The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (16 page)

She laughed again, and Don Rigoberto felt her moving away as she stroked his thinning hair with the kind of caress teachers give little boys who are good. He could not believe his eyes: when had Ilse taken off her clothes? There were her things on the sofa, and there she was, athletic, naked from head to foot, striding through the darkness toward the bed just as her remote ancestors, the Valkyries, strode through forests in their horned helmets hunting down bears, tigers, and men. At precisely that moment Narciso moved away from Lucrecia, ran toward the middle of the room—his face revealed indescribable happiness—and opened his arms to receive her with an animal roar of approval. And there she was now, the rejected, recanted Lucrecia withdrawing to the far side of the bed, fully aware that from now on she was not needed, looking to the left and right, searching for someone who could tell her what to do. Don Rigoberto felt pity. Without saying a word, he called her name. He watched her get out of bed on tiptoe so as not to disturb the happy couple, find her clothes on the floor, partially dress, and walk to where he was waiting for her with open arms. She huddled against his chest, trembling.

“Do you understand any of it, Rigoberto?” he heard her ask.

“Only that I love you,” he replied, holding her close. “I’ve never seen you so beautiful. Come, come with me.”

“What a pair of Corsican brothers.” He heard the Valkyrie laughing in the distance, against a background of a wild boar’s savage bellowing and Wagnerian trumpets.

Winged Lion Harpy

Where are you? In the Hall of Grotesques in the Museum of the Austrian Baroque on the Lower Belvedere in Vienna.

What are you doing there? You are carefully studying one of Jonas Drentwett’s female creatures that bring fantasy and glory to its walls.

Which one? The one that stretches her long neck in order to better display her bosom and reveal the beautiful, sharply pointed breast with the ruddy nipple that all living beings would come to suck if you had not reserved it.

For whom? For your lover at a distance, the reconstructor of your identity, the painter who unmakes and makes you at will, your waking dreamer.

What must you do? Learn the creature by heart and emulate her in the privacy of your bedroom, preparing for the night when I will come. Do not be discouraged because you do not have a tail, or the talons of a bird of prey, or because you are not in the habit of walking on all fours. If you truly love me, you will have a tail and talons, you will walk on all fours, and gradually, through the constancy and tenacity demanded by feats of love, you will cease to be Lucrecia of the Olivar and will become the Mythological Lucrecia, Lucrecia the Winged Lion Harpy, Lucrecia who has come to my heart and my desire from the legends and myths of Greece (with a stopover at the Roman frescoes from which Jonas Drentwett copied you).

Are you like her now? With your rump tucked in, your bosom haughty, your head aloft? Do you feel how the feline tail begins to appear, the redtinted pointed wings begin to grow? What you still lack, the diadem for your brow, the topaz necklace, the girdle of gold and precious stones where your tender bosom will rest, these will be brought to you, as a token of adoration and reverence, by one who adores you above all other things real or nonexistent.

The Lover of Harpies

Fonchito and the Girls

Señora Lucrecia dried her laughing eyes again, trying to gain time. She did not dare to ask Fonchito if what Teté Barriga had told her was true. She had been about to, twice, and both times she had lost her courage.

“Why are you laughing like that, Stepmamá?” the boy wanted to know, intrigued. Because from the time he had walked into the little house near the Olivar de San Isidro, Señora Lucrecia had been bursting into these unwarranted fits of laughter and devouring him with her eyes.

“Because of something a friend told me.” Doña Lucrecia blushed. “I’m too embarrassed to ask you about it, but I’m dying to know if it’s true.”

“It must be some gossip about my papá.”

“I’ll tell you, even though it’s very vulgar,” Señora Lucrecia said decisively. “My curiosity is stronger than my good manners.”

