The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “That’s exactly why, Stepmamá,” Fonchito interrupted. “I made you fight, and that’s why it’s up to me to make you friends again. But you have to help me. You will, won’t you? Say you will, Stepmamá.”

  Doña Lucrecia did not know how to answer; she wanted to slap him and kiss him at the same time. Her cheeks were hot. And to make matters worse, that impudent Fonchito, in an abrupt change of mood, seemed happy now. Suddenly he began to laugh.

  “You’re all red,” he said, throwing his arms around her neck again. “Then the answer’s yes. I love you so much, Stepmamá!”

  “First you cry and now you’re laughing,” said Justiniana, appearing in the hallway. “Just what is going on here?”

  “We have wonderful news,” said the boy by way of greeting. “Shall we tell her, Stepmamá?”

  “You’re the one who has a screw loose, not Rigoberto,” said Doña Lucrecia, hiding her embarrassment.

  “Venus must have infected me with syphilis too.” Fonchito laughed, looking away. And, in the same tone, he said to the girl, “My papá and my stepmamá are going to make up, Justita! What do you think of that?”

  Diatribe against the Sportsman

  I understand that in summer you surf the rough waves of the Pacific and spend the winters skiing down the Chilean trails at Portillo, the Argentine trails at Bariloche (since the Peruvian Andes do not permit such affectations), that you sweat every morning doing aerobic exercises at the gym, or running around athletic tracks or parks or streets, encased in a thermal suit that squeezes your ass and belly like the old-fashioned corsets that asphyxiated our grandmothers, that you never miss a soccer game or the classic encounter between Alianza Lima and Universitario de Deportes or a boxing match for the South American, Latin American, North American, European, or World title, and that on these occasions, glued to the television set and making the show even more agreeable with beer, cuba libres, or whiskey on the rocks, you yell at the top of your lungs, turn red in the face, howl, wave your arms, or become depressed with every triumph or failure of your idols, as befits a loyal sports fan. More than enough reasons, Señor, to confirm my worst suspicions regarding the world in which we live, and to classify you as a brainless, mentally defective shithead. (I use the first and third terms as metaphors; the second is to be taken literally.)

  Yes, it’s true, in your atrophied intellect a light has come on: I consider the practice of sports in general, and the cult of sports in particular, as radical forms of the imbecility that brings human beings close to sheep, geese, and ants, three extreme examples of animal gregariousness. Control your wrestler’s impulse to tear me to pieces and listen; in a moment we’ll talk about the Greeks and the hypocritical mens sana in corpore sano. First, I should tell you that the only sports I do not find ridiculous are those of the table (excluding Ping-Pong) and the bed (including, of course, masturbation). As for the rest, contemporary culture has transformed them into obstacles to the development of spirit, sensibility, and imagination (and, consequently, of pleasure). And above all, of consciousness and individual freedom. In our time nothing, not even ideology and religion, has contributed so much to the rise of contemptible mass-man, a robot full of conditioned reflexes, or to the resurrection of the culture of the tattooed primate in a loincloth which lies concealed behind the façade of modernity, as the glorification of physical exercise and games by our society.

  Now we can speak of the Greeks, so you won’t pester me anymore about Plato and Aristotle. But I warn you, the spectacle of young Athenian boys smearing themselves with oils in the gymnasium before testing their physical dexterity, or hurling the discus and the javelin beneath the pure blue of the Aegean sky, will be of no help to you but will force you deeper into ignominy, you, a buffoon whose muscles have been hardened at the expense of a lowered testosterone level and a plummeting IQ. Only blows to the head with a soccer ball or the punches received in the boxing ring or the mind-numbing turn of the cyclist’s wheels and the premature senile dementia (in addition to sexual dysfunction, incontinence, and impotence?) which they tend to provoke can explain the attempt to establish a direct line between the tunicked youths of Plato anointing themselves with resins after their sensual and philosophical physical displays and the drunken hordes roaring in the stands of modern stadiums (before setting them on fire) at contemporary soccer games, in which twenty-two clowns, depersonalized by garishly colored uniforms and running wildly after a ball on a grassy rectangle, serve as the pretext for exhibitions of collective insanity.

