"Why are you so interested in Egon Schiele?" asked Do?a Lucrecia.
"It makes me sad that he died so young and that they put him in prison," Fonchito replied. "His pictures are really beautiful. I spend hours looking at them in my papá's books. Don't you like them, Stepmamá?"
"I don't recall them very well. Except for the poses. The bodies are strained and twisted, aren't they?"
"And I like Schiele because, because …" The boy interrupted her, as if he were about to reveal a secret. "I'm afraid to tell you, Stepmamá."
"You know how to say things very well when you want to, so don't play the fool."
"Because I have a feeling that I'm like him. That I'm going to have a tragic life, like his."
Do?a Lucrecia laughed out loud. But then a feeling of uneasiness came over her. How did the boy ever think up an idea like that? Fonchito continued to look at her, very seriously. After a while, making an effort, he smiled. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the dining alcove; he was still wearing the blue jacket and gray tie of his uniform but had taken off the peaked cap, which lay beside him along with his book bag and the portfolio and box of pencils from the academy. Just then, Justiniana came in with the tea tray. Fonchito welcomed her with glee.
"Toasted sweet buns with butter and marmalade." He clapped his hands, suddenly freed from care. "What I love best in the whole world. You remembered, Justita!"
"I didn't fix this for you, it's for the se?ora," Justiniana lied, pretending severity. "Not even a burned crumb for you."
She began to serve the tea, arranging the cups on the coffee table in the living room. In the Olivar some boys were playing soccer, and their enthusiastic silhouettes could be seen through the curtains; inside the house they could hear, in muted form, their curses, resounding kicks, and shouts of triumph. Soon it would be dark.
"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 Do?a 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 se?ora 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.
Do?a 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, Do?a 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 Do?a 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?"
Se?ora 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?"
Do?a 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 Do?a 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?" Do?a 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." Do?a 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," Se?ora 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." Se?ora 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 Se?ora 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 Se?ora 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 wash-basin, full to the brim with soapy, blue-tinged water. The odor of bleach permeated the kitchen.
"Egon Schiele," whispered Do?a 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," Do?a Lucrecia reprimanded her. "He's only a boy."
"A nice big boy, Se?ora," 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 se?ora 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!" Do?a 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 Do?a 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?"
Do?a 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 Se?ora 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 Do?a Lucrecia. "But where he's concerned, it's better not to throw fuel on the fire."
"Fire is what's on your face, se?ora," 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 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 Vend?me 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, bo?tes, 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 Sevigné, 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 ma?tres 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).
The following morning—the seventh day, with the word "end" looming on the horizon—we will have to rise early. The plane to Paris leaves at ten, connecting with the Concorde to New York. As we fly over the Atlantic, we will sort through the images and sensations stored in our memories, selecting those that deserve to endure.
We will say goodbye at Kennedy Airport (your flight to Lima and mine to Boston leave at almost the same time), no doubt never to see one another again. I do not think our paths will cross a second time. I will not return to Peru, and I do not believe you will ever set foot in the remote corner of the Deep South that, beginning in October, will boast of the only Hispanic college president in this country (the 2,500 others are gringos, African Americans, or Asians).
Will you come? Your passage is waiting for you in the offices of Lufthansa in Lima. You don't need to send me a reply. On Saturday the 17th I will be at the appointed place. Your presence or absence will be your response. If you do not come, I will follow this itinerary alone, fantasizing that you are with me, making real this whim that has been my consolation for years, thinking of a woman who, despite the rejection that changed my life, will always be the very heart of my memory.
Need I point out that this is an invitation to honor me with your company and does not imply any obligation other than your presence? I am in no way asking you, during the days of our travels together—I can think of no other euphemism for saying this—to share my bed. My darling Lucrecia, my only desire is that you share my dream. The suites reserved in New York, Paris, and Venice have separate bedrooms with doors under lock and key, and if your scruples demand it, I can add daggers, hatchets, revolvers, and even bodyguards. But you know none of that will be necessary, and for the entire week this virtuous Modesto, this gentle Pluto, as they called me in the neighborhood, will be as respectful of you as I was years ago in Lima, when I tried to persuade you to marry me and barely had the courage to touch your hand in darkened movie theaters.
Until we meet at Kennedy, or goodbye forever, Lucre,
Modesto (Pluto)
Don Rigoberto felt assailed by the high temperature and tremors of tertian fever. How would Lucrecia respond? Would she indignantly reject this letter from Lazarus? Or would she succumb to frivolous temptation? In the milky light of dawn, it seemed to him that his notebooks were waiting for the denouement as impatiently as his tormented spirit.
Imperatives of the Thirsty Traveler
This is an order from your slave, beloved.
Before a mirror, on a bed or sofa adorned with hand-painted silks from India or Indonesian batik with circular eyes, you will lie on your back, undressed, and loosen your long black hair.
