The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (9 page)

But the principal and, I fear, irreversible difference that opens an unfathomable abyss between you and me—or, to move into the realm of scientific neutrality, between my penis and your vagina—has its roots in the fact that, from my point of view, feminism falls into the collectivist intellectual category; that is, it is a piece of specious reasoning that attempts to subsume within a generic, homogeneous concept a vast collection of heterogeneous individuals in whom differences and disparities are at least as important (surely more important) than the clitoral and ovarian common denominator. I mean to say, without a shred of cynicism, that having a penis or a clitoris (artifacts whose parameters are blurred, as I will prove to you below) seems less important for differentiating one being from another than other attributes (vices, virtues, or hereditary defects) that are specific to each individual. Forgetting this is the reason ideologies create leveling forms of oppression that are generally worse than the despotisms against which they rebelled. I fear that feminism, in the variant which you support, will follow the same path in the event your theses triumph, and from the point of view of the condition of women, this will simply mean, in vulgar parlance, exchanging drool for snot.

These are, in my opinion, considerations of a moral and aesthetic nature, and there is no reason for you to share them. Fortunately, I also have science on my side. You will discover this if you look, for example, at the works of Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Professor of Genetics and Medical Science at Brown University, who has, for many years, been demonstrating to a mob made imbecilic by conventions and myths, and blinded to the truth, that there are not two human genders—feminine and masculine—as we have been led to believe, but at least five, and perhaps more. Though I object for phonetic reasons to the names chosen by Dr. Fausto-Sterling (
herms, merms, and ferms
) for the three intermediate stages between masculinity and femininity that have been noted by biology, genetics, and sexology, I welcome her research and the research of scientists like her—powerful allies for those who believe, as does this coward writing to you, that the Manichaean division of humanity into men and women is a collectivist illusion marked by conspiracies against individual sovereignty—and therefore against liberty—a scientific falsehood enthroned by the traditional insistence of states, religions, and legal systems on maintaining a dualist system that is opposed to nature and contradicts it at every turn.

The imagination of an utterly free Hellenic mythology knew this very well when it created the being that combined Hermes and Aphrodite; the adolescent Hermaphroditus, when he fell in love with a nymph, fused his body with hers, becoming a man-woman or woman-man (each of these formulas,
dixit
Dr. Fausto-Sterling, represents a subtly different combination, in a single individual, of gonads, hormones, and the composition of chromosomes, and consequently gives rise to sexes different from the ones we know as man and woman, to wit, the cacophonous and weedy-sounding
herms, merms
, and
ferms
). The important thing to realize is that this is not mythology but concrete reality, for both before and after the Greek Hermaphrodite, intermediate beings have been born (neither male nor female in the usual sense of the word) and condemned by stupidity, ignorance, fanaticism, and prejudice to live in disguise or, if discovered, to be burned, hanged, exorcised as spawn of the devil and, in modern times, to be “normalized” in their infancy through surgery and the genetic manipulations of a science obedient to a fallacious nomenclature that accepts only the masculine and the feminine, and hurls, beyond the limits of normality and into the deepest hell of the anomalous, the monstrous, the physically freakish, these delicate intersexual heroes—all my sympathy lies with them—endowed with testicles and ovaries, clitorises like penises or penises like clitorises, urethras and vaginas, and who, on occasion, emit sperm at the same time they menstruate. For your information, these rare cases are not so rare; Dr. John Money, of Johns Hopkins University, estimates that intersexuals constitute 4 percent of born hominids (add it up and you will see that by themselves they could populate an entire continent).

The existence of this large, scientifically established human population (about whom I have learned by reading works that have, for me, a particularly erotic interest) living at the margins of normality, and for whose liberation, recognition, and acceptance I also struggle in my futile way (I mean, from my solitary corner where I, a libertarian hedonist, a lover of art and the pleasures of the body, am shackled behind the anodyne breadwinner, the insurance executive) by fulminating against those, like you, who insist on separating humanity into watertight compartments based on sex: penises here, clitorises there, vaginas to the right, scrotums to the left. This slavish schematic does not correspond to the truth. With regard to sex, we humans represent a gamut of variants, families, exceptions, originalities, subtleties. To grasp the ultimate, untransferable human reality in this domain, as in all others, one must renounce the herd instinct, the crowd view, and have recourse to the individual.

