They spent a long time talking as it grew dark and the lights in the city came on. They could no longer see the ocean, and the sky and the night were filled with lights that seemed like fireflies. Lucrecia told Rigoberto she’d read an essay Fonchito had written for school that had made an impression on her. She couldn’t get it out of her head.
“Did he show it to you himself?” Rigoberto asked pointedly. “Or were you snooping through his desk?”
“Well, it was right there, in plain sight, and it made me curious. That’s why I read it.”
“It’s not right for you to read his things without his permission and behind his back.” Rigoberto seemed to be reprimanding her.
“It left me thinking,” she continued, ignoring him. “It’s a half-philosophical, half-religious text. About liberty and evil.”
“Do you have it handy?” Rigoberto was interested. “I’d like to take a look at it too.”
“I made a copy for you, Mr. Nosy,” said Lucrecia. “I left it in your study.”
Don Rigoberto shut himself in with his books, records, and etchings to read Fonchito’s composition. “Liberty and Evil” was very short. It maintained that God, when He created man, probably had decided he wasn’t an automaton like plants and animals, whose lives were programmed from birth to death, but a creature endowed with free will, capable of deciding his actions on his own. This was how liberty was born. But this faculty with which man was endowed allowed human beings to choose evil, even, perhaps, to create it, doing things that contradicted all that emanated from God, and this represented the devil’s reason for being, the basis of his existence. Therefore evil was the child of liberty, a human creation. Which didn’t mean that liberty was evil in and of itself; no, it was a gift that had permitted great scientific and technical discoveries, social progress, the elimination of slavery and colonialism, the birth of human rights, etcetera. But it was also the origin of the terrible, never-ending cruelties and suffering that accompanied progress like its shadow.
Don Rigoberto was concerned. It occurred to him that all the ideas in the essay were somehow associated with the appearances of Edilberto Torres and his fits of weeping. Or was the essay the result of Fonchito’s conversation with Father O’Donovan? Had his son seen Pepín again? Just then Justiniana burst into his study, very excited. She’d come to tell him that the “newlywed” was on the phone.
“That’s what he said I should tell you, Don Rigoberto,” the girl explained. “‘Tell him the newlywed is calling, Justiniana.’”
“Ismael!” Don Rigoberto jumped up from his desk. “Hello? Hello? Is that you? Are you in Lima? When did you get back?”
“I haven’t returned yet, Rigoberto,” said a playful voice, which he recognized as belonging to his boss. “I’m calling from a place, but naturally I won’t say where it is, because a little bird told me your phone is bugged by you know who. A very beautiful place, so eat your heart out with envy.”
He burst into very joyful laughter and Rigoberto, alarmed, suddenly suspected that yes, his ex-boss and friend was in his dotage, hopelessly senile. Were the hyenas capable of paying one of those agencies to interfere with his phone? Impossible, the gray matter couldn’t take that in. Or perhaps it could.
“Well, well, what more could you wish for,” he replied. “Better for you, Ismael. I see that your honeymoon is going full speed ahead and you still have some wind left. I mean, at least you’re still alive. I’m glad, old man.”
“I’m in fine shape, Rigoberto. Let me tell you something: I’ve never felt better or happier than I have during this time. And that’s the truth.”
“Fantastic, then,” Rigoberto repeated. “Well, I don’t want to give you bad news, least of all by telephone. But I suppose you’re aware of what you’ve caused here and the trouble that’s raining down on us.”
“Claudio Arnillas keeps me up to date with plenty of details and sends me newspaper clippings. I enjoy reading that I’ve been kidnapped and am suffering from senile dementia. It seems you and Narciso have been complicit in my abduction, isn’t that right?” He burst into laughter again—long, loud, and very sarcastic.
“How nice that you can take everything with so much good humor,” Rigoberto grumbled. “Narciso and I aren’t enjoying this as much, as you can imagine. The brothers have driven Narciso half crazy with their intrigues and threats. And us as well.”
