Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

— So where are we going to get them from, man? I’ve done my part. You haven’t exactly put yourself out.

She is sitting at the table, wrapped in the Chinese robe from my faggot uncle. She doesn’t move her eyes, of course — she has her gaze fixed, fixed on Toño.

To escape that annoying look, I quickly take her by the arm, pick her up, and say to Toño that we have to put some makeup on her, dress her, make her comfortable, poor Desdichada! to see her always so distant and solitary — I force a laugh — a little attention wouldn’t hurt her, or a little fresh air.

I open the window overlooking the patio, leaving the dummy in Toño’s arms. There is no respite from the sound of the frogs croaking. The storm builds over the mountains. I am oppressed by the small noises of my city, which seem all the more piercing in the lull before the storm. Today the knife sharpeners sound sinister to my ears, the used-clothes venders even worse.

I turn back, and for a moment can’t find La Desdichada: I don’t see her where I left her, where she should be, where I had set her at the table. A cry escapes me: “What have you done with her?” Toño appears alone, parting the beads of the bath curtain. He has a long scratch on his face.

— Nothing. I cut myself. She’s coming right away.

Bernardo and Toño

Why were we afraid?

Why were we afraid to invent a life for her? The least a writer can do is give a person a destiny. It wouldn’t have cost us anything; we wouldn’t have had to account to anyone. Were we incapable of giving La Desdichada her destiny? Why? Did we really feel she was so dispossessed? Was it impossible to imagine her country, her family, her past? What was stopping us?

We can make her a housekeeper. She’ll keep the apartment clean. Run our errands. We would have more time to read and write, to see friends. Or we can make her a prostitute. That would help pay our household expenses. We’d have more time to read and write. To see friends and feel like big shots. We laugh. Do you think anyone would be interested in her as a whore? It would challenge the imagination, Bernardo. Like fucking a Siren: how?

We laughed.

A mother?

What did you say?

She could be a mother. Neither servant nor whore. Mother, give her a child, let her devote herself to taking care of her child.

How?

We laughed even harder.

Toño

Today was La Desdichada’s dinner party. The dummy was still dressed in the Chinese robe from my uncle the fruit. Nothing suited her better, Bernardo and I decided; not only that, but it was her name on the invitations, so, like a high-class courtesan or an eccentric Englishwoman in her castle, she could entertain in her dressing gown: Cast aside convention!

La Desdichada is receiving. From eight to eleven. Punctuality required. She is never late, we inform our friends: British punctuality, eh? And we sat down to wait for them, one on each side of her, I on her left, Bernardo on her right.

It occurred to me that a party would clear away the little cloud in our relations that I noted yesterday, when I cut myself shaving while she was watching me, sitting on the toilet, her legs crossed. Seated there, totally insouciant, one knee over the other. What a flirt! The toilet was just the most convenient place to sit her down to watch me shave. She made me a little nervous, that’s all.

I didn’t explain this to Bernardo. I know him too well, and maybe I shouldn’t have taken the mannequin into the bathroom with me. I’m sorry, really, and would like to ask his pardon without giving any explanation. I can’t; he wouldn’t understand, he likes to verbalize everything, starting with his feelings. The fact is that when he turned his back to the window and looked for us, without finding us, I took a quick look into the living room and saw him looking at nothing. I thought for a moment that we only see what we desire. I had a fleeting sense of terror.

I wanted to clear away the misunderstanding with a little joke, and he was agreeable. That’s another thing we had in common: the taste for a type of humor that, although we didn’t know it at the time, was in vogue in Europe and was associated with the games of Dada. Of course, Mexican Surrealism didn’t need the European imprimatur; we are Surrealists by vocation, by birth, as all the jokes we have inflicted on Christianity prove, confounding the sacrifices of blood and host, disguising whores as virgins, constantly moving between the stable and the brothel, creation and calendar, myth and history, the past and the future, the circle and the line, the mask and the face, the crown of thorns and the crown of feathers, the mother and the virgin, death and laughter: for five centuries, Bernardo and I tell ourselves with stern humor, we’ve been playing charades with the most exquisite corpse of all, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with our vessels of bloodstained glass, why shouldn’t we do the same with the poor cadaver of wood, La Desdichada? Why should we be afraid?

She would be the hostess. La Desdichada is receiving guests, and she will receive them in her robe, like a grand French courtesan, like a geisha, like a great English lady in her castle, taking advantage of her privilege of eccentricity to act freely.

Bernardo

Who sent these dried flowers an hour before dinner?

Who could it be?

Toño

Not many people came to the dinner. Well, fine, not many people would fit in our apartment, but Bernardo and I felt that a huge party with lots of people, the kind that’s usually given in Mexico (there are so many solitudes to overcome: more than in other places), might give the event an orgiastic tone. Secretly, I would have liked to have seen La Desdichada lost in a restless, even a mean crowd: I nourished the fantasy that, surrounded by a mass of indifferent bodies, hers would cease to be so: moved about, handled, passed from hand to hand, a party animal, she would go on being a mannequin but nobody would know: she would be just like everyone else.

Everyone would greet her, ask her name, what she did, wish her well, and quickly move on to chat with the next person, convinced that she had replied to his questions, how spiritual, how clever!

— My name is La Desdichada. I am a professional model. I’m not paid for my work.

The fact is, only three men accepted our invitation. You had to be curious to accept an invitation like ours on Monday night, at the beginning of the school week. It didn’t surprise us that two of our guests were fellows from aristocratic families whose fortunes had been reduced in those years of tumult and confusion. Nothing lasts longer than half a century in Mexico, except the poor and the priests. Bernardo’s family, which was very influential when the Liberals were in power back in the nineteenth century, does not have an ounce of influence today, and the families of Ventura del Castillo and Arturo Ogarrio, who obtained their power under the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship, had now lost theirs as well. The violent history of Mexico is a great leveler. The person who’s on top one day shows up the next, not on the heights, but in the flats: the mid-level middle-class plateau composed mainly of the impoverished remnants of short-lived aristocracies. Ventura del Castillo, self-proclaimed “new poor,” was more afraid of being middle-class than he was of being poor. The way he escaped was by being eccentric. He was the school clown, something his appearance helped him in. At twenty, he was fat and prim, with a tuft of hair over his lip, red cheeks, and the eyes of a lovesick sheep behind a ubiquitous monocle. His role-playing allowed him to rise above the humiliating aspects of his social decline; his exaggerated style, instead of making him a laughingstock at school, earned him a startled respect; he rejected the melodrama of the fallen family; with less justification he accepted the idea, still in vogue, of the “fallen woman,” and, no doubt, when he walked into our apartment, that’s what he thought Bernardo and I were exhibiting: a cheap Nana, taken from one of the red-light nightclubs that everyone, aristocrat or not, then frequented. Ventura had his commentary ready and the presence of La Desdichada gave him license to say: