The Discreet Hero (46 page)

“I don’t know if you remember me,” he greeted them, extending his hand. “I was in your house in Piura a few months ago. What a surprise to find you here. So you’re going on a trip.”

The two Piurans had stood, at first surprised, then smiling. They shook hands effusively.

“What a surprise, Don Rigoberto, seeing you here. How could we not remember our secret plotting.”

“Have a seat, señor,” said Señora Gertrudis. “It would be our pleasure.”

“Well, all right, delighted,” Don Rigoberto thanked her. “My wife and son are looking at the shops. We’re traveling to Madrid.”

“To Madrid?” Felícito Yanaqué’s eyes opened wide. “So are we, what a coincidence.”

“What would you like to have, señor?” a very solicitous Señora Gertrudis asked.

She seemed changed, she’d become more talkative and pleasant and was smiling now. He remembered her, during his days in Piura, as always severe and incapable of uttering a word.

“An espresso cut with milk,” he told the waiter. “So you’re going to Madrid. We’ll be traveling companions.”

They sat, smiled, exchanged impressions about the flight—would the plane leave on time or would it be late—and Señora Gertrudis, whose voice Rigoberto was sure he’d never heard during their meetings in Piura, talked now without stopping. She hoped this plane wouldn’t pitch as much as the LAN plane that brought them from Piura the night before. It had bounced so much that tears came to her eyes because she thought they would crash. And she hoped Iberia wouldn’t lose their suitcase, because if it was lost, what would they wear there in Madrid, where they’d be for three days and three nights and where it seemed the weather was very cold.

“Fall is the best season of the year all over Europe,” Rigoberto reassured her. “And the prettiest, I promise you. It isn’t cold, it’s pleasantly cool. Are you just passing through Madrid?”

“In fact we’re going to Rome,” said Felícito Yanaqué. “But Armida insisted that we spend a few days in Madrid simply to see it.”

“My sister wanted us to go to Andalucía too,” said Gertrudis. “But that would mean being away a long time and Felícito has a lot of work in Piura with the company’s buses and jitneys. He’s reorganizing it from top to bottom.”

“Narihualá Transport is moving forward, though it always gives me some headaches,” Señor Yanaqué said, smiling. “My son Tiburcio has been taking over for me. He knows the business very well, he’s worked there since he was a boy. He’ll do a good job, I’m certain. But, you know, you have to be on top of everything yourself, because otherwise, things start to go wrong.”

“Armida invited us on this trip,” said Señora Gertrudis, a touch of pride in her voice. “She’s paying for everything, it’s so generous. Fares, hotels, everything. And in Rome she’ll put us up in her house.”

“She’s been so nice we couldn’t turn her down over a thing like this,” explained Señor Yanaqué. “Imagine what this invitation must be costing her. A fortune! Armida says she’s very grateful for our putting her up. As if it was any trouble at all for us. More like a great honor.”

“Well, you were very good to her during those difficult days,” remarked Don Rigoberto. “You gave her affection, moral support; she needed to feel close to her family. Now she’s in a magnificent situation, so she’s done very well to invite you. You’ll love Rome, you’ll see.”

Señora Gertrudis got up to go to the ladies’ room. Felícito Yanaqué pointed at his wife and, lowering his voice, confessed to Don Rigoberto, “My wife is dying to see the pope. It’s the dream of her life, because Gertrudis is very caught up in religion. Armida promised to take her to St. Peter’s Square when the pope comes out on the balcony. And maybe she can manage to find her a place among the pilgrims the Holy Father gives an audience to on certain days. Seeing the pope and visiting the Vatican will be the greatest happiness of her life. She became very Catholic after we got married, you know. Before that she really wasn’t. That’s why I decided to accept this invitation. For her sake. She’s always been a very good woman. Very self-sacrificing at difficult times. If it hadn’t been for Gertrudis, I wouldn’t have made this trip. Do you know something? I’ve never taken a vacation before in my life. I don’t feel good if I’m not doing something. Because what I like is working.”

And suddenly, with no transition, Felícito Yanaqué began telling Don Rigoberto about his father. A sharecropper in Yapatera, a humble Chulucano with no education, no shoes, whose wife left him and who, breaking his back, brought up Felícito, making him study, learn a trade, so he could move up in the world. A man who was always rectitude personified.

“Well, how lucky to have had a father like that, Don Felícito,” said Don Rigoberto, getting to his feet. “You won’t regret this trip, I assure you. Madrid and Rome are cities full of interesting things, you’ll see.”

“Yes, I wish you the best,” the other man said, standing up as well. “My regards to your wife.”

But it seemed to Rigoberto that he wasn’t at all convinced, that he wasn’t at all hopeful about the trip, that he was sacrificing himself for his wife. He asked Felícito if his problems had been resolved and then immediately regretted it when he saw a strand of worry or sadness cross the face of the small man in front of him.

“Luckily everything’s resolved,” he murmured. “I hope this trip at least makes the Piurans forget about me. You don’t know how horrible it is to become well known, to appear in the papers and on television, to have people point you out on the street.”

“I believe it, I believe it,” said Don Rigoberto, patting him on the shoulder. He called over the waiter and insisted on paying the entire bill. “All right, we’ll see each other on the plane. My wife and son are over there looking for me. So long.”

They went to the departure gate but boarding hadn’t begun yet. Rigoberto told Lucrecia and Fonchito that the Yanaqués were traveling to Europe as Armida’s guests. His wife was moved by the generosity of Ismael Carrera’s widow.

“You don’t see things like that these days,” she said. “I’ll say hello to them on the plane. They put her up for a few days in their house and didn’t suspect they’d win the lottery because of that good deed.”

