Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Now, naked and deaf, with no court but the mocking kids painting insults on his fences, without Mexican maids or Andalusian cuadrilla, he felt his abandonment and nakedness reflected in the unsilvered mirrors, the two canvases that for some reason reminded him of a boy’s pants, a rustic skirt: blind canvases, there was nothing on them, everything was in the painter’s head; so onto the imagined canvas he placed the actress, his last desire as an old man: he had loved and been loved and also abandoned by the most beautiful and the cruelest women of his time, and now he went down to Madrid to see this woman on the stage and she never looked at him, she saw only herself, reflected in the public eye, and now he wanted to capture her in this rectangle; he began to outline her entire body with charcoal, there he would put her and from there she would never escape; he quickly drew the naked form, standing, of the coveted woman — this woman was not going to fly off on a broom; this woman was not going to be stolen by death, because he was much older than she (and yet …); this woman was not going to run away with a soldier, an aristocrat, or (who knows?) a bullfighter — he advanced slowly, yet every movement of the deaf old man was like a seismic shock that was felt by the unruly children outside, and they left their own brushes beside the wall and ran away, as if they knew that inside the workroom the other brush, the Great Brush, was outdoing theirs and would not admit of any rival; and now, on the second canvas, he began, in a high-minded spirit, with a restraint that surprised the painter himself, so given to satire, caricature, and the strictures of realism, he began to sketch the torso of a man, without any indication of a head, because the head would naturally be the crown of that grave body, full of dignity and repose; he sketched long, delicate, strong hands, and put in the cape, which he pictured a dark pink velvet, then the jacket, which he saw dark blue, and the waistcoat, which he knew had to be gray, colorless, to give the linen of the front and the neck of the shirt an exceptional whiteness, if only because of the contrast with those serene colors, and then he returned to the first canvas (and, outside, the walnut trees quivered) and he surprised the woman, who was pure silhouette, without features or details, on the point of escaping from the canvas, and the old man laughed (and the walnut trees, terrified, clung to one another), and he said to the woman:

— You can’t leave. There you are and there you will stay forever. And although she tried to hide, to take refuge in the darkest corner of the canvas, in the shadows, as if she divined the painter’s repugnance, he knew, although he would never say so, that it was an empty threat, because when the canvas left his studio and was seen by other eyes, those eyes would free Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, whom he had captured, from the canvas, and they would give her liberty, releasing her from the prison of the canvas to imprison them, to sleep with those who avidly eyed her, fainting à son plaisir, wrapped in the arms of one after another, never directing even a smile toward her true creator, the painter who held his brush suspended in the air, who looked at the actress’s empty face and decided not to add features, to leave it in suspense, in ellipsis, and in the actress’s stylized hand, raised in a gesture of exiting a stage, he quickly drew a chain, and at the end of the chain he attached a hideous ape with human eyes and a shaved rump, masturbating merrily.

Turning back to the second canvas, he really wanted to stick his brush like a banderilla in the bullfighter’s heart, but an unwanted feeling of respect again possessed him (deaf man, deaf man, the waifs cried at him from the wall, as if he could hear them, or they, fools, imagined that they could be heard) and he began to fill in the face with Pedro Romero’s noble features, the firm jaw, the elegant, taut cheeks, the small pressed mouth with its slight irregularity, the virile emerging beard, the perfectly straight nose, the fine, separated eyebrows, worthy physical base of a forehead as clear as an Andalusian sky, barely ruffled by a hint of widow’s peak, as Wellington’s elegant officers called the point formed by the hair in the middle of the forehead, which was besieged by the first gray hairs of his fourth decade. Don Francisco was about to give the bullfighter some of his own, all the way down his forehead, and call the painting The Man with Streaked Hair, something like that, but that would have meant sacrificing the center of his particular orbit of beauty, the famous eyes, full of competence, serenity, and tenderness, which were the source of Pedro Romero’s humanity, and that was sacred, the artist could not joke about it, and all his rancor, his jealousy, his resentment, his malice, even his cleverness (which he was always forgiven) was subjected to a sentiment, weakly traced by the restless brush, not a banderilla, barely a quill, a full caress, a complete embrace that told the model: You are not just what I would like to see in you, to admire or injure you, to portray or caricature you, you are more than I saw in you, and my canvas will be a great canvas, Romero, only if I explore the one thing I’m sure of, which is that you are more than my compassion or judgment of you at this moment; I see you as you are now but I know what you were before and you will continue to be, I see only one side of you, not all four sides, because painting is the art of a single moment’s frontal perspective, not a discursive and lineal art, and I lack your genius, Romero, for peril, I can’t paint your face and your body, Romero, as you fight a bull, in three dimensions, from four sides, subsuming every one of the angles of both you and the bull, and all the lights in which they are bathed. And as I can’t and don’t dare do that, I give you this image of your nobility, which is the only one that shows that you are more than the figure painted by your humble and invidious servant Lucifer lusts for lights, Lucientes, Francisco de Goya y.

She huddled on the canvas, naked, faceless, with a horrid chained ape. He hastily painted a butterfly covering her sex, like the ribbons that adorned her hair.

Outside, the urchins cried, Deaf man, deaf man, deaf man.

And in the whirlwind of sudden nightfall, hundreds of other women, laughing at the artist, preparing their revenge through the pain of the man seduced and abandoned — and what about them? When had they been treated with truth and care? They who dealt to sinners their just deserts — and as he sleeps, his head planted amid the papers and brushes on his worktable, they, the women of the night, fly about his sleeping head, dragging with them other papers with notices so new that they seem old, There is plenty to suck, reads one, and Until death, says another, and Of what illness will he die, asks a third, and all together, God forgive you, swathed in their veils, harnessed by mothers preparing to sell them, fanning themselves, rubbing themselves with oil, embalming themselves alive with unguents and powders, straddling brooms, rising in flight, hanging like bats in the corners of churches, carried on winds of dust and garbage, fanning, flying, uncovering tombs, looking for you, Francisco, and casting a final cackle at your face, dreaming and dead, both dead and dreaming.

— But I am the only one who can show the bullfighter and the actress in their true garb. Only I can give them heads. Afterwards, do with me what you will.

— May God forgive you!

4

— Never marry or begin a journey on Tuesday, an old woman sitting in a corner of the main square told Rubén Oliva as he passed, so discomposed and hurried that only a witch like her — shrouded in a newspaper but with a coquettish little hat made from the front page of El País on her grotesque head, to protect her from the midday August sun — could know that the man was going far away, even though it was Tuesday, the dangerous day, the day of naked war, hidden war, war of the soul, on the stage, in the rings, in the shops: Martes, Mars’ day, the god of war’s day, the day of dying, vying, plying, and crying, said a bitch half buried under the garbage in the plaza.