B004QGYWNU EBOK (8 page)

My left ear was bitten off in a fight with another human being, as I remember. But I hear the sounds of the world clearly through the thin slit that remains. I also see things, though only obliquely and with difficulty. Because, even though not apparent at first glance, this bluish protuberance, to the left of my mouth, is an eye. That it is there, in working order, apprehending forms and colors, is a marvel wrought by medical science, a testimonial to the extraordinary progress so characteristic of our time. I ought by all odds to be doomed to perpetual darkness, since all the survivors of the great fire—I do not recall whether it was caused by a bombardment or a coup d’état—lost both their sight and their hair, because of the oxides. I had the good fortune to lose only one eye; the other one was saved by the ophthalmologists after sixteen operations. It has no eyelid and frequently oozes tears, but it allows me to distract myself watching television and, above all, to detect in a flash the appearance of the enemy.

The glass cube I live in is my home, I can see through the walls of it, but no one can see me from the outside: a very handy system for ensuring the safety of the home, in this era of terrible traps. The glass panes of my dwelling are, of course, bulletproof, germproof, radiationproof, and soundproof. They are continually perfumed with the distinctive odor of armpits and musk, which to me—and only to me, I know—is delightful.

I have a very highly developed sense of smell and it is by way of my nose that I experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. Ought I to call this gigantic membranous organ that registers all scents, even the most subtle, a nose? I am referring to the grayish shape, covered with white crusts, that begins at my mouth and extends, increasing in size, down to my bull neck. No, it is not a goiter or an acromegalic Adam’s apple. It is my nose. I know that it is neither beautiful nor useful, since its excessive sensibility makes it an indescribable torment when a rat is rotting in the vicinity or fetid materials pass through the drainpipes that run through my home. Nonetheless, I revere it and sometimes think that my nose is the seat of my soul.

“Once upon a time, there was a man attached to a nose,” Don Rigoberto recited, beginning the Thursday ceremony with a poetic invocation. And he remembered José María Eguren, the slender nephelibate poet who, regarding the Spanish word
nariz
as being phonetically vulgar, gallicized it and called it
nez
in his poems.

Was his nose extremely ugly? It depended on the looking glass in which it was contemplated. It was round and hooked, without inferiority complexes, curious about the world, very sensitive, tuberous, and ornamental. Despite Don Rigoberto’s attentions and precautions, its appearance was marred from time to time by a rash of blackheads, but this week, to judge from what the mirror told him, not one had shown up to be squeezed, pressed out, and immediately disinfected with peroxide. Through an inexplicable cutaneous caprice, a good part of it, the lower end in particular, there where it curved and opened out to form two windows, had a reddish tinge to it, that aged-burgundy color that so often is a telltale sign of a souse. But Don Rigoberto drank in as great moderation as he ate, so that those red splotches had no other possible cause, in his opinion, than the vagaries and caprices of Dame Nature. Unless—the face of Doña Lucrecia’s husband broke into a smile that stretched from ear to ear—his big sensitive schnoz had taken on a permanent blush at the memory of the libidinous bodily needs he sniffed in the conjugal bed. Don Rigoberto noted that the two orifices of his respiratory organ immediately distended, anticipating those seminal breezes—emulsifying fragrances, he thought—that in a short while, entering therein, would impregnate him to the very marrow. He felt especially favored and grateful. To work, then, for there was a time and a place for everything: this is not yet the right moment for breathing exercises, you rascal.

Using his handkerchief, he blew his nose, hard, first one side and then the other, and with his index finger he blocked the opposite nostril each time, till he was certain that his nose was free of mucosities and watery secretions. Then, holding in his left hand the philatelist’s loupe that he was in the habit of using to explore the postcards and erotic etchings in his collection and as an aid in his meticulous cleansing ritual, and with his little nail scissors in his right, he proceeded to rid his nostrils of those tiny anti-aesthetic hairs whose small black heads were already beginning to be visible from the outside, despite their having been decapitated just seven days before. The task called for the concentration of an Oriental miniaturist to carry it out successfully without cutting himself. It brought Don Rigoberto a soothing spiritual serenity, little short of the state of “emptiness and fullness” described by mystics.

His iron will to control the unpleasant arbitrary acts of his body, forcing it to exist within certain aesthetic rules, never going beyond limits fixed by his sovereign taste—and, to a certain extent, Lucrecia’s—thanks to techniques of extirpation, trimming, expulsion, irrigation, friction, tonsure, polishing, et cetera; which he had finally mastered, as an excellent workman masters his craft, isolated him from the rest of humanity and produced in him that miraculous sensation—which would reach its apogee when he joined his wife in the darkness of the bedroom—of having escaped from time. More than a sensation: a physical certainty. All his cells were freed at that instant—snip snip went the silvery blades of the little scissors and snip snip the little clipped hairs drifted slowly, weightlessly, through the air, snip snip from his nostrils to the whirlpool in the washbasin, snip snip—reprieved, absolved of the deterioration of occurring, of the nightmare of persisting in being. That was the magic virtue of the rite, and primitive man had discovered it at the dawn of history: transforming one, for certain eternal instants, into sheer being-present. He had rediscovered that wisdom all by himself, on his own and at his own risk. He thought: The way of withdrawing momentarily from the base decadence and the civil servitudes of the social order, the abject conventions of the herd, in order to attain, for one brief parenthesis per day, a sovereign nature. He thought: This is a foretaste of immortality. The word did not strike him as excessive. At this instant he felt himself to be—snip snip snip snip—incorruptible, and, soon now, in the arms and between the legs of his spouse, he would feel himself to be a monarch. He thought: A god.

The bathroom was his temple; the washbasin, the sacrificial altar; he was the high priest and was celebrating the Mass that each night purified him and redeemed him from life. “In a moment I shall be worthy of Lucrecia and be with her,” he said to himself. Thus absorbed in contemplation, he addressed his strong nose in warm tones: “I say unto you that very soon you and I shall be in Paradise, my good thief.” Catching the scent of the future, his two orifices opened greedily. But instead of the intimate, prehensile aromas of the lady of the house, they took in the aseptic odor of soapy water which Don Rigoberto, by means of complicated manual aspersions and equine tossings of his head, was now applying, as a final touch, to the freshly clipped interior of his nostrils.

The delicate phase of the nasal rite being ended, his mind could now abandon itself once again to the play of fantasy, and all of a sudden, it associated the imminent nuptial bed, where Lucrecia lay awaiting him, with the unpronounceable name of the Dutch historian and essayist Johan Huizinga, one of whose essays had touched the depths of his heart, persuading him that it had been written for him, for her, for the two of them. Giving the soul of his nose one last rinse with pure water through a medicine dropper, Don Rigoberto asked himself: “Isn’t our bed the magic space that
Homo ludens
speaks of?” Yes, by antonomasia. According to the Dutch writer, culture, civilization, war, sports, law, religion had sprung from that territory bound by rules, as arborescences and luxuriant leafy growths, some of them felicitous, others perverse, of the irresistible human propensity for game playing. An amusing theory, doubtless; a subtle one as well, but surely false. The decorous humanist, however, had refrained from pursuing his flash of genius to the farthest depths, applying it to the domain that confirmed his intuition, where nearly everything became clear thanks to the light it shed.

“A magic space, a feminine realm, the grove of the senses”: he searched for metaphors for the little country that Lucrecia was inhabiting at this moment. “My kingdom is a bed,” he decreed, rinsing his hands now, drying them. The vast triple-width mattress allowed the couple to move comfortably in any direction, to stretch out, and roll over and over in free and joyous embrace without risk of falling to the floor. It was soft but resilient, with firm springs, and so perfectly level that any of their members could glide over it without encountering the slightest roughness or obstacle that would conspire against any given gymnastic exercise, pose, daring overture, or clever sculptural parody during their love games. “The Abbey of Incontinence,” Don Rigoberto ventured, in a moment of inspiration. “A garden-plot mattress, where my wife’s flowers open and yield their secret essences to this privileged mortal.”

He noted in the mirror that his nostrils had begun to throb like two famished little gullets. “Let me get a deep breath of you, my love.” He would sniff her and breathe her in from head to foot, with meticulous care and perseverance, lingering long at certain areas with their own special odor, and hurrying past others, vapid and uninteresting: he would subject her to intense nasal scrutiny and make love to her, hearing her demur every so often amid stifled giggles. “Oh, no, my love, you’re tickling me.” Don Rigoberto felt a bit light-headed with impatience. But he took his time: a wait in store brings hope of even more; one prepares to take one’s pleasure with greater discernment and discrimination.

