The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (35 page)

“A bottle of champagne,” the mulatta said with a triumphant smile. “Is your name really Rigoberto? Or is that your alias?”

“That’s my name. Pretty unusual, isn’t it?”

“Very unusual.” The mulatta nodded, looking at him as if instead of eyes she had two coals burning in her round face. “Well, original at least. You’re pretty original too, and that’s the truth. Want to know something? I’ve never seen ears and a nose like yours. My God, they’re enormous! Can I touch them? Will you let me?”

The mulatta’s request—she was tall and curvaceous, with incandescent eyes, a long neck, strong shoulders, and a burnished skin set off by her canary-yellow dress with its deeply plunging neckline—left Don Rigoberto speechless, incapable of even responding with a joke to what appeared to be a serious request. Lucrecia-Rosaura came to his rescue.

“Not yet, baby,” she said to the mulatta, pinching her ear. “When we’re alone, in the room, you can touch anything of his you want.”

“The three of us are going to be alone in a room?” the mulatta asked with a laugh, rolling her eyes beneath their silken false lashes. “Thanks for letting me know. And what will I do with the two of you, my angels? I don’t like odd numbers. I’m sorry. I’ll call a friend and then we can be two couples. But me alone with two men? Not on your life.”

However, when the waiter brought the bottle of what he called champagne but was in reality a sweetish spumante with hints of turpentine and camphor, the mulatta (she said her name was Estrella) seemed to become more enthusiastic about the idea of spending the rest of the night with the disparate pair, and she made jokes, laughing boisterously and distributing playful slaps between Don Rigoberto and Rosaura-Lucrecia. From time to time, like a refrain, she would laugh about “the gentleman’s ears and nose” and stare at them, her fascination charged with a mysterious covetousness.

“With ears like that you must hear more than normal people,” she said. “And smell more with that nose than ordinary men do.”

Probably, thought Don Rigoberto. What if it were true? What if he, thanks to the munificence of those organs, heard more and had a more acute sense of smell than other people? He did not like the comic turn the story was taking—his desire, inflamed only a moment ago, was fading, and he could not revive it, for Estrella’s jokes obliged him to move his attention away from Lucrecia-Rosaura and the mulatta to concentrate on his outsized auditory and nasal instruments. He tried to abbreviate certain stages, skipping over the bargaining with Estrella that lasted as long as the bottle of supposed champagne, the arrangements to have the mulatta leave the club—a token had to be purchased with a fifty-dollar bill—the rattling taxi afflicted with the tremors of tertian fever, their registering at the filthy hotel—
CIELITO LINDO
said the red-and-blue neon sign on its façade—and the negotiation with the squint-eyed clerk, who was picking his nose, to let them occupy only one room. It cost Don Rigoberto another fifty dollars to calm his fears that there might be a police raid and the establishment would be fined for renting one bedroom to three people.

As they crossed the threshold of the room, and in the dim light of a single lightbulb saw the king-size bed covered with a bluish spread, and next to it a washstand, a basin with water, a towel, a roll of toilet paper, and a chipped chamber pot—the squint-eyed clerk had just left, handing over the key and closing the door behind him—Don Rigoberto remembered: Of course! Rosaura! Estrella! He slapped his forehead, relieved. Naturally! Those names came from the performance in Madrid of
La vida es sueño
, Calderón de la Barca’s
Life Is a Dream
. And once again he felt, bubbling up from the bottom of his heart like a spring of clear water, a tender feeling of gratitude toward the depths of memory from which there endlessly poured forth surprises, images, phantoms, and suggestions to give body, backdrop, and storyline to the dreams with which he defended himself against his solitude, the absence of Lucrecia.

“Let’s get undressed, Estrella,” Rosaura was saying, standing up and then sitting down. “You’ll have the surprise of your life, so get ready.”

“I won’t take off my dress if I can’t touch your friend’s nose and ears first,” replied Estrella, utterly serious now. “I don’t know why, but I want to touch them so much it’s killing me.”

This time, instead of anger, Don Rigoberto felt flattered.

