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“They’re like conch shells that bear within them, trapped in their mother-of-pearl labyrinth, the music of the sea,” Don Rigoberto fantasized. His ears were large and prominent; both of them, but the left one in particular, tended to stand out from his head at the top, curving back on themselves, determined to capture for themselves only all the world’s sounds. Though as a child he was ashamed of their size and their downturned form, he had learned to accept them. And now that he devoted one night a week to their care alone, he even felt proud of them. Because, moreover, by dint of careful and persistent experimenting, he had managed to get those graceless appendages to participate, along with the alacrity of his mouth and the efficacy of his sense of touch, in his nights of love. Lucrecia, too, was fond of them and, in private, paid them any number of pretty compliments. In certain phases of their conjugal cavalry skirmishes she affectionately referred to them as “my little Dumbos.”

“Full-blown flowers, sensitive wing cases, auditoriums for music and dialogues,” Don Rigoberto poeticized. With the aid of a magnifying glass, he carefully examined the cartilaginous edges of his left ear. Yes, the tiny tips of little hairs plucked out the previous Wednesday were showing again. There were three of them, asymmetrical, like the points defining the sides of a scalene triangle. He imagined the dark little tuft of hair that they would turn into if he let them grow, if he stopped rooting them out, and a fleeting sensation of nausea suddenly came over him. Hurriedly, with the dexterity stemming from constant practice, he grasped those hairy heads between the prongs of the tweezers and pulled them out, one after the other. The tingling sensation that accompanied the extirpation made a delicious hot-and-cold shiver run up his spine. It was as though Doña Lucrecia were there, kneeling, her even white teeth disentangling the kinky little ringlets of his pubis. The mere idea gave him a semi-erection. He reined it in immediately, imagining a hirsute woman, her ears clogged with clumps of matted hair and a pronounced mustache on her upper lip, in whose shadows drops of sweat were trembling. He then remembered the story that a colleague of his in the insurance business had recounted, that time, on returning from a vacation in the Caribbean: how the undisputed queen of a brothel in Santo Domingo was a big beefy mulatta with a startling hairy crest between her breasts. He tried to imagine Lucrecia with a similar attribute—a silken mane!—between her ivory breasts and was horrified. I have all sorts of prejudices when it comes to lovemaking, he confessed to himself. But for the moment he had no intention of giving up any of them. Hair was acceptable, it was a strong sexual seasoning, provided it was in the proper place. On a head or a monsveneris, welcome and indispensable; under the arms, tolerable perhaps, if only so as to have tried everything (it was apparently an obsession with Europeans); but on arms and legs, definitely out; and between the breasts, never!

He then proceeded to examine his left ear, with the aid of his convex shaving mirrors. No, no new little hairs had popped out in any of the angles, protuberances, and curves of his outer ear, except for those three musketeers whose presence he had spied, to his surprise, one fine day, some years ago now.

Tonight I shall not make love but hear it, he decided. That was possible; he had done so on other occasions and it amused Lucrecia, too, at least as part of the prolegomena. “Let me hear your breasts,” he would murmur, and amorously plugging his wife’s nipples, first one and then the other, into the hypersensitive cavern of his two ears—which they fit into as snugly as a foot into a moccasin—he would listen to them with his eyes closed, reverent and ecstatic, his mind worshipfully concentrate as at the Elevation of the Host, till he heard ascending to the earthy roughness of each button, from subterranean carnal depths, certain stifled cadences, the heavy breathing, perhaps, of her pores opening, the boiling, perhaps, of her excited blood.

He was removing the piliform excrescences from his right ear. All of a sudden he spied a stranger: the solitary little hair was swaying back and forth, disgustingly, in the center of his neatly turned earlobe. He pulled it out with a slight jerk, and before throwing it into the washbasin to be flushed down the drain, he examined it with distaste. Would new hairs keep appearing in his big ears in the years to come? In any event, he would never give up; even on his deathbed, had he strength left, he would go on destroying them (pruning them, rather?). After that, however, as his body lay lifeless, the intruders could sprout at will, grow, blemish his corpse. The same would be true of his fingernails. Don Rigoberto told himself that this depressing perspective was an irrefutable argument in favor of cremation. Yes, fire would prevent posthumous imperfection. The flames would cause him to disappear while he was still perfect, thereby frustrating the worms. The thought came as a relief to him.

