And bad, too, because the body of the bullfighter had the right to do what others could not: to parade itself in public, exposing itself on every side, in the midst of applause, parading its sexual attributes, its tight little ass, its testicles straining beneath the silk the penis that at times was plainly revealed through the breeches that were the perfect mirror for the torero’s sex.
—Dress me, quickly …
—Come on, Figura, you know I can’t do that in less than forty-five minutes, you know that …
—I’m sorry, Sparky. I’m nervous this afternoon.
—That’s not good, Figura. Think of your fame. You may call me Spark, but it’s you who’s the light, the Great Figure of the Ring.
Let me die but let my fame endure—Pedro Romero smiled and let the attendant dress him, slowly: first the long white underpants, then the rose stockings with garters below the knees, next the hairpiece with the pigtail at the nape of the neck; his breeches, which this afternoon were silver and blue, and Sparky matched up the three hooks and eyes on the legs; the shirt that was a wash of white, the suspenders caressing his chest, the yellow cummerbund wrapped around his waist, or rather, it was the man himself wrapped in that mother of clothing, its symbol, its origin, a long ribbon of yellow silk, the cradle of the body, its maternal embrace, its umbilical projection, or so Pedro Romero felt that afternoon, as Sparky tied his narrow necktie, adjusted his majestic vest, his silver caparison, not as strong a shield as the bullfighter’s own armor, which is his heart, and his own natural mane, still silky, even though, like this afternoon’s suit, it was now silver; and finally the black shoes, the laces tied as only Sparky knew how, like two perfect rabbit’s ears.
Are there many people? Ah, a great crowd, Figura, you know, when you’re fighting, everyone shows up, rich and poor, men and women, everyone loves you, they would sell their beds to see you, and how they prepare for the fiesta, how many hours they spend to shine elegantly before you, elegantly as you, Figura, you, the King of the Ring, and then the hours they talk about you, commenting on the fight, looking forward to the next one: there’s a whole world that lives only for you, for your fame …
—Sparky, I’m going to confess something to you. This is my last fight. If the bull kills me, it will be for that reason. If I kill it, I will retire without a single wound.
—You care so much about your body, Figura? What about your fame?
—Don’t insult me. I haven’t yet taken as my motto: Let me endure, even if my fame dies.
—No, Figura, none of that. Look, you are going to fight in the oldest and most beautiful arena in Spain, here in Ronda, and if you die, at least you will be looking upon something beautiful before you close your eyes.
My town: a gash, a deep wound such as I never had, my town like a body with a scab that will not heal, contemplating its own wound from a perpetual watchtower of houses that are whitewashed every year to keep them from dissolving in the sun. Ronda, the most beautiful, because it opens the white wings of death and forces us to see it as our unexpected companion in the mirror of an abyss. Ronda, where our vision soars higher than the eagle.
3
Naked he was not, although those who remembered him young, with his wide-brimmed hat and his cape of braided cloth, or even younger, as he had first arrived in Madrid, in a low-crowned hat and a suit with fringed trousers, would not recognize him in his old age, disheveled, carelessly dressed, unshod, his pants stained (grease? urine?), his shirt sweaty, loose-fitting, hanging open, showing his gray chest, and crowning it all his great giant’s head, unkempt, gray, with sideburns, but not as fierce as the grimace on his thick lips, the eyes veiled by what they had seen, the eyebrows mussed by where they had been, and in spite of that, the high, impertinent, innocent nose, the stubborn, childish nose of an Aragón waif, constantly belying all the rest, belying all the godforsaken waifs, wretched as the river that gave birth to them, shit-assed kids of the Manzanares who wrote on the walls of his estate: Here lives the deaf man.
He didn’t hear the shouting of those or other jerks. Stone-deaf, shut inside his bare workroom, naked—comparatively—as a savage, he who shaped and helped invent a society of unabashed pomp and ostentation, he who gave the ears to every torero, the award to every actress, the medals at every festival, the prizes to every potter, every weaver, every witch, every pimp, every soldier, and every penitent, making them all protagonists, endowing rich and poor with the fame and form they had never had before: now he felt as naked as they who acquired an image at his hands, the hands full of the suns and shades of Francisco de Goya y Luz, lucid, loose, Lucifer, lost cipher, lust for light—Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: even the nobles who had always been painted—they alone, the kings, the aristocracy—now had to see themselves for the first time, full body, just as they were, not as they wished to be seen, and when they did (this was the painter’s miracle, his mystery, perhaps his defeat) they were not threatened, they accepted it: Carlos IV and his degenerate, concupiscent, disloyal, ignorant court, that collective phantasm with eyes frozen by abulia, with mugs lewdly drooling, with powdered wigs instead of brains, and with moles screwing their concave foreheads; Fernando VII and his image of self-satisfied cretinism, active, reckless cretinism, in contrast to that of the bewitched wretch Carlos II, that Goya before Goya, foolishly compassionate, dreaming of a better world, that is, a comprehensible one, that is, one as crazy as he was: they all accepted the painter’s reality, they clung to it, celebrated it, and didn’t realize that they were being seen for the first time, just like the actress, the swordsman, the circus performer, and the peasant, who had never been favored by the court painter’s brush before …
Now, naked and deaf, with no court but the mocking kids painting insults on his fences, without Mexican maids or Andalusian cuadrilla, he felt his abandonment and nakedness reflected in the unsilvered mirrors, the two canvases that for some reason reminded him of a boy’s pants, a rustic skirt: blind canvases, there was nothing on them, everything was in the painter’s head; so onto the imagined canvas he placed the actress, his last desire as an old man: he had loved and been loved and also abandoned by the most beautiful and the cruelest women of his time, and now he went down to Madrid to see this woman on the stage and she never looked at him, she saw only herself, reflected in the public eye, and now he wanted to capture her in this rectangle; he began to outline her entire body with charcoal, there he would put her and from there she would never escape; he quickly drew the naked form, standing, of the coveted woman—this woman was not going to fly off on a broom; this woman was not going to be stolen by death, because he was much older than she (and yet …); this woman was not going to run away with a soldier, an aristocrat, or (who knows?) a bullfighter—he advanced slowly, yet every movement of the deaf old man was like a seismic shock that was felt by the unruly children outside, and they left their own brushes beside the wall and ran away, as if they knew that inside the workroom the other brush, the Great Brush, was outdoing theirs and would not admit of any rival; and now, on the second canvas, he began, in a high-minded spirit, with a restraint that surprised the painter himself, so given to satire, caricature, and the strictures of realism, he began to sketch the torso of a man, without any indication of a head, because the head would naturally be the crown of that grave body, full of dignity and repose; he sketched long, delicate, strong hands, and put in the cape, which he pictured a dark pink velvet, then the jacket, which he saw dark blue, and the waistcoat, which he knew had to be gray, colorless, to give the linen of the front and the neck of the shirt an exceptional whiteness, if only because of the contrast with those serene colors, and then he returned to the first canvas (and, outside, the walnut trees quivered) and he surprised the woman, who was pure silhouette, without features or details, on the point of escaping from the canvas, and the old man laughed (and the walnut trees, terrified, clung to one another), and he said to the woman:
—You can’t leave. There you are and there you will stay forever.
And although she tried to hide, to take refuge in the darkest corner of the canvas, in the shadows, as if she divined the painter’s repugnance, he knew, although he would never say so, that it was an empty threat, because when the canvas left his studio and was seen by other eyes, those eyes would free Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, whom he had captured, from the canvas, and they would give her liberty, releasing her from the prison of the canvas to imprison them, to sleep with those who avidly eyed her, fainting à son plaisir, wrapped in the arms of one after another, never directing even a smile toward her true creator, the painter who held his brush suspended in the air, who looked at the actress’s empty face and decided not to add features, to leave it in suspense, in ellipsis, and in the actress’s stylized hand, raised in a gesture of exiting a stage, he quickly drew a chain, and at the end of the chain he attached a hideous ape with human eyes and a shaved rump, masturbating merrily.
Turning back to the second canvas, he really wanted to stick his brush like a banderilla in the bullfighter’s heart, but an unwanted feeling of respect again possessed him (deaf man, deaf man, the waifs cried at him from the wall, as if he could hear them, or they, fools, imagined that they could be heard) and he began to fill in the face with Pedro Romero’s noble features, the firm jaw, the elegant, taut cheeks, the small pressed mouth with its slight irregularity, the virile emerging beard, the perfectly straight nose, the fine, separated eyebrows, worthy physical base of a forehead as clear as an Andalusian sky, barely ruffled by a hint of widow’s peak, as Wellington’s elegant officers called the point formed by the hair in the middle of the forehead, which was besieged by the first gray hairs of his fourth decade. Don Francisco was about to give the bullfighter some of his own, all the way down his forehead, and call the painting The Man with Streaked Hair, something like that, but that would have meant sacrificing the center of his particular orbit of beauty, the famous eyes, full of competence, serenity, and tenderness, which were the source of Pedro Romero’s humanity, and that was sacred, the artist could not joke about it, and all his rancor, his jealousy, his resentment, his malice, even his cleverness (which he was always forgiven) was subjected to a sentiment, weakly traced by the restless brush, not a banderilla, barely a quill, a full caress, a complete embrace that told the model: You are not just what I would like to see in you, to admire or injure you, to portray or caricature you, you are more than I saw in you, and my canvas will be a great canvas, Romero, only if I explore the one thing I’m sure of, which is that you are more than my compassion or judgment of you at this moment; I see you as you are now but I know what you were before and you will continue to be, I see only one side of you, not all four sides, because painting is the art of a single moment’s frontal perspective, not a discursive and lineal art, and I lack your genius, Romero, for peril, I can’t paint your face and your body, Romero, as you fight a bull, in three dimensions, from four sides, subsuming every one of the angles of both you and the bull, and all the lights in which they are bathed. And as I can’t and don’t dare do that, I give you this image of your nobility, which is the only one that shows that you are more than the figure painted by your humble and invidious servant Lucifer lusts for lights, Lucientes, Francisco de Goya y.
She huddled on the canvas, naked, faceless, with a horrid chained ape. He hastily painted a butterfly covering her sex, like the ribbons that adorned her hair.
Outside, the urchins cried, Deaf man, deaf man, deaf man.
And in the whirlwind of sudden nightfall, hundreds of other women, laughing at the artist, preparing their revenge through the pain of the man seduced and abandoned—and what about them? When had they been treated with truth and care? They who dealt to sinners their just deserts—and as he sleeps, his head planted amid the papers and brushes on his worktable, they, the women of the night, fly about his sleeping head, dragging with them other papers with notices so new that they seem old, There is plenty to suck, reads one, and Until death, says another, and Of what illness will he die, asks a third, and all together, God forgive you, swathed in their veils, harnessed by mothers preparing to sell them, fanning themselves, rubbing themselves with oil, embalming themselves alive with unguents and powders, straddling brooms, rising in flight, hanging like bats in the corners of churches, carried on winds of dust and garbage, fanning, flying, uncovering tombs, looking for you, Francisco, and casting a final cackle at your face, dreaming and dead, both dead and dreaming.
—But I am the only one who can show the bullfighter and the actress in their true garb. Only I can give them heads. Afterwards, do with me what you will.
—May God forgive you!
4
—Never marry or begin a journey on Tuesday, an old woman sitting in a corner of the main square told Rubén Oliva as he passed, so discomposed and hurried that only a witch like her—shrouded in a newspaper but with a coquettish little hat made from the front page of El País on her grotesque head, to protect her from the midday August sun—could know that the man was going far away, even though it was Tuesday, the dangerous day, the day of naked war, hidden war, war of the soul, on the stage, in the rings, in the shops: Martes, Mars’ day, the god of war’s day, the day of dying, vying, plying, and crying, said a bitch half buried under the garbage in the plaza.
Wednesday
Rubén Oliva raised the open envelope to his lips and was about to lick the gummed border when he was halted by two hardly surprising occurrences. The desk clerk watched him preparing the envelope, writing the name and address, as if Rubén Oliva hadn’t the right to such whims, which only added, he seemed to be thinking, to the staff’s work load; doesn’t the guest, who is as rude as he is foolish, realize that his epistolary follies could not possibly interest anyone and, besides that, interrupted other activities, activities that are truly indispensable to the smooth operation of the hotel: for example, his lively phone conversations with his sweetheart, which required the lines for two hours at a time, or the games he played on that same telephone, refusing to give his name, or giving the concierge’s name instead of his own as head desk clerk, or using the slightest pretext to interrupt the examination of accounts and urgent papers, while the telephones rang and the guests waited patiently before the counter, letters pressed to their tongues.
Rubén Oliva didn’t have time to insist on his rights before—the second occurrence—an English gentleman with tight lips, watery eyes, and hair like sand, his ruddy nose trembling, paralyzed all circumstantial activity with one slap of his hand on the reception counter, followed by this question of surpassing importance: Why is there no soap in my bath? The desk clerk considered this question for a moment with feigned interest before haughtily responding: Because there is no soap in any of the bathrooms (don’t imagine yourself an exception, please!). But the obstinate Englishman insisted: Very well, then, why isn’t there soap in any of the baths? And the desk clerk said with marked scorn, seeking approval from the onlookers: Because in Spain we let everyone smell just as he likes.
—I have to go out and buy my own soap?
—No, Mr. Newton. We would be delighted to send the bellboy out for it. Oh, Manuelito, this gentleman is going to tell you what kind of soap he prefers.
—Don’t be so pleased with yourself—said Newton—reception desks are the very image of purgatory, not only here, but all over the world.
He invited Rubén Oliva to join him for a glass in the bar to settle his nerves and because, as he said, drinking alone is like masturbating in the bath. A bath, he added, without soap, that is. Rubén Oliva sat with the Englishman, whose manner was peevish, nervous, and ill at ease, but who concentrated on not showing any emotion, through the supernatural control of his stiff upper lip. And not only that, he said, searching unsuccessfully for something in the pockets of his beige poplin suit, which was wrinkled and loose, commodious, yet failing to yield what Mr. Newton searched for so assiduously, while Rubén Oliva watched him with a smile and waited to drink a toast with him, his glass of Jerez slightly raised in cordia
l expectation, while Newton desperately groped, without saying what he was looking for—mirror, pipe, cigarettes, ballpoint pen?—all the while condemning the age, cold, and dampness of this hotel, which seemed unreal in a country where it was impossible to escape the sun and heat, even in the shadows, whereas in his country, where one strove for light and warmth, you had to endure … He got lost in an endless round of complaints, groping nervously, his upper lip as stiff as ever, and Rubén Oliva stopped waiting for him and drank a sip and thought of repeating to the old, out-of-sorts Englishman what he had just written to Rocío in the unsealed letter he carried in the pocket of his white shirt: it was true, you were right, love, returning to the village is returning to an endless sleep, a long siesta, an eternal midday that he refused to escape on his return, not seeking refuge from the sun at its zenith, as was the custom.
He remembered that as a child, right here in the towns of Andalusia, he knew one thing, which was that in the heat of the day the towns were emptied of people; Rubén, the town is yours, the people hide in the cool shadows and sleep while you, Rubén, walk along the narrow streets that are your only defense against the sun, seeing how they protect you from the blaze, and you dream of returning to them someday, at two in the afternoon, with a beautiful foreigner, teaching her how to use the labyrinth of shadows to avoid the sun; Rubén, don’t hide from it, acknowledge it and defy it and even adore it, because you have a holy trinity in your soul where God the father is the sun, his crucified son is the shadow, and the holy spirit is the night, dissolving the troubles and joys of the past day and mounting forces for the next: today is Wednesday, said the Englishman, who had finally found a harmonica in the back pocket of his pants and, holding the instrument in his hands, got ready to raise it to his lips, and after announcing that Wednesday was Woden’s day, a day of commerce and robbery, so that it was not surprising that he found himself in this den of thieves, he began to play the old ballad of “Narcissus come kiss us,” while Rubén Oliva regarded him with an understanding smile and would have liked to tell him that his complaints didn’t matter, he accepted them with good humor, but the Englishman must know that he, Rubén Oliva, was revisiting his hometown, or a town like his, which was much the same, and for him—whether it was Tuesday, day of war, or Wednesday, day of commerce, or Friday, Venus’s day—all the days, except one, were waiting days, holy days because, like the Mass, they repeated an eternal rhythm—the same morning, noon, and night, winter, spring, and summer, as certain as the continuity of life, and the stages of that daily ceremony were repeated also in Rubén Oliva’s soul, as he would have liked to explain to the Englishman who resisted the pain of Spain with a harmonica and a barroom tune: they were identical yet distinct rhythms; as if Rubén, in some mysterious way that he hardly dared attempt to put into words, were always the exception that could arrest and express the forces of nature that surrounded him at birth and would continue to surround him one day when he would die but the world would not.
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Page 19