Read The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto for Free Online

horsemen, their testicles shrunken by the friction of the saddle, to be a particularly lugubrious type of human castrato). I respect, at a distance, those who attribute an erotic function to animals, but I personally am not seduced (on the contrary, it makes me smell nasty odors and presume a whole series of physical discomforts) by the idea of copulating with a chicken, a duck, a monkey, a mare, or any species with orifices, and I harbor the enervating suspicion that those who find gratification in such gymnastic feats are, in the marrow of their bones—and please do not take this personally—primitive ecologists and unknowing conservationists, more than capable in the future of banding together with Brigitte Bardot (whom I too, let it be said, loved as a young man) and working for the survival of the seals. Although, on occasion, I have had unsettling fantasies of a beautiful naked woman rolling on a bed covered with kittens, the fact that sixty-three million cats and fifty-four million dogs are household pets in the United States alarms me more than the host of atomic weapons stored in half a dozen countries of the former Soviet Union.
    If this is what I think of quadrupeds and mangy birds, you can well imagine the feelings awakened in me by murmuring trees, dense forests, delicious foliage, singing rivers, deep ravines, crystalline peaks, and so forth and so on. All these natural resources have significance and justification for me if they pass through the filter of urban civilization; in other words, if they are manufactured and transmuted—it does not matter to me if we say denaturalized, but I would prefer the currently discredited term humanized—by books, paintings, film, or television. To be sure we understand each other, I would give my life (this should not be taken literally since it is obvious hyperbole) to save the poplars that raise their lofty crowns in Góngora’s “Polyphemus,” the almond trees that whiten his “Solitudes,” the weeping willows in Garcilaso’s “Eclogues,” or the sunflowers and wheat fields that distill their golden honey onto the canvases of Van Gogh, but I would not shed a tear in praise of pine groves devastated by summer fires, and my hand would not tremble as I signed an amnesty for the arsonists who turn Andean, Siberian, or Alpine forests to ashes. Nature that is not passed through art or literature, Nature au naturel , full of flies, mosquitoes, mud, rats, and cockroaches, is incompatible with refined pleasures such as bodily hygiene and elegance of dress.
    For the sake of brevity, I will summarize my thinking—my phobias, at any rate—by explaining that if what you call “urban blight” were to advance unchecked and swallow up all the meadows of the world, and the earth were to be covered by an outbreak of skyscrapers, metal bridges, asphalt streets, artificial lakes and parks, paved plazas, and underground parking lots, and the entire planet were encased in reinforced concrete and steel beams and became a single, spherical, endless city (but one abounding in bookstores, galleries, libraries, restaurants, museums, and cafés), the undersigned, homo urbanus to his very bones, would applaud.
    For the reasons stated above, I will not contribute one cent to the Chlorophyll and Dung Association, over which you preside, and will do everything in my power (very little, don’t worry) to keep you from achieving your ends and to prevent your bucolic philosophy from destroying the object that is emblematic of the culture which you despise and I venerate: the truck.
    Pluto’s Dream
    In the solitude of his study, awake in the cold dawn, Don Rigoberto repeated from memory the phrase of Borges he had just found: “Adultery is usually made up of tenderness and abnegation.” A few pages after the Borgesian citation, the letter appeared before him, undamaged by the corrosive passage of years:
     
    Dear Lucrecia:
    Reading these lines will bring you the surprise of your life, and