The Discreet Hero

II

When Don Ismael Carrera, the owner of the insurance company, stopped by his office and suggested having lunch together, Rigoberto thought, “He’s going to ask me again to change my mind,” because Ismael, along with all his colleagues and subordinates, had been startled by Rigoberto’s unexpected announcement that he’d take his retirement three years early. Why retire at the age of sixty-two, they all said, when he could stay three more years in the manager’s position that he filled with the unanimous respect of the firm’s almost three hundred employees.

“And really, why, why?” he thought. He wasn’t even sure. But the truth was that his determination was immovable. He wouldn’t take a step backward, even though by retiring before the age of sixty-five, he wouldn’t keep his full salary or have any right to all the indemnities and privileges of those who retired when they reached the upper age limit.

He tried to cheer himself by thinking of the free time he’d have. Spending hours in his small space of civilization, protected against barbarism, looking at his beloved etchings and the art books that crowded his library, listening to good music, taking a trip to Europe once a year with Lucrecia in the spring or fall, attending festivals, art fairs, visiting museums, foundations, galleries, seeing again his best-loved paintings and sculptures and discovering others that he would bring into his secret art gallery. He’d made calculations, and he was good at math. By spending judiciously and prudently administering his almost million dollars of savings, as well as his pension, he and Lucrecia would have a very comfortable old age and be able to secure Fonchito’s future.

“Yes, yes,” he thought, “a long, cultured, and happy old age.” Why then, in spite of this promising future, did he feel so uneasy? Was it Edilberto Torres or anticipatory melancholy? Especially when, as now, he looked over the portraits and diplomas hanging on the walls in his office, the books lined up on two shelves, his desk meticulously arranged with its notebooks, pencils and pencil holders, calculator, reports, turned-on computer, and the television set always tuned to Bloomberg with the stock market quotations. How could he feel anticipatory nostalgia for this? The only important things in his office were the pictures of Lucrecia and Fonchito — newborn, child, adolescent — which he would take with him on the day of the move. As for the rest, soon this old building on Jirón Carabaya, in the center of Lima, would no longer be the insurance company’s headquarters. The new location, in San Isidro, on the edge of the Zanjón, was almost finished. This ugly edifice, where he’d worked for thirty years of his life, would probably be torn down.

He thought Ismael would take him, as always when he invited him to lunch, to the Club Nacional and he, once again, would be incapable of resisting the temptation of that enormous steak breaded with tacu-tacu they called “a sheet,” or of drinking a couple of glasses of wine — so that for the rest of the afternoon he’d feel bloated and dyspeptic, and lack all desire to work. To his surprise, when they got into the Mercedes-Benz in the building’s garage, his boss told the driver, “To Miraflores, Narciso, La Rosa Náutica.” Turning to Rigoberto, he explained, “It will do us good to breathe a little sea air and listen to the gulls screeching.”

“If you think you’re going to bribe me with a lunch, Ismael, you’re crazy,” he warned him. “I’m retiring no matter what, even if you put a pistol to my head.”

“I won’t do that,” said Ismael with a mocking gesture. “I know you’re as stubborn as a mule. And I also know you’ll be sorry, feeling useless and bored at home, getting on Lucrecia’s nerves all day. Soon you’ll show up on bended knee asking me to put you back in the manager’s office. I’ll do it, of course I will. But first I’ll make you suffer for a good long time, I’m warning you.”

He tried to remember how long he’d known Ismael. A lot of years. Ismael had been very good-looking as a young man. Elegant, distinguished, sociable. And, until he married Clotilde, a seducer. He made women, single and married, old and young, sigh for him. Now he’d lost most of his hair and had just a few white tufts on his bald head; he’d become wrinkled and fat and dragged his feet when he walked. His denture, fitted by a dentist in Miami, was unmistakable. The years, and especially the twins, had ruined him physically. They’d met the first day Rigoberto came to work at the insurance company in the legal department. Thirty long years! Damn, a lifetime ago. He recalled Ismael’s father, Don Alejandro Carrera, the founder of the company. Severe, tireless, a difficult but upright man whose mere presence imposed order and communicated certainty. Ismael respected him though he never loved him. Because Don Alejandro forced his only son, recently returned from England, where he’d studied economics at the University of London and completed a year’s training at Lloyd’s, to work in every division of the firm, which was just beginning to be prominent. Ismael was close to forty and felt humiliated by an apprenticeship that even had him sorting the mail, running the cafeteria, and tending to the machinery in the electrical plant and to the security and cleanliness of the company. Don Alejandro could be somewhat despotic, but Rigoberto recalled him with admiration: a captain of industry. He’d made this company out of nothing, starting out with almost no capital and loans that he repaid down to the last cent. And the truth was that Ismael had carried on his father’s work in excellent fashion. He too was tireless and knew how to exercise his gift for command when necessary. But with the twins at its head, the Carrera line would end up in the garbage. Neither one had inherited the entrepreneurial virtues of their father and grandfather. When Ismael died, pity the insurance company! Fortunately, he would no longer be there as manager to witness the catastrophe. Why had his boss invited him to lunch if not to talk to him about his upcoming retirement?

