In Praise of the Stepmother Page 7

  Take a good look at me, my love. Recognize me, and recognize yourself.

  Ten.

  Tuberous and Sensual

  “Once upon a time, there was a man attached to a nose,” Don Rigoberto recited, beginning the Thursday ceremony with a poetic invocation. And he remembered José María Eguren, the slender nephelibate poet who, regarding the Spanish word nariz as being phonetically vulgar, gallicized it and called it nez in his poems.

  Was his nose extremely ugly? It depended on the looking glass in which it was contemplated. It was round and hooked, without inferiority complexes, curious about the world, very sensitive, tuberous, and ornamental. Despite Don Rigoberto’s attentions and precautions, its appearance was marred from time to time by a rash of blackheads, but this week, to judge from what the mirror told him, not one had shown up to be squeezed, pressed out, and immediately disinfected with peroxide. Through an inexplicable cutaneous caprice, a good part of it, the lower end in particular, there where it curved and opened out to form two windows, had a reddish tinge to it, that aged-burgundy color that so often is a telltale sign of a souse. But Don Rigoberto drank in as great moderation as he ate, so that those red splotches had no other possible cause, in his opinion, than the vagaries and caprices of Dame Nature. Unless—the face of Doña Lucrecia’s husband broke into a smile that stretched from ear to ear—his big sensitive schnoz had taken on a permanent blush at the memory of the libidinous bodily needs he sniffed in the conjugal bed. Don Rigoberto noted that the two orifices of his respiratory organ immediately distended, anticipating those seminal breezes—emulsifying fragrances, he thought—that in a short while, entering therein, would impregnate him to the very marrow. He felt especially favored and grateful. To work, then, for there was a time and a place for everything: this is not yet the right moment for breathing exercises, you rascal.

  Using his handkerchief, he blew his nose, hard, first one side and then the other, and with his index finger he blocked the opposite nostril each time, till he was certain that his nose was free of mucosities and watery secretions. Then, holding in his left hand the philatelist’s loupe that he was in the habit of using to explore the postcards and erotic etchings in his collection and as an aid in his meticulous cleansing ritual, and with his little nail scissors in his right, he proceeded to rid his nostrils of those tiny anti-aesthetic hairs whose small black heads were already beginning to be visible from the outside, despite their having been decapitated just seven days before. The task called for the concentration of an Oriental miniaturist to carry it out successfully without cutting himself. It brought Don Rigoberto a soothing spiritual serenity, little short of the state of “emptiness and fullness” described by mystics.

  His iron will to control the unpleasant arbitrary acts of his body, forcing it to exist within certain aesthetic rules, never going beyond limits fixed by his sovereign taste—and, to a certain extent, Lucrecia’s—thanks to techniques of extirpation, trimming, expulsion, irrigation, friction, tonsure, polishing, et cetera; which he had finally mastered, as an excellent workman masters his craft, isolated him from the rest of humanity and produced in him that miraculous sensation—which would reach its apogee when he joined his wife in the darkness of the bedroom—of having escaped from time. More than a sensation: a physical certainty. All his cells were freed at that instant—snip snip went the silvery blades of the little scissors and snip snip the little clipped hairs drifted slowly, weightlessly, through the air, snip snip from his nostrils to the whirlpool in the washbasin, snip snip—reprieved, absolved of the deterioration of occurring, of the nightmare of persisting in being. That was the magic virtue of the rite, and primitive man had discovered it at the dawn of history: transforming one, for certain eternal instants, into sheer being-present. He had rediscovered that wisdom all by himself, on his own and at his own risk. He thought: The way of withdrawing momentarily from the base decadence and the civil servitudes of the social order, the abject conventions of the herd, in order to attain, for one brief parenthesis per day, a sovereign nature. He thought: This is a foretaste of immortality. The word did not strike him as excessive. At this instant he felt himself to be—snip snip snip snip—incorruptible, and, soon now, in the arms and between the legs of his spouse, he would feel himself to be a monarch. He thought: A god.

