The Discreet Hero (23 page)

“All he could do was hide again,” Rigoberto continued. “Fortunately, Narciso has friends and relatives all over Chincha. And it’s lucky for Ismael that he’s the most upright and loyal fellow in the world. In spite of how frightened he is, I doubt those two thugs are going to break him. I paid him his salary and gave him a little extra, just in case, for anything unforeseen. This business gets more complicated every day, my love.”

Don Rigoberto stretched and yawned in the easy chair in the living room, and while Doña Lucrecia prepared lemonade, he stared at the ocean of Barranco for a long time. It was a windless afternoon and several hang gliders were in the air. One passed by so close he could clearly see his head encased in a helmet. Damn mess, happening now when he was supposed to begin a retirement he thought would be dedicated to rest, art, and travel—that is, to pure pleasure. Things never worked out as planned: It was a rule with no exceptions. “I never imagined my friendship with Ismael would turn out to be so onerous,” he thought. “Much less that I’d have to sacrifice my small piece of civilization for it.” If the sun had been out, this would have been Lima’s magical time. A few minutes of absolute beauty. The fiery ball would sink into the sea on the horizon behind the islands of San Lorenzo and El Frontón, burning up the sky, turning the clouds pink, and for a few minutes putting on a show, both serene and apocalyptic, that signaled the onset of night.

“What did you say to him?” Doña Lucrecia asked, sitting beside him. “Poor Narciso, what he’s gotten himself into for being so decent to his employer.”

“I tried to reassure him,” recounted Don Rigoberto, tasting the lemonade with pleasure. “I told him not to be frightened, that nothing would happen to him or me because we’d been witnesses, that there was absolutely no crime in what we did. And that Ismael would win this battle with the hyenas. That Escobita and Miki’s campaign, the fuss they were making, didn’t have the slightest basis in law. That if he wanted more reassurance, he should consult a lawyer in Chincha whom he trusted and send me the bill. In short, I did everything I could. He’s a very honorable man and I repeat: Those thugs won’t be able to control him. But they certainly are giving him a very hard time.”

“And us too, aren’t they?” Doña Lucrecia complained. “I tell you, ever since this joke began, I’m even afraid to go out. Everybody asks me about the couple, as if it were the only thing Limeños cared about. Everybody I see looks like a reporter. You can’t imagine how much I hate them when I hear and read all the foolishness and lies they write.”

“She’s frightened too,” thought Don Rigoberto. His wife smiled at him, but he could detect a fleeting glimmer in her eyes and saw the uneasy way she was constantly wringing her hands. Poor Lucrecia. Not only had the European trip she’d so looked forward to been canceled but, on top of everything else, there was this scandal. And old man Ismael was still on his honeymoon in Europe, staying out of touch, while in Lima his boys were making life impossible for Narciso, for him, and for Lucrecia; they had even thrown the insurance company into an uproar.

“What is it, Rigoberto?” Lucrecia asked with some surprise. “The man who laughs alone is thinking of his evil deeds.”

“I’m laughing at Ismael,” Rigoberto explained. “He’s been on his honeymoon for a month. And he’s over eighty! I’ve confirmed it, he’s an octogenarian, not a septuagenarian.
Chapeau!
Do you see, Lucrecia? All that Viagra will eat up his brains, and the hyenas’ accusation that he’s soft in the head will turn out to be true. Armida must be a wild animal. She’ll drain him dry!”

“Don’t be vulgar, Rigoberto.” His wife laughed and pretended to admonish him.

“She knows how to make the best of a bad time,” Rigoberto thought tenderly. Over the past few days, while the twins’ campaign of intimidation had filled their house with judicial and police citations and bad news—the worst: they’d managed to tie up his retirement process with some legal dirty tricks—Lucrecia hadn’t shown the least sign of weakness. She’d supported him body and soul in his decision not to give in to the hyenas’ extortion and remain loyal to his employer and friend.

“The one thing that bothers me,” said Lucrecia, reading his mind, “is that Ismael hasn’t even called or dropped us a line. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Can he really not know about the headaches he’s giving us? Doesn’t he realize what poor Narciso is going through?”

“He knows everything,” Rigoberto assured her. “Arnillas is in touch with him and keeps him up to date. They speak every day, he told me.”

