B004QGYWNU EBOK (6 page)

He was now holding, between the thumb and index finger of each hand, a piece of dental floss twenty centimeters long. He began as always with the upper teeth, from right to left and then from left to right, using his incisors as anchor points. He worked the thread into the narrow interstices and with it raised the edges of the gum, which was where nasty little bread crumbs, shreds of meat, vegetable fibers, bits of fruit skin always lodged. With childish rapture he saw those illegitimate presences emerge, dislodged by the dental floss and his expert acrobatics. He spit them out in the washbasin and saw them slide down the drain and disappear, borne away in the vortex formed by the waterspout from the faucet. Meanwhile, he thought: There are bright heads of hair that crown dim brains or make them become so. The ugliest word in Spanish is brilliantine. As he finished brushing his upper teeth, he again rinsed his mouth and cleaned the length of dental floss in the stream of water from the faucet. Then, with the same vigor and identical professionalism, he began cleaning his lower teeth and molars. There are brilliant conversations, brilliant pieces of music, brilliant illnesses such as allergy to pollen, gout, depressions, and stress. There are, naturally, brilliant brilliant-cut diamonds. He rinsed his mouth out again and threw the piece of dental floss into the wastebasket.

He was now ready to brush his teeth with toothpaste. He did so, brushing downward, slowly, pressing hard so that the bristles—natural ones, never plastic—would penetrate the intimate depths of those bony crevices in search of the residues of food that had survived the sapper’s labor of the dental floss. He brushed the lingual surface first, then the buccal. When he rinsed his mouth out for the last time, he felt that agreeable sensation of mint and lemon, so refreshing and youthful, as if all of a sudden, in that cavity framed by gums and palate, someone had turned on an electric fan or the air conditioner and his teeth and molars had ceased to be those hard and insensitive bones and had been imbued with the sensitivity of lips. My teeth are bright, he thought with a twinge of anxiety. Well, that may be the exception that proves the rule. There are, he thought, bright plants, such as the rose. And bright animals such as the Angora cat. All at once he imagined Doña Lucrecia naked, playing with a dozen Angora kittens rubbing against all the curvaceous contours of her lovely body, meowing, and out of fear of experiencing a premature erection, he hastened to wash his armpits. He did so several times a day: in the morning, as he showered, and at noon in the bathroom of the insurance company, before going out for lunch. But it was only now, in the nightly ritual, that he did so conscientiously and at the same time thoroughly enjoying it, neither more nor less than if this were a forbidden pleasure. He first rinsed both armpits with warm water, and his arms as well, rubbing them hard to stimulate the circulation. Then he filled the washbasin with hot water, in which he dissolved a bit of scented soap till he saw the liquid surface begin to foam. He plunged each arm by turn in the warmly welcome temperature and scrubbed his armpits patiently and affectionately, tangling and disentangling the long dark curls of hair in the soapy water. Meanwhile, his mind went on: There are bright, sharp scents, such as that of the rose and camphor. Finally he dried himself and daubed his armpits with a breath of very light cologne suggestive of the smell of skin wet with seawater or that of an ocean breeze that had wafted through hothouses, taking on the heavy scent of flowers.

I am perfect, he thought, looking at himself in the mirror, smelling himself. There was not a whit of vanity in this reflection of his. The object of this laborious care of his body was not to make him better-looking or less ugly, affectations that in one way or another—most often unconsciously—rendered homage to the gregarious ideal that he disdained—wasn’t one always “good-looking” to others?—but to make him feel that, in this way, he was somehow halting time’s cruel work of undermining, that he was thereby controlling or delaying the fateful deterioration decreed for everything by wicked Nature. The feeling that he was waging this battle did his soul good. Moreover, since he had married, and without Lucrecia’s knowledge, he was also fighting his bodily decline in the name of his spouse. Like Amadis in the name of Oriana, he thought. In and on your behalf, my love.

The prospect, once he had turned out the light and left the bathroom, of finding his wife in their bed, awaiting him in a sensual, half-drowsing state, all her turgescences ready and willing to be awakened by his caresses, gave him gooseflesh all over. “You’ve reached the age of forty and you’ve never been more beautiful,” he murmured, heading for the door. “I love you, Lucrecia.”

A second before the bathroom lay in darkness again, he noticed in one of the mirrors on the dressing table that his emotions and wild imaginings had suddenly turned his humanity into a belligerent silhouette, into a profile that had something in common with that wondrous beast of medieval mythologies: the unicorn.

She is Venus, the Italian one, the daughter of Jupiter, the sister of Greek Aphrodite. The organ player gives her music lessons. My name is Love. Tiny, delicate, rosy, winged, I am a thousand years old and chaste as a dragonfly. The stag, the royal peacock, and the fallow deer that can be seen through the window are as alive as the pair of lovers strolling arm in arm in the shade of the promenade lined with poplars. The satyr of the fountain, however, into whose head crystalline water flows from an alabaster basin, is not alive: it is a piece of Tuscan marble modeled by a clever artist come from the South of France.

We three are alive, too, and as vivacious as the little stream that sings its way down the mountainside between the rocks or the chatter of the parrots that a trader from Africa sold to Don Rigoberto, our master. (The captive animals are now languishing in a cage in the garden.) Twilight has fallen and soon it will be night. When it comes with its lead-gray tatters, the organ will fall silent and the music teacher and I must leave so that the lord and master of everything to be seen here may enter this room to possess his lady. At that time, by our will and through our work well done, Venus will be ready to receive him and entertain him as his rank and fortune merit. That is to say, with the fire of a volcano, the sensuality of a serpent, and the hauteur of a pampered Angora cat.

The young music teacher and I are not here to enjoy ourselves but to work, though all work done wholeheartedly and well turns, it is true, into pleasure. Our task consists of kindling the lady’s bodily joy, poking up the ashes of each one of her five senses till they burst into flame, and peopling her fair-haired head with filthy fantasies. That is how Don Rigoberto likes to have us hand her over to him: ardent and avid, all her moral and religious scruples in abeyance and her mind and body filled to overflowing with appetites. It is an agreeable task, though not an easy one; it requires patience, cunning, and skill in the art of attuning the fury of instinct to the mind’s subtlety and the heart’s tender affections.