As he rolled little balls of cotton around the tips of the tweezers and wet them with soap and water so as to clean out the wax that had accumulated inside his ear, he anticipated what those clean funnels would soon be hearing as they descended from his wife’s breasts to her navel. They need make no special effort there to surprise Lucrecia’s secret music, for a veritable symphony of sounds, liquid and solid, prolonged and brief, diffuse and clear, would immediately reveal their hidden life to him. He looked forward with gratitude to how deeply he would be moved to perceive, thanks to those organs which he was now scraping clean with meticulous care and affection, ridding them of the oily film that formed on them every so often, something of the secret existence of her body: glands, muscles, blood vessels, hair follicles, membranes, tissues, filaments, ducts, tubes, all that rich and subtle biological orography that lay beneath the smooth epidermis of Lucrecia’s belly. I love everything that exists on the inside or the outside of her, he thought. Because everything about her is—or can be—erogenous.

He was not exaggerating, carried away by the tenderness that her sudden appearance in his fantasies always gave rise to. No, absolutely not. For thanks to his unyielding perseverance, he had managed to fall in love with the whole and with each one of the parts of his wife, to love, separately and together, all the components of that cellular universe. He knew himself to be capable of responding erotically, with a prompt, robust erection, to the stimulus of any of its infinite ingredients, including the meanest and humblest, including what—to the ordinary hominid—was most inconceivable and most repellent. “Here lies Don Rigoberto, who contrived to love the epigastrium of his spouse as much as her vulva or her tongue,” he philosophically projected as a fitting epitaph on the marble of his tomb. Would that mortuary motto be a lie? Not in the slightest. He thought of how impassioned he would become, very shortly, when the sound of muffled aqueous displacements reached his ears, avidly flattened against her soft stomach, and at this moment he could already hear the lively burbling of that flatus, the joyous cracking of a fart, the gargle and yawn of her vagina, or the languid stretching of her serpentine intestine. And he could already hear himself whispering, blind with love and lust, the phrases with which it was his habit to render his wife homage as he caressed her. “Those little noises, too, are you, Lucrecia; they are your characteristic harmony, your resounding person.” He was certain that he could immediately recognize them, distinguish them from the sounds produced by the abdomen of any other woman. It was a hypothesis that he would not have the opportunity to verify, since he would never embark upon the experiment of hearing love with any other woman. Why would he do such a thing? Wasn’t Lucrecia an ocean of unfathomable depths that he, the lover-diver, would never have done with exploring? “I love you,” he murmured, feeling once again the dawn of an erection. He conjured it away with a fillip of his finger, which, besides making him double over, brought on a fit of laughter. “He who laughs by himself is recalling his perversities!” he heard his wife admonishing him from the bedroom. Ah, if only Lucrecia knew what he was laughing about.

To hear her voice, to confirm her presence close at hand, and her existence, filled him with happiness. “Happiness exists,” he repeated to himself, as he did every night. Yes, provided one sought it where it was possible. In one’s own body and in that of one’s beloved, for instance; by oneself and in the bathroom; for hours or minutes on a bed shared with the being so ardently desired. Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic. It was hidden, a pearl in its seashell, in certain rites or ceremonial duties that offered human beings brief flashes and optical illusions of perfection. One had to be content with these crumbs so as not to live at the mercy of anxiety and despair, slapping at the impossible. Happiness lies hidden in the hollow of my ears, he thought, in a mellow mood.

He had finished cleaning the canals of both ears and there, beneath his gaze, were the little balls of moist cotton, impregnated with the oily yellow humor he had just removed from them. The one thing left to do now was to dry them, so that no dirt would crystallize in those drops of water before they evaporated. Once again he rolled two little balls of cotton around the tip of the tweezers and scrubbed the canals so gently that he appeared to be massaging or caressing them. He then threw the little balls of cotton in the toilet and pulled the chain. He cleaned the pair of tweezers and put it away in his wife’s little aloeswood kit.

He carefully inspected his ears one last time in the mirror. He felt satisfied, cheerful, and resolute. There those cartilaginous cones were, clean outside and in, ready to bend over to listen, respectfully and incontinently, to the body of his beloved.