According to Teté, whose husband had been there and told her about it with a mixture of amusement and anger, it happened at one of those gatherings held every two or three months in Don Rigoberto’s study. Men only, five or six childhood friends, acquaintances from school or the university or the neighborhood who continued to meet out of habit, and without enthusiasm, but who did not dare to break the ritual, perhaps because of the superstitious notion that if any one of them failed to attend, bad luck would befall the deserter, or even the entire group. And so they continued to see each other, although undoubtedly, like Rigoberto, they no longer enjoyed this bimonthly or trimonthly get-together when they would drink cognac, eat cheese turnovers, talk about those who had died, or discuss politics. Doña Lucrecia recalled that afterward Don Rigoberto’s head would ache with boredom, and he would have to take a few drops of valerian. The incident had occurred at the last gathering, just a week ago. The friends—in their fifties or sixties, some of them about to retire—saw Fonchito come in, his blond hair tousled, his big blue eyes opened wide at seeing them there. The disorder of his school uniform added a touch of abandon to the beauty of his small person. The gentlemen smiled at him: Hello, Fonchito, how big you’ve gotten, how you’ve grown.

“Can’t you say hello?” Don Rigoberto had gruffly admonished him.

“Yes, of course,” replied the crystalline voice of her stepson. “But, Papá, please, if your friends want to hug me, tell them not to touch my bottom.”

Señora Lucrecia burst into the fifth laughing fit of the afternoon.

“Did you really say something so outrageous, Fonchito?”

“But they pretend they’re hugging me and all the while they never stop touching me there.” The boy shrugged, not attributing too much importance to the subject. “I don’t like anybody touching me there, not even as a joke, because then it itches. And whenever I itch I scratch so much I break out in a rash.”

“Then it’s true, you did say it.” Señora Lucrecia passed from laughter to astonishment and back to laughter. “Obviously: Teté could never make up anything like that. And Rigoberto? How did he react?”

“His eyes were furious and he told me to go to my room and do my homework,” said Fonchito. “Later, when they had gone, he really scolded me. And he took away my Sunday allowance.”

“Those old men with their roving hands,” exclaimed Señora Lucrecia, suddenly indignant. “It’s disgusting. If I had ever caught them doing that, I would have thrown them out. And was your papá still so angry when you told him? But first, swear. Was it true? They touched your bottom? Could it be one of those strange things you think up?”

“Sure they touched me. Right here,” and the boy showed her where, patting his buttocks. “Just like the priests at school. Why, Stepmamá? What is it about my backside that makes everybody want to touch it?”

Señora Lucrecia stared at him, trying to guess if he was lying.

“If it’s true, then they have no shame, they’re abusive,” she exclaimed at last, still doubtful. “At school, too? Haven’t you told Rigoberto, so that he can complain?”

The boy assumed a seraphic expression. “I don’t want to give my papá anything else to worry about. Least of all now, when he’s so sad.”

Doña Lucrecia bent her head in confusion. This child was a master at saying things that made her feel bad. Well, if what he said was true, then good for him for making those dirty old men uncomfortable. Teté Barriga’s husband had said that he and his friends could not move and did not dare to look at Rigoberto for a long while. Then they made jokes, though their faces were grim. In any event, enough about that. She moved on to something else. She asked Fonchito how things were going at school, if he wasn’t getting into trouble at the academy when he left before classes were over, if he had gone to the movies, to a soccer game, to some party. But Justiniana, who came in with tea and biscuits, brought it up again. She had heard everything and began to give her opinion, and she had a lot to say. She was certain it was a lie: “Don’t believe him, Señora. It was just more of that little devil’s mischief to shame those gentlemen in front of Don Rigoberto. Don’t you know him yet?” “If you didn’t make such delicious sweet buns I’d be angry with you, Justita.” Doña Lucrecia felt that she had been imprudent; by allowing her morbid curiosity to get the better of her—one never knew with Fonchito—perhaps she had awakened the beast. And, in effect, as Justiniana was gathering up the cups and saucers, the boy’s question pierced her like the thrust of a sword.

“Why is it that grown-ups like children so much, Stepmamá?”