In summary, let me say that any movement that attempts to transcend (or relegate to the background) the struggle for individual sovereignty, to place greater importance on the interests of a collective—class, race, gender, nation, sex, ethnicity, vice, or profession—seems to me a conspiracy to rein in even further an abused human freedom. A freedom that reaches its deepest significance only in the sphere of the individual, that warm, indivisible homeland which we embody, you with your assertive clitoris and I with my sheathed penis (I have my foreskin and so does my son Alfonso, and I am opposed to the religious circumcision of the newborn—but not to that chosen by rational beings—for the same reasons I condemn the excision of the clitoris and vaginal labia practiced by many African Muslims) and which we should defend, above all, against the efforts of those who wish to absorb us into the amorphous, castrating conglomerations manipulated by persons hungry for power. Everything seems to indicate that you and your followers are part of that herd, and therefore it is my duty to inform you of my antagonism and hostility by means of this letter, which, incidentally, I do not intend to mail.

To lighten somewhat the funereal solemnity of my missive and end it with a smile, I would like to refer you to the case of the pragmatic androgyne Emma (should I, perhaps, say androgynette?) as reported by the urologist Hugh H. Young (also of Johns Hopkins), who treated her/him. Emma was reared as a girl, despite having a clitoris the size of a penis, as well as a hospitable vagina, which allowed her to have sexual exchanges with women and men. When she was unmarried, she had most of her encounters with girls, playing the male part. Then she married a man and made love as a woman, though this role did not give her as much pleasure as the other; and therefore she had women lovers, whom she happily drilled with her virile clitoris. When she consulted him, Dr. Young explained that it would be very easy to intervene surgically and transform her into a man, since that seemed to be her preference. Emma’s response is worth whole libraries on the narrowness of the human universe: “You’d have to take away my vagina, wouldn’t you, Doctor? I don’t think I’d like that, since it’s my meal ticket. If you operate, I’d have to leave my husband and find a job. And if that’s the case, I prefer to stay the way I am.” The anecdote is cited by Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling in
Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men
, a book I recommend to you.

Farewell and fine fucking, my friend.

Drunkenness with Hangover

In the stillness of the Barrancan night, Don Rigoberto sat up in his bed with the speed of a cobra summoned by a snake charmer. There was Doña Lucrecia, absolutely beautiful in her décolleté, sheer silk black dress, shoulders and arms bare, smiling, tending to a dozen guests. She gave instructions to the butler, who was serving drinks, and to Justiniana, who, in her blue uniform with the starched white apron, was passing around trays of canapés—cassava chunks with Huancayan sauce, cheese sticks, pasta shells á la parmigiana, stuffed olives—with an assurance worthy of the mistress of the house. Don Rigoberto’s heart skipped a beat, however, for what threatened to dominate the entire scene in his indirect memory of the event (he had been notably absent from that party, which he knew about through Lucrecia and his own imagination) was the singular voice of Fito Cebolla. Drunk already? Well on his way, for whiskeys passed through his hands like rosary beads between the fingers of a devout woman.

“If you had to travel”—Doña Lucrecia buried herself in his arms—“we should have canceled the cocktail party. I told you that.”

“Why?” asked Don Rigoberto, adjusting his body to his wife’s. “Did something happen?”

“A lot of things.” Doña Lucrecia laughed, her mouth against his chest. “But I won’t tell you. Don’t even think about it.”

“Did someone behave badly?” Don Rigoberto warmed to the topic. “Did Fito Cebolla cross the line?”

“Who else?” His wife gave him pleasure. “Of course it was him.”

Fito, Fito Cebolla, he thought. Did he love or hate him? It wasn’t easy to tell, for he awakened in Don Rigoberto the kind of diffuse, contradictory emotion that seemed to be his specialty. They had met at a directors’ meeting, when it was decided to name him head of public relations for the company. Fito had friends everywhere, and though he was clearly in decline and on the road to slobbering dipsomania, he was very good at what his high-sounding appointment suggested: having relations and being public.

