She began to speak, pausing as she searched for the words—silences meant to conceal her awkwardness—but little by little, aroused by his caresses and amorous interruptions, she gained confidence. At last, Don Rigoberto realized she had recovered her natural fluency and could tell her story by assuming a feigned distance from the account, clinging to his body, her head resting on his shoulder. The couple’s hands moved from time to time to take possession or verify the existence of a member, a muscle, or a piece of skin.
“Had he changed very much?”
He had become very much a gringo in the way he dressed and spoke, for he continually used English words. But though his hair was gray and he had put on weight, he still had the same long, melancholy Pluto face, and all the timidity and inhibitions of his youth.
“Seeing you arrive must have been like a gift from heaven.”
“He turned so pale! I thought he was going to faint. He was waiting for me with a bouquet of flowers bigger than he was. The limousine was one of those silver-colored ones that gangsters have in movies. With a bar, a television, a stereo, and—this will kill you—leopardskin seat covers.”
“Poor ecologists,” Don Rigoberto responded with enthusiasm.
“I know it’s very parvenu,” Modesto apologized while the chauffeur, an extremely tall Afghani in a maroon uniform, arranged their luggage in the trunk. “But it was the most expensive one.”
“He’s able to laugh at himself,” Don Rigoberto declared. “That’s nice.”
“On the ride to the Plaza he paid me a few compliments, blushing all the way to his ears,” Doña Lucrecia continued. “He said I looked very young and even more beautiful than when he asked me to marry him.”
“You are,” Don Rigoberto interrupted, drinking in her breath. “More and more, every day, every hour.”
“Not a single remark in bad taste, not a single offensive insinuation,” she said. “He was so grateful to me for joining him that he made me feel like the good Samaritan in the Bible.”
“Do you know what he was wondering while he was being so gallant?”
“What?” Doña Lucrecia slipped her leg between her husband’s.
“If he would see you naked that afternoon, in the Plaza, or if he would have to wait until that night, or even until Paris,” Don Rigoberto explained.
“He didn’t see me naked that afternoon or that night. Unless he peeked through the keyhole while I was bathing and dressing for the Metropolitan Opera. What he had said about separate rooms was true. Mine overlooked Central Park.”
“But he must have at least held your hand at the opera, in the restaurant,” he complained, feeling disappointed. “With the help of a little champagne, he must have put his cheek to yours while you were dancing at Regine’s. He must have kissed your neck, your ear.”
Not at all. He had not tried to take her hand or kiss her during that long night, though he did not spare the compliments, but always at a respectful distance. He was very likable, in fact, mocking his own lack of experience (“I’m mortified, Lucre, but in six years of marriage I’ve never cheated on my wife”), and admitting to her that this was the first time in his life he had attended the opera or set foot in Le Cirque and Regine’s.
“The only thing I’m sure of is that I must ask for Dom Pérignon, sniff at the glass of wine as if I suffered from allergies, and order dishes with French names.”
He looked at her with immeasurable, canine gratitude.
“To tell the truth, I’ve come out of vanity, Modesto. And curiosity too, of course. After ten years of our not seeing each other, of our not being in touch at all, is it possible you’re still in love with me?”
“Love isn’t the right word,” he pointed out. “I’m in love with Dorothy, the gringa I married, who’s very understanding and lets me sing in bed.”
“For him you meant something more subtle,” Don Rigoberto declared. “Unreality, illusion, the woman of his memory and desires. I want to worship you the same way, the way he does. Wait, wait.”
He removed her tiny nightgown and then positioned her so that their skin would touch in more places. He reined in his desire and asked her to continue.
“We returned to the hotel just as I was beginning to yawn. He said good night at a distance from my door. He wished me pleasant dreams. He behaved so well, he was so much a gentleman, that the next morning I flirted with him just a little.”
When she appeared for breakfast in the room that separated the two bedrooms, she was barefoot and wearing a short summer wrapper that left her legs and thighs exposed. Modesto was waiting for her, shaved, showered, and dressed. His mouth fell open.