  The bathroom was his temple; the washbasin, the sacrificial altar; he was the high priest and was celebrating the Mass that each night purified him and redeemed him from life. “In a moment I shall be worthy of Lucrecia and be with her,” he said to himself. Thus absorbed in contemplation, he addressed his strong nose in warm tones: “I say unto you that very soon you and I shall be in Paradise, my good thief.” Catching the scent of the future, his two orifices opened greedily. But instead of the intimate, prehensile aromas of the lady of the house, they took in the aseptic odor of soapy water which Don Rigoberto, by means of complicated manual aspersions and equine tossings of his head, was now applying, as a final touch, to the freshly clipped interior of his nostrils.

  The delicate phase of the nasal rite being ended, his mind could now abandon itself once again to the play of fantasy, and all of a sudden, it associated the imminent nuptial bed, where Lucrecia lay awaiting him, with the unpronounceable name of the Dutch historian and essayist Johan Huizinga, one of whose essays had touched the depths of his heart, persuading him that it had been written for him, for her, for the two of them. Giving the soul of his nose one last rinse with pure water through a medicine dropper, Don Rigoberto asked himself: “Isn’t our bed the magic space that Homo ludens speaks of?” Yes, by antonomasia. According to the Dutch writer, culture, civilization, war, sports, law, religion had sprung from that territory bound by rules, as arborescences and luxuriant leafy growths, some of them felicitous, others perverse, of the irresistible human propensity for game playing. An amusing theory, doubtless; a subtle one as well, but surely false. The decorous humanist, however, had refrained from pursuing his flash of genius to the farthest depths, applying it to the domain that confirmed his intuition, where nearly everything became clear thanks to the light it shed.

  “A magic space, a feminine realm, the grove of the senses”: he searched for metaphors for the little country that Lucrecia was inhabiting at this moment. “My kingdom is a bed,” he decreed, rinsing his hands now, drying them. The vast triple-width mattress allowed the couple to move comfortably in any direction, to stretch out, and roll over and over in free and joyous embrace without risk of falling to the floor. It was soft but resilient, with firm springs, and so perfectly level that any of their members could glide over it without encountering the slightest roughness or obstacle that would conspire against any given gymnastic exercise, pose, daring overture, or clever sculptural parody during their love games. “The Abbey of Incontinence,” Don Rigoberto ventured, in a moment of inspiration. “A garden-plot mattress, where my wife’s flowers open and yield their secret essences to this privileged mortal.”

  He noted in the mirror that his nostrils had begun to throb like two famished little gullets. “Let me get a deep breath of you, my love.” He would sniff her and breathe her in from head to foot, with meticulous care and perseverance, lingering long at certain areas with their own special odor, and hurrying past others, vapid and uninteresting: he would subject her to intense nasal scrutiny and make love to her, hearing her demur every so often amid stifled giggles. “Oh, no, my love, you’re tickling me.” Don Rigoberto felt a bit light-headed with impatience. But he took his time: a wait in store brings hope of even more; one prepares to take one’s pleasure with greater discernment and discrimination.

  He had just arrived at the final stages of the ceremony when, from the garden, filtering through the joints of the windowpanes, the penetrating perfume of honeysuckle reached his nostrils. He closed his eyes and inhaled. The scent of that rambling climber was a treacherous one. It stayed shut up tight for days without giving forth its green aroma, as though hoarding it and concentrating it, and then, all of a sudde
n, at certain mysterious moments of the day or night, owing to the humidity in the air, or the movements of the moon and stars, or certain circumspect cataclysms down below, there in the bosom of the earth in which it was rooted, it discharged upon the world that disturbing, bittersweet breath that called to mind swarthy-skinned women with long wavy hair, and dances that offered, in their wanton whirl of skirts, a glimpse of satiny thighs, dark buttocks, delicate ankles, and, swift will-o’-the-wisp, the tangle of a luxuriant pubis.

  Yes, now—Don Rigoberto’s eyes were closed and it was as if all his energy had fled his body and taken refuge in his reproductive and nasal organs—his nostrils were breathing in Doña Lucrecia’s honeysuckle. And as the warm, heavy perfume, with hints of musk, incense, sauerkraut, anise, pickled herring, violets opening, moist secretions of a virgin maiden, mounted to his brain like an emanation from the vegetable kingdom or a sulfurous lava, bringing an eruption of desire, his nose, transformed into a sensitive plant, could also catch the scent now of that beloved grove, the viscous friction of that slit of bright lips, the tickle of that moist fleece whose fine silky hairs agitated his nasal orifices, further enhancing the effect of a vaporous narcotic being offered him by the body of his beloved.

