The Discreet Hero (24 page)

“What happened? What did Ismael say? Tell me, tell me.”

“He seems very happy. He’s laughing at everything, believe it or not,” he told her. And then he was struck again by the same suspicion. “Do you know something, Lucrecia? What if he really has become senile? What if he doesn’t even realize the crazy things he’s doing?”

“Are you serious or are you joking, Rigoberto?”

“Until now he’d seemed absolutely lucid and clearheaded to me,” he said hesitantly. “But as I listened to him laughing on the phone, I started to think. Because he thought everything going on here was incredibly funny, as if he didn’t care at all about the scandal or the mess he’s gotten us into. Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m a little touchy. Do you realize the situation we’ll be in if it turns out that Ismael has been stricken overnight by senile dementia?”

“I wish you’d never put that idea into my head, Rigoberto. I’ll be thinking about it all night. Too bad for you if I can’t sleep, I’m warning you.”

“It’s sheer nonsense, don’t pay any attention to me, it’s a kind of magic charm so that what I say might happen, doesn’t,” Rigoberto reassured her. “But the truth is, I didn’t expect to find him so unconcerned. As if this all had nothing to do with him. Sorry, I’m sorry. Now I know what’s going on. He’s happy. That’s the key to everything. For the first time in his life Ismael knows what it means to have a real fuck, Lucrecia. What he had with Clotilde were conjugal diversions. With Armida there’s a little sin in the middle and the thing works better.”

“Again your dirty talk,” his wife protested. “Besides, I don’t know what you have against conjugal diversions. I think ours work wonderfully well.”

“Of course, my love, they’re marvelous,” he said, kissing Lucrecia on her hand and her ear. “The best thing for us is to do what he’s doing and not give the matter any importance. Load up on patience and wait for the storm to blow over.”

“Don’t you want to go out, Rigoberto? Let’s go to the movies and eat out.”

“Let’s watch a movie here instead,” her husband replied. “Just the thought that one of those people with their little tape recorders might show up to take photographs and ask me about Ismael and the twins upsets my stomach.”

Ever since journalists had seized upon the news of Ismael’s marriage to Armida, and his children’s police and judicial actions to annul the marriage and declare him incompetent, nothing else was talked about in newspapers, on radio and television programs, on social networks and blogs. The facts disappeared under a frenetic spluttering of exaggerations, inventions, gossipmongering, libel, and general baseness, in which iniquity, coarseness, perversion, resentment, and rancor came to the surface. If he hadn’t found himself dragged into the journalistic confusion, constantly hounded by hacks who compensated for their ignorance with morbid curiosity and insolence, Don Rigoberto told himself that this spectacle of Ismael Carrera and Armida transformed into the great entertainment in the city—dipped in print, radio, and television filth and unceasingly scorched in the bonfire that Miki and Escobita had lit and stirred up every day with statements, interviews, short articles, fantasies, and deliriums—would have been somewhat entertaining, as well as instructive and informative with respect to this country, this city, the human spirit in general, and the very evil that now concerned Fonchito, to judge by his essay. “Instructive and informative, yes,” he thought again. With respect to many things. The function of journalism in our time, at least in this society, was not to inform but to make the line between the lie and the truth disappear, to replace reality with a fiction in which the oceanic mass of neuroses, frustrations, hatreds, and traumas of a public devoured by resentment and envy was made manifest. One more proof that the small spaces of civilization would never prevail against immeasurable barbarism.

