The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (34 page)

If I tell you that I started at the firm soon after receiving my law degree, in an insignificant position in the legal department, and that in the past quarter century I have moved up through the hierarchy to become a manager, a member of the Board of Directors, and the owner of a good share of stock in the company, you will say that under these circumstances I have nothing to complain about, that I suffer from ingratitude. Don’t I live well? Don’t I form part of the microscopic portion of Peruvian society that owns a home and a car, has the opportunity to vacation once or twice a year in Europe or the United States, and enjoys the kind of comfortable, secure life that is unthinkable, undreamable, for four-fifths of our compatriots? All this is true. It is also true that because of my successful career (isn’t that what you people call it?) I have been able to fill my study with books, etchings, and paintings that protect me from rampant stupidity and vulgarity (that is, from everything you represent) and create an enclave of freedom and fantasy where every day or, rather, every night, I have been able to detoxify, shedding the thick crust of dulling conventionality, vile routine, castrating gregarious activities that you manufacture and that nour ish you, and live, truly live and be myself, opening wide to the angels and demons that live inside me the iron-barred doors behind which—and you, you are to blame—they are obliged to hide for the rest of the day.

You will also say, “If you hate office routine so much, and letters and policies, legal reports and protocols, claims, permits, and allegations, then why did you not have the courage to shake it off and live your true life, the life of your fantasy and desires, not only at night but in the morning, afternoon, and evening too? Why did you give more than half your life to the bureaucratic animal that enslaves you and your angels and demons?” The question is pertinent—I have asked it many times—but so is my reply: “Because the world of fantasy, pleasure, and liberated desire, my only homeland, would not have survived unscathed subjected to the rigors of need, deprivation, economic worries, the stifling weight of debts and poverty. Dreams and desires are inedible. My existence would have been impoverished, would have become a caricature of itself.” I am no hero, I am not a great artist, I lack genius, and consequently I would not have been able to console myself with the hope of a “work” that would outlive me. My aspirations and aptitudes do not go beyond knowing how to distinguish—in this I am superior to you, whose adventitious condition has reduced to less than nothing your sense of ethical and aesthetic discrimination—within the thicket of possibilities that surround me, between what I love and what I despise, what makes my life beautiful and what makes it ugly and besmirches it with stupidity, what exalts me and what depresses me, what gives me joy and what makes me suffer. Simply to be in a position to constantly differentiate among these contradictory options, I require the economic peace of mind provided by this profession so blemished by the culture of red tape, that noxious miasma produced by you as the worm produces slime, which has become the air the entire world now breathes. Fantasies and desires—mine, at least—demand a minimum of serenity and security to manifest themselves. Otherwise they would wither and die. If you wish to deduce from this that my angels and demons are defiantly bourgeois, that is absolutely true.

Earlier I mentioned the word “parasite,” and you probably asked yourself if I, a lawyer who for the past twenty-five years has applied the science of jurisprudence—the most nourishing food for bureaucracy and the primary begetter of bureaucrats—to the specialty of insurance, have the right to use it disparagingly about anyone else. Yes, I do, but only because I also apply it to myself, my bureaucratic half. In fact, to make matters even worse, legal parasitism was my first area of specialization, the key that opened the doors of the La Perricholi Company—yes, that is its ridiculous South Americanized name—and got me my first few promotions. How could I avoid being the most ingenious tangler or disentangler of juridical arguments when I discovered in my first law class that so-called legality is, in great measure, an intricate jungle in which technicians of obfuscations, intrigues, formalisms, and casuistries would always come out ahead? And that the profession has nothing to do with truth and justice but deals exclusively with the fabrication of incontrovertible appearances, with sophistries and deceptions impossible to clarify. It is true, I have engaged in this essentially parasitic activity with the competence needed to reach the top, but I have never deceived myself. I have always been aware that I was a boil feeding on the defenselessness, vulnerability, and impotence of others. Unlike you, I make no claims to being a “pillar of society” (it is useless to refer you to the painting of that name by George Grosz: you don’t know the painter, or, worse yet, you know him only for the splendid Expressionist asses he painted and not his lethal caricatures of your colleagues in the Weimar Republic): I know what I am and what I do, and I have as much or more contempt for that part of myself as I have for you. My success as an attorney is derived from this understanding—that the law is an amoral technique that serves the cynic who best controls it—and from my discovery, a precocious one as well, that in our country (in all countries?) the legal system is a web of contradictions in which each law, or ruling with the force of law, can be opposed by another, or many others, that amend or nullify it. Therefore all of us are always violating some law and transgressing in some way against the legal order (chaos, actually). Thanks to this labyrinth, you bureaucrats subdivide, multiply, reproduce, and regenerate at a dizzying pace. And we lawyers live and some of us—
mea culpa
—prosper.

