“Absolutely not,” and he recanted. “Brave men die with their boots on, like John Wayne.”
From the balcony of the Cipriani, over the trees in the garden, one could see the towers of San Marco and the palaces along the canal. They went out in the gondola-with-guide that was waiting for them. It was a whirl of canals and bridges, greenish waters and flocks of gulls that took flight as they passed, dim churches where they had to strain their eyes to make out the attributes of the gods and saints hanging there. They saw Titians and Veroneses, Bellinis and del Piombos, the horses of San Marco and the mosaics in the cathedral, and they fed a few grains of corn to the fat pigeons on the piazza. At midday they took the obligatory photograph at a table at Florian’s while they ate the requisite pizzetta. In the afternoon they continued their tour, hearing names, dates, and anecdotes they barely listened to, lulled by the soothing voice of the guide from the agency. At seven-thirty, when they had bathed and changed, they drank their Bellinis in the salon with Moorish arches and Arabian pillows at the Danieli, and at precisely the right hour—nine o’clock—they were in Harry’s Bar. There they saw the divine Catherine Deneuve (it seemed part of the program) come in and sit at the next table. Pluto said what he had to say, “I think you’re more beautiful, Lucre.”
“And?” Don Rigoberto pressed her.
Before taking the vaporetto back to Giudecca, they went for a walk, Doña Lucrecia holding Modesto’s arm, through narrow, half-deserted streets. They reached the hotel after midnight. Doña Lucrecia was yawning.
“And?” Don Rigoberto was impatient.
“I’m so exhausted after our walk and all the nice things I’ve seen, I won’t be able to close my eyes,” lamented Doña Lucrecia. “Fortunately, I have a remedy that never fails.”
“What’s that?” asked Modesto.
“What remedy?” echoed Don Rigoberto.
“A Jacuzzi, alternating cool and warm water,” explained Doña Lucrecia, walking toward her bedroom. Before she disappeared inside, she pointed toward the huge, luminous bathroom with its white tiled walls. “Would you fill the tub for me while I put on my robe?”
Don Rigoberto moved in his place, as restless as an insomniac: And? She went to her room, slowly undressed, folding each article of clothing, one piece at a time, as if she had all eternity at her disposal. Wearing a terry cloth robe and another little towel as a turban, she came back. The round tub bubbled noisily with the pulsations of the Jacuzzi.
“I put in bath salts.” Then Modesto asked timidly, “Was that right?”
“That’s perfect,” she said, testing the water with the toes of one foot.
She let the yellow robe fall to her feet, and keeping on the towel that served as a turban, she stepped in and lay down in the water. She leaned her head on a pillow that the engineer hurriedly handed her. She sighed in gratitude.
“Shall I do anything else?” Don Rigoberto heard Modesto asking in a strangled voice. “Shall I go? Shall I stay?”
“How delicious, this cool water massage is so delicious.” Doña Lucrecia stretched her legs and arms with pleasure. “Then I’ll add warmer water. And then to bed, as good as new.”
“You were roasting him over a slow fire,” Don Rigoberto bellowed approvingly.
“Stay if you like, Pluto,” she said at last, wearing the intense expression of one who derives infinite pleasure from the caress of the water going back and forth across her body. “The tub is enormous, there’s plenty of room. Why don’t you bathe with me?”
Don Rigoberto’s ears registered the strange hoot of an owl? howl of a wolf? trill of a bird? that greeted his wife’s invitation. And, seconds later, he saw the naked engineer sinking into the tub. His fifty-year-old body, saved in the nick of time from obesity by his practice of aerobics, and jogging that brought him to the threshold of a heart attack, lay only millimeters from his wife.
“What else can I do?” he heard him ask, and he felt his admiration for him growing at the same rate as his jealousy. “I don’t want to do anything you don’t want. I will not take any initiative. At this moment I am the happiest and most unfortunate creature on earth, Lucre.”
“You may touch me,” she said with a sigh, in the cadence of a bolero, not opening her eyes. “Caress me and kiss me, my body and my face. Not my hair, because if it gets wet, tomorrow you’ll be ashamed of me, Pluto. Don’t you see that in your program you didn’t leave a free moment for the hairdresser?”
