“Won’t you ever forgive me, Justita?” The boy grew sad. “Learn from my stepmamá she’s forgotten what happened and now we get along fine, just like before.”
No, not just like before, thought Doña Lucrecia. A hot wave lapped at her all the way from her feet to the ends of her hair. She concealed it and sipped at her tea.
“I guess the señora is very, very good and I’m very, very bad,” Justiniana said mockingly.
“Then you and I are alike, Justita. Because you think I’m very, very bad, don’t you?”
“You win, that’s another goal for you,” the girl said in parting as she disappeared into the hallway to the kitchen.
Doña Lucrecia and the boy did not speak as they ate their buns and drank their tea.
“Justita just says she hates me,” Fonchito declared when he had finished chewing. “But deep down I think she’s forgiven me too. Don’t you think so, Stepmamá?”
“Maybe, maybe not. She doesn’t let herself be taken in by your good-little-boy ways. She doesn’t want what happened to happen again. And even though I don’t like to think about it, I suffered a great deal because of you, Fonchito.”
“Do you think I don’t know that, Stepmamá?” The boy turned pale. “That’s why I’m going to do everything, everything, to make it up to you.”
Was he serious? Or was he playing a part, using words that were too mature for him? There was no way to tell in that young face, where the eyes, mouth, nose, cheekbones, ears, even the tousled hair, seemed the work of a scrupulous aesthete. He was as beautiful as an archangel or a little pagan god. And the worst thing, the very worst thing, Doña Lucrecia thought, was that he seemed the incarnation of purity, a model of innocence and virtue. “The same halo of chastity that Modesto had,” she said to herself, recalling the engineer, so fond of sentimental songs, who had courted her before she married Rigoberto, and whom she had rejected, perhaps because she could not truly appreciate his propriety and goodness. Or had she turned down poor Pluto precisely because he was so good? Because what appealed to her heart were those murky depths sounded by Rigoberto? With him, she had not hesitated for an instant. In the excellent Pluto, his chaste expression was a reflection of his soul; in this little devil Alfonso, it was a strategy for seduction, a siren song calling her down to the abyss.
“Do you love Justita very much, Stepmamá?”
“Yes, very much. She’s more than an employee to me. I don’t know what I would have done without Justiniana all these months, when I had to get used to living alone again. She’s been a friend, an ally. That’s how I think of her. I don’t have the stupid prejudices against servants that other people in Lima have.”
She almost told Fonchito about the eminently respectable Doña Felicia de Gallagher, who boasted at her tea and canasta parties that she had forbidden her chauffeur, a robust black man in a navy-blue uniform, to drink water when he was working so that he would not feel the need to urinate and have to stop the car, find a bathroom, and leave his employer alone in those streets crawling with thieves. But she stopped herself, sensing that even an indirect allusion to a bodily function in front of the boy would be like stirring up the fetid waters of a swamp.
“Shall I pour you more tea? The buns are delicious,” said Fonchito, flattering her. “When I can get away from the academy and come here, I feel happy, Stepmamá.”
“You shouldn’t cut so many classes. If you really want to be a painter, you’ll find those classes very useful.”
Why, when she spoke to him like a child—which is what he was—why was she overcome by a feeling of duplicity, of lying? But if she treated him like a young man, she had identical misgivings, the same sense of mendacity.
“Do you think Justiniana is pretty, Stepmamá?”
“Yes, yes I do. She’s a very Peruvian type, with her cinnamon skin and pert look. She must have broken a few hearts along the way.”
“Did my papá ever tell you he thought she was pretty?”
“No, I don’t think he ever did. Why so many questions?”
“No reason. Except you’re prettier than Justita, prettier than all of them, Stepmamá,” the boy exclaimed. And then, frightened, he immediately begged her pardon. “Was I wrong to say that? You won’t get angry, will you?”
Señora Lucrecia tried to keep Rigoberto’s son from noticing how perturbed she was. Was Lucifer up to his old tricks? Should she pick him up by the ear and throw him out and tell him never to come back? But now Fonchito seemed to have forgotten what he had just said and was looking for something in his portfolio. At last he found it.
“Look, Stepmamá,” and he handed her the small clipping. “Schiele when he was a boy. Don’t I look like him?”
Doña Lucrecia examined the painfully thin adolescent with the short hair and delicate features, tightly encased in a dark turn-of-the-century suit with a rose in the lapel and a high stiff collar and bow tie that seemed to be strangling him.
“Not at all,” she said. “You don’t look anything like him.”
“Those are his sisters standing beside him. Gertrude and Melanie. The smaller one, the blonde, is the famous Gerti.”
“Why famous?” asked Doña Lucrecia, feeling uncomfortable. She knew very well she was entering a minefield.
“What do you mean why?” The rosy little face showed amazement; his hands made a theatrical gesture. “Didn’t you know? She was the model for his best known nudes.”
“Oh, really?” Doña Lucrecia’s discomfort intensified. “I see you’re very familiar with Egon Schiele’s life.”
“I’ve read everything there is about him in my papá’s library. Lots of women posed naked for him. Schoolgirls, streetwalkers, his lover Wally. And also his wife, Edith, and his sister-in-law, Adele.”
“All right, all right.” Doña Lucrecia looked at her watch. “It’s getting late, Fonchito.”
“Didn’t you know he had Edith and Adele pose for him together?” the boy went on enthusiastically, as if he hadn’t heard her. “And the same thing happened when he was living with Wally, in the little village of Krumau. He posed her naked with some schoolgirls. That’s why there was such a scandal.”
“I’m not surprised, if they were schoolgirls,” Señora Lucrecia remarked. “Now, it’s getting dark and you’d better go. If Rigoberto calls the academy, he’ll find out you’re missing classes.”
“But the whole thing was unfair,” the boy continued, carried away by excitement. “Schiele was an artist, he needed inspiration. Didn’t he paint masterpieces? What was wrong with having them undress?”
“I’ll take the cups into the kitchen.” Señora Lucrecia rose to her feet. “Help me with the plates and the breadbasket, Fonchito.”
The boy quickly brushed the crumbs scattered on the table into his hand. Obediently he followed his stepmother. But Señora Lucrecia had not succeeded in tearing him away from his subject.
“Well, it’s true he did things with some of the women who posed naked for him,” he said as they walked down the hall. “For example, with his sister-in-law Adele. But he wouldn’t have with his sister Gerti, would he, Stepmamá?”
The cups had begun to clatter in Señora Lucrecia’s hands. The damn kid had the diabolical habit of turning the conversation to salacious topics, playing the innocent all the while.
“Of course not,” she replied, feeling her tongue stumbling over the words. “Certainly not, what an idea.”
They had walked into the small kitchen, its floor tiles gleaming like mirrors. The walls sparkled too. Justiniana observed them, intrigued. A light fluttered like a butterfly in her eyes, animating her dark face.
“With Gerti, maybe not, but he did with his sister-in-law,” the boy insisted. “Adele herself admitted it after Egon Schiele died. The books say so, Stepmamá. I mean, he did things with both sisters. That’s probably where his inspiration came from.”
“What good-for-nothing are you talking about?” asked the maid. Her expression was very lively. She took the cups
and plates, rinsed them in running water, then put them in the washbasin, full to the brim with soapy, blue-tinged water. The odor of bleach permeated the kitchen.
“Egon Schiele,” whispered Doña Lucrecia. “An Austrian painter.”
“He died when he was twenty-eight, Justita,” the boy explained.
“He must have died of all those things he did,” Justiniana said as she washed plates and cups and dried them with a red-checkered towel. “So behave yourself, Foncho, or the same thing will happen to you.”
“He didn’t die of the things he did, he died of Spanish influenza,” replied the boy, impervious to her mockery. “His wife too, three days before him. What’s Spanish influenza, Stepmamá?”
“A fatal flu, I guess. It must have come to Vienna from Spain. All right, you have to go now, it’s late.”
“Now I know why you want to be a painter, you bandit,” an irrepressible Justiniana interjected. “Because painters seem to have so much fun with their models.”
“Don’t make those kinds of jokes,” Doña Lucrecia reprimanded her. “He’s only a boy.”
“A nice big boy, Señora,” she replied, opening her mouth wide and showing her dazzling white teeth.
“Before he painted them, he played with them.” Fonchito took up the thread of his thought again, not paying attention to the dialogue between the señora and her maid. “He had them take different poses, trying things out. Dressed, undressed, half-dressed. What he liked best was for them to try on stockings. Red, green, black, every color. And lie on the floor. Together, separately, holding one another. And pretend they were fighting. He spent hours and hours looking at them. He played with the two sisters as if they were his dolls. Until his inspiration came. Then he painted them.”
“That’s quite a game,” Justiniana said, teasing him. “Like kids’ strip poker, but for grown-ups.”
“Enough! That’s enough!” Doña Lucrecia’s voice was so loud that Fonchito and Justiniana stood there openmouthed. More quietly, she said, “I don’t want your papá to start asking you questions. You have to go.”
“All right, Stepmamá,” the boy stammered.
He was white with shock, and Doña Lucrecia regretted having shouted. But she could not allow him to go on talking so passionately about the intimate details of Egon Schiele’s life; her heart warned her that a trap, a danger lay there, one she absolutely had to avoid. What had gotten into Justiniana to make her egg him on that way? The boy left the kitchen. She heard him picking up his book bag, portfolio, and pencils in the dining alcove. When he came back, he had straightened his tie, put on his cap, and buttoned his jacket.
Standing in the doorway, looking into her eyes, with utter naturalness he asked, “May I kiss you goodbye, Stepmamá?”
Doña Lucrecia’s heart, which was returning to normal, began to race again; but what disturbed her most was Justiniana’s little smile. What should she do? It was ridiculous to refuse. She nodded, bending her head down. A moment later she felt a baby bird’s peck on her cheek.
“May I kiss you too, Justita?”
“Make sure it’s on the mouth,” and the girl burst out laughing.
This time the boy joined in the joke, laughed, and stood on tiptoe to kiss Justiniana on the cheek. It was foolish, of course, but Señora Lucrecia did not dare to meet the eyes of her servant or reprimand her for carrying her tasteless jokes too far.
“I could kill you,” she said finally, half seriously, half in jest, when she heard the street door close. “Have you lost your mind, making jokes like that with Fonchito?”
“Well, there’s something about that boy,” Justiniana apologized with a shrug. “I don’t know what it is, but it fills your head with sin.”
“Whatever,” said Doña Lucrecia. “But where he’s concerned, it’s better not to throw fuel on the fire.”
“Fire is what’s on your face, señora,” replied Justiniana, with her customary impudence. “But don’t worry, you look terrific in that color.”
Chlorophyll and Dung
I am sorry I must disappoint you. Your impassioned arguments in favor of preserving nature and the environment do not move me. I was born, I have lived, and I will die in the city (in the ugly city of Lima, to make matters worse), and leaving the metropolis, even for a weekend, is a servitude to which I submit occasionally because of family or professional obligations, but always with distaste. Do not count me as one of those bourgeois whose fondest wish is to buy a little house on a southern beach where they can spend summers and weekends in obscene proximity to sand, salt water, and the beer bellies of other bourgeois identical to themselves. This Sunday spectacle of families fraternizing beside the sea in a bien pensant exhibitionism is, in the ignoble annals of gregariousness, one of the most depressing offered by this pre-individualist country.
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 wo
uld 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.