The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  You cross yourself for so little cause? Your sign of the cross moves me on to another subject, which is actually the same one. What part does religion play in this polemic? Is it also slapped in the face by this renegade from Catholic Action, this former fervent reader of Saint Augustine, Cardinal Newman, Saint John of the Cross, and Jean Guitton? Yes and no. If I am anything in these matters, I am agnostic. Suspicious of the atheist and the believer, I am in favor of people having and practicing a faith, for if not, they would have no spiritual life at all and savagery would increase. Culture—art, philosophy, all secular intellectual and artistic activity—cannot fill the spiritual vacuum left by the death of God and the eclipse of the transcendent life, except in a very small minority (of which I am a part). That vacuum makes people more destructive and bestial than they normally would be. While I am in favor of faith, religions generally make me want to hold my nose, because all of them imply processional herdism and the abdication of spiritual independence. All of them restrict human freedom and attempt to rein in desire. I acknowledge that from an aesthetic point of view, religions—Catholicism, perhaps, more than any other, with its beautiful cathedrals, rituals, liturgies, ceremonies, representations, iconographies, music—are usually superb sources of pleasure that delight the eye and the sensibility, spark the imagination, and purge us of evil thoughts. But in each of them there always lurks a censor, a commissar, a fanatic, an inquisitor’s flames and pincers. It is also true that without their prohibitions, sins, and moral fulminations, desires—especially sexual desire—would not have achieved the refinement they have reached at certain times. Consequently—and this is not theoretical but practical—as the result of a modest personal survey of limited scope, I affirm that people make love much better in religious countries than in secular ones (better in Ireland than in England, in Poland than in Denmark), better in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones (better in Spain or Italy than in Germany or Sweden), and that women who have been educated in nuns’ academies are a thousand times more imaginative, bold, and delicate than those who have studied at secular schools (Roger Vailland has theorized about this in Le Regard froid). Lucrecia would not be the Lucrecia who has filled me with a happiness I can never repay, both day and night (but especially at night) over the past ten years, if her childhood and youth had not been in the hands of extremely strict Sisters of the Sacred Heart, whose teachings included the warning that, for a little girl, it was a sin to sit with one’s knees apart. Throughout history these sacrificed slaves to the Lord, with their exacerbated susceptibility and casuistry in matters of love, have educated whole dynasties of Messalinas. My blessings on them!

  Well, then. Where does that leave us? I don’t know where it leaves you, my dear colleague (to use another vomitous term). As for me, I am left with my contradictions, which are, after all, also a source of pleasure for an intractable and unclassifiable spirit like mine. Opposed to the institutionalization of feelings and faith, but in favor of feelings and faith. On the margins of churches, but curious about them, and envious, I diligently make use of what they can offer to enrich my world of phantoms. I tell you that I am an undisguised admirer of those princes of the Church who were capable, on the highest level, of conjoining their purple vestments and their sperm. I look through my notebooks and find, as an example, the cardinal about whom the virtuous Azorín wrote: “A refined skeptic, he privately laughed at the farce through which his person moved, and was regularly astounded at the unending human stupidity that provided money to maintain the stupendous spectacle.” Is this not practically a portrait in miniature of the famous Cardinal de Bernis, the eighteenth-century French ambassador to Italy who, while in Venice, shared two lesbian nuns with Giacomo Casanova (vide his Memoirs), and in Rome entertained the Marquis de Sade, not knowing who he was, when the latter, a fugitive from France because of his libertine excesses, was traveling through Italy, with a false identity, as the Count of Mazan?

  But I see you are yawning because the names I am firing at you—Ayn Rand, Vailland, Azorín, Casanova, Bernis, Sade—are, for you, incomprehensible noises, and so I will conclude this letter (and don’t worry, I won’t send it, either).

  I wish you many luncheons and plaques, Rotarian.

  The Scent of Widows

  In the damp night that was agitated by a churning sea, Don Rigoberto awoke with a start, bathed in sweat: the innumerable rats of the Temple of Karniji, summoned by the merry bells of the Brahmins, were gathering for their evening meal. The enormous cauldrons, the metal dishes and wooden bowls, had already been filled with bits of meat or the milky syrup that was their favorite food. From every hole in the marble walls, openings that had been made for them by the pious monks and furnished with handfuls of straw for their comfort, thousands of gray rodents greedily left their nests. Falling over one another, they raced to the containers and dove in to lick the sweet syrup, nibble at the pieces of meat, and, most exquisite of all, to tear mouthfuls of calluses and corns from bare feet with their white incisors. The priests let them do as they wished, pleased to contribute, with their excess skin, to the pleasure of the rats, who were the incarnations of deceased men and women.

  The temple had been built for them five hundred years earlier in this northern corner of Rajasthan, in India, as a homage to Lakhan, the son of the goddess Karniji, a handsome youth who was transformed into a plump rat. From that time on, behind the imposing construction of silver-plated doors, marble floors, majestic walls and domes, the spectacle took place twice a day. There was the head Brahmin, Chotu-Dan, hidden beneath dozens of gray animals who climbed over his shoulders, arms, legs, back, to get to the great cauldron of syrup, for he sat on the edge. But what turned Don Rigoberto’s stomach and almost made him vomit was the smell. Dense, enveloping, more pungent than mule droppings, the wind from the garbage dump, or putrefying carrion, the stink of the gray horde was now inside him. It traveled beneath his skin, in his veins and in the secretions from his glands, it soaked into the cracks in his cartilage, the marrow of his bones. His body had been turned into the temple of Karniji. “I am saturated with the smell of rats,” he said in horror.

  He leaped from the bed in his pajamas, not putting on his robe but only his slippers, and ran to his study to see if by leafing through a book, looking at an engraving, listening to music, or scribbling in his notebooks, other images would come to exorcise the remnants of his nightmare.

  He was in luck. In the first notebook he opened, a scientific citation explained the variety of anopheles mosquito whose most outstanding characteristic is detecting the odor of their females at incredible distances. I am one of them, he thought, dilating his nostrils and sniffing. Right now, if I wish to, I can smell Lucrecia asleep near the Olivar de San Isidro, and clearly differentiate her scalp hair from that on her underarms and her pubis. But he discovered another smell—benign, literary, pleasant, fanciful—that began to dispel, as the dawn breeze dissipates nocturnal mists, the rattish stench of his dream. A holy, theological, extremely elegant smell emitted by Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life in the translation by Quevedo: “Lamps that use aromatic oil give off a gentler odor when their light is dimmed. In the same way, widows whose love has been pure in marriage exhale a precious, aromatic odor of the virtue of chastity when their light, that is, their husband, is dimmed by death.” That aroma of chaste widows, the impalpable melancholy of their bodies condemned to physical soliloquy, the nostalgic emanation of their unsatisfied desires, aroused him. His nostrils flared diligently, trying to reconstruct, detect, extract from the atmosphere some trace of its presence. The mere idea of a widow’s scent filled him with suspense. The remains of the nightmare evaporated, he felt wide awake, his spirit recovered its healthy confidence. And led him to think—why?—of Klimt’s women floating among rivers of stars, those perfumed women with their dissolute faces—there was Goldfish, the many-colored fish-female, and Danaë, feigning sleep and exhibiting with great simplicity an ass as curvaceous as a guitar. No pai
nter ever knew how to paint the odor of women as well as this decadent Viennese; his volatile, bending women had always entered his mind through his eyes and nose simultaneously. (Speaking of which, wasn’t it time to begin to worry about the excessive interest another Viennese, Egon Schiele, held for Fonchito? Perhaps, but not just now.)

  Had Lucrecia’s body begun to give off that saintly Salesian odor when they separated? If so, she still loved him. For that odor, according to Saint Francis de Sales, bore witness to a fidelity in love that transcended the grave. That would mean she had not replaced him. Yes, she was still a “widow.” The rumors, breaches of faith, accusations that had reached him—including the gossip about Fonchito—regarding Lucrecia’s newfound lovers, were slander. His heart rejoiced as he furiously sniffed all around him. Was it there? Had he detected it? Was that the odor of Lucrecia? No. It was the scent of the night, the dampness, the books, oils, woods, fabrics, and leathers in the study.

