The Discreet Hero

XII

“Did you find poor Narciso?” asked Señora Lucrecia. “What happened to him?”

Don Rigoberto nodded and collapsed, exhausted, in a chair in the living room of his house.

“A real odyssey,” he said, sighing. “Ismael did us no favor by involving us in his troubles in bed and with his children, my love.”

The relatives of Narciso, Ismael Carrera’s driver, had made an appointment to meet Rigoberto at the first gas station at the entrance to Chincha, and he drove on the highway for two hours to get there, but when he arrived no one was waiting for him. He spent a long time in the sun watching trucks and buses go by and swallowing the dust that a hot wind from the sierra blew into his face, and when he’d had enough and was tired and ready to go back to Lima, a little black boy appeared and said he was Narciso’s nephew. Very dark-skinned and barefoot, he had large, effusive, conspiratorial eyes. He spoke in such a roundabout way that Don Rigoberto barely understood what he was trying to tell him. Finally, it became clear that there had been a change of plan: his uncle Narciso was waiting for Rigoberto in Grocio Prado, in the doorway of the same house where the Blessed Melchorita (the boy crossed himself when he said her name) had lived, performed miracles, and died. Another half hour of driving on a dusty road filled with potholes, which ran between vineyards and small farms that grew fruit for export. In the doorway of the house-museum-sanctuary of the Blessed One, on the Plaza de Grocio Prado, Ismael’s driver finally appeared.

“Half in disguise, wearing a kind of poncho and a penitent’s hood so that nobody would recognize him and, of course, dying of fear,” Don Rigoberto recalled with a smile. “That black man was white with panic, Lucrecia. And really, it’s no wonder. The hyenas hound him day and night, it’s worse than I’d imagined.”

First they’d sent a lawyer, that is, a fast-talking shyster, to try to bribe him. If he appeared before the judge and said he’d been coerced into being a witness at his employer’s wedding and, in his opinion, Señor Ismael Carrera hadn’t been in his right mind on the day he married, they’d give him a gratuity of twenty thousand soles. When he replied that he’d think about it but in principle preferred not to have dealings with the judiciary or anyone in the government, the police showed up at his family’s house in Chincha with a summons. The twins had filed a complaint against him for complicity in several crimes, among them conspiracy and the abduction of his boss!

“All he could do was hide again,” Rigoberto continued. “Fortunately, Narciso has friends and relatives all over Chincha. And it’s lucky for Ismael that he’s the most upright and loyal fellow in the world. In spite of how frightened he is, I doubt those two thugs are going to break him. I paid him his salary and gave him a little extra, just in case, for anything unforeseen. This business gets more complicated every day, my love.”

Don Rigoberto stretched and yawned in the easy chair in the living room, and while Doña Lucrecia prepared lemonade, he stared at the ocean of Barranco for a long time. It was a windless afternoon and several hang gliders were in the air. One passed by so close he could clearly see his head encased in a helmet. Damn mess, happening now when he was supposed to begin a retirement he thought would be dedicated to rest, art, and travel — that is, to pure pleasure. Things never worked out as planned: It was a rule with no exceptions. “I never imagined my friendship with Ismael would turn out to be so onerous,” he thought. “Much less that I’d have to sacrifice my small piece of civilization for it.” If the sun had been out, this would have been Lima’s magical time. A few minutes of absolute beauty. The fiery ball would sink into the sea on the horizon behind the islands of San Lorenzo and El Frontón, burning up the sky, turning the clouds pink, and for a few minutes putting on a show, both serene and apocalyptic, that signaled the onset of night.

“What did you say to him?” Doña Lucrecia asked, sitting beside him. “Poor Narciso, what he’s gotten himself into for being so decent to his employer.”

“I tried to reassure him,” recounted Don Rigoberto, tasting the lemonade with pleasure. “I told him not to be frightened, that nothing would happen to him or me because we’d been witnesses, that there was absolutely no crime in what we did. And that Ismael would win this battle with the hyenas. That Escobita and Miki’s campaign, the fuss they were making, didn’t have the slightest basis in law. That if he wanted more reassurance, he should consult a lawyer in Chincha whom he trusted and send me the bill. In short, I did everything I could. He’s a very honorable man and I repeat: Those thugs won’t be able to control him. But they certainly are giving him a very hard time.”

