The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

In the solitude of his study, awake in the cold dawn, Don Rigoberto repeated from memory a phrase of Borges: "Adultery is usually made up of tenderness and abnegation." The letter to his wife lay before him.

Dear Lucrecia:

Reading these lines will bring you the surprise of your life, and perhaps you will despise me. But it doesn't matter. Even if there were only one chance that you would accept my offer against a million that you would reject it, I would take the plunge. I will summarize what would require hours of conversation, accompanied by vocal inflections and persuasive gestures.

I have decided that during the week between my departure from Boston and my arrival in Oxford, Mississippi to take up a new post, I will spend $100,000 on a vacation. If my plans materialize, as I hope they do, this week will be something quite out of the ordinary. Not the conventional (continued on page 120)Don Rigoberto (continued from page 117) Caribbean cruise nor beaches with palm trees and surfers in Hawaii. Something very personal, and unrepeatable: the realization of an old dream. This is where you come in, right through the front door. I know you are married to an honorable Limeño, an insurance executive. I am married too, a physician from Boston, and I am happy to the modest extent that marriage allows. I am not proposing that you divorce and take up a new life, not at all. Only that you share with me this ideal week, cherished in my mind for so many years, which circumstances now permit me to turn into reality. You will not regret sharing these seven days of illusion with me, days you will remember fondly for the rest of your life, I promise.

We will meet on Saturday the 17th at Kennedy Airport in New York, where you will arrive from Lima on Lufthansa, and I will fly in from Boston. A limousine will take us to a suite at the Plaza Hotel, which I have already reserved, along with the flowers I have selected to perfume it. You will have time to rest, have your hair done, take a sauna or go shopping on Fifth Avenue, which is literally at your feet. That night we have tickets to the Metropolitan Opera to see Puccini's "Tosca," with Luciano Pavarotti. We will dine at Le Cirque, where, with luck, you may rub elbows with Mick Jagger, Henry Kissinger or Sharon Stone. We will end the evening at the glamorous and exciting Regine's.

The Concorde to Paris leaves at noon on Sunday, so there will be no need for us to rise too early. The flight takes less than three and a half hours, and after we have registered at the Ritz (a view of the Place Vendôme guaranteed), there will be time for a stroll along the bridges over the Seine, to enjoy the mild evening of early autumn.

The next morning we will visit the Louvre to pay our respects to "La Gioconda," and have a light lunch at La Closerie des Lilas or La Coupole. In the afternoon we will dip into the avant-garde at the Centre Pompidou and make a quick visit to the Marais, famous for its 18th century palaces. We will have tea at La Marquise de Sévigné before returning to the hotel for a refreshing shower. Our program that night is completely frivolous: an aperitif at the Ritz, supper amid the modernist decor of Maxim's, and, to round off the festivities, a visit to that cathedral of striptease, the Crazy Horse Saloon, with its brand-new revue.

The Orient Express to Venice leaves on Wednesday at noon, from the Gare de L'Est. We will spend that day and night traveling and resting--according to those who have experienced this railway adventure, passing through the landscapes of France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy in those belle epoque compartments is relaxing and instructive.

Our suite at the Hotel Cipriani, on the island of Giudecca, has a view of the Grand Canal, the Piazza San Marco and the swelling Byzantine towers of its church. I have hired a gondola and the man considered by the agency to be the best-informed (and only good-natured) guide in the lacustrine city.

On the seventh day, we will have to rise early. The plane to Paris leaves at ten, connecting with the Concorde to New York. As we fly over the Atlantic, we will sort through the images and sensations stored in our memories, selecting those that deserve to endure.

We will say goodbye at Kennedy Airport (your flight to Lima and mine to Boston leave at almost the same time), no doubt never to see each other again. I do not think our paths will cross another time.

Will you come? Your ticket is waiting for you in the offices of Lufthansa in Lima. You don't need to send me an answer. On Saturday the 17th I will be at the appointed place. Your presence or absence will be your response. If you do not come, I will follow this itinerary alone, fantasizing that you are with me.

Need I point out that this is an invitation to honor me with your company and does not imply any obligation other than your presence? I am in no way asking you, during the days of our travels together--I can think of no other euphemism for this--to share my bed. The suites reserved in New York, Paris and Venice have separate bedrooms with doors under lock and key, and if your scruples demand it, I can add daggers, hatchets, revolvers and even bodyguards. But you know none of that will be necessary, and for the entire week this virtuous Modesto, this gentle Pluto, as they called me in the neighborhood, will be as respectful of you as I was years ago in Lima, when I tried to persuade you to marry me and barely had the courage to touch your hand in darkened movie theaters.

