For the entire day he was tormented by the fate of that teacher from Wellington, feeling immense sympathy for the public condemnation she must have been exposed to, the humiliation and mockery she must have suffered in addition to losing her job and having that cacographic, electronic, and now digital obscenity, the press, the so-called media, treat her as a corruptor of youth, a degenerate. He was not lying to himself, he was not perpetrating a masochistic farce. “No, dear Lucrecia, I swear I’m not.” Throughout the day and into the night the teacher’s face, incarnated as the face of his ex-wife, had appeared to him many times. And now, now he felt a driving need to let her know (“to let you know, my love”) of his regret and shame. For having been as insensitive, obtuse, inhuman, and cruel as that magistrate in Wellington, a city he would never set foot in except to lay fragrant red roses at the feet of that admired, admirable teacher who would pay for her generosity, her great heart, locked away with filicides, thieves, swindlers, and pickpockets (Anglophiles and Maori).
What would the teacher’s feet be like? If I could obtain her photograph I would not hesitate to light candles and burn incense to her, he thought. He hoped and prayed her feet were as beautiful and delicate as Doña Lucrecia’s, or the foot he had seen on the glossy page of Time magazine over the shoulder of a passerby one afternoon when he was stopped by a traffic light at the corner of La Colmena on his way to the Miguel Gray room at the Club Nacional, where he had a meeting with one of those necktied imbeciles who hold their meetings at the Club Nacional and provide a living for imbeciles like him who earn their bread insuring personal property and real estate. The vision lasted only a few seconds but was as illuminating, as bright, as convulsive and overwhelming as it must have been for that girl from Galilee when she had her vision of the winged Gabriel announcing the news that would inflict so many outrages upon the human race.
It was a tiny foot, viewed in profile, with a semicircular heel and a high instep rising proudly from an elegantly shaped sole and ending in meticulously modeled small toes, a feminine foot unblemished by calluses, rough spots, corns, or hideous bunions, a foot where nothing seemed inharmonious and nothing limited the perfection of the whole and the part, a small foot raised and apparently surprised by the alert photographer an instant before it came to rest on a soft carpet. Why Asian? Perhaps because the page it adorned advertised an airline from that part of the world—Singapore Airlines—or possibly because, in his limited experience, Don Rigoberto believed he could affirm that the women of Asia had the loveliest feet on the planet. He was shaken as he recalled the times he had kissed the delectable extremities of his beloved, calling them “little Filipino feet,” “Malaysian heels,” “Japanese insteps.”
All day, in fact, along with his rage over the misfortunes of his new friend, the teacher from Wellington, the tiny feminine foot in the advertisement in Time had troubled his mind, and later had disturbed his sleep, unearthing from the depths of memory the recollection of Cinderella, a story told to him when he was a child, and it was precisely the detail of the heroine’s emblematic slipper that only her tiny foot could wear which had awakened his first erotic fantasies (“Some wetness and a partial erection, if I must be technical,” he said aloud, in the first good-humored impulse of the night). Had he ever discussed with Lucrecia his theory that the amiable Cinderella had undoubtedly done more than all the corrupt mountains of antierotic pornography produced in the twentieth century to create legions of male fetishists? He could not remember. A lapse in his matrimonial relationship that he must correct one day. His state of mind had improved considerably since he had awakened, filled with vexation and longing, dying of rage, solitude, and sorrow. For the past few moments he had even authorized—it was his way of not succumbing to the despair of each day—certain fantasies that had to do not with the eyes, hair, breasts, thighs, or hips of Lucrecia but exclusively with her feet. He now had beside him—it had been difficult to find on the shelves where it had been mislaid—that first edition, in three small volumes, of the novel by Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (in his own hand he had noted on an index card: 1734-1806), the only one he owned of the dozens and dozens badly written by that incontinent polygraph: Le Pied de Franchette ou l’orpheline française: Histoire intéressante et morale (Paris, Humblot Quillau, 1769, 2 parties en 3 volumes, 160-148-192 pages). Now I leaf through it, he thought. And now you appear, Lucrecia, barefoot or shod, in every chapter, page, word.
