The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
When it was time for bed, he felt as he’d wished to: very tired and totally serene. Ismael, Armida, the hyenas, Edilberto Torres seemed distant, far behind him, banished. Would he fall asleep, then, right away? What a hope. After spending some time tossing and turning in bed, in the room that was almost dark except for the lamp on Lucrecia’s night table, he was still wide awake, and then, seized by a sudden inspiration, he asked his wife in a very quiet voice, “Sweetheart, haven’t you wondered about Ismael and Armida’s affair? When and how it began? Who took the initiative? What little games, coincidences, touches in passing, or jokes precipitated it?”
“Exactly,” she murmured, turning over as if remembering something. She came very close to her husband’s face and body and whispered in his ear: “I’ve been thinking about that constantly, darling. From the first moment you told me about it.”
“Oh, yes? What were you thinking? What ideas came to you, I mean?” Rigoberto turned toward her and encircled her waist with his hands. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Outside the room, on the streets of Barranco, the great silence of night had fallen, interrupted from time to time by the distant murmur of the ocean. Were the stars out? No, they never appeared in the Lima sky at this time of year. But in Europe they’d see them shining and twinkling every night. Lucrecia, in the dense, unhurried voice of their best times, the voice that was music to Rigoberto, said very slowly, as if reciting a poem, “This may sound incredible, but I can reconstruct for you in full detail Ismael and Armida’s romance. I know it’s robbed you of sleep and filled you with unpleasant thoughts ever since your friend told you in La Rosa Náutica that they were getting married. And how do I know? You’ll be flabbergasted: Justiniana. She and Armida have been close friends for a long time. I mean, since Clotilde’s attacks began and we sent her over to help Armida in the house for a couple of days. Those were such sad days: The world fell down around poor Ismael whenever he thought that his lifetime companion and the mother of his children might die. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Rigoberto lied, speaking syllable by syllable into his wife’s ear as if it were a shameful secret. “How could I not remember, Lucrecia. And then what happened?”
“Well, the two of them became friends and began to go out together. Armida, it seems, already had the plan in mind that turned out so well for her. From a maid who made beds and mopped floors to nothing less than the legal wife of Don Ismael Carrera, a respected, well-heeled big shot from Lima. And in his seventies to boot, maybe even his eighties.”
“Forget about commentary and what we already know,” Rigoberto rebuked her, playing now at being distressed. “Let’s get to what really matters, my love. You know very well what that is. The facts, the facts.”
“I’m getting to that. Armida planned everything very shrewdly. Obviously, if this little girl from Piura didn’t have certain physical charms, her intelligence and shrewdness would have done her no good. Justiniana saw her nude, of course. If you ask how and why, I don’t know. Certainly they bathed together at some point. Or slept in the same bed one night, who knows. She says we’d be surprised to learn how well-shaped Armida is when you see her naked, something one doesn’t notice because of how badly she dresses, always in those baggy outfits for fat women. Justiniana says she isn’t fat, her breasts and buttocks are high and solid, her nipples firm, her legs well shaped, and believe it or not, her belly’s as taut as a drum. With an almost hairless pubis, like a Japanese girl—”
“Is it possible that Armida and Justiniana got excited when they saw each other naked?” an overheated Rigoberto interrupted. “Is it possible they started to play, touching each other, fondling each other, and ended up making love?”
“Everything’s possible in this life, dear boy,” Doña Lucrecia suggested with her usual wisdom. Now husband and wife were welded together. “What I can tell you is that Justiniana even felt a tickle you know where when she saw Armida naked. She confessed as much to me, blushing and laughing. She jokes a great deal about those things, you know, but I think it’s true that seeing Armida naked excited her. So who knows, anything might have happened between those two. In any case, nobody could have imagined what Armida’s body was really like, hidden under the aprons and coarse skirts she wore. Even though you and I didn’t notice, Justiniana thinks that when poor Clotilde entered the final stage of her illness and her death seemed inevitable, Armida began to pay more attention to her appearance than she had before—”
“What did she do, for example?” Rigoberto interrupted her again. His voice was slow and thick and his heart was pounding. “Was she provocative with Ismael? Doing what? How?”
