The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Read online

  Flying-Ears Love

  Eyes for seeing, a nose for smelling, fingers for touching, and ears like horns of plenty for stroking with fingertips, like the hunchback’s hump or the Buddha’s belly—they bring luck—and then for licking and kissing.

  I adore you, Rigoberto, you and only you, but more than anything else about you I adore your flying ears. I would like to get down on my knees and peer into those dear openings that you clean each morning (I know what I know) with a little cotton-tipped stick, whose little hairs you pluck with a tweezer—strand ah by strand ooh in front of the mirror ow—on the days when it is their turn for purification. What would I see down those deep little caverns? A precipice. And then I would learn your secrets. What, for example? That without knowing it, you already love me, Rigoberto. Would I see anything else? Two baby elephants with their trunks raised. Dumbo, dear, sweet Dumbo, how I love you.

  We each love what we love. Though some say that because of your nose and ears you could win a contest as the Elephant Man of Peru, for me you are the most attractive, best-looking man in the world. Go on, Rigoberto, take a guess: if I had to choose between Robert Redford and you, who do you think would be my heart’s desire? Yes, my darling ears, yes, my precious nose, yes, my Pinocchio: it would be you, you.

  What else would I see if I peeked into your auditory abysses? A field of clover, all with four leaves. And bouquets of roses, every petal with a portrait on its velvety whiteness of a face in love. Whose? Mine.

  Who am I, Rigoberto? Who is the mountain climber who loves you, adores you, and one day in the not-too-distant future will scale your ears as others scale the Himalaya or the Huascarán peak?

  Yours, yours, yours forever,

  Mad About Your Ears

  IV

  Fonchito in Tears

  Fonchito had been dejected and pale since his arrival at the house in San Isidro, and Doña Lucrecia was sure his dark circles and his evasive eyes had something to do with Egon Schiele, the invariable topic of their afternoon conversations. He barely opened his mouth while they were having tea, and for the first time in weeks failed to praise Justiniana’s toasted sweet buns. Poor grades at school? Or had Rigoberto discovered he was missing classes at the academy to visit her? Enclosed in gloomy silence, he bit at his knuckles. At one point he had muttered something terrible about Adolf and Marie, the parents or relatives of his beloved painter.

  “When something is eating away at you inside, it’s a good idea to talk about it,” Doña Lucrecia proposed. “Don’t you trust me? Tell me what’s wrong, perhaps I can help you.”

  The startled boy looked into her eyes. He was blinking and seemed about to burst into tears. His temples were throbbing and Doña Lucrecia could see the fine blue veins in his neck.

  “Well, it’s just that I’ve been thinking,” he said at last. He looked away and fell silent, having second thoughts about what he was going to say.

  “About what, Fonchito? Go on, tell me. Why are you so worried about those two? Who are Adolf and Marie?”

  “Egon Schiele’s folks,” said the boy, as if he were speaking about a classmate. “But it’s not Señor Adolf I’m worried about, it’s my papá.”

  “Rigoberto?”

  “I don’t want my papá to end up like him.” The boyish face grew even more somber, and he made a strange gesture with his hand, as if he were frightening away a ghost. “It scares me and I don’t know what to do. I didn’t want to worry you. You still love my papá, don’t you, Stepmamá?”

  “Of course I do,” she agreed, disconcerted. “I’m really confused now, Fonchito. What does Rigoberto have to do with the father of a painter who died on the other side of the world half a century ago?”

  At first she had found it amusing and very typical of him, this strange game, this passion for the pictures and life of Egon Schiele, studying them, learning about them, identifying with the painter until he believed, or claimed to believe, he was the reincarnation of Egon Schiele, and like him would also die tragically, after a brief, brilliant career, at the age of twenty-eight. But now the game had gone too far.

  “His father’s fate is being repeated in my papá,” Fonchito stammered, swallowing hard. “I don’t want him to go crazy with syphilis like Señor Adolf, Stepmamá.”

