In Praise of the Stepmother Read online

  He had the pumice stone at the ready. He began with the left foot. At the upper edge of the heel, there where the friction from his shoe was greatest, an adventitious, horny growth had already begun to form, which felt to his fingertips as rough as an unplastered wall. By rubbing the pumice stone back and forth over it repeatedly, he gradually wore it down till there was nothing left of it. Pleased and satisfied, he noted that the outer edge had once again taken on the polish and smooth finish of the surrounding area. Though his fingers detected no other incipient callus or corn, he prudently applied the pumice stone to the soles of both feet, the insteps, and all ten of his toes.

  Then, scissors and file in hand, he went about paring and filing his toenails, a most enjoyable pleasure. There, the danger to be warded off was an ingrown toenail. He had an infallible method, the product of his patient observation and his practical imagination: clipping the nail in the shape of a half-moon, leaving at the ends two little intact horns which, thanks to their conformation, would grow out past the flesh without ever imbedding themselves in it. These Saracen toenails, moreover, thanks to their crescent shape, could be cleaned more easily: the point of the file easily penetrated the sort of trench or alveolus between the nail and the flesh where dirt might accumulate, sweat become concentrated, dross find a hiding place. Once he had finished paring, cleaning, and filing his toenails, he carefully dug away the cuticles till they were free of those mysterious whitish presences that had crystallized in the remote retreats of his pedal extremities through the work of friction, lack of ventilation, and sweat.

  His task ended, he contemplated and massaged his feet with fond satisfaction. He took the parings and filth that he had gathered on a piece of toilet paper, threw it into the bowl, and flushed it down; then he soaped his feet and rinsed them carefully. After drying them, he dusted them with a semi-invisible talcum powder that gave off a slight, virile odor, of heliotrope at dawn.

  Invariable ritual procedures remained to be completed: mouth and armpits. Though he concentrated his five senses on them, taking all the time needed to ensure the success of the operation, he had so completely mastered the rite that his attention could be divided and be partially devoted, as well, to a principle of aesthetics, a different one each day of the week, one extracted from that manual, tablet of the law, or commandments drawn up by himself, in secret also, in these nocturnal sessions which, on the pretext of cleanliness, constituted his particular religion and his personal way of bringing about a utopia.

  As he laid out on the slab of ocher marble, veined with white, the constituents of the buccal offering—a glassful of water, dental floss, toothpaste, toothbrush—he selected one of the postulates of which he was most certain, a principle which, once formulated, he had never doubted: “Everything bright is ugly, and, first and foremost, brilliant men.” He took in a mouthful of water and rinsed his oral cavity vigorously, noting in the mirror how his cheeks puffed out as he rinsed his mouth to rid it of the loosest residual particles, lodged in his gums or superficially suspended between his teeth. There are brilliant cities, brilliant paintings and poems, parties, landscapes, business deals, dissertations, he thought. They should be shunned like weak currencies, however brightly colored the bank notes, or like those tropical drinks for tourists, decorated with fruit slices and little pennants and sweetened with corn syrup.

  He was now holding, between the thumb and index finger of each hand, a piece of dental floss twenty centimeters long. He began as always with the upper teeth, from right to left and then from left to right, using his incisors as anchor points. He worked the thread into the narrow interstices and with it raised the edges of the gum, which was where nasty little bread crumbs, shreds of meat, vegetable fibers, bits of fruit skin always lodged. With childish rapture he saw those illegitimate presences emerge, dislodged by the dental floss and his expert acrobatics. He spit them out in the washbasin and saw them slide down the drain and disappear, borne away in the vortex formed by the waterspout from the faucet. Meanwhile, he thought: There are bright heads of hair that crown dim brains or make them become so. The ugliest word in Spanish is brilliantine. As he finished brushing his upper teeth, he again rinsed his mouth and cleaned the length of dental floss in the stream of water from the faucet. Then, with the same vigor and identical professionalism, he began cleaning his lower teeth and molars. There are brilliant conversations, brilliant pieces of music, brilliant illnesses such as allergy to pollen, gout, depressions, and stress. There are, naturally, brilliant brilliant-cut diamonds. He rinsed his mouth out again and threw the piece of dental floss into the wastebasket.