“And us too, aren’t they?” Doña Lucrecia complained. “I tell you, ever since this joke began, I’m even afraid to go out. Everybody asks me about the couple, as if it were the only thing Limeños cared about. Everybody I see looks like a reporter. You can’t imagine how much I hate them when I hear and read all the foolishness and lies they write.”

“She’s frightened too,” thought Don Rigoberto. His wife smiled at him, but he could detect a fleeting glimmer in her eyes and saw the uneasy way she was constantly wringing her hands. Poor Lucrecia. Not only had the European trip she’d so looked forward to been canceled but, on top of everything else, there was this scandal. And old man Ismael was still on his honeymoon in Europe, staying out of touch, while in Lima his boys were making life impossible for Narciso, for him, and for Lucrecia; they had even thrown the insurance company into an uproar.

“What is it, Rigoberto?” Lucrecia asked with some surprise. “The man who laughs alone is thinking of his evil deeds.”

“I’m laughing at Ismael,” Rigoberto explained. “He’s been on his honeymoon for a month. And he’s over eighty! I’ve confirmed it, he’s an octogenarian, not a septuagenarian. Chapeau! Do you see, Lucrecia? All that Viagra will eat up his brains, and the hyenas’ accusation that he’s soft in the head will turn out to be true. Armida must be a wild animal. She’ll drain him dry!”

“Don’t be vulgar, Rigoberto.” His wife laughed and pretended to admonish him.

“She knows how to make the best of a bad time,” Rigoberto thought tenderly. Over the past few days, while the twins’ campaign of intimidation had filled their house with judicial and police citations and bad news — the worst: they’d managed to tie up his retirement process with some legal dirty tricks — Lucrecia hadn’t shown the least sign of weakness. She’d supported him body and soul in his decision not to give in to the hyenas’ extortion and remain loyal to his employer and friend.

“The one thing that bothers me,” said Lucrecia, reading his mind, “is that Ismael hasn’t even called or dropped us a line. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Can he really not know about the headaches he’s giving us? Doesn’t he realize what poor Narciso is going through?”

“He knows everything,” Rigoberto assured her. “Arnillas is in touch with him and keeps him up to date. They speak every day, he told me.”

Dr. Claudio Arnillas, Ismael Carrera’s attorney for many years, was now Rigoberto’s intermediary with his former employer. According to him, Ismael and Armida were traveling through Europe and would return to Lima very soon. He assured him that the plans of Ismael Carrera’s sons to annul the marriage and have their father declared incompetent to head the insurance company on the grounds of incapacity and senile dementia were doomed to the most resounding failure. All Ismael had to do was appear and submit to the relevant medical and psychological tests, and their accusations would collapse.

“But then, I don’t understand why he doesn’t do that right now, Dr. Arnillas,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “For Ismael this scandal has to be even more painful than it is for us.”

“Do you know why?” explained Dr. Arnillas, adopting a Machiavellian expression and hooking his thumbs behind the psychedelic-colored suspenders holding up his trousers. “Because he wants the twins to keep spending what they don’t have: the money they must be borrowing all over the place to pay their army of shyster lawyers and the bribes they’re coughing up for the police and judges. It’s more than likely they’re being skinned alive, and he wants them completely ruined. Señor Carrera planned everything down to the smallest detail. Do you see?”

Don Rigoberto saw very clearly now that Ismael Carrera’s rancor toward the hyenas, from the day he discovered that in their eagerness to inherit everything they were waiting impatiently for his death, was unhealthy and irreversible. He never would have imagined the peaceable Ismael capable of a vengeful hatred of this magnitude, least of all toward his own children. Would Fonchito ever desire his death? And by the way, where was that boy?

“He went out with his friend Pezzuolo, I think to the movies,” Lucrecia said. “Haven’t you noticed that for the past few days he’s seemed better? As if he’d forgotten about Edilberto Torres.”

Yes, he hadn’t seen that mysterious character for more than a week. At least that’s what he’d told them, and Don Rigoberto had never caught his son in a lie.

“All of this wrecked the trip we’d planned so carefully,” Doña Lucrecia said with a sigh, suddenly becoming sad. “Spain, Italy, France. What a shame, Rigoberto. I’d been dreaming about it. And do you know why? It’s your fault, you kept telling me about it in that detailed, obsessive way. The places we’d visit, the museums, the concerts, the theaters, the restaurants. Well, what can you do except be patient.”