Well, even if my life has been the torment of Tantalus, a daily moral struggle between the bureaucratic rubble of my existence and the secret angels and demons of my being, you have not conquered me. Faced with what I do from Monday through Friday, from eight to six, I have always maintained sufficient irony to despise the job and despise myself for doing it, so that in the remaining hours I could make amends, redeem and in demnify myself, humanize myself (which, in my case, always means separating from the herd, the crowd). I can imagine the tingle running through you, the irritable curiosity with which you ask yourself, “And what does he do at night that immunizes him against me, that saves him from being what I am?” Do you want to know? Now that I am alone—separated from my wife, I mean—I read, look at my pictures, review and add to my notebooks with letters like this one, but, above all, I fantasize. I dream. I construct a better reality purged of all the scum and excrescences—you and your slime—which make the actual one so sinister and sordid that we wish for another. (I’ve spoken in the plural and I’m sorry; it won’t happen again.) In this other reality, you do not exist. All that exists is the woman I love and will love forever—the absent Lucrecia—my son, Alfonso, and a few variable, transitory secondary players who come and go like will-o’-the-wisps, spending only the time needed to be useful to me. Only when I am in that world, in that company, do I exist, for then I am joyful and content.

Now, these strands of happiness would not be possible without the immense frustration, arid tedium, and crushing routine of my real life. In other words, without a life dehumanized by you, without everything you weave and unweave with all the machinery of power you possess. Do you understand now why I began by calling you a
necessary evil
? You thought, master of the stereotype and the commonplace, that I described you in this way because I believed that a society must function, must have at its disposal order, legality, services, authority, in order not to run aground on confusion. And you thought this regulatory Gordian knot, this saving, organizing mechanism of the anthill, was you, the
necessary
man. No, my awful friend. Without you, society would function much better than it does now. But without you here to prostitute, poison, and hack away at human freedom, I would not appreciate it nearly as much, my imagination would not soar as high, my desires would not be as powerful, for they are born in rebellion against you, as the reaction of a free, sensitive being against an entity who is the negation of sensitivity and free will. Which means that however one looks at this rocky terrain, without you I would be less free and less sensitive, my desires more pedestrian, my life emptier.

I know you will not understand this either, but it does not matter at all if your puffy batrachian eyes never see this letter.

Bureaucrat, I curse you and thank you.

Dream Is a Life

Bathed in perspiration, not yet completely emerged from that narrow frontier where sleep and wakefulness were indistinguishable, Don Rigoberto could still see Rosaura, dressed in a jacket and tie, as she carried out his instructions: she approached the bar and leaned over the bare back of the flashy mulatta who had been flirting with her since she had seen them walk into that cheap hookers’ club.

