“I know it’s a very obscene self-portrait,” said Doña Lucrecia. “You’d better keep turning the pages, Foncho.”
“It seems sad to me,” the boy disagreed, with a good deal of conviction. “Look at Schiele’s face. It’s so discouraged, as if he couldn’t bear any more of the sorrow he’s feeling. He looks ready to cry. He was only twenty-one, Stepmamá. Why do you think he called this picture The Red Host?”
“You’re better off not finding out, Mr. Know-it-all.” Señora Lucrecia was becoming angry. “Is that what it’s called? So besides being obscene, its sacrilegious too. Turn the page or I’ll tear it.”
“But, Stepmamá,” Fonchito reproached her, “you can’t be like the judge who ordered Egon Schiele to destory his picture. You can’t be that unfair and prejudiced.”
His indignation seemed genuine. His eyes flashed, the fine nostrils quivered, and even his ears had sharpened. Doña Lucrecia regretted what she had just said.
“Well, you’re right, in painting, in art, you have to be broad-minded.” She rubbed her hands nervously. “But you make me so angry, Fonchito. I never know if you do what you do and say what you say spontaneously, or if you intend something else. I never know if I’m with a child or a dirty, perverse old man hiding behind the face of the Infant Jesus.”
The boy looked at her in bewilderment; his surprise seemed to well up from the deepest part of his being. He blinked, uncomprehending. Was she the one who was shocking the child with her suspicions? Of course not. And yet, when she saw Fonchito’s eyes brimming with tears, she felt responsible.
“I don’t even know what I’m saying,” she murmured. “Forget it, I didn’t say a thing. Come, give me a kiss, let’s be friends.”
The boy stood and threw his arms around her neck. Doña Lucrecia could feel the fragile form trembling, the delicate bones, the small body on the verge of adolescence, that age when boys could still be mistaken for girls.
“Don’t be angry with me, Stepmamá,” she heard him saying into her ear. “Correct me if I do something wrong, give me advice. I want to be just what you want me to be. But don’t be angry.”
“It’s all right, I’m not angry anymore,” she said. “Let’s forget it.”
His slim arms around her neck held her prisoner, and he spoke so slowly and softly that she could not understand what he was saying. But all her nerves registered the tip of the boy’s tongue when, like a slender probe, it entered the opening of her ear and wet it with saliva. She resisted the impulse to move him away. A moment later, she felt his finely molded lips moving across her lobe with slow, tiny kisses. And now she did move him away gently—little shudders ran up and down her body—and found herself looking into his mischievous face.
“Did I tickle you?” He seemed to be boasting of a great feat. “Your whole body started to tremble. Did you feel an electric current, Stepmamá?”
She did not know what to say. Her smile was forced.
“I forgot to tell you.” Fonchito himself saved her, returning to his usual spot in front of the sofa. “I started the job, on my papá.”
“What job?”
“Making you two be friends again,” the boy explained, gesticulating. “Do you know what I did? I told him I saw you coming out of the Church of the Virgen del Pilar, very elegant, on a gentleman’s arm. And that you looked like newlyweds on their honeymoon.”
“Why did you tell him lies?”
“To make him jealous. And I did. He got so nervous, Stepmamá!”
His laughter proclaimed a splendid joy in living. His papá had turned pale, and his eyes had bulged, though at first he didn’t say anything. But his curiosity held the strings, and he was dying to know more, twitching like a puppet! To make things easier for him, Fonchito fired the first shot: “Do you think my stepmamá is planning to marry again, Papá?”
Don Rigoberto’s face turned bitter, and he snorted in a strange way before answering. “I don’t know. You should have asked her yourself.” And after some vacillation, making an effort to sound natural: “Who can tell. Did the gentleman seem to be more than a friend?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Fonchito said uncertainly, moving his head like the cuckoo in a clock. “They were arm in arm. The gentleman was looking at her just like in the movies. And she was very flirtatious with him.”
“I could kill you, you’re such a lying rascal.” Señora Lucrecia threw one of the pillows and hit him in the head, and Fonchito reacted with a great show of fear. “You’re a fake. You didn’t tell him anything, you just like making fun of me.”
