An opportune warning. Was he still master of his dreams, or did they now rule him because he had abused them so much since his separation from Lucrecia?
“We became friends after the dinner at the French Embassy,” his wife was saying. “She asked me to her house for a steambath. A popular custom in Arabic countries, it seems. Steambaths. They’re not the same as saunas, which use dry heat. A hammam had been built at the end of the garden at their residence in Orrantia.”
A bemused Don Rigoberto still turned the pages of his notebook, but he was no longer completely there; now he was also in the densely planted garden filled with gaudy nightshade, white-and-pink-blossomed laurels, and the intense perfume of honeysuckle twined around the columns supporting the roof over a terrace. He was fully aroused as he spied on the two women—Lucrecia, in a flowered summer dress and sandals that revealed her powdered feet, and the Algerian ambassador’s wife in a delicately colored silk tunic made iridescent by the luminous morning—walking through masses of red geraniums, green and yellow croton, and carefully trimmed grass, toward the wooden structure half-hidden by the leafy branches of a fig tree. “The hammam, the steambath,” he said to himself, his heart pounding. He saw the two women from the rear and admired the similarity of their figures, their ample, unconfined buttocks moving in rhythm, their elegant backs, the graceful undulation of their hips as they walked, rippling their clothes. They strolled arm in arm, loving friends, and held towels in their hands. I am there, saving myself, and I am in my study, he thought, like Juan María Brausen in his apartment in Buenos Aires, who divides himself into the pimp Arce exploiting his neighbor Queca, and then saves himself by dividing into Dr. Díaz Grey in the nonexistent Santa María. But he was distracted from the two women when he turned a page in his notebook and found another quotation from La vida breve: “You appointed your breasts plenipotentiaries.”
“This is a night for breasts,” he said tenderly. “Are Brausen and I nothing but a couple of schizophrenics?” He didn’t care in the least. He had closed his eyes and could see the two friends undressing, without shame, with easy assurance, as if they had celebrated this ritual many times in the small, wood-paneled antechamber to the steamroom. They hung their clothes on hooks and wrapped themselves in large towels, talking animatedly about something that Don Rigoberto did not understand and did not wish to understand. Now, pushing open a wooden door with no latch, they passed into a small room filled with clouds of steam. On his face he felt a blast of humid heat that dampened his pajamas and made them cling to his back, his chest, his legs. The steam entered his body through his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes, and it seemed to be scented with pine, sandalwood, mint. He trembled, afraid the two friends would find him out. But they paid no attention to him, as if he were not there, as if he were invisible.
“Don’t think they used anything artificial, silicone or any junk like that,” Doña Lucrecia explained. “Not at all. They were reconstructed with skin and flesh from her own body. Taking a bit from her stomach, another from her buttock, another from her thigh. And leaving no scars. She looked terrific, terrific, I swear.”
It was true, he could see for himself. They had removed the towels and were sitting very close because there was not much space on the slatted wooden bench attached to the wall. Don Rigoberto contemplated the two naked bodies through the undulating clouds of steam. It was better than The Turkish Bath by Ingres, for in that picture the crowd of nudes divided one’s attention—“Damned collectivism,” he cursed—while here his perception could focus, take in the two friends at a single glance, scrutinize them without missing their tiniest gesture, possess them in a complete vision. Besides, in The Turkish Bath, the bodies were dry, but here, within a few seconds, Doña Lucrecia and the ambassador’s wife were covered with brilliant beads of perspiration. How beautiful they are, he thought, deeply moved. Even more so together, as if the beauty of one empowered the beauty of the other.
“Not even the shadow of a scar,” Doña Lucrecia insisted. “Not on her belly, her buttock, or her thigh. And, of course, not on the breasts they made for her. It was incredible, darling.”
