Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

by Carlos Fuentes

  Bernardo

  When Toño entered with La Desdichada in his arms, I couldn’t bring myself to thank him. That woman of wood embraced the body of my friend the way they say the Christ of Velázquez hangs from his cross: much too comfortably. Toño, who is a typical man of the north, tall and strong, could easily hold her with one arm. La Desdichada’s backside rested on one of Toño’s hands; his other hand was around her waist. Her legs hung down and her head was on his shoulders, her eyes open, her hair disheveled.

  He entered with his trophy and I wanted to show him I wasn’t angry, just vexed. Who had asked him to bring her home? I had asked him only to go look at her in the window.

  —Put her wherever you like.

  He stood her up, her back to us, as if to demonstrate that she was our statue now, our Venus Callipygia of the shapely ass. Statues rest on their feet, like trees (like horses that sleep on their feet?). She looked indecent. A naked mannequin.

  —We have to get her some clothes.

  Toño

  The store on Tacuba Street had already sold the bride’s gown. Bernardo didn’t want to believe me. What did you expect, I said to him, that the dummy would wait for us forever in that display window, dressed as a bride? The purpose of a mannequin is to display clothes to passersby, so that they buy them—the clothes, mind you, not the mannequins. It was pure chance that she was dressed as a bride when you walked by. She might have been showing off a bathing suit for a month without your noticing. Besides, nobody cares about the dummy. What they’re interested in is the outfit, and it has already been sold. The dummy is wood, nobody wants her, look, it’s what in law classes they call a fungible object, one’s as good as another, it’s all the same … Besides, look, she’s missing a finger, the ring finger of her left hand. If she was married, she isn’t anymore.

  He wanted to see her dressed as a bride again, and if he couldn’t, at least he wanted to see her dressed. La Desdichada’s nudity bothered him (it also attracted him). Nonetheless, I set her at the head of our humble table, the sort you’d expect of students of “limited resources,” as one said euphemistically in Mexico City in the year 1936.

  I gave her a sideways glance, and then I threw over her a Chinese robe that an uncle of mine, an old pederast from Monterrey, had given me when I was fifteen, with these premonitory words: —Some clothes anyone can wear. All of us girls want to look cute.

  Covered by a blaze of paralyzed dragons—gold, scarlet, and black—La Desdichada half-closed her eyes, lowering her eyelids a fraction of a centimeter. I looked at Bernardo. He wasn’t looking at her, now that she was dressed again.

  Bernardo

  What I like best about this poor forsaken place where we live is the patio. Every neighborhood in the capital has a place to wash clothes, but our own house has a fountain. You leave behind the noises of Tacuba Street, go past a tobacco and soft-drink stand, and enter a narrow alleyway, damp and shady, and then the world bursts into sunlight and geraniums, and in the center of the patio is the fountain. The noise remains very far away. A liquid silence imposes itself.

  I don’t know why, but the women of our house all choose to wash their clothes somewhere else, in other washing places, in the public fountains perhaps, or in the canals that are the last remnants of the lake city that was Mexico. Now the waters are drying up little by little, condemning us to death by dust. There is a constant come-and-go of laundry baskets, piled high with dirty clothes and clean clothes, which the strongest but least agile women clutch tightly, and the most atavistic carry proudly on their heads.

  The large circles of woven straw, the clothes colored indigo, white, and brown: it is easy to bump against a woman holding a basket on her head so she can’t really turn to look, knock over the basket, excuse yourself, extract a blouse, a shirt, whatever, pardon me, pardon me …

  I loved the patio of our student home so much, its soothing mediation between the noise of the street and the isolation of the apartment. I loved it as years later I would love the supreme palace: the Alhambra, a palace of water where the water, naturally, has disguised itself as tile. Back then, I hadn’t yet been in the Alhambra, but in my fond memories our poor patio possesses the same charms. Except that in the Alhambra there is not a single fountain that dries up from one day to the next, revealing at its bottom sluggish gray tadpoles looking up for the first time at the people who gaze into the fountain and see them there, doomed, without water.

