Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

He got up suddenly, put on his shirt and pants and shoes, while she kept on talking from the kitchen, and the children kept repeating over and over the ditty about “Sunday seven!” and as he dressed he only wanted the day to end, the slow and tedious day with its bits of soap operas and scraps of kitchen chatter, snatches of childish rounds and bits of old newspapers, traces of dust and traces of blood; he looked out the window — the waning moon appeared suddenly in the night sky, the moon was always a woman, always a goddess, never a god, unless it was a Spanish saint: San Lunes, Saint Monday, tomorrow, the day of leisure, of old men as lazy as he was (as Rocío would be going on without letup, invisible, bleeding, cut by the open tin, in the kitchen), and Rubén Oliva decided that he would let her go on talking forever, he didn’t even grab a bag or anything, he would leave quickly, before the night ended, when Sunday had passed, he would leave Madrid at the first tolling of San Lunes, go far away from the immortal tedium of Rocío, the filthy moon who was his wife, and the black bull, forever immobile, frozen on the television screen, watching him.

Monday

He hurried down Calle Ave María to Atocha and turned back to lose himself in the side streets of Los Desamparados, quickly passing the markets and taverns and tobacco shops, fleeing that confinement, walking down the middle of the street in the August heat, until he came to the fountain of Neptune, source of the invisible waters of La Castellana, and everyone was there, and freedom was there too, and Rubén Oliva — skinny and slick, with his white shirt and black pants, his green eyes and the dark shadows under his eyes — joined the endless summer nighttime stroll, the human river that runs from the Prado to the Columbus monument; Rubén Oliva lost himself for a moment in that sea of people moving without haste but without hesitation, from terrace to terrace, seldom stopping, choosing to see or be seen, beneath neon lights or other times under a single dangling bulb, the crowd lingering on elegant decks with chrome-and-steel furniture or stopping at movable stands covered with circus-like tents: seeing or being seen, the ones sitting in folding chairs watching and being watched by the passing multitude, which in turn observed those who watched and were watched by them; Rubén Oliva had the sudden feeling that he had returned to the Andalusian towns where he had grown up, where the night life of summer took place in the streets, in front of the houses, yet close to the doors, as if everyone were ready to run inside and hide as soon as the first thunderclap or gunshot broke up the peaceful nocturnal gathering of villagers sitting on seats of straw; then the memory of the people and their poverty was driven away by the present scene: Rubén Oliva, surrounded this August night by thousands of people, by boys and girls fifteen to twenty-five young Madrid men and women who were thin like him, but not from generations of hunger or the disasters of war, no, they were thin by choice, from aerobics, strict diets, even anorexia; there was no other place in Spain — said the deaf man, the madman the solitary man — where you could see such fine boys’ and girls’ faces, such willowy figures and such graceful walks, such fashionable summer clothes, such studied haughtiness, such penetrating gazes, such tantalizing flirtations, and yet Rubén Oliva kept scanning these faces for something he could recognize from places completely foreign to these Spanish youths of August — from poor hamlets, miserable towns, villages where boys first fought bulls in the dust by the stables, boys not unlike the stray dogs, the calves, or the roosters they imitated; brushing against these golden youths on that San Lunes dawn, Rubén Oliva saw in new guises the same poses of honor, the tremulous cool, and the disdain of death that is born of the conviction that in Spain, the country of delay, not even death is punctual; all this he saw where it shouldn’t have been, in the half-open lips of a girl bronzed by the sun, her peach skin contrasting with the brightness of her eyes; in the matador look of a tight-assed boy who held the waist of a bare-shouldered girl with silver specks between her braless, bouncing breasts; in the bare, smooth, lazily crossed legs of a girl sitting before an iced coffee or in the infinitely absent look of a boy on whose face a full beard had sprouted at fifteen, abruptly killing off the cherub who still survived in his eyes: it was a way they had of holding a glass, of lighting a cigarette, of crossing their legs, of placing their hands on their sides, of seeing without looking or being seen, becoming invisible to those who looked at them, and saying: I may not live long but I am immortal; or, rather, I’m never going to die, but don’t expect to see me again after tonight; or See in me only what I show you tonight because I don’t give you permission to see anything more; so said the moving bodies, the restless eyes, the laughter of some and the silence of others, prolonging the night before returning to their elegant middle-class homes and standing before their fathers, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the bankers, the notaries, the real estate agents, the tour directors, the hotelkeepers … to ask for money for the next night, money for shopping at Serrano, treating themselves to the indispensable blouse, trying out the shoes without which … It was the village gathering, only now with Benetton and Saint Laurent logos; it was the romantic stroll through the plazas of past years, the boys in one direction, the girls in the other, measuring each other for engagement, marriage, procreation, and death the way a mortician measures the bodies of the clients who one day, inevitably, will visit him and occupy his deluxe coffins. Luxury, lust of death that robs us of the past; but in this Madrid stroll the boys and the girls were not going in opposite directions — they couldn’t, because it was hard to tell them apart; Rubén Oliva, thirty-nine years old, unemployed (for the moment), fed up with his wife, victim of a tedious Sunday, was glad that, even though it was still night, San Lunes had arrived; he was not so different, physically, from the golden youths of Madrid: like them, like almost all Spanish gallants, he had an androgynous quality; but now the good-looking girls had that quality, too — they had more of the moon ways of Mondays than of the mercurial ways of Wednesdays; they were Tuesday’s martial Amazons, yet Friday remained their Venus day— lunes, miércoles, martes, viernes: they were still celestial goddesses, but in a new way for a new day, a way different from the tradition set by their stout, pallid, veiled, doughy, thick-ankled, heavy-hipped predecessors; Rubén Oliva amused himself, as he studied the slow nocturnal stroll, by picking out the boys who appeared to be girls, the women who resembled men, and he felt a sudden vertigo; the march of pleasure and extravagance and ostentation of a rich, European, progressive Spain, where everyone, however grudgingly, paid his taxes and could go to the beach in August, not wanting to be judged, not anymore, or classified so simply by gender, masculine/feminine, no, not now, now even sex was as fluctuating as the sea, which came closer to Madrid in August, because there was nothing the city denied itself, not even the sea, which it brought there through the secret power of the moon, converting Madrid, at daybreak on Monday, San Lunes’s day, into a summer beach of seas and undercurrents and daily menstruations, sewers and purified water.

— Madrid denies itself nothing, said the woman who paused beside him, watching the spectacle, and only her voice told Rubén Oliva that she was a woman, not one of these girls who resembled Tuesday’s warriors more than they did the mercurial girls of Wednesdays; Rubén could not make her out very well because there was a bank of Osborne brandy lights in the terrace where they were standing, and the black bull and the fluorescent glow blinded him and also her, the woman who first appeared as a blaze of light, blind or blinding, seen or seeing, who could tell which …