Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

By Mario Vargas Llosa. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 1997.

Don Rigoberto is probably not a man you'd like to know. Aging, balding, and sour, with an enormous nose and ears, and a dull (albeit successful) insurance business, he is no one's idea of Prince Charming. But what makes Don Rigoberto special is his fantasy life. In myriad notebooks he describes his most farfetched erotic inventions, all of which feature his exquisite wife, Lucrecia.

Through his imagination, Don Rigoberto becomes a voyeur, witnessing Lucrecia's diverse escapades, then re-creating them in sumptuous detail in his notebooks. In one fantasy he sees Lucrecia making love with an animal fetishist who surrounds her with cats, then anoints her body with honey, a magnet for felines. In another, an old friend invites her on a madcap trip to Europe, where Lucrecia prolongs his delicious agony by bestowing her titillating favors on him very, very slowly, one by one. In other episodes she finds herself the object of attention of an eighteenth-century foot fetishist, of a john who picks her up at the Lima Sheraton, and of a Mexican prostitute who dances with her, but then becomes so infatuated with Don Rigoberto's ears and nose that she nearly bites them off. In all of these fantasies, it is Lucrecia who engages in adultery. Don Rigoberto is always faithful to his wife. Even in his dreams, he is monogamous.

In addition to his fantasies, Don Rigoberto records letters; thoughts on paintings, books, theater performances, and pieces of music; quotations, random ideas; and descriptions of the games he plays with Lucrecia. One of his favorites is to have her re-create the poses of the models in certain paintings. Indeed, Don Rigoberto's erotic runminations are inspired by art and literature, not by experience. His books and pictures are of primary importance to him. In the directions he sends to the architect who designs his house, he specifies that the building is to be designed to accommodate his library and art collection; the people are of secondary importance.

The rest of Don Rigoberto's notebooks are filled with celebrations of individualism and condemnations of mass culture. In Don Rigoberto's mind, it is through the erotic that individuals reveal themselves; hedonism is a manifestation of the individual's search for beauty and purity. Self-indulgence, concupiscence, and sexual fantasy liberate the authentic self, as do art and literature. As he comments after watching a bad performance...