Only one thing in this overwrought scribbler deserved his sympathy and made him associate, in the middle of this misty night, Restif de la Bretonne with Lucrecia, while a thousand other things (well, perhaps not quite so many) made him forgettable, transitory, even unpleasant. Had he ever talked about him to her? Had his name ever come up in their nightly conjugal celebrations? Don Rigoberto could not remember. “But even if it is too late, my dearest, I present him to you, offer him, lay him at your feet (an appropriate turn of phrase).” He had been born into a time of great upheavals, the French eighteenth century, but it was unlikely that the good Nicolas-Edme realized that the entire world around him was falling apart and being put back together again in the pendulum swings of the revolution, obsessed as he was with his own revolution, not the one in society, the economy, and the political regime—“the ones, in general, that get good press”—but the one that concerned him personally: the revolution in carnal desire. That is what he found sympathetic, what led him to buy the first edition of Le Pied de Franchette, a novel of cruel coincidences and comic iniquities, absurd entanglements and mindless exchanges, which any respectable literary critic or reader of good taste would find execrable but for Don Rigoberto had the high merit of exalting to deicidal extremes the right of the human being to rebel against the establishment for the sake of his desires, to change the world by making use of his fantasy even for the ephemeral duration of his reading or dreaming.
He read aloud what he had written in the notebook about Restif after reading Le Pied de Franchette: “I do not believe that this provincial, the son of peasants, an autodidact, despite his having attended a Jansenist seminary, who taught himself languages and doctrines, all of them badly, and earned his living as a typesetter and maker of books (in both senses of the word, for he wrote them and manufactured them, though he did the second more artfully than the first), ever suspected the transcendental importance his writings would have (symbolic and moral importance, not aesthetic) when, in his incessant explorations of poor working-class neighborhoods in Paris, which fascinated him, or the villages and countryside of France, which he documented like a sociologist, taking time away from his amorous entanglements—adulterous, incestuous, mercenary, but always orthodox, for homosexuality produced a Carmelite consternation in him—he wrote on the run, guided, horror of horrors, by inspiration, never correcting, in a prose that poured out of him overblown, vulgar, burdened with all the detritus of the French language, confused, repetitive, labyrinthine, conventional, cheap, bereft of ideas, insensitive, and—in a word that defines his style better than any other—underdeveloped.”
Why, then, after so severe a judgment, was he wasting the dawn recalling this aesthetic imperfection, a crude scribbler who, to make matters worse, even plied the ugly trade of informer? The notebook overflowed with information about him. He had produced nearly two hundred books, all of them unreadable as literature. Why, then, did he persist in bringing him close to Doña Lucrecia, his polar opposite, perfection made woman? Because, he answered himself, no one but this uncouth intellectual could have understood his midday emotion on glimpsing so fleetingly, in a magazine advertisement, the Asian girl’s tiny swift foot that tonight had brought him the memory of, the desire for, the queenly feet of Lucrecia. No, no one but Restif, amateur and supreme adept of the cult that an abominable race of psychologists and psychoanalysts preferred to call fetishism, could have understood him, accompanied him, counseled him in this homage and act of gratitude to those adored feet. “Thank you, my beloved Lucrecia”—he prayed fervently—“fo
r the hours of pleasure they have given me since I first discovered them on the beach at Pucusana and kissed them beneath the water and the waves.” Overcome with emotion, Don Rigoberto once again felt the salty, agile toes wriggling inside the grotto of his mouth, and his retching because of the seawater he had swallowed.
Yes, that was Don Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne’s predilection: the feminine foot. And, by extension and “affinity,” as an alchemist would say, everything that clothes and covers it: stocking, shoe, sandal, boot. With the spontaneity and innocence of what he was, a rustic who migrated to the city, he practiced and proclaimed his predilection for that delicate extremity and its wrappings without a trace of shame; with the fanaticism of the convert, in his innumerable writings he replaced the real world with a fictitious one as monotonous, predictable, chaotic, and stupid as the first, except that in the one shaped by his bad prose and monothematic singularity, what shone brilliantly, what stood out and unleashed the passions of men, was not the charming faces of ladies, their cascading hair, graceful waists, ivory necks, or haughty bosoms but, inevitably and exclusively, the beauty of their feet. (If he were still alive, it occurred to him, Don Rigoberto would take his friend Restif, with Lucrecia’s consent, of course, to the little house by the Olivar and, hiding the rest of her body, show him her feet enclosed in a pair of darling granny boots and even permit him to remove her shoes. How would this forebear have reacted? With a transport of ecstasy? With trembling and howling? Rushing forward, like a happy bloodhound, tongue hanging out, nostrils dilated, to smell and lick the delicacy?