“Each morning she’d show up looking much more attractive than before. Her hair arranged, with small flirtatious touches that nobody would notice. And some new movements of her arms, her breasts, her bottom. But old man Ismael noticed. In spite of how he was when Clotilde died—in shock, like a sleepwalker, shattered by grief. He’d lost his compass, he didn’t know who or where he was. But he knew something was going on around him. Of course he noticed.”
“Again you’re moving away from the point, Lucrecia,” Rigoberto complained, holding her tight. “This isn’t the time to be talking about death, my love.”
“Then, oh what a miracle, Armida turned into the most devoted, attentive, and accommodating creature. There she was, always near her employer to prepare a chamomile maté or a cup of tea for him, pour him a whiskey, iron his shirt, sew on a button, put the finishing touches to his suit, give his shoes to the butler to polish, tell Narciso to hurry and get the car right away because Don Ismael was ready to go out and didn’t like waiting.”
“What does all that matter,” Rigoberto said in vexation, nibbling his wife’s ear. “I want to know more intimate things, my love.”
“At the same time, with an intelligence only we women have, an intelligence that comes to us from Eve herself and is in our souls, our blood, and, I suppose, in our hearts and ovaries too, Armida began to set the trap into which the widower, devastated by his wife’s death, would fall like an innocent babe.”
“What did she do to him,” Rigoberto pleaded urgently. “Tell me everything in lavish detail, my love.”
“On winter nights Ismael would shut himself in his study and suddenly start to cry. And as if by magic, Armida would be at his side, devoted, respectful, sympathetic, calling him tender nicknames in that northern singsong that sounds so musical. And shedding a few tears too, standing very close to the master of the house. He could feel and smell her because their bodies were touching. While Armida wiped her employer’s forehead and dried his eyes, without realizing it, you would say, in her efforts to console him, calm him, and be loving toward him, her neckline shifted and Ismael’s eyes couldn’t help but be aware of those plump, dark, young breasts brushing against his chest and face, which, from the perspective of his years, must have seemed like those not of a young woman but of a little girl. Then it must have occurred to him that Armida was not only a pair of tireless hands for making and stripping beds, dusting walls, waxing floors, washing clothes, but also an abundant, tender, palpitating, warm body, a fragrant, moist, exciting closeness. That was when poor Ismael, during his employee’s fond displays of loyalty and affection, probably began to feel that the hidden, shrunken thing between his legs, beyond all help from lack of use, was starting to show signs of life, to revive. Of course, Justiniana doesn’t know this but can only guess. I don’t know either, but I’m sure that’s how it all began. Don’t you think so too, my love?”
“When Justiniana was telling you all this, were you and she naked, my darling?” As Rigoberto spoke, he just barely nibbled at his wife’s neck, ears, and lips, and his hands caressed her back, buttocks, and inner thighs.
“I held her the way you’re holding me now,” responded Lucrecia, caressing him, biting him, kissing him, speaking inside his mouth. “We could hardly breathe, we were drowning, swallowing each other’s saliva. Justin
“Yes, yes, of course, go on, go on,” Rigoberto purred, becoming excited, his voice barely making a sound. “That’s how it had to be. That’s how it was.”
For some time they were silent, embracing each other, kissing each other, but suddenly Rigoberto, making a great effort, restrained himself. And moved gently away from his wife.
“I don’t want to finish yet, my love,” he whispered. “I’m enjoying this so much. I want you, I love you.”
“All right, a parenthesis,” Lucrecia said, moving away too. “Let’s talk about Armida then. In a sense what she’s done and achieved is admirable, don’t you agree?”
“In every sense,” said her husband. “A real work of art. She’s earned my respect and reverence. She’s a great woman.”
“By the way,” said his wife, her voice changing, “if I die before you, it wouldn’t bother me at all if you married Justiniana. She already knows all your habits, the good ones and the bad, especially the bad. So keep it in mind.”