Rigoberto agreed. “We’ve only postponed it, my love,” he reassured her, kissing her hair. “Since we can’t go in the spring, we’ll go in the fall. A very nice time of year too, with the trees turning golden and the leaves carpeting the streets. For operas and concerts, it’s the best time of year.”

“Do you think this mess with the hyenas will be over by October?”

“They don’t have any money, and they’re spending the little they have trying to annul the marriage and have their father declared incompetent,” Rigoberto said. “They won’t succeed and they’ll be ruined. Do you know something? I never imagined that Ismael was capable of doing what he’s doing. First, marrying Armida. And second, planning so unforgiving a revenge against Miki and Escobita. It’s true that it’s impossible to know anyone else completely, people are unfathomable.”

They spent a long time talking as it grew dark and the lights in the city came on. They could no longer see the ocean, and the sky and the night were filled with lights that seemed like fireflies. Lucrecia told Rigoberto she’d read an essay Fonchito had written for school that had made an impression on her. She couldn’t get it out of her head.

“Did he show it to you himself?” Rigoberto asked pointedly. “Or were you snooping through his desk?”

“Well, it was right there, in plain sight, and it made me curious. That’s why I read it.”

“It’s not right for you to read his things without his permission and behind his back.” Rigoberto seemed to be reprimanding her.

“It left me thinking,” she continued, ignoring him. “It’s a half-philosophical, half-religious text. About liberty and evil.”

“Do you have it handy?” Rigoberto was interested. “I’d like to take a look at it too.”

“I made a copy for you, Mr. Nosy,” said Lucrecia. “I left it in your study.”

Don Rigoberto shut himself in with his books, records, and etchings to read Fonchito’s composition. “Liberty and Evil” was very short. It maintained that God, when He created man, probably had decided he wasn’t an automaton like plants and animals, whose lives were programmed from birth to death, but a creature endowed with free will, capable of deciding his actions on his own. This was how liberty was born. But this faculty with which man was endowed allowed human beings to choose evil, even, perhaps, to create it, doing things that contradicted all that emanated from God, and this represented the devil’s reason for being, the basis of his existence. Therefore evil was the child of liberty, a human creation. Which didn’t mean that liberty was evil in and of itself; no, it was a gift that had permitted great scientific and technical discoveries, social progress, the elimination of slavery and colonialism, the birth of human rights, etcetera. But it was also the origin of the terrible, never-ending cruelties and suffering that accompanied progress like its shadow.

Don Rigoberto was concerned. It occurred to him that all the ideas in the essay were somehow associated with the appearances of Edilberto Torres and his fits of weeping. Or was the essay the result of Fonchito’s conversation with Father O’Donovan? Had his son seen Pepín again? Just then Justiniana burst into his study, very excited. She’d come to tell him that the “newlywed” was on the phone.

“That’s what he said I should tell you, Don Rigoberto,” the girl explained. “‘Tell him the newlywed is calling, Justiniana.’”

“Ismael!” Don Rigoberto jumped up from his desk. “Hello? Hello? Is that you? Are you in Lima? When did you get back?”

“I haven’t returned yet, Rigoberto,” said a playful voice, which he recognized as belonging to his boss. “I’m calling from a place, but naturally I won’t say where it is, because a little bird told me your phone is bugged by you know who. A very beautiful place, so eat your heart out with envy.”

He burst into very joyful laughter and Rigoberto, alarmed, suddenly suspected that yes, his ex-boss and friend was in his dotage, hopelessly senile. Were the hyenas capable of paying one of those agencies to interfere with his phone? Impossible, the gray matter couldn’t take that in. Or perhaps it could.

“Well, well, what more could you wish for,” he replied. “Better for you, Ismael. I see that your honeymoon is going full speed ahead and you still have some wind left. I mean, at least you’re still alive. I’m glad, old man.”

“I’m in fine shape, Rigoberto. Let me tell you something: I’ve never felt better or happier than I have during this time. And that’s the truth.”

“Fantastic, then,” Rigoberto repeated. “Well, I don’t want to give you bad news, least of all by telephone. But I suppose you’re aware of what you’ve caused here and the trouble that’s raining down on us.”

“Claudio Arnillas keeps me up to date with plenty of details and sends me newspaper clippings. I enjoy reading that I’ve been kidnapped and am suffering from senile dementia. It seems you and Narciso have been complicit in my abduction, isn’t that right?” He burst into laughter again — long, loud, and very sarcastic.

