Free The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

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