The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (37 page)

“I’m telling him about Egon going to prison, Stepmamá,” Fonchito explained. “I’ve told you so many times you’d be bored hearing it again.”

“No, no, of course, go on,” she urged him. “Though you’re right, I do know it by heart.”

“When did you tell your stepmother this story?” The question escaped between Don Rigoberto’s teeth as he blew on the lemon verbena tea. “She’s been home barely two days and I’ve monopolized her day and night.”

“When I visited her in her little house at the Olivar,” the boy replied with his customary crystalline frankness. “Didn’t she tell you?”

Don Rigoberto felt the air in the dining room turn electric. So he wouldn’t have to talk to his wife or look at her, he took a heroic swallow of the burning lemon verbena, scalding his throat and esophagus. The inferno settled in his innards.

“I haven’t had time,” he heard Doña Lucrecia whisper. He looked at her and—oh! oh!—she was livid. But of course she intended to tell him. There was nothing wrong about those visits, was there?

“Of course there was nothing wrong,” Don Rigoberto declared, swallowing another mouthful of the hellish perfumed liquid. “I think it’s fine that you went to your stepmamá’s house to give her my news. And the story about Schiele and his lover? You stopped in the middle, and I want to know how it ends.”

“Can I go on?” Fonchito asked happily.

Don Rigoberto felt his throat as a burning wound; his wife stood mute and frozen at his side, and he guessed that her heart was racing. Just like his.

Well, so…The next day Egon and Wally took the girl by train to Vienna, where her grandmother lived. She had promised she would stay with that lady. But in the city she changed her mind and spent the night with Wally, in a hotel. The next morning Egon and his lover took the girl back to Neulengbach, and she stayed with them another two days. On the third day her father showed up. He confronted Egon outdoors, where he was painting. He was very angry and said he had denounced him to the police, accusing him of seduction, because his daughter was a minor. While Schiele tried to calm him, explaining that nothing had happened, the girl spied her father from inside the house, picked up a pair of scissors, and tried to slash her wrists. But Wally, Egon, and her father all stopped her, they helped her, and she and her father talked and made up. They left together, and Wally and Egon thought everything had been settled. But of course it wasn’t. The police came to arrest him a few days later.”

Were they listening to his story? Apparently they were, for both Don Rigoberto and Doña Lucrecia found themselves petrified, and seemed to have lost the ability not only to move but even to breathe. Their eyes were fixed on the boy, and throughout his tale, recited without hesitation, with the pauses and emphasis of a good storyteller, neither one blinked an eye. But what about their pallor? Those intense, absorbed stares? Were they so moved by an old story about a painter long ago? These were the questions that Don Rigoberto thought he could read in the great, sparkling eyes of Fonchito, who was now calmly looking from one to the other, as if waiting for some comment. Was he laughing at them? At him? Don Rigoberto looked into his son’s clear, limpid eyes, searching for the malevolent glint, the wink, the flicker of light that would betray his Machiavellian duplicity. He saw nothing: only the healthy, innocent, beautiful gaze of a clear conscience.

“Shall I go on or are you bored, Papá?”

He shook his head and, making a great effort—his throat was as dry and rough as sandpaper—he murmured, “What happened to him in prison?”

“They kept him behind bars for twenty-four days, charged with immorality and seduction. Seduction because of the episode with the girl and immorality because of some paintings and drawings of nudes that the police found in the house. It was proven that he hadn’t touched the girl, and he was cleared of the first charge. But not the second. The judge ruled that since girls and boys who were minors visited the house and could have seen the nudes, Schiele deserved to be punished. How? By having his most immoral drawings burned.

“In prison his suffering was unspeakable. The self-portraits he painted in his cell show him as terribly thin, with a beard, sunken eyes, a cadaverous expression. He kept a diary, and in it he wrote (wait, wait, I know the sentence by heart): ‘I, who am by nature one of the freest of creatures, am bound by a law that is not the law of the masses.’ He painted thirteen watercolors, and that saved him from going mad or killing himself: he painted the cot, the door, the window, and a luminous apple, one of those that Wally brought him every day. Every morning she would stand outside the prison, strategically placed so that Egon could see her through the bars of his cell window. Wally loved him dearly and behaved wonderfully during that terrible month, giving him all her support. But he must have loved her less. He painted her, yes; he used her as a model, yes; but not only her, many others too, especially those little girls he picked up in the streets and kept there, half naked, while he painted them in every imaginable pose from the top of his ladder. Little girls and boys were his obsession. He was crazy about them, and, well, not only about painting them, it seems he really liked them, in the good and bad senses of the word. That’s what his biographers say. He may have been an artist, but he was also something of a pervert, because he had a predilection for boys and girls…”

“Well, well, I think I have caught a bit of a chill after all,” Don Rigoberto interrupted, standing so abruptly that the napkin on his lap fell to the floor. “I’d better follow your advice and lie down, Lucrecia. I don’t want to get one of those awful colds of mine.”

