The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (19 page)

The skilled surgeons in Miami mended his bones, straightened what had been bent and bent what had been straightened, sewed on what had been torn away, and constructed artificial genitals, using bits of flesh taken from his gluteal muscle. It was always stiff, but that was pure show, a framework of skin over a plastic prosthesis. “Lots of smoke and no fire, or to be mathematically precise, a shell with no nuts” was Don Rigoberto’s savage formulation. He could use it only to urinate, not even voluntarily but each time he drank any fluid, and since poor Manuel had no way to keep that constant flow of liquid from wetting the seat of his pants, he had to wear over it, like a grotesque little hat, a plastic bag to collect his water. Except for this inconvenience, the eunuch led a very normal life and—every madman has his madness—still served the cause of motorcycles.

“Are you going to visit him again?” Don Rigoberto asked, somewhat put out.

“He’s invited me for tea, and you know he’s a good friend and I feel very sorry for him,” Doña Lucrecia explained. “But if it bothers you, I won’t go.”

“Go, go by all means,” he said apologetically. “You’ll tell me about it afterward?”

They had know each other since childhood. They were from the same neighborhood and had been in love in school, when being in love meant holding hands on Sundays after eleven o’clock Mass as they walked in the Parque Central in Miraflores, or in the smaller Parquecito Salazar following a swooning movie matinee of kisses and some timid, well-bred touching in the orchestra seats. And they had been sweethearts when Manuel was performing his racing feats and had his picture on the sports pages, and pretty girls were dying for him. When his flirtatiousness became too much for her, Lucrecia broke the engagement. They stopped seeing one another until the accident. She visited him in the hospital and brought him a box of Cadbury’s. They re-established a relationship, a friendship, nothing more—that is what Don Rigoberto believed until he discovered the liquid truth—which continued after Doña Lucrecia’s marriage.

From time to time Don Rigoberto had caught glimpses of him through the show windows of his flourishing dealership in new and used motorcycles imported from the United States and Japan (alongside the hieroglyphics of Japanese names there now stood the American Harley-Davidson and Triumph, and the Germanic BMW), which was located on the expressway just before Javier Prado. He no longer participated as a racer in any championships, but with obvious sadomasochism he maintained his connection to the sport as a promoter and patron of those vicarious massacres and butcheries. Don Rigoberto would see him on television newscasts, lowering a ridiculous checked flag with the air of someone who was starting the First World War, or standing at the starting or finishing lines at races, or handing the winner a cup covered in fake silver. The move from participant to sponsor of events assuaged—according to Lucrecia—the addictive attraction the castrato felt for these gleaming motorcycles.

And the other? The other absence? Did something or someone assuage that too? On the afternoons when they would have tea and cakes and conversation, Manuel maintained remarkable discretion regarding the matter, which Lucrecia, of course, was never imprudent enough to mention. Their talks were exchanges of news, reminiscences of a Miraflores childhood, a San Isidro youth, and of old friends from the neighborhood who married, unmarried, remarried, fell ill, had children, and occasionally died; they were sprinkled with comments on recent events: the latest film or record, the latest dance craze, a marriage or a catastrophic breakup, a recently uncovered fraud, or the latest scandal concerning drugs, adultery, or AIDS. Until one day—Don Rigoberto’s hands quickly turned the pages of the notebook, trying to track down a citation that would correspond to the sequence of sharp images moving through his fevered mind—Doña Lucrecia had discovered his secret. Had she really discovered it? Or had Manuel arranged for her to believe that, when in fact she simply fell into the trap he had prepared for her? The truth is that one day, drinking tea in his house in La Planicie, which was surrounded by eucalyptus and laurels, Manuel lured Lucrecia into his bedroom. The pretext? To show her a photograph of a volleyball game at San Antonio Academy taken many years earlier. Once there, she was surprised beyond all measure. An entire bookcase of volumes dedicated to the chilling subject of castration and eunuchs! A specialized library! In every language, above all in those not understood by Manuel, who had mastered only Spanish, in its Peruvian, or, more accurately, its Mirafloran and San Isidran variant. And a collection of records and CD’s that approximated or simulated the voices of castrati!

“He has become a specialist in the field,” she told Don Rigoberto, for she was filled with excitement at her discovery.

“For obvious reasons,” he deduced.