“And that’s enough about death,” Rigoberto pleaded. “Let’s go back to Armida and don’t get so distracted, for God’s sake.”
Lucrecia sighed, pressed close to her husband, placed her mouth on his ear, and spoke very slowly.
“As I was saying, she was always there, always near Ismael. Sometimes, as she bent over to remove that little stain on the armchair, her skirt would move up and, without her noticing it—but he would notice—out would peek a rounded knee, a smooth, elastic thigh, a slim ankle, a bit of shoulder, arm, neck, the cleft between her breasts. There never was, there couldn’t be, the slightest hint of vulgarity in these moments of carelessness. Everything seemed natural, casual, never forced. Chance arranged matters in such a way that through these trivial episodes the widower, the veteran, our friend, the horrified father of his children, discovered he was still a man, that he had a live cock, a very live cock. Like the one I’m touching now, my love. Hard, damp, trembling.”
“It moves me to imagine the joy Ismael must have felt when he learned he still had his cock and, though it hadn’t done so for a long time, it began to crow again,” Rigoberto digressed, moving beneath the sheets. “I’m touched, my love, by how tender, how nice it must have been when, still submerged in the bitterness of his widowhood, he began to have fantasies, desires, ejaculations, thinking about his employee. Who touched whom first? Let’s guess.”
“Armida never thought matters would go that far. She hoped that Ismael would become fond of having her near, discovering thanks to her that he wasn’t the human ruin suggested by how he looked, that beneath his wretched look, his uncertain walk, his loose teeth, his poor eyesight, his sex still flapped its wings. That he was capable of feeling desire and, overcoming his sense of the ridiculous, would finally dare one day to take a bold step. And a secret, intimate complicity would be established between them in the large colonial mansion that Clotilde’s death had turned into a limbo. Perhaps she thought that all of this might move Ismael to promote her from servant to lover. Even that he’d set her up in a little house and give her a small allowance. That’s what she dreamed about, I’m certain. Nothing else. She never would have imagined the revolution it would cause in our good Ismael, or that circumstances would transform her into an instrument of revenge for a grieving, vindictive father.
“But, what is this? Who is this intruder? What’s happening here under these sheets?” Lucrecia interrupted her account, turning back and forth, exaggerating, touching him.
“Go on, go on, my darling, for God’s sake,” Rigoberto pleaded, choking, growing more and more excited. “Don’t stop talking now that everything’s going so well.”
“So I see,” Lucrecia said with a laugh, moving to take off her nightgown, helping her husband remove his pajamas, each of them entwined around the other, rumpling the bed, embracing and kissing each other.
“I need to know how it was the first time they went to bed,” Rigoberto demanded. He held his wife very tight against his body and spoke with his lips glued to hers.
“I’ll tell you, but at least let me breathe a little,” Lucrecia replied calmly, taking some time to put her tongue in her husband’s mouth and receive his in hers. “It began with crying.”
“Who was crying?” Rigoberto lost his concentration and became tense. “About what? Was Armida a virgin? Is that what you’re talking about? Did he deflower her? Did he make her cry?”
“One of the fits of crying that sometimes happened to Ismael at night, silly,” Doña Lucrecia admonished him, pinching his buttocks, kneading them, letting her hands run down to his testicles, gently cradling them. “When he thought about Clotilde. Loud crying; his sobs could be heard through the door, the walls.”
“Sobs that reached even Armida’s room, of course.” Rigoberto became excited. He talked as he turned Lucrecia around and settled her beneath him.
“They woke her, got her out of bed, made her rush to console him,” she said, slipping easily under her husband’s body, spreading her legs, embracing him.
“She didn’t have time to put on her robe or slippers,” Rigoberto took the words out of her mouth. “Or to comb her hair or anything. And that’s how she ran into Ismael’s room, half naked. I can see her now, my darling.”
“Remember that everything was dark; she kept tripping over furniture, guided by the poor man’s crying to his bed. When she reached it she embraced him and—”
“And he embraced her too and ripped off the chemise she was wearing. She pretended to resist, but not for very long. Almost as soon as the struggle began, she embraced him too. She must have been very surprised to discover that Ismael was a unicorn at that moment who pierced her, made her shriek—”
“Who made her shriek,” Lucrecia repeated and shrieked in turn, imploring: “Wait, wait, don’t come yet, don’t be mean, don’t do that to me.”
“I love you, I love you!” he exploded, kissing his wife on the neck and feeling her become rigid and, a few seconds later, she wailed, her body slackened, and she lay motionless, gasping.
They lay like this, still and silent, recovering, for a few minutes. Then they joked, got up, washed, straightened the sheets, put on pajamas and nightgown again, turned out the light on the night table, and tried to sleep. But Rigoberto remained awake, hearing Lucrecia’s breathing becoming gentler and more regular as she sank into sleep and her body stopped moving. Now she was asleep. Was she dreaming?
And then, in a totally unexpected way, he discovered the reason for the association his memory had been weaving in a sporadic, confused way for some time; that is, ever since Fonchito began to tell them about those impossible encounters, those improbable chance meetings with the outlandish Edilberto Torres. He had to reread that chapter from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus immediately. He’d read the novel many years before, but he clearly remembered the episode, the mouth of the volcano in the story.
He got up silently and, barefoot and in the dark, went to his study, his small space of civilization, feeling his way along the walls. He turned on the lamp at the easy chair where he usually read and listened to music. There was a complicit silence in the Barranco night. The ocean was a very distant sound. He had no trouble finding the volume in the bookcase of novels. There it was. Chapter 25: He’d marked it with a cross and two exclamation marks. The mouth of the volcano, the most personal chapter, the one that changed the nature of the entire story, introducing a supernatural dimension into a realist world. The episode in which for the first time the devil appears and talks to the young composer Adrian Leverkühn in Palestrina, his Italian retreat, and proposes his celebrated pact. As soon as he began to reread it, Rigoberto was taken in by the subtlety of the narrative strategy. The devil appears to Adrian as a normal, ordinary little man; the only unusual thing about him is the cold that emanates from him at first and makes the young musician shudder. He’d have to ask Fonchito, as a s
According to his son, Edilberto Torres was a normal, ordinary little man too. Rigoberto felt a sudden terror at the description of the little man’s sarcastic laugh that exploded unexpectedly in the half shadows of the mansion in the Italian mountains where the disquieting conversation took place. But why had his unconscious connected everything he was reading to Fonchito and Edilberto Torres? It made no sense. The devil in Thomas Mann’s novel alludes to syphilis and music as the two manifestations in life of his ruinous power, and his son never heard this Edilberto Torres speak of diseases or classical music. Did it make sense to wonder whether the appearance of AIDS, which caused as much devastation in today’s world as syphilis had years earlier, indicated the hegemony that the infernal presence was attaining in contemporary life? It was stupid, and yet at this moment, he, a nonbeliever, an inveterate agnostic, felt, as he was reading, that the penumbra of books and prints surrounding him and the darkness outside were at that very instant saturated with a cruel, violent, and malevolent spirit. “Fonchito, have you noticed that Edilberto Torres’s laugh doesn’t seem human? I mean, that the sound he makes seems to come not from a man’s throat but from the howl of a madman, the caw of a crow, the hiss of a serpent?” The boy would burst into laughter and think his father crazy. Once again he was invaded by uneasiness. Pessimism wiped out in a few seconds the moments of intense joy he’d just shared with Lucrecia, the pleasure derived from rereading that chapter of Doktor Faustus. He turned out the light and returned to his bedroom, dragging his feet. This couldn’t go on, he had to question Fonchito with prudence and astuteness, unmask what really went on in those encounters, dispel once and for all the absurd phantasmagoria devised by his son’s feverish imagination. My God, this wasn’t the time for the devil to give new signs of life and appear once more to humans.