From In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Helen Lane

As he rolled little balls of cotton around the tips of the tweezers and wet them with soap and water so as to clean out the wax that had accumulated inside his ear, he anticipated what those clean funnels would soon be hearing as they descended from his wife's breasts to her navel. They need make no special effort there to surprise Lucrecia's secret music, for a veritable symphony of sounds, liquid and solid, prolonged and brief, diffuse and clear, would immediately reveal their hidden life to him. He looked forward with gratitude to how deeply he would be moved to perceive, thanks to those organs which he was now scraping clean with meticulous care and affection, ridding them of the oily film that formed on them every so often, something of the secret existence of her body: glands, muscles, blood vessels, hair follicles, membranes, tissues, filaments, ducts, tubes, all that rich and subtle biological orography that lay beneath the smooth epidermis of Lucrecia's belly. Exists on the inside or the outside of her, he thought. Because everything about her is or can be erogenous.
     He was not exaggerating, carried away by the tenderness that her sudden appearance in his fantasies always gave rise to. No, absolutely not. For thanks to his unyielding perseverance, he had managed to fall in love with the whole and with each one of the parts of his wife, to love, separately and together, all the components of that cellular universe. He knew himself capable of responding erotically, with a prompt, robust erection, to the stimulus of any of its infinite ingredients, including the meanest and humblest, including what to the ordinary hominid was the most inconceivable and most repellent. "Here lies Don Rigoberto, who contrived to love the epigastrium of his spouse as much as her vulva or her tongue," he philosophically projected as a fitting epitaph on the marble of his tomb. Would that mortuary motto be a lie? Not in the slightest. He thought of how impassioned he would become, very shortly, when the sound of muffled aqueous displacements reached his ears, avidly flattened against her soft stomach, and at this moment he could already hear the lively burbling of that flatus, the joyous cracking of a fart, the gargle and yawn of her vagina, or the languid stretching of her serpentine intestine. And he could already hear himself whispering, blind with love and lust, the phrases with which it was his habit to render his wife homage as he caressed her. "Those little noises, too, are you, Lucrecia; they are your characteristic harmony, your resounding person." He was certain that he would not have the opportunity to verify, since he would never embark upon the experiment of hearing love with any other woman. Wasn't Lucrecia an ocean of unfathomable depths that he, the lover-diver, would never have done with exploring? "I love you," he murmured, feeling once again the dawn of an erection.