  Toño

  He asked me why she was missing a finger. I told him I didn’t know. He wouldn’t let the subject drop, as if I were responsible for La Desdichada’s being maimed, through some carelessness of mine in carrying her home, Christ, he just stopped short of accusing me of mutilating her on purpose.

  —Be more careful with her, please.

  Bernardo

  The toads that have taken over the beautiful fountain in the patio won’t be without water for long. A big storm is approaching. When you go up the stone stairs to our apartment, you look out over the low, flat roofs toward the mountains, which, in the summer light, seem to move closer. The giants of the valley of Mexico—volcanoes of basalt and fire—are accompanied in this season by a watery retinue. It’s as if they had awakened from the long sleep of the highlands, as though from a parched and crystalline dream, demanding a drink. The giants are thirsty and they make their own rain. The clouds that all through the sunlit morning have been accumulating, white and spongy, suddenly stop moving, their grave grayness become turbulent. Each afternoon, the summer sky swells with storm, punctual, abundant, fleeting, and attacks the accumulated light of the dying day and the morning that succeeds it.

  It rains the whole afternoon. Falling from the apartment to the patio. Why doesn’t the fountain fill with water? Why do the dry, wrinkled toads, under the stone moldings of the old colonial fountain, look at me with such anguish?

  Toño

  Today these are ghostly spaces: deserts born of our haste. I resolve not to forget them. Bernardo will know what I mean if I say that the city’s vacant lots were once our pleasure palaces. To forget them is to forget what we had: a little happiness, one time, when we were young and deserved it and didn’t know what to do with it.

  He laughs at me; he says that mine is the poetry of the lower depths. Fine: but someone should recall the aroma, poetic or not, of the Waikiki on the Paseo de la Reforma, near the Caballito, the nightclub of our youth. Inside, the Waikiki was the color of smoke, although outside it looked more like a cancerous palm tree, or a sickly stretch of sand turning gray in the rain. Never has a place of entertainment looked gloomier, more forbidding. Even its neon signs were repellent, square, you remember? Everything about them established a precise hierarchy of attractions: the singer (male or female) at the head of the marquee, then the band, then a pair of dancers, finally the magician, the clown, the dogs. It was like a list of political candidates, or a menu for an embassy dinner, or even a death notice: here lies a singer, a band, two ballroom dancers, a magician …

  The women were like the place, like the color of smoke inside the cabaret. They were the reason we went there. The closed society denied us love. We believed that, having left our fiancées at home, those maidens whom we couldn’t seduce physically without ruining them for marriage, we could come to the capital to study law and meet—as in the novels of Balzac or Octave Feuillet—an experienced lover, rich, married, who would introduce us to the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, in exchange for our virile services. Hélas, as Rastignac would say, the Mexican Revolution did not extend to sexual liberty. The city was so small then that everybody knew everybody else; groups of friends were exclusive, and if within one of the groups some member made love to another, not even the crumbs of that banquet reached us.

  We thought of our provincial fiancées, preserved like apricots, maintained in a state of purity behind the iron grilles on their windows, barely within the range of a serenade, and we wondered if our identity as provincials only put us in an even more sordid
position in the capital: either we got ourselves a virginal fiancée or we went to dance with the tarts of the Guay. They were almost all small, powdered, with the blackest eyes and the cheapest perfume, flat-chested, without hips, with skinny legs and shapeless asses. They had thick lips and limp hair, sometimes bullied into place with clips; they wore short skirts, mesh stockings, kiss-me-quicks smeared on their cheeks like question marks, their every other tooth was gold, their every other pore was marked with smallpox; their heels tapped the dance floor, the tapping of their heels resounded as they went out to dance and returned to their tables, and between those heelbeats you heard the sound of their feet dragging, in the slow steps of the danzón.

  What were we looking for, if these cheap hetaeras were so ugly? Only sex, which wasn’t so great either?