In the duty-free shop she’d bought several chains of Peruvian silver to give as mementos to nice people they met on the trip, and Fonchito had bought a DVD of Justin Bieber, a Canadian singer who was driving young people wild all over the world. He’d watch it on the plane on his computer. Rigoberto began to leaf through
The Economist
but then remembered that he’d better carry in his hand the book he’d chosen to read on the trip. He opened his carry-on and took out his old copy, bought at a bouquiniste on the banks of the Seine, of André Malraux’s essay on Goya:
Saturn
. For many years he’d selected carefully what he read on the plane. Experience had shown him that during a flight, he couldn’t read just anything. It had to be exciting, something that would concentrate his attention enough to cancel out completely the subliminal preoccupation that arose in him whenever he flew, remembering he was ten thousand meters high—ten kilometers—moving at a speed of nine hundred or a thousand kilometers an hour, and outside the temperature was fifty or sixty degrees below zero. It wasn’t exactly fear he felt when he flew but something even more intense, the certainty that any moment might be the end, the disintegration of his body in a fraction of a second and, perhaps, the revelation of the great mystery: knowing what, if anything, lay beyond death, a possibility that from the point of view of his old agnosticism, scarcely attenuated by the years, he tended to reject. But a certain kind of reading managed to put a stop to that ominous sensation, reading that could absorb him so much he forgot everything else. It had happened to him with a novel by Dashiell Hammett, Italo Calvino’s
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
, Claudio Magris’s
Danube
, and while rereading Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw.
This time he’d chosen Malraux’s essay because he remembered the emotion he felt the first time he read it, the longing it awoke in him to see in real life, not in reproductions in books, the frescoes at the Quinta del Sordo and the etchings
The Disasters of War
and
Los Caprichos
. Every time he’d been in the Prado he spent time in the rooms with the Goyas. Rereading Malraux’s essay would be a nice anticipation of that pleasure.

It was wonderful that the unpleasant story had finally been settled. He was firmly resolved not to allow anything to ruin these weeks. Everything had to be pleasant, beautiful, pleasing. He wouldn’t see anyone or anything that might turn out to be depressing, irritating, or ugly; he would organize all their moves so that for an entire month he’d have the permanent feeling that happiness was possible, and everything he did, heard, saw, and even smelled (this last not so easy, obviously) would contribute to it.

He was deep in this lucid daydream when he felt Lucrecia’s elbow indicating that boarding had begun. In the distance they saw that Don Felícito and Doña Gertrudis were boarding in business class. The line for economy passengers was very long, of course, which meant that the plane was full. In any event, Rigoberto felt calm; he’d asked the travel agency to reserve the three seats in the tenth row, next to the emergency door, which had more leg room and made the discomforts of the flight easier to bear.

When she walked onto the plane, Lucrecia shook hands with the Piurans, and the couple greeted her with a great deal of affection. Rigoberto and his family were in fact placed in the row next to the emergency door, with ample room for their legs. He sat beside the window, Lucrecia on the aisle, and Fonchito in the middle.

Don Rigoberto sighed. He heard without listening the instructions someone from the crew was giving about the flight. When the plane began to taxi along the runway toward the point of takeoff, he’d managed to become interested in an editorial in
The Economist
about whether the euro, the common currency, would survive the crisis shaking Europe, and whether the European Union would survive the disappearance of the euro. When, with the four engines roaring, the plane pulled away at a speed that increased by the second, he suddenly felt Fonchito’s hand pressing his right arm. He looked away from the magazine and turned to his son: The boy was looking at him in astonishment, with an indescribable expression on his face.

“Don’t be afraid, son,” he said in surprise, but then he stopped talking because Fonchito was shaking his head, as if to say, “It’s not that, it’s not that.”

The plane had just left the ground and the boy’s hand clutched at his arm as if he wanted to hurt him.

“What is it, Fonchito?” he asked, glancing at Lucrecia in alarm, but she didn’t hear them over the noise of the engines. His wife had her eyes closed and seemed to be dozing or praying.

Fonchito was trying to tell him something but though his mouth moved, no words passed his lips. He was very pale.

An awful premonition made Don Rigoberto lean toward his son and murmur in his ear, “We’re not going to allow Edilberto Torres to fuck up this trip, are we, Fonchito?”

Now the boy did manage to speak, and what Don Rigoberto heard froze his blood.

“He’s here, Papa, here on the plane, sitting right behind you. Yes, yes, Señor Edilberto Torres.”

Rigoberto felt a tug at his neck and it seemed to be bruised and injured. He couldn’t move his head, turn around to look at the seat behind him. His neck hurt horribly and his head had begun to boil. He had the stupid idea that his hair was smoking like a bonfire. Could it be possible that the son of a bitch was here, on this plane, traveling with them to Madrid? Fury rose in his body like irresistible lava, a savage desire to stand and attack Edilberto Torres, hit and insult him without pity until he was exhausted. In spite of the sharp pain in his neck, he finally managed to turn his upper body. But in the row behind him there was no man at all, only two older women and a little girl with a lollipop. Disconcerted, he turned to look at Fonchito, and he was greeted by a surprise: His son’s eyes were sending out sparks of mockery and joy. And at that instant he burst into laughter.

“You fell for it, Papa,” he said, choking on his healthy, mischievous, clean, childish laughter. “Isn’t it true you fell for it? If you could have seen your face, Papa!”

Now Rigoberto, relieved, moving his head, smiled, and then he laughed too, reconciled with his son, with life. They had risen above the cloud cover and a radiant sun lit the interior of the plane.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Mario Vargas Llosa
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works include
The Feast of the Goat
,
The Bad Girl
, and
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
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