He spoke, not looking at his wife but only at his son, who, when he saw him on his feet, stopped speaking, an alarmed expression on his face, as if he were anxious to help. Don Rigoberto did not look at Lucrecia as he passed her on his way to the stairs, though he was consumed by curiosity to know if she was still livid, or bright red perhaps, with indignation, surprise, uncertainty, unease, asking herself, as he was, whether what the boy had said and done was part of some plan or the work of chance, scheming and labyrinthine, frustrating and mean-spirited, the enemy of happiness. He realized he was dragging his feet like a broken old man and stood erect. He climbed the stairs at a brisk pace, as if to prove (to whom?) that he was still a vigorous man in his prime.

Removing only his shoes, he lay on the bed, face up, and closed his eyes. His body was on fire with fever. He saw a symphony of blue spots in the darkness behind his eyelids and thought he could hear the belligerent buzzing of the wasps he had heard during their failed picnic that morning. A short while later, as if he had taken a powerful barbiturate, he fell asleep. Or did he pass out? He dreamed he had mumps and that Fonchito, a boy with a grown man’s voice and specialist’s air, warned him, “Watch out, Papá! This is a filtering virus, and if it travels down to your balls they’ll get as big as two tennis balls and will have to be pulled out. Like wisdom-come-too-late teeth!” He awoke gasping for breath, bathed in sweat—Doña Lucrecia had put a blanket over him—and realized that night had fallen. It was pitch-black, there were no stars in the sky, the fog hid the lights along the Seawalk in Miraflores. The door to the bathroom opened, and in the flood of light that poured into the darkened room, Doña Lucrecia appeared in her robe, ready for bed.

“Is he a monster?” Don Rigoberto asked in anguish. “Does he realize what he’s doing, what he’s saying? Does he do what he does knowingly, weighing the consequences? Is that possible? Or is he simply a mischievous boy whose mischief turns out to be monstrous without his intending it to?”

His wife dropped onto the foot of the bed.

“I ask myself that question every day, many times a day,” she said, sighing dejectedly. “I don’t think he knows the answer either. Do you feel better? You’ve slept a couple of hours. I fixed you a hot lemonade, there in the thermos. Shall I pour you a glass? Listen, speaking of that, I never meant to keep anything from you, or not tell you that Fonchito visited me at the Olivar. It just kept slipping my mind, these two days have been so busy.”

“Of course,” Don Rigoberto said quickly, with a wave of his hand. “Let’s not talk about it, please.”

He stood, and murmuring, “This is the first time I’ve fallen asleep when it wasn’t my bedtime,” he walked to his dressing room. He took off his clothes; in a robe and slippers he went into the bathroom to perform his usual meticulous ablutions before retiring. He felt depressed, bewildered, with a buzzing in his head that seemed to portend a bad flu. He began to run warm water in the tub and poured in half a bottle of salts. As the tub was filling he flossed his teeth, brushed them, and with a tweezers plucked the new-grown hairs in his ears. How long was it since he had abandoned the habit of devoting one day a week to the specialized hygiene of each organ, in addition to his daily bath? Since his separation from Lucrecia. A year, more or less. He would resume that salutary weekly routine: Monday, ears; Tuesday, nose; Wednesday, feet; Thursday, hands; Friday, mouth and teeth. Et cetera. Lying in the bath, he felt less demoralized. He tried to guess if Lucrecia was already under the sheets, what nightgown she had put on, could she be naked? and for moments at a time he managed to eclipse the ominous presence from his mind: the little house by the Olivar de San Isidro, a childish figure standing at the door, a slim finger ringing the bell. A decision had to be made about the boy, once and for all. But what decision? All of them seemed unsuitable or impossible. After getting out of the tub and drying himself, he rubbed his body with cologne from the Floris shop in London; a colleague and friend at Lloyd’s periodically sent him their soaps, shaving creams, deodorants, talcs, and perfumes from there. He put on clean silk pajamas and left his robe hanging in the dressing room.