Justiniana slipped away, making a sound in her throat or stomach that could only be stifled laughter. Doña Lucrecia looked into Fonchito’s eyes. She scrutinized them calmly, searching for a spark of malice or evil intention. No. What she saw was the luminous clarity of a diaphanous sky.

“Everybody likes children,” she said hypocritically. “It’s normal for a person to be affectionate with them. They’re small, fragile, and sometimes very delicious.”

She felt stupid, impatient to escape those great, still, limpid eyes that were resting on her.

“Egon Schiele liked them a lot,” Fonchito said, nodding his agreement. “In Vienna, early in the century, there were so many abandoned little girls living on the streets. They begged in churches, in cafés.”

“Just like Lima,” she said, not knowing what she was saying. Once again she was overwhelmed by the sensation of being a fly lured, despite all her efforts, into the jaws of a spider.

“And he would go to Schonbrunn Park, where there were hundreds of them. He took them to his studio. He fed them and gave them money,” Fonchito continued, inexorably. “Señor Paris von Güterlash, a friend whom Schiele painted—I’ll show you his portrait in a minute—says there were always two or three girls from the street in his studio. They lived there at his expense. They would sleep or play while Schiele painted. Do you think there was anything wrong in that?”

“If he fed them and helped them, how could there be anything wrong?”

“But he made them get undressed and pose for him,” the boy went on. There’s no escape for me now, thought Doña Lucrecia. “Was it wrong for Egon Schiele to do that?”

“Well, I don’t think so.” His stepmother swallowed. “An artist needs models. Why have a nasty mind? Didn’t Degas like to paint his
little mice
, the young dancers at the Opera in Paris? Well, young girls inspired Egon Schiele too.”

Then why had he been arrested, accused of kidnapping a minor? Why was he sent to prison for circulating indecent pictures? And why had he been obliged to burn a drawing on the pretext that children had been exposed to indecency in his studio?

“I don’t know why.” She tried to calm him when she saw his agitation. “I don’t know anything about Schiele, Fonchito. You’re the one who knows everything about him. Artists are complicated people, your papá can explain it to you. They don’t have to be saints. You shouldn’t idealize them or demonize them. Their work is what matters, not their lives. Schiele’s legacy is how he painted those girls, not what he did with them in his studio.”

“He had them wear those colored stockings he liked so much,” said Fonchito, putting the finishing touches on the story. “Sprawled on the sofa, on the floor. Alone or in pairs. Then he would climb a ladder so he could look down at them from a height. At the top of the ladder he would make a sketch; his notebooks have been published. My papá has the book. But it’s in German. I could only look at the drawings, I couldn’t read it.”

“He climbed up a ladder? That’s how he painted them?”

Now you were caught in the web, Lucrecia. The kid always managed it somehow. Now you didn’t try to have him change the subject; you followed along, trapped. It’s true, Stepmamá. He said his dream was to be a bird of prey. To paint the world from a height, to see it as a condor or buzzard saw it. And if you look closely, it was absolutely true. He would show her right now. He jumped up, rummaged in his portfolio from the academy, and a moment later he was crouching at her feet—as always, she was on the sofa and he on the floor—turning the pages of another voluminous book of Egon Schiele reproductions that he rested on his stepmother’s knees. Did Fonchito really know all those things about the painter? How many of them were true? And why did he have this mania for Schiele? Had he heard things from Rigoberto? Was this painter her former husband’s latest obsession? In any case, his description was accurate. Those sprawling girls and entwined lovers, those phantasmal cities without people or animals or cars, the houses crowded together and almost frozen along the banks of empty rivers, all appeared as if viewed from a height by a rapacious bird that soared above them with an all-encompassing, merciless eye. Yes, it was the perspective of a bird of prey. The angelic face smiled at her. “Didn’t I tell you, Stepmamá?” She nodded in dismay. Behind those cherubic features, that innocence worthy of a religious painting, dwelled a subtle, precociously mature intelligence, its psychology as complex as Rigoberto’s. And at that moment she realized what was on the page. Her face flared like a torch. Fonchito had left the book open to a watercolor in red tones and cream-colored spaces, with a mauve border, and only now did Doña Lucrecia pay attention to its subject: the artist himself in sharp outline, sitting, and between his open legs a naked girl with her back turned, holding on high, as if it were a flagpole, his gigantic virile member.