Dr. Claudio Arnillas, Ismael Carrera’s attorney for many years, was now Rigoberto’s intermediary with his former employer. According to him, Ismael and Armida were traveling through Europe and would return to Lima very soon. He assured him that the plans of Ismael Carrera’s sons to annul the marriage and have their father declared incompetent to head the insurance company on the grounds of incapacity and senile dementia were doomed to the most resounding failure. All Ismael had to do was appear and submit to the relevant medical and psychological tests, and their accusations would collapse.

“But then, I don’t understand why he doesn’t do that right now, Dr. Arnillas,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “For Ismael this scandal has to be even more painful than it is for us.”

“Do you know why?” explained Dr. Arnillas, adopting a Machiavellian expression and hooking his thumbs behind the psychedelic-colored suspenders holding up his trousers. “Because he wants the twins to keep spending what they don’t have: the money they must be borrowing all over the place to pay their army of shyster lawyers and the bribes they’re coughing up for the police and judges. It’s more than likely they’re being skinned alive, and he wants them completely ruined. Señor Carrera planned everything down to the smallest detail. Do you see?”

Don Rigoberto saw very clearly now that Ismael Carrera’s rancor toward the hyenas, from the day he discovered that in their eagerness to inherit everything they were waiting impatiently for his death, was unhealthy and irreversible. He never would have imagined the peaceable Ismael capable of a vengeful hatred of this magnitude, least of all toward his own children. Would Fonchito ever desire his death? And by the way, where was that boy?

“He went out with his friend Pezzuolo, I think to the movies,” Lucrecia said. “Haven’t you noticed that for the past few days he’s seemed better? As if he’d forgotten about Edilberto Torres.”

Yes, he hadn’t seen that mysterious character for more than a week. At least that’s what he’d told them, and Don Rigoberto had never caught his son in a lie.

“All of this wrecked the trip we’d planned so carefully,” Doña Lucrecia said with a sigh, suddenly becoming sad. “Spain, Italy, France. What a shame, Rigoberto. I’d been dreaming about it. And do you know why? It’s your fault, you kept telling me about it in that detailed, obsessive way. The places we’d visit, the museums, the concerts, the theaters, the restaurants. Well, what can you do except be patient.”

Rigoberto agreed. “We’ve only postponed it, my love,” he reassured her, kissing her hair. “Since we can’t go in the spring, we’ll go in the fall. A very nice time of year too, with the trees turning golden and the leaves carpeting the streets. For operas and concerts, it’s the best time of year.”

“Do you think this mess with the hyenas will be over by October?”

“They don’t have any money, and they’re spending the little they have trying to annul the marriage and have their father declared incompetent,” Rigoberto said. “They won’t succeed and they’ll be ruined. Do you know something? I never imagined that Ismael was capable of doing what he’s doing. First, marrying Armida. And second, planning so unforgiving a revenge against Miki and Escobita. It’s true that it’s impossible to know anyone else completely, people are unfathomable.”

They spent a long time talking as it grew dark and the lights in the city came on. They could no longer see the ocean, and the sky and the night were filled with lights that seemed like fireflies. Lucrecia told Rigoberto she’d read an essay Fonchito had written for school that had made an impression on her. She couldn’t get it out of her head.

“Did he show it to you himself?” Rigoberto asked pointedly. “Or were you snooping through his desk?”

“Well, it was right there, in plain sight, and it made me curious. That’s why I read it.”

“It’s not right for you to read his things without his permission and behind his back.” Rigoberto seemed to be reprimanding her.

“It left me thinking,” she continued, ignoring him. “It’s a half-philosophical, half-religious text. About liberty and evil.”

“Do you have it handy?” Rigoberto was interested. “I’d like to take a look at it too.”

“I made a copy for you, Mr. Nosy,” said Lucrecia. “I left it in your study.”

Don Rigoberto shut himself in with his books, records, and etchings to read Fonchito’s composition. “Liberty and Evil” was very short. It maintained that God, when He created man, probably had decided he wasn’t an automaton like plants and animals, whose lives were programmed from birth to death, but a creature endowed with free will, capable of deciding his actions on his own. This was how liberty was born. But this faculty with which man was endowed allowed human beings to choose evil, even, perhaps, to create it, doing things that contradicted all that emanated from God, and this represented the devil’s reason for being, the basis of his existence. Therefore evil was the child of liberty, a human creation. Which didn’t mean that liberty was evil in and of itself; no, it was a gift that had permitted great scientific and technical discoveries, social progress, the elimination of slavery and colonialism, the birth of human rights, etcetera. But it was also the origin of the terrible, never-ending cruelties and suffering that accompanied progress like its shadow.