Until we meet at Kennedy, or goodbye forever, Lucre,

Modesto (Pluto)

Don Rigoberto felt assailed by the high temperature and tremors of tertian fever. How would Lucrecia respond? Would she indignantly reject this letter from Lazarus? Or would she succumb to frivolous temptation? In the milky light of dawn, it seemed to him that his notebooks were waiting for the denouement as impatiently as was his tormented spirit.

•

"My secretary called Lufthansa and, in fact, your paid passage is waiting there," said Don Rigoberto. "Roundtrip. First class, of course."

"Was I right to show you the letter, my love?" asked Doña Lucrecia in great alarm. "You're not angry, are you? We promised never to hide anything from each other, and I thought I ought to show it to you."

"You did just the right thing, my queen," said Don Rigoberto, kissing his wife's hand. "I want you to go."

"You want me to go?" Doña Lucrecia smiled, looked somber, then smiled again. "Are you serious?"

"I beg you to go," he insisted, his lips on his wife's fingers. "Unless the idea displeases you. But why should it? Even though the plan is that of a rather vulgar nouveau riche, it has been worked out in a spirit of joy and with an irony not at all frequent in engineers. You will have a good time, my dear."

"I don't know what to say, Rigoberto," Doña Lucrecia stammered, making an effort not to blush. "It's very generous of you, but--"

"I'm asking you to accept for selfish reasons," her husband explained. "And you know that selfishness is a virtue in my philosophy. Your trip will be a great experience for me."

•

And so she did take the trip, and on the eighth day she returned to Lima. At Córpac she was met by her husband. During the ride home Don Rigoberto, to help her conceal her discomfort, asked endless questions about the weather, going through customs, changes in schedule, jet lag and fatigue, avoiding anything approaching sensitive material.

After supper, Don Rigoberto withdrew to the bathroom and took less time than usual with his ablutions. When he emerged, he found the bedroom in darkness, cut by indirect lighting that illuminated only the two engravings by Utamaro depicting the incompatible but orthodox matings of the same couple, the man endowed with a long, corkscrew member, the woman with a lilliputian sex organ, the two of them surrounded by kimonos billowing like storm clouds, paper lanterns, floor mats, low tables holding a porcelain tea service and, in the distance, bridges spanning a sinuous river. Doña Lucrecia lay beneath the sheets, not naked, he discovered when he slipped in beside her, but in a new nightgown--purchased and worn on her trip?--that allowed his hands the (continued on page 134)Don Rigoberto (continued from page 120) freedom to reach her most intimate corners. She turned onto her side, and he could slide his arm under her shoulders and feel her from head to foot. He did not crush her to him but kissed her, very tenderly, on the eyes and cheeks, taking his time to reach her mouth.

"Don't tell me anything you don't want to," he lied into her ear with a boyish coquetry that inflamed her impatience as his lips traced the curve of her ear. "Whatever you have a mind to. Or nothing at all, if you prefer."

"I'll tell you everything," Doña Lucrecia murmured, searching for his mouth. "Isn't that why you sent me?"

"That's one reason," Don Rigoberto agreed, kissing her on her neck, her hair, her forehead, returning again and again to her nose, cheeks and chin. "Did you enjoy yourself? Did you have a good time?"

"Whether it was good or bad will depend on what happens now between you and me," said Doña Lucrecia hurriedly, and Don Rigoberto felt his wife become tense for a moment. "Yes, I enjoyed myself. Yes, I had a good time. But I was afraid the whole time."

"Afraid I would be angry?" Now Don Rigoberto was kissing her firm breasts, millimeter by millimeter, and the tip of his tongue played with her nipples, feeling them harden. "That I would make a scene and be jealous?"

"That you would suffer," Doña Lucrecia murmured, embracing him.

She's beginning to perspire, Don Rigoberto observed to himself. He felt joy as he caressed her increasingly responsive body, and he had to bring his mind to bear to control the vertigo that was quickly overtaking him. He whispered into his wife's ear that he loved her more, much more, than before she took her trip.

Doña Lucrecia began to speak, pausing as she searched for the words--silences meant to conceal her awkwardness--but little by little, aroused by his caresses and amorous interruptions, she gained confidence. At last, Don Rigoberto realized she had recovered her natural fluency and could tell her story by assuming a feigned distance from the account, clinging to his body, her head resting on his shoulder. The couple's hands moved from time to time to take possession or verify the existence of a member, a muscle or a piece of skin.

"Seeing you arrive must have been like a gift from heaven for him."

"He turned so pale! I thought he was going to faint. He was waiting for me with a bouquet of flowers bigger than he was. The limousine was one of those silver-colored ones that gangsters have in movies. With a bar, a television, a stereo and--this will kill you--leopard-skin seat covers."