Doña Lucrecia was already in bed. She had turned off the lights in the room except for the lamp on her night table. Outside, the sea crashed against the cliffs of Barranco, and the wind howled in lugubrious lament. He felt his heart pounding as he slipped under the sheets, next to his wife. A gentle aroma of fresh herbs, of flowers wet with dew, of spring, entered his nostrils and reached his brain. Almost levitating with the tension he felt, he could detect his wife’s thigh just millimeters from his left leg. In the scant, indirect light he saw that she was wearing a pink silk nightgown with spaghetti straps and a lace edging, through which he could see her breasts. He sighed, and was transformed. Impetuous, liberating desire filled his body and seeped out of his pores. He felt dizzy, intoxicated by his wife’s perfume.

And then, intuiting this, Doña Lucrecia stretched out her hand, turned off the small lamp, and in the same movement turned toward him and embraced him. A sigh escaped his lips as he felt Doña Lucrecia’s body, which he eagerly embraced, press against him, arms and legs enfolding him. He, in turn, kissed her neck, her hair, murmuring words of love. But when he began to strip and to remove his wife’s nightgown, Doña Lucrecia whispered words into his ear that had the effect of a cold shower.

“He first came to see me six months ago. He showed up one afternoon, with no warning, at the house near the Olivar. And from then on he visited me constantly, after school, slipping away from the painting academy. Three, even four times a week. He had tea with me, stayed for an hour or two. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you yesterday, the day before yesterday. I was going to. I swear I was going to.”

“I beg you, Lucrecia,” Don Rigoberto implored. “You don’t have to tell me anything. By what you hold most dear. I love you.”

“I want to tell you. Now, right now.”

She was still holding him, and when her husband searched for her mouth, she opened it and kissed him avidly. She helped him to take off his pajamas and remove her nightgown. But then, as he was caressing her and moving his lips along her hair, her ears, her cheeks, her neck, she spoke again: “I didn’t go to bed with him.”

“I don’t want to know anything, my love. Do we have to talk about this now?”

“Yes, now. I didn’t go to bed with him, but wait. Not because of any virtue in me, but because of him. If he had asked, if he had made the slightest suggestion, I would have done it. With the greatest of pleasure, Rigoberto. Many afternoons I felt sick because I hadn’t. You won’t hate me? I have to tell you the truth.”

“I’ll never hate you. I love you. My darling, my dear wife.”

But she interrupted with another confession: “And the truth is that if he doesn’t leave this house, if he goes on living with us, it will happen again. I’m sorry, Rigoberto. It’s better that you know. I have no defenses against that boy. I don’t want it to happen, I don’t want to make you suffer the way you suffered before. I know you suffered, my love. But there’s no reason for me to lie. He has a power, something, I don’t know what it is. If he gets the idea into his head again, I’ll do it. I won’t be able to stop. Even if it destroys our marriage, this time forever. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth, Rigoberto. The raw truth.”

His wife had begun to cry. The last shreds of his excitement disappeared. He embraced her, deeply troubled.

“Everything you’re telling me I know all too well,” he said softly, fondling her. “What can I do? Isn’t he my son? Where will I send him? To whom? He’s still very young. Don’t you think I’ve thought about it? When he’s older, of course. But let him finish school, at least. Doesn’t he say he wants to be a painter? Fine. He’ll study art. In the United States. In Europe. Let him go to Vienna. Doesn’t he love Expressionism? He’ll go to the academy where Schiele studied, the city where Schiele lived and died. But how can I send him away now, at his age?”

Doña Lucrecia pressed against him, entwined her legs with his, attempted to rest her feet on her husband’s.

“I don’t want you to send him away,” she whispered. “I realize he’s only a boy. I never could tell if he knows how dangerous he is, the catastrophes he can provoke with his beauty, that sly, terrible intelligence of his. I’m telling you only because, because it’s true. With him, we’ll always be in danger, Rigoberto. If you don’t want it to happen again, then watch me, guard me, hover over me. I never want to go to bed with anybody but you, my dear husband. I love you so much, Rigoberto. You don’t know how I’ve needed you, how I’ve missed you.”