“I swear by all that’s holy, Stepmamá.” The boy giggled and kissed his fingers as they sketched a cross.
“You’re the worst cynic I’ve ever known.” She tossed another pillow, and then she laughed too. “I can imagine what you’ll be like when you grow up. God protect the poor innocent who falls in love with you.”
The boy became serious, in one of those abrupt changes of mood that always disconcerted Doña Lucrecia. He folded his arms across his chest and, sitting like a Buddha, looked at her with some fear.
“You were joking, weren’t you, Stepmamá? Or do you really think I’m bad?”
She stretched out her hand and stroked his hair.
“No, not bad, no,” she said. “You’re unpredictable. A little know-it-all with too much imagination, that’s what you are.”
“I want you two to make up,” Fonchito interrupted, with an emphatic gesture. “That’s why I told him that story. I have a plan.”
“Since I’m one of the parties involved, at least let me give my approval.”
“Well, it’s just…” Fonchito wrung his hands. “It’s not finished yet. You have to trust me, Stepmamá. I need to know some things about you. How you and my papá met, for instance. And how you got married.”
A flood of melancholy images made that day—eleven years ago, now—present in Doña Lucrecia’s memory, when, at the crowded, boring party celebrating the silver wedding anniversary of her aunt and uncle, she had been introduced to the balding gentleman with the long, melancholy face, large ears, and assertive nose. He was about fifty; a matchmaking friend, a woman committed to marrying off everybody, told her about him: “Recently widowed, has a son, he’s an executive at La Perricholi Insurance, a little eccentric but from a good family, and plenty of money.” At first she noticed only Rigoberto’s funereal appearance and reticence, and how unattractive he was. But beginning that same night, something attracted her to this man without physical charms; she had intuited something complicated and mysterious in his life. And ever since she was a girl, Doña Lucrecia had felt a fascination for standing on the edge of the cliff and looking down into the abyss, for keeping her balance on the railing at the side of the bridge. And the attraction had been confirmed when she agreed to have tea with him at La Tiendecita Blanca, attended a Philharmonic concert with him at the Colegio Santa Ursula, and, above all, when she entered his house for the first time. Rigoberto showed her his etchings, his art books, the notebooks that contained his secrets, and he explained to her how he updated his collection, condemning the books and pictures he replaced to the flames. She had been impressed listening to him, observing how courteously he treated her, his maniacal correctness. To the astonishment of her family and friends (“What are you waiting for to get married, Lucre? Prince Charming? You can’t simply turn down every one of your suitors!”), when Rigoberto proposed (“Without ever having kissed me”) she accepted immediately. She had never regretted it. Not for a day, not for a minute. It had been amusing, exciting, marvelous to discover her husband’s world of manias, rituals, and fantasies, to share it with him, to build their private life together over a period of ten years. Until the absurd, mad, stupid story of what she had allowed to occur with her stepson. A baby who didn’t even seem to remember now what had happened. She! The woman everyone thought so judicious, so cautious, so organized, the one who always calculated every step with so much good sense. How could she have had an adventu
re with a schoolboy! Her own stepchild! Rigoberto had been very decent, really, avoiding a scandal, asking only for a separation and providing the financial support that permitted her to live alone. Another man would have killed her, clenched his jaws in rage and thrown her out without a cent, pilloried her publicly as a corruptor of youth. How foolish to think that Rigoberto and she could be reconciled. He would continue to be mortally offended by what had happened; he would never forgive her. Once again she felt the slender arms twining about her neck.
“What made you so sad?” Fonchito comforted her. “Did I do something bad?”
“I suddenly thought of something, and I’m a sentimental person…I’m all right now.”
“When I saw you getting like that, I was so scared!”
The boy kissed her again on the ear, with the same tiny kisses, finishing up his caresses by wetting her earlobe again with the tip of his tongue. Doña Lucrecia felt so depressed that she didn’t even have the energy to push him away.
After a while she heard him saying, in a different tone of voice, “You too, Stepmamá?”
“What?”
“You’re touching my backside too, just like my papá’s friends and the priests at school. Golly! Why is everybody so interested in my bottom?”
