The problem is more aesthetic than ethical, philosophical, sexual, psychological, or political, though it goes without saying that such divisions are unacceptable to me because everything that matters is, in the long run, aesthetic. Pornography strips eroticism of its artistic content, favors the organic over the spiritual and mental, as if the central protagonists of desire and pleasure were phalluses and vulvas and these organs not mere servants to the phantoms that govern our souls, and segregates physical love from the rest of human experience. Eroticism, on the other hand, integrates it with everything we are, everything we have. Pornographer, while for you the only thing that counts when you make love is the same thing that counts for a dog, a monkey, or a horse—that is, to ejaculate—Lucrecia and I, go on, envy us, also make love when we are having breakfast, dressing, listening to Mahler, talking with friends, and contemplating the clouds or the sea.
When I say aesthetic you may, perhaps, think—if pornography and thinking are compatible—that with this shortcut I fall into the trap of gregariousness, and, since values are generally shared, in this domain I am less myself and more the other, in short, a part of the tribe. I acknowledge that the danger exists, but I battle it unceasingly, day and night, defending my independence against all odds through the constant exercise of my freedom.
You can judge this for yourself by reading a small sample of my personal treatise on aesthetics (which I hope I do not share with many people, which is flexible, which is shaped and reshaped like clay in the hands of a skilled potter).
Everything brilliant is ugly. There are brilliant cities, like Vienna, Buenos Aires, and Paris; brilliant writers, like Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and John Updike; brilliant painters, like Andy Warhol, Matta, and Tàpies. Though all of them shine, for me they are dispensable. Without exception, all modern architects are brilliant, and for this reason architecture has been marginalized from art and transformed into a branch of advertising and public relations, and therefore it would be a good idea to reject architects en masse and have recourse only to masons, master builders, and the inspiration of laymen. There are no brilliant musicians, though composers like Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie struggled to achieve brilliance and almost succeeded. Cinema, a diversion like judo or wrestling, is post-artistic and does not deserve to be included in any considerations regarding aesthetics, despite a few Western anomalies (tonight I would save Visconti, Orson Welles, Buñuel, Berlanga, and John Ford) and one Japanese (Kurosawa).
Every person who writes “nuclearize,” “I submit,” “raise consciousness,” “visualize,” “societal,” and, above all, “telluric,” is a son/daughter of a bitch. As are those who use toothpicks in public, inflicting on their neighbors a repellent sight that defaces the landscape. As are those repulsive creatures who pull off pieces of bread and knead them into little balls that they leave on the table. Don’t ask me why the perpetrators of these hideous acts are sons/daughters of bitches; such knowledge is intuited and assimilated through inspiration; infused, not studied. The same term applies, of course, to the mortal of any sex who, in an attempt to Castilianize drink, writes guisqui for whiskey, yinyerel for ginger ale, or jaibol for highball. These men/women should probably die, for I suspect their lives are superfluous.
The obligation of a film or a book is to entertain me. If I am distracted, if I begin to nod or fall asleep when I watch or read them, they have failed in their duty and are bad books, bad films. Conspicuous examples: The Man without Qualities, by Musil, and all the movies made by those charlatans called Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino.
With regard to painting and sculpture, my criterion for making an artistic judgment is very simple: everything I could paint or sculpt myself is shit. The only artists of value are those whose works, far beyond the reach of my creative mediocrity, I could not reproduce. This criterion has allowed me to determine, on first viewing, that all work by “artists” like Andy Warhol or Frida Kahlo is trash, and, on the contrary, even the quickest sketch by George Grosz, Chillida, or Balthus is a work of genius. In addition to this general rule, the obligation of a picture is to excite me (an expression I am not fond of but use because I like even less, since it introduces a comic element into something very serious, our Latin American allegory: “almost get me off”). If I like it but it leaves me cold, if my imagination is not overwhelmed by theatrical-copulatory desires and that tickling buzz in the testicles that precedes a tender new erection, then even if it is the Mona Lisa, The Man with His Hand on His Chest, Guernica, or The Night Watch, the picture holds no interest for me. And so you may be surprised to learn that in Goya, another sacred monster, I like only the little shoes with golden buckles, pointed heels, and satin adornments worn with white mesh stockings by the marquises in his oil paintings, and that in Renoir’s paintings I look with benevolence (sometimes with pleasure) only on the pink behinds of his peasant girls and avoid his other bodies, above all those kewpie-doll faces and firefly-eyes that anticipate—vade retro!—the Playboy bunnies. In Courbet, I am interested in the lesbians and that gigantic posterior that made the prudish Empress Eugénie blush.
In my opinion, the obligation of music is to plunge me into a vertigo of pure sensation that makes me forget the most boring part of myself, the civil, municipal part, clears away preoccupations, isolates me in an enclave untouched by the sordid reality surrounding it, and in this way allows me to think clearly about the fantasies (generally erotic and always with my wife in the starring role) that make my existence bearable. Ergo, if the music makes its presence felt too strongly and, because I begin to like it too much or because it is very loud, distracts me from my own thoughts and demands and captures my attention—I quickly cite Gardel, Pérez Prado, Mahler, every merengue, and four-fifths of all operas—it is bad music and is banished from my study. This principle, of course, makes me love Wagner despite the trumpets and annoying English horns, and respect Schoenberg.
