Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

by Carlos Fuentes

  4

  The morning of the tragedy, I had only four servants in the big colonial house of Las Lomas, apart from the said Dimas Palmero: a cook, a maid, a chauffeur, and a gardener. I confess that I can barely recall their features or their names. That is perhaps because, as I work in my house, I have rendered them invisible. If I went out every day to an office, I would notice them, by contrast, on my return. But they stayed out of sight so as not to disturb me. I don’t know their names, or what they are like. My secretary, Sarita Palazuelos, dealt with them; I was busy with my work in the house, I’m not married, the servants are invisible. They don’t exist, as they say.

  I think I’m alone in my house. I hear a voice, I ask:

  —Who’s there?

  —Nobody, sir, answers the maid’s little voice.

  They prefer to be invisible. But there must be someone.

  —Take this gift, girl.

  —Oh, sir, you shouldn’t. I’m nobody to get presents from you, oh, no!

  —Happy birthday, I insist.

  —Oh, but you shouldn’t be thinking of me, sir.

  They return to being invisible.

  —Oh! Excuse me!

  —Please excuse my boldness, sir.

  —I won’t bother you for even a moment, sir. I’m just going to dust the furniture.

  Now one of them had a name: Dimas Palmero.

  I couldn’t bear to see him. Hate kept me from sleeping; I hugged the pillow that held the scent, each day fainter, of Lala my love, and I cried in despair. Then, to torture myself, I racked my mind with her memory and imagined the worst: Lala with that boy; Lala in the arms of Dimas Palmero; Lala with a past. Then I realized that I couldn’t recall the face of the young murderer. Young: I said that and began to remember. I began to draw him out from the original anonymity with which I regarded him that fatal night. Uniformed as a waiter, white cotton jacket, shiny pants, bow tie, identical to all, same as none. I began to wonder how Lala might have regarded him. Young, I said; was he handsome as well? But, besides being young and handsome, was he interesting? and was he interesting because he held some secret? I induced and deduced like mad those first days of my solitude, and from his secret I passed to his interest, from his interest to his youth, and from there to his good looks. Dimas Palmero, in my strange fiftyish pseudo-widowhood, was the Lucifer who warned me: For the first time in your life, you have lost a woman, cuckold Nicolás, not because you left her, or chased her out, not even because she left you, but because I took her away from you and I took her forever. Dimas had to be handsome and he had to have a secret. No other way a cheap naco could have defeated me. It couldn’t be. It would have to take a youth who was handsome, at least, and who held a secret, to defeat me.

  I had to see him. One night it became an obsession: to see Dimas Palmero, speak with him, convince myself that at least I deserved my grief and my defeat.

  They had been bringing me trays of food. I barely touched them. I never saw who brought the tray three times a day, or who took it away. Miss Palazuelos sent a note that she was waiting for my instructions, but what instructions could I give, drowned as I was in melancholy? I told her to take a vacation while I got over my broken heart. I noticed the eyes of the boy who took the message. I didn’t know him. Surely Miss Palazuelos had substituted a new boy for Dimas Palmero. But I was obsessed: I saw in this new servant a double, almost, of the incarcerated Dimas. How I wanted to confront my rival!

  I was obsessed, and my obsession was to go to the Reclusorio and speak with Dimas, to see him face to face. For the first time in ten days, I showered, I shaved, I put on a decent suit, and I left my bedroom, I went down the stairs of gargoyled ironwork to the colonial hall surrounded by little balconies, with a glazed-tile fountain in the corner, burbling water. I reached the front door and tried, with a natural gesture, to open it. It was locked. Such security! The help had turned cautious, indeed, after the crime. Skittish and, as I’ve said, invisible. Where were the damned bastards? How did I call them? What did I call them?? Boy, girl! Ah, my good woman, my good man!… Fuck it!

