B004QGYWNU EBOK (5 page)

Don Rigoberto entered the bathroom, bolted the door, and sighed. Instantly, a pleasing and gratifying sensation, of relief and expectation, came over him: in this solitary half hour he would be happy. He was happy every night, at times more, at others less, but the punctilious ritual that he had been perfecting down through the years, like an artist who polishes and hammers home each detail of his masterpiece, never failed to produce its miraculous effect: relaxing him, reconciling him with his fellows, rejuvenating him, raising his spirits. Each time, he left the bathroom with the feeling that, despite everything, life was worth living. He had, therefore, never once neglected to perform it, ever since—how long ago had it been?—he had had the idea of transforming what for ordinary mortals was a routine that they went through with the mindlessness of machines—brushing their teeth, drying themselves, et cetera—into an artful task that made of him, if only momentarily, a perfect being.

In his youth he had been a fervent militant in Catholic Action and dreamed of changing the world. He soon realized that, like all collective ideals, that particular one was an impossible dream, doomed to failure. His practical turn of mind led him not to waste his time waging battles that sooner or later he was bound to lose. He then conjectured that, as an ideal, perfection was perhaps possible for the isolated individual, if restricted to a limited sphere in space (cleanliness or corporeal sanctity, for example, or the practice of eroticism) and in time (ablutions and nocturnal emissions before going to sleep).

He removed his bathrobe, hung it on the back of the door, and, naked except for his house slippers, sat down on the toilet, separated from the rest of the bathroom by a lacquered screen with little dancing sky-blue figures. His stomach was a Swiss watch: disciplined and punctual, it always emptied itself at this particular time, totally and effortlessly, as though happy to rid itself of the policies and the detritus of the day’s business. Ever since, in the most secret decision of his life—so secret that probably not even Lucrecia would ever be privy to it in its entirety—he had resolved to be perfect for a brief fragment of each day, and once he had worked out this ceremony, he had never again experienced asphyxiating attacks of constipation or demoralizing diarrhea.

Don Rigoberto half closed his eyes and strained, just a little. That was all it took: he immediately felt the beneficent tickle in his rectum and the sensation that, there inside, in the hollows of his lower belly, something obedient to his will was about to depart and was already wriggling its way down that passage which, in order to make its exit easier, was widening. His anus, in turn, had begun to dilate in anticipation, preparing itself to complete the expulsion of the expelled, whereupon it would shut itself up tight and pout, with its thousand little puckers, as though mocking: “You’re gone, you rascal you, and can’t ever return.”

Don Rigoberto gave a satisfied smile. Shitting, defecating, excreting: synonyms for sexual pleasure? he thought. Of course. Why not? Provided it was done slowly, savoring the task, without the least hurry, taking one’s time, imparting to the muscles of the colon a gentle, sustained quivering. It was a matter not of pushing but of guiding, of accompanying, of graciously escorting the gliding of the offerings toward the exit. Don Rigoberto sighed once again, his five senses absorbed in what was happening inside his body. He could almost see the spectacle: those expansions and retractions, those juices and masses in action, all of them in warm corporeal shadow and in a silence interrupted every so often by muffled gargles or the joyful breeze of a mighty fart. He heard, finally, the discreet splash with which the first offering invited to leave his bowels plopped—was it floating, was it sinking?—into the water of the toilet bowl. Three or four more would fall. Eight was his Olympic record, the consequence of an extravagant lunch, with murderous mixtures of fats, sugars, and starches washed down with wines and spirits. As a general rule he evacuated five offerings; once the fifth was gone, after a few seconds’ pause to give muscles, intestines, anus, rectum, due time to assume their orthodox positions once again, there invaded him that intimate rejoicing at a duty fulfilled and a goal attained, that same feeling of spiritual cleanliness that had once upon a time possessed him as a schoolboy at La Recoleta, after he had confessed his sins and done the penance assigned him by the father confessor.

