Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

by Carlos Fuentes

  The bull charged and Rubén Oliva stood motionless, resolved not to feint with the cape but to let the bull do what he wanted; his head high, his gaze defiant, not even looking at the bull, seeing instead, for the first time—although he knew that they had been watching him from the moment he had dazedly entered the ring, forgetting the rules, neglecting to salute the president’s box—two pairs of eyes concentrated entirely on him, on him alone.

  Now he saw them and he knew that if he had not been able to see anyone in the stands, only the sun and the moon, it was because the sun and the moon were the only ones who had seen him. The big-headed man, with his high hat and unruly white side-whiskers, his turned-up nose and his thick-lipped, sarcastic mouth, looked at him with the eloquent look of one who has seen everything and knows that nothing can be done.

  —Now is the time.

  The woman with heavy eyebrows that met over her nose, with hair on her upper lip, with the high, curled hairstyle of another age crowned by a pink silk topknot, exposed her breast, offering it to a black child so he could nurse, and fixed Rubén with a pitying but peremptory look that commanded him:

  —To the death, Rubén.

  —You won’t escape this time, Pedro.

  —There it goes, Rubén.

  —Bravísimo, Pedro.

  —What a sacrifice, Rubén!

  —Of what illness will you die, Pedro?

  —In bed?

  —In the ring?

  —Old?

  —Young?

  —Neither more nor less.

  —Rubén Oliva.

  —Pedro Romero.

  He wanted to fight the bull face-on, to kill from the receiving end, using the ploy of the wrist. But the bull never lowered his head. The bull looked at him the way the woman with the bows and the man in the top hat had looked at him, demanding: One of us is going to die. How can you imagine you can kill me, when I am immortal?

  And if he could have spoken, Rubén Oliva would have answered: Come to me, attack me, and discover your death. You are right. The bullfighter is mortal, the bull is not, that is nature.

  And if Madreselva had been there, she would have cried: No, look at the bull, you don’t have the right to choose, boy, take the muleta in your left hand, so, and the sword in your right, so, at least show that you have chosen the volapié, the “flying while running” technique, keep the sword low, see if this virgin bull lowers its head a little and discovers its death instead of yours, boy: Do what I tell you, son (like a tide, like a drain, like a sewer, the dry, smoke-choked voice of the woman coursed through the shells of Rubén Oliva’s ears), now bury your sword in the cross of this virgin bull, where the shoulders meet the spine of this defiant female male, this cunt, this prick, obey me, I only want to save your life!

  —No, Madreselva, let the bull come to me and discover its death that way …

  —Oh, my son, oh, Rubén Oliva, was all the bullfighter’s god mother could say when at that moment and eternally he was gored by the virgin bull and began to die for the first time that summer afternoon in Ronda.

  —Oh, my men, oh, Pedro, and oh, Rubén, who made you be so much alike? said Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, from her seat of that moment, when Rubén Oliva and Pedro Romero began to die together that summer afternoon in Ronda.

  —Oh, my rival, oh, Pedro Romero, how could you imagine that you were going to exist outside my portrait, said Don Francisco de Goya y So Sorry from his seat beside La Privada’s, at that moment, when Pedro Romero began to die in a bullring for the first time, the very one where he had killed his first bull.

  But while Elisia Rodríguez felt the loss of the pleasure that only they, her lovers, had given her and that her toreros now had withdrawn, Goya looked at the dead body and said to the torero that he would have painted him for eternity, immortal, truly identical to how he was in life, but in the canvas that he painted …

  More than five thousand bulls killed and not a single gore, Pedro Romero, who had retired at forty, who had died at eighty without a single wound on his body: how could he imagine, and Don Francisco de Goya y Lucifer laughed, that he could escape the destiny my picture gave him? How could he imagine that he could reappear in a different picture that wasn’t by Don Paco de Goya y Losthishead, a natural portrait, without art, with no space for the imagination, a reproduction indistinguishable from what Romero was in life, as though he were sufficient unto himself …

  —Without my painting … Oh, Pedro Romero, forgive me for killing you this time in the fine ring of Ronda, but I cannot allow you to return to life and go around competing with my portrait of you, I cannot permit that; I cannot allow Elisia to go looking for you among the street stands and the bullrings, outside the destiny I gave you when I painted you together …

  No, certainly not: he could not allow what she told him, before, can’t you see, the witch showed him to me in that magic portrait, and now here he is, throbbing and pale, throbbing and impaled, and you, headless, you dirty old fool! No, certainly not, repeated the old man with the high silk hat and the crooked mouth, surrounded by women as dark and tremulous as the afternoon, as death.

  Between being gored and dying, the torero raised his eyes to the sky, and, as the plaza of Ronda is not very high, he felt that he was in the middle of a field, or a mountain, or the very sky that the bloody eyes of Rubén Oliva were contemplating. The plaza of Ronda is part of the nature that surrounds it, and, who knows, perhaps that is why Rubén Oliva, that Sunday, fixed his eyes on an audience of flowers and birds and trees, everything he knew and loved in childhood, and throughout his life, seeing the arches of the plaza covered with jasmine and four-o’clocks, and decking the spandrels with blackthorn, basil, and verbena, and spewing impatiens and balm gentle over the rosettes of the cornice, twin streams flowing over the roof tiles, where cranes nest and robins flutter. He heard the mocking voice of the kite, directing his attention to the sky where it was tracing its graceful curves. Rubén Oliva, through the blood of his eyelids, looked for one final time at the sun and the moon, and at last he saw that the light of the most recent, the nighttime star reached him forty years late, while the light of the sun that he was seeing now for the last time was only eight minutes old.

  Rubén Oliva looked into space and knew, finally, that he had spent his whole life watching the passage of time.

  And then he felt that nature had abandoned the land forever.

  First he closed his own eyes to die for the first time.

  Then he closed the eyes of the bullfighter Pedro Romero, who had just died, gored, at forty, as he was retiring from the bullring in the Royal Display Grounds of Ronda, beside Rubén, inside Rubén.

  He no longer heard the voice that said: My land, Ronda, the most beautiful because it opens the white wings of death and makes us see it as our inseparable companion in the mirror of the abyss.

  He no longer heard the actress’s cry of terror, or the nursing boy’s wail, or the cackle of the old painter in his silk hat.

  2

  Rocío, the wife of Rubén Oliva, put aside her kitchen affairs for a moment, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the black bull of Osborne brandy on the television screen, and, attracted by the young group in the street singing that childish round about Sunday seven, she looked out from the balcony and said with amazed delight, Rubén, Rubén, come and look, the sea has come to Madrid.

  Ronda

  July 31, 1988

  Reasonable People

  There are three partners at every birth: the father, the mother, and God.

  Talmud

  To Gabriella van Zuylen

  I. CONSTRUCTIONS

  1

  Again last night the glow appeared.

  2

  We invited our old teacher, the architect Santiago Ferguson, to join us for lunch at the Lincoln Restaurant. It was a long-standing custom: we’d gone there regularly, every month or so, since 1970. Eighteen years later, our teacher sitting there between us, we felt both sorrow and relief: he was g
etting old, but he had kept his vigor and, perhaps more important, his manias.

  One of them was eating in this restaurant, which was always very busy but still managed to seem a secret. One of the best restaurants in the city, it’s called the Lincoln only because it’s annexed to the hotel of that name. The Great Emancipator never saw anything like the food it serves: brain quesadillas, basted red snapper, the best marrow soup in the world …

  The restaurant is divided into several long, narrow sections, with the staff lined up on either side. The waiters look as if they’ve been there since 1940, at least. They greet our teacher by name, and he responds in kind. We’re like a family, and we’d prefer to go on being one even when our teacher is gone.

  When we mention that possibility—the teacher’s death—our thoughts immediately turn to his daughter, Catarina, the girl of our twenty-year-old dreams. She was older than we were; we met her through her father, and we were desperately in love with her. Catarina, of course, never even gave us a glance. She treated us like a couple of kids. Her father was aware of our youthful passion and may even have encouraged it. He was a widower and proud of his stately daughter; she was quite tall and she held herself very straight; she had the longest neck seen outside a Modigliani painting, dark eyes, and an uncommon style—she wore her hair pulled back in a bun. You had to be as attractive as Catarina to dare defy fashion and wear a hairstyle associated, and with good reason, with do-gooders, old maids, nuns, schoolmarms, and such.

  —So you’re both in love with the Salvation Army gal! said a waggish fellow student in a University City classroom, but he didn’t say any more because we knocked him out with a classic one-two punch. From then on, everyone knew that Professor Ferguson’s daughter had two gallant, though unrequited, admirers: us, the Vélez brothers, José María and Carlos María.

  Our teacher knew it as well; Catarina never gave us any encouragement. We were never sure if the professor himself had arranged the one thing we got out of it. What happened was that one afternoon he scheduled an appointment with us in his office in Colonia Roma. We went up to the third floor, knocked, the door was open, the secretary was out and so was our teacher, so we ventured into the architect’s elegant office, an Art Nouveau whimsy—serpentine woodwork, stained-glass windows, and lamps like drops of molten bronze—complete with kitchen, toilet, and bath. We saw smoke pouring out of the bathroom, we were alarmed, but when we got a little closer we calmed down, seeing that it was steam, the hot water in the shower turned on full blast.

  It was easy to make out white tiles decorated with a floral pattern and a white bathtub with inlaid porcelain frogs. It was harder to distinguish the clothes hanging over the shower pole, and even harder to see the naked body of Catarina, unaware of our presence, facing us, her eyes closed, holding a man with his back toward us, the two of them naked, making love amid the clouds of steam and the Art Nouveau frogs, in the bathroom of her father the architect.

  Catarina, her eyes closed, her legs wrapped around her lover’s waist, had her arms clasped behind the head of a man who held her suspended in the air.

  We said we would never know if that was to be our reward: a single glimpse of Catarina, naked, making love. Two months later, our teacher told us that Catarina was getting married to Joaquín Mercado, a thirty-five-year-old politician, for whom we immediately conceived a blind hatred.

