Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

by Carlos Fuentes

  She wants you to believe the opposite: nothing should ever be fixed, everything must always be in flux, that is pleasure, liberty, diversion, art, life. Have you heard her moaning at night? Have you felt her nails on your face? Have you seen her sitting on the toilet? Have you had to clean her filth from the bed? Have you ever soothed her to sleep? Have you ever prepared her pap? Do you know what it’s like to live every day with a woman with no voice, no language? Pardon me, Bernardo: do you know what it’s like to open your hand and find there that …

  Sometimes I see myself behind him in the glass, when we are in a hurry and must both shave at once. The mirror is like an abyss. It doesn’t matter that I fall in it. Not everything happens only in the mind, as you seem to think, Bernardo.

  Bernardo and Toño

  She whispered in my ear, with a breath of dust: How would you like to die? Can you picture yourself crucified? Can you imagine yourself with a crown of thorns? Tell me if you would like to die like Him. Would you dare, you wretch? Would you ask for a death like His? Don’t cover your ears, poor devil! You want to possess me and you aren’t capable of thinking of a death that would make me adore you? Then I will tell you what I’ll do with you, Toño, my little tony Toño, I’ll make you die of sickness, young or old, murdered like your friend Bernardo’s father, in a street accident, in a nightclub quarrel, fighting over a whore, gunned down, die however you die, tony Toño, I’ll dig up your body, gnaw your skeleton until you are sand, and I’ll put you in an hourglass, to mark the passing time: I’ll turn you into the sand in an hourglass, my little one, and I’ll turn you over every half hour, that will keep me busy until I die, turning you on your head every thirty minutes, how do you like my idea, how do you like it?

  Bernardo

  I know: I am coming back to take care of her. I enter our apartment without a sound. I open the door carefully. I’m sure that even before I’m inside I can hear her voice, very low, very far off, saying: I believe in you, I’m not sick, I do believe in you. I slam the door and the voice stops. I hate hearing words not meant for me. Can one be a poet in that case? I believe so, deeply: the words that I must hear are not necessarily directed toward me, they are not words only for me, but they are never words I shouldn’t be hearing. I’ve thought that love is an abyss; language too, and the words of another’s confidences, intrigues, and secrets—words of friends, politicians, insincere lovers—they are not mine.

  The poet is not a Peeping Tom—that may be the novelist’s role, I don’t know. The poet doesn’t seek, he receives; the poet doesn’t look through keyholes, he closes his eyes in order to see.

  She stopped talking. I went in and found Toño lying in my bed, his arms crossed over his face. I heard the clear glug-glug of the enchanted water. Slowly I entered the bath, parting the beaded curtain with its Malaysian sound.

  There she was, at the bottom of a tub full of steaming-hot water, her paint peeling, with barely a trace of eyebrows, of lips, of her languid eyes, already peeling away, blistering from the hot water, submerged in a glassy death, her final display window, her long black hair free at last, floating like algae, clean at last, no longer matted down, my woman was sleeping, in the window where no one would ever see her or admire her or desire her: never again imagine her, unhappy one, Desdichada …

  And yet I had to take her out and hold her one more time, comfort her, now cling to me, only me, go to sleep, my soul … How would it have been—I say to Toño—if one afternoon I had listened to you and taken La Desdichada to have tea at Aunt Fernandita’s house, and cousin Sonsoles had served us an insipid tea that was really an apple drink, and then the silly girl had invited us up to her dollhouse, to stay there, the three of us? Then what—I asked Toño—then what? Take this handkerchief, these panties, these stockings. They’re just things I’ve been gathering for her, here and there.

  Toño

  Throughout the wake, Bernardo didn’t look at her. He only looked at me. It doesn’t matter; I accept his reproaches. He doesn’t say a word to me. I don’t respond to his silent question. I could tell him—though it isn’t true: “You know why: because she refused to love me.”

  I went to buy her casket from the funeral home on the corner.

  Teófilo Sánchez and Ventura del Castillo came over. Ventura brought a sprig of fragrant spikenard. Arturo Ogarrio arrived with two tall tapers, he placed them at the head of the coffin and lit them.

  I went out to eat a sandwich nearby, watchful and sad. Bernardo left after me. He paused in the patio. He looked at the bottom of the dry fountain. It began to rain: the warm round drops of the month of July in the Mexican plateau. The sky-high tropics. The cats of the neighborhood slunk across the roofs and eaves of the house.