I hope these brief examples, which, naturally, I don’t expect you to share with me (and I desire it even less), illustrate what I mean when I state that eroticism is a private game (in the highest sense given to the word by the great Johan Huizinga) in which only I and phantoms and other players can participate, and whose success depends on its secrecy and imperviousness to public curiosity, for this can lead only to its regimentation and perverse manipulation by forces that would nullify erotic play. Underarm hair on a woman disgusts me, but I respect the amateurs who persuade their companion, male or female, to water and cultivate it so that they may play there with lips and teeth until achieving ecstasy, howling in C major. But I absolutely cannot respect, cannot feel anything but pity for the poor shithead who bastardizes this whim of his phantom by buying—for example in one of the pornographic department stores sown all over Germany by the former aviatrix Beate Uhse—an artificial hairy armpit or pubis (made with “natural hair,” boast the most expensive) sold in various shapes, sizes, flavors, and colors.
The legitimization and public acceptance of eroticism municipalizes it, nullifies it, debases it, turning it into pornography, that sad business which I define as eroticism for the poor in purse and spirit. Pornography is passive and collectivist, eroticism is creative and individual even when practiced in twos or threes (I repeat, I oppose raising the number of participants, so that these functions do not lose their inclination to be individualistic celebrations and exercises of sovereignty, and are not soiled by appearing to be meetings, sporting events, or circuses). Consequently, I can only laugh like a hyena at the arguments of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (see his interview with Allen Young in Consuls of Sodom) defending collective couplings in dimly lit bathhouses with the tall tale that such promiscuity is democratic and fair because the egalitarian darkness permits the ugly and the attractive, the skinny and the fat, the young and the old to have the same opportunities for pleasure. The absurd reasoning of a constructivist commissar! Democracy has to do only with the civil dimension of a person, while love—desire and pleasure—belong
s, like religion, to the private sphere, where differences, not similarities to others, matter more than anything else. Sex cannot be democratic; it is elitist and aristocratic, and a certain amount of despotism (mutually agreed upon) tends to be indispensable. The collective copulations in dark pools recommended as erotic models by the Beat poet too closely resemble the intercourse of stallions and mares in pastures or the indiscriminate skirmishes of roosters and hens in noisy henhouses to be confused with the beautiful creation of animatedfictions and carnal fantasies in which there is equal participation of body and spirit, imagination and hormones, the sublime and the base in the human condition, which is what eroticism means to this modest epicurean and anarchist concealed in the civil body of a man who insures property.
Sex practiced Playboy-style (I return to this subject and will continue to do so until my death, or yours, stops me) eliminates two ingredients essential to Eros, as I understand it: risk and modesty. Let us be clear. The terrified little man on the bus who, conquering his shame and fear, opens his overcoat and for a few seconds offers the sight of his erect penis to the unwary matron whom fate has placed in front of him, is recklessly indecent. He does what he does knowing that the price of his fugitive whim can be a beating, a lynching, prison, and a scandal that would reveal to public opinion a secret he would prefer to take with him to the grave, condemning him to the status of reprobate, psychopath, and a menace to society. But he risks all this because the pleasure he receives from his minimal exhibitionism is inseparable from fear and his transgression against modesty. What an interstellar distance—precisely the distance that separates eroticism from pornography—separates him from the executive basted in French cologne, his wrist encircled by a Rolex (what other watch could it be?), who, in a trendy bar enlivened by the sound of the blues, opens the latest issue of Playboy and exhibits himself and the magazine, convinced he is displaying his penis to the world, showing himself as worldly, unprejudiced, modern, pleasure-seeking, in. The poor imbecile! He does not suspect that what he is exhibiting is the sign and seal of his servitude to the commonplace, to advertising and a deindividualizing fashion, his abdication of freedom, his renunciation of emancipation, by means of his personal phantoms, from the atavistic slavery of serialization.
For this reason I accuse you and the aforementioned magazine and others like it and all of you who read them—or even leaf through them—and with that miserable prefabricated pap nourish—I mean, kill—your libidos, of spearheading the great campaign, the manifestation of contemporary barbarism, to desacralize and banalize sex. Civilization hides and nuances sex in order to better enjoy it, surrounding it with rituals and rules that enrich it to an extent undreamed of by pre-erotic men and women, copulators, progenitors of offspring. After traveling a long, long road whose backbone, in a sense, was the progressive distillation of erotic play by an unexpected route—the permissive society, the tolerant culture—we have returned to our ancestral starting point: lovemaking has again become physical, semipublic, thoughtless gymnastics performed to the rhythm of stimuli created not by the unconscious mind and the soul but by market analysts, stimuli as stupid as the false cow’s vagina passed under the noses of stabled bulls to make them ejaculate so that their semen can be collected and used for artificial insemination.
Go on, buy and read your latest Playboy, you living suicide, and bring your grain of sand to the creation of that world of ejaculating male and female eunuchs where imagination and secret phantoms will vanish as the pillars of love. For my part, I am going now to make love to the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra, both at the same time, in a play whose script I do not intend to share with anyone, least of all you.