“I’m very sorry for the bother I’m causing you, brother.” Ismael tried to smooth things over, and became very serious. “I’m sorry they’ve interfered with your retirement and that you’ve had to cancel your trip to Europe. I know everything, Rigoberto. A thousand apologies to you and Lucrecia for these problems. I swear to you it won’t be for much longer.”
“What do a retirement and a trip to Europe matter compared to the friendship of a grand fellow like you,” Don Rigoberto said sarcastically. “I’d better not tell you about the judicial summonses that compel me to testify as a presumed accomplice in your concealment and abduction; I don’t want to ruin that lovely honeymoon of yours. Well, I hope all this will soon be something we can laugh over and tell anecdotes about.”
Ismael guffawed again, as if it all had little to do with him.
“You’re the kind of friend that doesn’t exist anymore, Rigoberto. I always knew it.”
“Arnillas must have told you that your driver had to hide. The twins have set the police on him, and given how unstable they are, I wouldn’t be surprised if they also send in a couple of hired killers to cut off his you-know-what.”
“They’re very capable of it,” Ismael acknowledged. “That black man is worth his weight in gold. Reassure him, tell him he shouldn’t worry, that his loyalty will have its reward, Rigoberto.”
“Are you coming back soon or will you continue your honeymoon until your heart explodes and you drop dead?”
“I’m finishing up a little matter that will amaze you, Rigoberto. As soon as it’s settled, I’ll return to Lima and put things in order. You’ll see, this mess will disappear in the blink of an eye. I’m really sorry for the headaches I’ve caused. That’s why I called, no other reason. We’ll see each other very soon. Kisses to Lucrecia and a big hug for you.”
“Another one for you and kisses to Armida.” Don Rigoberto said goodbye.
When he hung up, he sat staring at the phone. Venice? The Riviera? Capri? Where could the lovebirds be? Somewhere exotic like Indonesia or Thailand? Could Ismael be as happy as he said? Yes, no doubt, judging by his juvenile laughter. At eighty he’d discovered that life could be more than work—it could also mean doing mad things. Running off, savoring the pleasures of sex and revenge. Better for him. Just then an impatient Lucrecia came into his study.
“What happened? What did Ismael say? Tell me, tell me.”
“He seems very happy. He’s laughing at everything, believe it or not,” he told her. And then he was struck again by the same suspicion. “Do you know something, Lucrecia? What if he really has become senile? What if he doesn’t even realize the crazy things he’s doing?”
“Are you serious or are you joking, Rigoberto?”
“Until now he’d seemed absolutely lucid and clearheaded to me,” he said hesitantly. “But as I listened to him laughing on the phone, I started to think. Because he thought everything going on here was incredibly funny, as if he didn’t care at all about the scandal or the mess he’s gotten us into. Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m a little touchy. Do you realize the situation we’ll be in if it turns out that Ismael has been stricken overnight by senile dementia?”
“I wish you’d never put that idea into my head, Rigoberto. I’ll be thinking about it all night. Too bad for you if I can’t sleep, I’m warning you.”
“It’s sheer nonsense, don’t pay any attention to me, it’s a kind of magic charm so that what I say might happen, doesn’t,” Rigoberto reassured her. “But the truth is, I didn’t expect to find him so unconcerned. As if this all had nothing to do with him. Sorry, I’m sorry. No
w I know what’s going on. He’s happy. That’s the key to everything. For the first time in his life Ismael knows what it means to have a real fuck, Lucrecia. What he had with Clotilde were conjugal diversions. With Armida there’s a little sin in the middle and the thing works better.”
“Again your dirty talk,” his wife protested. “Besides, I don’t know what you have against conjugal diversions. I think ours work wonderfully well.”
“Of course, my love, they’re marvelous,” he said, kissing Lucrecia on her hand and her ear. “The best thing for us is to do what he’s doing and not give the matter any importance. Load up on patience and wait for the storm to blow over.”
“Don’t you want to go out, Rigoberto? Let’s go to the movies and eat out.”