  Nobody answered. I looked out the stained-glass windows of the hall, parting the curtains. They were there in the gardens. Settled in. Sprawled over the grass, trampling it, smoking cigarettes and crushing the butts in the rose mulch; squatting, pulling from their food bags steaming pigs’ feet in green mole and steaming sweet and hot tamales, strewing the ground with the burnt maize leaves; the women coquettishly clipping my roses, sticking them in their shiny black hair, while the kids pricked their hands on the thorns and the piglets crackled over the flame … I ran to one of the side windows: they were playing marbles and ball-and-cup, they had set some suspicious, leaking casks by the side of the garage. I ran to the right wing of the mansion: a man was urinating in the narrow, shady part of the garden, a man in a lacquered straw hat was pissing against the wall between my house and …

  I was surrounded.

  A smell of purslane came from the kitchen. I entered. I had never seen the new cook, a fat woman, square as a die, with jet-black hair and a face aged by skepticism.

  —I am Lupe, the new cook—she told me—and this is Don Zacarías, the new chauffeur.

  Said chauffeur did not even rise from the table where he was eating purslane tacos. I looked at him with astonishment. He was the image of the ex-president Don Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who in turn was identified, in popular wit, with the actor Boris Karloff: bushy eyebrows, deep eyes, huge bags under the eyes, wrinkles deeper than the Grand Canyon, high forehead, high cheekbones, compressed skull, graying hair brushed to the back.

  —Pleased, I said, like a perfect idiot.

  I returned to the bedroom and, almost instinctively, I decided to put on some of the few shoes with laces that I have. I looked at myself there, seated on the unmade bed, by the pillow that held her scent, with my shoelaces untied and hanging loose like inert but hungry earthworms. I pulled the bell cord by the headboard, to see who would answer my call.

  A few minutes passed. Then knuckles rapped.

  He entered, the young man who resembled (according to my fancy) the incarcerated Dimas Palmero. I decided, nonetheless, to tell them apart, to separate them, not to allow any confusion. The murderer was locked away. This was someone else.

  —What is your name?

  —Marco Aurelio.

  You’ll notice he didn’t say “At your service, sir,” or “What may I do for you, patrón.” Nor did he look at me sideways, eyes hooded, head lowered.

  —Tie my shoes.

  He looked at me a moment.

  —Right now, I said. He continued to look at me, and then knelt before me. He tied the laces.

  —Tell the chauffeur I’m going out after eating. And tell the cook to come up so I can plan some menus. And another thing Marco Aurelio …

  Now back on his feet, he looked at me fixedly.

  —Clear all the intruders out of my garden. If they’re not gone within half an hour, I’ll call the police. You may go, Marco Aurelio. That’s all, you hear?

  I dressed, ostentatiously and ostensibly, to go out, I who had gone out so seldom. I decided to try for the first time—almost—a beige gabardine double-breasted suit, blue shirt, stupid yellow clip tie, and, sticking out of my breast pocket, a Liberty handkerchief an Englishwoman had given me.

  Real sharp, real shark: I spoke my name and, stomping loudly, I went downstairs. But there it was the same story. Locked door, people surrounding the house. A full-fledged party, and a piñata in the garage. The children squealing happily. A child making a hubbub, trapped in a strange metal crib, all barred in up to the top, like a furnace grate.

  —Marco Aurelio!

  I sat down in the hall of stained-glass windows. Marco Aurelio solicitously undid my shoes, and, solicitously, offered me my most comfortable slippers. Would I like my pipe? Did I want a brandy? I would lack nothing. The chauffeur would go out and get me any videotape I wanted: new pictures or old, sports, sex, music … The family has to
ld me to tell you not to worry. You know, Don Nico, in this country (he was saying as he knelt before me, taking off my shoes, this horrendous naco) we survive the worst calamities because we take care of each other, you’ll see, I was in Los Angeles as an illegal and the American families there are scattered all around, they live far apart from each other, parents without children, the old ones abandoned, the young ones looking to break away, but here it’s just the opposite, Don Nico, how can you have forgotten that? you’re so solitary, God help you, not us—if you don’t have a job, the family will feed you, it will put a roof over your head, if the cops are after you, or you want to escape the army, the family will hide you, send you back from Las Lomas to Morelos and from there to Los Angeles and back into circulation: the family knows how to move by night, the family is almost always invisible, but what the fuck, Don Nico, it can make its presence felt, how it can make its presence felt! You’ll see. So you’re going to call the police if we don’t go? Then I assure you that the police will not find us here when they arrive, although they will find you, quite stiff, floating in the pool, just like Eduardita, whom God has taken onto … But listen, Don Nico, there’s no need to look like you’ve seen a ghost, our message is real simple: you’ll lead your usual life, phone all you like, manage your business, throw parties, receive your pals and their dolls, and we’ll take care of you, the only thing is, you’ll never leave this place as long as our brother Dimas is in the pen: the day that Dimas leaves jail, you leave your house, Don Nico, not a minute before, not a minute later, unless you don’t play straight with us, and then you’ll leave here first—but they’ll carry you out, that much I swear.