  In Plato’s day, sport was a means, not the end it has become in these municipalized times. It served to enrich human pleasure (masculine pleasure, since women did not engage in sports), stimulating and prolonging it with the representation of a beautiful, smooth, oiled, well-proportioned, harmonious body, inciting it with pre-erotic calisthenics and certain movements, postures, frictions, bodily exhibitions, exercises, dances, touches, inflaming desire until participants and spectators were catapulted into coupling. That these encounters were eminently homosexual neither adds to nor subtracts from my argument, nor does the fact that in the sexual realm Yours Truly is boringly orthodox and loves only women—indeed, only one woman—and is totally disinterested in active or passive pederasty. Understand me, I have no objections at all to what gays do. I am delighted that they enjoy themselves, and I support their campaigns against discriminatory laws. Beyond that I cannot go, for very practical reasons. Nothing related to what Quevedo called the “eye of the ass” gives me pleasure. Nature, or God, if He exists and wastes His time on these matters, has made that concealed aperture the most sensitive of all the orifices that pierce my body. Suppositories wound it, and the tip of the enema syringe makes it bleed (once, during a period of stubborn constipation, one was forced into me, and it was terrible), and so the idea that certain bipeds enjoy having a virile member inserted there fills me with horrified amazement. I am certain, in my case, that along with howls and screams, I would experience a true psychosomatic cataclysm if that aforementioned opening were to be penetrated by an erect penis, even if it were a Pygmy’s. The only punch I ever threw in my life was aimed at a physician who, without warning and on the pretext of determining if I had appendicitis, attempted to commit upon my person a form of torture disguised by the scientific label “rectal examination.” Despite this, I am theoretically in favor of human beings making love inside out, upside down, alone or in couples or in promiscuous collective (ugh!) matings in which men copulate with men, and women with women, and both with ducks, dogs, watermelons, bananas, cantaloupes, and every imaginable disgusting thing if it makes them agreeable to the pursuit of pleasure, not reproduction, an accident of sex which one must accept as a minor inconvenience but in no way sanctify as the justification for carnal joy (this imbecility on the part of the Church exasperates me as much as a basketball game). But I digress: the image of aging Hellenes, wise philosophers, august legislators, battle-scarred generals, or high priests frequenting gymnasiums in order to revive their libidos with the sight of youthful discus throwers, wrestlers, marathon runners, or javelin hurlers—that image moves me. The kind of sport that panders to desire I condone and would not hesitate to engage in if my health, age, sense of the ridiculous, and leisure time were to permit it.

  There is another instance, even further removed from our cultural environment (I don’t know why I include you in this fraternity since, as a result of soccer’s kicks and blows to the head, cycling’s sweaty exertions, karate’s throws to the ground, you have been excluded from it), when sport also has an excuse. And that is when a human being, by engaging in it, transcends his animal nature, touches the sacred, and rises to a plane of intense spirituality. If you insist on our using the dangerous word “mystic,” then so be it. Obviously such cases, by this time extremely rare—an exotic reminiscence is the warlike sacrifice of the Japanese sumo wrestler, fed from childhood on a fierce vegetarian diet that elephantizes him and condemns him to die, his heart bursting, before the age of
forty, and to spend his life trying not to be expelled by another mountain of flesh exactly like him from the small magic circle to which his life is confined—cannot be compared to those idols of the mob that post-industrial society calls “martyrs to sport.” Where is the heroism in being turned to mush at the wheel of a racing car propelled by motors that do all the work for humans, in regressing from a thinking being to a mental defective with brains and testicles mangled by the practice of intercepting goals or striving to achieve them, just so that maddened crowds can be desexed by ejaculations of collective egotism at each point scored? For contemporary man, the physical exercises and skills called sports bring him no closer to the sacred and the religious; they distance him from the spirit, and brutalize him by catering to his most ignoble instincts: tribalism, machismo, the will to dominate, the dissolution of the individual ego in an amorphous gregariousness.

  I know of no lie more base than the phrase taught to children: “A sound mind in a sound body.” Who ever said that a sound mind is a desirable goal? In this case, “sound” means stupid, conventional, unimaginative, and unmischievous, the vulgar stereotype of established morality and official religion. Is that a “sound” mind? It is the mind of a conformist, a pious old woman, a notary, an insurance salesman, an altar boy, a virgin, a Boy Scout. That is not health, it is an impairment. A rich, independent mental life demands curiosity, mischief, fantasy, and unsatisfied desires, which is to say a “dirty” mind, evil thoughts, and the blossoming of forbidden images and appetites that stimulate exploration of the unknown, renovation of the known, and systematic disrespect toward received ideas, common knowledge, and current values.