“How nice that you can take everything with so much good humor,” Rigoberto grumbled. “Narciso and I aren’t enjoying this as much, as you can imagine. The brothers have driven Narciso half crazy with their intrigues and threats. And us as well.”

“I’m very sorry for the bother I’m causing you, brother.” Ismael tried to smooth things over, and became very serious. “I’m sorry they’ve interfered with your retirement and that you’ve had to cancel your trip to Europe. I know everything, Rigoberto. A thousand apologies to you and Lucrecia for these problems. I swear to you it won’t be for much longer.”

“What do a retirement and a trip to Europe matter compared to the friendship of a grand fellow like you,” Don Rigoberto said sarcastically. “I’d better not tell you about the judicial summonses that compel me to testify as a presumed accomplice in your concealment and abduction; I don’t want to ruin that lovely honeymoon of yours. Well, I hope all this will soon be something we can laugh over and tell anecdotes about.”

Ismael guffawed again, as if it all had little to do with him.

“You’re the kind of friend that doesn’t exist anymore, Rigoberto. I always knew it.”

“Arnillas must have told you that your driver had to hide. The twins have set the police on him, and given how unstable they are, I wouldn’t be surprised if they also send in a couple of hired killers to cut off his you-know-what.”

“They’re very capable of it,” Ismael acknowledged. “That black man is worth his weight in gold. Reassure him, tell him he shouldn’t worry, that his loyalty will have its reward, Rigoberto.”

“Are you coming back soon or will you continue your honeymoon until your heart explodes and you drop dead?”

“I’m finishing up a little matter that will amaze you, Rigoberto. As soon as it’s settled, I’ll return to Lima and put things in order. You’ll see, this mess will disappear in the blink of an eye. I’m really sorry for the headaches I’ve caused. That’s why I called, no other reason. We’ll see each other very soon. Kisses to Lucrecia and a big hug for you.”

“Another one for you and kisses to Armida.” Don Rigoberto said goodbye.

When he hung up, he sat staring at the phone. Venice? The Riviera? Capri? Where could the lovebirds be? Somewhere exotic like Indonesia or Thailand? Could Ismael be as happy as he said? Yes, no doubt, judging by his juvenile laughter. At eighty he’d discovered that life could be more than work — it could also mean doing mad things. Running off, savoring the pleasures of sex and revenge. Better for him. Just then an impatient Lucrecia came into his study.

“What happened? What did Ismael say? Tell me, tell me.”

“He seems very happy. He’s laughing at everything, believe it or not,” he told her. And then he was struck again by the same suspicion. “Do you know something, Lucrecia? What if he really has become senile? What if he doesn’t even realize the crazy things he’s doing?”

“Are you serious or are you joking, Rigoberto?”

“Until now he’d seemed absolutely lucid and clearheaded to me,” he said hesitantly. “But as I listened to him laughing on the phone, I started to think. Because he thought everything going on here was incredibly funny, as if he didn’t care at all about the scandal or the mess he’s gotten us into. Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m a little touchy. Do you realize the situation we’ll be in if it turns out that Ismael has been stricken overnight by senile dementia?”

“I wish you’d never put that idea into my head, Rigoberto. I’ll be thinking about it all night. Too bad for you if I can’t sleep, I’m warning you.”

“It’s sheer nonsense, don’t pay any attention to me, it’s a kind of magic charm so that what I say might happen, doesn’t,” Rigoberto reassured her. “But the truth is, I didn’t expect to find him so unconcerned. As if this all had nothing to do with him. Sorry, I’m sorry. Now I know what’s going on. He’s happy. That’s the key to everything. For the first time in his life Ismael knows what it means to have a real fuck, Lucrecia. What he had with Clotilde were conjugal diversions. With Armida there’s a little sin in the middle and the thing works better.”

“Again your dirty talk,” his wife protested. “Besides, I don’t know what you have against conjugal diversions. I think ours work wonderfully well.”

“Of course, my love, they’re marvelous,” he said, kissing Lucrecia on her hand and her ear. “The best thing for us is to do what he’s doing and not give the matter any importance. Load up on patience and wait for the storm to blow over.”

“Don’t you want to go out, Rigoberto? Let’s go to the movies and eat out.”