"Poor ecologists," Don Rigoberto responded with enthusiasm.

"I know that it's very parvenu," Modesto had apologized while the chauffeur, an extremely tall Afghan in a maroon uniform, arranged their luggage in the trunk. "But it was the most expensive one."

"He's able to laugh at himself," Don Rigoberto declared. "That's nice."

"On the ride to the Plaza he paid me a few compliments, blushing all the way to his ears," Doña Lucrecia continued. "He said I looked very young and even more beautiful than when he asked me to marry him."

"You are," Don Rigoberto interrupted, drinking in her breath. "More and more, every day, every hour."

"Not a single remark in bad taste, not a single offensive insinuation," she said. "He was so grateful to me for joining him that he made me feel like the Good Samaritan in the Bible."

"Do you know what he was wondering while he was being so gallant?"

"What?" Doña Lucrecia slipped her leg between her husband's legs.

"If he would see you naked that afternoon, in the Plaza, or if he would have to wait until that night, or even until Paris," Don Rigoberto explained.

"He didn't see me naked that afternoon, nor that night. Unless he peeked through the keyhole while I was bathing and dressing for the Metropolitan Opera. What he had written about separate rooms was true. Mine overlooked Central Park."

"But he must have at least held your hand at the opera, in the restaurant," Don Rigoberto complained, feeling disappointed. "With the help of a little champagne, he must have put his cheek to yours while you were dancing at Regine's. He must have kissed your neck, your ear."

Not at all. He had not tried to take her hand nor kiss her during that long night, though he did not spare the compliments, always at a respectful distance. He was very likable, in fact, mocking his own lack of experience ("I'm mortified, Lucre, but in six years of marriage I've never cheated on my wife"), admitting to her that this was the first time in his life he had attended the opera or set foot in Le Cirque and Regine's.

"To tell the truth, I've come out of vanity, Modesto. And curiosity too, of course. After ten years of our not seeing each other, of our not being in touch at all, is it possible you're still in love with me?"

"Love isn't the right word," he pointed out. "I'm in love with Dorothy, the gringa I married, who's very understanding and lets me sing in bed."

"For him you meant something more subtle," Don Rigoberto declared, "Unreality, illusion, the woman of his memory and desires. I want to worship you the same way, the way he does. Wait, wait."

He removed her tiny nightgown and then positioned her so that their skins would touch in more places. He reined in his desire and asked her to continue.

"We returned to the hotel just as I was beginning to yawn. He said goodnight at a distance from my door. He wished me pleasant dreams. He behaved so well, he was so much a gentleman, that the next morning I flirted with him just a little."

When she appeared for breakfast in the room that separated the two bedrooms, she was barefoot and wearing a short summer wrap that left her legs and thighs exposed. Modesto was waiting for her, shaved, showered and dressed. His mouth fell open.

"Did you sleep well?" he managed to articulate, slack-jawed, while pulling out a chair for her at the breakfast table that held fruit juice, toast and marmalade. "May I say that you look very attractive?"

"Stop," Don Rigoberto cut her off. "Let me kneel and kiss the legs that dazzled Pluto the dog."

•

On the way to the airport, and then as they ate lunch on the Air France Concorde, Modesto returned to the attitude of attentive adoration he had displayed on the first day. He reminded Lucrecia, in an undramatic way, of his decision to leave the School of Engineering when he became convinced she would not marry him; told of going to Boston to seek his fortune, of his early difficulties in that city of cold winters and dark-red Victorian mansions. His heart had been broken, but he was not complaining. He had achieved the security he needed, he got along well with his wife, and now that a new phase of his life was about to begin he was making his fantasy, the grown-up game that had been his refuge all these years, come true: his ideal week with Lucre, when he would pretend to be rich in New York, Paris and Venice. Now he could die happy.

"Are you really going to spend a quarter of your savings on this trip?"

"I would spend everything," he affirmed, looking into her eyes. "And not for the entire week. Just for having seen you at breakfast, just for seeing those legs, those arms, those shoulders. The most beautiful in the world, Lucre."

"What would he have said if he had seen your breasts and your sweet ass?" Don Rigoberto said, kissing her. "I love you. I adore you."

"This was when I decided that in Paris he would see the rest." Doña Lucrecia moved away slightly from her husband's kisses. "I made the decision when the pilot announced that we had broken the sound barrier."

"It was the least you could have done for so proper a gentleman," Don Rigoberto said, approvingly.

