The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (15 page)

“You know very well, my dear Corsican brother.” The fierce wolf brought his mouth to the great fluttering ear of Don Rigoberto. And without further maneuvering, he formulated his proposal: “The switching game. One more time. Today, right here, right now. Don’t you like Ilse? I like Lucrecia, a lot. We’ll do what we did with Lucerito and Chinchilla. Could there ever be jealousy between you and me? Let’s be young again, Brother!”

In his Sunday solitude, Don Rigoberto’s heart beat faster. With surprise, emotion, curiosity, excitement? And, as he had that night, he felt the urge to kill Narciso.

“We’re too old and too different now for our wives to be taken in,” he declared, drunk with astonishment.

“There’s no need for them to be taken in,” Narciso replied, very sure of himself. “They’re modern women, they don’t need excuses. Leave it to me, tiger.”

I’ll never, never play the switching game at my age, thought Don Rigoberto without opening his mouth. The rising intoxication of a moment ago had dissipated. Damn! Narciso certainly was a man of action. He had already taken his arm and was hurrying him back to the room with the mounted animals, where, cordially gossiping, Ilse and Lucrecia were tearing apart a mutual friend whose recent face-lift had left her with eyes that would be wide-open forever (at least until she was buried or incinerated). And was already announcing that the moment had come to open a bottle of the special reserve Dom Pérignon that he saved for special occasions.

A few minutes later they heard the foaming little explosion, and the four of them were toasting one another with that pale ambrosia. The bubbles going down his esophagus provoked in Don Rigoberto’s spirit an idea associated with the topic that had been monopolized all night by his Corsican brother: had Narciso laced the joyful champagne they were drinking with one of the countless aphrodisiacs he said he smuggled and about which he claimed expertise? Because the laughter and bravado of Lucrecia and Ilse were increasing, seeming to favor bold moves, and even he, who five minutes earlier had felt paralyzed, confused, shocked, angered by the proposal—and yet had not had the courage to reject it—now viewed the idea with less indignation, as if it were one of those irresistible temptations that, in his Catholic youth, had driven him to commit the sins he would later describe so contritely in the confessional. Through wisps of smoke—was his Corsican brother the one who was smoking?—and the savage fangs of an Amazonian lion, he saw his sister-in-law’s long white legs, crossed, carefully depilitated, and set off by the tigerskin rug in the living room—zoo—mortuary. Excitement manifested itself as a discreet itch low in his belly. And he could see her knees, rounded and satiny, the kind French gallantry called
polies
, indicating solid depths, undoubtedly wet, beneath her brown pleated skirt. Desire coursed through his body. Amazed at himself, he thought, After all, why not? Narciso had asked Lucrecia to dance, and with their arms around one another they began to sway, slowly, next to the wall hung with deer antlers and bear heads. Jealousy seasoned (but did not replace or destroy) his evil thoughts with a bittersweet flavor. He did not vacillate; he leaned over, took away the glass that Ilse was holding in her hand, and drew her toward him: “Care to dance, dear sister-in-law?” His brother had put on a series of slow boleros, of course.

He felt a pang in his heart when, through the locks of the Valkyrie’s hair, he saw his Corsican brother and Lucrecia dancing cheek to cheek. His arms encircling her waist, and hers around his neck. How long had these intimacies been going on? He could recall nothing like it in ten years of marriage. Yes, that evil wizard Narciso must have spiked the drinks. While he was lost in speculation, his right arm had been drawing his sister-in-law closer to him. And she did not resist. When he felt the brush of her thighs against his, their bellies touching, Don Rigoberto told himself, not without uneasiness, that now nothing, and no one, could prevent his approaching erection. And, in fact, it came upon him at the very moment he felt Ilse’s cheek against his. When the music ended it affected him like the bell during a pitiless boxing match. “Thank you, my beautiful Brunhilde,” and he kissed his sister-in-law’s hand. And, tripping over gruesome heads filled with stucco or papier-mâché, he moved toward the spot where Lucrecia and Narciso—with chagrin? reluctantly?—were disengaging. He took his wife in his arms and murmured pointedly, “Dear wife, may I have this dance?” He led her to the darkest corner of the room. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Narciso and Ilse were also embracing and, in a concerted movement, had begun to kiss.

Holding the suspiciously languid body of his wife very close, his erection was reborn; now it pressed without prudery against the form he knew so well. Their lips were touching as he whispered, “Do you know what Narciso proposed?”

