Generation rated X: Vargas Llosa's novel of mismarriage
Taylorleon
York: Pelican Español. ISBN 0 14 02.7472 3.
Fonchito, the blue-eyed, golden-curled gremlin bent on out-seducing his
father, escapes from the school academy for a day to pay his disrespects to his
voluptuous stepmother, doña Lucrezia. Though nicknamed Lucre, she is more
likely to cost men money than to enrich them: Mildly nymphomaniacal, she has
never met an extramarital proposition that she didn't like -- even from a
pubescent schoolboy. Fonchito ostensibly has come to apologize for wheedling
his madrasta into a series of sexual compromises, beginning with her erotic
poses for his birthday gift; in reality, he has come to finish the conquest.
On his knees, he takes her hands and adorns them with kisses -- begging for
forgiveness and hoping to leave her hot and bothered enough to do the seducing
for him. The doña's maid sees through his tricks; but, for Lucrezia, love is
blind. Era un niño, un niño, she tells herself. Travieso, malicioso,
agrandado, irresponsable, mil cosas más. Pero, malvado, no. (Approximately:
He is only a boy, a boy. Tricky, malicious, selfish, irresponsible -- a
thousand vices more. But, evil, no.) Pero, malvado, sí. Fonchito is Lucifer
in short pants. He is the son who has learned from the father how to devise
and conquer, and he will begin by dividing the doña from the don.
The Peruvian intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa came to fame in the Sixties with
La ciudad y los perros (The city and the dogs), an attack on the uniformity of
military academies. He has since held unswervingly that it is noble to think
for yourself even while the fine print calls for you to scrub the Herculean
stables with a toothbrush. Though he regards Camus as a sharper stylist than
philosopher, Vargas Llosa is closer to his theology than to that of Sartre:
Those with unfree wills may yet have free minds.
In The notebooks of don Rigoberto, Vargas Llosa writes of the
leisurely rich with free wills and unfree minds. Married to an
insurer-on-a-roll, Rigoberto, Lucrezia may do as she wishes: And so she does
not know what to do. She follows the path of least resistance, which heads
straight to the boudoir. Rigoberto, who cultivates his more advanced tastes by
collecting erotic art, sadly condones his wife's promiscuity, perhaps to
subconsciously punish his own departure from conservative norms, or perhaps to
satisfy an exotic taste in masochism. When an engineer invites Lucrezia on a
week-long trot around the world, Lucrezia sizzles; Rigoberto gulps and blesses.
When she returns with eager news of her seduction, he can only reply, "Hiciste
bien. Amor mio." But a change is in the air.
Rigoberto is a libertine and a slave to himself. Lima's answer to Hefner
reveres the sexual act as the evolutionary apex, regardless of the actors, as
long as they mutually consent. (Bestiality does pose a philosophical puzzle.
Must an adult duck consent?) For the insurance executive, sex is art, not
commitment. Or so Rigoberto propounds, as long as Lucrezia is committed to
him. The supreme artist on the sexual trapeze, she finally closes her eyes and
leaps into infidelity. He is urged on by his own tenets to praise her.
Baffled and hurt, both break away -- he into his locked study, amid the art of
the thousand and one positions; hence the notebooks.
Rigoberto's devotion to the intimate act eventually divests him
of all intimacy. Even the infidelity seems a mere aesthetic assault, as if he
must share a cherished watercolor with those gross of sense. Always, the art
comes first: He refers every connubial image to his neatly filed memories of
etchings. Life inundates art.
Lucrezia may be a tramp-in-waiting. 'Tis never clear whether her Arabian
tales of extracurricular pokery are facts or vengeful fictions -- or merely the
imaginings of the cloistered, fevered Rigoberto. In one rhapsody, he conceives
of her as a lawyer; but she is, at heart, an actress. He won her by indulging
her taste for fantasy; and he will lose her in the same confusion. No act of
retribution -- not even smearing her body with honey, admired by a roomful of
cats -- can purge his mind of the other, aeronautical, possibly fictional,
lover. Vargas Llosa is the Sardon of the leisure suits.
