The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (38 page)

“I know, my love, I know.”

Don Rigoberto turned her onto her back and positioned himself over her. Doña Lucrecia too seemed to have regained her desire—there were no more tears on her cheeks, her body was hot, her breathing heavy—and as soon as she felt him on top of her she parted her legs and let him enter. Don Rigoberto closed his eyes and gave her a long, deep kiss, immersed in total surrender, happy once more. Fitting perfectly, touching and rubbing from head to foot, their perspiration mixing, they rocked slowly, rhythmically, prolonging their pleasure.

“In fact, you’ve gone to bed with many people all year,” he said.

“Oh, really?” she purred, as if speaking with her belly from some secret gland. “How many? Who? Where?”

“A zoological lover who put you into bed with cats”—“How awful, that’s disgusting,” his wife protested weakly. “A love of your youth, a scientist who took you to Paris and Venice and who sang when he came…”

“I want details,” Doña Lucrecia gasped, speaking with difficulty. “All of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me.”

“That asshole Fito Cebolla almost raped you, and Justiniana too. You saved her from his raging lust. And ended up making love to her in this very bed.”

“Justiniana? In this bed?” Doña Lucrecia laughed. “Life is so strange. Well, because of Fonchito, one afternoon I almost made love to Justiniana in San Isidro. The only time my body betrayed you, Rigoberto. But my imagination has done it a thousand times. As has yours.”

“My imagination has never betrayed you. But tell me, tell me,” and her husband accelerated the rocking, the swaying.

“I’ll tell you later, you go first. Who? How? Where?”

“With a twin brother of mine whom I invented, a Corsican brother, in an orgy. With a castrated motorcyclist. You were a law professor in Virginia, and you corrupted a saintly jurist. You made love to the wife of the Algerian ambassador in a steambath. Your feet maddened a French fetishist of the eighteenth century. The night before our reconciliation, we were in a Mexican brothel with a mulatta who pulled off one of my ears in a single bite.”

“Don’t make me laugh, you fool, not now,” Doña Lucrecia protested. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you stop me.”

“I’m coming too. Let’s come together. I love you.”

Moments later, when they were calm, he on his back, she curled at his side with her head on his shoulder, they resumed their conversation. Outside, along with the crash of the sea, the night was disturbed by the shrieks and howls of cats fighting or in heat, and, at intervals, the blare of car horns and the roar of motors.

“I’m the happiest man in the world,” said Don Rigoberto.

She nestled against him demurely. “Will it last? Will we make our happiness last?”

“It can’t last,” he said gently. “All happiness is fleeting. An exception, a contrast. But we have to rekindle it from time to time, not allow it to go out. Blowing, blowing on the little flame.”

“I’ll start exercising my lungs right now,” Doña Lucrecia exclaimed. “I’ll make them like bellows. And when it begins to go out, I’ll puff out a blast of wind that will make it grow bigger and bigger. Phhhhewwww! Phhhhewwww!”

They lay silent, in each other’s arms. His wife was so still that Don Rigoberto thought she had fallen asleep. But her eyes were open.

“I always knew we would reconcile,” he said into her ear. “I wanted to, tried to, for months. But I didn’t know where to begin. And then your letters began to arrive. You read my thoughts, my love. You’re better than I am.”

His wife’s body stiffened. But it immediately relaxed again.

“An ingenious idea, those letters,” he went on. “The anonymous letters, I mean. A baroque scheme, a brilliant strategy. To pretend I was sending you anonymous letters so you would have an excuse to write to me. You’re always surprising me, Lucrecia. I thought I knew you, but no. I never would have imagined your sweet head involved in machinations and tangled schemes. They turned out well, didn’t they? Lucky for me.”

There was another long silence in which Don Rigoberto counted the beats of his wife’s heart, which sounded in counterpoint and at times were confused with his own.

“I’d like us to take a trip,” he digressed a little while later, feeling that he was succumbing to sleep. “Somewhere far away, totally exotic. Where we don’t know anybody and nobody knows us. Iceland, for example. Maybe at the end of the year. I can take a week, ten days. Would you like that?”