“Let’s watch a movie here instead,” her husband replied. “Just the thought that one of those people with their little tape recorders might show up to take photographs and ask me about Ismael and the twins upsets my stomach.”

Ever since journalists had seized upon the news of Ismael’s marriage to Armida, and his children’s police and judicial actions to annul the marriage and declare him incompetent, nothing else was talked about in newspapers, on radio and television programs, on social networks and blogs. The facts disappeared under a frenetic spluttering of exaggerations, inventions, gossipmongering, libel, and general baseness, in which iniquity, coarseness, perversion, resentment, and rancor came to the surface. If he hadn’t found himself dragged into the journalistic confusion, constantly hounded by hacks who compensated for their ignorance with morbid curiosity and insolence, Don Rigoberto told himself that this spectacle of Ismael Carrera and Armida transformed into the great entertainment in the city — dipped in print, radio, and television filth and unceasingly scorched in the bonfire that Miki and Escobita had lit and stirred up every day with statements, interviews, short articles, fantasies, and deliriums — would have been somewhat entertaining, as well as instructive and informative with respect to this country, this city, the human spirit in general, and the very evil that now concerned Fonchito, to judge by his essay. “Instructive and informative, yes,” he thought again. With respect to many things. The function of journalism in our time, at least in this society, was not to inform but to make the line between the lie and the truth disappear, to replace reality with a fiction in which the oceanic mass of neuroses, frustrations, hatreds, and traumas of a public devoured by resentment and envy was made manifest. One more proof that the small spaces of civilization would never prevail against immeasurable barbarism.

The phone conversation with his former employer and friend had left him depressed. He didn’t regret having lent him a hand by acting as a witness at his marriage. But the consequences of that signature were beginning to overwhelm him. It wasn’t so much the judicial and police complications, or the delay in processing his retirement; he thought (knock on wood, anything could happen) that this, bad as it was, would be settled. And he and Lucrecia would be able to travel to Europe. The worst thing was the scandal he found himself drawn into: Almost every day he was dragged through a journalistic sewer, muddied by a pestilential sensationalism. Bitterly he asked himself, “What good has it done you, this small refuge of books, prints, records, all these beautiful, refined, subtle, intelligent things you collected so zealously, believing that in this tiny space of civilization you’d be protected against lack of culture, frivolity, stupidity, and emptiness?” His old idea that these islands or fortresses of culture had to be erected in the middle of the storm, invulnerable to the surrounding barbarism, wasn’t working. The scandal provoked by his friend Ismael and the hyenas had leaked its acid, its pus, its poison into his study, this territory where for so many years — twenty, twenty-five, thirty? — he’d withdrawn to live his true life. The life that made up for the company’s policies and contracts, the intrigues and pettiness of local politics, the mendacity and idiocy of the people he was obliged to deal with every day. Now, with the scandal, it did him no good to search out the solitude of his study. He’d done so the night before. He put a beautiful recording on the phonograph, Arthur Honegger’s oratorio King David, recorded right in the Notre Dame Cathedral, which had always moved him a great deal. This time, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on the music for an instant. He was distracted, his mind fixed on the images and concerns of the past few days, the shock, the bilious displeasure each time he discovered his name in the reports that, though he didn’t buy those newspapers, friends had sent to him or commented on in an inflexible way, poisoning his life and Lucrecia’s. He had to turn off the phonograph and sit still, his eyes closed, listening to the beating of his heart with a brackish taste in his mouth. “In this country not even a tiny space of civilization can be built,” he concluded. “In the end, barbarism demolishes everything.” And once again he told himself, as he always did whenever he felt depressed, how mistaken he’d been when, as a young man, he decided not to emigrate, to remain here, in Lima the Horrible, convinced he’d be able to organize his life in a way that, even though he’d have to spend many hours a day submerged in the mundane noise of upper-class Peruvians to earn his daily bread, he’d really live in the pure, beautiful, elevated enclave made of sublime things that he would create as an alternative to the everyday yoke. That was when he’d had the idea of saving spaces, the idea that civilization was not, had never been a movement, a general state of things, an environment that would embrace all of society, but rather was composed of tiny citadels raised throughout time and space, which resisted the ongoing assault of the instinctive, violent, obtuse, ugly, destructive, bestial force that dominated the world and now had come into his own home.

That night, after supper, he asked Fonchito if he was tired.

