The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (4 page)

I understand that for people like you a landscape peppered with cows grazing on fragrant grasses or nanny goats sniffing around carob trees gladdens your heart and makes you experience the ecstasy of a boy seeing a naked woman for the first time. As far as I am concerned, the natural destiny of the bull is the bullring—in other words, it lives in order to face the matador’s cape and cane, the picador’s lance, the banderillero’s dart, the sword—and as for the stupid cows, my only wish is to see them carved, grilled, seasoned with hot spices, and set down before me bloody and rare and surrounded by crisp fried potatoes and fresh salads, and the goats should be pounded, shredded, fried, or marinated, depending on the recipe for northern
seco
, one of my favorite of all the dishes offered by our brutal Peruvian gastronomy.

I know I am offending your most cherished beliefs, for I am not unaware that you and your colleagues—yet another collectivist conspiracy!—are convinced, or are almost convinced, that animals have rights and perhaps a soul, all of them, not excluding the malarial mosquito, the carrion-eating hyena, the hissing cobra, and the voracious piranha. I openly admit that for me, animals are of edible, decorative, and perhaps sporting interest (though I state specifically that I find love of horses as unpleasant as vegetarianism, and consider horsemen, their testicles shrunken by the friction of the saddle, to be a particularly lugubrious type of human castrato). I respect, at a distance, those who attribute an erotic function to animals, but I personally am not seduced (on the contrary, it makes me smell nasty odors and presume a whole series of physical discomforts) by the idea of copulating with a chicken, a duck, a monkey, a mare, or any species with orifices, and I harbor the enervating suspicion that those who find gratification in such gymnastic feats are, in the marrow of their bones—and please do not take this personally—primitive ecologists and unknowing conservationists, more than capable in the future of banding together with Brigitte Bardot (whom I too, let it be said, loved as a young man) and working for the survival of the seals. Although, on occasion, I have had unsettling fantasies of a beautiful naked woman rolling on a bed covered with kittens, the fact that sixty-three million cats and fifty-four million dogs are household pets in the United States alarms me more than the host of atomic weapons stored in half a dozen countries of the former Soviet Union.

If this is what I think of quadrupeds and mangy birds, you can well imagine the feelings awakened in me by murmuring trees, dense forests, delicious foliage, singing rivers, deep ravines, crystalline peaks, and so forth and so on. All these natural resources have significance and justification for me if they pass through the filter of urban civilization; in other words, if they are manufactured and transmuted—it does not matter to me if we say denaturalized, but I would prefer the currently discredited term humanized—by books, paintings, film, or television. To be sure we understand each other, I would give my life (this should not be taken literally since it is obvious hyperbole) to save the poplars that raise their lofty crowns in Góngora’s “Polyphemus,” the almond trees that whiten his “Solitudes,” the weeping willows in Garcilaso’s “Eclogues,” or the sunflowers and wheat fields that distill their golden honey onto the canvases of Van Gogh, but I would not shed a tear in praise of pine groves devastated by summer fires, and my hand would not tremble as I signed an amnesty for the arsonists who turn Andean, Siberian, or Alpine forests to ashes. Nature that is not passed through art or literature, Nature
au naturel
, full of flies, mosquitoes, mud, rats, and cockroaches, is incompatible with refined pleasures such as bodily hygiene and elegance of dress.

For the sake of brevity, I will summarize my thinking—my phobias, at any rate—by explaining that if what you call “urban blight” were to advance unchecked and swallow up all the meadows of the world, and the earth were to be covered by an outbreak of skyscrapers, metal bridges, asphalt streets, artificial lakes and parks, paved plazas, and underground parking lots, and the entire planet were encased in reinforced concrete and steel beams and became a single, spherical, endless city (but one abounding in bookstores, galleries, libraries, restaurants, museums, and cafés), the undersigned,
homo urbanus
to his very bones, would applaud.

For the reasons stated above, I will not contribute one cent to the Chlorophyll and Dung Association, over which you preside, and will do everything in my power (very little, don’t worry) to keep you from achieving your ends and to prevent your bucolic philosophy from destroying the object that is emblematic of the culture which you despise and I venerate: the truck.