They were in Mexico City, weren’t they? Yes, after a week in Acapulco, making a stop on their way home to Lima following a brief vacation. It had been Don Rigoberto’s whim to dress Doña Lucrecia in men’s clothes and then go with her to a whores’ cabaret. Rosaura-Lucrecia was whispering something to the woman and smiling—Don Rigoberto saw with what authority she squeezed the bare arm of the mulatta, who looked at her with alert, malicious eyes—and finally led her out to dance. They were playing a mambo by Pérez Prado, of course—“
El ruletero
”—and on the narrow, smoky, crowded dance floor, where shadows were fitfully distorted by a reflector with colored lights, Rosaura-Lucrecia played her part very well: Don Rigoberto nodded approvingly. She did not seem a stranger in her men’s clothing, or different in her
garçon
haircut, or uncomfortable leading her partner when they tired of doing their own steps and danced with their arms around each other. In an increasingly feverish state, Don Rigoberto, filled with grateful admiration for his wife, risked a stiff neck in order not to lose sight of them among the heads and shoulders of so many other people. When the out-of-tune but intrepid band moved from the mambo to a bolero—“
Dos almas
,” which reminded him of Leo Marini—he felt that the gods were with him. Interpreting his secret desire, he saw Rosaura immediately press the mulatta to her, passing her arms around her waist and obliging the girl to place hers on her shoulders. Even if he could not make out the details in the half-light, he was sure that his beloved wife, the counterfeit male, had begun to kiss and gently bite the mulatta’s neck, rubbing up against her belly and breasts like a true man spurred on by desire.

He was awake now, no doubt about it, but though all his senses were alert, the mulatta and Lucrecia-Rosaura were still there, in a close embrace, in a nighttime brothel crowd, in that harsh, cruel place where the gaudily made-up women displayed tropical rumps and the male patrons had drooping mustaches, fat cheeks, and the eyes of marijuana smokers. Ready to pull out their pistols and start shooting at the first false move? Because of this excursion to the lower depths of the Mexican night, Rosaura and I may lose our lives, he thought with a happy shudder. And he anticipated the headlines in the gutter press:
DOUBLE HOMICIDE
:
BUSINESSMAN AND TRANSVESTITE WIFE MURDERED IN MEXICAN BROTHEL
;
MULATTA WAS BAIT
,
VICE THEIR DOWNFALL
;
UPPERCRUST LIMENIAN COUPLE KILLED IN MEXICO’S UNDERWORLD
;
WHITE
-
HOT SCANDAL
:
GO TOO FAR
,
PAY IN BLOOD
. He brought up a chuckle as if it were a belch: “If they kill us, the worms can worry about the scandal.”

He returned to the aforementioned club, where the mulatta and Rosaura, the counterfeit man, were still dancing. Now, to his joy, they were shamelessly caressing and kissing each other on the mouth. But wait: weren’t the professionals reluctant to offer their lips to clients? Yes, but did any obstacle exist that Rosaura-Lucrecia could not overcome? How had she gotten the fleshy mulatta to open that huge mouth with its thick scarlet lips to receive the subtle visit of her serpentine tongue? Had she offered her money? Had she aroused her? It didn’t matter how, what mattered was that her sweet, soft, almost liquid tongue was there in the mulatta’s mouth, wetting it with her saliva and absorbing the saliva—which he imagined as thick and fragrant—of that lush woman.

And then he was distracted by a question: Why Rosaura? Rosaura was also a woman’s name. If it was a question of disguising her completely, as he had disguised her body by dressing it in men’s clothes, then Carlos, Juan, Pedro, or Nicanor would have been preferable. Why Rosaura? Almost without realizing it, he got out of bed, put on his robe and slippers, and went to his study. He did not need to see the clock to know that the light of dawn would soon appear, seeming to rise out of the sea. Did he know any flesh-and-blood Rosaura? He ransacked his memory, and the answer was a categorical no. She was, then, an imaginary Rosaura who had come tonight to appear in his dream about Lucrecia, to merge with her, leaving the forgotten pages of some novel, or some drawing, oil painting, or engraving he could not recall. In any case, the pseudonym was there, clinging to Lucrecia like the man’s suit they had bought, laughing and whispering, that afternoon in a shop in the red-light district after he had asked Lucrecia if she would agree to concretize his fantasy and she—“as always, as always”—had said she would. Now Rosaura was a name as real as the couple who, arm in arm—the mulatta and Lucrecia were almost the same height—had stopped dancing and were approaching the table. He stood to greet them and ceremoniously offered his hand to the mulatta.

“Hello, hello, delighted to meet you, please have a seat.”

“I’m dying of thirst,” said the mulatta, fanning herself with both hands. “Shall we order something?”

“Whatever you want, baby,” Rosaura-Lucrecia said, caressing her chin and calling a waiter. “You order, go ahead.”