“Did you sleep well?” he managed to articulate, slack-jawed, pulling out a chair for her at the breakfast table, which held fruit juice, toast, and marmalade. “May I say that you look very attractive?”
“Stop.” Don Rigoberto cut her off. “Let me kneel and kiss the legs that dazzled Pluto the dog.”
On the way to the airport, and then as they ate lunch in the Air France Concorde, Modesto returned to the attentive adoration he had displayed on the first day. He reminded Lucrecia, in an undramatic way, of how he had decided to leave the School of Engineering when he became convinced she would not marry him, and had gone to Boston to seek his fortune; of his early difficulties in that city of cold winters and dark red Victorian mansions, where it took him three months to find his first permanent job. His heart had been broken, but he was not complaining. He had achieved the security he needed, he got along well with his wife, and now that a new phase of his life was about to begin with his return to the university, which was something he had always missed, he was making his fantasy, the grown-up game that had been his refuge all these years, come true: his ideal week with Lucre, when he would pretend to be rich in New York, Paris, and Venice. Now he could die happy.
“Are you really going to spend so much of your savings on this trip?”
“I would spend the three hundred thousand that are mine, because the rest belongs to Dorothy,” he affirmed, looking into her eyes. “And not for the entire week. Just for having seen you at breakfast, just for seeing those legs, those arms, those shoulders. The most beautiful in the world, Lucre.”
“What would he have said if he had seen your breasts and your sweet ass?” Don Rigoberto kissed her. “I love you, I adore you.”
“This was when I decided that in Paris he would see the rest.” Doña Lucrecia moved away slightly from her husband’s kisses. “I made the decision when the pilot announced that we had broken the sound barrier.”
“It was the least you could have done for so proper a gentleman,” said Don Rigoberto approvingly.
As soon as they were settled in their respective bedrooms—the view from Lucrecia’s windows included the dark column on the Place Vendôme, so high she could not see the top, and the glittering display windows of the jewelry shops all around it—they went out for a stroll. Modesto had memorized the route and calculated the time it would take. They passed through the Tuileries, crossed the Seine, and walked toward Saint-Germain along the quays on the Left Bank. They reached the abbey half an hour before the concert. It was a pale, mild afternoon, autumn had already turned the leaves on the chestnut trees, and, from time to time, the engineer would stop, guidebook and map in hand, to give Lucrecia a bit of historical, urbanistic, architectural, or aesthetic information. On the uncomfortable little seats in a church filled to capacity for the concert, they had to sit very close together. Lucrecia enjoyed the lavish melancholy of Mozart’s Requiem.
Later, when they were at a small table on the first floor of Lipp’s, she congratulated Modesto. “I can’t believe this is your first trip to Paris. You know streets, monuments, directions, as if you lived here.”
“I’ve prepared for this trip as if it were the final exam for a degree, Lucre. I’ve consulted books, maps, travel agencies, and talked to travelers. I don’t collect stamps or raise dogs or play golf. For years my only hobby has been preparing
for this week.”
“Was I always in it?”
“Another step along the road of flirtation,” Don Rigoberto noted.
“Always you and only you,” said Pluto, blushing. “New York, Paris, Venice, operas, restaurants, all the rest, were merely the background. The important thing, the central thing, was to be alone with you in that setting.”
They returned to the Ritz in a taxi, tired and a little tipsy from the champagne, the Burgundy wine, and the cognac with which they had anticipated, accompanied, and bidden farewell to the choucroute. When they said good night, standing in the small room that divided their bedrooms, Doña Lucrecia, without the slightest hesitation, announced to Modesto, “You’re behaving so well that I want to play too. I’m going to give you a present.”
“Oh, really?” Pluto’s voice broke. “What’s that, Lucre?”
“My entire body,” she sang out. “Come in when I call you. But just to look.”