His plot may seem a bedroom farce; but his spirit is creative, contrarian.
Vargas Llosa combines so many influences from Latin American fiction that he
redefines the novel. Here, for instance, are the divergences of headline
reality into fantasy, like those mapped by García Márquez and Fuentes. Yet the
intent is not the same; as Vargas Llosa sees it, fantasy is a choice and not a
subjugation. He uses fantasy to express our desire for freedom, not to depict
the way that pervasive randomness may constrict our scope of action. Like
Puig, he believes that life imitates cinema; but only because the flicks
provide handy templates for fantasy. And, like Borges, he seeks to untwine the
countervailing consequences of a decision which create moral ambiguity. He
does so without commentary: Whether, for example, Fonchito is an angel or an
agent of the competition is left to the reader.
Los cuadernos is not a straight shot. It is not morally direct,
like the work of Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya. After their squabble, Rigoberto
and Lucrezia retreat into their fantasies, a richer life than they had known.
Their later reconciliation is, in more ways than one, an anticlimax. Happiness
is an active imagination.
That point nimbly justifies magical realism. Yet works of
prolonged fantasy characterize any civilization passing from prosperity to the
precipice: The dreams of the red chamber in China, The Upanishads in India, the
call of the Wilde in England. One can marvel at the art and yet remain alive to
its dark hints for a short future history. A culture slipping into fantasy
depicts a society sliding away. Perhaps that is the underlying theme of a
subtle social critic who lost a presidential election to an incipient dictator.
Regards,
Leon Taylor,
Huntington, West Virginia
Taylo...@aol.com
Good reading
Vargas Llosa. Entre Sartre y Camus. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones
Huracán, 1981. ISBN 0-940238-48-9.
Ted Samsel
: Mario Vargas Llosa. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto. 1997. 384 pages. New
: York: Pelican Español. ISBN 0 14 02.7472 3.
<stuff deleted>
You forgot to mention the many references to Egon Schiele, the
Viennese voluptuary.
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net (or tbsa...@richmond.infi.net)
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1914-1999)
Francis Muir
Ted Samsel:
> Taylorleon:
> : Mario Vargas Llosa. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto. 1997.
> : 384 pages. New York: Pelican Español. ISBN 0 14 02.7472 3.
> You forgot to mention the many references to Egon Schiele, the
> Viennese voluptuary.
I have never quite understood what a voluptuary was. We don't seem to
have any here on RAB.
Taylorleon
Viennese voluptuary.
>Francis Muir: I have never quite understood what a voluptuary was. We don't
seem to have any here on RAB.
--
My dictionary, from Ambrose somebody, says a voluptuary is an unnatural
actuary.
Vargas Llosa once reviewed "Les belles images" by Simone de Beauvoir. The
restless protagonist, Laurence, seeks out her father, a bureaucrat who has
secluded himself among books and records since his wife abandoned him for his
lack of ambition. The admired father is the happy hermit; he believes that
civilization has corrupted the human spirit à la Rousseau. Nevertheless, he
reconciles tepidly with Dominique. Laurence concludes that civilization
corrupts indeed if it persuades one to prefer a cold companionship to a
fulfilling solitude. Judging from the looks of don Rigoberto, the novel
impressed its reviewer.
Regards,
Leon Taylor,
Huntington, West Virginia
Good reading
Vargas Llosa, Mario. "Entre Sartre y Camus." (Between Sartre and Camus.) Río
Lewis Mammel
> My dictionary, from Ambrose somebody, says a voluptuary is an unnatural
> actuary.
I find no such entry in The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, FWIW.
Dawn, n. The time when men of reason go to bed.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Lewis Mammel
>
> Taylorleon wrote:
>
> > My dictionary, from Ambrose somebody, says a voluptuary is an unnatural
> > actuary.
>
> I find no such entry in The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, FWIW.
When I woke up this morning, the first thing that popped into my head
was "Voluptuary/actuary - Good Grief".
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Jean Clarke
though the tendancy is hidden, like fencing with one hand behind their
back awaiting the cry of touche'!