As soon as they were settled in their respective bedrooms--the view from Lucrecia's windows included the dark column on the Place Vendôme, so high she could not see the top, and the glittering display windows of the jewelry shops all around it--they went out for a stroll. Modesto had memorized the route and had calculated the time it would take. They passed through the Tuileries, crossed the Seine and walked toward St.-Germain along the quays on the Left Bank. They reached the abbey half an hour before the concert. It was a pale, mild afternoon--autumn had already turned the leaves on the chestnut trees--and from time to time the engineer would stop, guidebook and map in hand, to give Lucrecia a bit of historical, urbanistic, architectural or aesthetic information. On the uncomfortable little seats in a church filled to capacity for the concert, they had to sit very close together. Lucrecia enjoyed the lavish melancholy of Mozart's Requiem, Later, when they were seated at a small table on the first floor of Lipp's, she congratulated Modesto:

"I can't believe this is your first trip to Paris. You know streets, monuments, directions, as if you lived here."

"I've prepared for this trip as if it were the final exam for a degree, Lucre. I've consulted books, maps, travel agencies, and talked to travelers. I don't collect stamps, or raise dogs, or play golf. For years my only hobby has been preparing for this week."

"Was I always in it?"

"Another step along the road of flirtation," Don Rigoberto noted.

"Always you and only you," said Pluto, blushing. "New York, Paris, Venice, operas, restaurants, all the rest, were merely the background. The important thing, the central thing, was to be alone with you in those settings."

They returned to the Ritz in a taxicab, tired and a little tipsy from the champagne, the Burgundy and the cognac with which they had anticipated, accompanied and bid farewell to the choucroute. When they said goodnight, standing in the small room that divided their bedrooms, Doña Lucrecia, without the slightest hesitation, announced to Modesto:

"You're behaving so well that I want to play too. So I'm going to give you a present."

"Oh, really?" Pluto's voice broke. "What's that, Lucre?"

"My entire body," she sang out. "Come in when I call you. But just to look."

She did not hear Modesto's reply but was sure that in the darkened room, as he nodded, speechless, his joy knew no bounds. Not certain exactly what she would do, she undressed, hung up her clothes and, in the bathroom, unpinned her hair ("The way I like it, my love?" "Exactly the same, Rigoberto."). She walked back into the room, turned out all the lights except the one on the night table, and moved the lamp so that its illumination, softened by a satin shade, fell on the sheets that the chambermaid had turned down for the night. She lay on her back, turned slightly to the side in a languid, uninhibited pose, and settled her head on the pillow.

"Whenever you're ready."

She closed her eyes so as not to see him come in, thought Don Rigoberto, moved by that touch of modesty. With absolute clarity he could see in the blue-tinged light, from the perspective of the hesitant, yearning engineer who had just crossed the threshold, the shapely body that, without reaching Rubenesque excesses, emulated the virginal opulence of Murillo as she lay on her back, one knee slightly forward to hide the pubis, the other presented openly, the full curves of her hips stabilizing the volume of golden flesh in the center of the bed. Though he had contemplated, studied, caressed and enjoyed that body so many times, through another man's eyes he seemed to see it for the first time. For a long while--his breathing agitated, his phallus stiff--he admired it.

Reading his mind, not saying a word to break the silence, from time to time Lucrecia moved in slow motion with the abandon of one who thinks she is safe from indiscreet eyes, and displayed to the respectful Modesto, frozen two paces from the bed, her flanks and back, her buttocks and breasts, her hair-free underarms and the little forest of her pubis. At last she began to open her legs, revealing her inner thighs and the half-moon of her sex. "In the pose of the anonymous model of L'origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet, 1866." Don Rigoberto sought and found the reference, overcome by emotion to discover that the exuberance of his wife's belly, the robust solidity of her thighs and mound of Venus coincided millimeter by millimeter with the headless woman in the oil painting that was the reigning prince of his private collection. Then, eternity dissolved:

"I'm tired, and I think you are too, Pluto. It's time to sleep."

"Goodnight," was the immediate reply of a voice at the very peak of ecstasy or agony. Modesto stepped back, stumbled, and seconds later the door closed.

"He was capable of restraining himself; he did not throw himself at you like a ravening beast," exclaimed an enchanted Don Rigoberto. "You were controlling him with your little finger."

"It's hard to believe," Lucrecia said, laughing. "But that docility of his was also part of the game."

The next morning a bellboy brought a bouquet of roses to her bed, with a card that read: "Eyes that see, a heart that feels, a mind that remembers, and a cartoon dog that thanks you with all his heart."

"I want you too much," Don Rigoberto apologized as he covered her mouth with his hand. "I must make love to you."

"Then imagine the night poor Pluto must have spent."