Pluto’s Dream

In the solitude of his study, awake in the cold dawn, Don Rigoberto repeated from memory the phrase of Borges he had just found: “Adultery is usually made up of tenderness and abnegation.” A few pages after the Borgesian citation, the letter appeared before him, undamaged by the corrosive passage of years:

Dear Lucrecia:

Reading these lines will bring you the surprise of your life, and perhaps you will despise me. But it doesn’t matter. Even if there were only one chance that you would accept my offer against a million that you would reject it, I would take the plunge. I will summarize what would require hours of conversation, accompanied by vocal inflections and persuasive gestures
.

Since leaving Peru (because you turned me down), I’ve been working in the United States and have done fairly well. In ten years I have become a manager and member of the executive board of a thriving electrical-conductor factory in the state of Massachusetts. As an engineer and entrepreneur, I have made my way in this, my second country, for I became an American citizen four years ago
.

I wanted to let you know that I have just resigned my position and am selling my stock in the firm, from which I expect to make a profit of $600,000—with luck, a little more. I am doing this because I have been offered the presidency of TIM (Technological Institute of Mississippi), the college I attended and with which I have maintained a close relationship. A third of the student body is now Hispanic (Latin American). My salary will be half of what I earn here. I don’t care. I look forward to devoting myself to the education of young people from the two Americas, who will build the twenty-first century. I always dreamed of dedicating my life to Academe, and this is what I would have done if I had remained in Peru, that is, if you had married me
.

“What’s the point of all this?” you must be asking yourself. “Why has Modesto returned after ten years to tell me this story?” I’m getting there, my darling Lucrecia
.

I have decided that during the week between my departure from Boston and my arrival in Oxford, Mississippi, I will spend $100,000 of my $600,000 on a vacation. I have, by the way, never taken a vacation and do not plan to take one in the future, because, as you may remember, I’ve always liked working. My job is still my favorite diversion. But if my plans materialize, as I hope they do, this week will be something quite out of the ordinary. Not the conventional Caribbean cruise or beaches with palm trees and surfers in Hawaii. Something very personal, and unrepeatable: the fulfillment of an old dream. This is where you come in, right through the front door. I know you are married to an honorable Limenian gentleman, a widower and an insurance executive. I am married too, to a gringa, a physician from Boston, and I am happy to the modest extent that marriage allows. I am not proposing that you divorce and take up a new life, not at all. Only that you join me for this ideal week, cherished in my mind for so many years, which circumstances now permit me to make a reality. You will not regret sharing these seven days of illusion with me, days you will remember fondly for the rest of your life, I promise
.

We will meet on Saturday the 17th at Kennedy Airport in New York, where you will arrive from Lima on Lufthansa, and I will fly in from Boston. A limousine will take us to the suite at the Plaza Hotel, which I have already reserved, along with the flowers I have selected to perfume it. You will have time to rest, have your hair done, visit a sauna, or go shopping on Fifth Avenue, which is literally at your feet. That night we have tickets to the Metropolitan Opera to see Puccini’s
Tosca,
with Luciano Pavarotti as Mario Cavaradossi and the Metropolitan Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Edouardo Muller. We will dine at Le Cirque, where, with luck, you can rub elbows with Mick Jagger, Henry Kissinger, or Sharon Stone. We will end the evening at the glamorous and exciting Regine’s
.

The Concorde to Paris leaves at noon on Sunday, and there will be no need for us to rise early. Since the flight takes less than three and a half hours—apparently one is hardly aware of the passage of time, thanks to the luncheon delicacies prepared under the supervision of Paul Bocuse—it will still be day when we reach the City of Light. After we have registered at the Ritz (a view of the Place Vendôme guaranteed), there will be time for a stroll along the bridges over the Seine, enjoying the mild evenings of early autumn, the loveliest season, according to connoisseurs, as long as it doesn’t rain. (I have failed in my efforts to determine the chances of fluvial precipitation in Paris on Sunday and Monday, since NASA, which is to say the science of meteorology, predicts the whims of heaven only four days in advance.) I have never been to Paris, and I hope you have not either, so that on our evening walk from the Ritz to Saint-Germain we will discover together what is, by all accounts, an astonishing itinerary. On the Left Bank (in other words, the Parisian Miraflores) we can look forward to a performance of Mozart’s unfinished
Requiem
at the Abbey of Saint-Germain des Prés, and supper chez Lipp, an Alsatian brasserie where the choucroute is obligatory (I don’t know what that is, but as long as it has no garlic, I’ll like it). I’ve assumed that when supper is over you will probably wish to rest in order to be fresh for our busy schedule on Monday, and therefore that night we will not be caught up in a whirl of discotheques, bars, boîtes, or
caves
that stay open until dawn
.

