In Praise of the Stepmother Read online

  The main character is not in the picture. Or rather, he is not in sight. He is there in the background, hidden in the shady grove, spying on us. With his beautiful wide-open eyes the color of dawn in the south and his round face flushed with desire, he is surely there, squatting on his heels in a trance, adoring me. With his blond curls entangled in the branches of the bower and his little pale-skinned member raised on high like a banner, drinking us in and devouring us with the fantasy of an innocent child, he is surely there. Knowing that this delights us and adds zest to our sport. He is neither a god nor a little animal, but a member of the human species. He tends goats and plays the panpipes. He is called Foncín.

  François Boucher. Diana at the Bath (1742), oil on canvas. The Louvre. Paris

  Justiniana discovered him, on the Ides of August, as I was tracking a stag through the forest. The little goatherd followed me, enthralled, tripping and stumbling, not taking his eyes off me for a single instant. My favorite says that when he saw me, drawn up to my full height, a ray of sunlight setting my hair afire and kindling a wild gleam in the pupils of my eyes, as all the muscles of my body tensed to let loose the arrow, the little darling burst into tears. She drew nearer to console him, whereupon she saw that the child was weeping for joy.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he confessed to her, his cheeks wet with tears, “but every time the lady appears in the forest, the leaves of the trees turn into morning stars and all the flowers burst into song. An ardent spirit steals within me and heats my blood. I see her and it is as if, poised motionless on the ground, I suddenly turned into a bird and began to fly.”

  “Despite his tender years, the form of your body has inspired in him the language of love,” Justiniana philosophized, recounting the episode to me. “Your beauty holds him spellbound, as the rattlesnake fascinates the hummingbird. Have pity on him, Diana Lucrecia. Why don’t we play games with the little goatherd? By amusing him, we shall amuse ourselves as well.”

  And so it was. A born pleasure-seeker just as I am, and perhaps even more so, Justiniana is never mistaken in matters concerning sensual enjoyment. It is what delights me about her, even more than her luxuriant hips or the silky down of her pubis, so deliciously tickling to the palate: her swift imagination and her unfailing, instinctive recognition, amid the sound and fury of this world, of the sources of diversion and pleasure.

  From that moment on, we have played with him, and although quite some time has passed, our sport is so agreeable we never tire of it. Each day is more diverting than the day before, adding novelty and good humor to existence.

  Along with his physical charms of a virile little god, Foncín is graced with another that is spiritual: timidity. The two or three attempts I have made to approach him so as to speak to him have been in vain. He pales and, a shy little musk deer, breaks into a run, fading into the network of branches as if by magic. He has intimated to Justiniana that the mere idea, not of touching me, but simply of being close to me, of having me look into his eyes and speak to him, dizzies him, devastates him. “A lady such as that is untouchable,” he has told her. “I know that if I approach her, her beauty will consume me as the sun of Libya consumes the butterfly.”

  Hence, we play our games in secret. Each of them different, a simulacrum like those theatrical dramas—so pleasing to the Greeks, those sentimentalists—wherein gods and mortals mingle in order to suffer and kill each other. Justiniana, pretending to be his accomplice and not mine—in point of fact, that clever creature is the accomplice of us both, and above all of herself—installs the little goatherd in a rocky spot, close by the cavern where I shall spend the night. And then, by the light of the fire with its reddish tongues of flame, she disrobes me and anoints my body with the honey of the gentle bees of Sicily. It is a Lacedaemonian formula for keeping the body taut and lustrous, and what is more, it rouses one’s senses. As she leans down over me, rubs my limbs, moves them, and offers them to the curious gaze of my chaste admirer, I half close my eyes. As I descend through the tunnel of sensation and quiver in delicious little spasms, I divine the presence of Foncín. More than that: I see him, I smell him, I caress him, I press him to my bosom and make him disappear within me, with no need to touch him. It makes my ecstasy the keener to know that as I near climax beneath the diligent hands of my favorite, he is doing the same, at the pace I set, along with me. His innocent little body, glistening with sweat as he watches me and takes his pleasure by watching me, contributes a note of tenderness that subtly shades and sweetens mine.