“Turning forty isn’t so terrible, after all,” Doña Lucrecia thought, stretching lazily in the darkened bedroom. She felt young, beautiful, and happy. Did happiness exist, then? Rigoberto said it did, “sometimes, for the two of us.” Wasn’t it a hollow word, a state that only fools attained? Her husband loved her, he proved it to her in tender, thoughtful little ways each day and sought her favors with youthful ardor nearly every night. Ever since they had decided to marry, four months before, he too seemed to have grown younger. The fears that had kept her from taking that step for so long—her first marriage had been a disaster and the divorce a nightmarish torment at the hands of money-grubbing shysters—had vanished. From the very outset, she had taken over her new household with the greatest assurance. The first thing she did was to redecorate all the rooms, so that nothing would summon up remembrances of Rigoberto’s late wife, and she now ran the house with a sure hand, as though she had always been the mistress of it. Only the cook, who had been there before she came, showed a certain hostility toward her, and she had had to replace her. The other servants got along very well with her. Justiniana especially; promoted by Doña Lucrecia to the status of personal maid, she turned out to be a real find: efficient, smart, extremely clean, and possessed of unfailing devotion.

But the greatest success was her relationship with the little boy. He had been her greatest concern at one time, something she had believed to be an insurmountable obstacle. A stepson, Lucrecia, she would think whenever Rigoberto insisted that they put an end to their semiclandestine affair and get married without further ado. It’s never going to work. That child is always going to hate you. He’ll make life impossible for you, and sooner or later you’ll end up hating him as well. When has a couple ever been happy when other people’s children enter the picture?

But that wasn’t how it had turned out at all. Alfonsito adored her. Yes, that was the right word. Perhaps a little too much, in fact. Doña Lucrecia stretched between the warm sheets again, coiling and uncoiling like a lazying serpent. Hadn’t he finished first in his class to please her? She remembered his flushed face, the triumph in his sky-blue eyes when he had handed her his report card:

“Here’s your birthday present, stepmother. May I give you a kiss?”

“Of course, Fonchito. Ten, if you like.”

He was forever asking her for kisses and giving them to her, with an excitement that, at times, gave her misgivings. Could the child really be that fond of her? Yes, she had won him over with all those presents, all that pampering, from the moment she had first set foot in the house. Or, as Rigoberto fantasized, fanning his desire in the midst of his nocturnal labors, was Alfonsito awakening to sexual life and had circumstances entrusted her with the role of inspirer? “What nonsense, Rigoberto. When he’s still just a little boy, when he’s just made his First Communion. What absurd notions you have sometimes.”

But even though she would never confess aloud to such a thing, least of all in her husband’s presence, when she was by herself, as she was now, Doña Lucrecia wondered whether the boy was not, in fact, discovering desire, the nascent poetry of the body, using her as a stimulus. Alfonsito’s attitude intrigued her: it seemed so innocent yet at the same time so ambiguous. She remembered then—it was an incident dating from her adolescence that she never forgot—the chance pattern she saw the graceful little feet of a seagull trace in the sand at the Yacht Club; she went closer to get a better look, expecting to come upon an abstract form, a labyrinth of straight lines and curves, and what she saw reminded her, rather, of a big, humpbacked penis! Was Foncho aware that when he threw his arms around her neck the way he did, when he gave her those lingering kisses, seeking her lips, he was going beyond the bounds of the permissible? Impossible to know. The child had such a candid, such a gentle gaze, that it seemed impossible to Doña Lucrecia that the small blond head of this exquisite beauty posing as a shepherd in the Christmas tableaux at the Santa María School for Boys could harbor dirty, scabrous thoughts.

