The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (14 page)

As if he were walking on live coals, he hurried past a page on which Azorín recalled that “caprice is derived from capra, a she-goat.” He paused, fascinated, at the description by the diplomat Alfonso de la Serna of the
Farewell Symphony
by Haydn, “in which each musician, as his part ended, put out the candle that lit his music stand and stole away until only one violin was left to play the final, solitary melody.” Wasn’t that a coincidence? Wasn’t that a mysterious joining, as if following a secret order, of the solo voice of Haydn’s violin with the pleasure-seeking egotist Philip Larkin, who believed that sex was too important to share?

And yet he, though he elevated sex to the highest level, had always shared it, even during this, his time of bitterest solitude. And then, out of the blue, he was reminded of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., playing double roles in the film that had so disquieted his childhood:
The Corsican Brothers
. Of course, he had never shared sex with anyone as deeply as he had with Lucrecia. But he had also shared it, as a child, youth, and adult, with his own Corsican brother—Narciso?—with whom he had always gotten along so well despite the differences in their natures. And yet those risqué games and deceptions devised and enjoyed by the brothers did not correspond to the ironic sense in which the poet-librarian used the verb “to share.” Turning page after page, he happened upon
The Merchant of Venice
:

“The man who has no music in his soul/And is not moved by harmonies of sweet sounds/Is likely to commit intrigue, fraud, and treason,” he translated freely. Narciso had no music at all, was cut off, body and soul, from the charms of Melpomene, and could not distinguish between Haydn’s
Farewell Symphony
and Pérez Prado’s “Mambo Number 5.” Was Shakespeare correct in decreeing that an ear deaf to the most abstract of the arts made his brother a potential schemer, swindler, and fraud? Well, perhaps it was true. The amiable Narciso had not been a model of virtue, civic, private, or theological, and would reach an advanced age boasting, like Bishop Harold (whose citation was it? The reference had been devoured by the sibylline Limenian damp, or the labors of a moth) on his deathbed, that he had practiced all the deadly sins with the regularity of his beating heart or the ringing of church bells in his bishopric. If that had not been his moral nature, Narciso never would have dared that night to suggest to his Corsican brother—Don Rigoberto could sense in his deepest being the stirrings of the Shakespearean music which he believed he carried inside himself—the daring exchange. And so they took shape before his eyes, sitting side by side in that room in the house in La Planicie that was a monument to kitsch and a blasphemous provocation to every society for the protection of animals, bristling as it was with embalmed tigers, buffalo, rhinos, and deer—Lucrecia next to Ilse, Narciso’s blond wife, on the night of their adventure. The Bard was right: a deaf ear for music was a symptom (or the cause?) of a base soul. No, one could not generalize, for then one would have to conclude that their insensitivity to music had turned Jorge Luis Borges and André Breton into Judas and Cain, when it was well known that both had been very fine people, for writers.

His brother Narciso was not a devil, merely an adventurer. Endowed with a diabolical aptitude for deriving enormous profits from his wanderlust and his taste for everything forbidden, secret, and exotic. But as he was also a mythomaniac, it was difficult to know what was true and what was fantasy in the tales of his travels with which he would hold his listeners spellbound at the (sinister) hour of gala dinners, wedding banquets, or cocktail parties, the stages for his great narrative performances. For example, Don Rigoberto had never entirely believed that he had made a good part of his fortune smuggling contraband—rhinoceros horns, leopard testicles, and the penises of walruses and seals (the first two from Africa, the last from Alaska, Greenland, and Canada)—to the prosperous nations of Asia. Body parts worth their weight in gold in Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and even Communist China, for connoisseurs considered them powerful aphrodisiacs and infallible remedies for impotence. On that night, in fact, while the Corsican brothers and the two sisters-in-law, Ilse and Lucrecia, were having an apéritif before supper in the Costa Verde restaurant, Narciso had entertained them with a wild story about aphrodisiacs (in it he was both hero and victim) that took place in Saudi Arabia, where he swore—backed up by precise geographical details and unpronounceable Arabic names full of guttural consonants—he had almost been decapitated in the public square in Riyadh when it was discovered that he had smuggled in a bag filled with Captagon tablets (acetophenetidin hydrochloride) to maintain the sexual potency of the lustful sheik Abdelaziz Abu Amid, who was fairly worn out by his four legitimate wives and the eighty-two concubines in his harem, and who paid him in gold for the shipment of amphetamines.

