The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Read Online Free PDF Page A

used to living alone again. She’s been a friend, an ally. That’s how I think of her. I don’t have the stupid prejudices against servants that other people in Lima have.”
    She almost told Fonchito about the eminently respectable Doña Felicia de Gallagher, who boasted at her tea and canasta parties that she had forbidden her chauffeur, a robust black man in a navy-blue uniform, to drink water when he was working so that he would not feel the need to urinate and have to stop the car, find a bathroom, and leave his employer alone in those streets crawling with thieves. But she stopped herself, sensing that even an indirect allusion to a bodily function in front of the boy would be like stirring up the fetid waters of a swamp.
    “Shall I pour you more tea? The buns are delicious,” said Fonchito, flattering her. “When I can get away from the academy and come here, I feel happy, Stepmamá.”
    “You shouldn’t cut so many classes. If you really want to be a painter, you’ll find those classes very useful.”
    Why, when she spoke to him like a child—which is what he was—why was she overcome by a feeling of duplicity, of lying? But if she treated him like a young man, she had identical misgivings, the same sense of mendacity.
    “Do you think Justiniana is pretty, Stepmamá?”
    “Yes, yes I do. She’s a very Peruvian type, with her cinnamon skin and pert look. She must have broken a few hearts along the way.”
    “Did my papá ever tell you he thought she was pretty?”
    “No, I don’t think he ever did. Why so many questions?”
    “No reason. Except you’re prettier than Justita, prettier than all of them, Stepmamá,” the boy exclaimed. And then, frightened, he immediately begged her pardon. “Was I wrong to say that? You won’t get angry, will you?”
    Señora Lucrecia tried to keep Rigoberto’s son from noticing how perturbed she was. Was Lucifer up to his old tricks? Should she pick him up by the ear and throw him out and tell him never to come back? But now Fonchito seemed to have forgotten what he had just said and was looking for something in his portfolio. At last he found it.
    “Look, Stepmamá,” and he handed her the small clipping. “Schiele when he was a boy. Don’t I look like him?”
    Doña Lucrecia examined the painfully thin adolescent with the short hair and delicate features, tightly encased in a dark turn-of-the-century suit with a rose in the lapel and a high stiff collar and bow tie that seemed to be strangling him.
    “Not at all,” she said. “You don’t look anything like him.”
    “Those are his sisters standing beside him. Gertrude and Melanie. The smaller one, the blonde, is the famous Gerti.”
    “Why famous?” asked Doña Lucrecia, feeling uncomfortable. She knew very well she was entering a minefield.
    “What do you mean why?” The rosy little face showed amazement; his hands made a theatrical gesture. “Didn’t you know? She was the model for his best known nudes.”
    “Oh, really?” Doña Lucrecia’s discomfort intensified. “I see you’re very familiar with Egon Schiele’s life.”
    “I’ve read everything there is about him in my papá’s library. Lots of women posed naked for him. Schoolgirls, streetwalkers, his lover Wally. And also his wife, Edith, and his sister-in-law, Adele.”
    “All right, all right.” Doña Lucrecia looked at her watch. “It’s getting late, Fonchito.”
    “Didn’t you know he had Edith and Adele pose for him together?” the boy went on enthusiastically, as if he hadn’t heard her. “And the same thing happened when he was living with Wally, in the little village of Krumau. He posed her naked with some schoolgirls. That’s why there was such a scandal.”
    “I’m not surprised, if they were schoolgirls,” Señora Lucrecia remarked. “Now, it’s getting dark and you’d better go. If Rigoberto calls the academy, he’ll find out you’re missing classes.”
    “But the whole thing was unfair,” the boy