Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

He got her singing teachers and dance masters, he got her speech and voice instructors, he got her as much work as he could find, from religious roles to profane comedies, but Elisia’s wisdom surpassed their teachings (her maids covered her charms with a bodice and for a minute Elisia was dissatisfied, but then she remembered that there were men who had loved her more for her bodice than for her body, she had even discovered one of them kneeling before the actress’s nightstand, kissing her intimate apparel, more excited there than in bed, he wanted to sing a hymn to the inventor of underclothing, but her earthy and practical side simply concluded that everything has its use in this world, where love is king. So her enthusiasm returned, and olé: the pregnancy that frightened the Jesuit was as much a deceit as the bustle the Mexican maids were now pinning on her). Elisia had a bloodhound’s instinct in her butterfly body, and she had arrived in Barcelona when all Spain had but two passions: the theater and the bulls, actresses and bullfighters, and the passion of passions, the rivalry among actresses, or among matadors, the disputes of one group and another, this one bedding that one (quick, it’s getting late, the white stockings, the garters, the sashes for the waist), and her husband doing his Pygmayonnaise number, and you, my Galantine, or something like that, as she said, showing off her learning before her teachers and the Jesuit nephew (the nephew-Jesuit), who gave her lessons in the dramatic arts and in the refinement of diction through recitation of verses, but she felt something different, her heart told her that the theater was the theater, not a repetition of words that nobody understood, but the occasion to display herself before an audience and make them feel that they were part of her, of her life, that they were her friends — and what is more, to reveal her greatest intimacies from the stage; and if her husband, who preferred the footlights to the chichisveo but now showed dangerous inclinations toward the conjugal bed instead of the theatrical boards, didn’t understand that, the members of the court who came to Barcelona to see Elisia did, including Princess M—, who had gotten married in Elisia’s town to spare that poor village from taxes and who imperiously demanded the presence of the entertainer, and Elisia said to tell her she wasn’t an entertainer but a tragedienne.

— Haven’t you seen the Empire styles with which Mam’selle George is dazzling Paris? And the princess said yes, she had seen them, and she wanted Elisia to wear them in Madrid, where she was urged, by royal decree, to present herself, with or without her husband, for he insisted that the best clothing was sold in the shop, and if she went so far from the Catalán port and his business in tobacco, sugar, fruit, rare woods, and all the riches of Havana, who was going to pay for his wife’s singing classes and her stiff silk bows?

In other words: her husband forbade Elisia to travel to Madrid; theaters and actresses, although his wife was one of them, were for passing the time, not for making fortunes; but Elisia went anyway, laughing at the old man, and he locked up her costumes and told her, Now show yourself naked on the stage, and she said, I am quite capable of doing so, and she went to Madrid, where the princess who had gotten married in her village presented her with a wardrobe the likes of which had never been seen before in the court at Madrid or anywhere else, for the princess raided the oldest wardrobes in the palace and found in them the forgotten Chinese garments brought to Europe by Marco Polo and the feathered Indian capes that Captain Cortés presented to the Crown after the fall of Mexico, and although Elisia said she wasn’t going to dress like a savage, the princess called her both beggar and chooser, Havanera and despot, but Elisia took the Chinese fabrics and the feathered Aztec capes and made them into Empire fantasies, until the Duchess of O—, rival of Princess M—, had copies made of all of Rodríguez’s outfits to give to her own favorite actress, Pepa de Hungría, and Elisia gave her outfits to her chambermaids so they would be dressed the same as Pepa, in rags, as Elisia announced in a song, and now no one wanted to compete with her, not La Cartuja or La Caramba, or La Tirana, or any of the other great stage sirens (quick, the gold brocade skirt, the white muslin, the taffeta and rose silk cloak), no orator or singer or dancer, just Elisia Rodríguez, ape, who was all that and more, who was the first to say to hell with written texts, who said what interests people is me, not someone embalmed two hundred years ago, and improvising texts and songs, she resolved to speak of herself, her most intimate affairs, her evolving loves, urgent as her need to feed her legend before the footlights, and while she invented something here and there, she began to feel an increasingly pressing need for real adventures, stories that the people could share, it’s true, she lay with that one, you know, ape, you were a witness, your mistress doesn’t lie, she spent the night in his palace, we saw her leaving at daybreak, she appeared at the windows, she greeted the doorkeepers, who knew her well, who all loved her because she greeted them all with a smile, and Elisia consolidated her fame singing only of her own loves, her own desires, her own struggles and adventures: that is what the public craved and that is what she gave them, and all she lacked was a special name, which is the symbol of fame, so:

— A name is not enough, one needs a nickname.

And they began, secretly and laughingly, to call Elisia “La Privada,” the private one, and at first everyone thought it was a joke to designate so public a woman that way; and even if its significance was extended later to God’s having deprived her of children, other nicknames failed to stick. Not simply Elisia, not La Rodríguez, not the Havanera, not the Barren One: even the seminarian could not effect that amazing conception; the woman was barren. This convinced no one, and although Elisia’s fame kept growing, it was fame without a name, which is fame without fame, until the truth became known and shone like the sun and filled everyone with the warmth, feeling, jealousy, the divided emotions that constitute fame itself: Elisia Rodríguez, whispered the growing legion of her lovers, fainted at the climax of love-making: she came and she went!

— La Privada! The deprived! The unconscious one! The fainter!

(All she lacked now was the cape, that’s it, and the satin shoes too, and the hairpiece, the great bow of rose silk on her head, ah and the disguised mustache on her upper lip, bah, she had to be a woman with hair, and that scent of garlic, caramba, if I don’t eat I die, what do they want, a corpse? and her eyes were dead beneath her heavy eyebrows, and her eyes were dead, and her eyes — were dead.)

2

Pedro Romero was stark naked in his dressing room and didn’t need to look at himself in the mirror to know that his caramel skin didn’t show a single scar, not the wound of a single horn. His dark, long, delicate, firm hand had killed 5,582 bulls, but not one had touched him, even though Romero had redefined the art of bullfighting; it was one of the oldest arts in the world, but it was the newest for the public that filled the plazas of Spain to admire — Romero realized — not only their favorite personalities but also themselves, for bullfighters were neither more nor less than the people’s triumph, the people doing what they had always done — daring, defying death, surviving — and now being applauded for it, recognized, lavished with fame and fortune for surviving, for lasting another month, when what everyone hoped was that the bull of life would rip you open and send you off to rot once and for all.