“What outrageous thing did he do?” he asked eagerly.

“He put his hands on me,” an embarrassed Doña Lucrecia replied evasively. “And practically raped Justiniana.”

Don Rigoberto had known him by reputation and was sure he would detest him the moment he appeared in the office to take up his new post. What else could he be but a despicable swine whose life was defined by recreational activities—his name was associated, Don Rigoberto vaguely recalled, with surfing, tennis, golf, with fashion shows or beauty contests where he was one of the judges, with frequent appearances on the society pages: his carnivorous teeth, his skin tanned on all the beaches of the world, dressed in formal clothes, sports clothes, Hawaiian clothes, evening, afternoon, dawn and dusk clothes, a glass in hand and surrounded by very pretty women. He expected complete imbecility in its high Limenian society variant. His surprise could not have been greater when he discovered that Fito Cebolla, who was precisely and utterly what he had expected—a frivolous, high-class pimp, a cynic, scrounger, and parasite, an ex-sportsman and exlion of the cocktail-party circuit—was also an original, unpredictable man and, until his alcoholic collapse, extremely amusing. He had, at one time, been a reader, and had profited from those pages, citing Fernando Casós—“In Peru what does not happen is admirable”—and, with admonitory laughter, Paul Groussac: “Florence is the artist-city, Liverpool the merchantcity, and Lima the woman-city.” (In order to verify this statement statistically, he carried a little book in which he took notes on the ugly and pretty women who crossed his path.) Soon after they met, while they were having a drink with two other men from the office at the Club de la Unión, the four of them had a contest to see who could utter the most pedantic sentence. Fito Cebolla’s (“Every time I pass through Port Douglas, Australia, I put away a crocodile steak and fuck an Aborigine”) was declared the unanimous winner.

In his solitary darkness, Don Rigoberto suffered an attack of jealousy that made his pulses pound. His fantasy clicked away like a typist. There was Doña Lucrecia again. Beautiful, with smooth shoulders and splendid arms, standing in her sandals with the stiletto heels, her shapely legs carefully depilitated, conversing with the guests, explaining to each couple in turn that Don Rigoberto had been urgently called away to Río de Janeiro that afternoon on company business.

“And why should we care?” Fito Cebolla gallantly joked, kissing the hand of his hostess after he had kissed her cheek. “It’s all we could desire.”

He was flabby despite the athletic prowess of his younger years, a tall, strutting man with batrachian eyes and a mobile mouth that stained each word with lasciviousness. He had, of course, come to the cocktail party without his wife—knowing that Don Rigoberto was flying over the Amazon jungle? Fito Cebolla had squandered the modest fortunes of his first three legitimate wives, whom he had divorced as he drained them dry, taking his leisure at the best spas in all the world. When the time came for him to rest, he settled for his fourth and, undoubtedly, final wife, whose dwindling inheritance would guarantee him not the luxurious excesses of travel, wardrobe, and cuisine but simply a decent house in La Planicie, a reasonable larder, and enough Scotch to nourish his cirrhosis, providing he did not live past seventy. She was delicate, small, elegant, and apparently stupefied by her retrospective admiration for the Adonis that Fito Cebolla had once been.

Now he was a bloated man in his sixties who went through life armed with a notebook and a pair of binoculars, and with these, on his walks around the center of the city and at red lights when he was behind the wheel of his old maroon Cadillac, he would observe and make notes, not only general information (were the women ugly or pretty?), but more specific data as well: the bounciest buttocks, pertest breasts, shapeliest legs, most swanlike necks, sensual mouths, and bewitching eyes that the traffic brought into view. His research, the most meticulous and arbitrary imaginable, sometimes devoted an entire day, and even as long as a week, to one portion of the passing female anatomies, in a manner not too different from the system devised by Don Rigoberto for the care and cleaning of body parts: Monday, asses; Tuesday, breasts; Wednesday, legs; Thursday, arms; Friday, necks; Saturday, mouths; Sunday, eyes. At the end of each month, Fito averaged out the ratings on a scale from zero to twenty.