The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
“So it seems Edilberto Torres has appeared again,” he said sadly. “I thought we’d gotten rid of him forever, Fonchito.”
“So did I, Papa,” his son replied with disarming sincerity. He removed the backpack, placed it on the floor, and sat down facing his father’s desk. “We had a very brief conversation. Didn’t my stepmother tell you about it? Just until the jitney reached Miraflores. He got off at the Diagonal, near the park. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Of course she told me, but I’d like it if you told me too.” He noticed that Fonchito had ink stains on his fingers and that his tie was unknotted. “What did he say to you? What did you talk about?”
“The devil,” Fonchito said with a laugh. “Yes, yes, don’t laugh. It’s true, Papa. And this time he didn’t cry, fortunately. I told him you and my stepmother thought he was the devil incarnate.”
He spoke with such evident naturalness, there was something so fresh and authentic in him, Rigoberto thought, how could he not believe him.
“They still believe in the devil?” Edilberto was surprised. He spoke to him in a whisper. “It seems there aren’t many people in our day who believe in that gentleman. Have your parents told you why they have so low an opinion of me?”
“Because of how you appear and disappear so mysteriously, señor,” explained Fonchito, lowering his voice too, because the subject seemed to interest the other passengers on the jitney, who’d started to look at them sideways. “I shouldn’t be talking to you. I already told you I’ve been forbidden to.”
“You tell them I told you that they can forget their fears and rest easy,” Edilberto Torres assured him in a barely audible voice. “I’m not the devil or anything like it, just a normal, ordinary person like you and like them. And like all the people on this jitney. Besides, you’re wrong, I don’t appear and disappear in a miraculous way. Our meetings are the result of chance. Sheer coincidence.”
“I’m going to speak to you frankly, Fonchito.” Rigoberto continued looking into the boy’s eyes for a long time, and he looked back without blinking. “I want to believe you. I know you’re not a liar and never have been. I know very well you’ve always told me the truth, even when it might have gone against your own interests. But in this case, I mean, the damned case of Edilberto Torres—”
“Why ‘damned,’ Papa?” Fonchito interrupted. “What has that man done to you to make you use such a terrible word about him?”
“What has he done to me?” Don Rigoberto exclaimed. “He’s made me doubt my son for the first time in my life, made me incapable of believing you’re still telling the truth. Do you understand, Fonchito? It’s a fact. Each time I hear you telling me about your meetings with Edilberto Torres, no matter how hard I try I can’t believe that what you’re saying is true. I’m not reprimanding you, try to understand. What’s happening to me now because of you makes me sad, it depresses me very much. Wait, wait, let me finish. I’m not saying that you want to lie to me or deceive me. I know you’d never do that. No, at least not in a deliberate, intentional way. But I’m begging you to think a moment about what I’m going to say, with all the love I feel for you. Reflect on it. Isn’t it possible that what you’re telling me and Lucrecia about Edilberto Torres is only a fantasy, a kind of waking dream, Fonchito? These kinds of things happen to people sometimes.”
He stopped speaking because he saw that his son had turned pale. His face had become filled with an invincible sadness. Rigoberto regretted speaking.
“You mean I’ve gone crazy and see visions, things that don’t exist. Is that what you’re telling me, Papa?”
“I didn’t say you were crazy, of course not,” Rigoberto apologized. “I didn’t even think it. But Fonchito, it isn’t impossible that this individual is an obsession, a fixed idea, a waking nightmare. Don’t look at me so incredulously. It could be true, trust me. I’m going to tell you why. In real life, in the world we live in, it’s impossible for a person to appear this way, suddenly, in the most unlikely places—on the soccer field at school, in the bathroom of a discotheque, on a Lima–Chorrillos jitney. And for that person to know everything about you, your family, what you do and don’t do. It just isn’t possible, do you see?”
“What will I do if you don’t believe me, Papa,” said the boy, crestfallen. “I don’t want to make you sad either. But how can I agree with you that I’m hallucinating when I’m certain that Señor Torres is flesh and blood and not a phantom. Maybe the best thing would be for me not to tell you about him anymore.”