  He pressed together his thumb and index finger and kissed them noisily as I buried myself in the pillow of Eduardita—my Lala!

  5

  So began my new life, and the first thing that will strike you, my listeners, is the same thought that occurred to me, in my own house in Las Lomas: Well, really my life hasn’t changed; indeed, now I’m more protected than ever; they let me throw my parties, manage my business affairs by telephone, receive the girls who console me for the death of Lala (my cup runneth over: I’m a tragic lover, howboutthat!), and to the cops who showed up to ask why all these people have surrounded my house, packed in the garden, frying quesadillas by the rosebushes, urinating in the garage, they explained: Because this gentleman is very generous every day he brings us the leftovers from his parties—every day! I confirmed this personally to the police, but they looked at me with a mournful smirk (Mexican officials are expert at looking at you with a sardonic grimace) and I understood: So be it. From then on, I would have to pay them their weekly bribe. I recorded it in my expense books, and I had to fire Miss Palazuelos, so that she wouldn’t suspect anything. She herself hadn’t an inkling why she was fired. I was famous for what I’ve mentioned: nobody lasted very long with me, not secretary or chauffeur or lover. I’m my own boss, and that’s the end of it! You will note that this whole fantastic situation was simply an echo of my normal situation, so there was no reason for anyone to be alarmed: neither the exterior world that kept on doing business with me nor the interior world (I, my servants, my lovers, the same as ever …).

  The difference, of course, is that this fantastic situation (masquerading as my usual situation) contained one element of abnormality that was both profound and intolerable: it was not the work of my own free will.

  There was that one little thing; this situation did not respond to my whim; I responded to it. And it was up to me to end it; if Dimas Palmero went free, I would be freed as well.

  But how was I going to arrange for said Dimas to get off? Although I was the one who called the police to have him arrested, he was now charged with murder by the District Attorney’s office.

  I decided to put on shoes with laces; it was a pretext for asking the valet Marco Aurelio to come up to help me, chat with me, inform me: Were all those people in the garden really the family of the jailed Dimas Palmero? Yes, answered Marco Aurelio, a fine, very extended Mexican family, we all help each other out, as they say. And what else? I insisted, and he laughed at that: We’re all Catholic, never the pill, never a condom, the children that God sends … Where were they from? From the state of Morelos, all campesinos, workers in the cane fields; no, the fields were not abandoned, didn’t they tell you, Don Nico? this is hardly the full contingent, ha ha, this is no more than a delegation, we’re good in Morelos at organizing delegations and sending them to the capital to demand justice, surely you remember General Emiliano Zapata; well, now you can see that we’ve learned something. Now we don’t ask for justice. Now we make justice. But I am innocent, I said to Marco Aurelio kneeling before me, I lost Lala, I am … He lifted his face, black and yellow as the flag of an invisible, hostile nation: —Dimas Palmero is our brother.

  Beyond that, I couldn’t make him budge. These people are tight-lipped. Our brother: did he mean it literally, or by solidarity? (Stubborn sons of that fucking Zapata!) A lawyer knows that everything in the world (words, the law, love …) can be interpreted in the strict sense or in the loose sense. Was the brotherhood of Marco Aurelio, my extraordinary servant, and Dimas, my incarcerated servant, of blood, or was it figurative? Narrow, or broad? I would have to know to understand my situation. Marco Aurelio, I said one day, even if I withdraw the charges against your brother, as you call him (poker-faced, bilious silence), the prosecutor will try him because too many people witnessed the scene by the pool between Lala and your brother, it doesn’t depend on me, they will proceed ex officio, understand? it’s not a question of avenging Lala’s death …

  —Our sister … But not a whore, no way.