Don Rigoberto was concerned. It occurred to him that all the ideas in the essay were somehow associated with the appearances of Edilberto Torres and his fits of weeping. Or was the essay the result of Fonchito’s conversation with Father O’Donovan? Had his son seen Pepín again? Just then Justiniana burst into his study, very excited. She’d come to tell him that the “newlywed” was on the phone.

“That’s what he said I should tell you, Don Rigoberto,” the girl explained. “‘Tell him the newlywed is calling, Justiniana.’”

“Ismael!” Don Rigoberto jumped up from his desk. “Hello? Hello? Is that you? Are you in Lima? When did you get back?”

“I haven’t returned yet, Rigoberto,” said a playful voice, which he recognized as belonging to his boss. “I’m calling from a place, but naturally I won’t say where it is, because a little bird told me your phone is bugged by you know who. A very beautiful place, so eat your heart out with envy.”

He burst into very joyful laughter and Rigoberto, alarmed, suddenly suspected that yes, his ex-boss and friend was in his dotage, hopelessly senile. Were the hyenas capable of paying one of those agencies to interfere with his phone? Impossible, the gray matter couldn’t take that in. Or perhaps it could.

“Well, well, what more could you wish for,” he replied. “Better for you, Ismael. I see that your honeymoon is going full speed ahead and you still have some wind left. I mean, at least you’re still alive. I’m glad, old man.”

“I’m in fine shape, Rigoberto. Let me tell you something: I’ve never felt better or happier than I have during this time. And that’s the truth.”

“Fantastic, then,” Rigoberto repeated. “Well, I don’t want to give you bad news, least of all by telephone. But I suppose you’re aware of what you’ve caused here and the trouble that’s raining down on us.”

“Claudio Arnillas keeps me up to date with plenty of details and sends me newspaper clippings. I enjoy reading that I’ve been kidnapped and am suffering from senile dementia. It seems you and Narciso have been complicit in my abduction, isn’t that right?” He burst into laughter again—long, loud, and very sarcastic.

“How nice that you can take everything with so much good humor,” Rigoberto grumbled. “Narciso and I aren’t enjoying this as much, as you can imagine. The brothers have driven Narciso half crazy with their intrigues and threats. And us as well.”

“I’m very sorry for the bother I’m causing you, brother.” Ismael tried to smooth things over, and became very serious. “I’m sorry they’ve interfered with your retirement and that you’ve had to cancel your trip to Europe. I know everything, Rigoberto. A thousand apologies to you and Lucrecia for these problems. I swear to you it won’t be for much longer.”

“What do a retirement and a trip to Europe matter compared to the friendship of a grand fellow like you,” Don Rigoberto said sarcastically. “I’d better not tell you about the judicial summonses that compel me to testify as a presumed accomplice in your concealment and abduction; I don’t want to ruin that lovely honeymoon of yours. Well, I hope all this will soon be something we can laugh over and tell anecdotes about.”

Ismael guffawed again, as if it all had little to do with him.

“You’re the kind of friend that doesn’t exist anymore, Rigoberto. I always knew it.”

“Arnillas must have told you that your driver had to hide. The twins have set the police on him, and given how unstable they are, I wouldn’t be surprised if they also send in a couple of hired killers to cut off his you-know-what.”

“They’re very capable of it,” Ismael acknowledged. “That black man is worth his weight in gold. Reassure him, tell him he shouldn’t worry, that his loyalty will have its reward, Rigoberto.”

“Are you coming back soon or will you continue your honeymoon until your heart explodes and you drop dead?”

“I’m finishing up a little matter that will amaze you, Rigoberto. As soon as it’s settled, I’ll return to Lima and put things in order. You’ll see, this mess will disappear in the blink of an eye. I’m really sorry for the headaches I’ve caused. That’s why I called, no other reason. We’ll see each other very soon. Kisses to Lucrecia and a big hug for you.”

“Another one for you and kisses to Armida.” Don Rigoberto said goodbye.

When he hung up, he sat staring at the phone. Venice? The Riviera? Capri? Where could the lovebirds be? Somewhere exotic like Indonesia or Thailand? Could Ismael be as happy as he said? Yes, no doubt, judging by his juvenile laughter. At eighty he’d discovered that life could be more than work—it could also mean doing mad things. Running off, savoring the pleasures of sex and revenge. Better for him. Just then an impatient Lucrecia came into his study.