“And yobimbine?” asked Ilse, cutting off her husband’s story just at the moment when he was appearing before a tribunal of turbaned ulemas. “Does it produce the effect they say in everybody who tries it?”

Losing no time, his handsome brother—without a trace of envy Don Rigoberto recalled how, after being indistinguishable as children and adolescents, adulthood began to differentiate between them, and now Narciso’s ears seemed normal in comparison to the spectacular wings that he sported, and Narciso’s straight, modest nose was no match for the corkscrew, or anteater’s snout, with which he sniffed at life—launched into an erudite peroration on yohimbine (called yobimbine in Peru because of the lazy phonetic tendencies of the natives, for whom an aspirated
h
demanded greater buccal effort than a
b
). Narciso’s lecture continued through their apéritifs—pisco sours for the gentlemen and cold white wine for the ladies—and the meal of shellfish and rice and crêpes with blancmange, and as far as he was concerned, it had the tingling effect of foreplay. At that moment—the caprices of chance—the notebook furnished him with the Shakespearean indication that turquoise stones change color to warn whoever is wearing them of imminent danger (again,
The Merchant of Venice
). Was he speaking seriously? Did he know or was he inventing knowledge in order to create the psychological climate, the amoral ambiance that would favor his subsequent proposals? He had not asked and he never would, for at this point, what did it matter?

Don Rigoberto began to laugh, and the dull gray afternoon lightened. At the bottom of the page, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste boasted: “Stupidity is not my strong suit” (
La bêtise n’est pas mon fort
). Lucky for him; Don Rigoberto had already spent a quarter of a century at the insurance company, surrounded by, submerged in, asphyxiated by stupidity, making him a specialist in the subject. Was Narciso simply an imbecile? Another piece of Limenian protoplasm that calls itself decent and proper? Yes. Which made him no less amiable when he set his mind to it. That night, for instance. There he sat, the indefatigable raconteur, his face closely shaven and sporting the deep tan of the leisured, expounding on an alkaloid plant, also called yohimbine, that had an illustrious history in herbalist tradition and natural medicine. It increased vasodilatation and stimulated the ganglia that control erective tissue, and it inhibited serotonin, which, in excessive amounts, inhibits the sexual appetite. He had the warm voice of an experienced seducer; his voice and gestures were in perfect harmony with the blue blazer, gray shirt, and dark silk scarf with white dots that encircled his neck. His exposition, interspersed with smiles, adroitly respected the line between information and insinuation, anecdote and fantasy, knowledge and hearsay, diversion and excitation. Suddenly Don Rigoberto noticed the gleam in the sea-green eyes of Ilse, the dark topaz eyes of Lucrecia. Had his pretentious Corsican brother aroused the ladies? Judging by their giggles, jokes, questions, the crossing and uncrossing of their legs, and the gaiety with which they emptied their glasses of Chilean wine (Concha y Toro), yes, he had. Why wouldn’t they experience the same stirring of the spirit as he? Did Narciso have his plan already prepared at this point in the evening? Of course, Don Rigoberto decreed.

And therefore, with great skill, he did not give them a chance to catch their breath, or allow the conversation to move away from the Machiavellian course he had laid out for it. From yobimbine he moved on to Japanese
fugu
, the testicular fluid of a small fish which, in addition to being an extremely powerful seminal tonic, can also cause a grisly death by poison—which is how hundreds of lascivious Japanese perish every year—and recounted the icy fear with which he had taken it, on that shimmering night in Kyoto, from the hands of a geisha in a billowing kimono, not knowing if what awaited him at the end of those opiate mouthfuls were death rattles and rigor mortis or one hundred explosions of pleasure (it was the latter, reduced by one zero). Ilse, a statuesque blonde, a former stewardess on Lufthansa, a Peruvianized Valkyrie, celebrated her husband’s achievement with not a trace of retrospective jealousy. It was she who suggested (was she in on the plot?), after their floury dessert, that they conclude the evening with a drink at their house in La Planicie. Don Rigoberto said “Good idea” without a second thought, affected by the visible enthusiasm with which Lucrecia welcomed the proposal.