You will raise your left leg, bending it until it forms an angle. You will rest your head on your right shoulder, partially open your lips, and, crushing a corner of the sheet in your right hand, you will lower your eyelids, feigning sleep. You will imagine a yellow river of butterfly wings and stardust descending from heaven and entering you.
Who are you?
The Dana? of Gustav Klimt, naturally. No matter the model he used to paint this oil (1907–8), the master anticipated you, foretold you, saw you just as you would come into the world, just as you would be half a century later, on the other side of the ocean. He believed he was re-creating a figure from Hellenic mythology with his brushes, when he was actually pre-creating you, future beauty, loving wife, sensual stepmother.
Only you among women, in this painterly fantasy, combine an angel's virtuous perfection, innocence, and purity with a boldly terrestrial body. Today I pass over the firmness of your breasts and the assertiveness of your hips to pay exclusive homage to the consistency of your thighs, a temple to whose columns I would like to be tied, then whipped because I have misbehaved.
All of you brings joy to my senses.
Velvet skin, aloe saliva, oh delicate lady of unwithering elbows and knees, awaken, regard yourself in the mirror, tell yourself, "I am worshipped and admired above all others, I am desired as watery mirages in the desert are longed for by the thirsty traveler."
Lucrecia-Dana?, Dana?-Lucrecia.
This is a plea from your master, slave.
The Ideal Week
"My secretary called Lufthansa and, in fact, your paid passage is waiting there," said Don Rigoberto. "Round trip. First class, of course."
"Was I right to show you the letter, my love?" exclaimed Do?a Lucrecia in great alarm. "You're not angry, are you? We promised never to hide anything from each other, and I thought I ought to show it to you."
"You did just the right thing, my queen," said Don Rigoberto, kissing his wife's hand. "I want you to go."
"You want me to go?" Do?a Lucrecia smiled, looked somber, then smiled again. "Are you serious?"
"I beg you to go," he insisted, his lips on his wife's fingers. "Unless the idea displeases you. But why should it? Even though the plan is that of a rather vulgar nouveau riche, it has been worked out in a spirit of joy and with an irony not at all frequent in engineers. You will have a good time, my dear."
"I don't know what to say, Rigoberto," Do?a Lucrecia stammered, making an effort not to blush. "It's very generous of you, but …"
"I'm asking you to accept for selfish reasons," her husband explained. "And you know that selfishness is a virtue in my philosophy. Your trip will be a great experience for me."
Do?a Lucrecia knew from Don Rigoberto's eyes and expression that he was serious. And so she did take the trip, and on the eighth day she returned to Lima. At Córpac she was met by her husband and Fonchito, who was holding a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of flowers with a card that read: Welcome home, Stepmamá. They greeted her with many displays of affection, and Don Rigoberto, to help her conceal her discomfort, asked endless questions about the weather, going through customs, changes in schedule, jet lag and fatigue, avoiding anything approaching sensitive material. On the way to Barranco he provided her with a meticulous accounting of events at the office and Fonchito's school, and their breakfasts, lunches, and dinners during her absence. The house sparkled with extravagant order and cleanliness. Justiniana had even had the curtains washed and the fertilizer in the garden replaced, tasks usually reserved for the end of the month.
The afternoon was spent unpacking suitcases, talking to the servants about practical matters, and answering phone calls from friends and relations who wanted to know how she had enjoyed her trip to Miami to shop for Christmas presents (the official version of her adventure). The atmosphere was absolutely uncharged when she took out gifts for her husband, her stepson, and Justiniana. Don Rigoberto liked the French ties, the Italian shirts, and the sweater from New York, and Fonchito looked marvelous in the jeans, leather jacket, and athletic gear. Justiniana gave a cry of enthusiasm when she tried on the duck-yellow dress over her smock.
After supper, Don Rigoberto withdrew to the bathroom and took less time than usual with his ablutions. When he emerged, he found the bedroom in darkness cut by indirect lighting that illuminated only the two engravings by Utamaro depicting the incompatible but orthodox matings of the same couple, the man endowed with a long, corkscrew member, the woman with a Lilliputian sex, the two of them surrounded by kimonos billowing like storm clouds, paper lanterns, floor mats, low tables holding a porcelain tea service, and, in the distance, bridges spanning a sinuous river. Do?a Lucrecia lay beneath the sheets, not naked, he discovered when he slipped in beside her, but in a new nightgown—purchased and worn on her trip?—that allowed his hands the freedom necessary to reach her most intimate corners. She turned on her side, and he could slide his arm under her shoulders and feel her from head to foot. He did not crush her to him but kissed her, very tenderly, on the eyes and cheeks, taking his time to reach her mouth.
"Don't tell me anything you don't want to," he lied into her ear with a boyish coquetry that inflamed her impatience as his lips traced the curve of her ear. "Whatever you have a mind to. Or nothing at all, if you prefer."
"I'll tell you everything," Do?a Lucrecia murmured, searching for his mouth. "Isn't that why you sent me?"
"That's one reason," Don Rigoberto agreed, kissing her on the neck, the hair, her forehead, returning again and again to her nose, cheeks, and chin. "Did you enjoy yourself? Did you have a good time?"
"Whether it was good or bad will depend on what happens now between you and me," said Se?ora Lucrecia hurriedly, and Don Rigoberto felt his wife become tense for a moment. "Yes, I enjoyed myself. Yes, I had a good time. But I was always afraid."
"Afraid I would be angry?" Now Don Rigoberto was kissing her firm breasts, millimeter by millimeter, and the tip of his tongue played with her nipples, feeling them harden. "That I would make a scene and be jealous"
"That you would suffer," Do?a Lucrecia whispered, embracing him.
"She's beginning to perspire," Don Rigoberto observed to himself. He felt joy as he caressed her increasingly responsive body, and he had to bring his mind to bear to control the vertigo that was overtaking him. He whispered into his wife's ear that he loved her more, much more than before her trip.
She began to speak, pausing as she searched for the words—silences meant to conceal her awkwardness—but little by little, aroused by his caresses and amorous interruptions, she gained confidence. At last, Don Rigoberto realized she had recovered her natural fluency and could tell her story by assuming a feigned distance from the account, clinging to his body, her head resting on his shoulder. The couple's hands moved from time to time to take possession or verify the existence of a member, a muscle, or a piece of skin.
"Had he changed very much?"
He had become very much a gringo in the way he dressed and spoke, for he continually used English words. But though his hair was gray and he had put on weight, he still had the same long, melancholy Pluto face, and all the timidity and inhibitions of his youth.
"Seeing you arrive must have been like a gift from heaven."
"He turned so pale! I thought he was going to faint. He was waiting for me with a bouquet of flowers bigger than he was. The limousine was one of those silver-colored ones that gangsters have in movies. With a bar, a television, a stereo, and—this will kill you—leopardskin seat covers.
"Poor ecologists," Don Rigoberto responded with enthusiasm.
"I know it's very parvenu," Modesto apologized while the chauffeur, an extremely tall Afghani in a maroon uniform, arranged their luggage in the trunk. "But it was the most expensive one."
"He's able to laugh at himself," Don Rigoberto declared. "That's nice."
"On the ride to the Plaza he paid me a few compliments, blushing all the way to his ears," Do?a Lucrecia continued. "He said I looked very young and even more beautiful than when he asked me to marry him."
"You are," Don Rigoberto interrupted, drinking in her breath. "More and more, every day, every hour."
"Not a single remark in bad taste, not a single offensive insinuation," she said. "He was so grateful to me for joining him that he made me feel like the good Samaritan in the Bible."
"Do you know what he was wondering while he was being so gallant?"
"What?" Do?a Lucrecia slipped her leg between her husband's.
"If he would see you naked that afternoon, in the Plaza, or if he would have to wait until that night, or even until Paris," Don Rigoberto explained.
"He didn't see me naked that afternoon or that night. Unless he peeked through the keyhole while I was bathing and dressing for the Metropolitan Opera. What he had said about separate rooms was true. Mine overlooked Central Park."
"But he must have at least held your hand at the opera, in the restaurant," he complained, feeling disappointed. "With the help of a little champagne, he must have put his cheek to yours while you were dancing at Regine's. He must have kissed your neck, your ear."
Not at all. He had not tried to take her hand or kiss her during that long night, though he did not spare the compliments, but always at a respectful distance. He was very likable, in fact, mocking his own lack of experience ("I'm mortified, Lucre, but in six years of marriage I've never cheated on my wife"), and admitting to her that this was the first time in his life he had attended the opera or set foot in Le Cirque and Regine's.
"The only thing I'm sure of is that I must ask for Dom Pérignon, sniff at the glass of wine as if I suffered from allergies, and order dishes with French names."
He looked at her with immeasurable, canine gratitude.
"To tell the truth, I've come out of vanity, Modesto. And curiosity too, of course. After ten years of our not seeing each other, of our not being in touch at all, is it possible you're still in love with me?"
"Love isn't the right word," he pointed out. "I'm in love with Dorothy, the gringa I married, who's very understanding and lets me sing in bed."
"For him you meant something more subtle," Don Rigoberto declared. "Unreality, illusion, the woman of his memory and desires. I want to worship you the same way, the way he does. Wait, wait."
He removed her tiny nightgown and then positioned her so that their skin would touch in more places. He reined in his desire and asked her to continue.
"We returned to the hotel just as I was beginning to yawn. He said good night at a distance from my door. He wished me pleasant dreams. He behaved so well, he was so much a gentleman, that the next morning I flirted with him just a little."
When she appeared for breakfast in the room that separated the two bedrooms, she was barefoot and wearing a short summer wrapper that left her legs and thighs exposed. Modesto was waiting for her, shaved, showered, and dressed. His mouth fell open.
"Did you sleep well?" he managed to articulate, slack-jawed, pulling out a chair for her at the breakfast table, which held fruit juice, toast, and marmalade. "May I say that you look very attractive?"
"Stop." Don Rigoberto cut her off. "Let me kneel and kiss the legs that dazzled Pluto the dog."
On the way to the airport, and then as they ate lunch in the Air France Concorde, Modesto returned to the attentive adoration he had displayed on the first day. He reminded Lucrecia, in an undramatic way, of how he had decided to leave the School of Engineering when he became convinced she would not marry him, and had gone to Boston to seek his fortune; of his early difficulties in that city of cold winters and dark red Victorian mansions, where it took him three months to find his first permanent job. His heart had been broken, but he was not complaining. He had achieved the security he needed, he got along well with his wife, and now that a new phase of his life was about to begin with his return to the university, which was something he had always missed, he was making his fantasy, the grown-up game that had been his refuge all these years, come true: his ideal week with Lucre, when he would pretend to be rich in New York, Paris, and Venice. Now he could die happy.
"Are you really going to spend so much of your savings on this trip?"
"I would spend the three hundred thousand that are mine, because the rest belongs to Dorothy," he affirmed, looking into her eyes. "And not for the entire week. Just for having seen you at breakfast, just for seeing those legs, those arms, those shoulders. The most beautiful in the world, Lucre."
"What would he have said if he had seen your breasts and your sweet ass?" Don Rigoberto kissed her. "I love you, I adore you."
"This was when I decided that in Paris he would see the rest." Do?a Lucrecia moved away slightly from her husband's kisses. "I made the decision when the pilot announced that we had broken the sound barrier."
"It was the least you could have done for so proper a gentleman," said Don Rigoberto approvingly.
As soon as they were settled in their respective bedrooms—the view from Lucrecia's windows included the dark column on the Place Vend?me, so high she could not see the top, and the glittering display windows of the jewelry shops all around it—they went out for a stroll. Modesto had memorized the route and calculated the time it would take. They passed through the Tuileries, crossed the Seine, and walked toward Saint-Germain along the quays on the Left Bank. They reached the abbey half an hour before the concert. It was a pale, mild afternoon, autumn had already turned the leaves on the chestnut trees, and, from time to time, the engineer would stop, guidebook and map in hand, to give Lucrecia a bit of historical, urbanistic, architectural, or aesthetic information. On the uncomfortable little seats in a church filled to capacity for the concert, they had to sit very close together. Lucrecia enjoyed the lavish melancholy of Mozart's Requiem.
Later, when they were at a small table on the first floor of Lipp's, she congratulated Modesto. "I can't believe this is your first trip to Paris. You know streets, monuments, directions, as if you lived here."
"I've prepared for this trip as if it were the final exam for a degree, Lucre. I've consulted books, maps, travel agencies, and talked to travelers. I don't collect stamps or raise dogs or play golf. For years my only hobby has been preparing for this week."
"Was I always in it?"
"Another step along the road of flirtation," Don Rigoberto noted.
"Always you and only you," said Pluto, blushing. "New York, Paris, Venice, operas, restaurants, all the rest, were merely the background. The important thing, the central thing, was to be alone with you in that setting."
They returned to the Ritz in a taxi, tired and a little tipsy from the champagne, the Burgundy wine, and the cognac with which they had anticipated, accompanied, and bidden farewell to the choucroute. When they said good night, standing in the small room that divided their bedrooms, Do?a Lucrecia, without the slightest hesitation, announced to Modesto, "You're behaving so well that I want to play too. I'm going to give you a present."
"Oh, really?" Pluto's voice broke. "What's that, Lucre?"
"My entire body," she sang out. "Come in when I call you. But just to look."
She did not hear Modesto's reply but was sure that in the darkened room, as he nodded, speechless, his joy knew no bounds. Not certain exactly what she would do, she undressed, hung up her clothes, and, in the bathroom, unpinned her hair ("The way I like it, my love?" "Exactly the same, Rigoberto"), walked back into the room, turned out all the lights except the one on the night table, and moved the lamp so that its illumination, softened by a satin shade, fell on the sheets that the chambermaid had turned down for the night. She lay on her back, turned slightly to the side in a languid, uninhibited pose, and settled her head on the pillow.
"Whenever you're ready."
She closed her eyes so as not to see him come in, thought Don Rigoberto, moved by that touch of modesty. With absolute clarity he could see in the blue-tinged light, from the perspective of the hesitant, yearning engineer who had just crossed the threshold, the shapely body that, without reaching Rubenesque excesses, emulated the virginal opulence of Murillo as she lay on her back, one knee slightly forward to hide the pubis, the other presented openly, the full curves of the hips stabilizing the volume of golden flesh in the center of the bed. Though he had contemplated, studied, caressed and enjoyed that body so many times, through another man's eyes he seemed to see it for the first time. For a long while—his breathing agitated, his phallus stiff—he admired it. Reading his mind, not saying a word to break the silence, from time to time Lucrecia moved in slow motion with the abandon of one who thinks she is safe from indiscreet eyes, and displayed to the respectful Modesto, frozen two paces from the bed, her flanks and back, her buttocks and breasts, her hair-free underarms and the little forest of her pubis. At last she began to open her legs, revealing her inner thighs and the half-moon of her sex. "In the pose of the anonymous model of L'Origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet (1866)," Don Rigoberto sought and found the reference, overcome by emotion to discover that the exuberance of his wife's belly, the robust solidity of her thighs and mound of Venus, coincided millimeter by millimeter with the headless woman in the oil painting that was the reigning prince of his private collection. Then eternity dissolved.
"I'm tired, and I think you are too, Pluto. It's time to sleep."
"Good night" was the immediate reply of a voice at the very peak of ecstasy, or agony. Modesto stepped back, stumbled, and seconds later closed the door.
"He was capable of restraining himself, he did not throw himself at you like a ravening beast," exclaimed an enchanted Don Rigoberto. "You were controlling him with your little finger."
"It's hard to believe," Lucrecia said with a laugh, "but that docility of his was also part of the game."
The next morning a bellboy brought a bouquet of roses to her bed, with a card that read: Eyes that see, a heart that feels, a mind that remembers, and a cartoon dog that thanks you with all his heart.
"I want you too much," Don Rigoberto apologized as he covered her mouth with his hand. "I must make love to you."
"Then imagine the night poor Pluto must have spent."
"Poor?" Don Rigoberto pondered after love, as they, exhausted and satisfied, were recovering their strength. "Why poor?"
"I'm the happiest man in the world, Lucre," Modesto declared that night in the interval between two striptease shows at the Crazy Horse Saloon, which was packed with Japanese and Germans, and after they had consumed a bottle of champagne. "Not even the electric train that Father Christmas brought me on my tenth birthday can compare to your gift."
During the day, as they had walked through the Louvre, lunched at La Closerie de Lilas, visited the Centre Pompidou, or lost their way in the narrow, reconstructed streets of the Marais, he had not made the slightest allusion to the previous night. He continued to act as her well-informed, devoted, obliging traveling companion.
"The more you tell me, the better I like him," remarked Don Rigoberto.
"The same thing happened to me," Do?a Lucrecia acknowledged. "And so that day I went a step further, to reward him. At Maxim's he felt my knee against his during the entire meal. And when we danced, my breasts. And at the Crazy Horse, my legs."
"I envy him," exclaimed Don Rigoberto. "To discover you serially, episodically, bit by bit. A game of cat and mouse, after all. A game not without its dangers."
"No, not if it's played with gentlemen like you," Do?a Lucrecia said coquettishly. "I'm glad I accepted your invitation, Pluto."
They were back at the Ritz, drowsy and content. They were saying good night in the sitting room of their suite.
"Wait, Modesto," she improvised, blinking. "Surprise, surprise, close your little eyes."
Pluto obeyed instantly, transformed by expectation. She approached, pressed against him, kissed him, lightly at first, noticing that he hesitated to respond to the lips brushing his, and then to the thrusts of her tongue. When he did, she sensed that with this kiss the engineer was giving her the love he had felt for so long, his adoration and fantasy, his well-being and (if he had one) his soul. When he caught her around the waist, cautiously, prepared to let go at the first sign of rejection, Do?a Lucrecia allowed him to embrace her.
"May I open my eyes?"
"You may."
And then he looked at her, not with the cold eyes of the perfect libertine, de Sade, thought Don Rigoberto, but with the pure, fervent, impassioned eyes of the mystic at the moment of his ascent and vision.
"Was he very excited?" The question escaped his lips, and he regretted it. "What a stupid question. Forgive me, Lucrecia."
"He was, but he made no attempt to hold me. At the first hint, he moved away."
"You should have gone to bed with him that night," Don Rigoberto admonished her. "You were being abusive. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you were doing just the right thing. Yes, yes, of course. The slow, the formal, the ritualized, the theatrical—that is eroticism. It was a wise delay. Rushing makes us more like animals. Did you know that donkeys, monkeys, pigs, and rabbits ejaculate in twelve seconds, at the most?"
"But the frog can copulate for forty days and nights without stopping. I read it in a book by Jean Rostand: From Fly to Man."
"I'm envious." Don Rigoberto was filled with admiration. "You are so wise, Lucrecia."
"Those were Modesto's words." His wife confused him, returned him to an Orient Express hurtling through the European night on its way to Venice. "The next day, in our belle époque compartment."
And the words were reiterated by a bouquet of flowers waiting for her at the Hotel Cipriani, on sun-filled Giudecca: To Lucrecia, beautiful in life and wise in love.
"Wait, wait." Don Rigoberto brought her back to the rails. "Did you share the compartment on the train?"
"It had two beds. I was in the upper berth and he was in the lower."
"In other words …"
"We literally had to undress on top of one another," she completed the sentence. "We saw each other in our underclothes, though it was dark, because I turned out all the lights except the night-light."
"Underclothing is a general, abstract concept," Don Rigoberto fumed. "Give me precise details."
Do?a Lucrecia did. When it was time to undress—the anachronistic Orient Express was crossing German or Austrian forests, passing an occasional village—Modesto asked if she wanted him to leave. "There's no need, in this darkness we're no more than shadows," Do?a Lucrecia replied. The engineer sat on the lower berth, taking up as little room as possible in order to give her more space. She undressed, not forcing her movements or stylizing them, turning round where she stood as she removed each article of clothing: dress, slip, bra, stockings, panties. The illumination from the night-light, a little mushroom-shaped lamp with lanceolate drawings, caressed her neck, shoulders, breasts, belly, buttocks, thighs, knees, feet. Raising her arms, she slipped a Chinese silk pajama top, decorated with dragons, over her head.
"I'm going to sit with my legs uncovered while I brush my hair," she said, and did so. "If you feel the urge to kiss them, you may. As far as my knees."
Was it the torment of Tantalus? Or the garden of earthly delights? Don Rigoberto had moved to the foot of the bed, and anticipating his wish, Do?a Lucrecia sat on the edge so that, like Pluto on the Orient Express, her husband could kiss her insteps, breathe in the fragrance of the creams and colognes that refreshed her ankles, nibble at her toes and lick the hollows that separated them.
"I love you and admire you," said Don Rigoberto.
"I love you and admire you," said Pluto.
"And now to sleep," ordered Do?a Lucrecia.
They reached Venice on an Impressionist morning, the sun strong and the sky a deep blue, and as the launch carried them to the Cipriani through curling waves, Modesto, Michelin in hand, provided Lucrecia with brief descriptions of the palaces and churches along the Grand Canal.
"I'm feeling jealous, my dear," Don Rigoberto interrupted her.
"If you're serious, we'll erase it, sweetheart," Do?a Lucrecia proposed.
"Absolutely not," and he recanted. "Brave men die with their boots on, like John Wayne."
From the balcony of the Cipriani, over the trees in the garden, one could see the towers of San Marco and the palaces along the canal. They went out in the gondola-with-guide that was waiting for them. It was a whirl of canals and bridges, greenish waters and flocks of gulls that took flight as they passed, dim churches where they had to strain their eyes to make out the attributes of the gods and saints hanging there. They saw Titians and Veroneses, Bellinis and del Piombos, the horses of San Marco and the mosaics in the cathedral, and they fed a few grains of corn to the fat pigeons on the piazza. At midday they took the obligatory photograph at a table at Florian's while they ate the requisite pizzetta. In the afternoon they continued their tour, hearing names, dates, and anecdotes they barely listened to, lulled by the soothing voice of the guide from the agency. At seven-thirty, when they had bathed and changed, they drank their Bellinis in the salon with Moorish arches and Arabian pillows at the Danieli, and at precisely the right hour—nine o'clock—they were in Harry's Bar. There they saw the divine Catherine Deneuve (it seemed part of the program) come in and sit at the next table. Pluto said what he had to say, "I think you're more beautiful, Lucre."
"And?" Don Rigoberto pressed her.
Before taking the vaporetto back to Giudecca, they went for a walk, Do?a Lucrecia holding Modesto's arm, through narrow, half-deserted streets. They reached the hotel after midnight. Do?a Lucrecia was yawning.
"And?" Don Rigoberto was impatient.
"I'm so exhausted after our walk and all the nice things I've seen, I won't be able to close my eyes," lamented Do?a Lucrecia. "Fortunately, I have a remedy that never fails."
"What's that?" asked Modesto.
"What remedy?" echoed Don Rigoberto.
"A Jacuzzi, alternating cool and warm water," explained Do?a Lucrecia, walking toward her bedroom. Before she disappeared inside, she pointed toward the huge, luminous bathroom with its white tiled walls. "Would you fill the tub for me while I put on my robe?"
Don Rigoberto moved in his place, as restless as an insomniac: And? She went to her room, slowly undressed, folding each article of clothing, one piece at a time, as if she had all eternity at her disposal. Wearing a terrycloth robe and another little towel as a turban, she came back. The round tub bubbled noisily with the pulsations of the Jacuzzi.
"I put in bath salts." Then Modesto asked timidly, "Was that right?"
"That's perfect," she said, testing the water with the toes of one foot.
She let the yellow robe fall to her feet, and keeping on the towel that served as a turban, she stepped in and lay down in the water. She leaned her head on a pillow that the engineer hurriedly handed her. She sighed in gratitude.
"Shall I do anything else?" Don Rigoberto heard Modesto asking in a strangled voice. "Shall I go? Shall I stay?"
"How delicious, this cool water massage is so delicious." Do?a Lucrecia stretched her legs and arms with pleasure. "Then I'll add warmer water. And then to bed, as good as new."
"You were roasting him over a slow fire," Don Rigoberto bellowed approvingly.
"Stay if you like, Pluto," she said at last, wearing the intense expression of one who derives infinite pleasure from the caress of the water going back and forth across her body. "The tub is enormous, there's plenty of room. Why don't you bathe with me?"
Don Rigoberto's ears registered the strange hoot of an owl? howl of a wolf? trill of a bird? that greeted his wife's invitation. And, seconds later, he saw the naked engineer sinking into the tub. His fifty-year-old body, saved in the nick of time from obesity by his practice of aerobics, and jogging that brought him to the threshold of a heart attack, lay only millimeters from his wife.
"What else can I do?" he heard him ask, and he felt his admiration for him growing at the same rate as his jealousy. "I don't want to do anything you don't want. I will not take any initiative. At this moment I am the happiest and most unfortunate creature on earth, Lucre."
"You may touch me," she said with a sigh, in the cadence of a bolero, not opening her eyes. "Caress me and kiss me, my body and my face. Not my hair, because if it gets wet, tomorrow you'll be ashamed of me, Pluto. Don't you see that in your program you didn't leave a free moment for the hairdresser?"
"I too am the happiest man in the world," whispered Don Rigoberto. "And the most unfortunate."
Do?a Lucrecia opened her eyes.
"Don't be like that, so timid. We can't stay in the water very long."
Don Rigoberto squinted to see them better. He heard the monotonous bubbling of the Jacuzzi and felt the tickle, the rush of water, the shower of drops spattering the tiles, and he saw Pluto, taking precaution to the extreme in order not to seem crude, as he eagerly applied himself to the soft body that let him kiss, touch, caress, that moved to facilitate access for his hands and lips to every area but did not respond to his caresses or kisses and remained in a state of passive delight. He could feel the fever burning the engineer's skin.
"Aren't you going to kiss him, Lucrecia? Aren't you going to embrace him, not even once?"
"Not yet," replied his wife. "I too had my program, I had planned it very carefully. Don't you think he was happy?"
"I've never been so happy," said Modesto, his head, between Lucrecia's legs, rising from the bottom of the tub before submerging again. "I'd like to sing at the top of my lungs, Lucre."
"He's saying exactly what I feel," Don Rigoberto interjected, then permitted himself a joke: "Wasn't he risking pneumonia with all that hydro-erotic exertion?"
He laughed and immediately regretted it, again remembering that humor and pleasure repel each other like water and oil. "Please excuse the interruption," he apologized. But it was late. Do?a Lucrecia had begun to yawn in such a way that the diligent engineer, summoning all his fortitude, stopped what he was doing. On his knees, dripping water, his hair streaming down in bangs, he feigned resignation.
"You're tired, Lucre."
"I'm feeling all the weariness of the day. I can't stay awake anymore."
She leaped lightly from the tub and wrapped herself in the robe. From the door of her room she said good night with words that made her husband's heart skip a beat: "Tomorrow is another day, Pluto."
"The last one, Lucre."
"And the last night, as well," she said with precision, blowing him a kiss.
They began Friday morning half an hour late, but they made up for it on their visit to Murano, where, in hellish heat, artisans in T-shirts with prison stripes were blowing glass in the traditional manner, turning out decorative or household objects. The engineer insisted that Lucrecia, who did not want to make further purchases, accept three little transparent animals: a squirrel, a stork, and a hippopotamus. On the way back to Venice the guide enlightened them about two villas by Palladio. Instead of lunch, they had tea and cakes at the Quadri, enjoying a blood-red twilight that set roofs, bridges, water, and bell towers on fire, and they reached San Giorgio for the concert of baroque music with enough time to stroll around the little island and view the lagoon and the city from different perspectives.
"The last day is always sad," Do?a Lucrecia remarked. "Tomorrow this will end forever."
"Were you holding hands?" Don Rigoberto wanted to know.
"We were, and during the entire concert as well," his wife confessed.
"Did the engineer weep great tears?"
"He was extremely pale. He squeezed my hand and his sweet eyes glistened."
"In gratitude and hope," thought Don Rigoberto. The "sweet eyes" reverberated along his nerve endings. He decided that from this moment on he would be silent. While Do?a Lucrecia and Pluto ate supper at Danieli's, contemplating the lights of Venice, he respected their melancholy, did not interrupt their conventional conversation, and suffered stoically when he realized, in the course of the meal, that Modesto was not alone in his lavish attentions. Lucrecia presented him with toast that she had buttered, with her own fork she offered him mouthfuls of her rigatoni, and she willingly gave her hand when he raised it to his mouth to rest his lips on it, once on the palm, once on the back, once on the fingers, and each one of her nails. With a fearful heart and an incipient erection, he waited for what was bound to happen.
And in fact, as soon as they entered the suite at the Cipriani, Do?a Lucrecia grasped Modesto's arm, put it around her waist, brought her lips up to his, and, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, she murmured, "To say goodbye, we'll spend the night together. With you I will be as compliant, as tender, as loving as I've been only with my husband."
"You said that?" Don Rigoberto swallowed strychnine and honey.
"Did I do wrong?" his wife asked in alarm. "Should I have lied to him?"
