The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (29 page)

Like a bolt of lightning she shot past Justiniana and Fonchito, wild with indignation. But before going to the dressing table where she kept the anonymous letters, she went to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face and rub her temples with cologne. She could not calm down. This kid, this damn brat. Playing with her, yes, the little kitten with the big mouse. Sending her daring, elaborate letters to make her think they were from Rigoberto, encouraging her to hope for a reconciliation. What was he after? What scheme was he devising? Why the farce? For the fun, the sheer fun of manipulating her emotions, her life? He was perverse, sadistic. He enjoyed leading her on and then watching her crumbling hopes, her disillusionment.

She returned to her bedroom, still not herself, and did not have to look very long in her dressing-table drawer to find the letter. The seventh one. There was the sentence that had alerted her, more or less as she had remembered it: “…you will hide your lovely head behind the mask of a wild animal, preferably the tigress in heat in Rubén Darío’s
Azul
…or a Sudanese lioness. You will thrust out your hip…” et cetera, et cetera. The Tahitian Moa in the drawing by Schiele, no more, no less. That precocious little troublemaker, that schemer. He’d had the gall to play out a whole drama about Schiele’s mirror, even showing her the picture that betrayed him. She wasn’t sorry she had thrown the book, even though it did give him a bloody nose. Good! Hadn’t the little devil ruined her life? Because she had not been the seducer, though the difference in their ages condemned her. He, he had been the seducer. With his youth and cherubic face, he was Mephistopheles, Lucifer in person. But that was all over. She’d make him eat this anonymous letter, yes, and throw him out of the house. And he’d never come back, never interfere in her life again.

But she found only a dejected Justiniana in the dining alcove. She showed her the bloodstained napkin.

“He left crying, Señora. Not because of his nose. But because when you threw it at him you tore the book about that painter he likes so much. He’s really sad, I can tell you.”

“Go on, now you’re feeling sorry for him.” Señora Lucrecia dropped to the sofa, exhausted. “Don’t you realize what he did to me? He, he’s the one who sent me those anonymous letters.”

“He swore he didn’t, Señora. He swore by all that’s holy that it was the señor who sent them.”

“He’s lying.” Doña Lucrecia felt utterly exhausted. Was she going to faint? How she longed to go to bed, close her eyes, sleep for an entire week. “He gave himself away when he mentioned the mask and the mirror.”

Justiniana came over to her and spoke almost in a whisper. “Are you sure you didn’t read him that letter? That you didn’t tell him about the mask? Fonchito is a clever little scamp, Señora. Do you think he’d let something so stupid trip him up?”

“I never read him that letter, I never told him about the mask,” Doña Lucrecia declared. But at that same moment she began to have doubts.

Had she? Yesterday, or the day before? Her mind wandered so these days; ever since the flood of anonymous letters she had been lost in a forest of conjectures, speculations, suspicions, fantasies. Wasn’t it possible? That she had told him, mentioned it, even read him that strange command to pose nude, wearing stockings and an animal mask, in front of a mirror? If she had, she had committed a grave injustice by insulting and hitting him.

“I can’t take any more,” she murmured, making an effort to hold back her tears. “I’m sick of it, Justita, sick of it. I probably told him and forgot. I don’t know where my head is. Maybe I did. I want to leave this city, this country. Go where nobody knows me. Far away from Rigoberto and Fonchito. Because of those two I’ve fallen into a pit and I’ll never climb out.”

“Don’t be sad, Señora.” Justiniana put her hand on her shoulder, stroked her forehead. “Don’t be bitter. And don’t worry. There’s a way, a very easy way, to find out if it’s Fonchito or Don Rigoberto who’s writing all that nonsense to you.”

Doña Lucrecia looked up. The girl’s eyes were flashing.

“Of course there is, Señora.” She spoke with her hands, her eyes, her lips, her teeth. “Didn’t the last letter arrange a date with you? That’s the answer. Go where it says, do what it asks.”

“Do you really think I’m going to do things that belong in a cheap Mexican movie?” Doña Lucrecia pretended to be shocked.

