The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Then you’re schizophrenic too, Stepmamá.” The boy laughed, and again the expression on his face was the look of someone catching her in a mistake.

  “A little, no, a lot,” she agreed. “Let’s not talk about sad things. Tell me about you. Or your papá.”

  “He misses you too.” Fonchito became serious, almost solemn. “That’s why he wrote you that anonymous letter. His wound has healed and he wants to make up.”

  She did not have the heart to argue with him. Now she felt overwhelmed by melancholy, and rather gloomy.

  “How is Rigoberto? Living his usual life?”

  “From the office to home, and from home to the office, every day,” Fonchito agreed. “Sitting in his study, listening to music, looking at his pictures. But it’s all an excuse. He doesn’t go in there to read or look at paintings or listen to his records, but only to think about you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he talks to you,” the boy declared, lowering his voice and looking toward the interior of the house to see if Justiniana was nearby. “I’ve heard him. I sneak up very slowly and put my ear to the door. It never fails. He’s always talking when he’s alone. And saying your name, I swear.”

  “I don’t believe you, you’re lying.”

  “You know I wouldn’t make up a thing like this, Stepmamá. Do you see now? He wants you to come back.”

  He spoke with so much certainty that it was difficult not to feel pulled toward his world, so seductive and false, so full of innocence, of good and evil, purity and vileness, spontaneity and calculation. Since this happened, I’ve stopped grieving about not having my own child, Doña Lucrecia thought. She believed she understood why. The boy, sitting back on his heels, the book of reproductions open at his feet, was scrutinizing her.

  “Do you know something, Fonchito?” she said, almost without thinking. “I love you very much.”

  “And I love you, Stepmamá.”

  “Don’t interrupt. And because I love you, it hurts me that you’re not like other boys. Acting so grown-up, you miss something you can only have at the age you are now. The most wonderful thing that can happen to anyone is being young. And you, you’re wasting it.”

  “I don’t understand you, Stepmamá,” Fonchito said impatiently. “Just a minute ago you said I was the most normal boy in the world. Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, no,” she reassured him. “I mean that I’d like to see you playing soccer, going to the stadium, going out with kids from the neighborhood and from school. Having friends your own age. Having parties, dancing, falling in love with girls. Aren’t you interested in any of those things?”

  Fonchito shrugged disdainfully.

  “They’re so boring,” he replied, not giving her words too much importance. “I play soccer at recess, and that’s enough. Sometimes I go out with guys from the neighborhood. But I’m bored by the dumb things they like to do. And the girls are even dumber. Do you think I could talk to them about Egon Schiele? When I’m with my friends I feel as if I’m wasting my time. But with you, I’m making good use of it. I like being here and talking to you a thousand times more than smoking with the kids on the Barranco Seawalk. And what do I need girls for if I have you, Stepmamá?”

  She did not know what to say. The smile she attempted could not have been more false. The boy, she was sure, was perfectly conscious of the embarrassment she felt. Looking at his upturned face, the features transformed by euphoria, the eyes devouring her with a manly light, she had the impression he was about to get up and kiss her on the mouth. She was relieved to see Justiniana come in just then. But her relief did not last very long, because when she saw the small white envelope in the girl’s hand, she guessed what it was.

  “Somebody slipped this envelope under the door, Señora.”

  “I bet it’s another anonymous letter from my papá,” Fonchito exclaimed, clapping his hands.

  An Exaltation and Defense of Phobias

  From this remote corner of the world, dear friend Peter Simplon—if that really is your last name and not a perverse alteration by some viper from the journalistic snakepit intending to ridicule you even further—I send you both my solidarity and my admiration. This morning, on my way to the office, I heard the newscast on Radio America reporting that a court in Syracuse, New York, had sentenced you to three months in prison for repeatedly climbing to the roof of your neighbor’s house in order to spy on her as she bathed, and since then I have been counting the minutes until the day was over and I could return to my house and write these lines to you. I wish to tell you right now that these effusive feelings for you exploded in my chest (this is not a metaphor, I felt a grenade of friendship go off inside my ribs), not when I learned the sentence, but when I heard your reply to the judge (a reply that the wretched man considered an aggravating factor): “I did it because I found the hair under my neighbor’s arms irresistibly attractive.” (The rattlesnake of an announcer, when he read this part of the report, put on a mellifluous, joking voice, to let his listeners know he was even more of an imbecile than his profession would oblige one to suppose.)

