Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

My brother, my friend.

Since I have known you I have realized the importance of forming an image of oneself at the moment when youth and talent meet: the sign of that meeting can manifest itself as a spark of ingenuity — and sometimes as a flash of genius. That is something you find out later (do you understand me, Desdichada, wretched one?). What the image of the young artist (you, Bernardo, coming up the stairs) tells the rest of us is that we can recapture that moment: the image reveals a vocation; if we falter, it can return to reawaken us. You remember, Bernardo? I cut out a print of the self-portrait of the young Dürer and stuck it into a corner of the mirror: to my friend, the young poet, who is going to write what I will never be able to write. Perhaps you understood. You didn’t say anything. Like you, I write, but I am afraid of my potential to call forth darkness. If creation is absolute, it will reveal good, but also evil. That must be the price of creation: if we are free, we are free both to create and to destroy. If we don’t want to be responsible to God for what we are and do, we must make ourselves responsible, don’t you agree, Bernardo? Don’t you agree, unhappy woman, Desdichada?

You believe that she has the right to impose herself between us, to destroy our friendship, bewitch you, turn you from your vocation, deliver you unto evil, frustrate your monogamous romanticism, initiate you in her voracious, perverse love of all shapes? I don’t know what you think. I have seen her up close. I have observed her changes of mood, of time, of taste, of age; she is tender one minute and violent the next; she comes to life at certain hours, she seems near death at others; she is enamored of metamorphosis, not of the inalterable form of a statue or a poem. Bernardo, my friend, my poet: let her go, your fascination with her is unhealthy for you, you must fix your words in a form to transmit them to others: they must return them to flux, instability, uncertainty; you can’t be expected to give form to loose and common words and then reanimate them as well: that is my responsibility as your reader, not yours, my creator.

She wants you to believe the opposite: nothing should ever be fixed, everything must always be in flux, that is pleasure, liberty, diversion, art, life. Have you heard her moaning at night? Have you felt her nails on your face? Have you seen her sitting on the toilet? Have you had to clean her filth from the bed? Have you ever soothed her to sleep? Have you ever prepared her pap? Do you know what it’s like to live every day with a woman with no voice, no language? Pardon me, Bernardo: do you know what it’s like to open your hand and find there that …

Sometimes I see myself behind him in the glass, when we are in a hurry and must both shave at once. The mirror is like an abyss. It doesn’t matter that I fall in it. Not everything happens only in the mind, as you seem to think, Bernardo.

Bernardo and Toño

She whispered in my ear, with a breath of dust: How would you like to die? Can you picture yourself crucified? Can you imagine yourself with a crown of thorns? Tell me if you would like to die like Him. Would you dare, you wretch? Would you ask for a death like His? Don’t cover your ears, poor devil! You want to possess me and you aren’t capable of thinking of a death that would make me adore you? Then I will tell you what I’ll do with you, Toño, my little tony Toño, I’ll make you die of sickness, young or old, murdered like your friend Bernardo’s father, in a street accident, in a nightclub quarrel, fighting over a whore, gunned down, die however you die, tony Toño, I’ll dig up your body, gnaw your skeleton until you are sand, and I’ll put you in an hourglass, to mark the passing time: I’ll turn you into the sand in an hourglass, my little one, and I’ll turn you over every half hour, that will keep me busy until I die, turning you on your head every thirty minutes, how do you like my idea, how do you like it?

Bernardo

I know: I am coming back to take care of her. I enter our apartment without a sound. I open the door carefully. I’m sure that even before I’m inside I can hear her voice, very low, very far off, saying: I believe in you, I’m not sick, I do believe in you. I slam the door and the voice stops. I hate hearing words not meant for me. Can one be a poet in that case? I believe so, deeply: the words that I must hear are not necessarily directed toward me, they are not words only for me, but they are never words I shouldn’t be hearing. I’ve thought that love is an abyss; language too, and the words of another’s confidences, intrigues, and secrets — words of friends, politicians, insincere lovers — they are not mine.

The poet is not a Peeping Tom — that may be the novelist’s role, I don’t know. The poet doesn’t seek, he receives; the poet doesn’t look through keyholes, he closes his eyes in order to see.

She stopped talking. I went in and found Toño lying in my bed, his arms crossed over his face. I heard the clear glug-glug of the enchanted water. Slowly I entered the bath, parting the beaded curtain with its Malaysian sound.

There she was, at the bottom of a tub full of steaming-hot water, her paint peeling, with barely a trace of eyebrows, of lips, of her languid eyes, already peeling away, blistering from the hot water, submerged in a glassy death, her final display window, her long black hair free at last, floating like algae, clean at last, no longer matted down, my woman was sleeping, in the window where no one would ever see her or admire her or desire her: never again imagine her, unhappy one, Desdichada …

And yet I had to take her out and hold her one more time, comfort her, now cling to me, only me, go to sleep, my soul … How would it have been — I say to Toño — if one afternoon I had listened to you and taken La Desdichada to have tea at Aunt Fernandita’s house, and cousin Sonsoles had served us an insipid tea that was really an apple drink, and then the silly girl had invited us up to her dollhouse, to stay there, the three of us? Then what — I asked Toño — then what? Take this handkerchief, these panties, these stockings. They’re just things I’ve been gathering for her, here and there.

Toño

Throughout the wake, Bernardo didn’t look at her. He only looked at me. It doesn’t matter; I accept his reproaches. He doesn’t say a word to me. I don’t respond to his silent question. I could tell him — though it isn’t true: “You know why: because she refused to love me.”

I went to buy her casket from the funeral home on the corner.

Teófilo Sánchez and Ventura del Castillo came over. Ventura brought a sprig of fragrant spikenard. Arturo Ogarrio arrived with two tall tapers, he placed them at the head of the coffin and lit them.

I went out to eat a sandwich nearby, watchful and sad. Bernardo left after me. He paused in the patio. He looked at the bottom of the dry fountain. It began to rain: the warm round drops of the month of July in the Mexican plateau. The sky-high tropics. The cats of the neighborhood slunk across the roofs and eaves of the house.

When I came running back, protecting myself from the torrential rain with a copy of the Ultimas Notícias de Excélsior, with my lapels turned up, brushing the water off my shoulders and stomping hard, the coffin was empty and none of the four — Ventura, Teófilo, Arturo, Bernardo — was there.

I laid out the wet paper on the sofa. I hadn’t read it. Besides, we saved the papers to light the water heater. I read the news of July 17, 1936: four generals had taken up arms in the Grand Canary Island against the Spanish Republic. Francisco Franco flew from Las Palmas to Tetuán in a plane called the Rapid Dragon.