  He was now ready to brush his teeth with toothpaste. He did so, brushing downward, slowly, pressing hard so that the bristles—natural ones, never plastic—would penetrate the intimate depths of those bony crevices in search of the residues of food that had survived the sapper’s labor of the dental floss. He brushed the lingual surface first, then the buccal. When he rinsed his mouth out for the last time, he felt that agreeable sensation of mint and lemon, so refreshing and youthful, as if all of a sudden, in that cavity framed by gums and palate, someone had turned on an electric fan or the air conditioner and his teeth and molars had ceased to be those hard and insensitive bones and had been imbued with the sensitivity of lips. My teeth are bright, he thought with a twinge of anxiety. Well, that may be the exception that proves the rule. There are, he thought, bright plants, such as the rose. And bright animals such as the Angora cat. All at once he imagined Doña Lucrecia naked, playing with a dozen Angora kittens rubbing against all the curvaceous contours of her lovely body, meowing, and out of fear of experiencing a premature erection, he hastened to wash his armpits. He did so several times a day: in the morning, as he showered, and at noon in the bathroom of the insurance company, before going out for lunch. But it was only now, in the nightly ritual, that he did so conscientiously and at the same time thoroughly enjoying it, neither more nor less than if this were a forbidden pleasure. He first rinsed both armpits with warm water, and his arms as well, rubbing them hard to stimulate the circulation. Then he filled the washbasin with hot water, in which he dissolved a bit of scented soap till he saw the liquid surface begin to foam. He plunged each arm by turn in the warmly welcome temperature and scrubbed his armpits patiently and affectionately, tangling and disentangling the long dark curls of hair in the soapy water. Meanwhile, his mind went on: There are bright, sharp scents, such as that of the rose and camphor. Finally he dried himself and daubed his armpits with a breath of very light cologne suggestive of the smell of skin wet with seawater or that of an ocean breeze that had wafted through hothouses, taking on the heavy scent of flowers.

  I am perfect, he thought, looking at himself in the mirror, smelling himself. There was not a whit of vanity in this reflection of his. The object of this laborious care of his body was not to make him better-looking or less ugly, affectations that in one way or another—most often unconsciously—rendered homage to the gregarious ideal that he disdained—wasn’t one always “good-looking” to others?—but to make him feel that, in this way, he was somehow halting time’s cruel work of undermining, that he was thereby controlling or delaying the fateful deterioration decreed for everything by wicked Nature. The feeling that he was waging this battle did his soul good. Moreover, since he had married, and without Lucrecia’s knowledge, he was also fighting his bodily decline in the name of his spouse. Like Amadis in the name of Oriana, he thought. In and on your behalf, my love.

  The prospect, once he had turned out the light and left the bathroom, of finding his wife in their bed, awaiting him in a sensual, half-drowsing state, all her turgescences ready and willing to be awakened by his caresses, gave him gooseflesh all over. “You’ve reached the age of forty and you’ve never been more beautiful,” he murmured, heading for the door. “I love you, Lucrecia.”

  A second before the bathroom lay in darkness again, he noticed in one of the mirrors on the dressing table that his emotions and wild imaginings had
suddenly turned his humanity into a belligerent silhouette, into a profile that had something in common with that wondrous beast of medieval mythologies: the unicorn.

  Seven.

  Venus, with Love and Music

  She is Venus, the Italian one, the daughter of Jupiter, the sister of Greek Aphrodite. The organ player gives her music lessons. My name is Love. Tiny, delicate, rosy, winged, I am a thousand years old and chaste as a dragonfly. The stag, the royal peacock, and the fallow deer that can be seen through the window are as alive as the pair of lovers strolling arm in arm in the shade of the promenade lined with poplars. The satyr of the fountain, however, into whose head crystalline water flows from an alabaster basin, is not alive: it is a piece of Tuscan marble modeled by a clever artist come from the South of France.