She did not hear Modesto’s reply but was sure that in the darkened room, as he nodded, speechless, his joy knew no bounds. Not certain exactly what she would do, she undressed, hung up her clothes, and, in the bathroom, unpinned her hair (“The way I like it, my love?” “Exactly the same, Rigoberto”), walked back into the room, turned out all the lights except the one on the night table, and moved the lamp so that its illumination, softened by a satin shade, fell on the sheets that the chambermaid had turned down for the night. She lay on her back, turned slightly to the side in a languid, uninhibited pose, and settled her head on the pillow.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
She closed her eyes so as not to see him come in, thought Don Rigoberto, moved by that touch of modesty. With absolute clarity he could see in the blue-tinged light, from the perspective of the hesitant, yearning engineer who had just crossed the threshold, the shapely body that, without reaching Rubenesque excesses, emulated the virginal opulence of Murillo as she lay on her back, one knee slightly forward to hide the pubis, the other presented openly, the full curves of the hips stabilizing the volume of golden flesh in the center of the bed. Though he had contemplated, studied, caressed and enjoyed that body so many times, through another man’s eyes he seemed to see it for the first time. For a long while—his breathing agitated, his phallus stiff—he admired it. Reading his mind, not saying a word to break the silence, from time to time Lucrecia moved in slow motion with the abandon of one who thinks she is safe from indiscreet eyes, and displayed to the respectful Modesto, frozen two paces from the bed, her flanks and back, her buttocks and breasts, her hair-free underarms and the little forest of her pubis. At last she began to open her legs, revealing her inner thighs and the half-moon of her sex. “In the pose of the anonymous model of L’Origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet (1866),” Don Rigoberto sought and found the reference, overcome by emotion to discover that the exuberance of his wife’s belly, the robust solidity of her thighs and mound of Venus, coincided millimeter by millimeter with the headless woman in the oil painting that was the reigning prince of his private collection. Then eternity dissolved.
“I’m tired, and I think you are too, Pluto. It’s time to sleep.”
“Good night” was the immediate reply of a voice at the very peak of ecstasy, or agony. Modesto stepped back, stumbled, and seconds later closed the door.
“He was capable of restraining himself, he did not throw himself at you like a ravening beast,” exclaimed an enchanted Don Rigoberto. “You were controlling him with your little finger.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Lucrecia said with a laugh, “but that docility of his was also part of the game.”
The next morning a bellboy brought a bouquet of roses to her bed, with a card that read: Eyes that see, a heart that feels, a mind that remembers, and a cartoon dog that thanks you with all his heart.
“I want you too much,” Don Rigoberto apologized as he covered her mouth with his hand. “I must make love to you.”
“Then imagine the night poor Pluto must have spent.”
“Poor?” Don Rigoberto pondered after love, as they, exhausted and satisfied, were recovering their strength. “Why poor?”
“I’m the happiest man in the world, Lucre,” Modesto declared that night in the interval between two striptease shows at the Crazy Horse Saloon, which was packed with Japanese and Germans, and after they had consumed a bottle of champagne. “Not even the electric train that Father Christmas brought me on my tenth birthday can compare to your gift.”
During the day, as they had walked through the Louvre, lunched at La Closerie de Lilas, visited the Centre Pompidou, or lost their way in the narrow, reconstructed streets of the Marais, he had not made the slightest allusion to the previous night. He continued to act as her well-informed, devoted, obliging traveling companion.
“The more you tell me, the better I like him,” remarked Don Rigoberto.
“The same thing happened to me,” Doña Lucrecia acknowledged. “And so that day I went a step further, to reward him. At Maxim’s he felt my knee against his during the entire meal. And when we danced, my breasts. And at the Crazy Horse, my legs.”
“I envy him,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “To discover you serially, episodically, bit by bit. A game of cat and mouse, after all. A game not without its dangers.”
“No, not if it’s played with gentlemen like you,” Doña Lucrecia said coquettishly. “I’m glad I accepted your invitation, Pluto.”
They were back at the Ritz, drowsy and content. They were saying good night in the sitting room of their suite.
“Wait, Modesto,” she improvised, blinking. “Surprise, surprise, close your little eyes.”