“Let’s watch a movie here instead,” her husband replied. “Just the thought that one of those people with their little tape recorders might show up to take photographs and ask me about Ismael and the twins upsets my stomach.”
Ever since journalists had seized upon the news of Ismael’s marriage to Armida, and his children’s police and judicial actions to annul the marriage and declare him incompetent, nothing else was talked about in newspapers, on radio and television programs, on social networks and blogs. The facts disappeared under a frenetic spluttering of exaggerations, inventions, gossipmongering, libel, and general baseness, in which iniquity, coarseness, perversion, resentment, and rancor came to the surface. If he hadn’t found himself dragged into the journalistic confusion, constantly hounded by hacks who compensated for their ignorance with morbid curiosity and insolence, Don Rigoberto told himself that this spectacle of Ismael Carrera and Armida transformed into the great entertainment in the city—dipped in print, radio, and television filth and unceasingly scorched in the bonfire that Miki and Escobita had lit and stirred up every day with statements, interviews, short articles, fantasies, and deliriums—would have been somewhat entertaining, as well as instructive and informative with respect to this country, this city, the human spirit in general, and the very evil that now concerned Fonchito, to judge by his essay. “Instructive and informative, yes,” he thought again. With respect to many things. The function of journalism in our time, at least in this society, was not to inform but to make the line between the lie and the truth disappear, to replace reality with a fiction in which the oceanic mass of neuroses, frustrations, hatreds, and traumas of a public devoured by resentment and envy was made manifest. One more proof that the small spaces of civilization would never prevail against immeasurable barbarism.
The phone conversation with his former employer and friend had left him depressed. He didn’t regret having lent him a hand by acting as a witness at his marriage. But the consequences of that signature were beginning to overwhelm him. It wasn’t so much the judicial and police complications, or the delay in processing his retirement; he thought (knock on wood, anything could happen) that this, bad as it was, would be settled. And he and Lucrecia would be able to travel to Europe. The worst thing was the scandal he found himself drawn into: Almost every day he was dragged through a journalistic sewer, muddied by a pestilential sensationalism. Bitterly he asked himself, “What good has it done you, this small refuge of books, prints, records, all these beautiful, refined, subtle, intelligent things you collected so zealously, believing that in this tiny space of civilization you’d be protected against lack of culture, frivolity, stupidity, and emptiness?” His old idea that these islands or fortresses of culture had to be erected in the middle of the storm, invulnerable to the surrounding barbarism, wasn’t working. The scandal provoked by his friend Ismael and the hyenas had leaked its acid, its pus, its poison into his study, this territory where for so many years—twenty, twenty-five, thirty?—he’d withdrawn to live his true life. The life that made up for the company’s policies and contracts, the intrigues and pettiness of local politics, the mendacity and idiocy of the people he was obliged to deal with every day. Now, with the scandal, it did him no good to search out the solitude of his study. He’d done so the night before. He put a beautiful recording on the phonograph, Arthur Honegger’s oratorio King David, recorded right in the Notre Dame Cathedral, which had always moved him a great deal. This time, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on the music for an instant. He was distracted, his mind fixed on the images and concerns of the past few days, the shock, the bilious displeasure each time he discovered his name in the reports that, though he didn’t buy those newspapers, friends had sent to him or commented on in an inflexible way, poisoning his life and Lucrecia’s. He had to turn off the phonograph and sit still, his eyes closed, listening to the beating of his heart with a brackish taste in his mouth. “In this country not even a tiny space of civilization can be built,” he concluded. “In the end, barbarism demolishes everything.” And once again he told himself, as he always did whenever he felt depressed, how mistaken he’d been when, as a young man, he decided not to emigrate, to remain here, in Lima the Horrible, convinced he’d be able to organize his life in a way that, even though he’d have to spend many hours a day submerged in the mundane noise of upper-class Peruvians to earn his daily bread, he’d really live in the pure, beautiful, elevated enclave made of sublime things that he would create as an alternative to the everyday yoke. That was when he’d had the idea of saving spaces, the idea that civilization was not, had never been a movement, a general state of things, an environment that would embrace all of society, but rather was composed of tiny citadels raised throughout time and space, which resisted the ongoing assault of the instinctive, violent, obtuse, ugly, destructive, bestial force that dominated the world and now had come into his own home.