  We were looking for a dance. That’s what they knew: not how to dress, or speak, not even how to make love. Those jokers of the Guay knew how to dance the slow danzón. That was their trick: to do the danzón, that ceremony of slowness. They say the best dancers of the danzón can dance in a space the size of a postage stamp. Second prize goes to the couple who can dance in a space the size of a single tile. Two bodies glued together, their movement almost imperceptible. Clothed bodies, flesh palpitating but almost still, the reflection of a dream as much as of a dance.

  Who would have thought that those beaten-down girls possessed the genius of the danzón, responding as they did to the flute and the violin, the piano and the maraca?

  Those hot little tamales from the venereal barrios of a city where nobody even used toilet paper or sanitary napkins—a city of dirty handkerchiefs before Kleenex and Kotex, just think, Bernardo, this city where the poor clean themselves with corn husks—what poor, biting poetry would their tragically restrained feelings produce? Because something else came from their world of rural misery, transferred from the destroyed haciendas to the city, the fear of making noise, of bothering the rich and being punished by them.

  The nightclub was their answer. The music of the bolero allowed those women, rescued from the fields and exploited again in the city, to express their most intimate feelings, vulgar but concealed; only when dancing were these enslaved bodies given the luxury of immobile movement: these women had the scandalous elegance of the servant who dares to sit down, that is, who asks to be noticed.

  Bah, let’s go to the Waikiki, I said to Bernardo, let’s go sleep with a couple of whores, what else is there to do? If you want, you can pretend you spent the night with Marguerite Gauthier or Delphine de Nucingen, but let’s go steal what we need for La Desdichada’s dowry. We can’t have her dressed in a robe all day. It’s indecent. What will our friends say?

  Toño and Bernardo

  —How would you prefer to die?

  Bernardo

  My mother was a widow of the revolution. Popular iconography is full of images of the woman warrior who accompanied the fighters into battle. You can see them riding on the trains, or around the campfires. But the widows who didn’t leave their homes were another matter. Like my mother: serious and resigned women, dressed in black ever since they received the fateful message: Your husband, madam, fell with honor on the field of Torreón or La Bufa or Santa Rosa. Perhaps that is what it means to be the widow of a hero. But you might think it would be different to be the widow of the victim of a political murder. Really? Aren’t all fallen soldiers the victims of a political crime? And isn’t every death a murder? It took us a long time to accept the notion that the dead person was not murdered, before we ascribed the death to the will of God.

  My father died with Carranza. That is, when the First Chief of the Revolution was murdered in Tlaxcalantongo, my father, who was his friend, was killed in one of the many acts of revenge against the supporters of the president. An undeclared war that took place not on the fields of military honor but in the back rooms of political terror. My mother remained loyal. She laid out my father’s uniform on his bed. His tunic with rows of silver buttons. His kepi with two stars. His riding pants and his heavy belt with its empty holster. His boots at the foot of the bed. This was her perpetual domestic Te Deum.

  There she passed the hours, in the orange-colored light of votive lamps, brushing the dust from his uniform, polishing his boots. As if the glory and the requiem of one faded battle would stay with her forever. As if this ceremony of mourning and love guaranteed that her husband (my father) would someday return.

  I think of all this because, between us, Toño and I have gotten together a wardrobe for La Desdichada, and we’ve spread it out on display on the four-poster bed. A white linen blouse (from the washerwomen of the patio) and a short black satin skirt (from the tarts of the Waikiki). Black stockings (courtesy of a little trifle named Miss Nothing-at-All, says Toño, laughing). But, for some reason, we couldn’t get shoes. And Toño maintains that La Desdichada doesn’t really need underwear. This made me doubt his Don Juanesque tale. Perhaps he didn’t get as far as I thought with the Waikiki girl. I, on the other hand, only aver that if we intend to treat La Desdichada with respect, we musn’t deprive her of panties and bra, at the least.

  —So where are we going to get them from, man? I’ve done my part. You haven’t exactly put yourself out.

  She is sitting at the table, wrapped in the Chinese robe from my faggot uncle. She doesn’t move her eyes, of course—she has her gaze fixed, fixed on Toño.

