“The only thing I understand is whore,” observed Justiniana, her head spinning at the words she was hearing. “Were you serious? How could you keep from laughing? Excuse the interruption, Señora.”
“Follow me,” said the newcomer, without a hint of humor. He moved like a robot.
Doña Lucrecia slid off the bar stool and could imagine the bartender’s evil-minded glance as he watched her leave. She followed the blond young man, who moved quickly among the crowded tables, cutting through the smoke-filled atmosphere on his way to the exit. Then he crossed the corridor to the elevators. Doña Lucrecia saw him press the button for the twenty-fourth floor, and her heart skipped a beat and the pit of her stomach felt hollow because of how quickly the elevator rose. A door was opened as soon as they walked out into the hallway. They were in the foyer of an enormous suite: through the large picture window, a sea of lights with dark patches and banks of fog spread out at her feet.
“You can take off the wig and get undressed in the bathroom.” The boy pointed to a room off the sitting room. But Doña Lucrecia could not take a step, for she was intrigued by that youthful face, the steely eyes, the tousled ringlets—she had thought his hair was blond, but it was light to medium brown—that fell on his forehead and were modeled by the cone of light from a lamp. How was it possible? He looked exactly like him.
“Do you mean Egon Schiele?” Justiniana interrupted. “The painter that Fonchito’s so crazy about? That good-for-nothing who painted his models doing dirty stuff?”
“Why do you think I was so shocked? I mean him and no one else.”
“I know I resemble him,” the boy explained in the same serious, businesslike, dehumanized tone he had used with her from the first. “Is that why you’re so disconcerted? All right, I resemble him. What about it? Or do you think I’m Egon Schiele come back to life? You’re not that foolish, are you?”
“It’s just that I’m dumbfounded by the resemblance,” Doña Lucrecia acknowledged as she stared at him. “It’s not just the face. It’s your body too, thin, tall, rachitic. And your hands, they’re so big. And the way you play with your fingers, hiding the thumbs. Exactly the same, identical to all the photographs of Egon Schiele. How is it possible?”
“Let’s not waste any more time,” the boy said coldly, with a look of irritation. “Take off that disgusting wig and those horrible earrings and beads. I’ll wait for you in the bedroom. Come in naked.”
There was something defiant and vulnerable in his face. He looked, thought Doña Lucrecia, like a spoiled, brilliant little boy who, in spite of his pranks and impudence, his audacity and insolence, needed his mamá very much. Was she thinking of Egon Schiele or Fonchito? Doña Lucrecia was absolutely certain that the boy prefigured what Rigoberto’s son would be in a few years.
“Now the hard part begins,” she said to herself. She was sure that the boy who resembled Fonchito and Egon Schiele had double-locked the door, and that even if she wanted to, there was no escape from the suite. She would have to remain there the rest of the night. Along with the fear that had overwhelmed her, she was consumed with curiosity, and even a hint of arousal. Giving herself to this slender youngster with the cold, rather cruel expression would be like making love to a Fonchito-youth-almost-man, or to a rejuvenated and beautified Rigoberto, a Rigoberto-youth-almost-boy. The idea made her smile. The mirror in the bathroom reflected her relaxed, almost happy expression. She had trouble taking off her clothes. Her hands felt stiff, as if they had been in snow. Without the absurd wig, free of the miniskirt that had confined her, she could breathe freely. She kept on her panties and minimal black lace bra, and before walking out she fluffed and arranged her hair—she had been wearing a hairnet—pausing for a moment in the doorway. Again she felt panic. “I may not get out of here alive.” But not even that fear made her regret coming here or acting out this cruel farce in order to please Rigoberto (or Fonchito?). When she walked into the sitting room, she saw that the boy had turned off all the lights in the room except for a small lamp in a far corner. Through the enormous window, thousands of fireflies were winking down below, in an inverted sky. Lima wore the disguise of a great city; the darkness wiped away its rags, its filth, even its bad smell. The soft music of harps, flutes, and violins washed over the shadows. As she walked, still apprehensive, toward the door the boy had indicated, she felt a new wave of excitement that stiffened her nipples (“Rigoberto likes that so much”). She moved silently across the thick-piled carpet and knocked on the closed door. It opened without a sound.