"Poor?" Don Rigoberto pondered after lovemaking, as they, exhausted and satisfied, were recovering their strength. "Why poor?"

"I'm the happiest man in the world, Lucre," Modesto declared that night in the interval between two striptease shows at the Crazy Horse Saloon, which was packed with Japanese and Germans, and after they had consumed a bottle of champagne. "Not even the electric train that Father Christmas brought me on my tenth birthday can compare to your gift."

During the day, as they had walked through the Louvre, lunched at La Closerie des Lilas, visited the Centre Pompidou or lost their way in the narrow, reconstructed streets of the Marais, he had not made the slightest allusion to the previous night. He continued to act as her well-informed, devoted, obliging traveling companion.

"The more you tell me the better I like him, "remarked Don Rigoberto.

"The same thing happened to me," Doña Lucrecia acknowledged. "And so that day I went a step further, to reward him. At Maxim's he felt my knee against his during the entire meal. And when we danced, my breasts. And at the Crazy Horse, my legs."

"I envy him," exclaimed Don Rigoberto. "To discover you serially, episodically, bit by bit. A game of cat and mouse, after all. A game not without its dangers."

"No, not if it's played with gentlemen like you," Doña Lucrecia said coquettishly. "I'm glad I accepted your invitation, Pluto."

They were back at the Ritz, drowsy and content. They were saying goodnight in the sitting room of their suite.

"Wait, Modesto," she improvised, blinking. "Surprise, surprise, close your little eyes."

Pluto obeyed instantly, transformed by expectation. She approached, pressed against him, kissed him, lightly at first, noticing that he hesitated to respond to the lips brushing his, and then to the thrusts of her tongue. When he did, she sensed that with this kiss the engineer was giving her the love he had felt for so long, his adoration and fantasy, his well-being and (if he had one) his soul. When he caught her around the waist, cautiously, prepared to let go at the first sign of rejection, Doña Lucrecia allowed him to embrace her.

"May I open my eyes?"

"You may."

And then he looked at her, not with the cold eyes of the perfect libertine, De Sade, thought Don Rigoberto, but with the pure, fervent, impassioned eyes of the mystic at the moment of his ascent and vision.

"Was he very excited?" The question escaped his lips, and he regretted it. "What a stupid question. Forgive me, Lucrecia."

"He was, but he made no attempt to hold me. At the first hint, he moved away."

"You should have gone to bed with him that night," Don Rigoberto admonished her. "You were being abusive. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps you were doing just the right thing. Yes, yes, of course. The slow, the formal, the ritualized, the theatrical--that is eroticism. It was a wise delay. Rushing makes us more like animals. Did you know that donkeys, monkeys, pigs and rabbits ejaculate in 12 seconds, at the most?"

"But the frog can copulate for 40 days and nights without stopping. I read it in a book by Jean Rostand."

"I'm envious." Don Rigoberto was filled with admiration. "You are so wise, Lucrecia."

"Those were Modesto's words," his wife confessed to him, as she returned him to an Orient Express hurtling through the European night on its way to Venice, "the next day, in our belle epoque compartment."

And the words were reiterated by a bouquet of flowers waiting for her at the Hotel Cipriani, on sun-filled Giudecca: "To Lucrecia, beautiful in life and wise in love."

"Wait, wait," Don Rigoberto brought her back to the rails. "Did you share the compartment on the train?"

"It had two beds. I was in the upper berth and he was in the lower."

"In other words--"

"We literally had to undress on top of each other," she completed the sentence. "We saw each other in our underclothes, though it was dark because I turned out all the lights except the night-light."

"Underclothing is a general, abstract term," Don Rigoberto fumed. "Give me precise details."

Doña Lucrecia did. When it was time to undress--the anachronistic Orient Express was crossing an Austrian forest, passing an occasional village--Modesto asked if she wanted him to leave. "There's no need. In this darkness we're no more than shadows," Doña Lucrecia replied. The engineer sat on the lower berth, taking up as little room as possible in order to give her more space. She undressed, not forcing her movements nor stylizing them, turning round where she stood as she removed each article of clothing: dress, slip, bra, stockings, panties. The illumination from the night-light, a little mushroom-shaped lamp with lanceolate drawings, caressed her neck, shoulders, breasts, belly, buttocks, thighs, knees, feet. Raising her arms, she slipped a Chinese silk pajama top, decorated with dragons, over her head.

"I'm going to sit with my legs uncovered while I brush my hair," she said, and did so. "If you feel the urge to kiss them, you may. As far as my knees."

