An Erotic Trip That Traverses Too-Familiar Territory

Mario Vargas Llosa seemed to depart from his fictions of Latin American darkness when he wrote “In Praise of the Stepmother” a few years ago. It is the elegant and highly erotic tale of Don Rigoberto: timid and proper in public and lush keeper of a pleasure garden in the harem-like privacy of his Lima home.

Certainly Don Rigoberto’s comic sexual rituals with his second wife, Lucrecia, and her artful seduction by Fonchito, Rigoberto’s 12-year-old son--as the bough is bent, so bends the twig--are delicate irony and insidiously pleasurable. Yet the “seemed” is appropriate.

“Stepmother” was not an entire departure. It is a parody of a theme developed in Vargas Llosa’s weightier novels: the Latin American male as conqueror and solipsist, and the indistinguishable line between solipsism and conquest.

In public, Don Rigoberto is a compliant insurance executive. Yet why should insurance, that epitome of calculated caution, exclude art? Look at Kafka and Wallace Stevens, he demands. And once at home, he is the kingly artificer of a kinky domestic establishment--or tries to be. He is too nice to quite succeed: the Marquis de Sade with a heart of meltable butter and awkwardly large ears.

At the end of “Stepmother,” he had brokenheartedly expelled Lucrecia to an apartment, leaving Fonchito, a golden cherub in whose mouth no butter would ever melt, in place. “The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto” picks up a year later.

Lucrecia is sorrowful and pining. Rigoberto is in worse shape: prey to lacerating sexual hallucinations, and writing pompous denunciations of all manner of contemporary practices. And one day Fonchito appears at Lucrecia’s apartment, golden and plaintive as ever. It was his tears as much as his beauty that had seduced her, and now he employs them--along with a forged correspondence he sets up between father and stepmother--to seduce her into coming home.

“Notebooks” shares some of “Stepmother’s” qualities: elegant writing, lovely conceits and a fusing of humor with erotic arousal. It is, nevertheless, a twice-told tale and suffers from it. The characters remain the same: Don Rigoberto, erotic philosopher, as architect of his own disaster; Lucrecia, his devoted pupil and beguilingly helpless before Fonchito; and Fonchito as a cherub-satyr souffle.

Accordingly, perhaps, Vargas Llosa forces his material. The witty erotic balance with which Rigoberto recounted life with Lucrecia is lost in his hallucinations after she has left. One of these is delightful: He imagines a suitor spiriting her away on a luxurious European tour, with Lucrecia meting out one additional favor each night. The suitor, nicknamed Pluto, is as hapless as Rigoberto. To sustain intercourse, he must sing pop songs at the top of his voice.

Other fantasies are strained: Rigoberto’s brother and Lucrecia have sex while he and the brother’s wife look on--she aroused and he miserable. There is a coprophilic affair between Lucrecia and a man in a wheelchair, and another in which she and her maid make love.

There are bright spots. Rigoberto describes how he limits his library to exactly 4,000 books. As he acquires new ones, he burns others. “I was engaging in literary criticism as it should be practiced: radically, irreverently, flammably,” he remarks.

In a series of unposted letters, he descants upon many things, including religion and Playboy magazine. He is against the latter because it “municipalizes” eroticism, which, properly practiced, requires “risk and modesty.” Declining to join the Rotary Club, he inquires why there are no women. Surely, he writes, the members cannot all be gay, “which would be the only vaguely acceptable justification for the trouserism.”

Unfortunately, the letters go on, with stylish turns of phrase but little other excitement. It is Rigoberto, or perhaps Vargas Llosa, taking his thoughts for a walk. There is more spirit when Fonchito lays siege to an eventually wavering Lucrecia to repair the marriage. The boy charms while Lucrecia displays a winning ability to feel two opposite emotions at once. A resilient realism underpins her susceptibility.

“Notebooks” is burdened with an excess of padding. Fonchito’s belief that he is really the Viennese painter Egon Schiele helps Vargas Llosa talk about Schiele, but it does little for Fonchito. If his seduction of Lucrecia is less lively than in “Stepmother,” it is because he uses his wiles not to do but to undo.

Instead of unfolding a comic disaster, the movement in “Notebooks” consists of folding it and putting it away again, a process unable to sustain its own artifice. It is not the same to pack for an exotic trip as to repack for the return.