  Furthermore, it is not even true that engaging in sports in our day creates sound minds in the banal sense of the word. Just the opposite occurs, and you know that better than anyone, for in order to win the hundred-meter dash on Sunday you would put arsenic and cyanide in your competitor’s soup, swallow every vegetable, chemical, or magical drug to guarantee your victory, corrupt or blackmail the judges, devise medical or legal schemes to disqualify your rivals, and live hounded by your neurotic fixation on the victory, the record, the medal, the dais; this has turned you, the professional sportsman, into an artificial creation of the media, an antisocial, nervous, hysterical psychopath, the polar opposite of that sociable, generous, altruistic, “healthy” individual to which imbeciles wish to allude when they still dare to use the expression “sportsmanship” in the sense of a noble athlete filled with civic virtues, when, in fact, what lurks behind the phrase is a potential assassin willing to kill referees, murder all the fans of the other team, devastate the stadiums and cities that house them, and bring about the final apocalypse, not for the high artistic purpose that led to the burning of Rome by the poet Nero, but so that his club can win a fake silver cup or he can see his eleven idols carried to a rostrum, flagrantly ridiculous in their shorts and striped undershirts, their hands to their chests and their eyes shining as they sing the national anthem!

  The Corsican Brothers

  On that oppressive Sunday afternoon in winter, in his study that looked out on an overcast sky and dull, rat-gray sea, Don Rigoberto anxiously leafed through his notebooks searching for ideas to fire his imagination. The first one he came across, by the poet Philip Larkin, “Sex is too good to share with anyone else,” reminded him of the many versions in art of the young Narcissus delighting in his own reflection in a pool, and of the recumbent hermaphrodite in the Louvre. But, inexplicably, this depressed him. On other occasions he had agreed with the philosophy that placed the responsibility for his pleasure exclusively on his own shoulders. Was it correct? Had it ever been correct? The truth was that even at its purest moments his solitude had been for two, a rendezvous that Lucrecia never failed to keep. A faint stirring in his spirit gave rise to new hope: she would not fail this time, either. Larkin’s thesis corresponded perfectly to the saint (another page in the notebook) described by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians: Saint Cubert was so distrustful of women that when he spoke to any of them, even the future Saint Ebba, he spent “the following hours in darkness, in prayer, submerged in water to the neck.” So many colds and bouts of pneumonia for a faith that condemned the believer to a Larkinian solitary pleasure.

  As if he were walking on live coals, he hurried past a page on which Azorín recalled that “caprice is derived from capra, a she-goat.” He paused, fascinated, at the description by the diplomat Alfonso de la Serna of the Farewell Symphony by Haydn, “in which each musician, as his part ended, put out the candle that lit his music stand and stole away until only one violin was left to play the final, solitary melody.” Wasn’t that a coincidence? Wasn’t that a mysterious joining, as if following a secret order, of the solo voice of Haydn’s violin with the pleasure-seeking egotist Philip Larkin, who believed that sex was too important to share?

  And yet he, though he elevated sex to the highest level, had always shared it, even during this, his time of bitterest solitude. And then, out of the blue, he was reminded of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., playing double roles in the film that had so disquieted his childhood: The Corsican Brothers. Of course, he had never shared sex with anyone as deeply as he had with Lucrecia. But he had also shared it, as a child, youth, and adult, with his own Corsican brother—Narciso?—with whom he had always gotten along so well despite the differences in their natures. And yet those risqué games and deceptions devised and enjoyed by the brothers did not correspond to the ironic sense in which the poet-librarian used the verb “to share.” Turning page after page, he happened upon The Merchant of Venice:

  The man that hath no music in himself,

  Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,

  Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils

  (Act V, Scene 1)

