really don’t hate me, give me just one good-night kiss. Like before, I mean. Have you forgotten?”

  She hesitated for a moment, but then acquiesced. She went over to the bed, bent down, and gave him a quick kiss on the top of his head. But the boy kept a tight hold on her, flinging his arms about her neck, and fooling around and cutting up, till Justiniana smiled at him despite herself. When he acted that way, sticking out his tongue, rolling his eyes, moving his head to and fro, raising and lowering his shoulders, she didn’t see him as the cruel, cold devil he had inside him, but as the pretty little boy he was on the outside.

  “Enough of that. Stop your clowning and go to sleep now, Foncho.”

  She kissed the top of his head again and sighed. And though she had promised herself that she would not say another word on the subject, she heard herself blurt out, contemplating those golden locks grazing her nose: “Did you do all that on account of Doña Eloísa? Because you didn’t want anyone to replace your mama? Because you couldn’t bear to have Doña Lucrecia take her place in this house?”

  She could feel the boy tense up, but he said nothing, as though thinking hard what his answer should be. Then the little arms entwined about her neck pressed her to lower her head so that the tiny lipless mouth might draw closer to her ear. But instead of hearing him whisper the secret that she expected, she felt him nibble and kiss her on the top of her ear and just behind, till she tingled all over.

  “I did it for you, Justita,” she heard him murmur, with velvety tenderness, “not for my mama. So she’d leave this house and leave the three of us alone together: my papa, you, and I. Because you’re the one I…”

  The girl suddenly felt the child’s mouth come down hard on hers.

  “Good lord, good lord.” She freed herself from his arms, pushing him, shaking him. She staggered out of the room, rubbing her mouth, crossing herself. It seemed to her that unless she got a breath of fresh air her heart would burst with rage. “My god, my god.”

  Outside now, in the hallway, she heard Fonchito laugh once more. Not sarcastically, not making mock of her flushed cheeks and brimming indignation. With genuine delight, as though enjoying a splendid joke. Fresh, round and full, healthy, childish, his laughter drowned out the sound of the water in the washbasin, appeared to fill the whole night and mount to those stars which, for once, had appeared in the muddy sky of Lima.

  Also by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The Cubs and Other Stories

  The Time of the Hero

  The Green House

  Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

  Conversation in the Cathedral

  Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

  The War of the End of the World

  The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

  The Perpetual Orgy

  Who Killed Palomino Molero?

  The Storyteller

  A Fish in the Water

  Death in the Andes

  Making Waves

  The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

  The Feast of the Goat

  IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER. Copyright © 1988 by Mario Vargas Llosa. English translation copyright © 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vargas Llosa, Mario.

  [Elogio de la madrastra. English]

  In praise of the stepmother / Mario Vargas Llosa; translated by Helen Lane.

  Translation of: Elogio de la madrastra.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-42130-4

  I. Title.

  PQ8498.32.A65E413

  863—dc20

  1990

  90-3018

  First published in Spanish under the title Elogio de la madrastra

  First published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux