Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

19

Every night, the lights of Mr. Plotnikov’s house come on. I stubbornly ignore them. The brightness comes in my windows and reflects off the gilded spines of my books. I try to close my eyes. But the summons is perpetual: they call to me. Later the lights go out.

And I will go to rejoin Constancia only on the day of my own death. The old actor warned me: Come to visit me, Gospodin Hull, on the day of your death. We are waiting. Our well-being depends on it. Never forget!

Now I devote myself to the family that asked me for asylum, I reach out to them and hold them tight, don’t worry, stay here, we will do woodworking together, it’s something for an old man to do, a retired surgeon, I have some skill with my hands. Stay here, but take these pencils, some paper, pens; if they come for you, remember that these things cannot be confiscated, so you can communicate with me if they put you in jail, so you can demand legal aid; pencils, paper, pens: carry them with you always. What else can you do? Ceramics? Ah, the soil here is good for that, we’ll buy a potter’s wheel, you can teach me, we’ll make plates, vases, flowerpots (for lemon balm, verbena …), my hands will not be idle, pottery makes use of the senses, my hands need to feel, don’t worry, stay here, don’t go yet, hold on to me, there are still so many things we have to do.

Trinity College

Cambridge

July 6, 1987

Toño

… In those years we studied at the National Preparatory School, where Orozco and Rivera had painted their frescoes, and we went to a Chinese café on the corner of San Ildefonso and República Argentina, we dipped sweet rolls in café au lait and discussed the books that we bought in the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore when we had the money or in the used bookstores on República de Cuba when we didn’t: we wanted to be writers, they wanted us to be lawyers and politicians; we were just a couple of self-taught guys who had been delivered onto the imagination of a city that, high though it was, gave you the secret sensation of being buried, even though it was then still the color of marble and burnt-out volcano and was filled with the ringing of silver bells and smelled of pineapple and coriander, and the air was so …

Bernardo

Today I saw La Desdichada for the first time. Toño and I have taken a small apartment together, the local equivalent of the garret in Parisian bohemia, in the Calle de Tacuba near the San Ildefonso school. The good thing is, it’s a commercial street. We didn’t like going out to shop, but two single students have to take care of themselves without letting on that they could use a mother figure. So we alternated domestic duties. We were from the provinces and we had no women — mothers, sisters, girlfriends, nurses — to take care of us. Not even a maid.

Tacuba was an elegant street during the viceroyalty. Today the most hideous commercialism has taken hold of it. I come from Guadalajara, a city still unspoiled, so I notice it. Toño is from industrialized Monterrey, and that makes everything here seem romantically beautiful and pure to him, even though there isn’t a ground floor on this street that hasn’t been taken over by a furniture shop, a mortuary, or a tailor’s. You have to look higher up — I say to Toño, his introspective eyes shielded by eyebrows thick as beetles — to visualize the nobility of this street, its serene proportions, its façades of soft red stone, its escutcheons of white stone inscribed with the names of vanished families, its niches acting as a refuge for saints and pigeons. Toño smiled and called me a romantic, for expecting beauty, even goodness, to descend from spiritual heights. I’m a secular Christian who has substituted Art with a capital A for god with a lowercase g. Toño said that poetry is to be found in the shoe-store windows. I looked at him reproachfully. Who in those days hadn’t read Neruda and repeated his credo of the poetry of the immediate, the streets of the city, the specters in the windows? I prefer to look up at the ironwork balconies and their peeling shutters.

The window I was distractedly looking at closed suddenly, and when I lowered my eyes they were reflected in a store window. My eyes, like a body apart from me — my Lazarus, my drudge — dove into the water of the glass and, swimming there, discovered what the window hid: what it displayed. It was a woman in a bridal gown. But whereas other mannequins in this street — which Toño and I walked through every day, hardly noticing it, accustomed by now to the plurally ugly and the singularly lovely of our city — were made forgettable by their struggle to be fashionably up-to-date, this woman caught my eye because her dress was old-fashioned, buttoned clear to the throat.

It was a style from a long time ago, nobody recalls the way women dressed then. They will all be old tomorrow. But not La Desdichada: the sumptuousness of her wedding gown was everlasting, the train of her dress splendidly elegant. The veil that covered her features revealed the perfection of her pale face, softened by gauze. In her flat satin slippers she appeared proud and proper. Elegant and obedient. An incongruous silver lizard ran out from beneath her motionless skirt, scooting away in trembling zigzags. It was looking for a sunny spot in the display window, and there it stopped, like a satisfied tourist.

Toño

I came to see the dummy in the wedding dress because Bernardo insisted. He said it was a rare sight, in the midst of what he called the crowded vulgarity of Tacuba. He was looking for an oasis in the city. I had long since renounced such things. If one wanted rural backwaters in Mexico, there are more than enough in Michoacán or Veracruz. The city must be what it is, cement, gasoline, and artificial light. I didn’t expect to find Bernardo’s bride in a window, and so it turned out: I didn’t find her, and I wasn’t a bit disappointed.

Our apartment is very small, just a sitting room where Bernardo sleeps and a loft that I go up to at night. In the sitting room there’s a cot that serves as a sofa by day. In the loft is a bed with metal posts and a canopy, which my mother gave me. The kitchen and the bath are one and the same room, at the back of the flat, behind a bead curtain, like in South Sea movies. (Two or three times a month we went to the Cine Iris: we saw Somerset Maugham’s Rain with Joan Crawford and China Seas with Jean Harlow — the sources of certain images we share.) When Bernardo talked about the dummy in the window on Tacuba, I got an odd feeling that what he wanted was to bring home La Desdichada, as he christened her (and I, letting myself be influenced by him, also started calling her that, before I saw her, before I even had proof of her existence).

He wanted to decorate our poor home a little.

Bernardo was reading and translating Nerval back then. He was busy with a sequence of images in the poem El Desdichado: a widower, a heavenly lute, a dead star, a burnt tower; the black sun of melancholy. As he read and translated during our moments of student freedom (long nights, rare sunrises), he told me that in the same way that a constellation of stars shapes itself into the image of a scorpion or a water carrier, so a cluster of syllables tries to form a word and the word (he says) painstakingly seeks its related words (friendly or enemy words) to form an image. The image travels through the entire world to embrace and make peace with its sister image, so long lost or estranged. This, he says, is the birth of metaphor.