  3

  The approach to the Lincoln had become an obstacle course, thanks to the never-ending construction on Revillagigedo, Luis Moya, Marroquí, and Artículo 123, the streets around it. The Federal Attorney’s Office, the site of the old Naval Ministry, several popular movie houses, and a real jungle of businesses, garages, hardware stores, and used-car lots made that part of the city look like a metallic mountain range: twisted, tortured, rough, rusty; several stages in the life of steel were exposed there, like the entrails of an iron-age animal—literal, emblematic—they were bursting out, exposing themselves and revealing their age, the age of the beast, the geology of the city. The deterioration of the iron and concrete amazed us: only a short time ago they were the very latest and most modern. Today, Bauhaus sounds like a cry or a sneeze.

  Professor Ferguson loved to discuss these things over lunch. Tall, balding, white as the tablecloth where we set our beers, Santiago Ferguson spent the meal railing vainly against the destruction of the oldest city in the New World. Not the oldest dead city (Machu Picchu, Teotihuacan, Tula), but a city that’s still alive, and has been since 1325—Mexico.

  It’s alive, you know, says Don Santiago, in spite of itself and in spite of its inhabitants: we have each, every one of us, tried to kill it.

  Seen from the air, it’s a valley seven thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by lofty mountains that trap the exhaust vomited from cars and factories under a layer of frozen air, and we’ve added a new mountain range, surrounding ourselves with smoldering piles of garbage. And on this early afternoon in a typically rainy August we leap across holes as big as canyons, open sewers, protruding steel reinforcing rods, broken pavement, and huge puddles, amid the excavations and the shattered glass between San Juan de Letrán and Azueta, remembering something Professor Ferguson said:

  —Mexico has ruins. The United States has garbage.

  Then, we said, we’re growing more alike every day. But he replied that we must lose no time in freeing ourselves from garbage, cement, glass boxes, architecture that is not our own.

  What we must do, immediately—he said—is see the modern as a ruin. That’s what it would take to make it perfect, like Monte Albán or Uxmal. The ruin is architecture’s eternity—he went on, this excitable, fast-talking, opinionated, wildly imaginative, affectionate, genial son of the open hearts and open arms of Glasgow. He said this between his last bite of red snapper stuffed with olives and his first taste of a rum-soaked cake: Professor Ferguson, the restorer, for us, of the wall as the fundamental principle of architecture.

  He said that if Indians used the wall to separate the sacred from the profane, Spanish conquistadors to separate the conqueror from the conquered, and modern citizens the rich from the poor, the Mexican of the future should use the wall again (opposing it to glass, concrete, and artificial verticality) as an invitation to move freely about, leave and enter, flow along its horizontal lines. Arches, porticoes, patios, open spaces, extended by walls of blue, red, and yellow; a fountain, a canal, an aqueduct; a return to the shelter of the convent, to the solitude that is as indispensable to art as it is to knowledge itself; a return to the water we obliterated in what used to be a city of lakes, the Venice of the New World.

  His voice and gestures grew more impassioned and we all were silent and listened, gratefully, respectfully. We Mexicans love utopias, which, like chivalric love, can never be consummated, so they are all the more intense and enduring. Ferguson’s vision of horizontal spaces—walls and water, arcades and patios—had only been achieved in a few houses in certain outlying districts, which he had wanted to keep pristine, private, but which were ultimately absorbed by the vast, spreading urban gangrene.

  Sometimes, resigning himself, he could admit that eventually the walls would grow tired, so that even the air could pass through them.

  But that’s all right—he would add, regaining his momentum—because it means that architecture will have fulfilled its original function, which was to serve as refuge.

  Even though its pretext might be religious? (He spoke, but we also spoke about him; he was a teacher who became the subject of the students he taught.)

  There has never been a civilization that hasn’t needed to establish a sacred center, a point of orientation, a place of refuge, from the pyramids of Malinalco to Rockefeller Center, replied Santiago Ferguson; for him, what was important was to distinguish a structure that was not visible at first (to the naked eye), a structure whose spirit would signify to him the unity of architecture, the building of buildings.

  His thought (we students said) was part of his incessant search, his effort to
find the point at which a single architectonic space, even if it doesn’t contain every space, symbolizes them all. But this ideal, because it was unattainable, at least led us toward its approximation. And that was the essence of the art.

  We discussed this among ourselves and decided that perhaps the ideal of the architect was to affirm as far as possible our right to live in the spaces that most resemble our dreams, but also to recognize the impossibility of achieving that. Perhaps our teacher was telling us that in art a project and its realization, a blueprint and the construction itself, can never correspond perfectly; the lesson we learned from him was that there is no perfection, only approximation, and that’s the way it should be, because the day a project and its realization coincide exactly, point by point, it will no longer be possible to design anything: at the sight of perfection—we said to him, he said to us—art dies, exhausted by its victory. There has to be a minimal separation, an indispensable divorce between idea and action, between word and thing, between blueprint and building, so that art can continue to attempt the impossible, the absolute unattainable aesthetic.

  So—our teacher smiles—always remember the story of the Chinese architect who, when the Emperor scolded him, disappeared through the door he’d drawn on his blueprint.