The phone conversation with his former employer and friend had left him depressed. He didn’t regret having lent him a hand by acting as a witness at his marriage. But the consequences of that signature were beginning to overwhelm him. It wasn’t so much the judicial and police complications, or the delay in processing his retirement; he thought (knock on wood, anything could happen) that this, bad as it was, would be settled. And he and Lucrecia would be able to travel to Europe. The worst thing was the scandal he found himself drawn into: Almost every day he was dragged through a journalistic sewer, muddied by a pestilential sensationalism. Bitterly he asked himself, “What good has it done you, this small refuge of books, prints, records, all these beautiful, refined, subtle, intelligent things you collected so zealously, believing that in this tiny space of civilization you’d be protected against lack of culture, frivolity, stupidity, and emptiness?” His old idea that these islands or fortresses of culture had to be erected in the middle of the storm, invulnerable to the surrounding barbarism, wasn’t working. The scandal provoked by his friend Ismael and the hyenas had leaked its acid, its pus, its poison into his study, this territory where for so many years—twenty, twenty-five, thirty?—he’d withdrawn to live his true life. The life that made up for the company’s policies and contracts, the intrigues and pettiness of local politics, the mendacity and idiocy of the people he was obliged to deal with every day. Now, with the scandal, it did him no good to search out the solitude of his study. He’d done so the night before. He put a beautiful recording on the phonograph, Arthur Honegger’s oratorio
King David
, recorded right in the Notre Dame Cathedral, which had always moved him a great deal. This time, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on the music for an instant. He was distracted, his mind fixed on the images and concerns of the past few days, the shock, the bilious displeasure each time he discovered his name in the reports that, though he didn’t buy those newspapers, friends had sent to him or commented on in an inflexible way, poisoning his life and Lucrecia’s. He had to turn off the phonograph and sit still, his eyes closed, listening to the beating of his heart with a brackish taste in his mouth. “In this country not even a tiny space of civilization can be built,” he concluded. “In the end, barbarism demolishes everything.” And once again he told himself, as he always did whenever he felt depressed, how mistaken he’d been when, as a young man, he decided not to emigrate, to remain here, in Lima the Horrible, convinced he’d be able to organize his life in a way that, even though he’d have to spend many hours a day submerged in the mundane noise of upper-class Peruvians to earn his daily bread, he’d really live in the pure, beautiful, elevated enclave made of sublime things that he would create as an alternative to the everyday yoke. That was when he’d had the idea of saving spaces, the idea that civilization was not, had never been a movement, a general state of things, an environment that would embrace all of society, but rather was composed of tiny citadels raised throughout time and space, which resisted the ongoing assault of the instinctive, violent, obtuse, ugly, destructive, bestial force that dominated the world and now had come into his own home.

That night, after supper, he asked Fonchito if he was tired.

“No,” his son replied. “Why, Papa?”

“I’d like to talk with you for a moment, if you don’t mind.”

“As long as it isn’t about Edilberto Torres, I’d be happy to,” Fonchito said mischievously. “I haven’t seen him again, so don’t worry.”

“I promise we won’t talk about him,” replied Don Rigoberto. And as he used to do when he was a boy, he shaped a cross with two fingers and swore, kissing them: “I swear to God.”

“Don’t take God’s name in vain—after all, I’m a believer,” Doña Lucrecia admonished. “Go into the study. I’ll tell Justiniana to bring you your ice cream there.”

In the study, while they were enjoying the lucuma ice cream, Don Rigoberto, between mouthfuls, spied on Fonchito. Sitting across from him with his legs crossed, he ate his ice cream in slow spoonfuls and seemed absorbed in some distant thoughts. He was no longer a child. How long had he been shaving? His face was smooth and his hair was tousled; he didn’t play a lot of sports but looked as if he did because his body was slim and athletic. He was a very good-looking boy, and the girls must be crazy about him. Everyone said so. But his son didn’t seem interested in those kinds of things; instead, he was interested in hallucinations and religious ideas. Was that a good or bad thing? Would he have preferred Fonchito to be a normal kid? “Normal,” he thought, imagining his son speaking the syncopated, simian jargon of the young people of his generation, getting drunk on weekends, smoking marijuana, getting high on coke, taking Ecstasy in the discos along the Asia beach at kilometer 100 on the Pan-American, as so many of Lima’s wealthy children did. A shudder ran through his body. A thousand times better for him to see phantoms or even the devil himself and write essays about evil.

“I read what you wrote about liberty and evil,” he said. “It was right there, on your desk, and I was curious. I hope you don’t mind. It impressed me a great deal, in fact. It’s very well written and full of original ideas. Which course is it for?”

“Language,” said Fonchito, not giving the subject much importance. “Professor Iturriaga asked for an essay on anything. That topic came to mind. But it’s only a rough draft. I still have to correct it.”

“I was surprised, because I didn’t know you were so interested in religion.”