  My fetishist friend, I have never been in Syracuse, a city about which I know nothing except that it is devastated by snowstorms and arctic cold in the winter, but it must have something special at its very core to give birth to a man of your sensibility and fantasy, possessed of the courage you have displayed, risking disgrace and, I imagine, your livelihood, as well as the mockery of friends and family, to defend your small eccentricity (when I say small, I clearly mean inoffensive, benign, exceedingly healthful and beneficial, since you and I both know that no manias or phobias lack grandeur, for they constitute a human being’s originality and the supreme expression of his sovereignty).

  This being said, and in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I feel obliged to inform you that what you find a delicacy is inedible to me, for in the rich universe of desires and dreams, those clumps of fleece in feminine armpits, the sight (and, I suppose, the taste, touch, and smell) of which brings you the most sublime joy, demoralize and disgust me, and repel me sexually. (Looking at Ribera’s Bearded Woman made me impotent for three weeks.) This is why my beloved Lucrecia always made certain that her soft underarms never revealed even the premonition of fleece, and the skin always seemed, to my eyes, tongue, and lips, like the smooth bottom of a cherub. In the matter of a woman’s fleece, I find delight only in the pubic, as long as it is well groomed and does not grow excessively dense and long on the sides, or in unkempt tangles that make the act of love difficult and turn cunnilingus into an undertaking that threatens asphyxiation and choking.

  Following your lead, having begun this intimate confession, I will add that not only underarms soiled by fleece (“hair” is a word that makes the reality even worse by adding sebaceous material and dandruff) provoke antisexual horror in me, comparable only to that produced by the disgraceful spectacle of a woman who chews gum, or has whiskers on her upper lip, or bipeds of either sex who root about their teeth with that ignoble object called a toothpick, searching for excrescences, or who gnaw at their nails, or who, in full view of the world and without scruple or shame, eat a mango, an orange, a pomegranate, a peach, grapes, custard apples, or any fruit having ghastly hard things—stems, fibers, pits, skins, rinds—the mere mention (not to mention the sight) of which makes my skin crawl and infects my soul with furious homicidal impulses. I in no way exaggerate, my dear companion-in-pride regarding our phantoms, if I say that each time I observe someone eating a fruit and removing the inedible parts from his mouth, or spitting them out, I feel nausea, and even find myself wishing for the death of the guilty party. By the same token, I have always considered any diner to be a cannibal if, when he brings the fork up to his mouth, he raises his elbow at the same time as his hand.

  This is how we are, we are not ashamed, and I admire nothing so much as people willing to go to prison and expose themselves to ignominy for the sake of their manias. I am not one of them.
I have organized my life secretly, within the bosom of the family, to reach the moral heights you have reached in public. In my case, everything is accomplished with discretion and prudence, with no missionary or exhibitionist spirit, in the most evasive manner, so as not to provoke sarcasm and hostility in those around me, people with whom I am forced to coexist because of professional or familial obligations, or for reasons of social servitude. If you are thinking there is a good deal of cowardice in me—above all when compared to your audacity in standing before the world as the man you are—then you are absolutely correct. I am much less a coward now than when I was young with regard to my phobias and manias—I don’t like either term because of the pejorative implications and the association with psychologists or psychoanalytic couches, but what name can I use that would not injure them: eccentricities? private desires? For the moment, let us say that the second is less bad. In those days I was very Catholic, a member, then a leader, of Catholic Action, influenced by thinkers like Jacques Maritain; in other words, a worshipper of social utopias, certain that by means of an energetic apostolate inspired in the Gospels, we could wrest control of human history away from the spirit of evil—we called it sin—and build a homogeneous society based on spiritual values. I spent the best years of my youth working to realize the Christian Republic, that collectivist utopia of the spirit, enduring with all the zeal of a convert the brutal refutations endlessly inflicted on me and my companions by a human reality vexed at the lunacy of every effort to construct something coherent and egalitarian out of the vortex of incompatible particularities which constitute the human conglomerate. It was during those years, my dear Peter Simplon of Syracuse, that I discovered, at first with a certain affection and then with embarrassment and shame, the manias that distinguished me from others and made me a unique specimen. (Many years would have to go by, countless experiences would be necessary, before I finally understood that all human beings are a case apart, which is what makes us creative and gives meaning to our freedom.) How amazed I was when the mere sight of a man, who until then had been a close friend, peeling an orange with his hands, putting the sections into his mouth, not caring that repellent strings of pulp were hanging from his lips, and spitting inedible whitish seeds in all directions, was enough to turn fondness into unconquerable dislike, and a short while later I broke off my friendship with him on some pretext or other.

  My confessor, Father Dorante, a good-natured Jesuit of the old school, listened without undue concern to my anxieties and scruples, considering those “little manias” as minor, venial sins, the unavoidable whims of any child of a well-off family who had been excessively catered to by his parents. “You want to be a freak, Rigoberto.” He laughed. “Except for your monumental ears and anteater’s nose, I’ve never seen anyone more normal than you. And so when you see someone eating fruit with pulp or pits, look the other way and don’t lose any sleep over it.” But I did lose sleep, I was frightened and troubled. Above all, after breaking with Otilia on some trivial pretext, Otilia of the braids, the skates, and the little turned-up nose, whom I loved so much and whom I pestered so much to make her notice me. Why did I quarrel with her? What crime was committed by the beautiful Otilia in her white uniform from the Villa Maria Academy? She ate grapes in front of me. She put them in her mouth one by one, showing her delight, rolling her eyes and sighing to mock my horrified grimaces, for I had already shared my phobia with her. She opened her mouth and made my disgust complete by using her hands to remove the repulsive seeds and obscene skins and tossing them into the garden of her house—we were sitting there, on the fence—with a defiant gesture. I detested her! I hated her! My longtime love melted away like a snowball in the sun, and for many days I hoped she would be hit by a car, knocked down by waves, infected by scarlet fever. “That’s not a sin, my boy,” Father Dorante thought he was reassuring me. “That’s raving lunacy. You don’t need a confessor, you need a keeper.”

  But, dear friend and beau idéal from Syracuse, this all made me feel abnormal. At the time the thought devastated me, because like so many hominids—the majority of them, I fear—I did not associate the notion of being different with a vindication of my independence but only with the social sanctions that inevitably fall on the black sheep of the flock. Being the pariah, the exception to the rule, seemed to me the worst of calamities. Until I discovered that not all manias were phobias; some were also a mysterious source of pleasure. The knees and elbows of girls, for example. My friends liked pretty eyes, a slim or a voluptuous body, a slender waist, and the boldest among them relished a prominent bottom or shapely legs. I alone gave a privileged place to those joints which, as I now confess with no shame in the tomblike intimacy of my notebooks, I valued more than all the rest of a girl’s physical attributes. I say it and will not retract it. Well-cushioned, rounded, satiny knees with no bony protuberances; glossy elbows, unwrinkled, unroughened, smooth and soft to the touch, endowed with the spongy quality of cake; these arouse me to the point of delirium. I am overjoyed to see and touch them; if I kiss them, I am transported to seventh heaven. You probably will not have the opportunity to do so, but if you needed confirmation from Lucrecia, my beloved, she would tell you how many hours I have spent—as many as at the foot of the cross when I was a boy—in ecstatic adoration, contemplating the perfection and unparalleled smoothness of her geometric knees and enchanting elbows, kissing them, biting them like a puppy playing with his bone, utterly intoxicated, until my tongue going to sleep or a labial cramp brings me back to pedestrian reality. Dear Lucrecia! Of all the graces that adorn her, I am most grateful for her understanding of my weaknesses, her wisdom in helping me to realize my fantasies.

