they met, while they were having a drink with two other men from the office at the Club de la Unión, the four of them had a contest to see who could utter the most pedantic sentence. Fito Cebolla’s (“Every time I pass through Port Douglas, Australia, I put away a crocodile steak and fuck an Aborigine”) was declared the unanimous winner.
In his solitary darkness, Don Rigoberto suffered an attack of jealousy that made his pulses pound. His fantasy clicked away like a typist. There was Doña Lucrecia again. Beautiful, with smooth shoulders and splendid arms, standing in her sandals with the stiletto heels, her shapely legs carefully depilitated, conversing with the guests, explaining to each couple in turn that Don Rigoberto had been urgently called away to Río de Janeiro that afternoon on company business.
“And why should we care?” Fito Cebolla gallantly joked, kissing the hand of his hostess after he had kissed her cheek. “It’s all we could desire.”
He was flabby despite the athletic prowess of his younger years, a tall, strutting man with batrachian eyes and a mobile mouth that stained each word with lasciviousness. He had, of course, come to the cocktail party without his wife—knowing that Don Rigoberto was flying over the Amazon jungle? Fito Cebolla had squandered the modest fortunes of his first three legitimate wives, whom he had divorced as he drained them dry, taking his leisure at the best spas in all the world. When the time came for him to rest, he settled for his fourth and, undoubtedly, final wife, whose dwindling inheritance would guarantee him not the luxurious excesses of travel, wardrobe, and cuisine but simply a decent house in La Planicie, a reasonable larder, and enough Scotch to nourish his cirrhosis, providing he did not live past seventy. She was delicate, small, elegant, and apparently stupefied by her retrospective admiration for the Adonis that Fito Cebolla had once been.
Now he was a bloated man in his sixties who went through life armed with a notebook and a pair of binoculars, and with these, on his walks around the center of the city and at red lights when he was behind the wheel of his old maroon Cadillac, he would observe and make notes, not only general information (were the women ugly or pretty?), but more specific data as well: the bounciest buttocks, pertest breasts, shapeliest legs, most swanlike necks, sensual mouths, and bewitching eyes that the traffic brought into view. His research, the most meticulous and arbitrary imaginable, sometimes devoted an entire day, and even as long as a week, to one portion of the passing female anatomies, in a manner not too different from the system devised by Don Rigoberto for the care and cleaning of body parts: Monday, asses; Tuesday, breasts; Wednesday, legs; Thursday, arms; Friday, necks; Saturday, mouths; Sunday, eyes. At the end of each month, Fito averaged out the ratings on a scale from zero to twenty.
The first time Fito Cebolla allowed him to leaf through his statistics, Don Rigoberto began to sense a disquieting similarity in their unfathomable seas of whims and manias, and to admit to an irrepressible sympathy for any specimen who could indulge his extravagances with so much insolence. (Not so in his case, for his were hidden and matrimonial.) In a certain sense, even setting aside his own cowardice and timidity—qualities lacking in Fito Cebolla—Don Rigoberto intuited that this man was his equal. Closing his eyes—useless, since the darkness in the bedroom was total—and lulled by the nearby sound of the sea at the base of the cliff, Don Rigoberto could make out that hand with its hairy knuckles, wedding band, and gold pinky ring, treacherously coming to rest on his wife’s bottom. An animal groan that could have awakened Fonchito was torn from his throat: “Son of a bitch!”
“That’s not how it happened,” said Doña Lucrecia, fondling him. “We were talking in a group of three or four people, Fito among
In his solitary darkness, Don Rigoberto suffered an attack of jealousy that made his pulses pound. His fantasy clicked away like a typist. There was Doña Lucrecia again. Beautiful, with smooth shoulders and splendid arms, standing in her sandals with the stiletto heels, her shapely legs carefully depilitated, conversing with the guests, explaining to each couple in turn that Don Rigoberto had been urgently called away to Río de Janeiro that afternoon on company business.
“And why should we care?” Fito Cebolla gallantly joked, kissing the hand of his hostess after he had kissed her cheek. “It’s all we could desire.”
He was flabby despite the athletic prowess of his younger years, a tall, strutting man with batrachian eyes and a mobile mouth that stained each word with lasciviousness. He had, of course, come to the cocktail party without his wife—knowing that Don Rigoberto was flying over the Amazon jungle? Fito Cebolla had squandered the modest fortunes of his first three legitimate wives, whom he had divorced as he drained them dry, taking his leisure at the best spas in all the world. When the time came for him to rest, he settled for his fourth and, undoubtedly, final wife, whose dwindling inheritance would guarantee him not the luxurious excesses of travel, wardrobe, and cuisine but simply a decent house in La Planicie, a reasonable larder, and enough Scotch to nourish his cirrhosis, providing he did not live past seventy. She was delicate, small, elegant, and apparently stupefied by her retrospective admiration for the Adonis that Fito Cebolla had once been.
Now he was a bloated man in his sixties who went through life armed with a notebook and a pair of binoculars, and with these, on his walks around the center of the city and at red lights when he was behind the wheel of his old maroon Cadillac, he would observe and make notes, not only general information (were the women ugly or pretty?), but more specific data as well: the bounciest buttocks, pertest breasts, shapeliest legs, most swanlike necks, sensual mouths, and bewitching eyes that the traffic brought into view. His research, the most meticulous and arbitrary imaginable, sometimes devoted an entire day, and even as long as a week, to one portion of the passing female anatomies, in a manner not too different from the system devised by Don Rigoberto for the care and cleaning of body parts: Monday, asses; Tuesday, breasts; Wednesday, legs; Thursday, arms; Friday, necks; Saturday, mouths; Sunday, eyes. At the end of each month, Fito averaged out the ratings on a scale from zero to twenty.
The first time Fito Cebolla allowed him to leaf through his statistics, Don Rigoberto began to sense a disquieting similarity in their unfathomable seas of whims and manias, and to admit to an irrepressible sympathy for any specimen who could indulge his extravagances with so much insolence. (Not so in his case, for his were hidden and matrimonial.) In a certain sense, even setting aside his own cowardice and timidity—qualities lacking in Fito Cebolla—Don Rigoberto intuited that this man was his equal. Closing his eyes—useless, since the darkness in the bedroom was total—and lulled by the nearby sound of the sea at the base of the cliff, Don Rigoberto could make out that hand with its hairy knuckles, wedding band, and gold pinky ring, treacherously coming to rest on his wife’s bottom. An animal groan that could have awakened Fonchito was torn from his throat: “Son of a bitch!”
“That’s not how it happened,” said Doña Lucrecia, fondling him. “We were talking in a group of three or four people, Fito among
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