Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

by Carlos Fuentes

  He covered her mouth gently with his hand, put his lips to her ear, told the woman lying there that it didn’t matter, he confessed it wouldn’t matter to him if she was a boy, a transvestite, a whore, diseased, dying, nothing mattered to him, because what she had given him, how she had given herself to him, excited him, attracted him, made him feel that every time was the first time, that every repeated act was the beginning of a night of love, so that each time he felt as if he hadn’t done it for a year, all of that was what …

  Now she covered his mouth with a hand and said: —But I did know you. I picked you because of who you were, not because you were unknown to me.

  The words were hardly out of the woman’s mouth when the doors of the armoire opened with a heart-stopping thump and two powerful hands, stained, dripping colors from the fingers, threw apart the panels, and a waistcoated, frock-coated body emerged, in a linen shirt and short pants, white silk stockings and country-style shoes, clogs maybe, smeared with mud and cow dung, and this creature jumped onto the bed of love, smeared the sheets with shit and mud, wrapped its hands around the woman’s face, and, without paying the slightest attention to Rubén Oliva, smeared the face of his lover with its fingers as it had just smeared the soiled sheets, and Rubén Oliva, paralyzed with astonishment, his head planted on a pillow, unable to move, never knew if those agile, irreverent fingers erased or created, composed or disfigured, while with equal speed and art, and with incredible fury, they traced on the woman’s featureless face the deformed arc of a diabolic brow or the semblance of a smile, or if they emptied out her eye sockets, turned the fine nose that Rubén had caressed into a misshapen cabbage and erased the lips that had kissed his, that had told him, I did know you, I chose you because of who you were …

  The giant—or perhaps it only appeared so because it was standing on the bed, doubling its size to destroy or create the woman’s face with its colors—panted, exhausted, and Rubén Oliva contemplated the woman, her face besmeared, made and unmade, covered by the two floods of flowing tears and a veil of hair; and watching the raging terror that had escaped from the armoire, he finally realized what he had known from the moment he had seen it appear—but what he couldn’t believe until, little by little, sweating, he began to overcome his panic: this man, atop his body and clothes and shoes and stooped shoulders, had no head.

  Tuesday

  1

  Imagine three spaces, said the headless giant then, three perfect circles that must never touch, three orbs, each circulating in its independent trajectory, with its own reason for being and its own court of satellites: three incomparable and self-sufficient worlds. So, perhaps, are the worlds of the gods. Ours, shamefully, are imperfect. The spheres meet, repel one another, penetrate each other, fertilize, vie against, and kill each other. The circle is not perfect because it is pierced by the tangent or the chord. But imagine only those three spaces: each in its own way is a dressing room, and in the first, a theatrical dressing room, a naked woman is being dressed slowly by her maids, though she isn’t talking to the servants but to her dancing monkey, with white necktie and blue-painted genitals, that swings among the mannequins, and those cloth breasts are the anticipation of the body of his mistress, who addresses her words to the monkey and to whom the monkey, as his day’s prize, addresses itself: its reward will be to jump onto the shoulder of the woman and leave with her for the stage first, to the dinners afterwards, on Sundays to a stroll on San Isidro, and at night, if he behaves well, to the foot of the bed of his mistress and her lover, to disconcert her venereal companions and amuse Elisia Rodríguez, called “La Privada,” queen of the Madrid stage, who can keep her acting glory alive in only one way: each night, before going onstage, she talks to the ape, who is dressed up and secretly bedaubed (for the spectators’ laughter, the families’ scandal, and her lovers’ discomfort: the blue prop noticeable only on certain occasions), and tells him who she is, where she came from, in order to appreciate her own success all the more for having risen from below, as she had, from so godforsaken a town that more than once the princes of the royal house had gone there to marry, because the law decreed that the place where the princes contracted matrimony would remain exempt from paying taxes forever, so they had to go to a place as dirt-poor as that, so its release from taxation would not matter to the Crown—though it did to the princes forced to marry in the ruined church, with crows flying past constantly, and bats too, except when it was daytime and they were asleep, hanging from the corners like shards of sleeping shit, like the shit of the unpaved streets, into which the finest shoes and the shiniest boots sink, where the wagons get stuck, at the mercy of the shoulders of the local studs who, to demonstrate their manhood, would rescue them, at times with their giddy duchesses, rocking amid the smell of sweat, onions, and excrement, and the processions were trailed and swelled by stray dogs and clouds of flies, and flanked by phalanxes of cockroaches in the corners of rude eateries (first let me see myself naked in the mirror, ape, and admit you’ve never seen anything more perfect than this hourglass of silky white skin whose uniformity—you have to season the dish—is barely interrupted by what is revealed at the tip of the tits, the navel, below the arms if I choose to raise them and between the legs if I don’t care to close them), and if that was how the weddings of the princes were, then women like me had betrothals that were long and unbroken: no girl had the right, you hear me, ape? to have a second suitor: you married your first and only one, chosen by your parents, after waiting five years, to make sure of the good intentions and the chastity of all.