  We three are alive, too, and as vivacious as the little stream that sings its way down the mountainside between the rocks or the chatter of the parrots that a trader from Africa sold to Don Rigoberto, our master. (The captive animals are now languishing in a cage in the garden.) Twilight has fallen and soon it will be night. When it comes with its lead-gray tatters, the organ will fall silent and the music teacher and I must leave so that the lord and master of everything to be seen here may enter this room to possess his lady. At that time, by our will and through our work well done, Venus will be ready to receive him and entertain him as his rank and fortune merit. That is to say, with the fire of a volcano, the sensuality of a serpent, and the hauteur of a pampered Angora cat.

  The young music teacher and I are not here to enjoy ourselves but to work, though all work done wholeheartedly and well turns, it is true, into pleasure. Our task consists of kindling the lady’s bodily joy, poking up the ashes of each one of her five senses till they burst into flame, and peopling her fair-haired head with filthy fantasies. That is how Don Rigoberto likes to have us hand her over to him: ardent and avid, all her moral and religious scruples in abeyance and her mind and body filled to overflowing with appetites. It is an agreeable task, though not an easy one; it requires patience, cunning, and skill in the art of attuning the fury of instinct to the mind’s subtlety and the heart’s tender affections.

  Titian, Venus with Cupid and Music, oil on canvas. The Prado, Madrid

  The repetitive, churchly strains of the organ create an auspicious atmosphere. It is generally thought that the organ, so closely associated with the Mass and the religious hymn, desensualizes and even disincarnates the humble mortal bathed in its waves. A gross error; in truth, organ music, with its obsessive languor and its soft purr, merely disconnects the Christian from the world and from contingency, isolating his mind so that it may turn toward something exclusive and different: God and salvation, quite true, in countless cases; but also, in many others, sin, perdition, lust, and other harsh municipal synonyms for what is expressed by that limpid word: pleasure.

  The sound of the organ calms the lady and quiets her mind: a flaccid immobility not unlike ecstasy steals over her and she then half closes her eyes so as to concentrate more intently on the melody which, as it invades her, removes from her mind the preoccupations and the petty concerns of the day and drains it of everything that is not audition, pure sensation. That is how it begins. The teacher plays with an agile, self-assured, unhurried touch, in a soft, melting crescendo, choosing ambiguous compositions that discreetly transport us to austere retreats under the monastic rule of Saint Bernard, to street processions that are suddenly transformed into a pagan carnival, and thence, without transition, to the Gregorian chant of an abbey or the sung Mass of a cathedral attended by a profusion of cardinals, and finally to a promiscuous masked ball in a mansion on the outskirts of the city. Wine flows in abundance and there are suspicious movements in the leafy bowers of the garden. A beautiful maiden, sitting in the lap of a lustful, potbellied old gaffer, suddenly removes her mask. And who does she turn out to be? One of the stable boys! Or the androgynous village idiot with a man’s cock and a woman’s tits! My lady sees this series of images because I describe them to her in her ear, in a soft, perverse voice, in time to the music. My vast knowledge translates the notes of the organ that is my accomplice into provocative shapes, colors, figures, actions. That is what I am doing now, more or less perched on her back, my smooth little face jutting out over her shoulder like a sharp-pointed prod: whispering naughty stories to her. Fictions that distract her and make her smile, fictions that shock and excite her.

  The teacher cannot leave off playing the organ for a single moment: his life depends on it. Don Rigoberto has warned him: “If those bellows stop working for one moment, I will know that you have yielded to the temptation to touch. I shall then plunge this dagger into your heart and throw your dead body to the dogs. We shall now find out which is stronger in you, young man: desire for my fair spouse or attachment to your life.” Attachment to his life, naturally.

  But as the pipes throb, he has the right to look. It is a privilege that honors and exalts him, that makes him feel himself to be a monarch or a god. He takes advantage of it with delicious pleasure. His glances, moreover, make my task easier and complement it, since the lady, noting the fervor and the homage rendered her by the eyes of that beardless countenance and intuiting the feverish cravings that her voluptuous white contours arouse in that sensitive adolescent, cannot but feel deeply touched and in the grip of concupiscent humors.