Don Rigoberto believed everything she said. How could he not, when he was seeing those two perfect women at such close range that if he stretched out his hand he would touch them? (“Oh, oh,” he groaned in self-pity.) His wife’s body was whiter and the ambassador’s wife was tanned, as if she had spent her life outdoors; Lucrecia’s hair was straight and dark, while her friend’s was curly and auburn, but despite these differences, they resembled one another in their rejection of the modern taste for lanceolate thinness, in their Renaissance sumptuousness, in their splendid abundance of breasts, thighs, buttocks, arms, in the magnificent rounded forms that were—he did not need to caress them to know—firm, hard, taut, compressed, as if molded by invisible bodices, girdles, corselets, brassieres. “The classical model, the great tradition,” he rejoiced.
“She suffered a great deal with so many operations, so much convalescence,” Doña Lucrecia said compassionately. “But her vanity, her will not to be conquered or defeated by nature, to go on being beautiful, helped her. And finally, she won the war. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”
“I think you are too,” Don Rigoberto responded.
The heat and their perspiration had excited them. Both were taking slow, deep breaths that raised and lowered their breasts like the ocean’s tides. Don Rigoberto was entranced. What were they saying? Why had a devilish gleam appeared in their eyes? He pricked up his ears and listened.
“I can’t believe it,” Doña Lucrecia was saying, looking at the breasts of the ambassador’s wife and exaggerating her amazement. “They would drive any man crazy. They couldn’t look more natural.”
“That’s what my husband says.” The ambassador’s wife laughed, not innocently, raising her torso slightly to show off her breasts. She pouted as she spoke, and her accent was French, though the j’s and rr’s were Arabic. (“Her father was born in Oran and played soccer with Albert Camus,” Don Rigoberto decided.) “He says they’re better than before, he likes them better now. And don’t think the surgery made them insensitive. Not at all.”
She laughed, feigning embarrassment, and Lucrecia laughed too and gave her a gentle pat on the thigh, which startled Don Rigoberto.
“I hope you don’t take it the wrong way or think badly of me,” she said a moment later. “Could I touch them? Would you mind? I’m dying to know if they’re as real to the touch as they are to the eye. You must think I’m crazy to ask. Would you mind?”
“Of course not, Lucrecia,” the ambassador’s wife answered warmly. Her pout had become accentuated, and then she smiled broadly, displaying, with legitimate pride, her brilliant white teeth. “You’ll touch mine and I’ll touch yours. We’ll compare. There’s nothing wrong with two friends caressing each other.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Doña Lucrecia exclaimed with enthusiasm. And, out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at Don Rigoberto. (“She knew from the very beginning that I was here.” He sighed.) “I don’t know about your husband, but mine adores this kind of thing. Let’s play, let’s play.”
They had begun to touch, at first very cautiously, very lightly; then more boldly; now they were openly fondling one another’s nipples. They moved closer. They embraced, their hair became entwined. Don Rigoberto could barely see them. Drops of sweat—or, perhaps, tears—irritated his eyes so much he had to blink constantly and close them. I am happy, I am sad, he thought, aware of the incongruity. Was that possible? Why not. It was like being in Buenos Aires and in Santa María, or alone, at dawn, in the solitary study, surrounded by notebooks and pictures, and in that spring-like garden, in clouds of steam, dripping with perspiration.
“It began as a game,” Doña Lucrecia explained. “To pass the time as we rid ourselves of toxins. I immediately thought of you. If you would approve. If it would excite you. If it would bother you. If you would make a scene when I told you.”
>
He, faithful to his promise to spend the whole night paying homage to his wife’s plenipotentiary breasts, had knelt on the floor between Lucrecia’s parted legs as she sat on the edge of the bed. With amorous solicitude he held each breast in one of his hands, showing exaggerated care, as if they were made of fragile crystal and could break. He kissed them with the surface of his lips, millimeter by millimeter, a conscientious farmer who does not leave a speck of earth unturned.
“In other words, I was moved to touch them to find out if her breasts felt artificial. And she touched mine because she’s responsive, because she didn’t want to sit there like an idiot and do nothing. But we were playing with fire, of course.”