“I can imagine,” replied Lucrecia with a naturalness that Don Rigoberto found as unsettling as her use of a verb neither of them had ever said in their conjugal intimacy. “He wants you to fuck Ilse while he fucks me?”

He longed to hurt her; instead, he kissed her, assailed by one of those moments of impassioned effusiveness to which he often gave way. Transfixed, feeling that he might begin to cry, he whispered that he loved and wanted her and could never thank her for the happiness she had brought him. “Yes, yes, I love you,” he said aloud. “With all my dreams, Lucrecia.” The gray Barrancan Sunday brightened, the solitude of his study softened. Don Rigoberto noticed that a tear had fallen from his cheek and blurred a very appropriate quotation from the Valéryan (valerian and Valéry, what a happy union) Monsieur Teste, which defined his own relationship to love: “
Tout ce qui m’était facile m’était indifférent etpresque ennemi
.”

Before sadness could overpower him, or the warm feeling of just a moment ago sink completely into corrosive melancholy, he made an effort, and half-closing his eyes and forcing himself to concentrate, he returned to the room filled with animals and the night heavy with smoke—did Narciso smoke? did Ilse?—to dangerous mixtures of champagne, cognac, whiskey, music, and the relaxed ambiance that enveloped them, no longer divided into two stable and precise couples as they had been at the start of the evening before they went to eat dinner at the Costa Verde restaurant, but intermingled, precarious couples who separated and came together again with an ease that matched the amorphous atmosphere as changeable as the shape in a kaleidoscope. Had the light been turned off? A while ago. By Narciso, of course. The room with its dead beasts was faintly illuminated by the light from the pool, allowing only glimpses of shadows, silhouettes, anonymous contours. His Corsican brother prepared his ambushes well. Don Rigoberto’s body and spirit had become dissociated; while his spirit wandered, attempting to discover if it would take the game suggested by Narciso to its ultimate consequences, his body, confident and free of scruples, was already engaged in play. Which one was he caressing as he pretended to dance and stood swaying in place, sensing vaguely that the music was stopping and starting periodically? Lucrecia or Ilse? He did not want to know. What a pleasurable sensation to have welded to him that female form whose breasts he could feel, deliciously, through his shirt, whose firm neck his lips nibbled slowly as they advanced toward an ear whose opening the tip of his tongue greedily explored. No, that cartilage or small bone was not Lucrecia’s. He raised his eyes and tried to penetrate the shadows of the corner where he recalled seeing Narciso dancing just a moment before.

“They went up a while ago.” Ilse’s voice sounded vague and bored in his ear. He could even detect a touch of mockery.

“Where?” he asked stupidly, immediately embarrassed by his stupidity.

“Where do you think?” Ilse replied, with a perverse little laugh and German humor. “To look at the moon? Or take a piss? Have any ideas, Brother-in-law?”

“You never see the moon in Lima,” Don Rigoberto stammered, releasing Ilse and moving away from her. “You can hardly see the sun in summer. It’s the damn fog.”

“Narciso has wanted Lucre for a long time.” Ilse put him back on the rack, not giving him a chance to catch his breath; she spoke as if it had nothing to do with her. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, you’re not a moron.”

His intoxication had dissipated, along with his excitement. He began to perspire. Silently, idiotically, he was asking himself how Lucrecia could have consented so easily to the machinations of his Corsican brother, when he was shaken once again by Ilse’s small, insidious voice.

“Are you a little jealous, Rigo?”

“Well, yes, I am,” he acknowledged. And then more frankly: “In fact, I’m very jealous.”

“I was too, at first,” she said, as if it were just another banal remark during a bridge game. “You get used to it, like watching the rain.”

“All right, all right,” he said, disconcerted. “Do you mean that you and Narciso often play the switching game?”

“Every three months,” Ilse replied with Prussian precision. “Not really often. Narciso says that if you don’t want this kind of adventure to lose its charm, you can only do it once in a while. Always with carefully chosen people. Because if it becomes trivialized it’s no fun anymore.”

He must have taken off her clothes by now, he thought. Now he’s holding her in his arms. Was Lucrecia kissing and caressing his Corsican brother with the same avidity? He was still trembling as if he had Saint Vitus’ dance when Ilse’s next question passed through him like an electric shock: “Would you like to see them?”

She had brought her face close to speak. His sister-in-law’s long blond hair was in his mouth and eyes.

“Are you serious?” he murmured in astonishment.

“Would you like to?” she insisted, brushing his ear with her lips.

“Yes, yes,” he agreed. He felt as if his bones were melting, as if he were evaporating.

She grasped his right hand. “Nice and slow, very quiet,” she ordered. She led him, floating, to the winding wrought-iron staircase that led to the bedrooms. It was dark, as was the hallway, though the corridor did receive some illumination from the floodlights in the garden. The deep pile of the carpet muffled their steps; they moved forward on tiptoe. Don Rigoberto felt his heart racing. What awaited him? What would he see? His sister-in-law stopped and whispered another order into his ear: “Take off your shoes,” as she leaned over to remove hers. Don Rigoberto obeyed. He felt ridiculous without his shoes, like a thief in his stockinged feet, with Ilse leading him by the hand along the dim corridor as if he were Fonchito. “Don’t make noise, you’ll ruin everything,” she said, standing still. He nodded, like a robot. Ilse started to walk again, opened a door, and had him go in ahead of her. They were in the bedroom, separated from the bed by a brick half-wall with regularly spaced diamond-shaped openings that allowed them to see the bed. It was extremely wide and theatrical. In the cone of light that fell from a ceiling fixture, he saw his Corsican brother and Lucrecia, fused together, moving rhythmically. The sound of their panting, like a quiet dialogue, reached him.

“You can sit down,” Ilse indicated. “Here, on the sofa.”

He did as he was told. He stepped back and dropped beside his sister-in-law on what must have been a long couch strewn with pillows and placed so that the person sitting there would not miss any part of the show. What did this mean? A chuckle escaped Don Rigoberto: “My Corsican brother is more baroque than I imagined.” His mouth was dry.

Their expert positioning and perfect joining made it seem as if the couple had been making love their entire lives. The two bodies never separated; with each new posture, legs, elbows, shoulders, hips seemed to find an even better fit, and as the moments passed, each partner seemed to derive even deeper pleasure from the other. There were the beautiful full curves, the wavy jet-black hair of his beloved, the raised buttocks that made one think of a gallant promontory defying the assault of a wild sea. “No,” he said to himself. Rather, the splendid rump in the gorgeous photograph
La Prière
, by Man Ray (1930). He searched through his notebooks and in a few minutes was contemplating the image. His heart sank as he recalled the times when Lucrecia had posed like this for him, in their nocturnal intimacy, sitting back on her heels, both hands supporting the hemispheres of her buttocks. Nor did he find any dissonance in the comparison to another image by Man Ray that his notebook offered next to the first, for the musical back of
Kikí de Montparnasse
(1925) was precisely the one displayed by Lucrecia as she twisted and turned. The deep inflections of her hips held him in rapt suspense for a few seconds. But the hairy arms encircling that body, the legs holding down those thighs and spreading them, were not his, nor was that face—he could not make out Narciso’s features—moving now along Lucrecia’s back, scrutinizing it millimeter by millimeter, the partially open mouth indecisive about where to land and what to kiss. In Don Rigoberto’s agitated mind there flashed the image of two trapeze artists at the circus, the Human Eagles, who flew and were united in midair—they worked without a net—after performing acrobatic feats ten meters above the ground. Lucrecia and Narciso were just as skilled, just as perfect, just as suited to one another. He was overcome by a tripartite feeling (admiration, envy, and jealousy) and tears of emotion again rolled down his cheeks. He noticed that Ilse’s hand was professionally exploring his fly.

“I don’t believe it, this doesn’t excite you at all,” he heard her say without lowering her voice.

Don Rigoberto detected a startled movement in the bed. They had heard, of course; they could no longer pretend not to know they were being observed. They remained motionless; Doña Lucrecia’s profile turned toward the openwork wall, but Narciso kissed her again and drew her back into the battle of love.

“Forgive me, Ilse,” he whispered. “I’m disappointing you, and I’m sorry. But I—how shall I put it—I’m monogamous. I can make love only to my wife.”

“Of course you are.” Ilse laughed affectionately, and so loudly that now, under the light, Doña Lucrecia’s tousled head escaped the embrace of his Corsican brother, and Don Rigoberto saw her large, startled eyes looking in fright toward the place where he and Ilse were sitting. “Just like your sweet Corsican brother. Narciso likes making love only to me. But he needs appetizers, apéritifs, prologues. He’s not as uncomplicated as you.”