Doña Lucrecia and he had seen the play in Madrid on their first trip to Europe a few months after they were married, a performance of
La vida es sueño
so old-fashioned that open laughter could be heard in the darkened theater. The tall skinny actor who played Prince Segismundo was so bad, so clearly overwhelmed by the role, and his voice so affected, that the spectator—“well,
this
spectator,” Don Rigoberto was more precise—felt inclined to look favorably upon his cruel, superstitious father, King Basilio, for keeping him, throughout his childhood and youth, chained like a wild beast in a solitary tower, fearful that if his son came to the throne the cataclysms predicted by the stars and his learned mathematicians would come true. The entire performance had been ghastly, dreadful, clumsy. And yet Don Rigoberto recalled with absolute clarity that the appearance in the first scene of the young Rosaura dressed as a man, and later, with a sword at her waist, ready to go into battle, had touched his soul. And now he was sure he had been tempted several times since then by the desire to see Lucrecia attired in boots, plumed hat, a soldier’s tunic, at the hour of love.
La vida es sueño!
Though the performance was awful, the director unspeakable, the actors even worse, it was not only that one actress who had lived on in memory and often inflamed his senses. Something in the work intrigued him as well, because—his recollection was unequivocal—it had led him to read the play. He must still have his notes from that reading. Down on all fours on the rug in the study, Don Rigoberto looked through and discarded one notebook after another. Not this one, or this one. It had to be this one. That was the year.

“I’m naked, honey,” said Estrella the mulatta. “Now let me touch your ears and nose. Don’t make me beg. Don’t make me suffer, don’t be mean. Can’t you see I’m dying to do it? Just this one favor, baby, and I’ll make you happy.”

She had a full, abundant body, shapely though somewhat flabby in the belly, with splendid breasts that barely sagged and Renaissance rolls of flesh at her hips. She did not even seem to notice that Rosaura-Lucrecia, who had also undressed and lay on the bed, was not a man but a beautiful woman with well-delineated curves. The mulatta had eyes only for him, or rather, for his ears and nose, which she now—Don Rigoberto had sat on the edge of the bed to facilitate the operation—caressed avidly, furiously. Her ardent fingers desperately kneaded, pressed, and pinched, first his ears, then his nose. He closed his eyes in anguish because he sensed that very soon the fingers on his nose would provoke one of those allergic attacks that would not stop until he had sneezed—lascivious number—sixty-nine times. His Mexican adventure, inspired by Calderón de la Barca, would end in a grotesque outburst of nasal excess.

Yes, this was it—Don Rigoberto brought the notebook into the light of the lamp: a page of quotations and comments he had made as he read the play, its title at the top of the page:
La vida es sueño
(1638).

The first two citations, taken from speeches by Segismundo, affected him like the lashes of a whip: “Nothing to me seems right/if it counters my delight.” And the other: “And I know that I am/compounded of beast and man.” Was there a cause-and-effect relationship between the two quotations he had transcribed? Was he compounded of man and beast because nothing that opposed his pleasure seemed right? Perhaps. But when he read the play after their trip, he was not the old, tired, solitary, dejected man he had become, desperately seeking refuge in his fantasies so as not to go mad or commit suicide; he was a happy fifty-year-old brimming with life who, in the arms of his bride, his second wife, was discovering that joy existed, that it was possible to construct, at the side of his beloved, a singular citadel fortified against the stupidity, the ugliness, the mediocrity, and the routine where he spent the rest of his day. Why had he felt the need to make these notes as he read a work that, at the time, had no bearing on his personal situation? Or did it?

“If I had a man with ears and a nose like these, I’d really go wild. I’d be his slave,” exclaimed the mulatta, resting for a moment. “I’d make him happy no matter what he wanted. I’d lick the floor clean for him.”

She was squatting on her heels, and her face was flushed and sweaty, as if she had been bending over a boiling pot of soup. Her whole body seemed to vibrate. As she spoke she greedily passed her tongue over the wet lips with which she had been interminably kissing, nibbling, and licking Don Rigoberto’s auditory and olfactory organs. He used the time to take in air and dry his ears with his handkerchief. Then he blew his nose with a good deal of noise.

“This man is mine; I’m just lending him to you for the night,” said Rosaura-Lucrecia firmly.

“But don’t these marvels belong to you?” asked Estrella, not paying the slightest attention to the dialogue. Her hands had taken hold of Don Rigoberto’s alarmed face, and her thick, determined lips were advancing again toward their prey.

“Haven’t you even noticed? I’m not a man, I’m a woman,” an exasperated Rosaura-Lucrecia protested. “Look at me, at least.”