Had that been part of Manuel’s strategy? Don Rigoberto’s large head nodded agreement in the small circle of light shed by the lamp. Naturally. To create a salacious intimacy, a complicity in forbidden areas that would subsequently allow him to beg for so bold a favor. He had confessed to her—feigning embarrassment and all the hesitations of a timid man? Of course—that ever since the brutal surgery he had been obsessed by the subject until it had become the central concern of his existence. He was now a great connoisseur and could speak for hours about it, touching on its historic, religious, physical, clinical, and psychoanalytic aspects. (Had the former cyclist ever heard of the Viennese and his couch? Before, no; afterward, yes; and he had even read something by him, though he did not understand a word.) In conversations that submerged them deeper and deeper into an affectionate association over the course of those apparently innocent meetings at teatime, Manuel explained to Lucrecia the difference between the eunuch, principally a Saracen variation practiced since the Middle Ages on the guardians of seraglios, which pitilessly removed phallus and testicles, rendering them chaste, and the castrato, a Western, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman version that consisted in removing only the jewels from the victim of the procedure—leaving the rest in place—for the purpose was not to keep him from copulating but simply to prevent the change that lowers the boy’s voice by an octave when he reaches adolescence. Manuel told Lucrecia the anecdote, which both had enjoyed, of the castrato Cortona, who wrote to Pope Innocent XI requesting permission to marry. He alleged that his castration had not damaged his ability to experience pleasure. His Holiness, who was in no way an innocent, wrote in the margin of the petition: “This time do a better job of castrating him.” (Those were real Popes, Don Rigoberto thought joyfully.)

He, Manuel, the great motorcycle ace, inviting her to tea and posing as a modern man critical of the Church, had explained to Lucrecia that castration with no bellicose aim, with an artistic purpose, began to be practiced in Italy in the seventeenth century because of the ecclesiastic prohibition against women’s voices in religious ceremonies. This stricture created the need for a hybrid, a male with a feminized voice (a “caprine” or “falsetto” voice, “between vibrato and tremolo” was the expert Carlos Gómez Amat’s explanation in the notebook), something that could be fabricated by means of a surgery that Manuel described and documented between cups of tea and bites of pastry. There was the primitive method, submerging boys with good voices in icy water to control the bleeding and crushing their balls with grinding stones (“Oh, oh!” shouted Don Rigoberto, who had forgotten all about the rats and was having a wonderful time), and the sophisticated one; to wit: the surgeon-barber, anesthetizing the boy with laudanum, used his recently sharpened razor to make an incision in the groin, and pulled out the tender young jewels. What effects did the operation have on the boy singers who survived? Obesity, thoracic swelling, a strong, piercing voice, as well as an uncommon ability to hold a note; some castrati, such as Farinelli, could sing arias for more than a minute without taking a breath. In the serene darkness of the study, with the sound of the sea in the background, Don Rigoberto was listening, more diverted and curious than joyful, to the vibration of vocal cords prolonging the fine, high-pitched tone indefinitely, like a long wound in the Barrancan night. And now, yes, yes, he could smell Lucrecia.

Manuel of the Prostheses, poisoned with death, he thought a short while later, content with his discovery. But he immediately realized he was quoting. Poisoned with death? As his hands searched through the notebook, his memory reconstructed the smoky, crowded club to which Lucrecia had dragged him on that extraordinary night. It had been one of his few memorable immersions in the nocturnal world of amusement in the foreign country, administratively his own, in which he sold insurance policies, against which he had built this enclave, and about which, as a result of discreet but monumental efforts, he had managed to learn very little. Here were the lyrics to the waltz “Desdén”:

Without the guitar, the drum, and the syncopated voice of the singer, some of the lugubrious, narcissistic audacity of the bardic composer was lost. But even without music, the inspired vulgarity and mysterious philosophy were still present. Who had composed this “classic” Peruvian waltz, which is how Lucrecia described it when he had asked the question. He found out: the man was from Chiclaya and his name was Miguel Paz. He imagined an untamed Peruvian who wandered through the night with a scarf around his neck and a guitar on his shoulder, who sang serenades and woke in folkloric dives surrounded by sawdust and vomit, his throat raw from singing all night. Wild, in any case. Vallejo and Neruda together had not produced anything comparable to those lines, and what’s more, you could dance to them. He chuckled suddenly and recaptured Manuel of the Prostheses, who had been getting away from him.

It had been after many late-afternoon conversations watered with tea, and after having poured his encyclopedic information regarding Turkish and Egyptian eunuchs and Neapolitan and Roman castrati all over Doña Lucrecia, that the ex-motorcyclist (“Manuel of the Prostheses, Perpetual Peepee, the Wet One, the Leaker, the Capped Cock, the Piss Bag,” Don Rigoberto improvised, his mood improving as each second passed) had made his move.

