Read Online The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online Page B

Armida’s affair? When and how it began? Who took the initiative? What little games, coincidences, touches in passing, or jokes precipitated it?”
    “Exactly,” she murmured, turning over as if remembering something. She came very close to her husband’s face and body and whispered in his ear: “I’ve been thinking about that constantly, darling. From the first moment you told me about it.”
    “Oh, yes? What were you thinking? What ideas came to you, I mean?” Rigoberto turned toward her and encircled her waist with his hands. “Why don’t you tell me?”
    Outside the room, on the streets of Barranco, the great silence of night had fallen, interrupted from time to time by the distant murmur of the ocean. Were the stars out? No, they never appeared in the Lima sky at this time of year. But in Europe they’d see them shining and twinkling every night. Lucrecia, in the dense, unhurried voice of their best times, the voice that was music to Rigoberto, said very slowly, as if reciting a poem, “This may sound incredible, but I can reconstruct for you in full detail Ismael and Armida’s romance. I know it’s robbed you of sleep and filled you with unpleasant thoughts ever since your friend told you in La Rosa Náutica that they were getting married. And how do I know? You’ll be flabbergasted: Justiniana. She and Armida have been close friends for a long time. I mean, since Clotilde’s attacks began and we sent her over to help Armida in the house for a couple of days. Those were such sad days: The world fell down around poor Ismael whenever he thought that his lifetime companion and the mother of his children might die. Don’t you remember?”
    “Of course I remember,” Rigoberto lied, speaking syllable by syllable into his wife’s ear as if it were a shameful secret. “How could I not remember, Lucrecia. And then what happened?”
    “Well, the two of them became friends and began to go out together. Armida, it seems, already had the plan in mind that turned out so well for her. From a maid who made beds and mopped floors to nothing less than the legal wife of Don Ismael Carrera, a respected, well-heeled big shot from Lima. And in his seventies to boot, maybe even his eighties.”
    “Forget about commentary and what we already know,” Rigoberto rebuked her, playing now at being distressed. “Let’s get to what really matters, my love. You know very well what that is. The facts, the facts.”
    “I’m getting to that. Armida planned everything very shrewdly. Obviously, if this little girl from Piura didn’t have certain physical charms, her intelligence and shrewdness would have done her no good. Justiniana saw her nude, of course. If you ask how and why, I don’t know. Certainly they bathed together at some point. Or slept in the same bed one night, who knows. She says we’d be surprised to learn how well-shaped Armida is when you see her naked, something one doesn’t notice because of how badly she dresses, always in those baggy outfits for fat women. Justiniana says she isn’t fat, her breasts and buttocks are high and solid, her nipples firm, her legs well shaped, and believe it or not, her belly’s as taut as a drum. With an almost hairless pubis, like a Japanese girl—”
    “Is it possible that Armida and Justiniana got excited when they saw each other naked?” an overheated Rigoberto interrupted. “Is it possible they started to play, touching each other, fondling each other, and ended up making love?”
    “Everything’s possible in this life, dear boy,” Doña Lucrecia suggested with her usual wisdom. Now husband and wife were welded together. “What I can tell you is that Justiniana even felt a tickle you know where when she saw Armida naked. She confessed as much to me, blushing and laughing. She jokes a great deal about those things, you know, but I think it’s true that seeing Armida naked excited her. So who knows, anything might have happened between those two. In any case,