“Dirty thoughts,” she whispered, her mouth against the pillow, “scabrous thoughts. Ha-ha!” She felt in fine spirits, and a delicious warmth was coursing through her veins, as though her blood had been transubstantiated into mulled wine. No, Fonchito couldn’t have any intimation that he was playing with fire; those effusions were doubtless prompted by a vague instinct, an unconscious tropism. They were dangerous games, nonetheless, weren’t they, Lucrecia? Because when she saw him, just a little boy still, kneeling on the floor, contemplating her as though his stepmother had just descended from Paradise, or when his little arms and his frail body clung to her, and his lips, so thin as to be nearly invisible, glued themselves to her cheeks and slid down to graze hers—she had never permitted them to linger there for more than a second—Doña Lucrecia could not help feeling at times a sudden sharp stab of excitement, a steamy breath of desire. “You’re the one who has dirty, scabrous thoughts, Lucrecia,” she murmured, hugging the mattress with her eyes closed. Would she one day become a hot-to-trot older woman, like some of her bridge cronies? Was that what was meant by the devil at midday, the passion of women of a certain age? Calm yourself, remember that you’ve been a grass widow for two days—Rigoberto, off on a business trip, some sort of deal having to do with insurance, wouldn’t be back till Sunday—and no more of this lolling about in bed. On your feet, you lazy creature! Struggling to shake off her pleasant drowsiness, she picked up the intercom and ordered Justiniana to bring her breakfast upstairs.

The girl entered the room five minutes later, with Doña Lucrecia’s breakfast on a tray, and her mail and the morning newspapers. She opened the curtains, and the humid, dreary gray light of September in Lima invaded the room. How grim winter is, Doña Lucrecia thought. And she dreamed of the summer sun, the burning sands of the beaches of Paracas, and the salty caress of the sea on her skin. So far off still! Justiniana placed the tray on her lap and plumped up the pillows to make a backrest. She was a slender woman, dark-skinned and kinky-haired, with bright sparkling eyes and a melodious voice.

“There’s something I don’t know how to tell you, señora,” she murmured, a tragicomic expression on her face, as she handed Doña Lucrecia her dressing gown and placed her mules at the foot of the bed.

“Well, you must tell me now, because you’ve whetted my appetite,” Doña Lucrecia said as she bit into a slice of toast and took a sip of tea without sugar or cream. “What’s happened?”

“I’m ashamed to say, señora.”

Doña Lucrecia, amused, looked at her closely. She was a young woman, and beneath the blue apron of her uniform was the merest hint of the supple curves of her slender, resilient body. What did she look like when her husband made love to her? She was married to a doorman at a restaurant, a tall black as well built as an athlete, who brought her to the house every morning. Doña Lucrecia had advised her not to complicate her life by having children while she was still so young, and had personally taken her to her own doctor to get her a prescription for the pill.

“Another fight between the cook and Saturnino?”

“No, it has to do with little Alfonso.” Justiniana lowered her voice as though the boy could hear her from his far-off school, and pretended to be more embarrassed than she really was. “The thing is, last night I caught him… But please don’t tell him, señora. If Fonchito finds out I told you, he’ll kill me.”

These affectations of modesty and exaggerated fears with which Justiniana always embroidered whatever she was saying amused Doña Lucrecia.

“Where did you catch him? Doing what?”

“Spying on you, señora.”

Some instinct warned Doña Lucrecia of what she was about to hear and put her on her guard. Justiniana was pointing to the bathroom ceiling and seemed genuinely embarrassed now.

“He could have fallen down into the garden and might even have killed himself,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “That’s why I’m telling you, señora. When I scolded him, he told me it wasn’t the first time. He’d climbed up onto the roof lots of times. To spy on you.”

“What’s that you’re telling me?”

“Just what you heard,” the child answered defiantly, almost heroically. “And I’ll go on doing it even if I slip and fall and kill myself, if you want to know the truth.”

“You’ve lost your mind, Fonchito. That’s very bad; it’s just not right. What would Don Rigoberto say if he found out that you spy on your stepmother while she’s taking a bath? He’d be terribly angry; he’d give you a thrashing. And what’s more, you might kill yourself. Just think how high up it is.”

“I don’t care,” the boy said, a determined gleam in his eye. But he calmed down immediately and, shrugging his shoulders, added meekly: “Even though my papa beats me, Justita. So, are you going to tell on me?”

“I won’t say a word to him if you promise me you won’t ever climb up here again.”

“I can’t promise you that, Justita,” the boy said regretfully. “I don’t make promises I’m not going to keep.”

“Aren’t you making all this up with that tropical imagination of yours?” Doña Lucrecia stammered. Ought she to laugh, lose her temper?

“I hesitated a long time before working up my courage to tell you, señora. Because I love Fonchito so dearly; he’s such a good boy. But the thing is, he could kill himself climbing up on that roof, I swear it.”

Doña Lucrecia tried in vain to imagine him up there, crouching like a wild animal, watching her.