  “But that’s so foolish,” she tried to reassure him. “First of all, lives aren’t inherited or repeated. Where’d you ever get a silly idea like that?”

  The boy’s face contorted, and incapable of controlling himself, he burst into tears, his thin body shaken by sobs. Señora Lucrecia leaped from her chair, sat beside him on the carpet in the dining alcove, put her arms around him, kissed his hair and forehead, dried his tears with her handkerchief, and had him blow his nose. Fonchito held her tight. His chest heaved with deep sighs, and Doña Lucrecia felt his heart pounding.

  “Calm down now, it’s all right, don’t cry, that’s nothing but nonsense.” She was smoothing his hair, kissing his hair. “Rigoberto is the healthiest, most sensible man I’ve ever known.”

  Egon Schiele’s father was syphilitic and had died insane? Her curiosity piqued by Fonchito’s constant allusions, Doña Lucrecia had gone to The Green House bookshop, just a few steps from her house, to learn more about Schiele, but she found no monographs, only a history of Expressionism that devoted no more than a chapter to him. She did not recall any mention at all of his family. The boy nodded, his lips pursed, his eyes half-closed. From time to time a shudder ran down his spine. But he was calmer, and without moving away, huddling against her, happy, one might almost say, to be sheltered in Doña Lucrecia’s arms, he began to speak. Didn’t she know the story of Señor Adolf Schiele? No, she didn’t know it; she hadn’t been able to find a biography of the painter. But Fonchito had read several in his papá’s library and consulted the encyclopedia. A terrible story, Stepmamá. They said if you didn’t know about Señor Adolf Schiele and Señora Marie Soukup, you couldn’t understand Egon. Because their story hid the secret of his painting.

  “All right, all right,” said Doña Lucrecia, trying to depersonalize the subject. “Then what’s the secret of his painting?”

  “His papá’s syphilis,” replied the boy, with no hesitation. “The madness of poor Señor Adolf Schiele.”

  Biting her lip, Doña Lucrecia contained her laughter, not wishing to hurt the boy. She seemed to hear Dr. Rubio, an acquaintance of Don Rigoberto’s who was an analyst, and very popular with her women friends ever since he began to undress during sessions—citing the example of Wilhelm Reich—in order to better interpret the dreams of his female patients. He would always say things like that at cocktail parties, and with the same conviction.

  “But, Fonchito,” she said, blowing on his forehead, for it gleamed with perspiration, “do you even know what syphilis is?”

  “A venereal disease; that means it comes from Venus, the goddess of something or other,” the boy confessed with disarming sincerity. “I couldn’t find her in the dictionary. But I know where Señor Adolf caught it. Shall I tell you what happened?”

  “Only if you calm down. And stop torturing yourself with absurd fantasies. You’re not Egon Schiele and Rigoberto has nothing to do with his father, you silly goose.”

  The boy made no promises, he did not respond at all. For a time he remained silent, within her protective arms, his head resting on his stepmother’s shoulder. When he began to tell her the story, he supplied a quantity of dates and details, as if he had been a witness to the events he was narrating. Or a protagonist, for he spoke with all the emotion of one who had experienced them personally. As if he had not been born in Lima at the end of the twentieth century but were Egon Schiele, a lad from the last generation of Austro-Hungarian subjects, the generation that would see the so-called Belle Epoque vanish in the catastrophe of the First World War, along with the Empire, that brilliant society—cosmopolitan, literary, musical, and artistic—which Rigoberto loved so dearly and about which he had instructed Doña Lucrecia so patiently during t
he early years of their marriage. (Now Fonchito was giving the lessons.) The generation of Mahler, Schoenberg, Freud, Klimt, Schiele. In the alarming account, and setting aside anachronisms and a certain childishness, a story was beginning to take shape. A village called Tulln, on the banks of the Danube, in the outskirts of Vienna (twenty-five kilometers away, he said), and the wedding, in the final years of the century, of the imperial railway official Adolf Eugen Schiele, a Protestant of German origin, just turned twenty-six, and Marie Soukup, a Catholic adolescent of Czech origin, seventeen years of age. A scandalous, unconventional marriage, due to the opposition of the bride’s family. (“Was your family opposed to your marrying my papá?” “Not at all, they were delighted with Rigoberto.”) It was a puritanical time and full of prejudices, wasn’t it, Stepmamá? Yes, certainly. Why? Because Marie Soukup didn’t know anything about life; she hadn’t even been told how babies are made, the poor girl thought storks brought them from Paris. (His stepmamá couldn’t have been that innocent when she married? No, Doña Lucrecia already knew all she had to know.) Marie was so innocent she didn’t even know she was pregnant and thought her discomfort was caused by eating too many apples, which she loved. But that’s getting ahead of the story. We have to go back to their honeymoon. That’s where it all began.

