Mario Vargas Llosa - The Discreet Hero

That was in the old stadium in the Buenos Aires district during a historic match: Atlético Grau, which hadn’t been in the first division for thirty years, took on and defeated none other than Alianza Lima. For him it was love at first sight. “You’re in a daze, compadre,” joked Colorado Vignolo, his friend, colleague, and competitor — he owned La Perla del Chira Transport — with whom he would go to soccer games when the teams from Lima and other departments came to Piura to play. “You’re staring at that little brunette so hard you’re missing all the goals.” “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Felícito murmured, clicking his tongue. “She’s absolutely fantastic!” She was a few meters away, accompanied by a young man who put his arm across her shoulders and from time to time caressed her hair. After a while, Colorado Vignolo whispered in his ear, “I know her. Her name’s Mabel. You’re primed and loaded, compadre. That one fucks.” Felícito gave a start: “Are you telling me, compadre, that this delicious girl is a whore?”

“Not exactly,” Colorado corrected himself, nudging him with his elbow. “I said she fucks, not that she whores around. Fucking and whoring are two different things, my friend. Mabel is a call girl, or something like that. Only with certain privileged men, and only in her own house. Charging an arm and a leg, I imagine. Do you want me to get you her phone number?”

He did, and, half dead with embarrassment — for, unlike Colorado Vignolo, who had been living high and whoring since he was a kid, Felícito had always led a very austere life, dedicated to his work and his family — he called her, and after beating around the bush, arranged a meeting with the pretty woman from the stadium. She met him for the first time at the Balalaika, a café on Avenida Grau near the benches where the old gossips, founders of CILOP (Center for the Investigation of the Lives of Other People), would gather to enjoy the cool breeze at nightfall. They had lunch and talked for a long time. He felt intimidated by so pretty and young a girl, wondering from time to time what he would do if Gertrudis or Tiburcio and Miguelito suddenly appeared in the café. How would he introduce Mabel to them? She played with him like a cat with a mouse: “You’re pretty old and worn out to fool around with a woman like me. Besides, you’re really a runt, with you I’d always have to wear flats.” She flirted with him all she wanted, bringing her smiling face close to his, her eyes flashing, grasping his hand or arm, a contact that made Felícito shiver from head to toe. He had to go out with Mabel for close to three months — taking her to the movies, inviting her to lunch or dinner, taking a ride to the beach at Yacila and the chicha bars in Catacaos, giving her a good many presents, from lockets and bracelets to shoes and dresses that she picked out herself — before she would allow him to visit her in her little house north of the city, near the old San Teodoro cemetery, on a corner in the labyrinth of alleyways, stray dogs, and sand that was the last remnant of La Mangachería. The day he went to bed with her, Felícito Yanaqué cried for the second time in his life (the first had been the day his father died).

“Why are you crying, old man? Didn’t you like it?”

“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” Felícito confessed, kneeling and kissing her hands. “Until now I didn’t know what it meant to feel pleasure, I swear. You’ve taught me happiness, Mabelita.”

A short while afterward, without further ado, he offered to set her up in what Piurans called a casa chica , a permanent love nest, and give her a monthly allowance so she could live without worries or concerns about money, in an area better than this one filled with streetwalkers and Mangache pimps and bums. Surprised, all she could find to say was: “Swear you’ll never ask me about my past or make a single jealous scene for the rest of your life.” “I swear it, Mabel.” She found the little house in Castilla, near the Salesian fathers’ Don Juan Bosco Academy, and furnished it as she pleased. Felícito signed the lease and paid all the bills without once arguing about the price. He paid her monthly allowance punctually, in cash, on the last day of the month, just as he did with the clerks and workers at Narihualá Transport. He always consulted her about the days he’d come to see her. In eight years he’d never shown up unexpectedly at the little house in Castilla. He didn’t want the bad experience of finding a pair of trousers in his lover’s bedroom. He also didn’t check on what she did on the days of the week they didn’t see each other. True, he sensed that she stepped out on him and silently thanked her for doing it discreetly, without humiliating him. How could he have objected? Mabel was young and high-spirited; she had a right to have a good time. She’d already done a great deal by agreeing to be the mistress of an old man as short and ugly as he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, not at all. When he occasionally saw Mabel in the distance, coming out of a shop or a movie theater with a man, his stomach twisted with jealousy. Sometimes he had nightmares in which Mabel announced, very seriously, “I’m getting married, this will be the last time we see each other, old man.” If he could, Felícito would have married her. But he couldn’t. Not only because he already was married but because he didn’t want to abandon Gertrudis the way his mother, that cruel woman he’d never known, had abandoned him and his father, in Yapatera, when Felícito was still on the breast. Mabel was the only woman he’d ever really loved. He’d never loved Gertrudis; he married her out of obligation, due to that youthful mistake and, maybe, maybe, because she and the Boss Lady set a good trap for him. (He tried not to think about this because it embittered him, but it was always running through his mind like a broken record.) Even so, he’d been a good husband. He gave his wife and children more than could have been expected from the poor man he’d been when he married. That was why he’d spent his life working like a slave, never taking a vacation. That had been his whole life until he met Mabel: working, working, working, breaking his back day and night to make something of his small capital until he could open the transport company he’d dreamed of. The girl had revealed to him that sleeping with a woman could be something beautiful, intense, moving, something he never imagined the few times he’d gone to bed with the whores in the brothels on the road to Sullana or with a woman he’d meet — once in a blue moon, as it turned out — at a party, but that never lasted more than a night. Making love with Gertrudis had always been something convenient, a physical necessity, a way to calm anxiety. They stopped sleeping together after Tiburcio was born, more than twenty years ago. When he heard Colorado Vignolo tell stories about all the women he’d bedded, Felícito was stupefied. Compared to his compadre, he’d lived like a monk.

Mabel greeted him in her robe, affectionate and chatty as usual. She’d just watched an episode of the Friday soap opera and talked about it as she led him by the hand to the bedroom. The blinds were already closed and the fan turned on. She’d put the red cloth over the lamp because Felícito liked looking at her naked body in the reddish light. She helped him undress and fall back on the bed. But unlike other times — all the other times — this time Felícito Yanaqué’s sex did not give the slightest indication of getting hard. It lay there, small and chagrined, encased in its folds, indifferent to the affectionate caresses lavished on it by Mabel’s warm fingers.

“So what’s wrong with him today, old man?” she asked in surprise, giving her lover’s flaccid sex a squeeze.