But with a slight movement of her shoulders the mulatta ignored her and passionately continued her work. She had Don Rigoberto’s left ear in her large, hot mouth, and he, unable to control himself, laughed hysterically. In fact he was very nervous. He had a presentiment that at any moment Estrella would move from love to hate and tear off his ear in one bite. “If I’m earless, Lucrecia won’t love me anymore.” He grew sad. He heaved a deep, cavernous, gloomy sigh similar to those of the bearded Prince Segismundo, chained in his secret tower, as he demanded of heaven, with great strident shouts, what sin he had committed by being born.

“That’s a stupid question,” Don Rigoberto said to himself. He had always despised the South American sport of self-pity, and from that point of view, the sniveling prince of Calderón de la Barca (a Jesuit, in all other respects), who presented himself to the audience moaning, “Ah, woe is me, most wretched of men,” had nothing that would appeal to the spectators or make them identify with him. Why, then, in his dream, had his phantoms structured the story by borrowing from
La vida es sueño
the names of Rosaura and Estrella and Rosaura’s masculine disguise? Perhaps because his life had become nothing but a dream since Lucrecia’s departure. Was he even
alive
during the gloomy, opaque hours he spent in the office discussing balances, policies, renewals, judgments, investments? His one corner of real life was provided by the night, when he fell asleep and the door of dreams was opened, which is what must have happened to Segismundo in his desolate stone tower in that dense forest. He too had discovered that true life, the rich, splendid life that yielded and bent to his will, was the life of lies, the life his mind and desires created—awake or asleep—to free him from his cell, allow him to escape the asphyxiating monotony of his confinement. The unexpected dream was not gratuitous after all: there was a kinship, an affinity, between the two miserable dreamers.

Don Rigoberto remembered a joke in diminutives whose sheer stupidity had made him and Lucrecia giggle like two children: “A teeny-tiny elephant came to the edge of a teeny-tiny lake to drink, and a teeny-tiny crocodile bit off his teeny-tiny trunk. With teeny-tiny tears, the teeny-tiny pug-nosed elephant sobbed, ‘Is that your teeny-tiny idea of a goddamn joke?’”

“Let go of my nose and I’ll give you anything you want,” he pleaded in terror, in a nasal Cantinflas voice, because Estrella’s teeny-tiny teeth were interfering with his breathing. “All the money you want. Let me go, please!”

“Quiet, I’m coming,” stammered the mulatta, letting go for a second and then seizing Don Rigoberto’s nose again with her two rows of carnivorous teeth.

A violent hippogriff, she came indeed, flying before the wind, shuddering from head to toe, while Don Rigoberto, drowning in panic, saw out of the corner of his eye that Rosaura-Lucrecia, distressed and disconcerted, sitting up in bed, had caught the mulatta around the waist and was trying to move her away, gently, without forcing, surely afraid that if she pulled too hard Estrella would bite off her husband’s nose in reprisal. They remained this way for a while, docile, joined together, while the mulatta reared and moaned and licked without restraint the nasal appendage of Don Rigoberto, who, in dark clouds of anxiety, recalled Bacon’s monstrous
Man’s Head
, a shocking canvas that had long obsessed him, and now he knew why: it was how Estrella’s jaws would leave him after she bit him. It was not the mutilation of his face that horrified him but a single question: Would Lucrecia still love an earless and noseless husband? Would she leave him?

Don Rigoberto read this excerpt in his notebook:

Segismundo declaimed this when he awoke from the artificial sleep into which (with a mixture of opium, poppy, and henbane) King Basilio and old Clotaldo had plunged him when they mounted the ignoble farce, moving him from his prison tower to court to have him rule for a brief time and leading him to believe that the transition was also a dream. What happened to your fantasy as you slept, poor prince, he thought, is that they put you to sleep with drugs and killed you. For a moment they returned you to your true state, making you believe that you dreamed. And then you took the liberties one takes when he enjoys the impunity of dreams. You gave free rein to your desires, you threw a man off a balcony, you almost killed old Clotaldo and even King Basilio himself. And so they had the pretext they needed—you were violent, foul-tempered, base—to return you to the chains and solitude of your prison. Despite this, he envied Segismundo. He too, like the unfortunate prince condemned by mathematics and the stars to live in dreams so as not to die of imprisonment and solitude, was, he had written in the notebook, “a living skeleton,” an “animate corpse.” But unlike the prince, he had no King Basilio, no noble Clotaldo, to remove him from his abandonment and solitude, to put him to sleep with opium, poppy, and henbane and allow him to wake in the arms of Lucrecia. “Lucrecia, my Lucrecia,” he sighed, realizing that he was weeping. What a sniveler he had become this past year!