The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Page 7

  “Brava, Justita!” The boy clapped his hands. “Between the two of us, we’ll persuade her. Will you give me this present, Stepmamá? But you do have to take off your shoes.”

  “Admit you want to see the señora’s feet because you know they’re very pretty,” Justiniana teased, bolder than she had been on other afternoons. She placed the Coca-Cola and the glass of mineral water they had requested on the table.

  “Everything about her is pretty,” the boy said candidly. “Go on, Stepmamá, don’t be embarrassed with us. If you want, just so you won’t feel uncomfortable, Justita and I can play the game too and imitate another picture by Egon Schiele.”

  Not knowing how to respond, what joke to make, how to feign an anger she did not feel, Señora Lucrecia suddenly found herself smiling, nodding, murmuring, “All right, you willful child, it will be your birthday present,” removing her shoes, leaning back, and stretching out on the settee. She tried to imitate the reproduction that Fonchito had unfolded and was showing to her, like a director giving instructions to the star of the show. The presence of Justiniana made her feel safe, even though this madwoman had gotten it into her head to take Fonchito’s part. At the same time, her presence as a witness added a certain spice to the outlandish situation. She attempted to make a lighthearted joke out of what she was doing—“Is this it? No, the shoulder’s a little higher, the neck’s stretched like a chicken’s, the head’s straighter”—while she leaned back on her elbows, extended one leg and flexed the other, carefully imitating the model’s pose. Justiniana and Fonchito looked back and forth from her to the page, from the page to her, the girl’s eyes laughing, the boy’s filled with deep concentration. This is the most serious game in the world, Doña Lucrecia thought.

  “That’s it exactly, Señora.”

  “Not yet,” Fonchito interrupted. “You have to raise your knee a little more, Stepmamá. I’ll help you.”

  Before she had a chance to forbid it, the boy handed the book to Justiniana, walked to the sofa, and placed both hands under her knee at the place where the dark green stocking ended and her thigh began. Very gently, paying close attention to the reproduction, he raised and moved her leg. The touch of his slender fingers on her bare flesh stirred Doña Lucrecia. The lower half of her body began to tremble. She felt a palpitation, a vertigo, something overpowering that brought both distress and pleasure. And just then she met Justiniana’s glance. The eyes burning in that dark face spoke volumes. She knows the way I am was her mortified thought. The boy shouted just in time to save her: “Now we have it, Stepmamá! Isn’t that perfect, Justita? Stay that way for a second, please.”

  Sitting cross-legged on the rug like an Oriental, he looked at her in rapture, his mouth partly open, his eyes as round as full moons, ecstatic. Señora Lucrecia let five, ten, fifteen seconds go by, lying absolutely still, infected by how solemnly the boy played the game. Something had happened. The suspension of time? A presentiment of the absolute? The secret of artistic perfection? She was struck by a suspicion: “He’s just like Rigoberto. He’s inherited his tortuous imagination, his manias, his power of seduction. But, fortunately, not his clerk’s face, or his Dumbo ears, or his carrot nose.” She found it difficult to break the spell.

  “Enough. Now it’s your turn.”

  Disappointment overcame the archangel. But his response was instantaneous: “You’re right. That’s what we agreed.”

  “Get to work,” Doña Lucrecia spurred them on. “What picture are you going to do? I’ll choose it. Give me the book, Justiniana.”

  “Well, there are only two pictures for Justita and me,” Fonchito advised her. “Mother and Child and the Nude Man and Woman Lying Down and Embracing. The others are just men, or just women, or two women together. Take your pick, Stepmamá.”

  “What a know-it-all!” exclaimed a stupefied Justiniana.

  Doña Lucrecia examined the images, and in fact, those mentioned by Alfonsito were the only ones they could imitate. She rejected the second, since how believable would it be if a beardless boy played the part of the bearded redhead identified by the author of the book as the artist Felix Albrecht Harta, who looked out at her from the photograph of the oil painting with an imbecilic expression, indifferent to the faceless nude in red stockings who slithered like an amorous snake beneath his bent leg. At least in Mother and Child the age difference was similar to the one that separated Alfonso and Justiniana.

  “That mommy and baby are in a nice little pose!” The maid pretended to be alarmed. “I suppose you won’t ask me to take off my dress, you rascal.”

  “Only to put on black stockings,” the boy replied with absolute seriousness. “I’ll take off just my shoes and shirt.”

  There was no nasty undercurrent in his voice, not a shadow of malicious intent. Doña Lucrecia sharpened her ears and scrutinized his precocious face with suspicion: no, not a shadow. He was a consummate actor. Or merely an innocent boy and she an idiotic, dirty old woman? What was the matter with Justiniana? In all the years she had known her, she could not recall seeing her so impertinent and bold.

  “How can I put on black stockings when I don’t even own any?”