Pluto obeyed instantly, transformed by expectation. She approached, pressed against him, kissed him, lightly at first, noticing that he hesitated to respond to the lips brushing his, and then to the thrusts of her tongue. When he did, she sensed that with this kiss the engineer was giving her the love he had felt for so long, his adoration and fantasy, his well-being and (if he had one) his soul. When he caught her around the waist, cautiously, prepared to let go at the first sign of rejection, Doña Lucrecia allowed him to embrace her.
“May I open my eyes?”
“You may.”
And then he looked at her, not with the cold eyes of the perfect libertine, de Sade, thought Don Rigoberto, but with the pure, fervent, impassioned eyes of the mystic at the moment of his ascent and vision.
“Was he very excited?” The question escaped his lips, and he regretted it. “What a stupid question. Forgive me, Lucrecia.”
“He was, but he made no attempt to hold me. At the first hint, he moved away.”
“You should have gone to bed with him that night,” Don Rigoberto admonished her. “You were being abusive. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you were doing just the right thing. Yes, yes, of course. The slow, the formal, the ritualized, the theatrical—that is eroticism. It was a wise delay. Rushing makes us more like animals. Did you know that donkeys, monkeys, pigs, and rabbits ejaculate in twelve seconds, at the most?”
“But the frog can copulate for forty days and nights without stopping. I read it in a book by Jean Rostand: From Fly to Man.”
“I’m envious.” Don Rigoberto was filled with admiration. “You are so wise, Lucrecia.”
“Those were Modesto’s words.” His wife confused him, returned him to an Orient Express hurtling through the European night on its way to Venice. “The next day, in our belle époque compartment.”
And the words were reiterated by a bouquet of flowers waiting for her at the Hotel Cipriani, on sun-filled Giudecca: To Lucrecia, beautiful in life and wise in love.
“Wait, wait.” Don Rigoberto brought her back to the rails. “Did you share the compartment on the train?”
“It had two beds. I was in the upper berth and he was in the lower.”
“In other words…”
“We literally had to undress on top of one another,” she completed the sentence. “We saw each other in our underclot
hes, though it was dark, because I turned out all the lights except the night-light.”
“Underclothing is a general, abstract concept,” Don Rigoberto fumed. “Give me precise details.”
Doña Lucrecia did. When it was time to undress—the anachronistic Orient Express was crossing German or Austrian forests, passing an occasional village—Modesto asked if she wanted him to leave. “There’s no need, in this darkness we’re no more than shadows,” Doña Lucrecia replied. The engineer sat on the lower berth, taking up as little room as possible in order to give her more space. She undressed, not forcing her movements or stylizing them, turning round where she stood as she removed each article of clothing: dress, slip, bra, stockings, panties. The illumination from the night-light, a little mushroom-shaped lamp with lanceolate drawings, caressed her neck, shoulders, breasts, belly, buttocks, thighs, knees, feet. Raising her arms, she slipped a Chinese silk pajama top, decorated with dragons, over her head.
“I’m going to sit with my legs uncovered while I brush my hair,” she said, and did so. “If you feel the urge to kiss them, you may. As far as my knees.”
Was it the torment of Tantalus? Or the garden of earthly delights? Don Rigoberto had moved to the foot of the bed, and anticipating his wish, Doña Lucrecia sat on the edge so that, like Pluto on the Orient Express, her husband could kiss her insteps, breathe in the fragrance of the creams and colognes that refreshed her ankles, nibble at her toes and lick the hollows that separated them.
“I love you and admire you,” said Don Rigoberto.
“I love you and admire you,” said Pluto.
“And now to sleep,” ordered Doña Lucrecia.
They reached Venice on an Impressionist morning, the sun strong and the sky a deep blue, and as the launch carried them to the Cipriani through curling waves, Modesto, Michelin in hand, provided Lucrecia with brief descriptions of the palaces and churches along the Grand Canal.
“I’m feeling jealous, my dear,” Don Rigoberto interrupted her.
“If you’re serious, we’ll erase it, sweetheart,” Doña Lucrecia proposed.