“I too am the happiest man in the world,” whispered Don Rigoberto. “And the most unfortunate.”
Doña Lucrecia opened her eyes.
“Don’t be like that, so timid. We can’t stay in the water very long.”
Don Rigoberto squinted to see them better. He heard the monotonous bubbling of the Jacuzzi and felt the tickle, the rush of water, the shower of drops spattering the tiles, and he saw Pluto, taking precaution to the extreme in order not to seem crude, as he eagerly applied himself to the soft body that let him kiss, touch, caress, that moved to facilitate access for his hands and lips to every area but did not respond to his caresses or kisses and remained in a state of passive delight. He could feel the fever burning the engineer’s skin.
“Aren’t you going to kiss him, Lucrecia? Aren’t you going to embrace him, not even once?”
“Not yet,” replied his wife. “I too had my program, I had planned it very carefully. Don’t you think he was happy?”
“I’ve never been so happy,” said Modesto, his head, between Lucrecia’s legs, rising from the bottom of the tub before submerging again. “I’d like to sing at the top of my lungs, Lucre.”
“He’s saying exactly what I feel,” Don Rigoberto interjected, then permitted himself a joke: “Wasn’t he risking pneumonia with all that hydro-erotic exertion?”
He laughed and immediately regretted it, again remembering that humor and pleasure repel each other like water and oil. “Please excuse the interruption,” he apologized. But it was late. Doña Lucrecia had begun to yawn in such a way that the diligent engineer, summoning all his fortitude, stopped what he was doing. On his knees, dripping water, his hair streaming down in bangs, he feigned resignation.
“You’re tired, Lucre.”
“I’m feeling all the weariness of the day. I can’t stay awake anymore.”
She leaped lightly from the tub and wrapped herself in the robe. From the door of her room she said good night with words that made her husband’s heart skip a beat: “Tomorrow is another day, Pluto.”
“The last one, Lucre.”
“And the last night, as well,” she said with precision, blowing him a kiss.
They began Friday morning half an hour late, but they made up for it on their visit to Murano, where, in hellish heat, artisans in T-shirts with prison stripes were blowing glass in the traditional manner, turning out decorative or household objects. The engineer insisted that Lucrecia, who did not want to make further purchases, accept three little transparent animals: a squirrel, a stork, and a hippopotamus. On the way back to Venice the guide enlightened them about two villas by Palladio. Instead of lunch, they had tea and cakes at the Quadri, enjoying a blood-red twilight that set roofs, bridges, water, and bell towers on fire, and they reached San Giorgio for the concert of baroque music with enough time to stroll around the little island and view the lagoon and the city from different perspectives.
“The last day is always sad,” Doña Lucrecia remarked. “Tomorrow this will end forever.”
“Were you holding hands?” Don Rigoberto wanted to know.
“We were, and during the entire concert as well,” his wife confessed.
“Did the engineer weep great tears?”
“He was extremely pale. He squeezed my hand and his sweet eyes glistened.”
“In gratitude and hope,” thought Don Rigoberto. The “sweet eyes” reverberated along his nerve endings. He decided that from this moment on he would be silent. While Doña Lucrecia and Pluto ate supper at Danieli’s, contemplating the lig
hts of Venice, he respected their melancholy, did not interrupt their conventional conversation, and suffered stoically when he realized, in the course of the meal, that Modesto was not alone in his lavish attentions. Lucrecia presented him with toast that she had buttered, with her own fork she offered him mouthfuls of her rigatoni, and she willingly gave her hand when he raised it to his mouth to rest his lips on it, once on the palm, once on the back, once on the fingers, and each one of her nails. With a fearful heart and an incipient erection, he waited for what was bound to happen.
And in fact, as soon as they entered the suite at the Cipriani, Doña Lucrecia grasped Modesto’s arm, put it around her waist, brought her lips up to his, and, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, she murmured, “To say goodbye, we’ll spend the night together. With you I will be as compliant, as tender, as loving as I’ve been only with my husband.”
“You said that?” Don Rigoberto swallowed strychnine and honey.
“Did I do wrong?” his wife asked in alarm. “Should I have lied to him?”
“You did the right thing,” Don Rigoberto howled. “My love.”