  When I came running back, protecting myself from the torrential rain with a copy of the Ultimas Notícias de Excélsior, with my lapels turned up, brushing the water off my shoulders and stomping hard, the coffin was empty and none of the four—Ventura, Teófilo, Arturo, Bernardo—was there.

  I laid out the wet paper on the sofa. I hadn’t read it. Besides, we saved the papers to light the water heater. I read the news of July 17, 1936: four generals had taken up arms in the Grand Canary Island against the Spanish Republic. Francisco Franco flew from Las Palmas to Tetuán in a plane called the Rapid Dragon.

  Bernardo

  (i)

  Some months later my loneliness led me back to the Waikiki. My Aunt Fernanda had let me stay at her house. All right, I will be frank: my poverty was great, but not as great as my wretchedness. I will go further. I needed the warmth of a home, I admit it, and the evocations of the Andalusian sun of my ancestors gave it to me, notwithstanding even the flirtations of that fake maja, cousin Sonsoles. On the other hand, I found it more difficult every day to put up with Uncle Feliciano, a Franco supporter to the bone; his trips to Veracruz provided the only relief, before I realized that he went to the port to organize the Spanish merchants against the red republic of Madrid, as he liked to call it.

  I began to spend a lot of time at the nightclub, stupidly blowing my mother’s check on dolls and drink. This was Toño’s world not mine; perhaps my secret desire was that I’d run into him there, we’d make up, forget La Desdichada, and resume our comfortable life together, which permitted us to share expenses that we really couldn’t afford if we each lived alone.

  There is something else (I must add): the visits to the nightclub reconciled me to the mystery of my city. The Waikiki was a public hiding place, as well as a private agora. In it, one felt oneself surrounded by the vast enigma of the oldest city of the New World, a city that one can travel to by train, plane, and highway, stay in a hotel, eat in restaurants, visit museums, and still never see.

  The unwary visitor doesn’t understand that the true Mexico City is not there. It must be imagined, it can’t be seen directly. It demands words to bring it to life, like the Baroque statue that can be fully seen only if one moves around it; like the poem that makes one condition to be ours: Speak me. Syllables, words, images, metaphors: a lyrical sentence is completed only when it goes beyond metaphor and becomes epiphany. The intangible crown on this web of encounters is, finally, amazement: the epiphany is wonderful because the poem now is written but cannot be seen; it is said (it said-duces).

  There must be a place for the final encounter of the poet and his reader: a port of sail.

  I see my city like this poem of invisible architecture, successfully concluded only to begin again, perpetually. The conclusion is the condition of the new beginning. And to start anew is to be led to the epiphany to come: I evoke names and places, Argentina and Donceles Streets, Reforma and Madero Avenues, the Churches of Santa Veracruz and San Hipólito, the pirul and the ahuehuete trees, calla lilies, a skeleton on a bicycle and a wasp stinging my forehead, Orozco and Tolsá, Porrúa Brothers Bookstore and Tacuba Café, the Cine Iris, sunstone and stone sun, zarzuelas at the Arbeu Theater, ahuautles and huitlacoche, pineapple and coriander, jicama and cactus with white cheese; L
os Leones desert, Ajusco Mountain and Colonia Roma, gooey popcorn and morning sweet rolls, the Salamanca ice-cream shop, the Waikiki and Rio Rosa cabarets, wet season and dry season: Mexico, D.F. In the renewed mystery of the city, starting from any of its streets, eating a taco, entering a movie house, I could meet my dear friend Toño again and tell him it’s all right, it’s all over, shake hands, man, buddies again, brothers forever, come on, Toñito …

  I released myself from the woman who was rubbing my knee, and set my glass on the table. The comic uproar in the middle of the nightclub’s raised runway, the unexpected Spanish dancing, the mood of a bullfight victory celebration, the play of warm red and blue lights, and the unmistakable figure of Teófilo Sánchez, his short jacket, his miner’s boots, his hair like a new recruit’s (shaved with the aid of a bowl), dancing to the exuberant music with a woman dressed in a wedding gown, moving back and forth, lifting her in the air, the arms of the popular poet showing her, on high, to all, clasping her tightly to his chest like a prize he’d been coveting, head to toe, that light, stiff, unpainted creature; again they crossed the stage, now spinning, her rigid arms raised as for a chant of hallucinated snakes, turning in circles, the music swelling double-time, and now Teófilo Sánchez threw his companion dressed as a bride into the air, her collar buttoned to her ears, her face covered by a wedding veil, hiding the signs of age, destruction, water, fire, pockmarks … the intensely sad eyes of the mannequin.

  I went to jump up on the runway to put an end to the horrible spectacle. It wasn’t necessary. Other small disturbances succeeded the first, like an earthquake followed by an aftershock, a new shaking that makes us forget the first, which seems remote, though it’s only a few seconds old. A commotion on the runway an angry scream, confused movement, injured bodies, shouted curses.

  Then the lights dimmed. The scene cooled down. The darkness surrounded us. A single ray of icy light, a silver light in a world of black velvet, shone like a lunar spotlight on the runway and the band began the slowest danzón. A young man dressed all in dark gray, pale and sunken-eyed, with his lips pressed tight and his black hair slicked back, took the woman dressed as a bride in his arms and held her in the slowest danzón, moving, yes, over the space of a single tile, practically a postage stamp, almost without moving his feet, without moving his hips or his arms, the two held each other in aquarian silence. Arturo Ogarrio and the rescued woman, slow, ceremonious as a Spanish Infanta, her face hidden behind a cascade of veils, but finally free, I realized with sudden relief, finally her own mistress in the arms of this young man who did the danzón so slowly, tenderly, respectfully, passionately, while I watched the figures of the dancers moving farther and farther away in the silver light, leaving more and more space, for me, for my life and my poetry, giving up a meeting with Toño, writing a farewell to Mexico in this night the color of smoke, in exchange for a meeting with literature …

  (ii)

  The words of a poem only return to life, imperfect or not, when they flow anew; that is, when they are said. Better said (read) than dead! The poem I’m translating is called El Desdichado—Nerval’s French did not offer the verbal phantasm of the Spanish words, in which what is said (dicho) defeats what is sad (des-dicha), and what is unsaid (des-dicho), and what’s unsound(ed) (des-dicho) is rent by the sword of words. Silence is the unsaid; it is sadness, whereas a word is award. The wordless are worldless, for silence is shapeless, hapless. It’s voice versus vice—so voice verses!

  But she, La Desdichada, does not speak, she does not speak …

  I think this and surprise myself. Emotion floods over me, I translate it as she who doesn’t speak: Love, be who you may, named as you’re named (name, flame: benighted, be lighted—to name is to bring to life, to flame is to inflame), speak through me, Desdichada, unhappy, unsaid one, trust in the poet, let me be your voice, your word/world. I will make you sound. Speak to me, through me, for me, and in exchange for your voice I swear I will always be true, always true to you. That is my desire, Desdichada, the world is slow to give me what I want, one woman who is mine alone, and I only hers.

  Let me draw near your wooden ear, while I’m still under twenty, and tell you: I don’t know if the world will ever bring me that one woman, or if so, when. Perhaps to find her I would have to change my ways (my virtue), perhaps I would have to love many women before discovering this is it, the one and only, the here and now. And even if I find her, what will become of me then, having loved so many to find that one, telling her that it was all for her and her alone—will she believe me when I tell her that I am a man meant for only one woman?

  How can I be believed? How can I prove my sincerity? And if she doesn’t believe me, how can I believe in her? It’s okay for a nineteen-year-old writer to say these things; perhaps confidence is, after all, the most important thing. But my fear is something known best in adolescence, though never completely forgotten, even if concealed: love is an abyss.

  I choose henceforth to put my trust in one woman: will La Desdichada be my abyss, the first, best, and most faithful lover of my life? Toño would laugh. It’s easy to count on the fidelity of a wooden doll. No, it’s hard, I tell him, for a wooden doll to rely on the fidelity of a man of flesh and blood.

  (iii)

  Twenty-five years later, I returned from all the cities of the world. I wrote. I loved. I did things that pleased me. I tried to turn them into literature. But the things that pleased me were sufficient unto themselves. They didn’t want to be words. Likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes fought among themselves. With luck they became poetry. The poetry of the changing city reflected my own tensions.

  I knew the old Waikiki was closing, so I went there one night. The last night it was open. I saw Toño sitting a little ways from me. He had gotten fatter and had an impressive mustache. There was no need to greet each other. What would he think of me, after a quarter of a century? We walked between the tables, the dancing couples, to shake hands and sit down together. All this without speaking a word, while the band played the anthem of all slow dances, Nereidas. Then we laughed. We had forgotten the ceremony, the rite that affirmed our public friendship. We stood up. We embraced. We slapped each other on the back, on the waist, Toño, Bernardo, how are you?

  We didn’t want to reminisce. We didn’t want to slip into an easy nostalgia. The Waikiki was taking care of that. We started talking as if no time had gone by. But the end of an era was being celebrated all around us; the city would never be the same, the Expressionist carnival was ending, from now on everything would be much too vast, distant, ground down; tonight marked the end of the theatrics that everyone could share, the witticisms that everyone could repeat, the celebrities that we could celebrate without risk of foreign comparisons: our village, rose-colored, blue, vivid, was going away, it was whirling around us, inviting us to a carnival that was a funeral, the footlights pointed toward the edges of the nightclub full of smoke and sadness so that we were all mixed together: show, audience, whores, Johns, band, masters, servants, slaves: out of this crowd that moved like a sick serpent, two extraordinary figures emerged: a Pierrot and a Columbine in perfect costume: they both wore whiteface, his forehead was black, her tragic smile was painted on with lipstick; he had the black gorget, the shiny white suit of a clown, the black buttons, the satin slippers; Columbine had the white wig, the tiny fairy cap, the white gorget, the white mesh stockings, the ballet slippers; their moonlike faces were both masked.

  They came over to us, said our names. Bernardo, welcome to Mexico! Toño, we knew you’d be here! Come on! Today marks the end of the Mexico City we knew, today one city dies and another is born, come with us!

  Laughing, we asked their names.

  —Ambar.

  —Estrella.

  —Come with us.

  We took taxi after taxi, the four of us squeezed in together, breathing the intense perfume of those strange creatures. It was the last night of the city we had known. The ball at San Carlos, where they took us that night
(the perfumed couple, Pierrot and Columbine), was the annual saturnalia of the university students, who cast aside the medieval prohibitions of the Royal, Holy University of Mexico amid the Neoclassicism of the eighteenth-century palace’s stone staircases and columns: disguises, drinks, abandon, the always threatening movement of the crowd carried away by the dance, the drunkenness, the sensuality on display, the lights like waves; who was going to dance with Ambar, who with Estrella: which was the man, which was the woman, what would our hands tell us when we danced first with Columbine, then with Pierrot? And how easily the two were able to avoid our touch so that we were left without sex, with only perfume and movement. We were drunk. But we justified intoxication with a thousand excuses: seeing each other after so many years, the night, the dance, the company of this couple, the city celebrating its death, the suspicion I formed in the taxi, when we all climbed in and Estrella ordered: “Let’s have one for the road at Las Veladoras”—an outdoor bar lit by votive lamps: could it be Arturo Ogarrio and his girlfriend, his double? I asked Toño No, he answered, they’re too young, the best thing would be to pull off their masks, find out for sure. So we tried, and they both shrieked in androgynous voices, screamed horribly, squealed as pigs would if we took their hind legs and castrated them, and they cried for the taxi driver to stop, they’re killing us, and the flustered driver came to a stop, they got out, we were in front of the cathedral, Ambar and Estrella ran past the iron gate into the churchyard and on into the splendid cave of carved stone.

  We followed them inside, but our search was futile. Pierrot and Columbine had disappeared into the bowels of the cathedral. Something told me that Toño and I had not come here to find them. Sacred, profane, cathedral, cabaret, school, Orozco’s mural, the carnival of San Carlos, the agony of Mexico; I felt dizzy, I grasped a gilded screen in front of a dark side altar. I tried to catch Toño’s eye. He didn’t look at me. Toño was holding on to the screen with both hands and gazing intently at the altar behind it. It was dawn and some religious women who had been there for four centuries knelt down one more time, wrapped in black shawls as always, with skins like yellow onions. Toño didn’t look at them. The incense made me nauseated, the smell of rotting spikenard. Toño stared fixedly at the altar.