“No, no, Fonchito, I want you always to tell me about these meetings,” Rigoberto insisted. “Though it’s hard for me to accept what you’re saying about him, I’m sure you believe you’re telling me the truth. You can be certain about that. If you’re lying to me, you’re doing it without meaning to or realizing it. Well, you must have homework to do, don’t you? Go ahead then, if you want to. We’ll talk more later.”
Fonchito picked up his backpack from the floor and took a couple of steps toward the study door. But before opening it, as if he’d just remembered something, he turned to his father.
“You dislike him so much, yet Señor Torres thinks very highly of you, Papa.”
“Why do you say that, Fonchito?”
“Because I think I know your papa has problems with the police, with the law, you must know about it already,” said Edilberto Torres in farewell, after he’d already signaled the driver that he was getting off at the next stop. “It’s obvious to me that Rigoberto is an irreproachable man and I’m sure what’s happening to him is very unjust. If I can do anything for him, I’d be delighted to lend a hand. Tell him that for me, Fonchito.”
Don Rigoberto didn’t know what to say. In silence he contemplated the boy, who remained where he stood, looking at him calmly, waiting for his response.
“He said that to you?” he stammered after a moment. “In other words, he sent me a message. He knows about my legal problems and wants to help me. Is that it?”
“Exactly, Papa. You see, he has a very high opinion of you.”
“Tell him I accept with pleasure.” Rigoberto finally regained control of himself. “Of course. The next time he shows up, thank him and tell him I’d be delighted to talk to him. Wherever he likes. Have him call me. Maybe he can help me out, let’s hope so. What I want most in the world, son, is to see and talk to Edilberto Torres in person.”
“Okay, Papa, I’ll tell him if I see him again. I promise. You’ll see he isn’t a spirit but flesh and blood. I’m going to do my homework. I have a lot to get through.”
When Fonchito left the study, Rigoberto tried to open the computer again but closed it almost immediately. He’d lost all interest in Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A. and in Ismael’s serpentine financial dealings. Was it possible that Edilberto Torres had said that to Fonchito? Was it possible he knew about his legal troubles? Of course not. Once again the boy had set a trap for him and he’d fallen into it like a simpleton. And if Edilberto Torres scheduled a meeting with him? “Then,” he thought, “I’ll return to religion, I’ll reconvert and live out the rest of my days in a Carthusian monastery.” He laughed and mumbled, “How infinitely boring. So many oceans of stupidity in the world.”
He stood and went to look at the nearest shelves where he kept his favorite art books and catalogues. As he examined them, he recalled the shows where he’d bought them. New York, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Mexico City. How painful to be seeing lawyers and judges, thinking about the twins, those functional illiterates, instead of losing himself morning, noon, and night in these volumes, prints, and designs, listening to good music, fantasizing, traveling in time, experiencing extraordinary adventures, getting emotional, growing sad, enjoying, crying, becoming exalted and excited. He thought: “Thanks to Delacroix I was present at the death of Sardanapalus surrounded by naked women, and thanks to the young Grosz I beheaded them in Berlin while at the same time, with an enormous phallus, I sodomized them. Thanks to Botticelli I was a Renaissance Madonna,
He was beginning to enjoy himself and, almost unconsciously, his hands had already found what he’d been looking for since he’d begun his examination of the shelves: the catalogue of the 2004 retrospective that the Royal Academy dedicated to Tamara de Lempicka that had run from May to August, which he had visited in person the last time he was in England. There, in the crotch of his trousers, he felt the outline of an encouraging tickle in the intimacy of his testicles, while at the same time he felt himself becoming emotional and filling with nostalgia and gratitude. Now, along with the tickle he felt a light burning at the tip of his cock. With the book in his hands he went to sit in his reading armchair and lit the lamp whose light would allow him to enjoy the reproductions in full detail. The magnifying glass was within reach. Was it true that, according to her final wishes, the ashes of the Polish-Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka were dropped from a helicopter by her daughter Kizette into the crater of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl? What an Olympian, cataclysmic, magnificent way for the woman to say goodbye to this world, a woman who, as her paintings testified, knew not only how to paint but how to enjoy herself, an artist whose fingers imparted an exalted and at the same time icy lasciviousness to these supple, slithering, rounded, opulent nudes who paraded before his eyes: Rhythm, La Belle Rafaela, Myrto, The Model, The Slave. His five favorites. Who said that art deco and eroticism were incompatible? In the 1920s and 1930s, this Polish-Russian woman with the tweezed eyebrows, burning, voracious eyes, sensual mouth, and crude hands populated her canvases with an intense lechery, icy only in appearance, because in the imagination and sensibility of an attentive spectator the sculptural immobility of the canvas disappeared and the figures became animated, intertwined, they assailed, caressed, united with, loved, and enjoyed one another with complete shamelessness. A beautiful, marvelous, exciting spectacle: those women portrayed or invented by Tamara de Lempicka in Paris, Milan, New York, Hollywood, and in her final seclusion in Cuernavaca. Inflated, fleshy, exuberant, elegant, they proudly displayed the triangular navels for which Tamara must have felt a particular predilection, as great as the one inspired by the abundant, succulent thighs of immodest aristocrats whom she stripped only to clothe them in lechery and carnal insolence. “She gave dignity and good press to lesbianism and the garçon style, made them acceptable and worldly, exhibiting them in Parisian and New York salons,” he thought. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that, inflamed by her, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s mad cock tried to violate her in his house, the Vittoriale, on Lake Garda, where he took her under the pretext of having her paint his portrait, though in fact he was crazed with the desire to possess her. Did she escape through a window?” He slowly turned the pages of the book, barely stopping at the mannered aristocratic men, with blue tubercular circles under their eyes, pausing at the splendid, languid female figures with shifting eyes, hair as flat as helmets, scarlet nails, upright breasts, majestic hips, who almost always seemed to be writhing like cats in heat. He spent a long time lost in his illusion, feeling sure he’d be filled once again with the desire that had been extinguished so many days and weeks ago, ever since his pedestrian problems with the hyenas had begun. He was ecstatic over these beautiful damsels decked out in low-cut, transparent dresses, gleaming jewels, all of them possessed by a profound desire that struggled to become manifest in their enormous eyes. “To go from art deco to abstraction, what madness, Tamara,” he thought. Though even the abstract paintings of Tamara de Lempicka exuded a mysterious sensuality. Moved and happy, he noticed in his lower belly a small tumult, the dawning of an erection.
And at that moment, returning to ordinary reality, he noticed that Doña Lucrecia had come into the study without his having heard her open the door. What was wrong? She stood next to him, her eyes wet and dilated and her lips half open, trembling. She struggled to speak but her tongue didn’t obey, instead of words, an incomprehensible stammering emerged.
“More bad news, Lucrecia?” he asked in terror, thinking about Edilberto Torres, about Fonchito. “Bad news again?”
“Armida called crying like a madwoman,” Doña Lucrecia sobbed. “Right after he said goodbye to you, Ismael collapsed in the garden. They took him to the American Clinic. And he just passed, Rigoberto! Yes, yes, he just died!”
XV
“What’s wrong, Felícito?” the holy woman repeated, bending toward him and fanning him with the old straw fan riddled with holes that she held in her hand. “Don’t you feel well?”
The trucker saw the concern in Adelaida’s large eyes, and in the fog that filled his head it occurred to him that since she could prophesy, she must know what was wrong. But he didn’t have the strength to answer her; he was dizzy and certain that at any moment he’d faint. He didn’t care. Sinking into a deep sleep, forgetting everything, not thinking: how wonderful. He thought vaguely of asking the Captive Lord of Ayabaca for help; Gertrudis was especially devoted to him. But he didn’t know how.
“Do you want a nice glass of cool water right from the filter, Felícito?”