Was it the torment of Tantalus? Or the garden of earthly delights? Don Rigoberto had moved to the foot of the bed, and, anticipating his wish, Doña Lucrecia sat on the edge so that, like Pluto on the Orient Express, her husband could kiss her insteps, breathe in the fragrance of the creams and colognes that refreshed her ankles, nibble at her toes and lick the hollows that separated them.

"I love you and admire you," said Don Rigoberto.

"I love you and I admire you," said Pluto.

"And now, to sleep," ordered Doña Lucrecia.

They reached Venice on an impressionist morning, the sun strong and the sky a deep blue, and as the launch carried them to the Cipriani through curling waves, Modesto, Michelin in hand, provided Lucrecia with brief descriptions of the palaces and churches along the Grand Canal.

"I'm feeling jealous, my dear," Don Rigoberto interrupted her.

"If you're serious, we'll erase it, sweetheart," Doña Lucrecia proposed.

"Absolutely not," and he recanted. "Brave men die with their boots on, like John Wayne."

From the balcony of the Cipriani, over the trees in the garden, one could see the towers of San Marco and the palaces along the canal. They went out in the gondola-with-guide that was waiting for them. It was a whirl of canals and bridges, of greenish waters and flocks of gulls that took flight as they passed, of dim churches where they had to strain their eyes to make out the attributes of the gods and saints hanging there. They saw Titians and Veroneses, Bellinis and Del Piombos, the horses of San Marco and the mosaics in the cathedral, and they fed a few grains of corn to the fat pigeons on the Piazza. At midday they took the obligatory photograph at a table at Florian's while they ate the requisite pizzetta. In the afternoon they continued their tour, hearing names, dates and anecdotes they barely listened to, lulled by the soothing voice of the guide from the agency. At 7:30, after they had bathed and changed, they drank their Bellinis in the salon with Moorish arches and Arabian pillows at the Danieli, and at precisely the right hour--at nine o'clock--they were seated in Harry's Bar. There they saw the divine Catherine Deneuve come in and sit at the next table (it seemed part of the program). Pluto said what he had to say: "I think you're more beautiful, Lucre."

"And?" Don Rigoberto pressed her.

Before taking the vaporetto back to Giudecca, they went for a walk, with Doña Lucrecia holding Modesto's arm, through narrow, half-deserted streets. They reached the hotel after midnight. Doña Lucrecia was yawning.

"And?" Don Rigoberto was impatient.

"I'm so exhausted after our walk and all the nice things I've seen, I won't be able to close my eyes," lamented Doña Lucrecia. "Fortunately, I have a remedy that never fails."

"What's that?" asked Modesto.

"What sort of remedy?" echoed Don Rigoberto.

"A Jacuzzi, alternating cool and warm water," explained Doña Lucrecia, walking toward her bedroom. Before she disappeared inside, she pointed toward the huge, luminous bathroom with its white tiled walls. "Would you fill the Jacuzzi for me while I put on my robe?"

Don Rigoberto moved in his place, as restless as an insomniac.

She went to her room and slowly undressed, folding each article of clothing, one piece at a time, as if she had all of eternity at her disposal. Wearing a terrycloth robe and a towel as a turban, she came back. The round tub bubbled noisily with the pulsations of the Jacuzzi.

"I put in bath salts," Modesto said, then asked timidly: "Was that right?"

"That's perfect," she said, testing the water with the toes of one foot.

She let the robe fall to her feet and, keeping on the towel that served as a turban, she stepped in and lay down in the Jacuzzi. She rested her head on a pillow that the engineer hurriedly handed her. She sighed in gratitude.

"Shall I do anything else?" Don Rigoberto heard Modesto asking in a strangled voice. "Shall I go? Shall I stay?"

"How delicious--this cool water massage is so delicious." Doña Lucrecia stretched her legs and arms with pleasure. "Then I'll add warmer water. And then to bed, as good as new."

"You're roasting him over a slow fire," Don Rigoberto said approvingly.

"Stay if you like, Pluto," she said at last, wearing the intense expression of one who derives infinite pleasure from the caress of water going back and forth across her body. "The tub is enormous, there's plenty of room. Why don't you bathe with me?"

Don Rigoberto's ears registered the strange hoot of an owl? howl of a wolf? trill of a bird? that greeted his wife's invitation. Seconds later, he saw the naked engineer sinking into the tub. His 50-year-old body, saved in the nick of time from obesity by his practice of aerobics and jogging that brought him to the threshold of a heart attack, lay only millimeters from his wife's.

"What else can I do?" Don Rigoberto heard Modesto ask, and he felt his admiration for him growing at the same rate as his jealousy. "I don't want to do anything you don't want. I will not take any initiative. At this moment I am the happiest and most unfortunate creature on earth, Lucre."