“No,” his son replied. “Why, Papa?”

“I’d like to talk with you for a moment, if you don’t mind.”

“As long as it isn’t about Edilberto Torres, I’d be happy to,” Fonchito said mischievously. “I haven’t seen him again, so don’t worry.”

“I promise we won’t talk about him,” replied Don Rigoberto. And as he used to do when he was a boy, he shaped a cross with two fingers and swore, kissing them: “I swear to God.”

“Don’t take God’s name in vain — after all, I’m a believer,” Doña Lucrecia admonished. “Go into the study. I’ll tell Justiniana to bring you your ice cream there.”

In the study, while they were enjoying the lucuma ice cream, Don Rigoberto, between mouthfuls, spied on Fonchito. Sitting across from him with his legs crossed, he ate his ice cream in slow spoonfuls and seemed absorbed in some distant thoughts. He was no longer a child. How long had he been shaving? His face was smooth and his hair was tousled; he didn’t play a lot of sports but looked as if he did because his body was slim and athletic. He was a very good-looking boy, and the girls must be crazy about him. Everyone said so. But his son didn’t seem interested in those kinds of things; instead, he was interested in hallucinations and religious ideas. Was that a good or bad thing? Would he have preferred Fonchito to be a normal kid? “Normal,” he thought, imagining his son speaking the syncopated, simian jargon of the young people of his generation, getting drunk on weekends, smoking marijuana, getting high on coke, taking Ecstasy in the discos along the Asia beach at kilometer 100 on the Pan-American, as so many of Lima’s wealthy children did. A shudder ran through his body. A thousand times better for him to see phantoms or even the devil himself and write essays about evil.

“I read what you wrote about liberty and evil,” he said. “It was right there, on your desk, and I was curious. I hope you don’t mind. It impressed me a great deal, in fact. It’s very well written and full of original ideas. Which course is it for?”

“Language,” said Fonchito, not giving the subject much importance. “Professor Iturriaga asked for an essay on anything. That topic came to mind. But it’s only a rough draft. I still have to correct it.”

“I was surprised, because I didn’t know you were so interested in religion.”

“You thought it was religious?” Fonchito was surprised. “I think it’s more like philosophy. Well, I don’t know, philosophy and religion blend into each other, that’s true. Weren’t you ever interested in religion, Papa?”

“I studied at La Recoleta, a priests’ academy,” said Don Rigoberto. “After that, at the Universidad Católica. And for a time I was even a leader of Acción Católica, with Pepín O’Donovan. Of course it interested me a great deal when I was young. But one day I lost my faith and never got it back again. I think I lost it as soon as I began to think. To be a believer, you can’t think too much.”

“In other words, you’re an atheist. You believe there isn’t anything before or after this life. That’s being an atheist, isn’t it?”

“We’re getting into deep waters,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “I’m not an atheist, an atheist is also a believer. He believes that God doesn’t exist, isn’t that so? I’m more of an agnostic, if I’m anything. Someone who declares that he’s perplexed, incapable of believing either that God exists or that God doesn’t exist.”

“Neither fish nor fowl,” said Fonchito with a laugh. “It’s a very convenient way to avoid the problem, Papa.”

He had a fresh, healthy laugh, and Don Rigoberto thought he was a good kid. He was going through an adolescent crisis, suffering doubts and uncertainties regarding the afterlife and this life, which spoke well of him. How he would have liked to help him. But how, how could he?

“Something like that, though there’s no need to make fun of me,” he agreed. “Shall I tell you something, Fonchito? I envy believers. Not the fanatics, of course, who horrify me. Real believers. The ones who have a faith and try to organize their lives in accordance with their beliefs. Soberly, with no fuss and no foolishness. I don’t know many, but I do know some. And they seem enviable to me. By the way, are you a believer?”

Fonchito became serious and reflected for a moment before answering.

“I’d like to know more about religion, because I was never taught.” He avoided answering with a reproachful tone. “That’s why Chato Pezzuolo and I have joined a Bible-study group. We meet on Fridays after classes.”

“An excellent idea.” Don Rigoberto was pleased. “The Bible’s a marvelous book that everyone ought to read, believers and nonbelievers. First of all, for their general culture. But also to better understand the world we live in. Many things that happen around us come directly or indirectly from the Bible.”

“Is that what you wanted us to talk about, Papa?”

“No, not really,” said Don Rigoberto. “I wanted to talk to you about Ismael and the scandal we’re caught up in. I’m sure it’s all over your school too.”

Fonchito laughed again. “I’ve been asked a thousand times if it was true you helped him to marry his cook, as the papers say. You’re on all the blogs that cover that mess.”

“Armida was never his cook,” explained Don Rigoberto. “More like his housekeeper. She cleaned and managed the house, especially after Ismael lost his wife.”

“I’ve been to his house two or three times and don’t remember her at all,” said Fonchito. “Is she pretty, at least?”

“Presentable, let’s say,” Don Rigoberto conceded in a Solomonic way. “Much younger than Ismael, of course. Don’t believe all the nonsense in the press. That he was abducted, that he’s senile, that he didn’t know what he was doing. Ismael’s in his right mind and that’s why I agreed to be a witness. Of course I didn’t suspect that the uproar would be so awful. Well, it’ll pass. I wanted to tell you that they’ve held up my retirement in the company. The twins have accused me of alleged complicity in an abduction that never happened. And so for now I’m tied up here in Lima with summonses and lawyers. That’s what it’s about. We’re going through a difficult period, and until this is resolved, we’ll have to tighten our belts a little. Because it’s not a good idea to liquidate all the savings our future depends on. Yours especially. I wanted to keep you up to date.”

“Of course, Papa,” said Fonchito, encouraging him. “Don’t worry. If you have to you can suspend my allowance until this is over.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Don Rigoberto said with a smile. “There’s more than enough for your allowance. At school, the teachers and students, what do they say about all this?”

“Most are siding with the twins, naturally.”

“The hyenas? It’s obvious they don’t know them.”

“The thing is they’re racists,” Fonchito declared. “They can’t forgive Señor Ismael for marrying a chola. They believe nobody in his right mind would do that, and that the only thing Armida wants is to keep his money. You don’t know how many boys I’ve fought with defending your friend’s marriage, Papa. Only Pezzuolo backs me up, but more out of friendship than because he thinks I’m right.”

“You’re defending a good cause, son.” Don Rigoberto patted his knee. “Because even if nobody believes it, Ismael’s marriage was for love.”

“Can I ask you a question, Papa?” the boy said suddenly, just as it seemed he was about to leave the study.

“Of course, son. Whatever you like.”

“It’s just that there’s something I don’t understand,” Fonchito ventured uncomfortably. “About you, Papa. You always liked art, painting, music, books. It’s the only thing you seem passionate about. So, then, why did you become a lawyer? Why did you spend your whole life working in an insurance company? You should have been a painter, a musician, well, I don’t know. Why didn’t you follow your calling?”

Don Rigoberto nodded and reflected a moment before answering.

“Because I was a coward, son,” he finally murmured. “Because I lacked faith in myself. I never believed I had the talent to be a real artist. But maybe that was an excuse for not trying. I decided not to be a creator but only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. Because I was a coward is the sad truth. So now you know. Don’t follow my example. Whatever your calling is, follow it as far as you can and don’t do what I did, don’t betray it.”

“I hope you’re not annoyed, Papa. It was a question I’d been wanting to ask you for a long time.”

“It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for many years, Fonchito. You’ve forced me to answer and I thank you for that. Go on, that’s enough, good night.”

He went to bed in wonderful spirits after his conversation with Fonchito. He told Doña Lucrecia how much good it had done him to hear his son being so judicious after an entire afternoon sunk in bad humor and unpleasantness. But he didn’t tell her about the last part of their conversation.

“It made me happy to see him so calm, so mature, Lucrecia. Involved in a Bible-study group, imagine. How many kids his age would do something like that? Very few. Have you read the Bible? I confess I’ve read only parts, and that was a long time ago. Wouldn’t you like it if, as a kind of game, we started to read it too and talk about it? It’s a very beautiful book.”

“I’d be delighted. Perhaps this way you’ll reconvert and come back to the Church,” said Lucrecia, adding, after a few seconds’ thought: “I hope reading the Bible won’t be incompatible with making love, Ears.”

She heard her husband’s mischievous laugh, and almost at the same time, she felt his avid hands running up and down her body.

“The Bible is the most erotic book in the world,” she heard him say eagerly. “You’ll see, when we read the Song of Songs and the outrageous things Samson does with Delilah and Delilah does with Samson, you’ll see.”