“And what was your reaction when he told you?”

On the television in their bedroom they had just watched
Senso
, a beautiful Stendhalian melodrama by Visconti, and Don Rigoberto was holding his wife on his lap, she in her nightdress and he in pajamas.

“I was speechless,” replied Doña Lucrecia. “Do you think it’s possible?”

“If he told you wringing his hands and weeping, it must be. Why would he lie?”

“Of course, he had no reason to,” she purred, writhing. “If you keep on kissing my neck that way, I’ll scream. What I don’t understand is why he would tell me.”

“It was the first step.” Don Rigoberto’s mouth moved up her warm throat until it reached her ear, which he kissed as well. “The next step will be to ask you to let him watch you, or at least listen to you.”

“He told me because it was good for him to share his secret.” Doña Lucrecia tried to move him away, and Don Rigoberto’s pulse beat wildly. “Knowing that I know made him feel less alone.”

“Do you want to bet that at your next tea he’ll proposition you?” Her husband insisted on kissing her ear very slowly.

“I’d leave his house and slam the door behind me.” Doña Lucrecia twisted in his arms, deciding to kiss him too. “And never go back.”

She had done neither. Manuel of the Prostheses had made his request with so much servile humility, and so many victim’s tears and excuses and apologies, that she had not had the courage (or the desire?) to offend him. Had she said, “Have you forgotten that I’m a decent married woman?” No. Or even: “You are abusing our friendship and destroying the good opinion I had of you”? Not that either. She had simply calmed Manuel, who, pale and ashamed, begged her not to take it the wrong way, or be angry with him, or deprive him of her precious friendship. It was a highly strategic and successful move, for Lucrecia took pity on so much psychodrama and had tea with him again—Don Rigoberto felt acupuncture needles in his temples—and eventually gave him what he wanted. The man poisoned with death listened to that silvery music, was intoxicated by the liquid arpeggio. Just listening? Couldn’t he have been watching too?

“I swear he wasn’t,” Doña Lucrecia protested, huddling against him and talking into his chest. “In absolute darkness. That was my condition. And he met it. He saw nothing. He heard.”

In exactly the same position they had watched a video of
Carmina Burana
, taped at the Berlin Opera with the Peking Chorus, and conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

“That may be,” replied Don Rigoberto, his imagination inflamed by the vibrant Latin of the choir (could there be castrati among the choir members with their almond-shaped eyes?). “But it may also be that Manuel has developed his vision to an extraordinary degree. And even though you didn’t see him, he saw you.”

“If you start conjecturing, everything is possible,” Doña Lucrecia argued, though without too much conviction. “But if he did look, there was hardly anything to see.”

Her odor was there, no doubt about it: corporeal, intimate, with marine touches and fruity reminiscences. Closing his eyes, he breathed it in avidly, his nostrils very wide. I am smelling the soul of Lucrecia, he thought, deeply moved. The merry splash of the stream in the bowl did not dominate this aroma; it barely colored with a physiological tint what was an exhalation of hidden glandular humors, cartilaginous exudations, secretions of muscles, which were condensed and confused in a thick, valiant, domestic discharge. It reminded Don Rigoberto of the most distant moments of his childhood—a world of diapers and talcum, vomit and excrement, cologne and sponges soaked in warm water, a prodigal tit—and of nights entwined with Lucrecia. Ah yes, how well he understood the mutilated motorcyclist. But it was not necessary to emulate Farinelli or undergo a prosthetic procedure to assimilate that culture, convert to that religion, and, like the poisoned Manuel, like Neruda’s widower, like so many anonymous aesthetes of hearing, smell, fantasy (he thought of the Prime Minister of India, the nonagenarian Rarji Desai, who, when he read his speeches, paused to take little sips of his own pee; “Ah, if it had only been his wife’s!”), who felt themselves transported to heaven as they watched and heard the squatting or sitting beloved creature interpret that ceremony, in appearance so trivial and functional, of emptying a bladder, who elevated it into spectacle, intoamorous dance, the prologue or epilogue (for the mutilated Manuel, a substitute) to the act of love. Don Rigoberto’s eyes filled with tears. He rediscovered the fluid silence of the Barrancan night, the solitude in which he found himself, surrounded by mindless engravings and books.