In an ambiguous state in which arousal clashed with jealousy and each fed on the other retrospectively, he watched them undress, admired the selfconfidence displayed by his wife, enjoyed the clumsiness of that fortunate mortal overwhelmed by a joy that compensated, on this last night, for his timidity and obedience. She would be his, he would love her: his hands fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, caught the zipper on his trousers, stumbled when he took off his shoes, and when, wild-eyed, he was about to climb into the bed where that magnificent body lay waiting for him in the dark, in a languid pose—Goya’s Naked Maja, Don Rigoberto thought, though her thighs are wider apart—he banged his ankle on the edge of the bed and squealed “Owwowoww!” Don Rigoberto enjoyed listening to the hilarity the mishap provoked in Lucrecia. Modesto laughed too as he knelt in the bed: “Emotion, Lucre, pure emotion.”
The burning coals of his pleasure cooled when, stifling her laughter, he saw his wife abandon the statue-like indifference with which she had received the caresses of the engineer on the previous day and begin to take the initiative. She embraced him, she obliged him to lie beside her, on top of her, beneath her; she entwined her legs in his legs, she searched for his mouth, she thrust her tongue deep inside, and—oh, oh, Don Rigoberto protested—she crouched down with amorous intent, fished with gentle fingers for his startled member, and, after stroking the shaft and head, brought it to her lips and kissed it before taking it into her mouth. Then, at the top of his voice, bouncing in the soft bed, the engineer began to sing—to bellow and howl—“Torna a Sorrento.”
“He began to sing ‘Torna a Sorrento’?” Don Rigoberto sat up violently. “At that very moment?”
“At exactly that moment.” Doña Lucrecia burst into laughter again, then controlled herself and apologized. “You astonish me, Pluto. Are you singing because you like it or because you don’t?”
“I’m singing so I will like it,” he explained, tremulous and bright red, between false notes and arpeggios.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“I want you to continue, Lucre,” a euphoric Modesto implored. “Laugh, I don’t care. I sing to make my happiness complete. Cover your ears if it distracts you or makes you laugh. But by all you hold most dear, don’t stop.”
“And he went on singing?” Don Rigoberto exclaimed, intoxicated, mad with satisfaction.
“Without stopping for a second,” Doña Lucrecia affirmed, between giggles. “While I was kissing him, when I was on top, when he was on top, while we made love both orthodox and heterodox. He sang, he had to sing. Because if he didn’t sing, fiasco.”
“And always ‘Torna a Sorrento’?” Don Rigoberto delighted in the sweet pleasure of revenge.
“Any song of my youth,” the engineer sang, leaping with all the power of his lungs from Italy to Mexico. “Voy a cantarles un corrido muy mentadooo…”
“A potpourri of cheap music from the fifties.” Doña Lucrecia was very specific. “‘O sole mio,’ ‘Caminito,’ ‘Juan Charrasqueado,’ ‘Allá en el rancho grande,’ and even Agustín Lara’s ‘Madrid.’ Oh, it was so funny!”
“And without all that musical vulgarity, fiasco?” Don Rigoberto asked for confirmation, a visitor to seventh heaven. “It’s the best part of the night, my love.”
“You haven’t heard the best part yet, the best part came at the end, it was the height of absurdity.” Doña Lucrecia wiped away her tears. “The other guests began to bang on the walls, the front desk called saying we should turn down the TV, the phonograph, nobody in the hotel could sleep.”
“In other words, neither of you ever finished…” Don Rigoberto suggested, with faint hope.
“I did, twice,” said Doña Lucrecia, bringing him back to reality. “And he, at least once, I’m sure of that. When he was all set for the second one, that’s when the complaints started and he lost his inspiration. Everything ended in laughter. What a night. Worthy of Ripley.”
“Now you know my secret,” said Modesto, once their neighbors and the front desk had been placated, and their laughter had subsided, and their impulses had quieted, and they were wrapped in the white Cipriani bathrobes and had begun to talk. “Do you mind if we don’t speak of it? As you can imagine, it embarrasses me…Well, let me tell you one more time that I’ll never forget our week together, Lucre.”