He had just arrived at the final stages of the ceremony when, from the garden, filtering through the joints of the windowpanes, the penetrating perfume of honeysuckle reached his nostrils. He closed his eyes and inhaled. The scent of that rambling climber was a treacherous one. It stayed shut up tight for days without giving forth its green aroma, as though hoarding it and concentrating it, and then, all of a sudden, at certain mysterious moments of the day or night, owing to the humidity in the air, or the movements of the moon and stars, or certain circumspect cataclysms down below, there in the bosom of the earth in which it was rooted, it discharged upon the world that disturbing, bittersweet breath that called to mind swarthy-skinned women with long wavy hair, and dances that offered, in their wanton whirl of skirts, a glimpse of satiny thighs, dark buttocks, delicate ankles, and, swift will-o’-the-wisp, the tangle of a luxuriant pubis.

Yes, now—Don Rigoberto’s eyes were closed and it was as if all his energy had fled his body and taken refuge in his reproductive and nasal organs—his nostrils were breathing in Doña Lucrecia’s honeysuckle. And as the warm, heavy perfume, with hints of musk, incense, sauerkraut, anise, pickled herring, violets opening, moist secretions of a virgin maiden, mounted to his brain like an emanation from the vegetable kingdom or a sulfurous lava, bringing an eruption of desire, his nose, transformed into a sensitive plant, could also catch the scent now of that beloved grove, the viscous friction of that slit of bright lips, the tickle of that moist fleece whose fine silky hairs agitated his nasal orifices, further enhancing the effect of a vaporous narcotic being offered him by the body of his beloved.

Making an intense intellectual effort—to recite aloud the Pythagorean theorem—Don Rigoberto halted halfway in its course the erection that was beginning to bare its amorous little head, and splashing it with handfuls of cold water, he calmed it down and returned it, shy and shrunken, to its discreet foreskin cocoon. He fondly contemplated the soft cylinder which, serene now, elastic, swinging back and forth like the clapper of a bell, prolonged his lower belly. He told himself once again that it was a great stroke of luck that it had not occurred to his parents to have him circumcised: his prepuce was a diligent producer of pleasing sensations, and he was certain that, had he been deprived of this translucent membrane, his nights of love would have been the poorer, a privation as grave as if an evil spell had destroyed his sense of smell.

And he suddenly remembered those bold eccentrics for whom breathing in peculiar odors, regarded as repellent by the ordinary individual, was a vital necessity, to precisely the same degree as eating and drinking. He tried to picture in his mind the poet Friedrich von Schiller avidly burying his sensitive nostrils in the rotten apples that stimulated him and predisposed him to creation and love, precisely as little erotic figures did Don Rigoberto. And then he allowed his imagination to dwell upon the unsettling private recipe of that elegant historian of the French Revolution, Francois Michelet—one of whose vagaries was to keep an observant eye on his beloved Athéné as she menstruated; on finding himself overcome with fatigue and thoroughly discouraged, he was in the habit of abandoning the manuscripts, parchments, and filing cabinets of his study and silently stealing, like a thief, into the water closet of their home. Don Rigoberto conjured up a mental image of him: in a swallowtail coat, pumps, and a frilled shirt perhaps, kneeling reverently before the toilet bowl, absorbing with infantile delight the fetid miasmas which, once they reached the labyrinthine folds of his romantic brain, restored his enthusiasms and his energy, refreshed his mind and his body, revived his intellectual drive and his generous ideals. What a normal man I am, compared to those queer birds, he thought. But he did not feel disheartened or inferior. The bliss he had found in his solitary hygienic practices and, above all, in the love of his wife appeared to him to be sufficient compensation for his normalcy. Having this, what need was there to be rich, famous, eccentric, a genius? The modest obscurity that his life represented in the eyes of others, that routine existence as the general manager of an insurance company, concealed something which, he was sure, few of his fellows enjoyed or even suspected existed: possible happiness. Transitory and secret, yes, minimal even, but certain, palpable, nightly, alive. He was now feeling it all about him, surrounding him like an aureole, and in a few minutes he would be that happiness, and it would also be his wife, together with him and with it, united in that profound trinity of two who, thanks to pleasure, were one, or rather, three. Had he perhaps resolved the mystery of the Trinity? He smiled: it’s not that big a deal, you rascal. Just a pinch of wisdom to use as a momentary antidote to the frustrations and annoyances that seasoned existence. He thought: Fantasy gnaws life away, thank God.

As he stepped through the door of the bedroom, he gave a tremulous sigh.