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having expressly planned it, because of the esteem I have for you. But watch your tongue. I would not be pleased if this story were to become tavern gossip and marketplace tittle-tattle. I might regret having brought you here.”
    He swore to me that he would never say a word.
    But he did. If not, how did there come to be so many stories about what happened? The various versions contradict one another, each of them more absurd and more untrue than the next. They reach our ears, and though they annoyed us in the beginning, they amuse us now. It is something that has come to be part of this little southern kingdom of that country which centuries later will go by the name of Turkey. Like its bone-dry mountains and its churlish subjects, like its wandering tribes, its falcons, and its bears. After all, I am not displeased at the idea that, once time has gone by, swallowing everything that now exists and surrounds me, the one thing to come down to future generations on the waters of the shipwreck of Lydia’s history will be, round and solar, bountiful as spring, the croup of Lucrecia the queen, my wife.

Three.
The Wednesday Ear Ritual
    “They’re like conch shells that bear within them, trapped in their mother-of-pearl labyrinth, the music of the sea,” Don Rigoberto fantasized. His ears were large and prominent; both of them, but the left one in particular, tended to stand out from his head at the top, curving back on themselves, determined to capture for themselves only all the world’s sounds. Though as a child he was ashamed of their size and their downturned form, he had learned to accept them. And now that he devoted one night a week to their care alone, he even felt proud of them. Because, moreover, by dint of careful and persistent experimenting, he had managed to get those graceless appendages to participate, along with the alacrity of his mouth and the efficacy of his sense of touch, in his nights of love. Lucrecia, too, was fond of them and, in private, paid them any number of pretty compliments. In certain phases of their conjugal cavalry skirmishes she affectionately referred to them as “my little Dumbos.”
    “Full-blown flowers, sensitive wing cases, auditoriums for music and dialogues,” Don Rigoberto poeticized. With the aid of a magnifying glass, he carefully examined the cartilaginous edges of his left ear. Yes, the tiny tips of little hairs plucked out the previous Wednesday were showing again. There were three of them, asymmetrical, like the points defining the sides of a scalene triangle. He imagined the dark little tuft of hair that they would turn into if he let them grow, if he stopped rooting them out, and a fleeting sensation of nausea suddenly came over him. Hurriedly, with the dexterity stemming from constant practice, he grasped those hairy heads between the prongs of the tweezers and pulled them out, one after the other. The tingling sensation that accompanied the extirpation made a delicious hot-and-cold shiver run up his spine. It was as though Doña Lucrecia were there, kneeling, her even white teeth disentangling the kinky little ringlets of his pubis. The mere idea gave him a semi-erection. He reined it in immediately, imagining a hirsute woman, her ears clogged with clumps of matted hair and a pronounced mustache on her upper lip, in whose shadows drops of sweat were trembling. He then remembered the story that a colleague of his in the insurance business had recounted, that time, on returning from a vacation in the Caribbean: how the undisputed queen of a brothel in Santo Domingo was a big beefy mulatta with a startling hairy crest between her breasts. He tried to imagine Lucrecia with a similar attribute—a silken mane!—between her ivory breasts and was horrified. I have all sorts of prejudices when it comes to lovemaking, he confessed to himself. But for the moment he had no intention of giving up any of them. Hair was acceptable, it was a strong sexual seasoning, provided it was