“And that’s how you’ll find out who’s writing the letters,” Justiniana concluded. “I’ll go with you, if you like. So you won’t feel so alone. And because I’m dying of curiosity too, Señora. Sonny or daddy? Which one can it be?”

She laughed with all her usual boldness and charm, and Doña Lucrecia finally began to smile as well. After all, perhaps this lunatic was right. If she kept the mysterious appointment, her doubts would be over at last.

“He won’t show up, I’ll be playing the fool again,” she argued, not very convincingly, knowing deep down that she had made her decision. She would go, do every silly thing daddy or sonny asked. She’d go on playing the game that, willingly or not, she had been playing for so long.

“Shall I fix you a nice warm bath with salts, so you’ll get over your temper?” Justiniana was extremely animated.

Doña Lucrecia nodded. Damn it, now she had the feeling she had been too hasty and very unfair to poor Fonchito.

Letter to the Reader of
Playboy,
or A Brief Treatise on Aesthetics

Since eroticism is the intelligent and sensitive humanization of physical love, and pornography its cheapening and degradation, I accuse you, reader of
Playboy
or
Penthouse
, frequenter of vile dens that show hard-core movies, and sex shops where you purchase electric vibrators, rubber dildos, and condoms adorned with rooster crests or archbishops’ mitres, of contributing to the rapid regression to mere animal copulation of the one attribute granted to men and women that makes them most like gods (pagan ones, of course, who were neither chaste nor prudish regarding sexual matters, like the one we all know about).

You transgress openly each month when, aroused by the flames of your desires, you renounce the exercise of your own imagination and succumb to the municipal vice of permitting your most subtle drives, those of the carnal appetite, to be reined in by products that have been cloned, and by seeming to satisfy your sexual urges actually subjugate them, watering them down, serializing and constricting them in caricatures that vulgarize sex, strip it of originality, mystery, and beauty, and turn it into a farcical, ignoble affront to good taste. To let you know who your accuser is, perhaps I can clarify my thinking for you by stating (monogamist that I am, though looking kindly on adultery) that I consider the late and highly respected Israeli leader Doña Golda Meir, or the austere Señora Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, not one of whose hairs moved for the entire time she was Prime Minister, as more delectable sources of erotic desire than any of those interchangeable pimp’s dolls, breasts swollen by silicone, pubises trimmed and dyed, the same fraud mass-produced out of a single mold, who, blending stupidity with the ridiculous, appear in the centerfold of
Playboy
, that enemy of Eros, wearing plush ears and a tail and flourishing their scepter as “Bunny of the Month.”

My hatred for
Playboy
,
Penthouse
, and others of their ilk is not gratuitous. This kind of magazine symbolizes the corruption of sex, the disappearance of the beautiful taboos that once surrounded it and against which the human spirit could rebel, exercising individual freedom, affirming the singular personality of each human being, gradually creating the sovereign individual in the secret and discreet elaboration of rituals, actions, images, cults, fantasies, ceremonies which, by ethically ennobling the act of love and conferring aesthetic distinction upon it, progressively humanized it until it was transformed into a creative act. An act thanks to which, in the private intimacy of bedrooms, a man and a woman (I cite the orthodox formula, but clearly this also applies to a gentleman and a web-footed creature, two women, two or three men, and all imaginable combinations as long as the company does not exceed three individuals or, at most, two couples) could spend a few hours emulating Homer, Phidias, Botticelli, or Beethoven. I know you don’t understand me, but that is not important; if you understood me, you would not be imbecilic enough to synchronize your erections and orgasms with the watch (surely solid gold and waterproof?) of a man named Hugh Hefner.

The problem is more aesthetic than ethical, philosophical, sexual, psychological, or political, though it goes without saying that such divisions are unacceptable to me because
everything
that matters is, in the long run, aesthetic. Pornography strips eroticism of its artistic content, favors the organic over the spiritual and mental, as if the central protagonists of desire and pleasure were phalluses and vulvas and these organs not mere servants to the phantoms that govern our souls, and segregates physical love from the rest of human experience. Eroticism, on the other hand, integrates it with everything we are, everything we have. Pornographer, while for you the only thing that counts when you make love is the same thing that counts for a dog, a monkey, or a horse—that is, to ejaculate—Lucrecia and I, go on, envy us,
also
make love when we are having breakfast, dressing, listening to Mahler, talking with friends, and contemplating the clouds or the sea.