  Closing his eyes, he attempted to retrieve from the past, from nothingness, the nocturnal odors he had breathed in during those ten years, aromas that had given him so much pleasure, perfumes that had protected him from the surrounding pestilence and ugliness. He was overcome by depression. Some lines by Neruda came to console him as he turned another page in the same notebook:

  And to see you urinate, in the dark, at the back of the house, as if you were pouring out a slender, tremulous, silvery, obstinate stream of honey, I would give up, many times over, this choir of shades I possess, and the clang of useless swords that echoes in my soul…

  Wasn’t it extraordinary that the poem those lines were taken from is called “Widower’s Tango”? Without transition he caught a glimpse of Lucrecia sitting on the toilet, and listened to the merry splash of her pee in the bottom of the bowl that received it with tinkling gratitude. Of course, silent, squatting in the corner, absorbed, mystically concentrating, listening and smelling, there too was the happy beneficiary of that emission, that liquid concert: Manuel of the Prostheses! But at that moment Gulliver appeared, saving the Empress of Lilliput from her burning palace with his foaming piss. He thought of Jonathan Swift, who lived obsessed by the contrast between physical beauty and hideous bodily functions. The notebook recalled how, in his most famous poem, a lover explains with these verses why he decided to leave his lady:

  Nor wonder how I lost my wits;

  Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits

  “What a stupid man” was his judgment. Lucrecia also shat, and this, rather than degrading her, enhanced her in his eyes and nostrils. For a few seconds, with the first smile of the night on his face, his memory inhaled the vapors reminiscent of the passage of his former wife through the bathroom. Though now the sexologist Havelock Ellis intruded, whose most secret joy, according to the notebook, was to listen to his beloved passing water, and who proclaimed in his correspondence that the happiest day of his life had been the one on which his compliant wife, in the shelter of her full Victorian skirts, irreverently urinated for him among unwitting passersby at the feet of Admiral Nelson, under the eyes of the monumental stone lions on Trafalgar Square.

  But Manuel had not been a poet like Neruda, a moralist like Swift, a sexologist like Ellis. Merely a castrato. Or, perhaps, a eunuch? An abysmal difference between the two kinds of inability to fecundate. One still had a penis and an erection, the other had lost the instrument and its reproductive function and displayed a smooth, curved, feminine pubis. Which was Manuel? A eunuch. How could Lucrecia have granted that to him? Generosity, curiosity, compassion? Or vice and morbidity? Or all of them combined? She had known him before his famous accident, when Manuel was winning motorcycling championships wearing a shining helmet and a plastic face protector, straddling a mechanical steed made of tubes, levers, and wheels, always with a Japanese name (Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Yamaha), catapulting himself forward with the noise of a deafening fart in a cross-country race—it was called a motorcross—though he also participated in idiocies named Trail and Enduro, this last competition suspiciously reminiscent of the Albigensians—at two or three hundred kilometers an hour. Flying across ditches, climbing hills, agitating stretches of sand, leaping over rocks or chasms, Manuel won trophies and had his picture in the papers uncorking bottles of champagne with models who kissed him on the cheek. Until, in one of those displays of pure stupidity, he flew through the air after racing like a shooting star up a treacherous hill; waiting for him on the other side was not, as he incautiously believed, an easy slope of cushioning sand but a rocky precipice. He was hurled into it, shouting an old-fashioned obscenity—Oh shit!—as he plummeted astride his metal charger into the depths, and seconds later he reached bottom in a resounding clamor of bones and pieces of metal being crushed, broken, and impaled. A miracle! His head was whole; his teeth intact; his vision and hearing not damaged at all; the use of his limbs somewhat painful because of broken bones and torn, bruised muscles. The liability was compensatorily concentrated in his genitals, which monopolized most of the damage. Nuts, bolts, and sharp points perforated his testicles despite the elastic supporter that guarded them, and turned them into a hybrid substance, somewhere between taffy and ratatouille, while the stalk of his virility was sliced at the root by some cutting material that perhaps—the ironies of life—did not come from the cycle of his loves and triumphs. What, then, had castrated him? The heavy, sharply pointed crucifix he wore to invoke divine protection when he perpetrated his motorcycling feats.