That night, after supper, he asked Fonchito if he was tired.
“No,” his son replied. “Why, Papa?”
“I’d like to talk with you for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
“As long as it isn’t about Edilberto Torres, I’d be happy to,” Fonchito said mischievously. “I haven’t seen him again, so don’t worry.”
“I promise we won’t talk about him,” replied Don Rigoberto. And as he used to do when he was a boy, he shaped a cross with two fingers and swore, kissing them: “I swear to God.”
“Don’t take God’s name in vain—after all, I’m a believer,” Doña Lucrecia admonished. “Go into the study. I’ll tell Justiniana to bring you your ice cream there.”
In the study, while they were enjoying the lucuma ice cream, Don Rigoberto, between mouthfuls, spied on Fonchito. Sitting across from him with his legs crossed, he ate his ice cream in slow spoonfuls and seemed absorbed in some distant thoughts. He was no longer a child. How long had he been shaving? His face was smooth and his hair was tousled; he didn’t play a lot of sports but looked as if he did because his body was slim and athletic. He was a very good-looking boy, and the girls must be crazy about him. Everyone said so. But his son didn’t seem interested in those kinds of things; instead, he was interested in hallucinations and religious ideas. Was that a good or bad thing? Would he have preferred Fonchito to be a normal kid? “Normal,” he thought, imagining his son speaking the syncopated, simian jargon of the young people of his generation, getting drunk on weekends, smoking marijuana, getting high on coke, taking Ecstasy in the discos along the Asia beach at kilometer 100 on the Pan-American, as so many of Lima’s wealthy children did. A shudder ran through his body. A thousand times better for him to see phantoms or even the devil himself and write essays about evil.
“I read what you wrote about liberty and evil,” he said. “It was right there, on your desk, and I was curious. I hope you don’t mind. It impressed me a great deal, in fact. It’s very well written and full of original ideas. Which course is it for?”
“Language,” said Fonchito, not giving the subject much importance. “Professor Iturriaga asked for an essay on anything. That topic came to mind. But it’s only a rough draft. I still have to correct it.”
“I was surprised, because I didn’t know you were so interested in religion.??
?
“You thought it was religious?” Fonchito was surprised. “I think it’s more like philosophy. Well, I don’t know, philosophy and religion blend into each other, that’s true. Weren’t you ever interested in religion, Papa?”
“I studied at La Recoleta, a priests’ academy,” said Don Rigoberto. “After that, at the Universidad Católica. And for a time I was even a leader of Acción Católica, with Pepín O’Donovan. Of course it interested me a great deal when I was young. But one day I lost my faith and never got it back again. I think I lost it as soon as I began to think. To be a believer, you can’t think too much.”
“In other words, you’re an atheist. You believe there isn’t anything before or after this life. That’s being an atheist, isn’t it?”
“We’re getting into deep waters,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “I’m not an atheist, an atheist is also a believer. He believes that God doesn’t exist, isn’t that so? I’m more of an agnostic, if I’m anything. Someone who declares that he’s perplexed, incapable of believing either that God exists or that God doesn’t exist.”
“Neither fish nor fowl,” said Fonchito with a laugh. “It’s a very convenient way to avoid the problem, Papa.”
He had a fresh, healthy laugh, and Don Rigoberto thought he was a good kid. He was going through an adolescent crisis, suffering doubts and uncertainties regarding the afterlife and this life, which spoke well of him. How he would have liked to help him. But how, how could he?
“Something like that, though there’s no need to make fun of me,” he agreed. “Shall I tell you something, Fonchito? I envy believers. Not the fanatics, of course, who horrify me. Real believers. The ones who have a faith and try to organize their lives in accordance with their beliefs. Soberly, with no fuss and no foolishness. I don’t know many, but I do know some. And they seem enviable to me. By the way, are you a believer?”