The next morning we will visit the Louvre to pay our respects to
La Gioconda,
have a light lunch at La Closerie de Lilas or La Coupole (the restaurants in Montparnasse so revered by snobs), and in the afternoon we will dip into the avant-garde at the Centre Pompidou and make a quick visit to the Marais, famous for its eighteenth-century palaces and contemporary faggots. We will have tea at La Marquise de Sévigné, at La Madeleine, before returning to the hotel for a refreshing shower. Our program that night is completely frivolous: an apéritif at the Ritz Bar, supper in the modernist decor of Maxim’s, and to round off the festivities, a visit to that cathedral of striptease the Crazy Horse Saloon, with its brand-new revue
, It’s So Hot!
(Tickets have been purchased, tables reserved, and maîtres d’s and doormen bribed to assure the best locations, tables, and service.)

On Tuesday morning a limousine, less showy but more refined than the one in New York, complete with driver and guide, will take us to Versailles to visit the palace and gardens of the Sun King. We will eat a typical meal (steak and fried potatoes, I’m afraid) at a bistro along the way, and before the opera (Verdi’s
Otello,
with Plácido Domingo, of course) you will have time for shopping on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, very close to the hotel. We will have a simulacrum of supper, for purely visual and sociological reasons, at the Ritz, where—dixit the expert—the sumptuous ambiance and elegant service compensate for an unimaginative menu. We will have our real supper after the opera, at La Tour d’Argent, from whose windows we will bid a fond farewell to the towers of Notre Dame and the lights of the bridges reflected in the flowing waters of the Seine
.

The Orient Express to Venice leaves on Wednesday at noon, from the Gare Saint Lazare. We will spend that day and night traveling and resting, but according to those who have engaged in this railway adventure, passing through the landscapes of France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy in those
belle époque
compartments is relaxing and instructive, stimulating but not fatiguing, exciting but in moderation, and entertaining, if only for archaeological reasons, because of the tastefully restored elegance of the compartments, restrooms, bars, and dining cars of that legendary train, the setting for so many novels and films of the years between the wars. I will bring with me Agatha Christie’s novel
Murder on the Orient Express,
in both English and Spanish, in case you wish to enhance your view of the locales where the action occurs. According to the prospectus, for our supper
à la chandelle
that evening, formal wear and deep décolletage are
de rigueur.

Our suite at the Hotel Cipriani, on the island of Giudecca, has a view of the Grand Canal, the Piazza di San Marco, and the swelling Byzantine towers of its church. I have hired a gondola and the man considered by the agency to be the best-informed (and only good-natured) guide in the lacustrine city, so that on Thursday morning and afternoon he can familiarize us with the churches, plazas, convents, bridges, and museums, including a short break at noon for a snack—a pizza, for example—surrounded by pigeons and tourists on the terrazza of the Florian. We will have a drink—an inevitable concoction called a Bellini—at the Hotel Danieli, and our supper at Harry’s Bar, immortalized in a wretched novel by Hemingway. On Friday we will continue the marathon with a visit to the Lido and an excursion to Murano, where glass is still shaped by human breath (a technique that preserves tradition as it strengthens the lungs of the natives). There will be time for souvenirs and a furtive glance at a villa by Palladio. At night, a concert on the isle of San Giorgio—I Musici Veneti—performing music by Venetian baroque composers, of course: Vivaldi, Cimarosa, and Albinoni. Supper will be on the
terrazza
of the Danieli, where, if the sky is clear, we can watch (I cite the guidebooks) the lights of Venice like a mantle of fireflies. We will take our leave of the city and the Old Continent, my dear Lucre, if our bodies permit, surrounded by modernity in the discotheque Il Gatto Nero, which attracts old, middle-aged, and youthful jazz fans (something you and I have never been, but one of the requirements of this ideal week is to do what we have never done, subject as we are to the servitude of the mundane)
.