  Thus, hidden from me by Justiniana amid the forest greenery, the little goatherd has seen me fall asleep and waken, throw the javelin and the dart, dress and undress myself. He has seen me squat down on two stones and watched my pale gold urine flow into a transparent little brook, whereupon he will immediately hasten downstream to drink from it. He has seen me decapitate geese and eviscerate doves so as to offer their blood to the gods and read in their entrails the hidden mysteries of the future. He has seen me caress and sate myself and caress and sate my favorite, and he has seen Justiniana and me, immersed in the stream, drink the crystalline water of the cascade, each from the mouth of the other, savoring our mingled saliva, our juices, and our sweat. There is no exercise or function, no wanton ritual of body or soul that we have not performed for him, the privileged freeholder enjoying our privacy from his errant hiding places. He is our buffoon; but he is also our master. He is in our service and we in his. Without having ever touched each other or exchanged a single word, we have brought each other to the heights of rapture countless times and it is not inexact to say that, despite the unbridgeable abyss that our different natures and ages open up between him and me, we are more nearly one than the most impassioned pair of lovers.

  Now, at this very moment, Justiniana and I are going to perform for him, and Foncín, simply by remaining there where he is, between the stone wall and the grove, will also perform for the two of us.

  In a word, this eternal immobility will come to life and be time, history. The hounds will bay, the copse will trill, the water of the river will sing its way amid the pebbles and the rushes, and the full-crowned clouds will drift eastward, driven by the same playful little breeze that will ruffle the madcap curls of my favorite. She will move, will bend down, and her little vermilion-lipped mouth will kiss my foot and suck each one of my toes as one sucks lemons and limes on sultry summer afternoons. Soon our limbs will be intertwined, as we gambol on the whispering silk of the blue coverlet, given over to the intoxication from which life springs. The hounds will circle us, breathing on us the hot vapor of their eager maws, and perhaps lick us excitedly. The grove will hear us sigh as we swoon and, then, each mortally wounded, let out a sudden cry. An instant later it will hear us laughing in boisterous jest. And it will see us slowly drowse off into a peaceful sleep, our limbs still intertwined.

  It is then quite possible that, on seeing us prisoners of the god Hypnos, the witness of our poses, taking infinite precautions so as not to awaken us with his soft footfalls, will abandon his refuge and come to contemplate us from the edge of the blue coverlet.

  There he will be and there we will be, motionless once again, in another eternal instant. Foncín, his brow pale and his cheeks blushing, his eyes wide open in astonishment and gratitude, a little thread of saliva dangling from his tender mouth. The two of us, perfectly commingled, breathing in unison, with the fulfilled look of women who know how to be happy. There the three of us will be, calm, patient, awaiting the artist of the future who, roused by desire, will imprison us in dreams and, pinning us to the canvas with his brush, will believe that he is inventing us.

  Six.

  Don Rigoberto’s Ablutions

  Don Rigoberto entered the bathroom, bolted the door, and sighed. Instantly, a pleasing and gratifying sensation, of relief and expectation, came over him: in this solitary half hour he would be happy. He was happy every night, at times more, at others less, but the punctilious ritual that he had
been perfecting down through the years, like an artist who polishes and hammers home each detail of his masterpiece, never failed to produce its miraculous effect: relaxing him, reconciling him with his fellows, rejuvenating him, raising his spirits. Each time, he left the bathroom with the feeling that, despite everything, life was worth living. He had, therefore, never once neglected to perform it, ever since—how long ago had it been?—he had had the idea of transforming what for ordinary mortals was a routine that they went through with the mindlessness of machines—brushing their teeth, drying themselves, et cetera—into an artful task that made of him, if only momentarily, a perfect being.

  In his youth he had been a fervent militant in Catholic Action and dreamed of changing the world. He soon realized that, like all collective ideals, that particular one was an impossible dream, doomed to failure. His practical turn of mind led him not to waste his time waging battles that sooner or later he was bound to lose. He then conjectured that, as an ideal, perfection was perhaps possible for the isolated individual, if restricted to a limited sphere in space (cleanliness or corporeal sanctity, for example, or the practice of eroticism) and in time (ablutions and nocturnal emissions before going to sleep).