  “What happened on their honeymoon?”

  “Nothing,” said the boy, sitting up to blow his nose. His eyes were swollen, but he had lost his pallor and was involved, body and soul, in his story. “Marie was afraid. For the first three days she wouldn’t let Señor Adolf touch her. The marriage was not consummated. What are you laughing at, Stepmamá?”

  “Hearing you talk like an old man when you’re still a little boy. Don’t be angry, I’m very interested. All right, for the first three days of their marriage nothing, nothing at all, between Adolf and Marie.”

  “It’s no laughing matter.” Fonchito grew sad. “It’s something to cry over. The honeymoon was in Trieste. In memory of their parents’ trip, Egon Schiele and Gerti, his favorite sister, made an identical trip in 1906.”

  In Trieste, during the frustrated honeymoon, the tragedy began. Since his wife would not allow him to touch her—she would cry, kick and scratch him, make a huge scene every time he tried to get close enough to kiss her—Señor Adolf went out. Where did he go? To console himself with bad women. And in one of those places Venus infected him with syphilis. That was when the disease began to kill him, slowly. It made him lose his mind and brought misfortune to the entire family. A curse fell on the Schieles. Adolf, without realizing it, infected his wife when he was finally able to consummate the marriage, on the fourth day. And that was why Marie’s first three pregnancies miscarried; and that was why Elvira died, the little girl who lived only ten short years. And that was why Egon was so weak and sickly. In fact, when he was a boy they thought he would die because he spent so much time seeing doctors. In the end, Doña Lucrecia could visualize him: a solitary child playing with his toy trains, drawing, drawing all the time in his school notebooks, in the margins of the Bible, even on pieces of papers he pulled from the trash.

  “You see, you’re nothing like him. You were the healthiest child in the world, according to Rigoberto. And you liked to play with planes, not trains.”

  Fonchito refused to joke. “Shall I finish the story or are you getting bored?”

  She wasn’t bored, she was enjoying it, less because of the vicissitudes of Austro-Hungarian characters at the turn of the century than for the passion with which Fonchito evoked them: trembling, moving his eyes and hands, using melodramatic inflections. The awful thing about the disease was that it came slowly and stealthily, and it brought disgrace to its victims. That was why Señor Adolf never acknowledged that he suffered from it. When his relatives advised him to see the doctor, he would protest: “I’m healthier than any of you.” But he wasn’t. He had begun to lose his mind. Egon loved him, they got on very well, he suffered when his father grew worse. Señor Adolf would sit down to play cards as if his friends had come for a visit, but he was all alone. He would deal the cards, chat with them, offer them cigarettes, and there was nobody sitting at the table in the house in Tulln. Marie, Melanie, and Gerti tried to make him see reality: “But, Papá, there’s nobody here to talk to, to play cards with, don’t you know that?” Egon would contradict them: “It’s not true, Father, don’t pay attention to them, here’s the chief of police, the postmaster, the schoolteacher. Your friends are here with you, Father. I see them too, just like you.” He didn’t want to accept the fact that his father was hallucinating. Without warning Señor Adolf would put on his dress uniform, his cap with the gleaming visor, his boots shining like mirrors, and he would stand at attention on the railway platform. “What are you doing here, Father?” “I’m waiting to receive the Emperor and Empress, my son.” He was completely mad. He couldn’t go on working for the railway, he had to retire. The Schieles were so ashamed they moved from Tulln to a town where no one knew them: Klosterneuburg. In German it means: “new convent town.” Señor Adolf grew worse, he forgot how to speak. He spent his days in his room, never saying a word. Did she see? Did she? Fonchito was suddenly overcome by an anguished agitation.