La Rosa Náutica was filled with people, many of them tourists speaking English or French; Don Ismael had reserved a table next to the window. They drank a Campari and watched some surfers riding the waves in their rubber suits. It was a gray winter morning, with low leaden clouds that hid the cliffs and the flocks of screeching seagulls. A squadron of pelicans glided past, just grazing the ocean’s surface. The rhythmic sound of the waves and the undertow was pleasant. “Winter is melancholy in Lima, though a thousand times preferable to the summer,” Rigoberto thought. He ordered grilled corvina and a salad and told his boss he wouldn’t have even a drop of wine; he had work to do in the office and didn’t want to spend the afternoon yawning like a crocodile and feeling like a zombie. It seemed to him that a self-absorbed Ismael didn’t even hear him. What was troubling him?

“You and I are good friends, aren’t we?” his boss said suddenly, as if just waking up.

“I suppose we are, Ismael,” Rigoberto replied, “if friendship can really exist between an employer and his employee. The class struggle is real, you know.”

“We’ve had our battles at times,” Ismael continued very seriously. “But even so, I think we’ve gotten along pretty well these thirty years. Don’t you agree?”

“All this sentimental beating around the bush just to ask me not to retire?” Rigoberto teased. “Are you going to tell me that if I leave, the company will go under?”

Ismael wasn’t in the mood for jokes. He eyed the scallops à la parmigiana that had just been brought to him as if they might be poisoned. He moved his mouth, making his denture click. There was disquiet in his half-closed eyes. His prostate? Cancer? What was wrong with him?

“I want to ask you for a favor,” he murmured, very quietly, not looking at him. When he raised his eyes, Rigoberto saw them filled with perplexity. “Not a favor, no. A huge favor, Rigoberto.”

“If I can, of course,” he agreed, intrigued. “What’s wrong, Ismael? You look so strange.”

“I want you to be my witness,” said Ismael, lowering his eyes again to the scallops. “I’m getting married.”

The fork with a mouthful of corvina stayed in the air for a moment and then, instead of carrying it to his mouth, Rigoberto returned it to his plate. “How old is he?” he thought. “No younger than seventy-five or seventy-eight — maybe even eighty.” He didn’t know what to say. He was dumbstruck with surprise.

“I need two witnesses,” Ismael added, looking at him now, more calmly. “I’ve gone over all my friends and acquaintances. And I’ve reached the conclusion that the most loyal people, the ones I trust most, are Narciso and you. My driver has accepted. Do you?”

Still incapable of saying a word or making a joke, Rigoberto managed only to nod his agreement.

“Of course I do, Ismael,” he finally stammered. “But tell me that this is serious and not the first symptom of senile dementia.”

This time Ismael smiled, though without a shred of joy, opening his mouth and displaying the explosive white of his false teeth. There were well-preserved septuagenarians and octogenarians, Rigoberto told himself, but his boss was not one of them, of course. On his oblong skull, under the white tufts, there were plenty of dark spots, his forehead and neck were furrowed with wrinkles, and there was something defeated in his appearance. He dressed with his usual elegance: a blue suit, a shirt that looked recently ironed, a tie held with a gold clip, a handkerchief in the breast pocket.

“Have you lost your mind, Ismael?” Rigoberto exclaimed suddenly in a delayed reaction to the news. “Are you really getting married? At your age?”

“It’s a perfectly rational decision,” he heard him say firmly. “I’ve made it knowing very well that things will come down around my ears. No need to tell you that if you’re my witness at the wedding, you’ll have problems too. Well, what’s the point of talking about what you already know.”

