Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

And yet, naked in that cool, dark dressing room, Pedro Romero felt the fiction of his own body and the virtual sensation of having previously inhabited that body, which so many had loved — he looked down, gauged the bulk of his testicles, as the sword handler would do in a minute to adjust his breeches — but which was, in the end, in a more profound sense, a virgin body, a body that had never been penetrated. He smiled at the thought that all men who aren’t queer are virgins because they always penetrate, they’re never penetrated by the woman; but the bullfighter knew that he had to be penetrated by the bull to lose his macho virginity, and that had never happened to him.

He considered himself, naked, at forty still possessing a nearly perfect figure, a muscular harmony revealed by the soft caramel color of his skin, which accentuated his body’s classic Mediterranean forms, the medium height, strong shoulders, long upper arms, compact chest, flat belly, narrow hips, sensual buttocks over well-formed but short legs, and small feet: a body of bodies, a soft-assed English lover had told him, jealous not just of his tight ass but of the blood beneath his skin, his skin and body molded like almond paste by Phoenician and Greek hands, washed like Holland sheets by waves of Carthaginians and Celts, stormed like a merlon by Roman phalanxes and Visigoth hordes, caressed like ivory by Arab hands, and kissed like crosses by Jewish lips.

It was a body of bodies, too, because more than five thousand pairs of bulls’ horns had failed to wound it; his body had never bled, suppurated, scabbed; it was a good body, at peace with the soul that inhabited it, but also a bad body, bad because it was provocative. It continually exceeded its moral constraint, its sufficiency as the container of Pedro Romero’s soul, exhibiting itself before others, exciting them, saying to them: Look, more than five thousand bulls and not a single wound.

And bad, too, because the body of the bullfighter had the right to do what others could not: to parade itself in public, exposing itself on every side, in the midst of applause, parading its sexual attributes, its tight little ass, its testicles straining beneath the silk the penis that at times was plainly revealed through the breeches that were the perfect mirror for the torero’s sex.

— Dress me, quickly …

— Come on, Figura, you know I can’t do that in less than forty-five minutes, you know that …

— I’m sorry, Sparky. I’m nervous this afternoon.

— That’s not good, Figura. Think of your fame. You may call me Spark, but it’s you who’s the light, the Great Figure of the Ring.

Let me die but let my fame endure — Pedro Romero smiled and let the attendant dress him, slowly: first the long white underpants, then the rose stockings with garters below the knees, next the hairpiece with the pigtail at the nape of the neck; his breeches, which this afternoon were silver and blue, and Sparky matched up the three hooks and eyes on the legs; the shirt that was a wash of white, the suspenders caressing his chest, the yellow cummerbund wrapped around his waist, or rather, it was the man himself wrapped in that mother of clothing, its symbol, its origin, a long ribbon of yellow silk, the cradle of the body, its maternal embrace, its umbilical projection, or so Pedro Romero felt that afternoon, as Sparky tied his narrow necktie, adjusted his majestic vest, his silver caparison, not as strong a shield as the bullfighter’s own armor, which is his heart, and his own natural mane, still silky, even though, like this afternoon’s suit, it was now silver; and finally the black shoes, the laces tied as only Sparky knew how, like two perfect rabbit’s ears.

Are there many people? Ah, a great crowd, Figura, you know, when you’re fighting, everyone shows up, rich and poor, men and women, everyone loves you, they would sell their beds to see you, and how they prepare for the fiesta, how many hours they spend to shine elegantly before you, elegantly as you, Figura, you, the King of the Ring, and then the hours they talk about you, commenting on the fight, looking forward to the next one: there’s a whole world that lives only for you, for your fame …

— Sparky, I’m going to confess something to you. This is my last fight. If the bull kills me, it will be for that reason. If I kill it, I will retire without a single wound.

— You care so much about your body, Figura ? What about your fame?

— Don’t insult me. I haven’t yet taken as my motto: Let me endure, even if my fame dies.

— No, Figura, none of that. Look, you are going to fight in the oldest and most beautiful arena in Spain, here in Ronda, and if you die, at least you will be looking upon something beautiful before you close your eyes.

My town: a gash, a deep wound such as I never had, my town like a body with a scab that will not heal, contemplating its own wound from a perpetual watchtower of houses that are whitewashed every year to keep them from dissolving in the sun. Ronda, the most beautiful, because it opens the white wings of death and forces us to see it as our unexpected companion in the mirror of an abyss. Ronda, where our vision soars higher than the eagle.

3

Naked he was not, although those who remembered him young, with his wide-brimmed hat and his cape of braided cloth, or even younger, as he had first arrived in Madrid, in a low-crowned hat and a suit with fringed trousers, would not recognize him in his old age, disheveled, carelessly dressed, unshod, his pants stained (grease? urine?), his shirt sweaty, loose-fitting, hanging open, showing his gray chest, and crowning it all his great giant’s head, unkempt, gray, with sideburns, but not as fierce as the grimace on his thick lips, the eyes veiled by what they had seen, the eyebrows mussed by where they had been, and in spite of that, the high, impertinent, innocent nose, the stubborn, childish nose of an Aragón waif, constantly belying all the rest, belying all the godforsaken waifs, wretched as the river that gave birth to them, shit-assed kids of the Manzanares who wrote on the walls of his estate: Here lives the deaf man.

He didn’t hear the shouting of those or other jerks. Stone-deaf, shut inside his bare workroom, naked — comparatively — as a savage, he who shaped and helped invent a society of unabashed pomp and ostentation, he who gave the ears to every torero, the award to every actress, the medals at every festival, the prizes to every potter, every weaver, every witch, every pimp, every soldier, and every penitent, making them all protagonists, endowing rich and poor with the fame and form they had never had before: now he felt as naked as they who acquired an image at his hands, the hands full of the suns and shades of Francisco de Goya y Luz, lucid, loose, Lucifer, lost cipher, lust for light — Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: even the nobles who had always been painted — they alone, the kings, the aristocracy — now had to see themselves for the first time, full body, just as they were, not as they wished to be seen, and when they did (this was the painter’s miracle, his mystery, perhaps his defeat) they were not threatened, they accepted it: Carlos IV and his degenerate, concupiscent, disloyal, ignorant court, that collective phantasm with eyes frozen by abulia, with mugs lewdly drooling, with powdered wigs instead of brains, and with moles screwing their concave foreheads; Fernando VII and his image of self-satisfied cretinism, active, reckless cretinism, in contrast to that of the bewitched wretch Carlos II, that Goya before Goya, foolishly compassionate, dreaming of a better world, that is, a comprehensible one, that is, one as crazy as he was: they all accepted the painter’s reality, they clung to it, celebrated it, and didn’t realize that they were being seen for the first time, just like the actress, the swordsman, the circus performer, and the peasant, who had never been favored by the court painter’s brush before …