  He was kneeling in front of me, tying my shoelaces, and on hearing him say this, I gave him a kick in the face. I assure you it wasn’t intentional; it was a brutal reflex responding to a brutal assertion. I gave him a brutal kick in the jaw, I knocked him good, he fell on his back, and I followed my blind instinct, left reason aside (left it sound asleep), and ran down the stairs to the hall just as an unfamiliar maid was sweeping the entrance, and the open door invited me to go out into the morning of Las Lomas, the air sharp with pollution, the distant whoosh of a balloon and the flight of the red, blue, yellow spheres, liberated far from the empty barranca that surrounded us, its high eucalyptuses with their peeling bark fighting the smell of shit from the bluff’s recesses: globes of colors greeted me as I went out and breathed poison and rubbed my eyes.

  My garden was the site of a pilgrimage. The scent of fried food mixed with the odor of shit and eucalyptus: smoke from cookstoves, squeals of children, the strumming of guitars, click of marbles, two policemen flirting with the girls in braids and aprons on the other side of the gargoyled grillwork of my mansion, an old, toothless, graying man in patched pants and huaraches, his lacquered straw hat in his hand and an invitation—he came over to me: Please try something, sir, there are good tacos, sir. I looked at the policemen, who didn’t look at me but laughed wickedly with the country girls and I thought the stupid cunts were practically pregnant already, who said they weren’t whores, giving birth in the open fields to the bastard kids of these bastard cops, their children adding to the family of, of, of this old patriarch who offered me tacos instead of protecting the two girls being seduced by this pair of sinister uniformed bandits, smiling, indifferent to my presence on the steps of my house. Was he going to protect them the way he protected Lala? I got up. I studied him, trying to understand.

  What could I do? I thanked him and sat down with him in my own garden and a woman offered us hot tortillas in a willow basket. The old man asked me to take the first bite and I repeated the atavistic gesture of taking the moistened bread of the gods out from under the damp colored napkin, as if the earth itself had opened up to offer me the Proustian madeleine of the Mexican: the warm tortilla. (You who are listening to me will remember that I had plied a whole generation of young readers with Marcel Proust, and he who reads Proust, said a staunch nationalistic friend o
f mine, Proustitutes himself!) Awful! The truth is that, sitting there with the old patriarch eating hot salted tortillas, I felt so transported, so back in my mama’s arms again or something like that, that I was already telling myself, forget it let’s have the tortillas, let’s have those casks of pulque that I saw going into the garage the other day; they brought us brimming glasses of thick liquor, tasting of pineapple, and Marco Aurelio must have had a pretty good knock, because there wasn’t a trace of him to be seen. I sat with my legs crossed on my own lawn, the old man feeding me, I questioning him: How long are you going to be here? Don’t worry, we don’t have to return to Morelos, this could go on for years, do you realize that, señor? He looked at me with his ageless face, the old goat, and told me that they were taking turns, hadn’t I caught on? They came and went, they were never the same twice, every day some went home and others arrived, because it’s a question of making a sacrifice for Dimas Palmero and for Eduardita, poor child, too, hadn’t I realized? Did I think it was always the same folk outside here? He laughed a little, tapping his gummy mouth: the truth was that I had never really noticed them, to me they had, indeed, all appeared the same …

  But each one is different, the old man said quickly, with a dark seriousness that filled me with fear, each one comes into the world to aid his people, and although most die in infancy, those who have the good fortune to grow, those, señor, are a treasure for an old man like me, they are going to inherit the earth, they are going to go to work there in the North with the gringos, they are going to come to the capital to serve you; and they won’t send money to the old folks, you can’t argue with that, señor (he resumed his usual cordiality), if the old folks don’t know who each of their children are, their names, what they do, what they look like, if we depend on them to keep from dying of hunger when we grow old? Just one condition, he said, pausing: