“If you had to travel”—Doña Lucrecia buried herself in his arms—“we should have canceled the cocktail party. I told you that.”
“Why?” asked Don Rigoberto, adjusting his body to his wife’s. “Did something happen?”
“A lot of things.” Doña Lucrecia laughed, her mouth against his chest. “But I won’t tell you. Don’t even think about it.”
“Did someone behave badly?” Don Rigoberto warmed to the topic. “Did Fito Cebolla cross the line?”
“Who else?” His wife gave him pleasure. “Of course it was him.”
Fito, Fito Cebolla, he thought. Did he love or hate him? It wasn’t easy to tell, for he awakened in Don Rigoberto the kind of diffuse, contradictory emotion that seemed to be his specialty. They had met at a directors’ meeting, when it was decided to name him head of public relations for the company. Fito had friends everywhere, and though he was clearly in decline and on the road to slobbering dipsomania, he was very good at what his high-sounding appointment suggested: having relations and being public.
“What outrageous thing did he do?” he asked eagerly.
“He put his hands on me,” an embarrassed Doña Lucrecia replied evasively. “And practically raped Justiniana.”
Don Rigoberto had known him by reputation and was sure he would detest him the moment he appeared in the office to take up his new post. What else could he be but a despicable swine whose life was defined by recreational activities—his name was associated, Don Rigoberto vaguely recalled, with surfing, tennis, golf, with fashion shows or beauty contests where he was one of the judges, with frequent appearances on the society pages: his carnivorous teeth, his skin tanned on all the beaches of the world, dressed in formal clothes, sports clothes, Hawaiian clothes, evening, afternoon, dawn and dusk clothes, a glass in hand and surrounded by very pretty women. He expected complete imbecility in its high Limenian society variant. His surprise could not have been greater when he discovered that Fito Cebolla, who was precisely and utterly what he had expected—a frivolous, high-class pimp, a cynic, scrounger, and parasite, an ex-sportsman and exlion of the cocktail-party circuit—was also an original, unpredictable man and, until his alcoholic collapse, extremely amusing. He had, at one time, been a reader, and had profited from those pages, citing Fernando Casós—“In Peru what does not happen is admirable”—and, with admonitory laughter, Paul Groussac: “Florence is the artist-city, Liverpool the merchantcity, and Lima the woman-city.” (In order to verify this statement statistically, he carried a little book in which he took notes on the ugly and pretty women who crossed his path.) Soon after they met, while they were having a drink with two other men from the office at the Club de la Unión, the four of them had a contest to see who could utter the most pedantic sentence. Fito Cebolla’s (“Every time I pass through Port Douglas, Australia, I put away a crocodile steak and fuck an Aborigine”) was declared the unanimous winner.
In his solitary darkness, Don Rigoberto suffered an attack of jealousy that made his pulses pound. His fantasy clicked away like a typist. There was Doña Lucrecia again. Beautiful, with smooth shoulders and splendid arms, standing in her sandals with the stiletto heels, her shapely legs carefully depilitated, conversing with the guests, explaining to each couple in turn that Don Rigoberto had been urgently called away to Río de Janeiro that afternoon on company business.
“And why should we care?” Fito Cebolla gallantly joked, kissing the hand of his hostess after he had kissed her cheek. “It’s all we could desire.”
He was flabby despite the athletic prowess of his younger years, a tall, strutting man with batrachian eyes and a mobile mouth that stained each word with lasciviousness. He had, of course, come to the cocktail party without his wife—knowing that Don Rigoberto was flying over the Amazon jungle? Fito Cebolla had squandered the modest fortunes of his first three legitimate wives, whom he had divorced as he drained them dry, taking his leisure at the best spas in all the world. When the time came for him to rest, he settled for his fourth and, undoubtedly, final wife, whose dwindling inheritance would guarantee him not the luxurious excesses of travel, wardrobe, and cuisine but simply a decent house in La Planicie, a reasonable larder, and enough Scotch to nourish his cirrhosis, providing he did not live past seventy. She was delicate, small, elegant, and apparently stupefied by her retrospective admiration for the Adonis that Fito Cebolla had once been.
Now he was a bloated man in his sixties who went through life armed with a notebook and a pair of binoculars, and with these, on his walks around the center of the city and at red lights when he was behind the wheel of his old maroon Cadillac, he would observe and make notes, not only general information (were the women ugly or pretty?), but more specific data as well: the bounciest buttocks, pertest breasts, shapeliest legs, most swanlike necks, sensual mouths, and bewitching eyes that the traffic brought into view. His research, the most meticulous and arbitrary imaginable, sometimes devoted an entire day, and even as long as a week, to one portion of the passing female anatomies, in a manner not too different from the system devised by Don Rigoberto for the care and cleaning of body parts: Monday, asses; Tuesday, breasts; Wednesday, legs; Thursday, arms; Friday, necks; Saturday, mouths; Sunday, eyes. At the end of each month, Fito averaged out the ratings on a scale from zero to twenty.
The first time Fito Cebolla allowed him to leaf through his statistics, Don Rigoberto began to sense a disquieting similarity in their unfathomable seas of whims and manias, and to admit to an irrepressible sympathy for any specimen who could indulge his extravagances with so much insolence. (Not so in his case, for his were hidden and matrimonial.) In a certain sense, even setting aside his own cowardice and timidity—qualities lacking in Fito Cebolla—Don Rigoberto intuited that this man was his equal. Closing his eyes—useless, since the darkness in the bedroom was total—and lulled by the nearby sound of the sea at the base of the cliff, Don Rigoberto could make out that hand with its hairy knuckles, wedding band, and gold pinky ring, treacherously coming to rest on his wife’s bottom. An animal groan that could have awakened Fonchito was torn from his throat: “Son of a bitch!”
“That’s not how it happened,” said Doña Lucrecia, fondling him. “We were talking in a group of three or four people, Fito among them, and he’d already had a good number of whiskeys. Justiniana was passing a serving platter and then he, as fresh as he could be, began to flirt with her.”
“What a good-looking maid,” he exclaimed, his eyes bloodshot, his lips dribbling a thread of saliva, his voice thick. “The little zamba half-breed’s a knockout. What a body!”
“Maid’s an ugly word, it’s derogatory and somewhat racist,” responded Doña Lucrecia. “Justiniana is an employee, Fito. Like you. Rigoberto, Alfonsito, and I are very fond of her.”
“Employee, favorite, friend, protégée, whatever, I mean no disrespect,” Fito Cebolla went on, not taking his eyes off the young woman as she moved away. “I’d like to have a little zamba like that in my house.”
And at that moment Doña Lucrecia felt—unequivocal, powerful, slightly damp and warm—a man’s hand on the lower part of her left buttock, the sensitive spot where it descended in a pronounced curve to meet her thigh. For a few seconds she did not react, move it away, move away herself, or become angry. He had taken advantage of the large croton plant near the place where they were talking to make his move without anyone else noticing. Don Rigoberto was distracted by a French expression: la main baladeuse. How would you translate that? The traveling hand? The nomadic hand? The wandering hand? The slippery hand? The passing hand? Without resolving the linguistic dilemma, he became indignant again. An impassive Fito looked at Lucrecia with a suggestive smile while his fingers began to move, crushing the crepe of her dress. Doña Lucrecia moved away abruptly.
“I was faint with rage and I went to the pantry for a glass of water,” she explained to Don Rigoberto.
“What’s wrong, Señora?” Justiniana asked.
“That revolting pig put hi
s hand on me, right here. I don’t know how I kept from hitting him.”
“You should have, you should have broken a flowerpot over his head, scratched him, thrown him out of the house.” Rigoberto was furious.
“I did, I did hit him, and break the pot, and scratch him, and throw him out.” Doña Lucrecia rubbed her nose against her husband’s, like an Eskimo. “But that was later. First, some other things happened.”