  Making an intense intellectual effort—to recite aloud the Pythagorean theorem—Don Rigoberto halted halfway in its course the erection that was beginning to bare its amorous little head, and splashing it with handfuls of cold water, he calmed it down and returned it, shy and shrunken, to its discreet foreskin cocoon. He fondly contemplated the soft cylinder which, serene now, elastic, swinging back and forth like the clapper of a bell, prolonged his lower belly. He told himself once again that it was a great stroke of luck that it had not occurred to his parents to have him circumcised: his prepuce was a diligent producer of pleasing sensations, and he was certain that, had he been deprived of this translucent membrane, his nights of love would have been the poorer, a privation as grave as if an evil spell had destroyed his sense of smell.

  And he suddenly remembered those bold eccentrics for whom breathing in peculiar odors, regarded as repellent by the ordinary individual, was a vital necessity, to precisely the same degree as eating and drinking. He tried to picture in his mind the poet Friedrich von Schiller avidly burying his sensitive nostrils in the rotten apples that stimulated him and predisposed him to creation and love, precisely as little erotic figures did Don Rigoberto. And then he allowed his imagination to dwell upon the unsettling private recipe of that elegant historian of the French Revolution, Francois Michelet—one of whose vagaries was to keep an observant eye on his beloved Athéné as she menstruated; on finding himself overcome with fatigue and thoroughly discouraged, he was in the habit of abandoning the manuscripts, parchments, and filing cabinets of his study and silently stealing, like a thief, into the water closet of their home. Don Rigoberto conjured up a mental image of him: in a swallowtail coat, pumps, and a frilled shirt perhaps, kneeling reverently before the toilet bowl, absorbing with infantile delight the fetid miasmas which, once they reached the labyrinthine folds of his romantic brain, restored his enthusiasms and his energy, refreshed his mind and his body, revived his intellectual drive and his generous ideals. What a normal man I am, compared to those queer birds, he thought. But he did not feel disheartened or inferior. The bliss he had found in his solitary hygienic practices and, above all, in the love of his wife appeared to him to be sufficient compensation for his normalcy. Having this, what need was there to be rich, famous, eccentric, a genius? The modest obscurity that his life represented in the eyes of others, that routine existence as the general manager of an insurance company, concealed something which, he was sure, few of his fellows enjoyed or even suspected existed: possible happiness. Transitory and secret, yes, minimal even, but certain, palpable, nightly, alive. He was now feeling it all about him, surrounding him like an aureole, and in a few minutes he would be that happiness, and it would also be his wife, together with him and with it, united in that profound trinity of two who, thanks to pleasure, were one, or rather, three. Had he perhaps resolved the mystery of the Trinity? He smiled: it’s not that big a deal, you rascal. Just a pinch of wisdom to use as a momentary antidote to the frustrations and annoyances that seasoned existence. He thought: Fantasy gnaws life away, thank God.

  As he stepped through the door of the bedroom, he gave a tremulous sigh.

  Eleven.

  After Dinner

  “I’m going to tell you something you don’t know, stepmother,” Alfonso exclaimed, with a vibrant little gleam in his eye. “You’re in the painting in the living room.”

  His face was excited and playful, and he was hoping, with an impish half smile, that she would guess what was behind the hint he had just given her.

  He’s a child again, Doña Lucrecia thought from inside the warm cocoon of languor in which she found herself, halfway between sleep and waking. Only a moment before, he had been a youth without scruples, of unerring instinct, riding her like an expert horseman. And now he was a happy child once more, delighting in propounding riddles to his adoptive mother. He was squatting on his heels, naked, at the foot of the bed, and she was unable to resist the temptation to reach out her hand and place it on that fair-skinned thigh, the color of honey, covered with a barely visible down glistening with sweat. That’s what Greek gods must have looked like, she thought. The little cupids in paintings, the pages who were the attendants of princesses, the little genies of The Thousand and One Nights, the spintria of Suetonius’ book. She sank her fingers into that young, resilient flesh and thought, with a voluptuous shiver: You’re as happy as a queen, Lucrecia.

  “But that’s a Szyszlo in the living room,” she murmured halfheartedly. “An abstract painting, sweetie.”

  Alfonsito let out a hearty laugh.

  “Well, it’s you,” he declared. And suddenly he blushed to the ears, as though warmed by a strong solar current. “I first noticed this morning. But I won’t tell you how I discovered it, even if you kill me.”

  He was overcome by another fit of giggles and let himself fall face down on the bed. He remained in that position for some time, his face buried in the pillow, quaking with laughter. “Whatever notion can you have gotten into that crazy little head of yours now?” Doña Lucrecia murmured, ruffling his hair, as fine as sand or rice powder. “Some bad thought, you bandit, since you’re blushing like anything.”

  They had spent the night together for the first time, taking advantage of one of those lightning-quick business trips to the provinces that Don Rigoberto often took. The day before, Doña Lucrecia had given all the servants the night off, so that the two of them were alone in the house. That evening, after having dinner together and watching television as they waited for Justiniana and the cook to leave, they went upstairs to the bedroom and made love before going to sleep. And made love again when they woke up, just a short while later, with the first morning light. Behind the chocolate-colored window blinds, the day soon grew brighter and brighter. There were already the sounds of people and cars in the street. The servants would soon be arriving. They had a hearty breakfast, with fruit juice and scrambled eggs. At noon, she and Alfonsito would go to the airport to pick up her husband. She had never said anything about it to Alfonsito, but they both knew that Don Rigoberto was always delighted to see them there waving to him as he got off the plane, and whenever they could, they gave him that pleasure.

  “So I know now what’s meant by an abstract painting,” the youngster reflected, without raising his head from the pillow. “A dirty picture! I had no idea.”

  Doña Lucrecia leaned over toward him. She rested her cheek on his smooth back, without a drop of oil on it, gleaming as though with hoarfrost, revealing just the barest hint of his spinal column, like a miniature Cordillera. She closed her eyes and seemed to hear the slow pulse of precocious blood beneath the supple skin. It’s life beating, life living, she thought in amazement.

  Since making love with the boy for the first time,
she had lost her scruples and that feeling of guilt that had so troubled her before. It had happened on the day following the episode of the letter and his threats to kill himself. It had been something so unexpected that when Doña Lucrecia remembered it, it seemed impossible to her, something not experienced in real life but dreamed of or read about. Don Rigoberto had just shut himself up in the bathroom for his nightly personal hygiene ceremony and she, in a negligee and a nightgown, had gone downstairs to say good night to Alfonsito, as she had promised. The boy leapt out of bed to greet her. Clinging to her neck, he sought her lips and timidly caressed her breasts, as the two of them heard, above their heads, like background music, Don Rigoberto humming an operetta—out of tune, with the water running into the washbasin serving as counterpoint. And, all of a sudden, Doña Lucrecia felt an aggressive, virile presence against her body. It had been more powerful than her sense of danger, an uncontrollable ecstasy. She allowed herself to fall back on the bed as she drew the youngster to her, not at all abruptly, as though fearful of crushing him to bits. Opening her negligee and drawing aside her nightdress, she positioned him and guided him, with an impatient hand. She had heard him work away, pant, kiss her, move, as clumsy and unsteady as a little animal learning to walk. Very soon thereafter, she had heard him let out a moan as he came.

  When she went back to her bedroom, Don Rigoberto had not yet completed his toilet. Doña Lucrecia’s heart was a runaway drum, a blind gallop. She felt amazed at her boldness and—she found it hard to believe—eager to embrace her husband. Her love for him had grown. The figure of the child was also there in her memory, filling her heart with tenderness. Was it possible that she had made love with him and was now about to make love with his father? Yes, it was. She felt neither shame nor remorse. Nor did she consider herself a cynic. It was as though the world were docilely submitting to her. An imcomprehensible feeling of pride came over her. “I had a better orgasm tonight than last night, better than ever before,” she heard Don Rigoberto say, later on. “I have no way to thank you for the happiness you give me.” “Nor have I, my love,” Doña Lucrecia whispered, trembling.