Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero

“I won’t do that,” said Ismael with a mocking gesture. “I know you’re as stubborn as a mule. And I also know you’ll be sorry, feeling useless and bored at home, getting on Lucrecia’s nerves all day. Soon you’ll show up on bended knee asking me to put you back in the manager’s office. I’ll do it, of course I will. But first I’ll make you suffer for a good long time, I’m warning you.”

He tried to remember how long he’d known Ismael. A lot of years. Ismael had been very good-looking as a young man. Elegant, distinguished, sociable. And, until he married Clotilde, a seducer. He made women, single and married, old and young, sigh for him. Now he’d lost most of his hair and had just a few white tufts on his bald head; he’d become wrinkled and fat and dragged his feet when he walked. His denture, fitted by a dentist in Miami, was unmistakable. The years, and especially the twins, had ruined him physically. They’d met the first day Rigoberto came to work at the insurance company in the legal department. Thirty long years! Damn, a lifetime ago. He recalled Ismael’s father, Don Alejandro Carrera, the founder of the company. Severe, tireless, a difficult but upright man whose mere presence imposed order and communicated certainty. Ismael respected him though he never loved him. Because Don Alejandro forced his only son, recently returned from England, where he’d studied economics at the University of London and completed a year’s training at Lloyd’s, to work in every division of the firm, which was just beginning to be prominent. Ismael was close to forty and felt humiliated by an apprenticeship that even had him sorting the mail, running the cafeteria, and tending to the machinery in the electrical plant and to the security and cleanliness of the company. Don Alejandro could be somewhat despotic, but Rigoberto recalled him with admiration: a captain of industry. He’d made this company out of nothing, starting out with almost no capital and loans that he repaid down to the last cent. And the truth was that Ismael had carried on his father’s work in excellent fashion. He too was tireless and knew how to exercise his gift for command when necessary. But with the twins at its head, the Carrera line would end up in the garbage. Neither one had inherited the entrepreneurial virtues of their father and grandfather. When Ismael died, pity the insurance company! Fortunately, he would no longer be there as manager to witness the catastrophe. Why had his boss invited him to lunch if not to talk to him about his upcoming retirement?

La Rosa Náutica was filled with people, many of them tourists speaking English or French; Don Ismael had reserved a table next to the window. They drank a Campari and watched some surfers riding the waves in their rubber suits. It was a gray winter morning, with low leaden clouds that hid the cliffs and the flocks of screeching seagulls. A squadron of pelicans glided past, just grazing the ocean’s surface. The rhythmic sound of the waves and the undertow was pleasant. “Winter is melancholy in Lima, though a thousand times preferable to the summer,” Rigoberto thought. He ordered grilled corvina and a salad and told his boss he wouldn’t have even a drop of wine; he had work to do in the office and didn’t want to spend the afternoon yawning like a crocodile and feeling like a zombie. It seemed to him that a self-absorbed Ismael didn’t even hear him. What was troubling him?

“You and I are good friends, aren’t we?” his boss said suddenly, as if just waking up.

“I suppose we are, Ismael,” Rigoberto replied, “if friendship can really exist between an employer and his employee. The class struggle is real, you know.”

“We’ve had our battles at times,” Ismael continued very seriously. “But even so, I think we’ve gotten along pretty well these thirty years. Don’t you agree?”

“All this sentimental beating around the bush just to ask me not to retire?” Rigoberto teased. “Are you going to tell me that if I leave, the company will go under?”

Ismael wasn’t in the mood for jokes. He eyed the scallops à la parmigiana that had just been brought to him as if they might be poisoned. He moved his mouth, making his denture click. There was disquiet in his half-closed eyes. His prostate? Cancer? What was wrong with him?

“I want to ask you for a favor,” he murmured, very quietly, not looking at him. When he raised his eyes, Rigoberto saw them filled with perplexity. “Not a favor, no. A huge favor, Rigoberto.”

“If I can, of course,” he agreed, intrigued. “What’s wrong, Ismael? You look so strange.”

“I want you to be my witness,” said Ismael, lowering his eyes again to the scallops. “I’m getting married.”

The fork with a mouthful of corvina stayed in the air for a moment and then, instead of carrying it to his mouth, Rigoberto returned it to his plate. “How old is he?” he thought. “No younger than seventy-five or seventy-eight — maybe even eighty.” He didn’t know what to say. He was dumbstruck with surprise.

“I need two witnesses,” Ismael added, looking at him now, more calmly. “I’ve gone over all my friends and acquaintances. And I’ve reached the conclusion that the most loyal people, the ones I trust most, are Narciso and you. My driver has accepted. Do you?”

Still incapable of saying a word or making a joke, Rigoberto managed only to nod his agreement.

“Of course I do, Ismael,” he finally stammered. “But tell me that this is serious and not the first symptom of senile dementia.”

This time Ismael smiled, though without a shred of joy, opening his mouth and displaying the explosive white of his false teeth. There were well-preserved septuagenarians and octogenarians, Rigoberto told himself, but his boss was not one of them, of course. On his oblong skull, under the white tufts, there were plenty of dark spots, his forehead and neck were furrowed with wrinkles, and there was something defeated in his appearance. He dressed with his usual elegance: a blue suit, a shirt that looked recently ironed, a tie held with a gold clip, a handkerchief in the breast pocket.

“Have you lost your mind, Ismael?” Rigoberto exclaimed suddenly in a delayed reaction to the news. “Are you really getting married? At your age?”

“It’s a perfectly rational decision,” he heard him say firmly. “I’ve made it knowing very well that things will come down around my ears. No need to tell you that if you’re my witness at the wedding, you’ll have problems too. Well, what’s the point of talking about what you already know.”

“Do they know?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, please,” his boss said impatiently. “The twins will go through the roof, move heaven and earth to annul the marriage, have me declared incompetent, put me in a mental hospital, a thousand other things. Even have me killed by a hired assassin, if they can. Certainly you and Narciso will also be targeted. You know all this and even so you’ve said yes. I wasn’t wrong. You’re the sincere, generous, noble fellow I always thought you were. Thanks, old man.”

He extended his hand, grasped Rigoberto by the arm, and kept his hand there for a moment with an affectionate pressure.

“At least tell me who the lucky bride is,” asked Rigoberto, trying to swallow a mouthful of corvina. He’d lost his appetite.

This time Ismael really smiled and looked at him mockingly. A malicious light glinted in his eyes as he said, “Have a drink first, Rigoberto. If my telling you I was getting married made you turn pale, when I tell you who she is you might have a heart attack.”

“Is the gold digger so ugly?” he murmured. With a prologue like this, his curiosity was boundless.

“It’s Armida,” said Ismael, spelling out the name. He waited for Rigoberto’s reaction, like an entomologist with an insect.