The night is long, Don Rigoberto thought. He had become interested in Fito Cebolla, as if he were an entomologist studying a rare, collectible insect. He envied the crass humanity that so shamelessly displayed tics, fantasies, everything a moral code not his own would call vices, failings, degeneracy. Through an excess of egotism, without even realizing it, that fool Fito Cebolla had achieved greater freedom than he had, for he realized everything but was a hypocrite and, to make matters worse, an insurance man (like Kafka and the poet Wallace Stevens, he excused himself to himself, but in vain). With amusement Don Rigoberto recalled their conversation in César’s bar—recorded in his notebooks—when Fito Cebolla confessed that the greatest excitement he had felt in his life had been provoked not by the statuesque body of one of his infinite lovers or the show girls at the Folies-Bergére in Paris but in austere Louisiana, at the chaste State University in Baton Rouge, where his misguided father had enrolled him in the hope he would take a degree in chemical engineering. There, on a window ledge in his dormitory one spring afternoon, he had witnessed the most formidable sexual encounter since the dinosaurs had fornicated.
“Between two spiders?” Don Rigoberto’s nostrils flared and continued to quiver ferociously. His great Dumbo ears fluttered too, in an excess of excitement.
“They were this big.” Fito Cebolla mimed the scene, raising and crooking his ten fingers obscenely, bringing them close. “They saw one another, desired one another, and each advanced on the other prepared to make love or die. I should say, to make love until they died. When one leaped on the other, there was the thunder of an earthquake. The window, the whole dormitory, filled with a seminal odor.”
“How do you know they were copulating?” Don Rigoberto taunted him. “Why not just fighting?”
“They were fighting and fornicating at the same time, as it must be, as it has always had to be.” Fito Cebolla danced in his seat; his hands had locked and his ten fingers rubbed hard against one another, the joints cracking. “They sodomized each other with all their legs, rings, hairs, and eyes, with everything they had in their bodies. I never saw such happy creatures. Nothing has ever been that exciting, I swear by my sainted mother in heaven, Rigo.”
According to him, the excitation produced in him by arachnidian coitus had resisted an aerial ejaculation and several cold showers. After four decades and countless adventures, the memory of those hairy little beasts clutching at one another beneath the inclement blue sky of Baton Rouge still returned to disturb him, and even now, when his years recommended moderation, whenever that distant image came suddenly to mind, it gave him more of a hard-on than a swig of yohimbine.
“Tell us what you did at the Folies-Bergère, Fito,” Teté Barriga requested, knowing perfectly well the risk she was taking. “Even if it’s a lie, it’s so funny!”
“That was asking for it, like holding your hand to the flame,” Señora Lucrecia remarked, drawing out the story. “But Teté loves to play with fire.”
Fito Cebolla stirred in the seat where he sprawled, almost overcome by whiskey. “What do you mean, a lie! It was the only pleasant job I ever had in my life. Even though they treated me as badly as your husband treats me at the office, Lucre. Come, sit with us, pay some attention to us.”
His eyes were glazed, his voice lewd. The other guests were glancing at their watches. Doña Lucrecia, summoning all her courage, sat down next to Teté Barriga and her husband. Fito Cebolla began to evoke that summer. He had been stranded in Paris without a cent, and through a girlfriend he got a job as nippler at the “historic theater on the rue Richer.”
“That’s nippler, not nibbler,” he explained, showing the obscene tip of his reddish tongue, half-closing his salacious eyes, as if to see more clearly what he was looking at (“And what he was looking at was my cleavage, my love.” Don Rigoberto’s solitude became populated, and feverish). “Though my work was the most menial, the worst paid, the success of the show depended on me. And that was a damned big responsibility!”
“What, what was it?” Teté Barriga urged him on.
“To stiffen the nipples of the chorus girls just before they went onstage.”
And for that, in his nook behind the curtains, he had a bucket of ice. The girls, decked out in plumes, adorned with flowers, exotic hairdos, long eyelashes, false fingernails, invisible mesh tights, and peacock tails, their buttocks and breasts bare, bent over Fito Cebolla, who rubbed each nipple and the surrounding corolla with an ice cube. Then they, giving a little shriek, leaped out onstage, their breasts like swords.