“You thought it was religious?” Fonchito was surprised. “I think it’s more like philosophy. Well, I don’t know, philosophy and religion blend into each other, that’s true. Weren’t you ever interested in religion, Papa?”

“I studied at La Recoleta, a priests’ academy,” said Don Rigoberto. “After that, at the Universidad Católica. And for a time I was even a leader of Acción Católica, with Pepín O’Donovan. Of course it interested me a great deal when I was young. But one day I lost my faith and never got it back again. I think I lost it as soon as I began to think. To be a believer, you can’t think too much.”

“In other words, you’re an atheist. You believe there isn’t anything before or after this life. That’s being an atheist, isn’t it?”

“We’re getting into deep waters,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “I’m not an atheist, an atheist is also a believer. He believes that God doesn’t exist, isn’t that so? I’m more of an agnostic, if I’m anything. Someone who declares that he’s perplexed, incapable of believing either that God exists or that God doesn’t exist.”

“Neither fish nor fowl,” said Fonchito with a laugh. “It’s a very convenient way to avoid the problem, Papa.”

He had a fresh, healthy laugh, and Don Rigoberto thought he was a good kid. He was going through an adolescent crisis, suffering doubts and uncertainties regarding the afterlife and this life, which spoke well of him. How he would have liked to help him. But how, how could he?

“Something like that, though there’s no need to make fun of me,” he agreed. “Shall I tell you something, Fonchito? I envy believers. Not the fanatics, of course, who horrify me. Real believers. The ones who have a faith and try to organize their lives in accordance with their beliefs. Soberly, with no fuss and no foolishness. I don’t know many, but I do know some. And they seem enviable to me. By the way, are you a believer?”

Fonchito became serious and reflected for a moment before answering.

“I’d like to know more about religion, because I was never taught.” He avoided answering with a reproachful tone. “That’s why Chato Pezzuolo and I have joined a Bible-study group. We meet on Fridays after classes.”

“An excellent idea.” Don Rigoberto was pleased. “The Bible’s a marvelous book that everyone ought to read, believers and nonbelievers. First of all, for their general culture. But also to better understand the world we live in. Many things that happen around us come directly or indirectly from the Bible.”

“Is that what you wanted us to talk about, Papa?”

“No, not really,” said Don Rigoberto. “I wanted to talk to you about Ismael and the scandal we’re caught up in. I’m sure it’s all over your school too.”

Fonchito laughed again. “I’ve been asked a thousand times if it was true you helped him to marry his cook, as the papers say. You’re on all the blogs that cover that mess.”

“Armida was never his cook,” explained Don Rigoberto. “More like his housekeeper. She cleaned and managed the house, especially after Ismael lost his wife.”

“I’ve been to his house two or three times and don’t remember her at all,” said Fonchito. “Is she pretty, at least?”

“Presentable, let’s say,” Don Rigoberto conceded in a Solomonic way. “Much younger than Ismael, of course. Don’t believe all the nonsense in the press. That he was abducted, that he’s senile, that he didn’t know what he was doing. Ismael’s in his right mind and that’s why I agreed to be a witness. Of course I didn’t suspect that the uproar would be so awful. Well, it’ll pass. I wanted to tell you that they’ve held up my retirement in the company. The twins have accused me of alleged complicity in an abduction that never happened. And so for now I’m tied up here in Lima with summonses and lawyers. That’s what it’s about. We’re going through a difficult period, and until this is resolved, we’ll have to tighten our belts a little. Because it’s not a good idea to liquidate all the savings our future depends on. Yours especially. I wanted to keep you up to date.”

“Of course, Papa,” said Fonchito, encouraging him. “Don’t worry. If you have to you can suspend my allowance until this is over.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Don Rigoberto said with a smile. “There’s more than enough for your allowance. At school, the teachers and students, what do they say about all this?”

“Most are siding with the twins, naturally.”

“The hyenas? It’s obvious they don’t know them.”

“The thing is they’re racists,” Fonchito declared. “They can’t forgive Señor Ismael for marrying a
chola
. They believe nobody in his right mind would do that, and that the only thing Armida wants is to keep his money. You don’t know how many boys I’ve fought with defending your friend’s marriage, Papa. Only Pezzuolo backs me up, but more out of friendship than because he thinks I’m right.”