  Above all, when the organ player looks at her there where his gaze is fixed. What is the young musician finding, or what is he asking in that intimate Venusian retreat? What are his virgin pupils endeavoring to penetrate? What is so powerfully magnetizing him in that triangle of transparent skin, traversed in circular paths by little blue veins like rivulets, cast in shadow by the depilated thicket of her pubis? I could not say; nor, I believe, could he. But there is something there that attracts his eyes in the late afternoon each day, with the imperiousness of a stroke of fate or the magic of a witch’s spell. Something like the divination that, at the foot of the sunlit mound of Venus, in the tender cleft protected by the rounded columns of the lady’s thighs, resilient, red, moist with the dew of her privateness, pours forth the fountain of life and pleasure. In just a little while now, our lord and master Don Rigoberto will bend down to drink ambrosia from it. The organ player knows that this draft will forever be forbidden him, since he will soon be entering the Dominican monastery. He is a pious lad who from the tender years of his childhood felt the call of God and whom nothing or no one will keep from the priesthood. Even though, as he has confessed to me, these twilight parties make him break into an icy sweat and people his dreams with demons tricked out in a woman’s tits and buttocks, they have not undermined his religious vocation. On the contrary: they have convinced him of the necessity, in order to save his soul and help others save theirs, of renouncing the pomp and the carnal pleasures of this world. Perhaps he casts his eyes so pertinaciously upon the curly garden of his mistress only to prove to himself and to show God that he is capable of resisting temptations, even the most Luciferian of them: the imperishable body of our lady.

  Neither she nor I have these moral dilemmas and problems of conscience. I because I am a little pagan god, and nonexistent besides, nothing more nor less than a fancy of the human imagination, and she because she is an obedient wife who reluctantly goes along with these soirees that are a prelude to the conjugal night, out of respect for her husband, who programs them down to the last detail. She is, then, a lady who bows to the will of her master, as a Christian wife should, so that, if these sensual love feasts are sinful, it is to be supposed that they will blacken only the soul of the person who, for personal pleasure, conceives them and orders them.

  My lady’s delicate and painstakingly constructed coiffure, with its curls, waves, flirtatious loose locks, rises and falls, and its baroque pearl adornments, is also a spectacle orchestrated by Don Rigoberto. He gave precise instructions to the hairdressers and holds daily inspection, like a military officer reviewing his troops, of the array of j
ewels in my lady’s dowry so as to choose those that will gleam that night in her hair, circle her throat, dangle from her translucent ears, and imprison her fingers and wrists. “You are not you but my fantasy,” she says he whispers to her when he makes love to her. “You will not be Lucrecia today but Venus, and today you will change from a Peruvian woman into an Italian one and from a creature of this earth into a goddess and a symbol.”

  Perhaps that is how she is, in Don Rigoberto’s elaborate imaginings. But she is nonetheless real, concrete, as alive as a rose not plucked from the branch, or a little songbird. Is she not a beautiful woman? Yes, wondrously beautiful. Above all, at this instant, when her instincts have begun to awaken, revived by the studied alchemy of the organ’s prolonged notes, the tremulous glances of the musician, and the ardent corruptions that I distill into her ear. My left hand feels, there above her breast, how her skin has little by little grown tense and hot. Her blood is beginning to boil. This is the moment when she is at the full, or (to put it in scholarly terms) has reached plenitude, what philosophers term the absolute and alchemists transubstantiation.

  The word that best sums up her body is: tumid. Roused by my salacious fictions, everything about her becomes curve and prominence, sinuous elevation, tempered softness. That is the consistency that the connoisseur should prefer in his partner at the hour of love: tender abundance that appears to be just about to overflow yet remains firm, supple, resilient as ripe fruit and freshly kneaded dough, that soft texture Italians call morbidezza, a word that sounds lustful even when applied to bread.