The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa [Llosa, Mario Vargas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0140283595
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-03-04T06:00:00+00:00

An Exaltation and Defense of Phobias

From this remote corner of the world, dear friend Peter Simplon—if that really is your last name and not a perverse alteration by some viper from the journalistic snakepit intending to ridicule you even further—I send you both my solidarity and my admiration. This morning, on my way to the office, I heard the newscast on Radio America reporting that a court in Syracuse, New York, had sentenced you to three months in prison for repeatedly climbing to the roof of your neighbor’s house in order to spy on her as she bathed, and since then I have been counting the minutes until the day was over and I could return to my house and write these lines to you. I wish to tell you right now that these effusive feelings for you exploded in my chest (this is not a metaphor, I felt a grenade of friendship go off inside my ribs), not when I learned the sentence, but when I heard your reply to the judge (a reply that the wretched man considered an aggravating factor): “I did it because I found the hair under my neighbor’s arms irresistibly attractive.” (The rattlesnake of an announcer, when he read this part of the report, put on a mellifluous, joking voice, to let his listeners know he was even more of an imbecile than his profession would oblige one to suppose.)

My fetishist friend, I have never been in Syracuse, a city about which I know nothing except that it is devastated by snowstorms and arctic cold in the winter, but it must have something special at its very core to give birth to a man of your sensibility and fantasy, possessed of the courage you have displayed, risking disgrace and, I imagine, your livelihood, as well as the mockery of friends and family, to defend your small eccentricity (when I say small, I clearly mean inoffensive, benign, exceedingly healthful and beneficial, since you and I both know that no manias or phobias lack grandeur, for they constitute a human being’s originality and the supreme expression of his sovereignty).

This being said, and in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I feel obliged to inform you that what you find a delicacy is inedible to me, for in the rich universe of desires and dreams, those clumps of fleece in feminine armpits, the sight (and, I suppose, the taste, touch, and smell) of which brings you the most sublime joy, demoralize and disgust me, and repel me sexually. (Looking at Ribera’s Bearded Woman made me impotent for three weeks.) This is why my beloved Lucrecia always made certain that her soft underarms never revealed even the premonition of fleece, and the skin always seemed, to my eyes, tongue, and lips, like the smooth bottom of a cherub. In the matter of a woman’s fleece, I find delight only in the pubic, as long as it is well groomed and does not grow excessively dense and long on the

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