A dream of sons and lovers

Mario Vargas Llosa revisits the theme of a youth, an older woman, and the multiple illusions of sex

Author: By Linda Wolfe

Date: SUNDAY, June 14, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

Rigoberto, an ugly man with ``great Buddha ears and outrageous nose,'' is convinced that his second wife, the beautiful and much younger Lucrecia, has taken his schoolboy son to her bed. Angry, he throws her out of their house, and during their yearlong separation comforts himself with writing in his notebooks. As for Lucrecia, she seems at first to be enjoying the separation -- or at least enjoying, during it, a number of exotic erotic encounters. Her expenses paid in full, she travels to Europe, where she makes love in opulent quarters with an old beau who is in the habit of singing when he ejaculates. But by the time Lucrecia has an affair with Rigoberto's twin brother, makes love in a steambath to the wife of an ambassador, and participates in a three-way encounter with Rigoberto and a Mexican whore, it has become apparent that all of Lucrecia's sexual activities are merely the figments of Don Rigoberto's perfervid imagination.

He finds Lucrecia hot stuff indeed. But the reader may not. In scenes that coexist with the fantasies and detail Lucrecia's actual life during the marital breakup, she emerges as quite straitlaced and rather dullwitted. When her stepson, Fonchito, the cause of the separation, takes to visiting her and showing her the erotic prints of his favorite painter, Egon Schiele, Lucrecia suspects he is trying to seduce her but does not succumb to his approaches. Rather, she wonders -- incessantly -- whether the boy is really attempting to sexualize their relationship. ``He was a boy, only a boy. Wasn't he?'' she muses. Is he ``a consummate actor,'' she asks herself, ``or merely an innocent boy and she an idiotic, dirty old woman?'' To the boy himself, she says, ``I never know if I'm with a child or a dirty, perverse old man hiding behind the face of the Infant Jesus.'' Before Lucrecia wises up to Fonchito's real interest -- the desire to reunite his father and stepmother -- we perceive that the author is trying to tell us, both through Rigoberto's notebooks and Lucrecia's endless self-questioning, that the notion of others as incorrigibly sexual is, like beauty, a function of the mind of the beholder.

There's more he may be trying to tell us, for Vargas Llosa -- an essayist as well as a novelist, not to mention a former president of PEN and a onetime candidate for president of Peru -- also engages in cultural criticism here. Shoehorned into the mix of story and fantasy are letters, often to unnamed individuals, in which Rigoberto expresses contrarian views about contemporary society. In one, he takes on exponents of patriotism: ``Behind patriotism and nationalism, there always burns the malignant fiction of collectivist identity, that ontological barbed wire which attempts to congregate `Peruvians,' `Spaniards,' `French,' `Chinese,' etc. in inescapable and unmistakable fraternity. You and I know that these categories are abject lies that throw a mantle of oblivion over countless diversities and incompatibilities, and attempt to abolish centuries of history and return civilization to those barbaric times preceding the creation of individuality, not to mention rationality and freedom.'' In another, he rails against readers of magazines like Playboy: ``This kind of magazine symbolizes the corruption of sex, the disappearance of the beautiful taboos that once surrounded it and against which the human spirit could rebel . . . gradually creating the sovereign individual in the secret and discreet elaboration of rituals, actions, images, cults, fantasies, ceremonies which, by ethically ennobling the act of love and conferring aesthetic distinction upon it, progressively humanized it until it was transformed into a creative act.'' Other targets of these verbose diatribes include militant feminists, sports enthusiasts, and Rotarians.

Vargas Llosa surely had a high ambition for this novel of daydreams and cogitation. One of the book's two epigraphs is a line from Hoelderlin's ``Hyperion'': ``Man, a god when he dreams, barely a beggar when he thinks.'' But sadly, ``Don Rigoberto'' doesn't hold together. Indeed, it seems almost tossed off, its structure casual, its scenes repetitious, its letters overlong, its sexual fantasies more silly than arousing, and its characters, except for the pontificating satyromanic Rigoberto, unconvincing. ``Aunt Julia'' was entertaining. ``Don Rigoberto'' has its entertaining moments, but as a whole it is merely tedious.