In Praise of the Stepmother
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Helen Lane
Farrar Straus Giroux, 149 pages, $18.95
Defeated presidential candidates are supposed to write books like ”My Six Crises” or inspirational tomes on weathering one`s fifties usefully. Mario Vargas Llosa, who is 54 and last spring lost a campaign for the presidency of Peru, has written a novel about a 7-year-old boy who seduces his beautiful new middle-aged stepmother.
Of course, Vargas Llosa is both a politician and a prolific professional writer whose fiction has aroused controversy from the time his first novel, translated into English in 1966 as ”The Time of the Hero,” so outraged authorities at the Lima military academy he had attended that they
ceremonially burned hundreds of copies of it.
His subsequent work has alternated and sometimes mingled the themes of social comment and erotic daring. That intermixture in this new book has a precedent in ”Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” (1982), in which a teenage boy`s campaign to seduce a recently divorced and sexy aunt amounts to a devastating satire on the illusions and self-delusions of propriety and convention.
But the best light in which to view Vargas Llosa`s unsettling new novel comes from his passionate and brilliant work of literary criticism ”The Perpetual Orgy” (1986), a study of ”Madame Bovary.”
”The greater the role that rebellion, violence, melodrama, and sex, expertly combined in a compact plot, have played in a novel, the greater its appeal has been to me,” Vargas Llosa says in ”The Perpetual Orgy.” And ”In Praise of the Stepmother” certainly was written to these specifications, daringly so in view of the current sensitivity to the issue of child sexual abuse. But it is important to emphasize that this book-like Nabokov`s
”Lolita”-is about the innocent evil of which children are capable, with the accent on ”innocent.”
Grownups in the West get very nervous about the existence of infantile sexuality and have tended to deny or suppress any knowledge of it ever since Freud first pointed out the universal ”polymorphous perversity” of children. And this is where the corruption comes in: among adults and what they think and do. If they take advantage of a child to satisfy their own desire-like Humbert Humbert in ”Lolita,” like Dona Lucrecia, the stepmother in this novel, and like any number of more forcible child abusers at large today-then they are the guilty ones, though the experience may inflict a crippling guilt on the children who have been subjected to it.
Though Humbert Humbert belatedly realizes that he has ”stolen Lolita`s childhood,” and though Dona Lucrecia ends up banished and her husband Don Rigoberto broken by young Alfonso`s revelation of intercourse with his stepmother, the boy himself remains innocent and undamaged to the end. And this, among other things, leads one to think that ”Stepmother” is less a realistic account of sexual contact between an adult and a child than it is a comic Faustian fable of two grownups who are damned by their own erotomania through the agency of a demonically knowing, yet technically innocent, child. Don Rigoberto, the youngish father in this ultimate Oedipal triangle, admits to his new wife that he never knew what sex was until he married her. Once knowing, he makes a virtual religion out of it, fetishizing the parts of his own and his wife`s body with ritual ablutions and conjugal sex acts in which the idea of young Alfonso discovering sex through his apparent adoration of Lucrecia acts as a powerful stimulant for both father and stepmother.
Vargas Llosa rhapsodizes in ”The Perpetual Orgy” about how Emma Bovary, once liberated by her first extramarital affairs, ”envelops the novel in a passionate eroticism” in which, ”like the libertine literature of the eighteenth century . . . love is linked to religion or, rather, to the Church and trappings of worship.” So Dona Lucrecia, musing on the erotic thoughts she may have inspired in her stepson, feels ”a delicious warmth
. . . coursing through her veins, as though her blood had been transubstantiated into mulled wine.” Her first intuition that ”this little boy is corrupting me,” that he represents ”the devil at midday, the passion of women of a certain age,” is negated by the thought that the boy ”has just made his first communion.”
The fantasy element in the sex play is emphasized through alternation of realistic action with chapters where the three main characters (including Alfonso) get to act out their erotic fantasies, each psychoscript illustrated in the book by a color reproduction of one of the sumptuous paintings in Don Rigoberto`s extensive collection of erotica. After the chapter in which he is aroused by the idea of his son watching the proceedings, for example, he becomes in the alternating chapter Candaules, king of Lydia in Jacob Jordaens` 1648 painting in which the king is ”showing his (naked) wife to Prime Minister Gyges.”
Francois Boucher`s ”Diana at the Bath” with a handmaiden is keyed to two chapters; in the first the maid Justiniana tells Lucrecia that she has caught Alfonso spying on his naked stepmother in her bath, and in the second
”Diana Lucrecia . . . goddess of the oak tree and of forests . . . goddess of the chase,” narrates a fantasy of making love with ”Justiniana, my favorite” while being spied on by, and arousing, little ”Foncin,” who
”tends the goats and plays the panpipe.”
Sometimes, as here, the fantasies extend the erotic possibilities of the preceding realistic narrative. Sometimes they seem to represent the guilt or revulsion toward the sexual that underlies them, or the attraction of beauty to the beastly. In any case, the guilt or corruption exist only in the adults, not in the incorruptible Fonchito, the nickname by which Alfonso is often called. As the maid Justiniana asks Lucrecia, ”Is there any such thing as a right age for love, senora?” Don Rigoberto, having ritualized sex to the point where he feels a truly Nietzschean hubris (”. . . in the arms . . . of his spouse, he would feel himself to be a monarch. . . . A god.”) comes to realize that loving ”the impossible has a price that must be paid sooner or later.” And he pays it when his son shows him a school essay describing in detail what has occurred between the boy and Dona Lucrecia.
As the epilogue makes clear, only the little boy, and none of the adults, his or her own sexuality as a fact; it has to be exalted and deified or debased and demonized. And this makes what I take to be Vargas Llosa`s ultimate point: that sexuality merely is, and that the only perversity lies in the conventions and convulutions through which the guilty adult mind transmutes it into something else.