  “My stepmamá will lend you some.”

  Instead of cutting the game short, as her reason told her to, she heard herself saying, “Of course.” She went to her room and returned with the black wool stockings she wore on cold nights. The boy was removing his shirt. He was slim and well proportioned, his skin between white and gold. She saw his torso, his slender arms, his thin shoulders with the fine little bones protruding, and Doña Lucrecia remembered. Had it all really happened? Justiniana had stopped laughing and was avoiding her eyes. She must be on edge as well.

  “Put them on, Justita,” the boy urged her. “Shall I help you?”

  “No, thanks very much.”

  The girl had also lost the naturalness and assurance that rarely abandoned her. Her fingers were fumbling, and the stockings were crooked when she put them on. As she straightened and tugged at them, she bent over in an effort to hide her legs. She stood on the rug next to the boy, looking down and moving her hands, to no discernible effect.

  “Let’s begin,” said Alfonso. “You’re facedown, resting your head on your arms; they’re crossed, like a pillow. I have to be on your right. My knees on your leg, my head on your side. Except, since I’m bigger than the boy in the painting, my head reaches to your shoulder. Are we getting it, Stepmamá?”

  Holding the book, caught up in a desire for perfection, Doña Lucrecia leaned over them. His left hand had to be under Justiniana’s right shoulder, his face turned more this way. “Lay your left hand on her back, Foncho, let it rest on her. Yes, now you’re getting it.”

  She sat on the sofa and looked at them, without seeing them, lost in her own thoughts, astonished at what was happening. He was Rigoberto. Improved and corrected. Corrected and improved. She felt impetuous, and changed. The two of them lay still, playing the game with utter gravity. Nobody was smiling. The pose revealed only one of Justiniana’s eyes, and it no longer flashed mischievously but was like a pool, languid and indolent. Was she excited too? Yes, yes, like her, even more so. Only Fonchito—eyes closed to heighten the resemblance to Schiele’s faceless child—seemed to play the game openly, with no hidden agenda. The atmosphere had thickened, the sounds from the Olivar were muffled, time had slipped away, and the little house, San Isidro, the world, had evaporated.

  “We have time for one more,” Fonchito said at last as he got to his feet. “Now you two. What do you think? It can only be—turn the page, Stepmamá—it can only be that one, it’s perfect. Two Girls Lying in an Embrace. Don’t move, Justita. Just turn a little, that’s it. Lie down beside her, Stepmamá, hover over her, your back to me. Your hand like this, under her hip. You’re the one in the yellow dress, Justita. Imitate her. This arm here, and your right arm, just pass it under my stepmamá’s legs. Bend a little, let your knee brush against Justita’s shoulder. Raise this hand, put it on my
stepmamá’s leg, spread your fingers. That’s it, that’s it. Perfect!”

  They were silent, obedient, bending, straightening, turning on their sides, extending or withdrawing legs, arms, necks. Docile? Bewitched? Enchanted? “Defeated,” Doña Lucrecia admitted to herself. Her head was resting on her maid’s thighs and her right hand held her waist. From time to time she pressed it to feel the moist heat emanating from her, and in response to that pressure, Justiniana’s fingers clasped her right thigh and made her feel what she was feeling. She was aroused. Of course she was; that intense, heavy, disturbing odor, where would it come from if not Justiniana’s body? Or did it come from her? How had they ever gone so far? What had happened? How, without realizing it—or realizing it, perhaps—had the boy made them play this game? Now she didn’t care. She felt content to be in the picture. To be with her, her body, Justiniana, in this situation. She heard Fonchito leaving.

  “What a shame I have to go. Everything was so nice. But you two go on playing. Thanks for the present, Stepmamá.”

  She heard him open the door, she heard him close it. He had gone. He had left them alone, lying entwined, abandoned, lost in a fantasy of his favorite painter.

  The Rebellion of the Clitorises

  I understand, Señora, that the feminist sect which you represent has declared a war of the sexes, and that the philosophy of your movement is based on the conviction that the clitoris is morally, physically, culturally, and erotically superior to the penis, ovaries more noble than testicles.

  I grant that your theses are defensible. I do not attempt to make the slightest objection to them. My sympathies for feminism are profound, though subordinate to my love for individual freedom and human rights, which means that those sympathies are bounded by limits I should specify so that my subsequent remarks make sense. Speaking generally, and beginning with the most obvious point, I will state that I am in favor of eliminating every legal obstacle to a woman’s accepting the same responsibilities as a man, in favor of the intellectual and moral struggle against the prejudices upon which restrictions to women’s rights rest, and let me add, among these I believe the most important, for women as well as men, is not the right to employment, education, health, and so forth, but the right to pleasure, and here, I am certain, is where our first disagreement arises.

  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 eff
orts 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.