"You may touch me," she murmured in the cadence of a bolero, not opening her eyes. "Caress me and kiss me, my body and my face. Not my hair, because if it gets wet, tomorrow you'll be ashamed of my hair, Pluto. Don't you see that in your program you didn't leave a free moment for the hairdresser?"

"I too am the happiest man in the world," murmured Don Rigoberto. "And the most unfortunate."

Doña Lucrecia opened her eyes.

"Don't be like that, so timid. We can't stay in the water long."

Don Rigoberto squinted to see them better. He heard the monotonous bubbling of the Jacuzzi and felt the tickle, the rush of water, the shower of drops spattering the tiles, and he saw Pluto, taking precaution to the extreme in order not to seem crude, as he eagerly applied himself to the soft body that let him do, touch, caress, that moved to facilitate access for his hands and lips to every area but did not respond to his caresses or kisses and remained in a state of passive delight. He could feel the fever burning the engineer's skin.

"Aren't you going to kiss him, Lucrecia? Aren't you going to embrace him, not even once?"

"Not yet," replied his wife. "I too had my program. I had planned it very carefully. Don't you think he was happy?"

"I've never been so happy," said Modesto, his head, between Lucrecia's legs, rising from the bottom of the tub before submerging again. "I'd like to sing at the top of my lungs, Lucre."

"He's saying exactly what I feel," Don Rigoberto interjected, then permitted himself a joke. "Wasn't he risking pneumonia with all of that hydroerotic exertion?"

He laughed and immediately regretted it, remembering that humor and pleasure repel each other like water and oil. "Please excuse the interruption," he apologized. It was late. Doña Lucrecia had begun to yawn in such a way that the diligent engineer, summoning all his fortitude, stopped what he was doing. On his knees, dripping water, his hair streaming down in bangs, he feigned resignation.

"You're tired, Lucre."

"I'm feeling all the weariness of the day. I can't stay awake anymore."

She leaped lightly from the tub and wrapped herself in the robe. From the door of her room she said goodnight with words that made her husband's heart skip a beat:

"Tomorrow is another day, Pluto."

"The last one, Lucre."

"And the last night, as well," she said with precision, blowing him a kiss.

•

They began Saturday morning half an hour late, but they made up for it on their visit to Murano, where, in hellish heat, artisans in T-shirts with prison stripes were blowing glass in the traditional manner, turning out decorative and household objects. The engineer insisted that Lucrecia, who did not want to make further purchases, accept three little transparent animals: a squirrel, a stork and a hippopotamus. On the way back to Venice the guide enlightened them about two villas by Palladio.

Instead of lunch, they had tea and cakes at the Quadri, enjoying a blood-red twilight that set roofs, bridges, water and bell towers on fire, and they reached San Giorgio for the concert of baroque music with enough time to stroll around the little island and view the lagoon and the city from different perspectives.

"The last day is always sad," Doña Lucrecia remarked. "Tomorrow this will end forever."

"Were you holding hands?" Don Rigoberto wanted to know.

"We were, and during the entire concert as well," his wife confessed.

"Did the engineer weep great tears?"

"He was extremely pale. He squeezed my hand and his sweet eyes glistened."

In gratitude and hope, thought Don Rigoberto. The "sweet eyes" reverberated along his nerve endings. He decided that from this moment on he would be silent. While Doña Lucrecia and Pluto ate supper at Danieli's, contemplating the lights of Venice, he respected their melancholy, did not interrupt their conventional conversation and suffered stoically when he realized, in the course of the meal, that Modesto was not alone in his lavish attentions. Lucrecia presented him with toast that she had buttered, with her own fork she offered him mouthfuls of her rigatoni, and she willingly offered her hand when he raised it to his mouth to rest his lips on it, once on the palm, once on the back, once on the fingers and each one of her nails. With a fearful heart and an incipient erection, he waited for what was bound to happen.

And in fact, as soon as they entered the suite at the Cipriani, Doña Lucrecia grasped Modesto's arm, put it around her waist, brought her lips up to his and, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, she murmured:

"To say goodbye, we'll spend the night together. With you I will be as compliant, as tender, as loving as I've been only with my husband."

"You said that?" Don Rigoberto swallowed strychnine and honey.

"Did I do wrong?" his wife asked in alarm. "Should I have lied to him?"

"You did the right thing," Don Rigoberto howled. "My love."

