In Praise of the Stepmother

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  My minister and I were speaking of the sorcerers and the holy man as we savored a cup of Greek wine, when good Gyges, with that wicked gleam that drink leaves in his eyes, suddenly lowered his voice and whispered to me:

  “The Egyptian woman I’ve bought has the most beautiful backside that Providence has ever bestowed upon a woman. Her face is imperfect, her breasts are small, and she sweats excessively; but the abundance and generosity of her posterior more than compensate for all her defects. Something the mere memory of which dizzies my brain, Your Majesty.”

  “Show it to me and I’ll show you another. We’ll compare and decide which is better, Gyges.”

  I saw him lose his composure, blink, part his lips to speak, and yet say nothing. Did he believe that I was speaking in jest? Did he fear he had not heard right? My guard and minister knew very well who it was we were speaking of. I had made that proposal without thinking, but once it was made, an irksome little worm began to gnaw at my brain and rouse my anxiety.

  “You haven’t uttered a word, Gyges. What is troubling you?”

  “I don’t know what to say, sire. I’m disconcerted.”

  “So I see. Go on, give me your answer. Do you accept my offer?”

  “Your Majesty knows that his desires are mine.”

  That was how it all began. We went first to his residence, and at the far end of the garden, where the steam baths are, as we sweated and his masseur rejuvenated our members, I scrutinized the Egyptian woman. A very tall woman, her face marred by those scars with which people of her race dedicate pubescent girls to their bloodthirsty god. She was already past childhood. But she was interesting and attractive, I grant. Her ebony skin shone amid the clouds of steam as though it had been varnished, and all her movements and gestures revealed an extraordinary hauteur. She showed not the slightest trace of that abject servility, so common in slaves, aimed at attaining the favor of their masters, but, rather, an elegant coldness. She did not understand our language, yet she immediately deciphered the instructions transmitted to her by her master through gestures. Once Gyges had indicated what it was we wanted to see, the woman, enveloping the two of us for a few seconds in her silken, scornful gaze, turned around, bent over, and lifted her tunic with both hands, offering us her backside. It was indeed notable, a veritable miracle in the eyes of anyone save the spouse of Lucrecia, the queen. Firm and spherical, gently curved, the skin hairless and fine-grained, with a blue sheen, over which one’s gaze glided as over the sea. Bliss, and bliss likewise for my guard and minister, as the owner of such a sweet delight.

  In order to fulfill my part of the offer, we were obliged to act with the greatest discretion. That episode with Atlas, the slave, had been deeply shocking to my wife, as I have already recounted: Lucrecia acquiesced because she satisfies my every whim. But I saw her so overcome with shame as Atlas and she did their best, to no avail, to act out the fantasy which I had woven that I swore to myself not to subject her to such a test again. Even now, when so long a time has passed since that episode, when there must be nothing left of Atlas but bones picked clean in the bottom of the stinking ravine teeming with vultures and hawks into which his remains were flung, the queen sometimes awakens at night, overcome with terror in my arms, for in her sleep the shadow of the Ethiopian has once again burst into flame on top of her.

  Hence, this time I arranged matters so that my beloved would not know. That was my intention at least, though on reflection, delving into the chinks of my memory in search of what took place that night, I sometimes have my doubts.

  I took Gyges through the little garden gate and introduced him into the apartments as the maid-servants were disrobing Lucrecia and perfuming her and anointing her with the essences that it pleases me to smell and savor on her body. I suggested to my minister that he hide behind the draperies of the balcony and try not to move or make the slightest sound. From that coign, he had a perfect view of the splendid bed with carved corner posts, bedside steps, and red satin curtains, richly decorated with cushions, silks, and precious embroideries, where each night the queen and I staged our love matches. And I snuffed out all the lamp wicks, so that the room was lighted only by the crackling tongues of flame in the fireplace.

  Lucrecia entered shortly thereafter, drifting in dressed in a filmy semitransparent tunic of white silk, with exquisitely delicate lacework at the wrists, neck, and hem. She was wearing a pearl necklace and a coif, and her feet were shod in felt slippers with high wooden platform soles and heels.