“And they were there, the ones from before?” exclaimed Justiniana, even more incredulous. “I can’t believe it. Both of them? Adelita, Señora Esther’s daughter?”
“And the man with the horses, the dealer, or whatever he was,” Doña Lucrecia confirmed. “Yes, they were there. Both of them. In bed.”
“And stark naked, of course.” Justiniana giggled, raising a hand to her mouth and brazenly rolling her eyes. “Waiting for you, Señora.”
The room seemed larger than usual for a hotel, even one in a luxury suite, but Doña Lucrecia could not make an exact estimate of its dimensions because only the lamp on one of the night tables was lit, and the circular light, reddened by the large, scorpion-colored shade, clearly illuminated only the couple lying in an embrace on the coal-black spread with the dark brownish markings that covered the king-size bed. The rest of the room lay in shadow.
“Come in, baby,” the man welcomed her, waving a hand as he continued to kiss Adelita, whom he had partially mounted. “Have a drink. There’s champagne on the table. And some coke in that silver snuffbox.”
Her surprise at finding Adelita and the horse lover did not make her forget the slender young man with the cruel mouth. Where had he gone? Was he spying on them from the shadows?
“Hi, honey.” Adelita’s mischievous face appeared over the man’s shoulder. “I’m glad you got rid of your date. Come on, hurry up. Aren’t you cold? It’s nice and warm in here.”
She lost all her fear. She went to the table and poured a glass of champagne from a bottle resting in an ice bucket. And if she did a line of cocaine as well? As she sipped her drink in the semidarkness, she thought, It’s magic or witchcraft. It can’t be a miracle. The man was fatter than he had seemed in clothes; his pale body, spotted with moles, had rolls of fat around the middle, smooth buttocks, and very short legs covered with tufts of dark hair. Adelita, on the other hand, was even thinner than Lucrecia had thought; her body was long, lean, and dark, with an extremely narrow waist and protruding hipbones. She allowed herself to be kissed and embraced, and also embraced the horse-loving dealer, but though her gestures simulated enthusiasm, Doña Lucrecia noticed that she did not kiss him, and even avoided his mouth.
“Come on, come on, I can’t hold out much longer,” the man pleaded suddenly, vehemently. “My fantasy, my fantasy. It’s now or never, girls!”
Though her earlier excitement had ebbed and she felt a certain revulsion, after she drained her glass, Doña Lucrecia obeyed. Going toward the bed, she again saw the archipelago of lights through the window, below and above her, in the hills where the distant Cordillera began. She sat on a corner of the bed, not fearful but bewildered and increasingly repelled. A hand grasped her arm, pulled her, forced her to lie beneath a small, soft body. She gave in, she did not resist, she was disheartened, demoralized, disillusioned. She told herself, over and over again, like an automaton: “You’re not going to cry, Lucrecia, you’re not going to cry.” The man embraced her with his left arm and Adelita with his right, and his head pivoted from one to the other, kissing them on the neck, on the ears, searching for their mouths. Adelita’s face was very close to hers; she was disheveled and flushed, and in her eyes she detected a mocking, cynical sign of complicity, urging her on. His lips and teeth pressed against hers, forcing her mouth open. His tongue slithered in like an asp.
“You’re the one I want to fuck,” she heard him beg as he nibbled and caressed her breasts. “Get on, get on. Hurry, I
’m going to come.”
She hesitated, but Adelita helped her mount him, and then she squatted too, passing one of her legs over him and adjusting her position so that his mouth was at her depilitated sex, where Doña Lucrecia saw no more than a sparse line of hair. At that moment, she felt herself impaled. Had that tiny, barely erect thing that seconds before had been rubbing against her legs grown so much when it entered her? Now it was a rod, a battering ram that raised her up, pierced her, wounded her with cataclysmic force.
“Kiss each other, kiss each other,” the pony man was moaning. “I can hardly see you, damn it. We don’t have a mirror!”
