from In Praise of the Stepmother

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

If you haven’t already read Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother, you damn well better get cracking. The novel as a whole is remarkable in the scope of its sensuality. Here is a book where we see the unfaded passions of a man of middle years, not only for the armpits, ass, and vulva of his incomparable wife but for the mundane rituals of daily existence: the trimming of nails, cleaning of ears, and, in his estimation, the sublime pleasure of taking a shit. Nor is he the only one in the house with hightened empirical faculties: his prepubescent son Alphonso cloaks some pretty grown-up desire for his heavy-breasted stepmother in the guise of naïve youth. And then there is the stepmother herself, a gloriously crafted character with whom I am still irremediably in love. As to the playing out of their accelerated Oedipal triangle, I won’t tip the hand, but I assure you it is not without surprises.

Interspersed in the unfolding of the primary narrative are a number of loosely connected vignettes, occasioned and accompanied by single-page reproductions of great paintings from history. The scene that follows weaves a story behind the image in the great Francis Bacon canvas Head 1. It is a minitreatise on the erotics of revulsion, the draw of the horrible, the subcutaneous pull of the abject. The passage is unlike any other in the novel and, I would argue, unlike virtually anything else in literature. Few authors can portray the sexuality of the hideous; fewer still can capture the gravity of its allure.

I have a very highly developed sense of smell and it is by way of my nose that I experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. Ought I to call this gigantic membranous organ that registers all scents, even the most subtle, a nose? I am referring to the grayish shape, covered with white crusts, that begins at my mouth and extends, increasing in size, down to my bull neck. No, it is not a goiter or an acromegalic Adam’s apple. It is my nose. I know that it is neither beautiful nor useful, since its excessive sensibility makes it an indescribable torment when a rat is rotting in the vicinity or fetid materials pass through the drainpipes that run through my home. Nonetheless, I revere it and sometimes think that my nose is the seat of my soul.

I have no arms or legs, but my four stumps are nicely healed over and well toughened, so that I can move about easily along the ground and can even run if need be. My enemies have never been able to catch me in any of their roundups thus far. How did I lose my hands and feet? An accident at work, perhaps; or maybe some medicine my mother took so as to have an easy pregnancy (science doesn’t come up with the right answers in all cases, unfortunately).

My sex organ is intact. I can make love, on condition that the young fellow or the female acting as my partenaire allows me to position myself in such a way that my boils don’t rub against his or her body, for if they burst they leak stinking pus and I suffer terrible pain. I like to fornicate, and I would say that, in a certain sense, I am a voluptuary. I often have fiascoes or experience a humiliating premature ejaculation, it is true. But, other times, I have prolonged and repeated orgasms that give me the sensation of being as ethereal and radiant as the Archangel Gabriel. The repulsion I inspire in my lovers turns into attraction, and even into delirium, once they overcome—thanks almost always to alcohol or drugs—their initial prejudices and agree to do amorous battle with me in bed. Women even come to love me, in fact, and become addicted to my ugliness. In the depths of her soul, Beauty was always fascinated by the Beast, as so many fantastic tales and mythologies recount, and it is only in rare cases that the heart of a good-looking youth does not harbor something perverse.

—translated by Helen Lane