  I kept her there before me for a fair time, feasting my eyes upon her and offering my good minister this spectacle fit for the gods. And as I contemplated her and thought of Gyges doing the same, that perverse complicity that united us suddenly made me burn with desire. Without a word I advanced upon her, pushed her onto the bed, and mounted her. As I caressed her, Gyges’ bearded face appeared to me and the idea that he was watching us inflamed me even more, seasoning my pleasure with a bittersweet, piquant condiment hitherto unknown to me. And Lucrecia? Did she surmise that something was afoot? Did she know? Because I think I never felt her to be as spirited as she was that time, never so eager to take the initiative, to respond, never so bold at biting, kissing, embracing. Perhaps she sensed that, that night, it was not two of us but three who took our pleasure in that bedchamber turned a glowing red by candlelight and desire set aflame.

  When, at dawn, as Lucrecia lay sleeping, I slipped out of bed and went on tiptoe to guide my guard and minister to the gate leading out of the garden, I found him shivering with cold and astonishment.

  “You were right, Your Majesty,” he stammered, ecstatic, tremulous. “I have seen it and it still seems to me that I merely dreamed it.”

  “Forget all about it this very minute and forever, Gyges,” I ordered him. “I have granted you this privilege in a strange access of passion, without having expressly planned it, because of the esteem I have for you. But watch your tongue. I would not be pleased if this story were to become tavern gossip and marketplace tittle-tattle. I might regret having brought you here.”

  He swore to me that he would never say a word.

  But he did. If not, how did there come to be so many stories about what happened? The various versions contradict one another, each of them more absurd and more untrue than the next. They reach our ears, and though they annoyed us in the beginning, they amuse us now. It is something that has come to be part of this little southern kingdom of that country which centuries later will go by the name of Turkey. Like its bone-dry mountains and its churlish subjects, like its wandering tribes, its falcons, and its bears. After all, I am not displeased at the idea that, once time has gone by, swallowing everything that now exists and surrounds me, the one thing to come down to future generations on the waters of the shipwreck of Lydia’s history will be, round and solar, bountiful as spring, the croup of Lucrecia the queen, my wife.

  Three.

  The Wednesday Ear Ritual

  “They’re like conch shells that bear within them, trapped in their mother-of-pearl labyrinth, the music of the sea,” Don Rigoberto fantasized. His ears were large and prominent; both of them, but the left one in particular, tended to stand out from his head at the top, curving back on themselves, determined to capture for themselves only all the world’s sounds. Though as a child he was ashamed of their size and their downturned form, he had learned to accept them. And now that he devoted one night a week to their care alone, he even felt proud of them. Because, moreover, by dint of careful and persistent experimenting, he had managed to get those graceless appendages to participate, along with the alacrity of his mouth and the efficacy of his sense of touch, in his nights of love. Lucrecia, too, was fond of them and, in private, paid them any number of pretty compliments. In certain phases of their conjugal cavalry skirmishes she affectionately referred to them as “my little Dumbos.”

  “Full-blown flowers, sensitive wing cases, auditoriums for music and dialogues,” Don Rigoberto poeticized. With the aid of a magnifyin
g glass, he carefully examined the cartilaginous edges of his left ear. Yes, the tiny tips of little hairs plucked out the previous Wednesday were showing again. There were three of them, asymmetrical, like the points defining the sides of a scalene triangle. He imagined the dark little tuft of hair that they would turn into if he let them grow, if he stopped rooting them out, and a fleeting sensation of nausea suddenly came over him. Hurriedly, with the dexterity stemming from constant practice, he grasped those hairy heads between the prongs of the tweezers and pulled them out, one after the other. The tingling sensation that accompanied the extirpation made a delicious hot-and-cold shiver run up his spine. It was as though Doña Lucrecia were there, kneeling, her even white teeth disentangling the kinky little ringlets of his pubis. The mere idea gave him a semi-erection. He reined it in immediately, imagining a hirsute woman, her ears clogged with clumps of matted hair and a pronounced mustache on her upper lip, in whose shadows drops of sweat were trembling. He then remembered the story that a colleague of his in the insurance business had recounted, that time, on returning from a vacation in the Caribbean: how the undisputed queen of a brothel in Santo Domingo was a big beefy mulatta with a startling hairy crest between her breasts. He tried to imagine Lucrecia with a similar attribute—a silken mane!—between her ivory breasts and was horrified. I have all sorts of prejudices when it comes to lovemaking, he confessed to himself. But for the moment he had no intention of giving up any of them. Hair was acceptable, it was a strong sexual seasoning, provided it was in the proper place. On a head or a monsveneris, welcome and indispensable; under the arms, tolerable perhaps, if only so as to have tried everything (it was apparently an obsession with Europeans); but on arms and legs, definitely out; and between the breasts, never!