Half an hour later they were settled in comfortable chairs in the hideous kitsch of Narciso and Isle’s living room—Peruvian ostentation and Prussian orderliness—surrounded by dried and stuffed beasts that impassively observed them with icy glass eyes as they drank whiskey in the indirect lighting, listening to songs by Nat “King” Cole and Frank Sinatra, and contemplating the tiles in the illuminated pool through the glass doors that led to the garden. Narciso continued to display his knowledge of aphrodisiacs with all the ease of the Great Richardi—Don Rigoberto sighed as he recalled the circuses of his childhood—pulling scarves from his top hat. Combining omniscience and exoticism, Narciso asserted that in southern Italy each male consumed a ton of sweet basil in the course of his lifetime, for tradition maintains that not only the flavor of pasta but the size of the penis depends on this aromatic herb, and that in India an ointment with a base of garlic and monkey secretions was sold in the markets—he gave it to his friends when they turned fifty—and when rubbed on the proper place produced erections in succession, like the sneezes of a person suffering from allergies. He inundated them with musings on the virtues of oysters, celery, Korean ginseng, sarsaparilla, licorice, pollen, truffles, and caviar, until Don Rigoberto began to suspect, after listening to him for more than three hours, that all the animal and vegetable products in the world were probably designed to foster that joining of bodies called physical love, copulation, sin, to which human beings (himself not excluded) attached so much importance.

This was when Narciso took him by the arm and led him away from the ladies on the pretext of showing him the latest piece in his collection of walking sticks (in addition to mounted animals, what else could this priapic beast, this walking phallus, collect but walking sticks?). The pisco sours, the wine and cognac, had all had their effect. Instead of walking, Don Rigoberto seemed to float into Narciso’s study, where, their pages uncut, naturally, the leatherbound volumes stood guard on the shelves: the
Britannica
, Ricardo Palma’s
Peruvian Traditions
, and the Durants’
History of Civilization
, along with a paperback novel by Stephen King. Without any preliminaries, lowering his voice, Narciso spoke into his ear and asked if he remembered the tricks they had played on girls long ago in the boxes at the Leuro Cinema. What tricks? But before his brother could answer, he remembered. The switching game! The company lawyer would call it appropriating another person’s identity. Taking advantage of their resemblance, emphasizing it with identical clothes and haircuts, each passed himself off as the other in order to kiss and fondle—it was called “making out” in their neighborhood—his brother’s girlfriend for the duration of the movie.

“Those were the days, Brother.” Don Rigoberto smiled, succumbing to nostalgia.

“You thought they didn’t know, that they mixed us up,” Narciso recalled. “I could never convince you they did it because they liked the game.”

“No, they didn’t know,” Rigoberto asserted. “They couldn’t have. The morality back then wouldn’t have permitted it. Lucerito and Chinchilla? So proper, always going to Mass and taking Communion? Never! They would have told their parents.”

“Your concept of women is too angelic,” Narciso admonished him.

“That’s what you think. The fact is, I’m just discreet, unlike you. But every moment I don’t devote to the obligations of earning a living, I invest in pleasure.”

(And just then the notebook presented him with an appropriate quotation from Borges: “The duty of all things is to give joy; if they do not give joy they are either useless or harmful.” Don Rigoberto thought of a machista footnote: “Suppose we say women instead of things, then what?”)

“We have only one life, Brother. You don’t get a second chance.”

“After the matinees we would run to Huatica Boulevard, to the block where the French girls lived,” Don Rigoberto said dreamily. “In the days before AIDS, when all you got was a harmless bug and an easy cure.”

“Those days aren’t over. They’re still here,” Narciso declared. “We haven’t died, and we’re not going to die. That decision is irrevocable.”

His eyes flamed and his voice was mellow. Don Rigoberto realized that nothing he was hearing was spontaneous; a scheme lurked behind the clever reminiscing.

“Would you care to tell me what you have in mind?” he asked, intrigued.