“Does it work, does it work?” insisted Teté Barriga, eyeing her sagging bosom while her husband yawned. “If you rub them with ice they get…?”
“Hard, firm, erect, proud, haughty, arrogant, overbearing, bristling, enraged.” Fito Cebolla was prodigal with his synonymatic knowledge. “They stay that way for fifteen minutes by the clock.”
“Yes, it works,” Don Rigoberto repeated to himself. A faint ray of light slipped through the blinds. Another dawn far from Lucrecia. Was it time to wake Fonchito for school? Not yet. But wasn’t she here? As she had been when he had verified the Folies-Bergère formula on her own beautiful breasts. He had seen her dark nipples harden in their golden areolas and offer themselves, as cold and hard as stones, to his lips. The process of verification had cost Lucrecia a cold that had infected him as well.
“Where’s the bathroom?” asked Fito Cebolla. “I just want to wash my hands, don’t think anything dirty.”
Lucrecia led him to the hall, keeping a prudent distance. She feared she would feel that cupping hand again at any moment.
“Seriously, I really liked your little zamba half-breed,” Fito stammered as he stumbled over his own feet. “I’m democratic, they can be black, white, or yellow, as long as they’re hot. Will you give her to me? Or sell her, if you’d prefer. I’ll pay you.”
“There’s the bathroom,” Doña Lucrecia stopped him. “Wash your mouth out too, Fito.”
“Your wish is my command,” he drooled, and before she could move away, his damned hand went straight to her breasts. He pulled it back immediately and walked into the bathroom. “Excuse me, excuse me, I tried to open the wrong door.”
Doña Lucrecia returned to the living room. The guests were leaving. She trembled with rage. This time she would throw him out of the house. She exchanged the conventional courtesies and said goodbye to them in the garden. “This is the last straw, the last straw.” The minutes passed and Fito Cebolla did not appear.
“Do you mean he had left?”
“That’s what I thought. That when he left the bathroom he had gone out, discreetly, through the service entrance. But no, he hadn’t. The awful man had stayed behind.”
The guests were gone, the hired waiter had left, and, after they helped Justiniana to collect glasses and plates and closed the windows, turned out the lights in the garden, and set the alarm, the butler and cook said good night to Lucrecia and retired to their remote bedrooms in a separate wing behind the swimming pool. Justiniana, who slept on the top floor, next to Don Rigoberto’s study, was in the kitchen putting dishes in the washer.
“Fito Cebolla was hiding in the house?”
“In the sauna, perhaps, or in the garden. Waiting for the others to leave and for the cook and butler to go to bed before sneaking into the kitchen. Like a thief!”
Doña Lucrecia sat on a sofa in the living room, tired and still disturbed by the unpleasant experience. That reprobate Fito Cebolla would never set foot in this house again. She was wondering if she should tell Don Rigoberto what had
happened when she heard the scream. It came from the kitchen. She jumped to her feet and ran. At the door of the white pantry—tile walls gleaming beneath the pharmaceutical light—what she saw paralyzed her. Don Rigoberto blinked several times before fixing his gaze on the pale light at the blinds that announced the dawn. He could see them: Justiniana, sprawled on the pine table to which she had been dragged, struggling with hands and legs against the soft corpulence that was crushing her, lavishing kisses on her, making gurgling noises that were, that had to be, obscenities. In the doorway, her face distorted, her eyes wide, stood Doña Lucrecia. Her paralysis did not last long. There she was—the heart of Don Rigoberto beat wildly, filled with admiration for the Delacroixian beauty of that fury who seized the first thing she could find, the rolling pin, and threw herself on Fito Cebolla, shouting insults at him. “You abusive, miserable, filthy drunkard!” She hit him without mercy, wherever the rolling pin landed, on his back, his fat neck, his balding head, his buttocks, until she forced him to let go of his prey and defend himself. Don Rigoberto could hear the blows falling on the bones and muscles of the interrupted ravisher, who, finally defeated by the beating and by the intoxication that hindered his movements, turned, his hands outstretched toward his attacker, stumbled, slipped, and slid to the floor like jelly.