  He then proceeded to examine his left ear, with the aid of his convex shaving mirrors. No, no new little hairs had popped out in any of the angles, protuberances, and curves of his outer ear, except for those three musketeers whose presence he had spied, to his surprise, one fine day, some years ago now.

  Tonight I shall not make love but hear it, he decided. That was possible; he had done so on other occasions and it amused Lucrecia, too, at least as part of the prolegomena. “Let me hear your breasts,” he would murmur, and amorously plugging his wife’s nipples, first one and then the other, into the hypersensitive cavern of his two ears—which they fit into as snugly as a foot into a moccasin—he would listen to them with his eyes closed, reverent and ecstatic, his mind worshipfully concentrate as at the Elevation of the Host, till he heard ascending to the earthy roughness of each button, from subterranean carnal depths, certain stifled cadences, the heavy breathing, perhaps, of her pores opening, the boiling, perhaps, of her excited blood.

  He was removing the piliform excrescences from his right ear. All of a sudden he spied a stranger: the solitary little hair was swaying back and forth, disgustingly, in the center of his neatly turned earlobe. He pulled it out with a slight jerk, and before throwing it into the washbasin to be flushed down the drain, he examined it with distaste. Would new hairs keep appearing in his big ears in the years to come? In any event, he would never give up; even on his deathbed, had he strength left, he would go on destroying them (pruning them, rather?). After that, however, as his body lay lifeless, the intruders could sprout at will, grow, blemish his corpse. The same would be true of his fingernails. Don Rigoberto told himself that this depressing perspective was an irrefutable argument in favor of cremation. Yes, fire would prevent posthumous imperfection. The flames would cause him to disappear while he was still perfect, thereby frustrating the worms. The thought came as a relief to him.

  As he rolled little balls of cotton around the tips of the tweezers and wet them with soap and water so as to clean out the wax that had accumulated inside his ear, he anticipated what those clean funnels would soon be hearing as they descended from his wife’s breasts to her navel. They need make no special effort there to surprise Lucrecia’s secret music, for a veritable symphony of sounds, liquid and solid, prolonged and brief, diffuse and clear, would immediately reveal their hidden life to him. He looked forward with gratitude to how deeply he would be moved to perceive, thanks to those organs which he was now scraping clean with meticulous care and affection, ridding them of the oily film that formed on them every so often, something of the secret existence of her body: glands, muscles, blood vessels, hair follicles, membranes, tissues, filaments, ducts, tubes, all that rich and subtle biological orography that lay beneath the smooth epidermis of Lucrecia’s belly. I love everything that exists on the inside or the outside of her, he thought. Because everything about her is—or can be—erogenous.