Letter to a Rotarian
Friend, I know you were offended by my refusal to join the Rotary Club, for you are an officer and promoter of that institution. And I suspect you felt somewhat distrustful as well, not at all convinced that my reluctance to be a Rotarian in no way suggests that I am going to enroll in the Lions Club or the recently established Kiwanis Club of Peru, associations with which your organization competes implacably to win first place in good works, civic spirit, human solidarity, social welfare, and other things of that nature. Don’t worry: I do not belong and will never belong to any of those clubs or associations, or to anything resembling them (the Boy Scouts, the Alumni of the Jesuits, the Masons, Opus Dei, et cetera). My hostility to associations is so radical that I have stopped being a member of the Automobile Club, not to mention the so-called social clubs that gauge the ethnicity and wealth of Limenians. Since the now distant days of my membership in Catholic Action, and because of it—for this was the experience that opened my eyes to the illusory nature of all social utopias and catapulted me to a defense of hedonism and the individual—I have contracted such a moral, psychological, and ideological revulsion toward all forms of gregarious servitude that—this is no joke—even the line at the movies makes me feel abused, diminished in my own freedom (at times, obviously, I cannot help joining the line), and reduced to the condition of mass-man. The only concession I remember making was in response to the threat of being overweight (I am convinced, like Cyril Connolly, that “obesity is a mental disease”), which led me to join a gym, where a brainless Tarzan made fifteen imbeciles sweat for an hour a day to the rhythm of his bellowing and engage in certain simian contractions that he called aerobics. This gymnastic torture confirmed all my prejudices against the herd-man.
Allow me, in this regard, to transcribe for you one of the many citations that fill my notebooks, for it is a marvelous synthesis of what I believe. The author Francisco Pérez de Antón is an Asturian world traveler currently residing in Guatemala: “A herd, as everyone knows, is composed of creatures deprived of speech and with fairly weak sphincters. It is a proven fact, moreover, that in times of confusion, the herd prefers servitude to disorder. Which is why those who behave like crazed nanny goats do not have leaders but great goatish assholes at their head. Something in this species must be contagious, since it is so common in the human herd to find someone who can lead the masses to the edge of the reef and, once there, make them jump into the water. Unless he decides to destroy a civilization, which is something he does fairly frequently.” You will say it is paranoid to detect, behind a few benign men who meet for lunch once a week and discuss in which new district they ought to put up one of those limestone pillars with the metal plaque that reads THE ROTARY CLUB WELCOMES YOU, whose erection they all contribute to, an ominous devaluation of sovereign individual into mass-man. Perhaps I exaggerate. But I cannot be negligent. Since the world is moving so quickly toward complete disindividualization and the extinction of that historical accident, the rule of the free and sovereign individual, which a series of coincidences and circumstances made possible (for a limited number of people, naturally, in an even more limited number of countries), I am mobilized and combat-ready, with all my five senses, twenty-four hours a day, prepared to delay, as much as I can and in areas that concern me, this existential calamity. It is a battle to the death, it is total warfare; everything and everyone is involved. Those associations of overfed professionals, executives, and high-level bureaucrats who show up once a week to eat a regimented meal (stuffed potato, a small steak and rice, crêpes with blancmange, all washed down with a pleasant little Tacama Reserva red wine?) are a victory for definitive robotization and obscurantism, a great advance for the planned, the organized, the obligatory, the routinized, the collective, and an even greater retreat for the spontaneous, the inspired, the creative, and the original, which are conceivable only in the sphere of the individual.
Does what you’ve read lead you to suspect that beneath my drab appearance as a bourgeois in his fifties there lurks a bearded antisocial anarchist? Bingo! On the nose, brother. (I’ve made a joke, but it’s not funny: that brother suggests the inevitable slap on the shoulder that goes along with it, the loathsome sight of two men, their guts swollen by beer and huge quantities of spicy foods, joining together, forming a collectivist society, renouncing their innermost phantoms, their unique selves.) It is true: I am antisocial to the best of my ability, which is, unfortunately, very limited, and I resist gregarization in everything that does not endanger my survival or my excellent standard of living. That’s right. To be an individualist is to be an egotist (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness) but not an imbecile. As for the rest, I think imbecility is respectable if it is genetic, inherited, and not a chosen, deliberate stance. I’m afraid that being a Rotarian, or a Lion, Kiwanis, Mason, Boy Scout, or Opus Deist is (you’ll forgive me) a cowardly vote in favor of stupidity.