“Of course,” Don Rigoberto agreed, tireless in his search for symmetry, moving, in fairness, from one breast to the other. “Why did you both get excited? Why did you go from touching to kissing? From kissing to sucking?”
He repented immediately. He had violated the strict rules that established the incompatibility between pleasure and the use of vulgar words, especially verbs (suck, nurse) that did harm to any illusion.
“I didn’t say sucking,” he apologized, trying to bring back the past and correct it. “Let’s stop at kissing. Who began? Did you, love of my life?”
He heard her faint voice but could no longer see her because she was fading quickly, like vapor on the mirror when it is rubbed or touched by a breath of cool air: “Yes, I did, isn’t that what you told me to do, isn’t that what you wanted?” No, thought Don Rigoberto. What I want is to have you here, flesh and blood, not a phantom. Because I love you. Sadness had fallen on him like a heavy rain, a downpour of impetuous water that washed away the garden, the residence, the scent of sandalwood, pine, mint, honeysuckle, the steambath, the two affectionate friends. As well as the heat and humidity of a moment ago, and his dream. The cold dawn chilled his bones. The sea crashed furiously against the cliffs with monotonous regularity.
And then he remembered that in the novel—damned Onetti! blessed Onetti!—Queca and Gorda had kissed and caressed behind the back of Brausen, the false Arce, and that the whore, or ex-whore, his neighbor Queca, the one they killed, thought her apartment was filled with monsters, gnomes, dragons, invisible metaphysical terrors who were pursuing her. Queca and Gorda, he thought, Lucrecia and the ambassador’s wife. Schizophrenic, just like Brausen. Now not even his phantoms could save him, but buried him each day in deeper solitude, leaving his study, like Queca’s apartment, sown with ravening beasts. Should he burn this house? With him and Fonchito in it?
In the notebook there gleamed an erotic dream of Juan María Brausen (“taken from paintings by Paul Delvaux that Onetti could not have known when he wrote La vida breve because the Belgian surrealist had not even painted them yet,” said a brief note in parentheses: “I lean back in the chair, resting on the girl’s shoulder, and imagine I am leaving a small city made up of houses of assignation; a secretive village where naked couples stroll through small gardens, along moss-covered paving stones, hiding their faces with their open hands when the lights go on, when they cross paths with pederastic servants…” Would he end up like Brausen? Was he Brausen already? A failed man, a mediocre man who could not succeed as a Catholic idealist or an evangelical social reformer, as an irredeemable libertine individualist and agnostic hedonist or a creator of private enclaves of the highest fantasy and artistic good taste, a man defeated by everything, the woman he loved, the son he fathered, the dreams he tried to embed in reality, decaying day after day, night after night, behind the repellent mask of an executive in a successful insurance company, transformed into the “purely desperate man” mentioned in Onetti’s novel, into a copy of the pessimistic masochist in La vida breve. At least Brausen finally succeeded in escaping from Buenos Aires and, by train, car, ship, or bus, had managed to reach Santa María, the city of his invention in the region of the Río de la Plata. Don Rigoberto was still lucid enough to know he could not traffic in fictions, leap headlong into dreams. He was not Brausen yet. There was still time to react, to do something. But what, what?
Invisible Games
I enter your house by the chimney, though I am not Santa Claus. I float to your bedroom and, very close to your face, imitate the buzz of a mosquito. As you sleep you begin to swat in the darkness at a poor insect that does not exist.
When I tire of playing the mosquito, I uncover your legs and blow a breath of cold air that numbs your bones. You begin to shiver, you curl up, you tug at the blanket, your teeth begin to chatter, you cover your head with the pillow and even begin to sneeze sneezes not caused by your allergy.
Then I become a Piuran, Amazonian heat that soaks you in perspiration from head to toe. You look like a little wet chick, kicking the sheets to the floor, pulling off your pajama tops and bottoms. Until you are stark naked, sweating, sweating and panting like a bellows.