In an ambiguous state in which arousal clashed with jealousy and each fed on the other retrospectively, he watched them undress, admired the self-confidence displayed by his wife, enjoyed the clumsiness of that fortunate mortal overwhelmed by a joy that compensated, on this last night, for his timidity and obedience. She would be his and he would love her: His hands fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, caught the zipper on his trousers, stumbled when he took off his shoes, and when, wild-eyed, he was about to climb into the bed where that magnificent body lay waiting for him in the dark, in a languid pose--Goya's Naked Maja, Don Rigoberto thought, though her thighs were wider apart--he banged his ankle on the edge of the bed and squealed "Owwowoww!" Don Rigoberto enjoyed listening to the hilarity that the mishap provoked in Lucrecia. Modesto laughed too as he kneeled in the bed: "Emotion, Lucre, pure emotion."

The burning coals of his pleasure cooled when, stifling her laughter, he saw his wife abandon the statuelike indifference with which she had received the caresses of the engineer on the previous day and begin to take the initiative. She embraced him, she obliged him to lie beside her, on top of her, beneath her, she entwined her legs in his, she searched for his mouth, she thrust her tongue deep inside, and--"Uh-oh," Don Rigoberto protested--she crouched down with amorous intent, fished with gentle fingers for his startled member and, after stroking the shaft and head, brought it to her lips and kissed it before taking it into her mouth. Then, at the top of his voice, bouncing in the soft bed, the engineer began to sing--to bellow and howl--Torna a Sorrento.

"He began to sing Torna a Sorrento?" Don Rigoberto sat up violently. "At that very moment?"

"At exactly that moment." Doña Lucrecia burst into laughter again, then controlled herself and apologized. "You astonish me, Pluto. Are you singing because you like it or because you don't like it?"

"I'm singing so I will like it," he explained, tremulous and bright red, between false notes and arpeggios.

"Do you want me to stop?"

"I want you to continue, Lucre," a euphoric Modesto implored. "Laugh, I don't care. I sing to make my happiness complete. Cover your ears if it distracts you or makes you laugh. But by all you hold most dear, don't stop."

"And he went on singing?" Don Rigoberto exclaimed, intoxicated, mad with satisfaction.

"Without stopping for a second," Doña Lucrecia affirmed between giggles. "While I was kissing him, when I was on top, when he was on top, while we made love both orthodox and heterodox. He sang, he had to sing. Because if he didn't sing, fiasco."

"And always Torna a Sorrento?" Don Rigoberto delighted in the sweet pleasure of revenge.

"Any song of my youth," the engineer sang, leaping with all the power of his lungs from Italy to Mexico. "Voy a cantarles un corrido muy mentadooo...."

"A potpourri of cheap music from the Fifties." Doña Lucrecia was very specific. "O sole mio, Caminito, Juan Charrasqueado, Allá en el rancho grande, and even Augustín Lara's Madrid. Oh, it was so funny!"

"And without all that musical vulgarity, fiasco?" Don Rigoberto asked for confirmation, a visitor to seventh heaven. "It's the best part of the night, my love."

"You haven't heard the best part yet, the best part came at the end. It was the height of absurdity." Doña Lucrecia wiped away her tears. "The other guests began to bang on the walls, the front desk called saying we should turn down the TV, the phonograph. Nobody in the hotel could sleep."

"In other words, neither of you ever finished--" Don Rigoberto suggested with faint hope.

"I did, twice," said Doña Lucrecia, bringing him back to reality. "And he, at least once, I'm sure of that. When he was all set for the second one, that's when the complaints started and he lost his inspiration. Everything ended in laughter. What a night. Worthy of Ripley's."

"Now you know my secret," said Modesto, once their neighbors and the front desk had been placated, and their laughter had subsided, and their impulses had quieted, and they were wrapped in the white Cipriani bathrobes and had begun to talk. "Do you mind if we don't speak of it? As you can imagine, it embarrasses me.... Well, let me tell you one more time that I'll never forget our week together, Lucre."

"Neither will I, Pluto. I'll always remember it. And not only for the concert, I swear."

They slept the sleep of the just, knowing they had fulfilled their obligations, and they were on the dock in good time to catch the vaporetto to the airport. Alitalia was meticulous as well, and the plane left with no delays, allowing them to connect with the Concorde from Paris to New York, where they said goodbye, knowing they would never see each other again.

"Tell me that it was a horrible week, that you hated it," Don Rigoberto suddenly moaned, grasping his wife around her waist and pulling her down onto him. "Didn't you, Lucrecia, didn't you?"

"Why don't you try singing something at the top of your lungs," she suggested in the velvety voice of their finest nocturnal encounters. "Something really vulgar, darling. La flor de la canela, Fumando espero, Brasil, terra de meu coracâo. Let's see what happens, Rigoberto."

"I beg you to go," he insisted, his lips on his wife's fingers. "Unless the idea displeases you."

"I'll tell you everything," Doña Lucrecia murmured. "Isn't that why you sent me?"