  The skilled surgeons in Miami mended his bones, straightened what had been bent and bent what had been straightened, sewed on what had been torn away, and constructed artificial genitals, using bits of flesh taken from his gluteal muscle. It was always stiff, but that was pure show, a framework of skin over a plastic prosthesis. “Lots of smoke and no fire, or to be mathematically precise, a shell with no nuts” was Don Rigoberto’s savage formulation. He could use it only to urinate, not even voluntarily but each time he drank any fluid, and since poor Manuel had no way to keep that constant flow of liquid from wetting the seat of his pants, he had to wear over it, like a grotesque little hat, a plastic bag to collect his water. Except for this inconvenience, the eunuch led a very normal life and—every madman has his madness—still served the cause of motorcycles.

  “Are you going to visit him again?” Don Rigoberto asked, somewhat put out.

  “He’s invited me for tea, and you know he’s a good friend and I feel very sorry for him,” Doña Lucrecia explained. “But if it bothers you, I won’t go.”

  “Go, go by all means,” he said apologetically. “You’ll tell me about it afterward?”

  They had know each other since childhood. They were from the same neighborhood and had been in love in school, when being in love meant holding hands on Sundays after eleven o’clock Mass as they walked in the Parque Central in Miraflores, or in the smaller Parquecito Salazar following a swooning movie matinee of kisses and some timid, well-bred touching in the orchestra seats. And they had been sweethearts when Manuel was performing his racing feats and had his picture on the sports pages, and pretty girls were dying for him. When his flirtatiousness became too much for her, Lucrecia broke the engagement. They stopped seeing one another until the accident. She visited him in the hospital and brought him a box of Cadbury’s. They re-established a relationship, a friendship, nothing more—that is what Don Rigoberto believed until he discovered the liquid truth—which continued after Doña Lucrecia’s marriage.

  From time to time Don Rigoberto had caught glimpses of him through the show windows of his flourishing dealership in new and used motorcycles imported from the United States and Japan (alongside the hieroglyphics of Japanese names there now stood the American Harley-Davidson and Triumph, and the Germanic BMW), which was located on the expressway just before Javier Prado. He no longer participated as a racer in any championships, but with obvious sadomasochism he maintained his connection to the sport as a promoter and patron of those vicarious massacres and butcheries. Don Rigoberto would see
him on television newscasts, lowering a ridiculous checked flag with the air of someone who was starting the First World War, or standing at the starting or finishing lines at races, or handing the winner a cup covered in fake silver. The move from participant to sponsor of events assuaged—according to Lucrecia—the addictive attraction the castrato felt for these gleaming motorcycles.

  And the other? The other absence? Did something or someone assuage that too? On the afternoons when they would have tea and cakes and conversation, Manuel maintained remarkable discretion regarding the matter, which Lucrecia, of course, was never imprudent enough to mention. Their talks were exchanges of news, reminiscences of a Miraflores childhood, a San Isidro youth, and of old friends from the neighborhood who married, unmarried, remarried, fell ill, had children, and occasionally died; they were sprinkled with comments on recent events: the latest film or record, the latest dance craze, a marriage or a catastrophic breakup, a recently uncovered fraud, or the latest scandal concerning drugs, adultery, or AIDS. Until one day—Don Rigoberto’s hands quickly turned the pages of the notebook, trying to track down a citation that would correspond to the sequence of sharp images moving through his fevered mind—Doña Lucrecia had discovered his secret. Had she really discovered it? Or had Manuel arranged for her to believe that, when in fact she simply fell into the trap he had prepared for her? The truth is that one day, drinking tea in his house in La Planicie, which was surrounded by eucalyptus and laurels, Manuel lured Lucrecia into his bedroom. The pretext? To show her a photograph of a volleyball game at San Antonio Academy taken many years earlier. Once there, she was surprised beyond all measure. An entire bookcase of volumes dedicated to the chilling subject of castration and eunuchs! A specialized library! In every language, above all in those not understood by Manuel, who had mastered only Spanish, in its Peruvian, or, more accurately, its Mirafloran and San Isidran variant. And a collection of records and CD’s that approximated or simulated the voices of castrati!