Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero

They’d attended the best school in Lima, had private tutors for the courses in which they were weak, gone to summer school in the United States and England. They learned English but spoke an illiterate Spanish full of the awful slang and dropped endings of Lima’s young people, hadn’t read a book or even a newspaper in their entire lives, probably didn’t know the capital of half the countries in Latin America, and neither one had been able to pass even the first year at the university. They’d made their debut as villains while still adolescents, raping a girl they picked up at a run-of-the-mill party in Pucusana. Floralisa Roca, that was her name, a name right out of a novel of chivalry. Slim, rather pretty, with terrified, tear-filled eyes, her thin body trembling with fear. Rigoberto remembered her clearly. She was on his conscience, and he still felt remorse for the ugly role he’d had to play in the matter. The whole imbroglio came back to him: lawyers, doctors, police reports, desperate measures to keep the names of the twins out of the articles about the incident in La Prensa and El Comercio . He’d had to speak to the girl’s parents, an Ican couple already along in years, and it cost close to $50,000, a fortune at the time, to placate and silence them. He remembered very clearly the conversation he had one day with Ismael. His boss pressed his hands to his head, held back his tears while his voice broke: “How have we failed, Rigoberto? What did Clotilde and I do to have God punish us like this? How can we have these thugs for sons! They’re not even sorry for the outrage they committed. Can you imagine? They blame the poor girl. They not only raped her, they hit and abused her.” “Thugs,” that was the word exactly. Perhaps Clotilde and Ismael had spoiled them too much, perhaps they hadn’t been strict enough. They shouldn’t have always excused their escapades, not so quickly, at any rate. The twins’ escapades! Car crashes caused by driving drunk and drugged, debts incurred using their father’s name, forged receipts at the office when Ismael had the bad idea of placing them in the company to toughen them up. They’d been a nightmare for Rigoberto. He had to go in person to inform his boss about the brothers’ exploits. They even emptied the petty cash box in his office. That was the last straw, fortunately. Ismael let them go, preferring to give them an allowance to finance their idleness. Their record was endless. For example, they enrolled at Boston University and their parents were ecstatic. Months later, Ismael discovered they’d never set foot in BU, had pocketed their tuition and allowance, and forged their grades and attendance reports. One of them — Miki or Escobita? — ran over a pedestrian in Miami and was a fugitive because he fled to Lima while out on bail. If he ever returned to the United States, he’d go to prison.

After Clotilde’s death, Ismael gave up. Let them do whatever they wanted. He’d advanced them part of their inheritance so they could increase it if they chose or squander it, which naturally is what they did, traveling through Europe and living the high life. By now they were grown men, close to forty. His boss wanted no more headaches with his incorrigible sons. And now this! Of course they would try to annul the marriage, if it actually happened. They’d never allow an inheritance they’d waited for, with the voraciousness of cannibals, to be snatched away from them. He imagined their paroxysms of rage. Their father married to Armida! A servant! A chola ! He laughed to himself: Yes, what faces they’d make. The scandal would be tremendous. He could already hear, see, smell the river of slander, conjecture, jokes, falsehoods that would spread like wildfire along the telephone lines in Lima. He could hardly wait to tell Lucrecia the news.

“Do you get along with Fonchito?” His boss’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. “How old is your son now? He must be fourteen or fifteen, isn’t he?”

Rigoberto shuddered as he imagined Fonchito turning into someone like Ismael’s sons. Happily, his son didn’t go in for carousing.

“I get along pretty well with him,” he replied. “And Lucrecia even better than I do. Fonchito loves her just as if she were his mother.”

“You’ve been lucky: A child’s relationship with a stepmother isn’t always easy.”

“He’s a good boy,” Don Rigoberto acknowledged. “Studious, well-behaved. But very solitary. He’s in that difficult period of adolescence. He withdraws too much. I’d like to see him with more friends, going out, falling in love with girls, going to parties.”

“That’s what the hyenas did at his age,” Don Ismael lamented. “Go to parties, have a good time. He’s better off the way he is, old man. It was bad company that ruined my sons.”

Rigoberto was about to tell Ismael the nonsense about Fonchito and the appearances of one Edilberto Torres, whom he and Doña Lucrecia called the devil, but he restrained himself. To what end — who knew how he would take it. At first he and Lucrecia had been amused by the supposed appearances of that asshole and had celebrated the boy’s luminous imagination, convinced it was another of the tricks he liked to spring on them from time to time. But now they were concerned and considered taking him to a psychologist. Really, he had to reread that chapter on the devil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus .

“I still can’t believe all of this, Ismael,” he exclaimed again, blowing on his demitasse. “Are you really sure you want to do it — get married?”

“As sure as I am that the world is round,” his boss declared. “It’s not only to teach those two a lesson. I’m very fond of Armida. I don’t know what would have happened to me without her. Since Clotilde’s death, her help has been invaluable.”

“If memory serves, Armida’s very young,” murmured Rigoberto. “How many years older are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Thirty-eight, that’s all,” Ismael said with a laugh. “Yes, she’s young, and I hope she reinvigorates me, like the young girl did with Solomon in the Bible. The Shulamite, wasn’t it?”

“All right, all right, it’s your business, your life,” Rigoberto said, resigned. “I’m not good at giving advice. Marry Armida and let the world end, what difference does it make, old man.”

“If you’re interested, we’re very compatible in bed,” Ismael boasted, laughing, while he gestured to the waiter to bring the check. “To be even more precise, I rarely use Viagra because I hardly need it. And don’t ask me where we’ll spend our honeymoon because I won’t tell you.”

Felícito Yanaqué received the second letter signed with a spider a few days after the first, on a Friday afternoon, the day he always visited Mabel. Eight years ago, when he set her up in the small house in Castilla, not far from the Puente Viejo, a bridge that had since fallen victim to El Niño’s devastation, he’d see her two, even three times a week; but over the years the fire of passion had subsided, and for some time now he saw her only on Fridays after he left the office. He’d spend a few hours with her, and they almost always ate together, in a nearby Chinese restaurant or in a Peruvian restaurant in the center of the city. Sometimes Mabel cooked him a dried-beef stew, her specialty, which Felícito dispatched happily with a nice cold beer from Cusco.

Mabel took good care of herself. In these eight years she hadn’t gotten fat: She still had her gymnast’s figure, her narrow waist, pert breasts, and round, high ass that she still shook joyfully when she walked. She was dark, with straight hair, a full mouth, very white teeth, a radiant smile, and laughter that infected everyone around her with joy. Felícito thought she was as pretty and attractive as she’d been the first time he saw her.