“Do they know?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, please,” his boss said impatiently. “The twins will go through the roof, move heaven and earth to annul the marriage, have me declared incompetent, put me in a mental hospital, a thousand other things. Even have me killed by a hired assassin, if they can. Certainly you and Narciso will also be targeted. You know all this and even so you’ve said yes. I wasn’t wrong. You’re the sincere, generous, noble fellow I always thought you were. Thanks, old man.”

He extended his hand, grasped Rigoberto by the arm, and kept his hand there for a moment with an affectionate pressure.

“At least tell me who the lucky bride is,” asked Rigoberto, trying to swallow a mouthful of corvina. He’d lost his appetite.

This time Ismael really smiled and looked at him mockingly. A malicious light glinted in his eyes as he said, “Have a drink first, Rigoberto. If my telling you I was getting married made you turn pale, when I tell you who she is you might have a heart attack.”

“Is the gold digger so ugly?” he murmured. With a prologue like this, his curiosity was boundless.

“It’s Armida,” said Ismael, spelling out the name. He waited for Rigoberto’s reaction, like an entomologist with an insect.

Armida? Armida? Rigoberto went over all the women he knew, but none had that name.

“Do I know her?” he finally asked.

“Armida,” Ismael repeated, scrutinizing and measuring him with a little smile. “You know her very well. You’ve seen her a thousand times in my house. It’s just that you never noticed her. Because nobody ever notices domestic servants.”

Rigoberto’s fork, holding another mouthful of corvina, slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. As he bent over to pick it up he felt his heart begin to pound. He heard his boss laughing. Was it possible? Was he going to marry his servant? Didn’t these things happen only in soap operas? Was Ismael serious or was he kidding? He imagined the rumors, the inventions, the conjectures, the jokes that would inflame the gossips of Lima: This diversion would last a long time.

“Somebody here is crazy,” he mumbled. “You or me. Or are we both crazy, Ismael?”

“She’s a good woman and we love each other,” his boss said, without the slightest sign of discomfort. “I’ve known her a long time. She’ll be an excellent companion in my old age, you’ll see.”

Now Rigoberto could see her, re-create her, invent her. A good-looking brunette, very black hair, lively eyes. A typical woman from the coast with an easy manner, slim, not very short. A fairly presentable chola. “He must be forty years older than her, maybe more,” he thought. “Ismael has lost his mind.”

“If your intention in your old age is to be part of the most sensational scandal in the history of Lima, you’ll succeed,” he said with a sigh. “You’ll be fodder for the gossips for God only knows how many years. Centuries, perhaps.”

Ismael laughed openly, with good humor this time, agreeing.

“At last I’ve told you, Rigoberto,” he exclaimed with relief. “The truth is I found it very difficult. I confess I had endless doubts. I was dying of embarrassment. When I told Narciso, that black man’s eyes opened as wide as saucers, and he almost swallowed his tongue. Well, now you know. There’ll be a huge scandal and I don’t give a damn. Do you still agree to be my witness?”

Rigoberto nodded his head: Yes, yes, Ismael, if he asked how would he not agree. But, but … Damn, he didn’t know what the hell to say.

“Is this wedding absolutely necessary?” he finally found the courage to say. “I mean, to risk facing everything that you’ll suffer. I’m not thinking only of the scandal, Ismael. You can imagine where I’m going with this. Is it worth the monumental trouble this will unleash with your sons? A marriage has legal and economic effects. Well, I imagine you’ve thought about all this and that I’m talking to you like a fool. Am I right, Ismael?”

He saw his boss drink half a glass of white wine in a single swallow. He saw him shrug and agree.

“They’ll try to have me declared incompetent,” he said sarcastically, making a scornful face. “Of course a lot of palms will have to be greased, what with judges and shyster lawyers. I have more money than they do, so they won’t win the suit, if they decide to bring it.”

He spoke without looking at Rigoberto, without raising his voice so people at nearby tables couldn’t hear him, with his eyes fixed on the ocean. But he clearly wasn’t seeing the surfers, or the gulls, or the waves rushing to the shore and throwing off white foam, or the double line of cars driving along the Costa Verde. His voice was filling with rage.