“Neither will I, Pluto. I’ll always remember it. And not only for the concert, I swear.”
They slept the sleep of the just, knowing they had fulfilled their obligations, and they were on the dock in good time to catch the vaporetto to the airport. Alitalia was meticulous as well, and the plane left with no delays, allowing them to connect with the Concorde from Paris to New York, where they said goodbye, knowing they would never see each other again.
“Tell me it was a horrible week, that you hated it,” Don Rigoberto suddenly moaned, grasping his wife around the waist and pulling her down on him. “Didn’t you, Lucrecia, didn’t you?”
“Why don’t you try singing something at the top of your lungs,” she suggested in the velvety voice of their finest nocturnal encounters. “Something really vulgar, darling. ‘La flor de la canela,’ ‘Fumando espero,’ ‘Brasil, terra de meu coração.’ Let’s see what happens, Rigoberto.”
III
The Picture Game
“How funny, Stepmamá,” said Fonchito. “Your dark green stockings are exactly the same color that one of Egon Schiele’s models wore.”
Señora Lucrecia looked at the heavy wool stockings covering her legs up past the knee.
“They’re very good for Lima’s damp weather,” she said, stroking them. “They keep my feet nice and warm.”
“Reclining Nude in Green Stockings,” the boy recalled. “One of his most famous pictures. Do you want to see it?”
“All right, show it to me.”
While Fonchito hurried to open the bag that he had dropped, as usual, on the rug in the dining alcove, Señora Lucrecia felt the vague uneasiness the boy tended to arouse in her with his sudden outbursts of enthusiasm, which always seemed to conceal some danger beneath their apparent innocence.
“What a coincidence, Stepmamá,” said Fonchito as he leafed through the book of Schiele reproductions that he had just taken out of his book bag. “I look like him and you look like his models. In lots of ways.”
“What ways, for example?”
“The green or black or maroon stockings you wear. And the checked cover on your bed.”
“My goodness, how observant you are!”
“And then, you’re so regal,” Fonchito added, not looking up, absorbed in searching for Reclining Nude in Green Stockings. Doña Lucrecia did not know if she should laugh or make fun of him. Was he aware of the affected gallantry or had he said it accidentally? “Didn’t my papá always say you were regal? And that no matter what you did, you were never vulgar? Only through Schiele could I understood what he meant
. His models lift their skirts, show everything, assume very strange poses, but they never seem vulgar. They always look like queens. Why? Because they’re regal. Like you, Stepmamá.”
Confused, flattered, irritated, alarmed, Doña Lucrecia both wanted and did not want to put an end to his talk. Once again, she was beginning to feel insecure.
“What silly things you say, Fonchito.”
“Here it is!” the boy exclaimed, handing her the book. “Do you see now what I’m saying? Isn’t she in a pose that would seem bad in any other woman? But not in her. That’s what being regal means.”
“Let me see.” Señora Lucrecia took the book, and after examining Reclining Nude in Green Stockings for a time, she agreed. “You’re right, they’re the same color as the ones I’m wearing.”
“Don’t you think it’s nice?”
“Yes, very pretty.” She closed the book and quickly handed it back to him. Again she was devastated by the idea that she was losing the initiative, that the boy was beginning to defeat her. But in what battle? Her eyes met his: Alfonso’s eyes were shining with an equivocal light, and the first signs of a smile played across his untroubled face.
“Could I ask you for a big favor? The biggest in the world? Would you do it for me?”
He’s going to ask me to take off my clothes, she thought in terror. I’ll slap his face and never see him again. She hated Fonchito and she hated herself.
“What favor?” she murmured, trying to keep her smile from turning grotesque.
“Would you pose like the lady in Reclining Nude in Green Stockings?” intoned the mellifluous young voice. “Just for a minute, Stepmamá!”
“What are you saying?”
“Without undressing, of course,” the boy reassured her, moving eyes and hands, wrinkling his nose. “Just the pose. I’m dying to see it. Would you do that big, big favor for me? Don’t be mean, Stepmamá.”
“Don’t play so hard to get when you know very well you’ll enjoy it,” said Justiniana, walking in and displaying her usual high spirits. “And since tomorrow is Fonchito’s birthday, let this be his present.”