Drenched with perspiration from head to foot, stupefied, in pain, not opening her eyes, she stretched out her arms and searched for Adelita’s face, but when she found her thin lips the girl, though she pressed them hard against Lucrecia’s, kept them closed. They did not open even when she applied pressure with her tongue. And then, through the lashes of her half-closed eyes and the beads of sweat falling from her brow, she saw the young man with the steely eyes, above them, near the ceiling, balancing at the top of a ladder. Half-hidden by what seemed to be a lacquered screen that had Chinese characters on it, his ears attentive, his eyes ablaze, the small cruel mouth puckered, he was furiously drawing her, drawing them, with a long stick of charcoal on snow-white paper. He looked, in fact, like a bird of prey crouched at the top of the ladder, observing them, measuring them, putting on the finishing touches with long, energetic strokes, those fierce, sharp eyes darting back and forth from the pad to the bed, the bed to the pad, not paying attention to anything else, indifferent to the lights of Lima spread out beneath the window, and to his own virile member that had forced its way out of his trousers, popping the buttons, and stretched and grew like a balloon filling with air. A flying serpent, it hovered over her, contemplating her with its great Cyclopean eye. It did not surprise her or matter to her. She was riding, overflowing, intoxicated, grateful, full to the brim, thinking now of Fonchito, now of Rigoberto.
“Why are you still bouncing around, can’t you see I’ve come?” whimpered the lover of horses. In the semidarkness his face looked ashen. He was pouting like a spoiled child. “Damned luck, the same thing always happens. Just when things get going, I come. I can’t hold it back. No way, no way. I went to a specialist and he prescribed mud baths. Pure crap. They gave me a stomachache and made me puke. Massages. More crap. I went to a witch doctor in La Victoria and he put me in a tub with herbs that smelled like shit. What good did it do me? None at all. Now I come faster than I did before. Why do I have such rotten luck, damn it?”
He moaned and began to sob.
“Don’t cry, compadre, didn’t you have your fantasy?” Adelita consoled him, passing her leg again over the sniveler’s head and lying beside him.
Apparently neither of them could see Egon Schiele, or his double, balancing a meter above them at the top of the ladder, who kept from falling and maintained his center of gravity thanks to that immense penis waving gently over the bed, displaying in the dim light its delicate rose-colored creases and the merry veins on its back. And they undoubtedly did not hear him either. She did, very clearly. Between clenched teeth he was repeating, like a harsh, belligerent mantra, “I am the most timid of men. I am divine.”
“Take a rest, honey, what are you doing, the show’s over,” Adelita said to her affectionately.
“Don’t let them leave, hit them if you have to. Don’t let them go. Hit them, hit them hard, both of them!”
It was Fonchito, naturally. No, not the painter absorbed in the task of sketching them. It was the boy, her stepchild, Rigoberto’s son. Was Rigoberto there too? Yes. Where? Somewhere, hidden in the shadows in that room of miracles. Lying still, feeling awkward, no longer excited, terrified, covering her breasts with her hands, Doña Lucrecia looked to the right, peered to the left. And at last she found them, reflected in a great oval mirror where she saw herself as well, repeated like one of Egon Schiele’s models. The half-light did not dissolve them; instead, it revealed father and son, sitting next to each other—the former observing them with benevolent affection, the latter overexcited, his angelic face red with so much shouting—“Hit them, hit them”—on a settee that seemed like a box in a theater perching over the stage of the bed.
“You mean the señor and Fonchito were there too?” said Justiniana in a rather sharp tone of utter disbelief. “Now that’s something nobody could believe.”
“Sitting right there watching us.” Doña Lucrecia nodded. “Rigoberto, very well-bred, understanding, tolerant. And the boy out of control, up to his usual mischief.”
“I don’t know about you, Señora,” said Justiniana abruptly, cutting the narration short and getting to her feet, “but right now I need a cold shower. So I won’t spend another sleepless night tossing and turning. I love having these conversations with you. But they leave me hot and bothered and charged with electricity. If you don’t believe me, just put your hand here and see what a shock you’ll get.”