Then I become a feather and tickle you, on the soles of your feet, in your ear, under your arms. Hee hee, ha ha, ho ho, you laugh without waking up, making desperate faces and twisting to the right, the left, trying to ease the cramps caused by your laughter. Until, at last, you wake, frightened, not seeing me but sensing that someone is moving in the darkness.
When you get up to go to your study and spend time with your pictures, I lay traps for you. I move chairs and objects and tables from their place so that you will trip over them and shout “Owowowww!” rubbing your shins. Sometimes I hide your robe, your slippers. Sometimes I spill the glass of water you leave on the night table to drink when you wake up. How angry you are when you open your eyes and feel around for it and find it in the middle of a puddle on the floor!
This is how we do it, how we play with the men we love.
Yours, yours, yours,
A Phantom in Love
VIII
Beast in the Mirror
“I went off last night,” Doña Lucrecia said without thinking. Before fully realizing what she had said, she heard Fonchito: “Where to, Stepmamá?” She blushed to the roots of her hair, consumed by shame.
“I meant to say I couldn’t sleep a wink,” she lied, because for some time she had not enjoyed so deep a sleep, though one, it must be said, shaken by storms of desire and the phantoms of love. “I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m saying.”
The boy was concentrating again on a page in the book about the painter he adored, which displayed a photograph of Egon Schiele looking at himself in the large mirror in his studio. He was shown full-length, his hands in his pockets, his short hair uncombed, his slender boyish body encased in a white, high-collared shirt and tie, but no jacket, and his hands hidden, of course, in the pockets of a pair of trousers with the bottoms rolled as if he were about to wade across a river. Since he had arrived, Fonchito had done nothing but talk about that mirror, attempting over and over again to initiate a conversation about the photograph; but Doña Lucrecia, lost in her own thoughts and still caught up in the confused exaltation, the doubts and hopes that had dominated her since yesterday’s surprising development in her anonymous correspondence, had paid no attention. She looked at Fonchito’s head of golden curls and saw his profile, his solemn scrutiny of the photograph as if he were trying to wrench some secret from it. “He doesn’t realize, he didn’t understand.” Though one never knew with him. He had probably understood perfectly and was pretending he hadn’t so as not to increase her embarrassment.
Or, perhaps, “to go off” didn’t have the same meaning for the boy? She recalled that some time ago she and Rigoberto had engaged in one of those salacious conversations that the secret laws governing their lives permitted only at night and in bed during the prologue, main text, or epilogue of love. Her husband had assured her that the younger generation no longer used “to go off” but “to come,” a clear demonstration, even in the delicate realm of Venus, of the influence of English, for when gringos and gringas made love they “came” and didn’t go off anywhere, as Latins do. In any event, Doña Lucrecia had gone off, come, or
finished (this was the verb she and Don Rigoberto had used during their ten years of marriage after agreeing never to refer to that beautiful conclusion to the erotic encounter as an uncivil, clinical “orgasm,” much less a dripping-wet, belligerent “ejaculation”) the night before, enjoying it intensely, with an acute, almost painful pleasure—she had awakened bathed in sweat, her teeth chattering, her hands and feet convulsed—dreaming that she had gone to the mysterious appointment indicated in the anonymous letter, following all the extravagant instructions, and in the end, after the most intricate routes along dark streets in both the center and outlying districts of Lima, she had been—wearing a blindfold, naturally—admitted to a house whose odor she recognized, led up a flight of stairs to the second floor—from the first moment she was certain it was the house in Barranco—undressed, and made to lie down on a bed that she also identified as their old one, until she felt herself held tightly, embraced, penetrated, and filled to overflowing by a body which, of course, was Rigoberto’s. They had finished—going off or coming—together, which did not happen to them very often. Both had thought it a positive sign, a happy omen for the new life opening before them following this abracadabraesque reconciliation. Then she woke, wet, languorous, confused, and had to struggle for some time before she could accept that her intense happiness had been only a dream.