I ought to explain this insult to you, and therefore I will soften it so that the next time company business brings us together, you won’t punch me in the mouth (or kick me in the shins, a more appropriate form of aggression for people of our age). I don’t know of a more accurate definition of the institutionalization of virtues and charitable feelings that these organizations represent than to call it an abdication of personal responsibility and a cheap way of acquiring a good “social” conscience (I put the word in quotation marks to emphasize how much I dislike it). In practical terms, the actions taken by you and your colleagues do not, in my opinion, help to diminish evil (or increase the good, if you prefer) to any appreciable degree. The principal beneficiaries of such collectivized generosity are you yourselves, beginning with your stomachs as you gobble down your weekly dinners, and your dirty minds, which during those evenings of fellowship (a horrifying concept!) regurgitate with pleasure, exchanging gossip and suggestive jokes, and cutting absent members to pieces. I am not opposed to such entertainments, nor, in principle, to anything that gives pleasure; but I am opposed to the hypocrisy of not proclaiming this right openly, of seeking pleasure that is concealed behind the hygienic excuse of responsible social action. Didn’t you tell me, leering like a satyr and with a pornographic nudge, that another advantage of being a Rotarian was that every week the institution provided a first-class excuse for being out of the house without alarming one’s wife? And here I offer another objection. Is it law or mere custom that excludes women from your ranks? I’ve never seen a skirt at any of the lunches you’ve inflicted on me. I’m certain that not all of you are faggots, which would be the only vaguely acceptable justification for the trouserism of Rotarians (Lions, Kiwanis, Boy Scouts, et cetera). My thesis is this: being a Rotarian is a pretext for having good male times fr
ee of the vigilance, servitude, or correct behavior that is, all of you claim, imposed by cohabitation with a woman. To me this seems as anticivilized as the paranoia of the recalcitrant feminists who have declared war between the sexes. My philosophy is that in those circumstances where one is unavoidably subjected to gregariousness—school, work, entertainment—the mixing of genders (and races, languages, customs, and beliefs) is a way to ameliorate the cretinization that the mob brings with it and to introduce an element of piquancy and mischief (I am a devoted practitioner of evil thoughts) to human relationships, something which, from my point of view, elevates those relationships aesthetically and morally. I will not say that for me they are one and the same thing, since you would not understand).
All human activity that does not contribute, even indirectly, to testicular and ovarian arousal, to the meeting of sperm and egg, is contemptible. For instance, the selling of insurance, to which you and I have devoted the past thirty years, or misogynistic Rotary luncheons. As well as everything that distracts us from the truly essential purpose of human life, which, in my opinion, is to satisfy desires. I see no other reason for our being here, spinning like slow tops in a gratuitous universe. We can sell insurance, as you and I have done—and with a fair amount of success, for we have achieved notable positions in our respective companies—because we must provide food, clothing, shelter, and enough income to permit us to have and gratify desires. There is no other valid reason for selling insurance policies, or for building dams, castrating cats, or taking shorthand. I can hear you now: Suppose, unlike this lunatic Rigoberto, a man finds selling insurance against fire, theft, or sickness a fulfilling and pleasurable activity? What if attending Rotary luncheons and making small financial contributions to put up signs along highways that read SPEED KILLS is the fulfillment of his most burning desires and makes him just as happy, no more and no less, as you are when you leaf through your collection of pictures and books not suitable for young ladies or engage in the mental masturbation of writing soliloquies in your notebooks? Does not each person have a right to his own desires? Yes, he does. But if a human being’s dearest desires (the most beautiful word in the dictionary) consist of selling insurance and joining the Rotary Club (or related groups), then that biped is an asshole. Agreed: this describes 90 percent of the human race. I see, insurance man, that you are beginning to understand.