“I’d rather go to Vienna,” she said, stumbling over the words—because she was tired? feeling the languor that love always caused in her? “And see Egon Schiele’s work, visit the places where he worked. For all these months I haven’t done anything but hear about his life, his paintings, his drawings. And now my curiosity is piqued. Doesn’t Fonchito’s fascination with this painter surprise you? You’ve never liked Schiele very much, as far as I know. So why does he?”

He shrugged. He didn’t have the slightest idea where that passion might have sprung from.

“Well then, in December we’ll go to Vienna,” he said. “To listen to Mozart and see the Schieles. I never liked him, it’s true, but perhaps now I’ll start to. If you like him, I’ll like him. I don’t know where Fonchito’s enthusiasm comes from. Are you falling asleep? I’m keeping you up with my talking. Good night, love.”

She murmured “Good night,” turned on her side, and pressed her back against her husband’s chest; he turned on his side as well, flexing his legs so that she seemed to be sitting on his knees. This is how they had slept for the ten years before their separation. And how they had slept since the day before yesterday. Don Rigoberto passed an arm over Lucrecia’s shoulder and rested one hand on her breast, clasping her waist with the other.

The cats in the vicinity had stopped their fighting, or their lovemaking. The last horn and raucous motor had long since fallen silent. Warm, and warmed by the nearness of the beloved body so close to his, Don Rigoberto had the sensation that he was floating, gliding, moved by a pleasant inertia through tranquil, delicate waters, or, perhaps, through deep, empty space on his way to the icy stars. How many more days or hours would it last without shattering, this sensation of plenitude, of harmonious calm, of equilibrium with life? As if responding to his silent question, he heard Doña Lucrecia: “How many anonymous letters did you receive, Rigoberto?”

“Ten,” he replied with a start. “I thought you were asleep. Why do you ask?”

“I received ten from you, too,” she said, not moving. “That’s called love by symmetry, I guess.”

Now it was he who tensed. “Ten letters from me? I never wrote to you, not once. Not anonymous letters, or signed ones, either.”

“I know,” she said, sighing deeply. “You’re the one who doesn’t know. You’re the one whose head is in the clouds. Now do you understand? I didn’t send you any anonymous letters either. Only one letter. But I’ll bet that one, the only genuine one, never reached you.”

Two, three, five seconds passed without his speaking or moving. The only sound came from the sea, but it seemed to Don Rigoberto that the night had filled with furious tomcats and she-cats in heat.

“You’re not joking, are you?” he said at last, knowing very well that Doña Lucrecia had spoken with absolute seriousness.

She did not answer. She remained as still and silent as he, for another long while. What a short time it had lasted, how brief that overwhelming happiness. There it was again, harsh and cruel, Rigoberto, real life.

“If you can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep,” he finally proposed, “maybe we could try to straighten this out, the way other people count sheep. We’d better do it now, once and for all. If you agree, if you want to. Because if you’d rather forget it, we’ll forget it. We won’t talk about those letters again.”

“You know very well we’ll never be able to forget them, Rigoberto,” his wife declared, with a trace of weariness. “Let’s do now what you and I both know we’ll eventually do anyway.”

“All right, then,” he said, sitting up. “We’ll read them.”

The temperature had dropped, and before they went to the study they put on their robes. Doña Lucrecia brought the thermos of hot lemonade for her husband’s supposed cold. Before showing one another their respective letters, they drank some warm lemonade from the same glass. Don Rigoberto had kept his anonymous letters in the last of his notebooks, which still had blank pages free of commentaries and annotations; Doña Lucrecia had hers in a portfolio, tied with a thin purple ribbon. They found that the envelopes were identical as well as the paper, the kind of envelopes and paper that sold for four reales in little Chinese grocery stores. But the writing was different. And, of course, the letter from Doña Lucrecia, the only authentic one, was not among them.

“It’s my writing,” Don Rigoberto murmured, going beyond what he believed was the limit of his capacity for astonishment, and then feeling even more astounded. He had read the first letter with great care, almost ignoring what it said, concentrating only on the calligraphy. “Well, the fact is that my handwriting is the most conventional in the world. Anybody can imitate it.”