  “Just like my papá,” he cried, his voice breaking. “He comes home from the office and shuts himself in and doesn’t talk to anybody. Not even me. Even on Saturdays and Sundays he does the same thing; the whole darn day in his study. When I try to talk to him, it’s ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘All right.’ That’s all he says.”

  Could he have syphilis? Was he going crazy? And for the same reason as Señor Adolf. Because he was left all alone when Señora Lucrecia went away. He went to one of those bad houses and Venus infected him. He didn’t want his papá to die, Stepmamá!

  He started to cry again, this time silently, to himself, covering his face, and this time it was harder for Doña Lucrecia to soothe him. She comforted him, what an absurd idea, she petted him, there was nothing wrong with Rigoberto, she cradled him, he was saner than Fonchito and her put together, she felt the tears from that rosy face dampening the bodice of her dress. After a good deal of fondling, she managed to calm him. Rigoberto liked to shut himself away with his pictures and books, with his notebooks, to read and listen to music, to write his citations and reflections. Didn’t he know him yet? Hadn’t he always been like that?

  “No, not always.” The boy denied this firmly. “Before, he used to tell me about the lives of the painters, he explained their pictures, he showed me things. And he read to me from his notebooks. With you he used to laugh, go out; he was normal. But he changed when you left. He became sad. Now he doesn’t even care about my grades; he signs my report card without looking at it. The only thing he cares about is his study. He shuts himself in there for hours and hours. He’ll go crazy, just like Señor Adolf. Maybe it’s happened already.”

  The boy had thrown his arms around her neck and was resting his head on his stepmother’s shoulder. In the Olivar there were children calling and playing as they did every afternoon when the schools let out and the boys from the area flocked to the park from countless street corners to smoke, hiding from their parents, and kick the ball, and flirt with the neighborhood girls. Why didn’t Fonchito ever do those things?

  “Do you still love my papá, Stepmamá?” The same question, this time full of apprehension, as if someone’s life or death depended on her answer.

  “I’ve already told you, Fonchito. I never stopped loving him. What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “He’s the way he is because he misses you. Because he loves you, Stepmamá, and he hasn’t gotten over your not living with us anymore.”

  “Things happened the way they happened.” Doña Lucrecia struggled against a growing uneasiness.

  “You’re not thinking about getting married again, are you, Stepmamá?” the boy suggested timidly.

  “The last thing I would ever do in this life is get married again. Never, never. Besides, Rigoberto and I aren’t even
divorced, we’re only separated.”

  “Then you can make up,” Fonchito exclaimed with relief. “When people fight, they can make up. I fight and make up every day with the kids at school. You could come back, Justita too. Everything would be the way it was before.”

  “And we could cure your papá’s craziness,” Doña Lucrecia thought. She was annoyed. Fonchito’s fantasies no longer amused her. Wordless anger, bitterness, rancor overwhelmed her as her mind dusted off unpleasant memories. She took the boy by the shoulders and moved him away. She observed him, their faces close, indignant that those blue eyes, swollen and red, so innocently withstood her reproachful look. Could he really be so cynical? He wasn’t even an adolescent yet. How could he talk about the break between her and Rigoberto as if it were not his affair, as if he had not been the cause of everything? Hadn’t he arranged for Rigoberto to find out the whole story? His tear-streaked face, his artfully drawn features, pink lips, curly eyelashes, small firm chin, looked at her with virginal innocence.

  “You know better than anyone what happened,” said Señora Lucrecia between clenched teeth, trying to keep her indignation from exploding. “You know very well why we separated. Don’t pretend to be a good little boy who feels bad about that separation. You were as much to blame as me, maybe even more.”