  He removed his bathrobe, hung it on the back of the door, and, naked except for his house slippers, sat down on the toilet, separated from the rest of the bathroom by a lacquered screen with little dancing sky-blue figures. His stomach was a Swiss watch: disciplined and punctual, it always emptied itself at this particular time, totally and effortlessly, as though happy to rid itself of the policies and the detritus of the day’s business. Ever since, in the most secret decision of his life—so secret that probably not even Lucrecia would ever be privy to it in its entirety—he had resolved to be perfect for a brief fragment of each day, and once he had worked out this ceremony, he had never again experienced asphyxiating attacks of constipation or demoralizing diarrhea.

  Don Rigoberto half closed his eyes and strained, just a little. That was all it took: he immediately felt the beneficent tickle in his rectum and the sensation that, there inside, in the hollows of his lower belly, something obedient to his will was about to depart and was already wriggling its way down that passage which, in order to make its exit easier, was widening. His anus, in turn, had begun to dilate in anticipation, preparing itself to complete the expulsion of the expelled, whereupon it would shut itself up tight and pout, with its thousand little puckers, as though mocking: “You’re gone, you rascal you, and can’t ever return.”

  Don Rigoberto gave a satisfied smile. Shitting, defecating, excreting: synonyms for sexual pleasure? he thought. Of course. Why not? Provided it was done slowly, savoring the task, without the least hurry, taking one’s time, imparting to the muscles of the colon a gentle, sustained quivering. It was a matter not of pushing but of guiding, of accompanying, of graciously escorting the gliding of the offerings toward the exit. Don Rigoberto sighed once again, his five senses absorbed in what was happening inside his body. He could almost see the spectacle: those expansions and retractions, those juices and masses in action, all of them in warm corporeal shadow and in a silence interrupted every so often by muffled gargles or the joyful breeze of a mighty fart. He heard, finally, the discreet splash with which the first offering invited to leave his bowels plopped—was it floating, was it sinking?—into the water of the toilet bowl. Three or four more would fall. Eight was his Olympic record, the consequence of an extravagant lunch, with murderous mixtures of fats, sugars, and starches washed down with wines and spirits. As a general rule he evacuated five offerings; once the fifth was gone, after a few seconds’ pause to give muscles, intestines, anus, rectum, due time to assume their orthodox positions once again, there invaded him that intimate rejoicing at a duty fulfilled and a goal attained, that same feeling of spiritual cleanliness that had once upon a time possessed him as a schoolboy at La Recoleta, after he had confessed his sins and done the penance assigned him by the father confessor.

  But cleaning out one’s belly is a much less dubious proposition than cleaning out one’s soul, he thought. His stomach was clean now, no doubt about it. He spread his legs, leaned his head down and looked: those drab brown cylinders, half submerged in the green porcelain bowl, were proof. What penitent was able, as he was now, to see and (if he so desired) to touch the pestilential filth that repentance, confession, penance, and God’s mercy drew out of the soul? When he was a practicing believer—he as now only the latter—the suspicion had never left him that, despite confession, however meticulously detailed, a certain quantity of filth remained stuck to the walls of his soul, a few stubborn, rebellious stains that penance was unable to remove.

  It was, moreover, a feeling he had sometimes had, though far less strong and unaccompanied by anxiety, ever since he had read in a magazine how young novices in a Buddhist monastery in India purified their intestines. The operation involved three gymnastic exercises, a length of rope, and a basin for the evacuated stools. It had the simplicity and the clarity of perfect objects and acts, such as the circle and coitus. The author of the text, a Belgian professor of yoga, had practiced with them for forty days in order to master the technique. The description of the three exercises whereby the novices hastened evacuation was not clear enough, however, to allow one to picture the ritual in detail and imitate it. The professor of yoga guaranteed that by means of those three flexions, torsions, and gyrations the stomach dissolved all the impurities and remains of the (vegetarian) diet to which the novices were subjected. Once this first stage of purification of their bellies was completed, the youngsters—with a certain melancholy, Don Rigoberto imagined their shaved skulls and their austere little bodies covered by tunics the color of saffron or perhaps snow—proceeded to assume the proper posture: supple, pliant, leaning to one side, legs slightly apart and the soles of their feet firmly planted on the ground so as not to move a single millimeter, as their bodies—ophidians slowly swallowing the interminable little worm—absorbed, thanks to peristaltic contractions, that rope which, coiling and uncoiling, advancing calmly and inexorably through the moist intestinal labyrinth, irresistibly pushed downward all those leftovers, remains, adhesions, minutiae, and excrescences that the emigrant oblations left behind.

