We left Wells Cathedral, each of us knowing that we could return only when we again had a thirst for miracles, and that our newfound kinship would depend on our continuing to believe in the miracle of the others. Apart from that, to all appearances, we would continue to be “reasonable people.”
At that moment we lost the possibility of the couple, but we gained, behind the multitude of our ghosts, a fraternal trinity. Carlos María, José María, Catarina.
Had that been Santiago Ferguson’s secret wish, after all?
3
Again last night the glow appeared.
Doña Heredad Mateos arrived at the convent hidden in Calle José María Marroquí, and in the hot white bathroom where the steam formed drops on the dried-up, wrinkled backs of the frogs, she presented to the woman who had just given birth an old patched wedding dress, which the old seamstress’s art had made like new: pearls, organdy, and a whiff of naphthalene. The nuns thanked her for the gift and placed it, as though to try it on, over the stretched-out body of the woman who had just given birth, who did not smile. The mask of her immobile face, embellished only by the hair on her upper lip and the moles on her temples, broke as she asked, again, why the birth was a miracle the first time and now, the second time, it was a sin. The seamstress said she didn’t know anything about that kind of thing, it was beyond her, all she had was faith. And, as always, she would gladly take care of the child. Yes, it was better, as always, for the father not to know about the child. She would take care of him.
—What a good idea it was to build this temascal—said Doña Heredad, looking around at the steamy white bath. —It’s good here—she said tenderly to the woman who had just given birth.
Then the old seamstress, dressed in black, with her long skirt, her rebozo, her cotton stockings and flat shoes, took the baby and placed it in her crude multicolored shopping basket, hailed a bus on Artículo 123 and, after a long ride through the city of sorrows, got off on the broad avenue of La Esplanada, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec.
There, with the shopping basket in her hand, she went patiently from door to door, from one luxurious residence to another, requesting “an offering for this poor mother,” and receiving, from time to time, a bottle of lemonade, the leftovers from a banquet, fried pork or seafood, dry tortillas, a bit of tossed salad. The assiduous woman placed it all in her basket, indifferent to the sounds of cars and trucks and helicopters and motorcycles; oblivious to the black clouds of exhaust fumes, because she knew that none of that affected the child; this child was born without lead in his lungs; each year when he was born, the child was saved from stain, sickness, and death. Presenting him at the doors of Las Lomas, Doña Heredad was oblivious to the noise and pollution. She received alms, but her memory went far beyond the limit of her travails, and in her head she heard the ancient sounds of organ-grinders, itinerant venders, old-clothes sellers, and knife sharpeners filling the ever-expanding, ever more immense terrain of the oldest city of the New World—another city, murmured Doña Heredad Mateos to herself, a pure city, in whose houses the living could rejoin the dead, a small city where people could tell their stories, a city of faith where miracles occurred, even if reasonable people never understood, said Doña Heredad, asking charity for the god child, charity for the newborn, showing the foam-rubber doll with his golden curls and his blue eyes and his white gown with gold edging and his bloody fingers—charity, charity for the child.
Varaville, Normandy, Easter 1987
Tepoztlán, Morelos, Easter 1988
BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES
Where the Air Is Clear
The Good Conscience
Aura
The Death of Artemio Cruz
A Change of Skin
Terra Nostra
The Hydra Head
Burnt Water
Distant Relations
The Old Gringo
Myself with Others
Christopher Unborn
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
English translation copyright © 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number: 89-82138
Originally published in Spanish as Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes by Mondadori España, copyright © 1989 by Carlos Fuentes
Published simultaneously in Canada by Harper & Collins, Toronto
First American edition, 1990
“A Lover from Palestine” by Mahmoud Darweesh, translated by B. M. Bennani, from Splinters of Bone (Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1974)
The translator acknowledges Carol Christensen for her superb editorial assistance
eISBN 9781466840102
First eBook edition: February 2013
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Page 35