Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

I need a space between Toño and me and our wooden guest. Wooden, I repeat to myself walking along the new Avenida Nuevo León almost to the pasture that separates the Colonia Hipódromo from Insurgentes, walking across that field of prickly heather until I reach the leafy avenue and from there cross over to the Colonia del Valle: La Desdichada is wooden. I’m not going to compensate for that fact with a Waikiki whore, as Toño would, or would like to, cynically. But if I go on believing that Sonsoles is going to compensate me for anything, I know that I am making a mistake. The tiresome girl stops playing croquet and invites me into the living room. She asks me if I would care for some tea and I answer yes, amused by the British afternoon invented by my cousin. She skips off coquettishly and in a little while comes back with a tray, teapot, and teacups. Such speed. She hardly gave me time to sneer at the Romero de Torres-style kitsch of this pseudo-gypsy room, full of silk shawls on black pianos, glass cases, with open fans, wooden statues of Don Quixote, and furniture carved with scenes from the fall of Granada. It is hard to sit and take tea with your head leaning against a carving of the tearful Moorish king Boabdil and his stern mother, while my cousin Sonsoles sits under a column portraying Isabel la Católica in the encampment of Santa Fe, about to have a last swing at the infidel. — Will the gentleman take a little tea? the silly little thing asks.

I say yes with my most, well, gentlemanly smile. She serves me the tea. It doesn’t steam. I take a sip and spit it out involuntarily. It’s cider, a lukewarm apple drink, unexpected, repugnant. She looks at me with her hazel eyes very round, not sure whether to smile or take offense. I didn’t know what to say. I saw her there with the teapot in her hand, spilling out of her Hollywood vamp costume, bending over to expose her breasts while she pours the tea: the freckled, deceitful, heavily powdered breasts of my cousin Sonsoles, who looks at me with a question on her face, asking if I don’t want to play with her. But I only see a pale face, long and narrow, without artifice, almost unpainted, nunlike, protected from the sun and air for five hundred years — since the fall of Granada! — and now showing up, like a pale conventual ghost, in the century of the swimsuit, tennis, and suntan lotion.

— A little tea, sir?

She probably has a dollhouse in her bedroom. Then Aunt Fernandita arrives, what a surprise, stay for dinner, spend the night, Bernardito, Feliciano had to go to Veracruz to fill out the papers on some imported goods, he won’t be back until Thursday, stay with us, boy, come on, why not, it’s what your mother would want.

Toño

Bernardo hasn’t come back. I think of him; I hadn’t imagined that his absence would bother me so much. I miss him. I ask myself why, what is it that binds us? I look at her sleeping, her eyes always open but languid. There is no other mannequin like her; who can have given her this singular expression?

Since childhood, our literary vocation has earned us nothing but scorn. Or disapproval. Or pity. I don’t know what he is going to write. Nor what I am going to write. But our friendship derives from others’ saying: They’re crazy, they want to be writers. How can it be? Here, in this country that’s now wide open, anything you want, easy money, easy power, anyone can make it to the top … What binds us is that Lázaro Cárdenas is president and he brings a moment of moral seriousness to politics. We feel that Cárdenas values power and money less than justice and work. He wants to get things done, and when I see his Indian face in the newspaper, I sense that’s his one great anxiety: so little time! Then the crooks, the bullies, the murderers will be back. It’s inevitable. It’s wonderful, Bernardo, that we grew up under the power of a serious man, a decent man. If power can be ethical, then why can’t two young men be writers, if that’s what they want?

(They’re crazy: they hear music without instruments, the music of time, bands in the night. They feed the woman soup. She drinks it, mute and grateful. How can Bernardo be so sensitive in everything and so brutal to a sick woman who only needs a little care, attention, tenderness?)

Bernardo

I ran into Arturo Ogarrio in the hall at school and he thanked me for the other night’s dinner. He asked if he could go with me, where was I headed? That morning I had gotten a check from my mother, who lives in Guadalajara, at Aunt Fernandita’s house, where I’m staying until the tempest with Toño passes over.

I intend to blow it on books. Ogarrio takes my arm, stopping me; he asks me to take a moment to admire the symmetry of the colonial patio, the arches, the porticoes of the old school of San Ildefonso; he complains about Orozco’s murals, those violent caricatures that disrupt the harmony of the cloister with their parade of oligarchs, their beggars, their Liberty in chains, their deformed prostitutes, and their cross-eyed Pancreator. I ask him if he prefers the hideous stained-glass window in the stairway, a hopeful salute to progress: salvation through Industry and Commerce, in full color. He says that is not the problem, the problem is that the building represents harmony and Orozco’s violent fresco represents discord. That’s what I like, that Orozco doesn’t go along with the consensus, that he tells the priests and politicians and ideologues that things are not going to turn out well — just the opposite of Diego Rivera, who keeps on saying that this time, yes, things will turn out all right for us. No.

We ventured into the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore. The employees, walled in behind glass counters, their arms crossed, block the path of the presumed client and reader. Their brown jackets, their black ties, their false black elbow-length sleeves make a single statement: They shall not pass.

— Surely it was easier to acquire that mannequin in a shop — said Arturo quietly — than it is to acquire a book here.

I placed my check on the counter and on top of the check my student ID. I asked for the Romancero Gitano of Lorca, Andreyev’s Sashka Yegulev, Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, and the review Letras de México, where I had published, hidden toward the back, a little poem.

— Unless, as Ventura says, you ran the risk of stealing her …

— She’s flesh and blood. The other night she wasn’t feeling well. That’s all. Look — I said quickly — I’ll give you this Ortega book; you know it?

— No, you can’t, said the clerk. You have to cash the check in a bank and pay in cash; checks are not accepted here, or money orders, or anything of the sort, said the employee with the black sleeves and coffee-colored jacket, assiduously reclaiming the books one by one:

— Above all, young man, we do not extend credit.

— Toño has been looking for the Andreyev novel for a long time. He wanted to give it to her. It’s the story of a young rebel. And an anarchist, besides. I turned to face him. — She is flesh and blood.

— I know — said Ogarrio with his usual seriousness. — Come with me.

Toño

I think she’s feeling better, thanks to my care. Bernardo has stayed away for several nights and hasn’t helped me. I spend hours watching over her, ministering to her complaints, to her needs. I understand her: in her condition, she needs all sorts of attention. It’s Bernardo’s fault she feels bad: he should have been here helping me, instead of hiding in the tower of his resentment. Thank God, she’s better. I look at her face, so thin and sweet.

… I feel an overwhelming fatigue in the morning, as I’ve never felt before.

I dream that I’m talking with her. But she only talks to herself. When I talk, she doesn’t listen. She talks over my head, or around me, to some other person who is above or behind me, someone I can’t see. It makes me sick with grief. I believe in someone who doesn’t exist. Then she caresses me. She does believe in me.