Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Merton House

Cambridge

May 1987

Sunday

What he would particularly remember about that Sunday was the quiet tedium. Lying on the sofa in T-shirt and briefs to beat the unbearable heat, but wearing his socks out of a sense of decorum even he could not explain, he leaned his head against his raised arms and clenched fists, watching the frozen, repeating image of the black bull in an Osborne brandy ad on the television screen: why should that seductive yet bestial image linger there, inviting us to consume an alcoholic drink, perhaps threatening us — will we be killed, gored by that mercantile bull, if we reject his command: Drink me? Rubén Oliva was about to pose that question to his wife when the voice of the announcer praising the bull’s brandy became smothered by the smells of other, louder voices wafting in from the street, from neighboring balconies and from distant open windows. He heard them as smells because those voices — bits of soap-opera dialogue, commercials like the one he was watching, children’s squeals, domestic squabbles — reached him with the same mixture of faintness and force, immediate yet immediately dissipated, as the kitchen smells that circulated through that lower-class neighborhood. He shook his head; he didn’t distinguish between a newborn’s wail and a whiff of stew. He put his hands back over his eyes and rubbed them, as if his hands could scour out the shadows under his intense green eyes, lost in cavernous depths of dark skin. Surely those eyes shone more brightly because they were ringed by such darkness. They were lively but serene eyes, resigned, always alert, though without illusions that anything could be done with the day’s news. To wake, to sleep, to wake again. He looked back at the television screen, the figure of the bull at once dark and clear, heavy and light, a pasteboard bull that was also flesh and blood, ready to attack if he, Rubén Oliva, didn’t obey the command: Drink!

He got up with a wince, but easily; he wasn’t heavy, he never had to make an effort to stay slim. A doctor had said to him: —It’s heredity, Rubén, you can thank your metabolism. — Centuries of hunger, you mean, he had answered.

He worried sometimes about turning forty within the year, developing a paunch; but no, skinny he was born and skinny he would die. He smiled and, smelling beans cooking in oil, went to the balcony to watch the kids running along Calle Jesús Fucar like him dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals with socks, repeating until everyone was sick of it the tired old comic ditty about the days of the week: “Monday one, Tuesday two, Wednesday three, Thursday four, Friday five, Saturday six,” they sang all together, and then a single voice, “and Sunday seven!” The others laughed and they began another round of the week, ending with another lone voice crying out the “Sunday seven!” business, and the others laughing again. But Sunday would come in turn to each, muttered Rubén Oliva from his balcony, his elbows resting on the iron balustrade, the taunts and the jests divided equally, and then he stopped talking, because talking to yourself was the mania of a deaf man or a madman and he wasn’t even alone, which would have been a third excuse for such a monologue.

The voices, the various emissions, were silenced then by a sudden wind, a summer gust that picked up worn-out dust and discarded papers, whirling and swirling them along the narrow, boxed-in street, forcing Oliva to close the window and the voice from the kitchen to scream at him: —What are you doing? Can’t you help me in the kitchen? Don’t you know it isn’t good to fix a meal when you’re menstruating? Are you going to help me, or would you rather have poisoned soup?

Rubén Oliva had forgotten she was there.

— You can fix dinner, Rubén called back, what you can’t do is water the plants. That is true, you could kill the plants if you water them when you are unwell. That is true, Rocío, yes.

He lay back down on the sofa, raising his arms and resting his head on the joined fingers of his open hands. He closed his eyes as he had closed the window, but in such intense heat the sweat dripped from his forehead, neck, and armpits. The heat from the kitchen added to that of the living room, but Rubén Oliva remained there, with his eyes shut, incapable of getting up and reopening the window that let in the little noises and fading smells of a Sunday afternoon in Madrid, when the unexpected breeze died away and they were shut inside the little four-room flat — living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen — he and his wife, Rocío, who was menstruating and fixing supper.

And yelling from the kitchen, always complaining, why was he so shiftless, idling there instead of going out to work, others worked on Sunday, he always used to, things were getting so bad for them now that he wasn’t working on Sundays, she could see she was going to have to support the household soon if they didn’t want to live like beggars, just look at them stuck in this pigsty, and in the middle of August, when everyone else had gone to the beach, can you tell me why, listen to me, if you go on this way I’m going to look for work myself, and the way things are, with all the nudity these days, I’ll probably end up posing naked for some magazine, that’s the kind of thing I’ll have to do, why don’t you answer me, you don’t even show me that basic courtesy anymore; yes, said Rubén Oliva, his eyes closed and his mouth shut, like a deaf man or a madman, not even that, just to imagine myself sleeping, imagine myself dreaming, imagine myself dead, or, best of all, as a dead man who is dreaming that he’s alive. That would be perfect, instead of having to listen to Rocío’s complaints from the kitchen; she seemed to read his mind, cutting him with her recriminations: why didn’t he go out, do something, she laughed bitterly, Sundays used to be festive days, unforgettable days, what had happened to him, why was he afraid now, why didn’t he go out and kill, show his courage, yelled Rocío, invisible in the kitchen, almost inaudible as she poured the sputtering oil out of the frying pan, why don’t you fight anymore, why don’t you go out and follow someone, why don’t you pursue glory, fame? So she argued, just so she, by God and His most Holy Mother, could leave Madrid and spend the summer by the sea.

She gave a cry of pain, but he didn’t stop to ask what had happened and she didn’t come into the living room but contented herself with screaming at him that she had cut a finger opening a tin of sardines, she took more risk, taunted Rocío, opening a tin than he, forever lying on the sofa, in his shorts — with the paper open on his belly and a black bull looking at him from the little screen, recriminating him for his idleness — such a sluggard she had married, and nearly forty, things would only get worse since, as her grandfather used to say, from forty on, no man should get his belly wet, and she had loved him because he was brave, handsome, and young, because he was courageous, and he killed, and …

Rubén no longer heard her. He smelled her and felt like killing her, but how can you kill the moon, for that was what she was for him, not the sun of his life but, yes, a familiar moon that appeared every night without fail; and although its light was cool, its appearance excited him; and although its sands were sterile, they seemed fertile since its hypnotic movements moved the tides, marked the dates, governed the calendar, and drained the garbage from the world …