Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Bernardo

(i)

Some months later my loneliness led me back to the Waikiki. My Aunt Fernanda had let me stay at her house. All right, I will be frank: my poverty was great, but not as great as my wretchedness. I will go further. I needed the warmth of a home, I admit it, and the evocations of the Andalusian sun of my ancestors gave it to me, notwithstanding even the flirtations of that fake maja, cousin Sonsoles. On the other hand, I found it more difficult every day to put up with Uncle Feliciano, a Franco supporter to the bone; his trips to Veracruz provided the only relief, before I realized that he went to the port to organize the Spanish merchants against the red republic of Madrid, as he liked to call it.

I began to spend a lot of time at the nightclub, stupidly blowing my mother’s check on dolls and drink. This was Toño’s world not mine; perhaps my secret desire was that I’d run into him there, we’d make up, forget La Desdichada, and resume our comfortable life together, which permitted us to share expenses that we really couldn’t afford if we each lived alone.

There is something else (I must add): the visits to the nightclub reconciled me to the mystery of my city. The Waikiki was a public hiding place, as well as a private agora. In it, one felt oneself surrounded by the vast enigma of the oldest city of the New World, a city that one can travel to by train, plane, and highway, stay in a hotel, eat in restaurants, visit museums, and still never see.

The unwary visitor doesn’t understand that the true Mexico City is not there. It must be imagined, it can’t be seen directly. It demands words to bring it to life, like the Baroque statue that can be fully seen only if one moves around it; like the poem that makes one condition to be ours: Speak me. Syllables, words, images, metaphors: a lyrical sentence is completed only when it goes beyond metaphor and becomes epiphany. The intangible crown on this web of encounters is, finally, amazement: the epiphany is wonderful because the poem now is written but cannot be seen; it is said (it said-duces ).

There must be a place for the final encounter of the poet and his reader: a port of sail.

I see my city like this poem of invisible architecture, successfully concluded only to begin again, perpetually. The conclusion is the condition of the new beginning. And to start anew is to be led to the epiphany to come: I evoke names and places, Argentina and Donceles Streets, Reforma and Madero Avenues, the Churches of Santa Veracruz and San Hipólito, the pirul and the ahuehuete trees, calla lilies, a skeleton on a bicycle and a wasp stinging my forehead, Orozco and Tolsá, Porrúa Brothers Bookstore and Tacuba Café, the Cine Iris, sunstone and stone sun, zarzuelas at the Arbeu Theater, ahuautles and huitlacoche, pineapple and coriander, jicama and cactus with white cheese; Los Leones desert, Ajusco Mountain and Colonia Roma, gooey popcorn and morning sweet rolls, the Salamanca ice-cream shop, the Waikiki and Rio Rosa cabarets, wet season and dry season: Mexico, D.F. In the renewed mystery of the city, starting from any of its streets, eating a taco, entering a movie house, I could meet my dear friend Toño again and tell him it’s all right, it’s all over, shake hands, man, buddies again, brothers forever, come on, Toñito …

I released myself from the woman who was rubbing my knee, and set my glass on the table. The comic uproar in the middle of the nightclub’s raised runway, the unexpected Spanish dancing, the mood of a bullfight victory celebration, the play of warm red and blue lights, and the unmistakable figure of Teófilo Sánchez, his short jacket, his miner’s boots, his hair like a new recruit’s (shaved with the aid of a bowl), dancing to the exuberant music with a woman dressed in a wedding gown, moving back and forth, lifting her in the air, the arms of the popular poet showing her, on high, to all, clasping her tightly to his chest like a prize he’d been coveting, head to toe, that light, stiff, unpainted creature; again they crossed the stage, now spinning, her rigid arms raised as for a chant of hallucinated snakes, turning in circles, the music swelling double-time, and now Teófilo Sánchez threw his companion dressed as a bride into the air, her collar buttoned to her ears, her face covered by a wedding veil, hiding the signs of age, destruction, water, fire, pockmarks … the intensely sad eyes of the mannequin.

I went to jump up on the runway to put an end to the horrible spectacle. It wasn’t necessary. Other small disturbances succeeded the first, like an earthquake followed by an aftershock, a new shaking that makes us forget the first, which seems remote, though it’s only a few seconds old. A commotion on the runway an angry scream, confused movement, injured bodies, shouted curses.

Then the lights dimmed. The scene cooled down. The darkness surrounded us. A single ray of icy light, a silver light in a world of black velvet, shone like a lunar spotlight on the runway and the band began the slowest danzón. A young man dressed all in dark gray, pale and sunken-eyed, with his lips pressed tight and his black hair slicked back, took the woman dressed as a bride in his arms and held her in the slowest danzón, moving, yes, over the space of a single tile, practically a postage stamp, almost without moving his feet, without moving his hips or his arms, the two held each other in aquarian silence. Arturo Ogarrio and the rescued woman, slow, ceremonious as a Spanish Infanta, her face hidden behind a cascade of veils, but finally free, I realized with sudden relief, finally her own mistress in the arms of this young man who did the danzón so slowly, tenderly, respectfully, passionately, while I watched the figures of the dancers moving farther and farther away in the silver light, leaving more and more space, for me, for my life and my poetry, giving up a meeting with Toño, writing a farewell to Mexico in this night the color of smoke, in exchange for a meeting with literature …

(ii)

The words of a poem only return to life, imperfect or not, when they flow anew; that is, when they are said. Better said (read) than dead! The poem I’m translating is called El Desdichado —Nerval’s French did not offer the verbal phantasm of the Spanish words, in which what is said ( dicho ) defeats what is sad ( des-dicha ), and what is unsaid ( des-dicho ), and what’s unsound(ed) ( des-dicho ) is rent by the sword of words. Silence is the unsaid; it is sadness, whereas a word is award. The wordless are worldless, for silence is shapeless, hapless. It’s voice versus vice — so voice verses!

But she, La Desdichada, does not speak, she does not speak …

I think this and surprise myself. Emotion floods over me, I translate it as she who doesn’t speak: Love, be who you may, named as you’re named (name, flame: benighted, be lighted — to name is to bring to life, to flame is to inflame), speak through me, Desdichada, unhappy, unsaid one, trust in the poet, let me be your voice, your word/world. I will make you sound. Speak to me, through me, for me, and in exchange for your voice I swear I will always be true, always true to you. That is my desire, Desdichada, the world is slow to give me what I want, one woman who is mine alone, and I only hers.

Let me draw near your wooden ear, while I’m still under twenty, and tell you: I don’t know if the world will ever bring me that one woman, or if so, when. Perhaps to find her I would have to change my ways (my virtue), perhaps I would have to love many women before discovering this is it, the one and only, the here and now. And even if I find her, what will become of me then, having loved so many to find that one, telling her that it was all for her and her alone — will she believe me when I tell her that I am a man meant for only one woman?