“Especially a young boy with a passion for painting, a child-artist,” concluded Doña Lucrecia, flourishing the anonymous letters supposedly written by her, which she had just leafed through. “On the other hand, this is not my writing. That’s why he didn’t give you the only letter I really wrote. So you wouldn’t compare it to these and discover the deception.”

“They’re vaguely similar,” Don Rigoberto corrected her; he had picked up a magnifying glass and was examining the letter, like a collector with a rare stamp. “It is, in any case, a round hand, very clear. The writing of a woman who studied with nuns, probably at the Sophianum.”

“And you didn’t know my handwriting?”

“No, no, I didn’t,” he admitted. It was the third surprise on this night of great surprises. “I realize now that I didn’t. As far as I recall, you never wrote me a letter before.”

“I didn’t write these to you, either.”

Then, for at least half an hour, they sat in silence, reading their respective letters, or more precisely, each one read the other, unknown half of this correspondence. They were sitting next to one another on the large leather sofa with pillows, beneath the tall floor lamp whose shade had drawings of an Australian tribe. The wide circle of light reached both of them. From time to time they drank warm lemonade. From time to time one of them chuckled, but the other asked no questions. From time to time the expression on one of their faces would change, showing amazement, anger, or a sentimental weakness, tenderness, indulgence, a vague melancholy. They finished reading at the same time. They looked at one another obliquely; they were exhausted, perplexed, indecisive. Where should they begin?

“He’s been in here,” Don Rigoberto said at last, pointing at his desk, his shelves. “He’s looked through my things and read them. The most sacred, secret things I have, these notebooks. Not even you have seen them. My supposed letters to you are, in reality, mine. Though I didn’t write them. Because I’m certain he transcribed all those phrases from my notebooks. Making a mixed salad. Combining thoughts, quotations, jokes, games, my own reflections and other people’s.”

“And that’s why those games, those orders, seemed to come from you,” said Doña Lucrecia. “But these letters, I don’t know how you could have thought they were mine.”

“I was going crazy, wanting to know about you, to receive some sign from you,” Don Rigoberto apologized. “Drowning men grab on to whatever’s in front of them, they don’t turn up their noses at anything.”

“But all that vulgarity, that sentimentality? Don’t they sound more like Corín Tellado?”

“They are Corín Tellado, some of them,” said Don Rigoberto, remembering, associating. “A few weeks ago her novels began to show up around the house. I thought they belonged to the maids or the cooks. Now I know whose they were and what they were used for.”

“I’m going to murder that boy,” exclaimed Doña Lucrecia. “Corín Tellado! I swear I’ll murder him.”

“You’re laughing?” he said in astonishment. “You think it’s funny? Should we congratulate him, reward him?”

She really laughed now, for a longer time, more openly than before.

“The truth is, I don’t know what I think, Rigoberto. It certainly is nothing to laugh at. Should we cry? Get angry? All right, let’s get angry, if that’s what must be done. Is that what you’ll do tomorrow? Scold him? Punish him?”

Don Rigoberto shrugged. He wanted to laugh as well. And he felt stupid.

“I’ve never punished him, much less hit him, I wouldn’t know how to do it,” he confessed with some embarrassment. “That’s probably why he’s turned out the way he has. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what to do with him. I suspect that whatever I do, he’ll always win.”

“Well, in this case we’ve won something too.” Doña Lucrecia leaned against her husband, who put his arm around her shoulders. “We’re together again, aren’t we? You never would have dared to call me or ask me to tea at the Tiendecita Blanca without those letters. Isn’t that so? And I wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for the letters. I’m sure not. They prepared the way. We can’t complain, he helped us, he brought us together. I mean, you’re not sorry we made up, are you, Rigoberto?”

In the end, he laughed too. He rubbed his nose against his wife’s head, feeling her hair tickling his eyes.

“No, I’ll never be sorry about that,” he said. “Well, after so many emotions, we’ve earned the right to sleep. All of this is very nice, but tomorrow I have to go to the office, my dear wife.”

They returned to the bedroom in the dark, holding hands. And she still had the heart to make a joke: “Are we taking Fonchito to Vienna in December?”

Was it really a joke? Don Rigoberto immediately pushed away the evil thought as he proclaimed: “In spite of everything we’re a happy family, aren’t we, Lucrecia?”