  “The man who has no music in his soul/And is not moved by harmonies of sweet sounds/Is likely to commit intrigue, fraud, and treason,” he translated freely. Narciso had no music at all, was cut off, body and soul, from the charms of Melpomene, and could not distinguish between Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and Pérez Prado’s “Mambo Number 5.” Was Shakespeare correct in decreeing that an ear deaf to the most abstract of the arts made his brother a potential schemer, swindler, and fraud? Well, perhaps it was true. The amiable Narciso had not been a model of virtue, civic, private, or theological, and would reach an advanced age boasting, like Bishop Harold (whose citation was it? The reference had been devoured by the sibylline Limenian damp, or the labors of a moth) on his deathbed, that he had practiced all the deadly sins with the regularity of his beating heart or the ringing of church bells in his bishopric. If that had not been his moral nature, Narciso never would have dared that night to suggest to his Corsican brother—Don Rigoberto could sense in his deepest being the stirrings of the Shakespearean music which he believed he carried inside himself—the daring exchange. And so they took shape before his eyes, sitting side by side in that room in the house in La Planicie that was a monument to kitsch and a blasphemous provocation to every society for the protection of animals, bristling as it was with embalmed tigers, buffalo, rhinos, and deer—Lucrecia next to Ilse, Narciso’s blond wife, on the night of their adventure. The Bard was right: a deaf ear for music was a symptom (or the cause?) of a base soul. No, one could not generalize, for then one would have to conclude that their insensitivity to music had turned Jorge Luis Borges and André Breton into Judas and Cain, when it was well known that both had been very fine people, for writers.

  His brother Narciso was not a devil, merely an adventurer. Endowed with a diabolical aptitude for deriving enormous profits from his wanderlust and his taste for everything forbidden, secret, and exotic. But as he was also a mythomaniac, it was difficult to know what was true and what was fantasy in the tales of his travels with which he would hold his listeners spellbound at the (sinister) hour of gala dinners, wedding banquets, or cocktail parties, the stages for his great narrative performances. For example, Don Rigoberto had neve
r entirely believed that he had made a good part of his fortune smuggling contraband—rhinoceros horns, leopard testicles, and the penises of walruses and seals (the first two from Africa, the last from Alaska, Greenland, and Canada)—to the prosperous nations of Asia. Body parts worth their weight in gold in Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and even Communist China, for connoisseurs considered them powerful aphrodisiacs and infallible remedies for impotence. On that night, in fact, while the Corsican brothers and the two sisters-in-law, Ilse and Lucrecia, were having an apéritif before supper in the Costa Verde restaurant, Narciso had entertained them with a wild story about aphrodisiacs (in it he was both hero and victim) that took place in Saudi Arabia, where he swore—backed up by precise geographical details and unpronounceable Arabic names full of guttural consonants—he had almost been decapitated in the public square in Riyadh when it was discovered that he had smuggled in a bag filled with Captagon tablets (acetophenetidin hydrochloride) to maintain the sexual potency of the lustful sheik Abdelaziz Abu Amid, who was fairly worn out by his four legitimate wives and the eighty-two concubines in his harem, and who paid him in gold for the shipment of amphetamines.

  “And yobimbine?” asked Ilse, cutting off her husband’s story just at the moment when he was appearing before a tribunal of turbaned ulemas. “Does it produce the effect they say in everybody who tries it?”

  Losing no time, his handsome brother—without a trace of envy Don Rigoberto recalled how, after being indistinguishable as children and adolescents, adulthood began to differentiate between them, and now Narciso’s ears seemed normal in comparison to the spectacular wings that he sported, and Narciso’s straight, modest nose was no match for the corkscrew, or anteater’s snout, with which he sniffed at life—launched into an erudite peroration on yohimbine (called yobimbine in Peru because of the lazy phonetic tendencies of the natives, for whom an aspirated h demanded greater buccal effort than a b). Narciso’s lecture continued through their apéritifs—pisco sours for the gentlemen and cold white wine for the ladies—and the meal of shellfish and rice and crêpes with blancmange, and as far as he was concerned, it had the tingling effect of foreplay. At that moment—the caprices of chance—the notebook furnished him with the Shakespearean indication that turquoise stones change color to warn whoever is wearing them of imminent danger (again, The Merchant of Venice). Was he speaking seriously? Did he know or was he inventing knowledge in order to create the psychological climate, the amoral ambiance that would favor his subsequent proposals? He had not asked and he never would, for at this point, what did it matter?