But cleaning out one’s belly is a much less dubious proposition than cleaning out one’s soul, he thought. His stomach was clean now, no doubt about it. He spread his legs, leaned his head down and looked: those drab brown cylinders, half submerged in the green porcelain bowl, were proof. What penitent was able, as he was now, to see and (if he so desired) to touch the pestilential filth that repentance, confession, penance, and God’s mercy drew out of the soul? When he was a practicing believer—he as now only the latter—the suspicion had never left him that, despite confession, however meticulously detailed, a certain quantity of filth remained stuck to the walls of his soul, a few stubborn, rebellious stains that penance was unable to remove.

It was, moreover, a feeling he had sometimes had, though far less strong and unaccompanied by anxiety, ever since he had read in a magazine how young novices in a Buddhist monastery in India purified their intestines. The operation involved three gymnastic exercises, a length of rope, and a basin for the evacuated stools. It had the simplicity and the clarity of perfect objects and acts, such as the circle and coitus. The author of the text, a Belgian professor of yoga, had practiced with them for forty days in order to master the technique. The description of the three exercises whereby the novices hastened evacuation was not clear enough, however, to allow one to picture the ritual in detail and imitate it. The professor of yoga guaranteed that by means of those three flexions, torsions, and gyrations the stomach dissolved all the impurities and remains of the (vegetarian) diet to which the novices were subjected. Once this first stage of purification of their bellies was completed, the youngsters—with a certain melancholy, Don Rigoberto imagined their shaved skulls and their austere little bodies covered by tunics the color of saffron or perhaps snow—proceeded to assume the proper posture: supple, pliant, leaning to one side, legs slightly apart and the soles of their feet firmly planted on the ground so as not to move a single millimeter, as their bodies—ophidians slowly swallowing the interminable little worm—absorbed, thanks to peristaltic contractions, that rope which, coiling and uncoiling, advancing calmly and inexorably through the moist intestinal labyrinth, irresistibly pushed downward all those leftovers, remains, adhesions, minutiae, and excrescences that the emigrant oblations left behind.

They purify themselves the way someone reams out a rifle, he thought, filled once more with envy. He imagined the dirty little head of the rope coming back into the world by way of the little Quevedoesque eye of the ass, after having traversed and cleaned out all those dark, tortuous inner recesses, and he could see it come out and fall into the basin like a crumpled carnival streamer. There it would remain, of no use to anyone, along with the last impurities that its presence had evacuated, ready for the funeral pyre. How good those youngsters must feel! How weightless! How free of all pollution! He would never be able to follow their example, at least as far as that experience was concerned. But Don Rigoberto was certain that, if they left him far behind when it came to the technique of sterilizing the bowels, in every other respect his ritual of bodily cleanliness was infinitely more scrupulous and technically exacting than that of those exotic practitioners.

He gave one last push, discreet and soundless, just in case. Could that anecdote by any chance be true—the one that had it that the textual scholar Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who suffered from chronic constipation, spent a good part of his life, in his house in Santander, sitting on the toilet, straining? People had assured Don Rigoberto that in the house of the celebrated historian, poet, and critic, now a museum, the visiting tourist could contemplate the portable writing desk that Don Marcelino had had made to order for him so as not to be obliged to break off his research and his elegantly penned writings as he struggled against his mean, stingy belly, determined not to give up the fecal filth deposited there by heavy, hearty Spanish viands. It touched Don Rigoberto to imagine that robust intellectual, of such untroubled brow and such firm religious beliefs, shut up in his private water closet, perhaps bundled up in a thick plaid lap robe to withstand the freezing mountain cold, straining and straining for hours at a time as, undaunted, he went on digging about in old folio volumes and dusty incunabula of the history of Spain in his search for heterodoxies, impieties, schisms, blasphemies, and doctrinal follies to be catalogued.

He wiped himself with four small squares of folded tissue and flushed the toilet. He went over to the bidet, sat down, filled it with warm water, and meticulously soaped his anus, phallus, testicles, pubis, crotch, and buttocks. Then he rinsed himself off and dried himself with a clean towel.