  They purify themselves the way someone reams out a rifle, he thought, filled once more with envy. He imagined the dirty little head of the rope coming back into the world by way of the little Quevedoesque eye of the ass, after having traversed and cleaned out all those dark, tortuous inner recesses, and he could see it come out and fall into the basin like a crumpled carnival streamer. There it would remain, of no use to anyone, along with the last impurities that its presence had evacuated, ready for the funeral pyre. How good those youngsters must feel! How weightless! How free of all pollution! He would never be able to follow their example, at least as far as that experience was concerned. But Don Rigoberto was certain that, if they left him far behind when it came to the technique of sterilizing the bowels, in every other respect his ritual of bodily cleanliness was infinitely more scrupulous and technically exacting than that of those exotic practitioners.

  He gave one last push, discreet and soundless, just in case. Could that anecdote by any chance be true—the one that had it that the textual scholar Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who suffered from chronic constipation, spent a good part of his life, in his house in Santander, sitting on the toilet, straining? People had assured Don Rigoberto that in the house of the celebrated historian, poet, and critic, now a museum, the visiting tourist could contemplate the portable writing desk that Don Marcelino had had made to order for him so as not to be obliged to break off his research and his elegantly penned writings as he struggled against his mean, stingy belly, determined not to give up the fecal filth deposited there by heavy, hearty Spanish viands. It touched Don Rigoberto to imagine that robust intellectual, of such untroubled brow and such firm religious beliefs, shut up in his private water closet, perhaps bundled up in a thick plaid lap robe to
withstand the freezing mountain cold, straining and straining for hours at a time as, undaunted, he went on digging about in old folio volumes and dusty incunabula of the history of Spain in his search for heterodoxies, impieties, schisms, blasphemies, and doctrinal follies to be catalogued.

  He wiped himself with four small squares of folded tissue and flushed the toilet. He went over to the bidet, sat down, filled it with warm water, and meticulously soaped his anus, phallus, testicles, pubis, crotch, and buttocks. Then he rinsed himself off and dried himself with a clean towel.

  Today was Tuesday, foot day. He had divided the week up among different organs arid members: Monday, hands; Wednesday, ears; Thursday, nose; Friday, hair; Saturday, eyes; and Sunday, skin. This was the variable element of the nocturnal ritual, what left it open to possible change and reformation. Concentrating each night on just one area of his body allowed him to carry out the task of cleaning it and preserving it with greater thoroughness and attention to detail; and by so doing, to know and to love it more. With each individual organ and area the master of his labors for one day, perfect impartiality with regard to the care of the whole was assured: there were no favoritisms, no postponements, no odious hierarchies with respect to the overall treatment and detailed consideration of part and whole. He thought: My body is that impossibility: an egalitarian society.

  He filled the washbasin with warm water and, installing himself on the toilet-seat cover, soaked his feet for quite some time so as to reduce the swelling in his heels, the soles of his feet, his toes, ankles, and insteps, and soften them. He did not have bunions or flat feet, though his instep, it was quite true, was unusually high. No matter; that was a minor deformity, imperceptible to anyone who did not subject his feet to clinical examination. As for size, proportion, conformation of toes and toenails, nomenclature and anatomy of the bones, everything appeared to be more or less normal. The danger lay in the corns and calluses that, every so often, did their best to make them look ugly. But he knew how to cut the evil off at the root, always in good time.