  On account of this mania, I found myself obliged to examine my conscience. A friend from Catholic Action who knew me very well and was aware of what attracted me most in girls—their knees and elbows—warned me that something was wrong. He was very fond of psychology, which made matters worse, for, in his orthodox way, he wanted to bring human behavior and motivation into harmony with the morality and teachings of the Church. He spoke of deviancy and pronounced the words “fetishism” and “fetishist.” They now seem two of the most acceptable in the dictionary (that is what we are, you and I and all sensitive people), but in those days they sounded to me like depravity and abominable vice.

  You and I know, my Syracusan friend, that fetishism is not the “cult of fetishes,” as the Dictionary of the Academy so unfortunately defines it, but a privileged form of expression of human particularity that allows men and women to define their space, mark their difference from others, exercise their imagination, express their anti-herd spirit, and be free. I would like to recount to you, as we sit in a little cottage in the countryside surrounding your city, which I picture as full of lakes, pine groves, and hills white with snow, and drink a glass of whiskey together and listen to the logs crackling in the hearth, how discovering the central role of fetishism in the individual’s life played a decisive role in my disenchantment with social utopias—the idea that it was possible to collectively create happiness and goodness or realize any ethical or aesthetic value—in my journey from faith to agnosticism and the belief that moves me now: since man and woman cannot live without utopias, the only realistic way to create them is by transferring them from the social to the individual sphere. A collective cannot organize to achieve any kind of perfection without destroying the freedom of many and obliterating beautiful individual differences in the name of horrifying common denominators. On the other hand, the solitary individual can—by acting on his appetites, manias, fetishes, phobias, or preferences—create his own world, one that approaches (or eventually incarnates, as it does in saints and Olympic champions) the supreme ideal in which experience and desire are one. Naturally, in certain privileged instances, a happy coincidence—for example, the sperm and ovum meeting to produce fertilization—allows two people to realize their dreams in complementary fashion. This was true in the case (I’ve just read it in the biograph
y written by his understanding widow) of the journalist, playwright, critic, entertainer, and professionally frivolous man, Kenneth Tynan, a secret masochist to whom chance granted the opportunity of meeting a girl who happened to be a shameless sadist, a fact that allowed them both to be happy two or three times a week in a Kensington basement, he receiving the lash of the whip and she dispensing it, in a bruising game that transported them to heaven. I respect but do not practice games that have Mercurochrome and arnica as their corollaries.

  Since we are relating anecdotes—in this sphere there are hundreds of them—I cannot resist describing for you the fantasy that afflicts the libido of Cachito Arnilla, a champion in the verbose profession of selling insurance, with the frenzy of Saint Vitus’ dance; it consists—he confessed this to me at one of those abominable Patriotic Festival or Christmas cocktail parties that I cannot avoid attending—of seeing a woman, naked except for stiletto heels, smoking and playing billiards. This image, which he thinks he saw as a boy in some magazine, was associated with his first erections, and since then it has been the polestar of his sexual life. Dear Cachito! When he married a dark little hussy from Accounting, capable, I am sure, of complying with his wishes, I slyly presented him, in the name of La Perricholi Insurance Company—I am the director—with a full-size billiard table, delivered to his house in a van on the day of his wedding. Everyone thought it was an inane gift, but the look in Cachito’s eye and the anticipatory salivation with which he expressed his thanks told me I had hit the bull’s-eye.

  My dear friend from Syracuse, lover of underarm bushes, the exaltation of manias and phobias must have limits. One needs to recognize certain restrictions, for without them crime would be unleashed and we would return to the bestiality of the jungle. But in the private domain, the domain of these phantoms, everything should be permitted between adults who consent to the game and its rules for their mutual pleasure. And though I find many of these games unbearably repugnant (for example, the little pills that produced the noisy farts so beloved of the gallant French century and, in particular, of the Marquis de Sade, who, not content with mistreating women, also demanded that they make him dizzy with artillery explosions of gases) it is equally true that in this sphere such differences deserve consideration and respect, for nothing else so well represents the unfathomable complexity of the human person.