A Tiny Foot
It is four in the morning, my darling Lucrecia, thought Don Rigoberto. As he did almost every day, he had risen in the mournful damp of dawn to celebrate the ritual he had monotonously repeated ever since Doña Lucrecia had gone to live near the Olivar de San Isidro: dreaming while awake, creating and re-creating his wife under the magic spell of those notebooks where his phantoms hibernated. And where, from the first day I met you, you have been queen and mistress.
And yet, unlike other desolate or ardent early mornings, today it was not enough for him to imagine and desire her, chat with her absence, love her with his fantasy and the heart she had never left; today he needed more material, more certain, more tangible contact. Today I could kill myself, he thought without anguish. And if he wrote to her? Finally answered her suggestive anonymous letters? The pen slipped from his fingers, he barely managed to catch it. No, he couldn’t do it, and in any case, he wouldn’t be able to send her the letter if he did.
In the first notebook he opened, an exceedingly opportune phrase leaped off the page and bit him: “My savage awakenings at dawn are always spurred on by an image of you, real or invented, which inflames my desire, maddens my nostalgia, suspends me in midair, and drives me to this study to defend myself against annihilation, finding sanctuary in the antidote of my notebooks, pictures, and books. This alone cures me.” True. But today the usual remedy would not have the beneficial effect it had at other dawns. He felt bewildered, tormented. He had been awakened by a mixture of sensations: a generous rebelliousness, similar to the feeling that at the age of eighteen had led him to Catholic Action and filled his spirit with the missionary urge to change the world, armed with the Gospels, was confused with a melting nostalgia for an Asian woman’s tiny foot glimpsed in passing over the shoulder of a passerby who stood beside him for a few moments while waiting for the red light to change at a midtown intersection, and with the appearance in his memory of an eighteenth-century French scribbler named Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne; he had only one of his books in his library—he would look for it and find it before the morning began—a first edition bought many years before in an antiquarian bookshop in Paris, costing him an arm and a leg. “What a hodgepodge.”
On the surface, none of this had anything directly to do with Lucrecia. Why, then, this urgent need to communicate with her, to recount to her in minute detail every thought boiling inside him? I am lying, my love, he thought. Of course it has to do with you. Everything he did, including the stupid managerial tasks that kept him shackled eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, in an insurance company in downtown Lima, had a profound connection to Lucrecia and to no one else. But above all, and even more slavishly, his nights and the exaltations, fictions, and passions that filled them were, with chivalrous fidelity, dedicated to her. There was the proof—intimate, incontrovertible, painful—on each page of the notebooks he now leafed through.
Why had he thought about rebellions? The thing that had awakened him a few moments earlier was surely an intensification of that morning’s indignant anger, his consternation when he read the newspaper article that Lucrecia must have read as well; in a cramped hand, he began to transcribe it onto the first blank page he found:
Wellington (Reuters). A twenty-four-year-old teacher from New Zealand has been sentenced by a judge in this city to four years in prison for sexual assault after it was learned that she had been having carnal relations with a ten-year-old boy, a friend and classmate of her son’s. The judge declared that he had given her the same sentence he would have imposed if a man had raped a girl of that age.
My love, my darling Lucrecia, please do not find in this even the shadow of a reproach for what happened between us, he thought. No distasteful allusion, nothing that might seem accusatory or vindictive. No. She ought to see exactly the opposite. Because when the few lines of this dispatch unfolded beneath his eyes this morning as he was taking the first sips of his bitter breakfast coffee (not because he drank it without sugar but because Lucrecia was not beside him and he could not talk over the news with her), Don Rigoberto felt no anguish or pain, much less gratitude or enthusiasm for the judge’s statement. Rather, he felt the impetuous, startling solidarity of an adolescent attending a rally for that poor New Zealander so brutally punished because she had introduced the delights
of Muslim heaven (the most carnal of those offered in the marketplace of religions, as far as he knew) to that fortunate boy.
Yes, yes, my beloved Lucrecia. He was not pretending or lying or exaggerating. All day he had been aflame with the same indignation he had felt that morning at the judge’s foolishness and its unfortunate symmetry with certain feminist doctrines. Could an adult male violating a prepubescent girl of ten, a punishable crime, be the same as a woman of twenty-four disclosing bodily joy and the miracles of sex to a ten-year-old boy already capable of timid erections and simple seminal emissions? If in the first case the presumption of violence against the victim by the victimizer was obligatory (even if the girl had sufficient use of reason to give her consent, she would still be the victim of physical aggression against her hymen), in the second it was simply inconceivable, for if copulation did take place it could happen only with the boy’s enthusiastic acquiescence, without which the carnal act would not have been consummated. Don Rigoberto picked up his pen and wrote in a fever of rage: “Although I despise utopias and know they are catastrophic for human life, I now embrace this one: let all boys in this city be deflowered when they reach the age of ten by married women in their thirties, preferably their aunts, teachers, or godmothers.” He breathed deeply, feeling somewhat relieved.
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Page 25
