Vargas Llosa imagines Lima as a city of extremes. It’s beautiful if you “concentrate on the landscape and the birds, but it’s “ugly if you notice the piles of garbage festering as it “piles up on the outer edge of the Malecón and spills down its face.” Most of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is concerned with graphic sexuality (some call it pornography), but Rigoberto’s family picnic is without sexual innuendo. It’s planned as a happy day in the country with his wife Lucretia and son Fonchito. But it turns out otherwise.
The Rímac River is Lima’s most important water resource is a garbage dump. Photo/Andina Defusion.
Problems are immediate: the heat in Lima is sweltering, the polluted air is dense, and traffic crawls. They lose the route to the Rímac River in Chaclacayo, and when they find it, they wander into a local garbage dump and an outdoor privy. Though none of these unfortunate facts conforms “to the pastoral expedition anticipated by Don Rigoberto,” he is “armed with unassailable patience and a crusader’s optimism.” With uncharacteristic optimism, he persuades the incredulous Lucrecia and Fonchito “not to be disheartened by difficult circumstances.”
The culminating mishap occurs when Rigoberto wades into the Rímac’s swift current, slips, and loses the picnic basket. Gone are the spicy ceviche, the rice and duck, the crepes with blancmange, and the wine. Gone are the checkered cloth and napkins especially selected by Dona Lucrecia. Everything. Miraculously there are no recriminations, and when they get home, they have another picnic in the kitchen, eating avocado-with egg-and-tomato sandwiches and sipping a cold beer.
Imagining otherwise, Rigoberto thinks his family picnic “wasn’t so disastrous after all.” Maybe. Though Rigoberto, Lucrecia, and Fonchito might laugh off the picnic’s disasters and passionately make love, Vargas Llosa is daring (warning) his readers that they might not be happy for long.
Featured Image: A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac (1780/1805ca.) Oil on Canvas. Brooklyn Museum of Art. Two centuries before Rigoberto’s picnic, an unidentified artist of the Lima School painted A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac, a happy picnic in which elegant aristocrats engage in lovemaking. Perhaps a scene such as this was the source of Rigoberto’s expectation.
See Mario Vargas Llosa. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Translated by Edith Grossman, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998