“This couple has also been painted from above,” the crystalline voice informed her. “But how could he have done the sketch? He couldn’t do it from the ladder, because he’s the man sitting on the floor. You know that, don’t you, Stepmamá?”

“I know it’s a very obscene self-portrait,” said Doña Lucrecia. “You’d better keep turning the pages, Foncho.”

“It seems sad to me,” the boy disagreed, with a good deal of conviction. “Look at Schiele’s face. It’s so discouraged, as if he couldn’t bear any more of the sorrow he’s feeling. He looks ready to cry. He was only twenty-one, Stepmamá. Why do you think he called this picture
The Red Host?
”

“You’re better off not finding out, Mr. Know-it-all.” Señora Lucrecia was becoming angry. “Is that what it’s called? So besides being obscene, its sacrilegious too. Turn the page or I’ll tear it.”

“But, Stepmamá,” Fonchito reproached her, “you can’t be like the judge who ordered Egon Schiele to destory his picture. You can’t be that unfair and prejudiced.”

His indignation seemed genuine. His eyes flashed, the fine nostrils quivered, and even his ears had sharpened. Doña Lucrecia regretted what she had just said.

“Well, you’re right, in painting, in art, you have to be broad-minded.” She rubbed her hands nervously. “But you make me so angry, Fonchito. I never know if you do what you do and say what you say spontaneously, or if you intend something else. I never know if I’m with a child or a dirty, perverse old man hiding behind the face of the Infant Jesus.”

The boy looked at her in bewilderment; his surprise seemed to well up from the deepest part of his being. He blinked, uncomprehending. Was she the one who was shocking the child with her suspicions? Of course not. And yet, when she saw Fonchito’s eyes brimming with tears, she felt responsible.

“I don’t even know what I’m saying,” she murmured. “Forget it, I didn’t say a thing. Come, give me a kiss, let’s be friends.”

The boy stood and threw his arms around her neck. Doña Lucrecia could feel the fragile form trembling, the delicate bones, the small body on the verge of adolescence, that age when boys could still be mistaken for girls.

“Don’t be angry with me, Stepmamá,” she heard him saying into her ear. “Correct me if I do something wrong, give me advice. I want to be just what you want me to be. But don’t be angry.”

“It’s all right, I’m not angry anymore,” she said. “Let’s forget it.”

His slim arms around her neck held her prisoner, and he spoke so slowly and softly that she could not understand what he was saying. But all her nerves registered the tip of the boy’s tongue when, like a slender probe, it entered the opening of her ear and wet it with saliva. She resisted the impulse to move him away. A moment later, she felt his finely molded lips moving across her lobe with slow, tiny kisses. And now she did move him away gently—little shudders ran up and down her body—and found herself looking into his mischievous face.

“Did I tickle you?” He seemed to be boasting of a great feat. “Your whole body started to tremble. Did you feel an electric current, Stepmamá?”

She did not know what to say. Her smile was forced.

“I forgot to tell you.” Fonchito himself saved her, returning to his usual spot in front of the sofa. “I started the job, on my papá.”

“What job?”

“Making you two be friends again,” the boy explained, gesticulating. “Do you know what I did? I told him I saw you coming out of the Church of the Virgen del Pilar, very elegant, on a gentleman’s arm. And that you looked like newlyweds on their honeymoon.”

“Why did you tell him lies?”

“To make him jealous. And I did. He got so nervous, Stepmamá!”

His laughter proclaimed a splendid joy in living. His papá had turned pale, and his eyes had bulged, though at first he didn’t say anything. But his curiosity held the strings, and he was dying to know more, twitching like a puppet! To make things easier for him, Fonchito fired the first shot: “Do you think my stepmamá is planning to marry again, Papá?”