Why was Adelaida talking so loud, as if he were going deaf? He nodded and, still in a fog, saw the mulatta wrapped in her rough mud-colored tunic running in her bare feet toward the back of the herbs and saints shop. He closed his eyes and thought: “You have to be strong, Felícito. You can’t die yet, Felícito Yanaqué. Balls, man! Where are your balls?” He felt his dry mouth and his heart struggling to grow larger among the ligaments, bones, and muscles of his chest. He thought: “It’s coming right out of my mouth.” At that moment he realized how precise that expression was. Not impossible, hey waddya think. That organ was thundering so energetically and so uncontrollably inside his rib cage that it could suddenly leap free, escape the prison of his body, climb up his larynx, and be ejected in a great spewing of bile and blood. He’d see his heart at his feet, flattened on the dirt floor of the holy woman’s house, deflated now, quiet now, perhaps surrounded by scurrying, chocolate-colored cockroaches. That would be the last thing in this life he’d remember. When he opened the eyes of his soul, he’d be before God. Or maybe the devil, Felícito.
“What’s going on?” he asked uneasily. Because as soon as he saw their faces, he knew something very serious had happened, which explained the urgency of their summons to the station, their uncomfortable expressions, the evasive eyes and false half smiles of Captain Silva and Sergeant Lituma. The two policemen had become mute and petrified as soon as they’d seen him walk into the narrow cubicle.
“Here you go, Felícito, nice and cool. Open your mouth and drink it slow, in little sips, baby. It’ll do you good, you’ll see.”
He nodded, and without opening his eyes he parted his lips and felt with relief the cool liquid Adelaida brought to his mouth, as if he were a baby. The water seemed to douse the flames on his palate and tongue, and even though he couldn’t speak and didn’t want to, he thought: “Thanks, Adelaida.” The tranquil semidarkness in which the holy woman’s shop was always submerged calmed his nerves a little.
“Important business, my friend,” the captain said at last, becoming serious and standing to shake his hand with unusual effusiveness. “Come, let’s have a coffee somewhere cooler on the avenue, where we can talk better than in here. It’s hotter than hell in this cave, don’t you agree, Don Felícito?”
And before he had time to respond, the chief took his kepi from the hook and, followed like a robot by Lituma, who avoided looking him in the eye, headed for the door. What was wrong with them? What important business? What was going on? What fly had bitten this pair of cops?
“Do you feel better, Felícito?” the holy woman asked.
“Yes,” he managed to stammer with difficulty. His tongue, palate, and teeth hurt. But the glass of cool water had done him good and returned some of the energy that had been draining from his bo
“That’s good, thank God for that,” the mulatta exclaimed, crossing herself and smiling at him. “That was some scare you gave me, Felícito. You were so pale! Oh, hey waddya think! When I saw you come in and drop into the rocker like a sack of potatoes, you looked like a corpse. What happened, baby, who died?”
“With all this mystery you have me on pins and needles, Captain,” Felícito insisted, beginning to be alarmed. “What is this business, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“A good, strong coffee for me,” Captain Silva told the waiter. “An espresso cut with milk for the sergeant. What’ll you have, Don Felícito?”
“A soda, Coca-Cola, Inca Kola, whatever.” He was impatient now, tapping on the table. “Okay, let’s get to the point. I’m a man who knows how to hear bad news, with all that’s happened I’m getting used to it. Let’s have it, no more beating around the bush.”
“The matter’s resolved,” said the captain, looking him in the eye. But he looked at him not with joy but with sorrow, even compassion. Surprisingly, instead of continuing, he fell silent.
“Resolved?” Felícito exclaimed. “Do you mean you caught them?”
He saw the captain and sergeant nod, still very serious and displaying a ridiculous solemnity. Why were they looking at him in that strange way, as if they felt sorry for him? On Avenida Sánchez Cerro there was infernal noise, people going and coming, car horns, shouts, barking, braying. A band was playing a waltz, but the singer didn’t have Cecilia Barraza’s sweet voice, how could he when he was an old man reeking of aguardiente?
“Do you remember the last time I was here, Adelaida?” Felícito spoke very quietly, searching for the words, afraid he’d lose his voice. To breathe more easily he’d unbuttoned his vest and loosened his tie. “When I read the first spider letter to you.”