The Slimy Worm
Although I know all too well that you are a necessary evil without which communal life would not be livable, I must tell you that you represent everything I despise, in society and in myself. Because for more than a quarter of a century, Monday through Friday, from eight in the morning until six in the evening, with some ancillary activities (cocktail parties, seminars, inaugurations, conferences) which are impossible for me to avoid without risk to my livelihood, I too am a kind of bureaucrat though I work in the private, not the public sector. But, like you, and because of you, in the course of these twenty-five years my energy, time, and talent (I had some, once) have been swallowed up in large part by transactions, negotiations, applications, petitions, the procedures invented by you to justify the salary you earn and the desk where your rear end grows fat, leaving me barely a few crumbs of freedom to take certain initiatives and engage in work that may deserve to be called creative. I know that insurance (my professional field) and creativity are as far apart as the planets Saturn and Pluto in the vast reaches of space, but this distance would not be so vertiginous if you, regulationist hydra, red tapist caterpillar, king of seal-bearing documents, had not made it into an abyss. For even in the arid desert of insurers and underwriters the human imagination could play an enthusiastic part and derive intellectual stimulation and even pleasure if you, imprisoned in that dense chain mail of suffocating regulations—meant to lend an air of necessity to the bloated bureaucracy that gorges itself at the public trough and creates myriad alibis and justifications for its blackmail, bribery, trafficking, and theft—had not transformed the work of an insurance company into a mind-numbing routine similar to that followed by Jean Tinguely’s complicated, hardworking machines, which move chains, pulleys, rods, blades, scoops, and pistons, and eventually give birth to a Ping-Pong ball (you don’t know who Tinguely is, nor should you, though I am sure that if you ever happened to run across his creations, you would have taken every precaution to not understand, to trivialize the savage sarcasm aimed at you by the works of this sculptor, one of the few contemporary artists who understand me).
If I tell you that I started at the firm soon after receiving my law degree, in an insignificant position in the legal department, and that in the past quarter century I have moved up through the hierarchy to become a manager, a member of the Board of Directors, and the owner of a good share of stock in the company, you will say that under these circumstances I have nothing to complain about, that I suffer from ingratitude. Don’t I live well? Don’t I form part of the microscopic portion of Peruvian society that owns a home and a car, has the opportunity to vacation once or twice a year in Europe or the United States, and enjoys the kind of comfortable, secure life that is unthinkable, undreamable, for four-fifths of our compatriots? All this is true. It is also true that because of my successful career (isn’t that what you people call it?) I have been able to fill my study with books, etchings, and paintings that protect me from ramp
ant stupidity and vulgarity (that is, from everything you represent) and create an enclave of freedom and fantasy where every day or, rather, every night, I have been able to detoxify, shedding the thick crust of dulling conventionality, vile routine, castrating gregarious activities that you manufacture and that nour ish you, and live, truly live and be myself, opening wide to the angels and demons that live inside me the iron-barred doors behind which—and you, you are to blame—they are obliged to hide for the rest of the day.
You will also say, “If you hate office routine so much, and letters and policies, legal reports and protocols, claims, permits, and allegations, then why did you not have the courage to shake it off and live your true life, the life of your fantasy and desires, not only at night but in the morning, afternoon, and evening too? Why did you give more than half your life to the bureaucratic animal that enslaves you and your angels and demons?” The question is pertinent—I have asked it many times—but so is my reply: “Because the world of fantasy, pleasure, and liberated desire, my only homeland, would not have survived unscathed subjected to the rigors of need, deprivation, economic worries, the stifling weight of debts and poverty. Dreams and desires are inedible. My existence would have been impoverished, would have become a caricature of itself.” I am no hero, I am not a great artist, I lack genius, and consequently I would not have been able to console myself with the hope of a “work” that would outlive me. My aspirations and aptitudes do not go beyond knowing how to distinguish—in this I am superior to you, whose adventitious condition has reduced to less than nothing your sense of ethical and aesthetic discrimination—within the thicket of possibilities that surround me, between what I love and what I despise, what makes my life beautiful and what makes it ugly and besmirches it with stupidity, what exalts me and what depresses me, what gives me joy and what makes me suffer. Simply to be in a position to constantly differentiate among these contradictory options, I require the economic peace of mind provided by this profession so blemished by the culture of red tape, that noxious miasma produced by you as the worm produces slime, which has become the air the entire world now breathes. Fantasies and desires—mine, at least—demand a minimum of serenity and security to manifest themselves. Otherwise they would wither and die. If you wish to deduce from this that my angels and demons are defiantly bourgeois, that is absolutely true.