  To escape that annoying look, I quickly take her by the arm, pick her up, and say to Toño that we have to put some makeup on her, dress her, make her comfortable, poor Desdichada! to see her always so distant and solitary—I force a laugh—a little attention wouldn’t hurt her, or a little fresh air.

  I open the window overlooking the patio, leaving the dummy in Toño’s arms. There is no respite from the sound of the frogs croaking. The storm builds over the mountains. I am oppressed by the small noises of my city, which seem all the more piercing in the lull before the storm. Today the knife sharpeners sound sinister to my ears, the used-clothes venders even worse.

  I turn back, and for a moment can’t find La Desdichada: I don’t see her where I left her, where she should be, where I had set her at the table. A cry escapes me: “What have you done with her?” Toño appears alone, parting the beads of the bath curtain. He has a long scratch on his face.

  —Nothing. I cut myself. She’s coming right away.

  Bernardo and Toño

  Why were we afraid?

  Why were we afraid to invent a life for her? The least a writer can do is give a person a destiny. It wouldn’t have cost us anything; we wouldn’t have had to account to anyone. Were we incapable of giving La Desdichada her destiny? Why? Did we really feel she was so dispossessed? Was it impossible to imagine her country, her family, her past? What was stopping us?

  We can make her a housekeeper. She’ll keep the apartment clean. Run our errands. We would have more time to read and write, to see friends. Or we can make her a prostitute. That would help pay our household expenses. We’d have more time to read and write. To see friends and feel like big shots. We laugh. Do you think anyone would be interested in her as a whore? It would challenge the imagination, Bernardo. Like fucking a Siren: how?

  We laughed.

  A mother?

  What did you say?

  She could be a mother. Neither servant nor whore. Mother, give her a child, let her devote herself to taking care of her child.

  How?

  We laughed even harder.

  Toño

  Today was La Desdichada’s dinner party. The dummy was still dressed in the Chinese robe from my uncle the fruit. Nothing suited her better, Bernardo and I decided; not only that, but it was her name on the invitations, so, like a high-class courtesan or an eccentric Englishwoman in her castle, she could entertain in her dressing gown: Cast aside convention!

  La Desdichada is receiving. From eight to eleven. Punctuality required. She is never late, we inform our friends: British punctuality, eh? And we sat down to wait for them,
one on each side of her, I on her left, Bernardo on her right.

  It occurred to me that a party would clear away the little cloud in our relations that I noted yesterday, when I cut myself shaving while she was watching me, sitting on the toilet, her legs crossed. Seated there, totally insouciant, one knee over the other. What a flirt! The toilet was just the most convenient place to sit her down to watch me shave. She made me a little nervous, that’s all.

  I didn’t explain this to Bernardo. I know him too well, and maybe I shouldn’t have taken the mannequin into the bathroom with me. I’m sorry, really, and would like to ask his pardon without giving any explanation. I can’t; he wouldn’t understand, he likes to verbalize everything, starting with his feelings. The fact is that when he turned his back to the window and looked for us, without finding us, I took a quick look into the living room and saw him looking at nothing. I thought for a moment that we only see what we desire. I had a fleeting sense of terror.

  I wanted to clear away the misunderstanding with a little joke, and he was agreeable. That’s another thing we had in common: the taste for a type of humor that, although we didn’t know it at the time, was in vogue in Europe and was associated with the games of Dada. Of course, Mexican Surrealism didn’t need the European imprimatur; we are Surrealists by vocation, by birth, as all the jokes we have inflicted on Christianity prove, confounding the sacrifices of blood and host, disguising whores as virgins, constantly moving between the stable and the brothel, creation and calendar, myth and history, the past and the future, the circle and the line, the mask and the face, the crown of thorns and the crown of feathers, the mother and the virgin, death and laughter: for five centuries, Bernardo and I tell ourselves with stern humor, we’ve been playing charades with the most exquisite corpse of all, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with our vessels of bloodstained glass, why shouldn’t we do the same with the poor cadaver of wood, La Desdichada? Why should we be afraid?