Although he wrote so badly, wasn’t he to be respected as a man who paid so much reverence to pleasure and defended his phantom with such conviction and coherence? Wasn’t the good Restif, despite his indigestible prose, “one of us”? Of course he was. That is why he had appeared tonight in his dream, drawn by that furtive little Burmese or Singaporean foot, to accompany him through the dawn. A sudden feeling of demoralization gripped Don Rigoberto. The cold penetrated his bones. How he wished at this moment that Lucrecia could know all the repentance and pain tormenting him because of the stupidity, or obstinate incomprehension, that had driven him a year ago to behave just as the ignoble judge in Wellington across the sea had when he sentenced that teacher, that friend (“She is also one of us”) to four years in prison for having allowed that fortunate child, that New Zealander Fonchito, to glimpse—no, to inhabit—heaven. “Instead of suffering, instead of reproaching you, I should have thanked you, adorable nursemaid.” He did so now, in a dawn filled with resounding, turbulent waves and an invisible, corrosive drizzle, seconded by an obliging Restif, whose little novel deliciously entitled Le Pied de Franchette, and stupidly subtitled ou l’orpheline française: Histoire intéressante et morale (after all, there was good reason to call it moral), he held on his lap and caressed with both hands, like a pair of beautiful feet.
When Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (the citation reappeared constantly in every notebook he opened), was he thinking of Doña Lucrecia’s feet? Yes, though the unhappy man did not know it. And, when Restif de la Bretonne wrote and printed (at the same speed, probably) Le Pied de Franchette, in 1769, at the age of thirty-five, he too had been inspired, from the future, by a woman who would come into the world nearly two centuries later, in a barbarous region of America called (seriously?) Latin. Thanks to his commentaries in the notebook, Don Rigoberto began to remember the plot of the little novel. As conventional and predictable as could be, written with his feet (no, this he should not think or say), the true protagonist was not the beautiful adolescent orphan Franchette Florangis but the maddening feet of Franchette Florangis, and this elevated and individualized the novel, giving it the wisdom and persuasiveness of a true work of art. The opalescent feet of the young Franchette caused unimaginable disturbances, ignited unimaginable passions. Her tutor, Monsieur Apatéon, a foolish old man who loved to buy exquisite shoes for them and took advantage of any excuse to caress them, was so inflamed by his pupil’s feet that he even tried to rape her, the daughter of his dearest friend. They turned the painter Dolsans, a decent young man who was smitten from the first time he saw them encased in little green slippers adorned with a golden flower, into a desperate madman full of criminal designs who lost his life because of them. The fortunate young man, the wealthy Lusanville, before his arms and mouth ever held the beautiful girl of his dreams, took solace in one of her shoes which he, another amateur, had stolen. Every living male who saw them—financiers, merchants, landowners, noblemen, plebeians—succumbed to their charms, pierced by the arrows of carnal love and prepared to do anything to possess them. And therefore the narrator was correct when he stated the words that Don Rigoberto had transcribed: “Le joli pied les rendait tous criminels.” Yes, yes, those tiny feet made them all criminals. The slippers, sandals, boots, shoes of the beautiful Franchette, those magical objects, moved through the story and illuminated it with a dazzling, seminal light.
Though stupid people might speak of perversion, he, and Lucrecia of course, could understand Restif, celebrate his having the audacity, the lack of shame, to display to others his right to be different, to remake the world in his own image. Hadn’t they done the same, he and Lucrecia, every night for ten years? Hadn’t they disarranged and rearranged life according to their desires? Would they ever do so again? Or would all of it remain confined to the past, along with the images that memory treasures in order not to succumb to the despair of the real, the actual?
On this night-dawn, Don Rigoberto felt like one of the men driven mad by Franchette’s foot. His life was empty; each night, each dawn, he replaced Lucrecia’s absence with phantoms, but they were not enough to console him. Was there any solution? Was it too late to turn back and correct the error? Couldn’t a Supreme Court or Constitutional Tribunal in New Zealand revoke the sentence of the obtuse magistrate in Wellington and pardon the teacher? Couldn’t an unprejudiced New Zealander governor declare an amnesty and even present her with a civilian heroine’s medal to honor her demonstrated sacrifices for the sake of youth? Couldn’t he go to the little house by the Olivar de San Isidro and tell Lucrecia that stupid human justice had been wrong, had condemned her with no right to do so, and give her back her honor and the freedom to…to? To what? He hesitated, but went forward the best he could.
Was this a utopia? A utopia like the ones also fantasized by the fetishist Restif de la Bretonne? No, no, for those of Don Rigoberto, when, borne away by the languid sweetness of a mind at play, he sometimes gave himself over to them, were private utopias incapable of infringing on the free will of others. Couldn’t these be legitimate utopias, very different from the collective ones, the rabid enemies of freedom, the ones that always carried in them the seed of catastrophe?
This had been the weak and dangerous side of Nicolas-Edmé as well: a disease of the age, to which he had succumbed, as had so many of his contemporaries. Because the appetite for social utopias, the great legacy of the Enlightenment together with new horizons and bold vindications of the right to pleasure, had also brought historical apocalypses. Don Rigoberto remembered none of this; his notebooks did. They contained the accusatory data, the implacable fulminations.
In Restif, the refined devotee of tiny feet and women’s shoes—“May God bless him for that, if He exists”—there was also a dangerous, messianic thinker (a cretin if one wished to judge him harshly, a misguided dreamer if one preferred to spare his life), a reformer of institutions, a savior from social ills who, among the mountains of paper he scribbled, dedicated a few hills and highlands to erecting those prisons, his public utopias, whose purpose was to regulate prostitution and impose happiness on whores (the hideous enterprise appeared in a book with the deceptively attractive title of Le Pornographe), improve the operation of theaters and the behavior of actors (Le Mimographe), organize the life of women by assigning them duties and setting limits on them so that there would be harmony between the sexes (this fearsome aberration also b
ore a title that seemed to promise pleasure—Les Gynographes—when it actually proposed stocks and chains for freedom). Much more ambitious and threatening, of course, had been his attempt to regulate—to suffocate, in fact—the behavior of the human race (L’Andrographe) and introduce an intrusive, sharp-edged legal system that would attack intimacy and put an end to free initiative and the free disposition of human desires: Le Thermographe. In the face of these interventionist excesses worthy of a secular Torquemada, Restif’s regulatory madness seemed mere child’s play, causing him to recommend a total reform of orthography (Glossographe). He had collected these utopias in a book he called Idées singulières (1769), which they undoubtedly were, but in the sinister, criminal interpretation of the notion of singularity.
The sentence inscribed in the notebook was unappealable, and Don Rigoberto agreed with it: “There is no doubt that if this diligent printer, writer of documents, and refined amateur of feminine pedal appendages had ever attained political power, he would have turned France, and perhaps all of Europe, into a well-disciplined concentration camp in which a fine mesh of prohibitions and obligations would have vaporized the last trace of freedom. Fortunately, he was too much of an egotist to lust after power, concentrating instead on reconstructing human reality in fiction, reshaping it to suit his desires, so that, as in Le Pied de Franchette, the supreme value, the greatest aspiration of the male biped was not to perform heroic feats of military conquest, or achieve sainthood, or discover the secrets of matter and life, but consisted instead of that delectable, delicious, divine as the ambrosia that nourished the gods on Olympus, tiny, feminine foot.” Like the one Don Rigoberto had seen in the advertisement in Time, which reminded him of Lucrecia’s feet and held him here, in the first light of morning, sending his beloved this bottle that he would throw into the sea, hoping it would find her, knowing very well it would not, for how could something that did not exist, something shaped by the evanescent brush of his dreams, ever reach her?