“I just can’t bring myself to believe it. So polite, so well mannered. I just can’t see him doing a thing like that.”

“It’s because Fonchito has fallen in love with you, señora.” The girl sighed, clapping a hand over her mouth and smiling. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know, because I don’t believe it.”

“What nonsense you’re talking, Justiniana.”

“Is there such a thing as a right age for love, señora? There are youngsters who first fall in love at Fonchito’s age. And what’s more, he’s smart as a whip, no matter what he’s up to. If only you’d heard what he told me, you’d be dumbfounded. Left with your mouth hanging open. The way I was.”

“What’s this story you’re making up now, you silly girl?”

“It’s just the way I’m telling you, Justita. When she takes off her dressing gown and gets into the tubful of foam, I can’t tell you what I feel. She’s so pretty, so very pretty. It’s as though I’m watching a movie, I tell you. It’s as though—it’s something I just can’t explain to you. Could that be why I cry, do you think?”

Doña Lucrecia chose to burst out laughing. The maidservant felt more sure of herself and smiled, too, a look of complicity on her face.

“I believe only a tenth of what you’re telling me,” Doña Lucrecia finally said, climbing out of bed. “But even so, something has to be done about that boy. Cut these games off at their very root, and do so immediately.”

“Please don’t tell the señor,” Justiniana begged her, in fear and trembling. “He’d be very angry and might give him a thrashing. Fonchito doesn’t have the least idea he’s doing something bad. I give you my word he doesn’t. He’s like a little angel; he doesn’t know good from evil.”

“I can’t tell Rigoberto, no, of course not,” Doña Lucrecia agreed, thinking aloud. “But this foolishness must be brought to an end. Immediately, though I don’t know how.”

She felt apprehensive and uneasy, irritated at the boy, the maidservant, and herself. What should she do? Have a word with Fonchito and reprimand him? Threaten to tell Rigoberto the whole story? What would his reaction be? Would he be hurt, feel betrayed? Would the love he now felt for her suddenly turn into hatred?

Soaping herself, she fondled her big strong breasts, the erect nipples, and her still-graceful waist, from which the ample curves of her hips opened out, like two halves of a fruit, and her thighs, her buttocks, her armpits with the hair removed, and her long smooth neck with one solitary mole. “I shall never grow old,” she prayed, as she did each morning at her bath. “Even if it means having to sell my soul or anything else. I shall never be ugly or miserable. I shall die beautiful and happy.” Don Rigoberto had convinced her that saying, repeating, and believing these things would make them come true. “Sympathetic magic, my love.” Lucrecia smiled: her husband might be a little eccentric, but, in all truth, a woman never tired of a man like that.

All the rest of the day, as she gave orders to the servants, went shopping, visited a woman friend, lunched, made and received phone calls, she wondered what to do with the child. If she gave his secret away to Rigoberto, he would turn into her enemy and then the old premonition of a domestic hell would become a reality. Perhaps the most sensible thing to do was to forget Justiniana’s revelation and, adopting a cool aloofness, gradually undermine the fantasies the boy had woven around her, no doubt only half aware that that was what they were. Yes, that was the prudent thing to do: say nothing, and, little by little, distance herself from him.

That afternoon, when Alfonsito, back from school, came to kiss her, she quickly turned her cheek away and buried herself in the magazine she was leafing through, without asking him how his classes had gone or if he had homework for the next day. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his little face pucker up in a tearful pout. But she was not moved and that night she let him eat his dinner alone, without coming downstairs to keep him company as she often did (she rarely ate dinner herself). Rigoberto phoned her a little later, from Trujillo. All his business deals had gone well and he missed her lots. He would miss her even more that night, in his dreary room in the Hotel de Turistas. Nothing new there at home? No, nothing. Take good care of yourself, darling. Doña Lucrecia listened to a bit of music, alone in her room, and when the child came to bid her good night, she coldly bade him the same. Shortly thereafter, she told Justiniana to prepare the bubble bath she always took before going to bed.

As the girl drew the bathwater and she undressed, the feeling of apprehension that had dogged her footsteps all day came to the fore again, much stronger now. Had she done the right thing by treating Fonchito as she had? Despite herself, it pained her to remember the look of hurt and surprise on his little face. But wasn’t that the only way to put a stop to childish behavior that threatened to become dangerous?