The Discreet Hero (8 page)

“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. Justiniana thinks Armida made the first move, not him. That she was the one who touched Ismael first. Here, yes. Like that.”

“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 somewhat foolish, casual point of curiosity, “Do you feel cold each time this individual appears?” Ah, Adrian also suffers from premonitory migraines and nausea before the encounter that will change his life. “Tell me, Fonchito, do you happen to get headaches, an upset stomach, physical ailments of any kind whenever this person appears?”

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.

V

The notice, paid for out of his own pocket, that Felícito Yanaqué published in
El Tiempo
made him famous overnight throughout Piura. People stopped him on the street to congratulate him, show their solidarity, ask for his autograph, and, above all, warn him to be careful: “What you’ve done is very rash, Don Felícito. Hey waddya think! Now your life’s really in danger.”

None of this went to the trucker’s head, and none of it frightened him. What affected him most was observing the change the small notice in Piura’s principal newspaper caused in Sergeant Lituma and, especially, in Captain Silva. He’d never liked this vulgar police chief who used any pretext to run his mouth about Piuran women’s bottoms, and he thought the antipathy was mutual. But now the captain’s attitude was less arrogant. On the very afternoon of the day the notice was published, both police officers showed up at his house on Calle Arequipa, affable and ingratiating. They’d come to demonstrate their concern over “what was happening to you, Señor Yanaqué.” Not even when the fire set by the spider crooks leveled part of Narihualá Transport had they been so attentive. What pangs of conscience troubled this pair of cops now? They seemed truly sorry about his situation and eager to challenge the extortionists.

Finally, Captain Silva took a clipping of the
El Tiempo
notice out of his pocket.

“You must have been crazy when you published this, Don Felícito,” he said, half in jest, half seriously. “Didn’t it occur to you that this kind of hotheaded act could get your throat slit or put a bullet in the back of your neck?”

“It wasn’t a hotheaded act, I thought about it a lot before I did it,” the trucker explained gently. “I wanted those sons of bitches to know once and for all that they won’t get a cent out of me. They can burn down this house, all my trucks, buses, and jitneys. Even knock off my wife and children if they want. Not one fuckin’ cent!”

Small and steadfast, he said this without exaggeration or anger, his hands quiet, his glance firm, his determination serene.

“I believe you, Don Felícito,” the distressed captain agreed. And he got to the point: “The thing is, without wanting to, without realizing it, you’ve gotten us into one enormous jam. Colonel Rascachucha, our regional chief, called the station this morning about the notice. Do you know why? Tell him, Lituma.”

“To tell us to go to hell and call us morons and losers, sir,” the sergeant explained sorrowfully.

Felícito Yanaqué laughed. For the first time since he’d begun to receive the spider letters, he was in a good mood.

“That’s what the two of you are, Captain,” he murmured with a smile. “I’m so glad your boss told you off. Is that word really his name? Cuntscratcher?”

Sergeant Lituma and Captain Silva laughed too, uneasily.

“Of course not, that’s his nickname,” the chief explained. “His real name is Colonel Asundino Ríos Pardo. I don’t know how he got that moniker or who gave it to him. He’s a good officer, but he swears a lot. He doesn’t put up with any nonsense, he’ll curse out anybody for the least little thing.”

“You’re wrong to think we haven’t taken your complaint seriously, Señor Yanaqué,” Sergeant Lituma interjected.

“We had to wait until the crooks revealed themselves before we could act,” the captain went on with sudden energy. “Now that they have, we’re taking care of business.”

“That’s cold comfort to me,” said Felícito Yanaqué, frowning annoyance. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but as far as I’m concerned, nobody’s going to give me back the business they burned down.”