Today was Tuesday, foot day. He had divided the week up among different organs arid members: Monday, hands; Wednesday, ears; Thursday, nose; Friday, hair; Saturday, eyes; and Sunday, skin. This was the variable element of the nocturnal ritual, what left it open to possible change and reformation. Concentrating each night on just one area of his body allowed him to carry out the task of cleaning it and preserving it with greater thoroughness and attention to detail; and by so doing, to know and to love it more. With each individual organ and area the master of his labors for one day, perfect impartiality with regard to the care of the whole was assured: there were no favoritisms, no postponements, no odious hierarchies with respect to the overall treatment and detailed consideration of part and whole. He thought: My body is that impossibility: an egalitarian society.

He filled the washbasin with warm water and, installing himself on the toilet-seat cover, soaked his feet for quite some time so as to reduce the swelling in his heels, the soles of his feet, his toes, ankles, and insteps, and soften them. He did not have bunions or flat feet, though his instep, it was quite true, was unusually high. No matter; that was a minor deformity, imperceptible to anyone who did not subject his feet to clinical examination. As for size, proportion, conformation of toes and toenails, nomenclature and anatomy of the bones, everything appeared to be more or less normal. The danger lay in the corns and calluses that, every so often, did their best to make them look ugly. But he knew how to cut the evil off at the root, always in good time.

He had the pumice stone at the ready. He began with the left foot. At the upper edge of the heel, there where the friction from his shoe was greatest, an adventitious, horny growth had already begun to form, which felt to his fingertips as rough as an unplastered wall. By rubbing the pumice stone back and forth over it repeatedly, he gradually wore it down till there was nothing left of it. Pleased and satisfied, he noted that the outer edge had once again taken on the polish and smooth finish of the surrounding area. Though his fingers detected no other incipient callus or corn, he prudently applied the pumice stone to the soles of both feet, the insteps, and all ten of his toes.

Then, scissors and file in hand, he went about paring and filing his toenails, a most enjoyable pleasure. There, the danger to be warded off was an ingrown toenail. He had an infallible method, the product of his patient observation and his practical imagination: clipping the nail in the shape of a half-moon, leaving at the ends two little intact horns which, thanks to their conformation, would grow out past the flesh without ever imbedding themselves in it. These Saracen toenails, moreover, thanks to their crescent shape, could be cleaned more easily: the point of the file easily penetrated the sort of trench or alveolus between the nail and the flesh where dirt might accumulate, sweat become concentrated, dross find a hiding place. Once he had finished paring, cleaning, and filing his toenails, he carefully dug away the cuticles till they were free of those mysterious whitish presences that had crystallized in the remote retreats of his pedal extremities through the work of friction, lack of ventilation, and sweat.

His task ended, he contemplated and massaged his feet with fond satisfaction. He took the parings and filth that he had gathered on a piece of toilet paper, threw it into the bowl, and flushed it down; then he soaped his feet and rinsed them carefully. After drying them, he dusted them with a semi-invisible talcum powder that gave off a slight, virile odor, of heliotrope at dawn.

Invariable ritual procedures remained to be completed: mouth and armpits. Though he concentrated his five senses on them, taking all the time needed to ensure the success of the operation, he had so completely mastered the rite that his attention could be divided and be partially devoted, as well, to a principle of aesthetics, a different one each day of the week, one extracted from that manual, tablet of the law, or commandments drawn up by himself, in secret also, in these nocturnal sessions which, on the pretext of cleanliness, constituted his particular religion and his personal way of bringing about a utopia.

As he laid out on the slab of ocher marble, veined with white, the constituents of the buccal offering—a glassful of water, dental floss, toothpaste, toothbrush—he selected one of the postulates of which he was most certain, a principle which, once formulated, he had never doubted: “Everything bright is ugly, and, first and foremost, brilliant men.” He took in a mouthful of water and rinsed his oral cavity vigorously, noting in the mirror how his cheeks puffed out as he rinsed his mouth to rid it of the loosest residual particles, lodged in his gums or superficially suspended between his teeth. There are brilliant cities, brilliant paintings and poems, parties, landscapes, business deals, dissertations, he thought. They should be shunned like weak currencies, however brightly colored the bank notes, or like those tropical drinks for tourists, decorated with fruit slices and little pennants and sweetened with corn syrup.