  He was not exaggerating, carried away by the tenderness that her sudden appearance in his fantasies always gave rise to. No, absolutely not. For thanks to his unyielding perseverance, he had managed to fall in love with the whole and with each one of the parts of his wife, to love, separately and together, all the components of that cellular universe. He knew himself to be capable of responding erotically, with a prompt, robust erection, to the stimulus of any of its infinite ingredients, including the meanest and humblest, including what—to the ordinary hominid—was most inconceivable and most repellent. “Here lies Don Rigoberto, who contrived to love the epigastrium of his spouse as much as her vulva or her tongue,” he philosophically projected as a fitting epitaph on the marble of his tomb. Would that mortuary motto be a lie? Not in the slightest. He thought of how impassioned he would become, very shortly, when the sound of muffled aqueous displacements reached his ears, avidly flattened against her soft stomach, and at this moment he could already hear the lively burbling of that flatus, the joyous cracking of a fart, the gargle and yawn of her vagina, or the languid stretching of her serpentine intestine. And he could already hear himself whispering, blind with love and lust, the phrases with which it was his habit to render his wife homage as he caressed her. “Those little noises, too, are you, Lucrecia; they are your characteristic harmony, your resounding person.” He was certain that he could immediately recognize them, distinguish them from the sounds produced by the abdomen of any other woman. It was a hypothesis that he would not have the opportunity to verify, since he would never embark upon the experiment of hearing love with any other woman. Why would he do such a thing? Wasn’t Lucrecia an ocean of unfathomable depths that he, the lover-diver, would never have done with exploring? “I love you,” he murmured, feeling once again the dawn of an erection. He conjured it away with a fillip of his finger, which, besides making him double over, brought on a fit of laughter. “He who laughs by himself is recalling his perversities!” he heard his wife admonishing him from the bedroom. Ah, if only Lucrecia knew what he was laughing about.

  To hear her voice, to confirm her presence close at hand, and her existence, filled him with happiness. “Happiness exists,” he repeated to himself, as he did every night. Yes, provided one sought it where it was possible. In one’s own body and in that of one’s beloved, for instance; by oneself and in the bathroom; for hours or minutes on a bed shared with the being so ardently desired. Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic. It was hidden, a pearl in its seashell, in certain rites or ceremonial duties that offered human beings brief flashes and optical illusions of perfection. One had to be content with these crumbs so as not to live at the mercy of anxiety and despair, slapping at the impossible. Happiness lies hidden in the hollow of my ears, he thought, in a mellow mood.

  He had finished cleaning the canals of both ears and there, beneath his gaze, were the little balls of moist cotton, impregnated with the oily yellow humor he had just removed from them. The one thing left to do now was to dry them, so that no dirt would crystallize in those drops of water before they evaporated. Once again he rolled two little balls of cotton around the tip of the tweezers and scrubbed the canals so gently that he appeared to be massaging or caressing them. He then threw
the little balls of cotton in the toilet and pulled the chain. He cleaned the pair of tweezers and put it away in his wife’s little aloeswood kit.

  He carefully inspected his ears one last time in the mirror. He felt satisfied, cheerful, and resolute. There those cartilaginous cones were, clean outside and in, ready to bend over to listen, respectfully and incontinently, to the body of his beloved.

  Four.

  Eyes Like Fireflies

  “Turning forty isn’t so terrible, after all,” Doña Lucrecia thought, stretching lazily in the darkened bedroom. She felt young, beautiful, and happy. Did happiness exist, then? Rigoberto said it did, “sometimes, for the two of us.” Wasn’t it a hollow word, a state that only fools attained? Her husband loved her, he proved it to her in tender, thoughtful little ways each day and sought her favors with youthful ardor nearly every night. Ever since they had decided to marry, four months before, he too seemed to have grown younger. The fears that had kept her from taking that step for so long—her first marriage had been a disaster and the divorce a nightmarish torment at the hands of money-grubbing shysters—had vanished. From the very outset, she had taken over her new household with the greatest assurance. The first thing she did was to redecorate all the rooms, so that nothing would summon up remembrances of Rigoberto’s late wife, and she now ran the house with a sure hand, as though she had always been the mistress of it. Only the cook, who had been there before she came, showed a certain hostility toward her, and she had had to replace her. The other servants got along very well with her. Justiniana especially; promoted by Doña Lucrecia to the status of personal maid, she turned out to be a real find: efficient, smart, extremely clean, and possessed of unfailing devotion.