  —What are you laughing at, you old farts, Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, said then, slapping the shoulders of her maids with feigned annoyance—one, two, three, four—with the end of her fan, although the servants, all of them Mexican, were of stoic cast and were neither frightened nor insulted by their whimsical mistress. If La Privada said to Rufina from Veracruz or Guadalupe from Orizaba, see how high a girl from a town exempted from taxes can climb, the servants, who perhaps were descended from Totonac and Olmec princes, were grateful to have arrived there to lace up the most celebrated performer in Spain, instead of being branded like cattle or lashed like dogs in the colonial haciendas.

  If they felt any sorrow (Rufina from Veracruz and Guadalupe from Orizaba, already mentioned, plus Lupe Segunda from Puebla and Petra from Tlaxcala), Elisia Rodríguez did not, as she looked at herself, first naked, then with a single ornament, the fan in her hand, and now they were going to put on her rings—naked, fan, rings, she grew excited on seeing herself in the mirror—and still talking to the ape, never to the Mexicans, who pretended not to hear, she told how she was seduced after the royal wedding by a young Jesuit traveling with the court to chronicle the events, and how the lettered youth, to gain absolution for his sins, concupiscence, and the pregnancy announced by Elisia, had taken her to Barcelona, promised to teach her to read works of theater and poetry, and married her to his uncle, an importer of Cuban goods, an old man undaunted by the institution of chichisveo, which authorized the ménage à trois with the consent of the old husband, who showed off his young wife in public but privately freed her from sexual obligations, granting them to the young man, though with certain conditions, such as his right to watch them, Elisia and the nephew, making love, secretly, naturally, the old man wanted to behave decently, and if they knew he was watching them without their seeing him, perhaps that would excite them even more.

  It happened, however, related Elisia, that in a little while the husband began to be annoyed that the beneficiary of the institution was his nephew, and he began to add to his complaints that it didn’t bother him so much that he was his nephew as that he was a priest. Elisia, hearing these retractions, began to believe that her husband desired her, and even began to wonder if he could satisfy her female desires. What made her decide to follow the advice of her husband—“Be mine and mine alone, Elisia”—is that she was annoyed by the contrast between the Jesuit’s flattery of the powerful and his contempt for
the weak, which he showed so often that she considered it the true norm of conduct not only of her lover but of the entire Company of Jesus, whereas rich and poor, powerful and weak were treated alike by her husband, a good, honest man. Elisia’s husband said simply that in business one saw the rise and fall of fortunes: the poor of today could be the rich of tomorrow, and vice versa. But then the old man would quickly repeat his formal argument that he was dissolving the agreement of chichisveo because the young man was a priest, not because he was his nephew: nothing demanded respect but religion, he again advised Elisia.

  —Religion and, he added quickly, commerce.

  And the theater? Elisia, after a few months of his amorous admonishments, decided that there was a lover more varied, neither too permanent nor too fleeting, less faithful perhaps but also less demanding than any individual, momentarily more intense if temporally less enduring. In other words, Elisia wanted the public for her lover, not a naïve seminarian; she wanted the spectators as her beloved, not the writers of plays, and her husband consented to these thousands of lovers, relieved that his precious Elisia, from that forsaken, flea-ridden town that paid no taxes, preferred this form of chichisveo to the other, more traditional kind.

  He got her singing teachers and dance masters, he got her speech and voice instructors, he got her as much work as he could find, from religious roles to profane comedies, but Elisia’s wisdom surpassed their teachings (her maids covered her charms with a bodice and for a minute Elisia was dissatisfied, but then she remembered that there were men who had loved her more for her bodice than for her body, she had even discovered one of them kneeling before the actress’s nightstand, kissing her intimate apparel, more excited there than in bed, he wanted to sing a hymn to the inventor of underclothing, but her earthy and practical side simply concluded that everything has its use in this world, where love is king. So her enthusiasm returned, and olé: the pregnancy that frightened the Jesuit was as much a deceit as the bustle the Mexican maids were now pinning on her). Elisia had a bloodhound’s instinct in her butterfly body, and she had arrived in Barcelona when all Spain had but two passions: the theater and the bulls, actresses and bullfighters, and the passion of passions, the rivalry among actresses, or among matadors, the disputes of one group and another, this one bedding that one (quick, it’s getting late, the white stockings, the garters, the sashes for the waist), and her husband doing his Pygmayonnaise number, and you, my Galantine, or something like that, as she said, showing off her learning before her teachers and the Jesuit nephew (the nephew-Jesuit), who gave her lessons in the dramatic arts and in the refinement of diction through recitation of verses, but she felt something different, her heart told her that the theater was the theater, not a repetition of words that nobody understood, but the occasion to display herself before an audience and make them feel that they were part of her, of her life, that they were her friends—and what is more, to reveal her greatest intimacies from the stage; and if her husband, who preferred the footlights to the chichisveo but now showed dangerous inclinations toward the conjugal bed instead of the theatrical boards, didn’t understand that, the members of the court who came to Barcelona to see Elisia did, including Princess M——, who had gotten married in Elisia’s town to spare that poor village from taxes and who imperiously demanded the presence of the entertainer, and Elisia said to tell her she wasn’t an entertainer but a tragedienne.

  —Haven’t you seen the Empire styles with which Mam’selle George is dazzling Paris? And the princess said yes, she had seen them, and she wanted Elisia to wear them in Madrid, where she was urged, by royal decree, to present herself, with or without her husband, for he insisted that the best clothing was sold in the shop, and if she went so far from the Catalán port and his business in tobacco, sugar, fruit, rare woods, and all the riches of Havana, who was going to pay for his wife’s singing classes and her stiff silk bows?

  In other words: her husband forbade Elisia to travel to Madrid; theaters and actresses, although his wife was one of them, were for passing the time, not for making fortunes; but Elisia went anyway, laughing at the old man, and he locked up her costumes and told her, Now show yourself naked on the stage, and she said, I am quite capable of doing so, and she went to Madrid, where the princess who had gotten married in her village presented her with a wardrobe the likes of which had never been seen before in the court at Madrid or anywhere else, for the princess raided the oldest wardrobes in the palace and found in them the forgotten Chinese garments brought to Europe by Marco Polo and the feathered Indian capes that Captain Cortés presented to the Crown after the fall of Mexico, and although Elisia said she wasn’t going to dress like a savage, the princess called her both beggar and chooser, Havanera and despot, but Elisia took the Chinese fabrics and the feathered Aztec capes and made them into Empire fantasies, until the Duchess of O——, rival of Princess M——, had copies made of all of Rodríguez’s outfits to give to her own favorite actress, Pepa de Hungría, and Elisia gave her outfits to her chambermaids so they would be dressed the same as Pepa, in rags, as Elisia announced in a song, and now no one wanted to compete with her, not La Cartuja or La Caramba, or La Tirana, or any of the other great stage sirens (quick, the gold brocade skirt, the white muslin, the taffeta and rose silk cloak), no orator or singer or dancer, just Elisia Rodríguez, ape, who was all that and more, who was the first to say to hell with written texts, who said what interests people is me, not someone embalmed two hundred years ago, and improvising texts and songs, she resolved to speak of herself, her most intimate affairs, her evolving loves, urgent as her need to feed her legend before the footlights, and while she invented something here and there, she began to feel an increasingly pressing need for real adventures, stories that the people could share, it’s true, she lay with that one, you know, ape, you were a witness, your mistress doesn’t lie, she spent the night in his palace, we saw her leaving at daybreak, she appeared at the windows, she greeted the doorkeepers, who knew her well, who all loved her because she greeted them all with a smile, and Elisia consolidated her fame singing only of her own loves, her own desires, her own struggles and adventures: that is what the public craved and that is what she gave them, and all she lacked was a special name, which is the symbol of fame, so:

  —A name is not enough, one needs a nickname.

  And they began, secretly and laughingly, to call Elisia “La Privada,” the private one, and at first everyone thought it was a joke to designate so public a woman that way; and even if its significance was extended later to God’s having deprived her of children, other nicknames failed to stick. Not simply Elisia, not La Rodríguez, not the Havanera, not the Barren One: even the seminarian could not effect that amazing conception; the woman was barren. This convinced no one, and although Elisia’s fame kept growing, it was fame without a name, which is fame without fame, until the truth became known and shone like the sun and filled everyone with the warmth, feeling, jealousy, the divided emotions that constitute fame itself: Elisia Rodríguez, whispered the growing legion of her lovers, fainted at the climax of love-making: she came and she went!

  —La Privada! The deprived! The unconscious one! The fainter!

  (All she lacked now was the cape, that’s it, and the satin shoes too, and the hairpiece, the great bow of rose silk on her head, ah and the disguised mustache on her upper lip, bah, she had to be a woman with hair, and that scent of garlic, caramba, if I don’t eat I die, what do they want, a corpse?, and her eyes were dead beneath her heavy eyebrows, and her eyes were dead, and her eyes—were dead.)

  2

  Pedro Romero was stark naked in his dressing room and didn’t need to look at himself in the mirror to know that his caramel skin didn’t show a single scar, not the wound of a single horn. His dark, long, delicate, firm hand had killed 5,582 bulls, but not one had touched him, even though Romero had redefined the art of bullfighting; it was one of the oldest arts in the world, but it was the newest for the public that filled the plazas of Spain to
admire—Romero realized—not only their favorite personalities but also themselves, for bullfighters were neither more nor less than the people’s triumph, the people doing what they had always done—daring, defying death, surviving—and now being applauded for it, recognized, lavished with fame and fortune for surviving, for lasting another month, when what everyone hoped was that the bull of life would rip you open and send you off to rot once and for all.

  And yet, naked in that cool, dark dressing room, Pedro Romero felt the fiction of his own body and the virtual sensation of having previously inhabited that body, which so many had loved—he looked down, gauged the bulk of his testicles, as the sword handler would do in a minute to adjust his breeches—but which was, in the end, in a more profound sense, a virgin body, a body that had never been penetrated. He smiled at the thought that all men who aren’t queer are virgins because they always penetrate, they’re never penetrated by the woman; but the bullfighter knew that he had to be penetrated by the bull to lose his macho virginity, and that had never happened to him.

  He considered himself, naked, at forty still possessing a nearly perfect figure, a muscular harmony revealed by the soft caramel color of his skin, which accentuated his body’s classic Mediterranean forms, the medium height, strong shoulders, long upper arms, compact chest, flat belly, narrow hips, sensual buttocks over well-formed but short legs, and small feet: a body of bodies, a soft-assed English lover had told him, jealous not just of his tight ass but of the blood beneath his skin, his skin and body molded like almond paste by Phoenician and Greek hands, washed like Holland sheets by waves of Carthaginians and Celts, stormed like a merlon by Roman phalanxes and Visigoth hordes, caressed like ivory by Arab hands, and kissed like crosses by Jewish lips.

  It was a body of bodies, too, because more than five thousand pairs of bulls’ horns had failed to wound it; his body had never bled, suppurated, scabbed; it was a good body, at peace with the soul that inhabited it, but also a bad body, bad because it was provocative. It continually exceeded its moral constraint, its sufficiency as the container of Pedro Romero’s soul, exhibiting itself before others, exciting them, saying to them: Look, more than five thousand bulls and not a single wound.