Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

— Melodrama is simply comedy without humor.

Our friend was not disturbed by La Desdichada’s appearance, wrapped in her Chinese dressing gown, her unchanging painted face giving her a rather Orozcoan look (Expressionist, we called it then), but it carried his innate sense of the grotesque to new heights. Wherever he went, Ventura became the festive center of attention, eating his monocle at dinner. Everyone suspected that his eyeglass was made of gelatin; when he swallowed it, he made such an outrageous noise that everyone ended up laughing, repelled and pained, until the wag ended his joke by rinsing his mouth with beer and eating, as a sort of dessert, the flower eternally in his buttonhole — a daisy, no less.

For all that, the encounter between Ventura del Castillo and La Desdichada resulted in a sort of unexpected standoff: we were confronting him with someone who was vastly more eccentric than he was. He looked at her and asked us with his eyes, Is she a dummy, or is she a splendid actress? Is she La Duse with an expressionless face? Bernardo and I looked at each other. We didn’t know if Ventura was going to see us, and not La Desdichada, as the eccentrics of the affair, challenging our fat friend’s supremacy.

— Such rakes you chaps are! laughed the lad, who affected the verbal mannerisms of Madrid.

— She’s a paralytic for sure!

Arturo Ogarrio, by contrast, wasn’t as lighthearted about his family’s decline. Having to study with the masses at San Ildefonso Prep annoyed him; he never resigned himself to losing his chance to enroll at Sandhurst in England, as two preceding generations of his family had done. His bitterness showed in his face. He saw everything that took place in this world of “reality” with a kind of poisonous clarity.

— What we left behind was a fantasy — he told me once, as if I were the cause of the Mexican Revolution and he — noblesse oblige — had to thank me for opening his eyes.

Severely dressed, all in dark gray, with a waistcoat, stiff collar, and black tie, bearing the grief of a lost time, Arturo Ogarrio had no trouble seeing what was going on: it was a gag, a wooden dummy presiding over a dinner of prep students where a pair of friends with literary inclinations were throwing down the gauntlet to the imagination of Arturo Ogarrio, new citizen of the republic of reality.

— Are you going to join our game? Yes or no?

His face was extremely pale, thin, without lips, but with the brilliant eyes of the frustrated aesthete, frustrated because he identified art with leisure, and since he didn’t have the one, he couldn’t conceive of having the other. He refused to be a dilettante; perhaps that is all we offered him: a breach of quotidian reality, an unimportant aesthetic diversion. He was almost contemptuous of us. I considered that something I could interpret as his refusal of concessions, like his rejection of dilettantism. He would not take sides — reality or fantasy. He would judge matters on their own merits and respond to the initiatives of the others. He crossed his arms and watched us with a severe smile.

The third guest, Teófilo Sánchez, was the school’s professional bohemian: poet and painter, singer of traditional melodies. He must have seen old engravings or recent films, or simply have heard somewhere that the painter wears a floppy hat and a cape, and the poet long hair and florid neckwear. To be different, Teófilo chose to wear a railroad engineer’s shirt without a tie, and a short jacket, and he went about with his head uncovered (in that age of the obligatory hat, his head appeared offensively naked, it was practically shaved, in a cut that at that time was associated with German schools or the lowest class of army recruits). His careless features, resembling a loaf of rye before it’s put in the oven, his lively raisin eyes, the spontaneous abundance of his poetic language, seemed a commentary on Ventura’s remark, which I had rewarded with a sour smile a moment before: Melodrama is comedy without humor.

Was that remark directed at me, since I was still writing little chronicles of the fait-divers of the capital and the minor poetry, unquestionably vulgar, of the popular dance hall, the tart, and the pimp, the couples of the barrio, jealousy and betrayal, abandoned gardens and sleepless nights? Don’t overlook the classical statues in the gardens and the forgotten idols in the basements, Bernardo commented very seriously. Ventura laughed at Teófilo because Teófilo wanted to provoke laughter. Arturo saw Teófilo as what Teófilo was and would be: a youthful curiosity, but a disappointment as an older man.

What was the bard of bohemia going to do, once we each sat down with our cuba libres, but improvise some awful verses on the subject of our lady, sitting there wordlessly? We saw Arturo’s grimace of disdain and Ventura took advantage of Teófilo’s sigh to laugh good-naturedly and say that this donna immobile would be the best Tancredo at a bullfight. Too bad that woman, inventor of the art of bullfighting in Crete (who continued to delight circus audiences as écuyère ), is not able to play the central role in the modern bullring. The man who plays the Tancredo — the fat, rosy-cheeked Ventura began his imitation, first licking his rosebud lips and then anointing a finger with saliva and dramatically running it over his eyebrows — is put in the center of the ring — so — and doesn’t budge for anything — so — because his life depends on it. His future movement depends on his present immobility — he stood stock-still in front of La Desdichada — as the gate opens — so — and the bull — so — is released and seeks movement, the bull is attracted by the movement of the other, and there is Tancredo, unmoving, and the bull doesn’t know what to do, he awaits a movement, an excuse to ape and attack it: Ventura del Castillo motionless before La Desdichada, who is sitting between Bernardo and me, Arturo standing, watching what is going on with the most correct cynicism, Teófilo confused, his words starting to burst out, his inspiration starting to perish: his hands in front of him, his pose and his speech suspended by Ventura’s frozen act, the perfect Tancredo, rigid in the center of the ring, defying the fierce bull of the imagination.

Our friend had been converted into the mirror image of the wooden dummy. Bernardo was sitting on La Desdichada’s right and I on the mannequin’s left. Silence, immobility.

Then we heard a sigh and we all turned to look at her. Her head fell to the side, onto my shoulder. Bernardo stood up trembling, he looked at her huddled there, resting on my shoulder — so — and took her by the shoulders — so — so — and shook her, I didn’t know what to do, Teófilo babbled something, and Ventura was true to his game. The bull was attacking and he, how could he move? It would be suicide, caramba!

I defended La Desdichada, I told Bernardo to calm down.

— You’re hurting her, you prick!

Arturo Ogarrio let his arms drop and said: Let’s go, I think we are intruding on the private lives of these people.

— Good night, madam, he said to La Desdichada, who was being held up with one arm supported by Bernardo, the other by me. — Thank you for your exquisite hospitality. I hope to repay it one of these days.

Toño and Bernardo

How would you prefer to die? Do you see yourself crucified? Tell me if you would like to die like Him. Would you dare? Would you ask for a death like His?

Bernardo

I watched La Desdichada for hours, taking advantage of the heavy sleep Toño fell into after dinner.

She had returned, still in her Chinese dressing gown, to her place at the head of the table; I studied her in silence.

Her sculptor had given her a face of classic features, a straight nose and nicely spaced eyes, not as round as those of most mannequins of the time, who looked like caricatures, especially since they were usually given fan-shaped eyelashes. The black eyes of La Desdichada, on the other hand, were melancholy: the lengthened lids, like a lizard’s, gave her that quality. In contrast, the mannequin’s mouth, tiny, tight, and painted to look like a ribbon, could be that of any store-window dummy. Her chin, again, was different, a little prognathous, like that of a Spanish princess. She also had a long neck, perfect for those old garments that buttoned to the ear, as the poet López Velarde wrote. La Desdichada had, in fact, a neck for all ages: childish nakedness, then silk mufflers, finally pearl chokers.