“Yes, sometimes she does. She makes a great effort and goes out. She’s going out today. For all day. You and I could…”
“Go away?”
“If you want to.”
“Well … perhaps not yet. I’m under contract. But as soon as I can finish the work, then…”
“Ah, yes. But she’s going to be out all day. We could do something.”
“What?”
“I’ll wait for you this evening in my aunt’s bedroom. I’ll wait for you as always.”
She turns away, ringing her bell like the lepers who use a bell to announce their approach, telling the unwary: “Out of the way, out of the way.” You put on your shirt and coat and follow the sound of the bell calling you to the dining room. In the parlor the widow Llorente comes toward you, bent over, leaning on a knobby cane; she’s dressed in an old white gown with a stained and tattered gauze veil. She goes by without looking at you, blowing her nose into a handkerchief, blowing her nose and spitting. She murmurs, “I won’t be at home today, Señor Montero. I have complete confidence in your work. Please keep at it. My husband’s memoirs must be published.”
She goes away, stepping across the carpets with her tiny feet, which are like those of an antique doll, and supporting herself with her cane, spitting and sneezing as if she wanted to clear something from her congested lungs. It’s only by an effort of the will that you keep yourself from following her with your eyes, despite the curiosity you feel at seeing the yellowed bridal gown she’s taken from the bottom of that old trunk in her bedroom.
You scarcely touch the cold coffee that’s waiting for you in the dining room. You sit for an hour in the tall, arch-back chair, smoking, waiting for the sounds you never hear, until finally you’re sure the old lady has left the house and can’t catch you at what you’re going to do. For the last hour you’ve had the key to the trunk clutched in your hand, and now you get up and silently walk through the parlor into the hallway, where you wait for another fifteen minutes—your watch tells you how long—with your ear against Señora Consuelo’s door. Then you slowly push it open until you can make out, beyond the spider’s web of candles, the empty bed on which her rabbit is gnawing at a carrot: the bed that’s always littered with scraps of bread, and that you touch gingerly as if you thought the old lady might be hidden among the rumples of the sheets. You walk over to the corner where the trunk is, stepping on the tail of one of those rats; it squeals, escapes from your foot, and scampers off to warn the others. You fit the copper key into the rusted padlock, remove the padlock, and then raise the lid, hearing the creak of the old, stiff hinges. You take out the third portion of the memoirs—it’s tied with a red ribbon—and under it you discover those photographs, those old, brittle, dog-eared photographs. You pick them up without looking at them, clutch the whole treasure to your breast, and hurry out of the room without closing the trunk, forgetting the hunger of the rats. You close the door, lean against the wall in the hallway till you catch your breath, then climb the stairs to your room.
Up there you read the new pages, the continuation, the events of an agonized century. In his florid language General Llorente describes the personality of Eugenia de Montijo, pays his respects to Napoleon the Little, summons up his most martial rhetoric to proclaim the Franco-Prussian War, fills whole pages with his sorrow at the defeat, harangues all men of honor about the Republican monster, sees a ray of hope in General Boulanger, sighs for Mexico, believes that in the Dreyfus affairs the honor—always that word “honor”—of the army has asserted itself again.
The brittle pages crumble at your touch: you don’t respect them now, you’re only looking for a reappearance of the woman with green eyes. “I know why you weep at times, Consuelo. I have not been able to give you children, although you are so radiant with life…” And later: “Consuelo, you should not tempt God. We must reconcile ourselves. Is not my affection enough? I know that you love me; I feel it. I am not asking you for resignation, because that would offend you. I am only asking you to see, in the great love which you say you have for me, something sufficient, something that can fill both of us, without the need of turning to sick imaginings…” On another page: “I told Consuelo that those medicines were utterly useless. She insists on growing her own herbs in the garden. She says she is not deceiving herself. The herbs are not to strengthen the body, but rather the soul.” Later: “I found her in a delirium, embracing the pillow. She cried, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I’ve done it, I’ve re-created her! I can invoke her, I can give her life with my own life!’ It was necessary to call the doctor. He told me he could not quiet her, because the truth was that she was under the effects of narcotics, not of stimulants.” And finally: “Early this morning I found her walking barefooted through the hallways. I wanted to stop her. She went by without looking at me, but her words were directed to me. ‘Don’t stop me,’ she said. ‘I’m going toward my youth, and my youth is coming toward me. It’s coming in, it’s in the garden, it’s come back…’ Consuelo, my poor Consuelo! Even the devil was an angel once.”
There isn’t any more. The memoirs of General Llorente end with that sentence: “Consuelo, le démon aussi était un ange, avant…”
And after the last page, the portraits. The portrait of an elderly gentleman in a military uniform, an old photograph with these words in one corner: “Moulin, Photographe, 35 Boulevard Haussmann” and the date “1894.” Then the photograph of Aura, of Aura with her green eyes, her black hair gathered in ringlets, leaning against a Doric column with a painted landscape in the background: the landscape of a Lorelei in the Rhine. Her dress is buttoned up to the collar, there’s a handkerchief in her hand, she’s wearing a bustle: Aura, and the date “1876” in white ink, and on the back of the daguerreotype, in spidery handwriting: “Fait pour notre dixième anniversaire de mariage,” and a signature in the same hand, “Consuelo Llorente.” In the third photograph you see both Aura and the old gentleman, but this time they’re dressed in outdoor clothes, sitting on a bench in a garden. The photograph has become a little blurred: Aura doesn’t look as young as she did in the other picture, but it’s she, it’s he, it’s … it’s you. You stare and stare at the photographs, then hold them up to the skylight. You cover General Llorente’s beard with your finger, and imagine him with black hair, and you only discover yourself: blurred, lost, forgotten, but you, you, you.
Your head is spinning, overcome by the rhythms of that distant waltz, by the odor of damp, fragrant plants: you fall exhausted on the bed, touching your cheeks, your eyes, your nose, as if you were afraid that some invisible hand had ripped off the mask you’ve been wearing for twenty-seven years, the cardboard features that hid your true face, your real appearance, the appearance you once had but then forgot. You bury your face in the pillow, trying to keep the wind of the past from tearing away your own features, because you don’t want to lose them. You lie there with your face in the pillow, waiting for what has to come, for what you can’t prevent. You don’t look at your watch again, that useless object tediously measuring time in accordance with human vanity, those little hands marking out the long hours that were invented to disguise the real passage of time, which races with a mortal and insolent swiftness no clock could ever measure. A life, a century, fifty years: you can’t imagine those lying measurements any longer, you can’t hold that bodiless dust within your hands.
When you look up from the pillow, you find you’re in darkness. Night has fallen.
Night has fallen. Beyond the skylight the swift black clouds are hiding the moon, which tries to free itself, to reveal its pale, round, smiling face. It escapes for only a moment, then the clouds hide it again. You haven’t got any hope left. You don’t even look at your watch. You hurry down the stairs, out of that prison cell with its old papers and faded daguerreotypes, and stop at the door of Señora Consuelo’s room, and listen to your own voice, muted and transformed after all those hours of silence: “Aura…”
Again: “Aura…”
You enter the room. The
votive lights have gone out. You remember that the old lady has been away all day: without her faithful attention the candles have all burned up. You grope forward in the darkness to the bed.
And again: “Aura…”
You hear a faint rustle of taffeta, and the breathing that keeps time with your own. You reach out your hand to touch Aura’s green robe.
“No. Don’t touch me. Lie down at my side.”
You find the edge of the bed, swing up your legs, and remain there stretched out and motionless. You can’t help feeling a shiver of fear: “She might come back any minute.”
“She won’t come back.”
“Ever?”
“I’m exhausted. She’s already exhausted. I’ve never been able to keep her with me for more than three days.”
“Aura…”
You want to put your hand on Aura’s breasts. She turns her back: you can tell by the difference in her voice.
“No … Don’t touch me…”
“Aura … I love you.”
“Yes. You love me. You told me yesterday that you’d always love me.”
“I’ll always love you, always. I need your kisses, your body…”
“Kiss my face. Only my face.”
You bring your lips close to the head that’s lying next to yours. You stroke Aura’s long black hair. You grasp that fragile woman by the shoulders, ignoring her sharp complaint. You tear off her taffeta robe, embrace her, feel her small and lost and naked in your arms, despite her moaning resistance, her feeble protests, kissing her face without thinking, without distinguishing, and you’re touching her withered breasts when a ray of moonlight shines in and surprises you, shines in through a chink in the wall that the rats have chewed open, an eye that lets in a beam of silvery moonlight. It falls on Aura’s eroded face, as brittle and yellowed as the memoirs, as creased with wrinkles as the photographs. You stop kissing those fleshless lips, those toothless gums: the ray of moonlight shows you the naked body of the old lady, of Señora Consuelo, limp, spent, tiny, ancient, trembling because you touch her. You love her, you too have come back …
You plunge your face, your open eyes, into Consuelo’s silver-white hair, and you’ll embrace her again when the clouds cover the moon, when you’re both hidden again, when the memory of youth, of youth re-embodied, rules the darkness.
“She’ll come back, Felipe. We’ll bring her back together. Let me recover my strength and I’ll bring her back…”
BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES
Aura
Distant Relations
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
Terra Nostra
The Campaign
The Old Gringo
Where the Air Is Clear
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Good Conscience
Burnt Water
The Hydra Head
A Change of Skin
Christopher Unborn
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
The Orange Tree
Myself with Others
The Buried Mirror
A New Time for Mexico
The Crystal Frontier
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1965 by Carlos Fuentes
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish under the title Aura, copyright © 1962 by Ediciones Era, S.A.
Published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1980
First paperback edition, 1975
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuentes, Carlos.
Aura / Carlos Fuentes.
English and Spanish.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-51171-5
ISBN-10: 0-374-51171-3
I. Title.
PZ4.F952Au7 [PQ7297.F793] 863
75-2417
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 9781466840041
First eBook edition: February 2013
Aura Page 4