When I say aesthetic you may, perhaps, think—if pornography and thinking are compatible—that with this shortcut I fall into the trap of gregariousness, and, since values are generally shared, in this domain I am less myself and more the other, in short, a part of the tribe. I acknowledge that the danger exists, but I battle it unceasingly, day and night, defending my independence against all odds through the constant exercise of my freedom.

You can judge this for yourself by reading a small sample of my personal treatise on aesthetics (which I hope I do not share with many people, which is flexible, which is shaped and reshaped like clay in the hands of a skilled potter).

Everything brilliant is ugly. There are brilliant cities, like Vienna, Buenos Aires, and Paris; brilliant writers, like Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and John Updike; brilliant painters, like Andy Warhol, Matta, and Tàpies. Though all of them shine, for me they are dispensable. Without exception, all modern architects are brilliant, and for this reason architecture has been marginalized from art and transformed into a branch of advertising and public relations, and therefore it would be a good idea to reject architects en masse and have recourse only to masons, master builders, and the inspiration of laymen. There are no brilliant musicians, though composers like Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie struggled to achieve brilliance and almost succeeded. Cinema, a diversion like judo or wrestling, is post-artistic and does not deserve to be included in any considerations regarding aesthetics, despite a few Western anomalies (tonight I would save Visconti, Orson Welles, Buñuel, Berlanga, and John Ford) and one Japanese (Kurosawa).

Every person who writes “nuclearize,” “I submit,” “raise consciousness,” “visualize,” “societal,” and, above all, “telluric,” is a son/daughter of a bitch. As are those who use toothpicks in public, inflicting on their neighbors a repellent sight that defaces the landscape. As are those repulsive creatures who pull off pieces of bread and knead them into little balls that they leave on the table. Don’t ask me why the perpetrators of these hideous acts are sons/daughters of bitches; such knowledge is intuited and assimilated through inspiration; infused, not studied. The same term applies, of course, to the mortal of any sex who, in an attempt to Castilianize drink, writes
guisqui
for whiskey,
yinyerel
for ginger ale, or
jaibol
for highball. These men/women should probably die, for I suspect their lives are superfluous.

The obligation of a film or a book is to entertain me. If I am distracted, if I begin to nod or fall asleep when I watch or read them, they have failed in their duty and are bad books, bad films. Conspicuous examples:
The Man without Qualities
, by Musil, and all the movies made by those charlatans called Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino.

With regard to painting and sculpture, my criterion for making an artistic judgment is very simple: everything I could paint or sculpt myself is shit. The only artists of value are those whose works, far beyond the reach of my creative mediocrity, I could not reproduce. This criterion has allowed me to determine, on first viewing, that all work by “artists” like Andy Warhol or Frida Kahlo is trash, and, on the contrary, even the quickest sketch by George Grosz, Chillida, or Balthus is a work of genius. In addition to this general rule, the obligation of a picture is to excite me (an expression I am not fond of but use because I like even less, since it introduces a comic element into something very serious, our Latin American allegory: “almost get me off”). If I like it but it leaves me cold, if my imagination is not overwhelmed by theatrical-copulatory desires and that tickling buzz in the testicles that precedes a tender new erection, then even if it is the
Mona Lisa
,
The Man with His Hand on His Chest
,
Guernica
, or
The Night Watch
, the picture holds no interest for me. And so you may be surprised to learn that in Goya, another sacred monster, I like only the little shoes with golden buckles, pointed heels, and satin adornments worn with white mesh stockings by the marquises in his oil paintings, and that in Renoir’s paintings I look with benevolence (sometimes with pleasure) only on the pink behinds of his peasant girls and avoid his other bodies, above all those kewpie-doll faces and firefly-eyes that anticipate—
vade retro!
—the
Playboy
bunnies. In Courbet, I am interested in the lesbians and that gigantic posterior that made the prudish Empress Eugénie blush.