"You did the right thing," Don Rigoberto howled. "My love."
In an ambiguous state in which arousal clashed with jealousy and each fed on the other retrospectively, he watched them undress, admired the self-confidence displayed by his wife, enjoyed the clumsiness of that fortunate mortal overwhelmed by a joy that compensated, on this last night, for his timidity and obedience. She would be his, he would love her: his hands fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, caught the zipper on his trousers, stumbled when he took off his shoes, and when, wild-eyed, he was about to climb into the bed where that magnificent body lay waiting for him in the dark, in a languid pose—Goya's Naked Maja, Don Rigoberto thought, though her thighs are wider apart—he banged his ankle on the edge of the bed and squealed "Owwowoww!" Don Rigoberto enjoyed listening to the hilarity the mishap provoked in Lucrecia. Modesto laughed too as he knelt in the bed: "Emotion, Lucre, pure emotion."
The burning coals of his pleasure cooled when, stifling her laughter, he saw his wife abandon the statue-like indifference with which she had received the caresses of the engineer on the previous day and begin to take the initiative. She embraced him, she obliged him to lie beside her, on top of her, beneath her; she entwined her legs in his legs, she searched for his mouth, she thrust her tongue deep inside, and—oh, oh, Don Rigoberto protested—she crouched down with amorous intent, fished with gentle fingers for his startled member, and, after stroking the shaft and head, brought it to her lips and kissed it before taking it into her mouth. Then, at the top of his voice, bouncing in the soft bed, the engineer began to sing—to bellow and howl—"Torna a Sorrento."
"He began to sing 'Torna a Sorrento'?" Don Rigoberto sat up violently. "At that very moment?"
"At exactly that moment." Do?a Lucrecia burst into laughter again, then controlled herself and apologized. "You astonish me, Pluto. Are you singing because you like it or because you don't?"
"I'm singing so I will like it," he explained, tremulous and bright red, between false notes and arpeggios.
"Do you want me to stop?"
"I want you to continue, Lucre," a euphoric Modesto implored. "Laugh, I don't care. I sing to make my happiness complete. Cover your ears if it distracts you or makes you laugh. But by all you hold most dear, don't stop."
"And he went on singing?" Don Rigoberto exclaimed, intoxicated, mad with satisfaction.
"Without stopping for a second," Do?a Lucrecia affirmed, between giggles. "While I was kissing him, when I was on top, when he was on top, while we made love both orthodox and heterodox. He sang, he had to sing. Because if he didn't sing, fiasco."
"And always 'Torna a Sorrento'?" Don Rigoberto delighted in the sweet pleasure of revenge.
"Any song of my youth," the engineer sang, leaping with all the power of his lungs from Italy to Mexico. "Voy a cantarles un corrido muy mentadooo …"
"A potpourri of cheap music from the fifties." Do?a Lucrecia was very specific. "'O sole mio,' 'Caminito,' 'Juan Charrasqueado,' 'Allá en el rancho grande,' and even Agustín Lara's 'Madrid.' Oh, it was so funny!"
"And without all that musical vulgarity, fiasco?" Don Rigoberto asked for confirmation, a visitor to seventh heaven. "It's the best part of the night, my love."
"You haven't heard the best part yet, the best part came at the end, it was the height of absurdity." Do?a Lucrecia wiped away her tears. "The other guests began to bang on the walls, the front desk called saying we should turn down the TV, the phonograph, nobody in the hotel could sleep."
"In other words, neither of you ever finished …" Don Rigoberto suggested, with faint hope.
"I did, twice," said Do?a Lucrecia, bringing him back to reality. "And he, at least once, I'm sure of that. When he was all set for the second one, that's when the complaints started and he lost his inspiration. Everything ended in laughter. What a night. Worthy of Ripley."
"Now you know my secret," said Modesto, once their neighbors and the front desk had been placated, and their laughter had subsided, and their impulses had quieted, and they were wrapped in the white Cipriani bathrobes and had begun to talk. "Do you mind if we don't speak of it? As you can imagine, it embarrasses me … Well, let me tell you one more time that I'll never forget our week together, Lucre."
"Neither will I, Pluto. I'll always remember it. And not only for the concert, I swear."
They slept the sleep of the just, knowing they had fulfilled their obligations, and they were on the dock in good time to catch the vaporetto to the airport. Alitalia was meticulous as well, and the plane left with no delays, allowing them to connect with the Concorde from Paris to New York, where they said goodbye, knowing they would never see each other again.
"Tell me it was a horrible week, that you hated it," Don Rigoberto suddenly moaned, grasping his wife around the waist and pulling her down on him. "Didn't you, Lucrecia, didn't you?"
"Why don't you try singing something at the top of your lungs," she suggested in the velvety voice of their finest nocturnal encounters. "Something really vulgar, darling. 'La flor de la canela,' 'Fumando espero,' 'Brasil, terra de meu cora??o.' Let's see what happens, Rigoberto."