“Is it all worth it, Ismael?” Rigoberto repeated. “Lawyers, notaries, judges, court appearances, the indecency of reporters digging into your private life ad nauseam. All that trouble, besides the fortune that this kind of whim will cost you, the headaches and quarrels. Is it worth it?”

Instead of responding, Ismael surprised him with another question.

“Do you remember when I had my heart attack in September?”

Rigoberto remembered very well. Everyone had thought Ismael would die. It had taken him by surprise in his car, driving back to Lima from a lunch in Ancón. He’d passed out and Narciso took him to the Clínica San Felipe. They kept him in intensive care for several days, on oxygen, so weak he couldn’t speak.

“We thought you were done for, what a scare you gave us. Why do you bring that up now?”

“That was when I decided to marry Armida.” Ismael’s face had become sour and his voice filled with bitterness. At that moment he looked older. “I was close to death, of course I was. I could see it up close, touch it, smell it. I was too weak to speak, that’s true. But I could hear. That pair of contemptible sons I have didn’t know that, Rigoberto. I can tell you. Only you. You’ll never tell anyone about it, not even Lucrecia. Swear you won’t, please.”

“Dr. Gamio has been crystal clear,” Miki said enthusiastically. “He kicks the bucket tonight, brother. A massive heart attack. A devastating heart attack, he said. And slim chances of recovery.”

“Not so loud,” Escobita reproached him. He spoke very softly in the half-light that deformed silhouettes, in the strange room that smelled of formaldehyde. “From your lips, compadre. Couldn’t you find out anything about the will in Dr. Arnillas’s office? Because if he wants to fuck us, we’re fucked. That old bastard knows all the tricks.”

“Arnillas keeps his mouth shut because he’s been paid off,” said Miki, lowering his voice. “I went to see him this afternoon and tried to get something out of him but there was no way. I asked around anyway. Even if he wanted to fuck us, he couldn’t. The money he gave us when he got us out of the company doesn’t count, there are no documents and no solid proof. The law’s absolutely clear. We’re compulsory heirs. That’s what it’s called: compulsory. He can’t do anything, brother.”

“Don’t be so sure, compadre. He knows all the tricks. As long as he can fuck us he’s capable of anything.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t last the day,” said Miki. “Because, if nothing else, the old geezer will give us another sleepless night.”

“‘Old bastard’ says one, ‘I hope he croaks right now’ says the other, less than a meter away from me, happy to know I was dying,” Ismael recalled, speaking slowly, his gaze lost in the void. “Do you know something, Rigoberto? They saved me from dying. Yes, those two, I swear it. Because listening to them say those outrageous things gave me an incredible will to live. To deny them the satisfaction, to not die. And I swear my body responded. I decided right there, right in the hospital: If I recover, I’m marrying Armida. I’ll fuck them before they can fuck me. They wanted war? They’d have one. And they’ll have one, old man. I can see their faces now.”

Bitterness, disappointment, anger filled not only his words and voice but also the grimace that twisted his mouth, the hands that crushed his napkin.

“It could have been a hallucination, a nightmare,” Rigoberto murmured, not believing what he was saying. “With all the drugs in your body, you could have dreamed the whole thing, Ismael. You were delirious, I saw you.”

“I knew very well my sons never loved me,” his boss continued, ignoring him. “But not that they hated me so much that they’d wish me dead so they could get their inheritance once and for all. And of course squander in the blink of an eye what my father and I broke our backs to build up over so many years. Well, they won’t be able to. Those hyenas will be disappointed.”

Hyenas described Ismael’s sons pretty well, thought Rigoberto. A couple of scoundrels, one worse than the other. Lazy, too fond of carousing, abusive, a pair of parasites who dishonored the name of their father and grandfather. How had they turned out this way? It certainly wasn’t for lack of affection and care from their parents. Just the opposite. Ismael and Clotilde always bent over backward for them, doing the impossible to give them the best upbringing. They dreamed of turning them into two fine gentlemen. How the devil did they turn out so bad? It wasn’t all that strange that they’d had their sinister conversation at the foot of their dying father’s bed. And they were stupid on top of everything else, not even thinking he could hear them. They were capable of that and worse, of course. Rigoberto knew this very well; over the years he’d often been the shoulder his boss had cried on, Ismael’s confidant about his sons’ outrageous behavior. How Ismael and Clotilde had suffered because of the scandals the boys had caused from the time they were very young.

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.”