B004QGYWNU EBOK by Mario Vargas Llosa Read Free Book Online Page B

once more with envy. He imagined the dirty little head of the rope coming back into the world by way of the little Quevedoesque eye of the ass, after having traversed and cleaned out all those dark, tortuous inner recesses, and he could see it come out and fall into the basin like a crumpled carnival streamer. There it would remain, of no use to anyone, along with the last impurities that its presence had evacuated, ready for the funeral pyre. How good those youngsters must feel! How weightless! How free of all pollution! He would never be able to follow their example, at least as far as that experience was concerned. But Don Rigoberto was certain that, if they left him far behind when it came to the technique of sterilizing the bowels, in every other respect his ritual of bodily cleanliness was infinitely more scrupulous and technically exacting than that of those exotic practitioners.
    He gave one last push, discreet and soundless, just in case. Could that anecdote by any chance be true—the one that had it that the textual scholar Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who suffered from chronic constipation, spent a good part of his life, in his house in Santander, sitting on the toilet, straining? People had assured Don Rigoberto that in the house of the celebrated historian, poet, and critic, now a museum, the visiting tourist could contemplate the portable writing desk that Don Marcelino had had made to order for him so as not to be obliged to break off his research and his elegantly penned writings as he struggled against his mean, stingy belly, determined not to give up the fecal filth deposited there by heavy, hearty Spanish viands. It touched Don Rigoberto to imagine that robust intellectual, of such untroubled brow and such firm religious beliefs, shut up in his private water closet, perhaps bundled up in a thick plaid lap robe to withstand the freezing mountain cold, straining and straining for hours at a time as, undaunted, he went on digging about in old folio volumes and dusty incunabula of the history of Spain in his search for heterodoxies, impieties, schisms, blasphemies, and doctrinal follies to be catalogued.
    He wiped himself with four small squares of folded tissue and flushed the toilet. He went over to the bidet, sat down, filled it with warm water, and meticulously soaped his anus, phallus, testicles, pubis, crotch, and buttocks. Then he rinsed himself off and dried himself with a clean towel.
    Today was Tuesday, foot day. He had divided the week up among different organs arid members: Monday, hands; Wednesday, ears; Thursday, nose; Friday, hair; Saturday, eyes; and Sunday, skin. This was the variable element of the nocturnal ritual, what left it open to possible change and reformation. Concentrating each night on just one area of his body allowed him to carry out the task of cleaning it and preserving it with greater thoroughness and attention to detail; and by so doing, to know and to love it more. With each individual organ and area the master of his labors for one day, perfect impartiality with regard to the care of the whole was assured: there were no favoritisms, no postponements, no odious hierarchies with respect to the overall treatment and detailed consideration of part and whole. He thought: My body is that impossibility: an egalitarian society.
    He filled the washbasin with warm water and, installing himself on the toilet-seat cover, soaked his feet for quite some time so as to reduce the swelling in his heels, the soles of his feet, his toes, ankles, and insteps, and soften them. He did not have bunions or flat feet, though his instep, it was quite true, was unusually high. No matter; that was a minor deformity, imperceptible to anyone who did not subject his feet to clinical examination. As for size, proportion, conformation of toes and toenails, nomenclature and anatomy of the bones, everything appeared to be more or less normal. The danger lay in the corns and calluses that, every so often,