Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

He watched the first children chasing the pigeons in the dusty square. The whole plaza was sand. The balconies, the upper stories, the shuttered windows and the open windows, all eyes faced the enclosed sand of the plaza: there was only one entrance, fewer than in a bullring; it had only one gate to let the bulls in safely — although it was not safe to guess in what state they would leave. It was a plaza where people turned their backs to their doors. The women came out carrying their cane chairs, locked their doors, and sat in a circle to shell almonds and gossip. The smell of cooking and of urine got stronger. Other women crocheted in silence, and men sat down cautiously with their backs turned. Some young people formed another circle, boys and girls together, and began to clap and sing loud, sorrowful songs, in a rough and halting performance. A beautiful woman with heavy eyebrows, her hair in a bun, sat in a rocking chair as if presiding over the evening; she bared her breast, brought to it a bundle and uncovered the head of a black boy, and offered her breast to him; the boy took it eagerly, her breast’s white blood dripping down his purple lips.

The young men were taunting and teasing a gnarled old man with side-whiskers, gray kinky hair, a turned-up nose, and thick lips, who went over to a broken-down wagon, set his jaw, dribbling spittle as though his mouth were watering for a banquet, tucked up the sleeves of his soiled, loose white shirt, got under the wagon, and hoisted it over his shoulders, while the young men looked on, excited and provoked.

A girl sat in a corner of the plaza with her skirts raised high up her legs to catch the dying rays of sun.

It was the twilight hour and Rubén Oliva was in the center of the plaza, surrounded by all this life.

This was his village, which he had left to live as he had to live, but to save himself, to die in peace, he had to return.

Andalusia was his love, not despite his having left, but because he had left. There was nothing true on this earth, not even solitude, that wasn’t me/us/the other.

But this afternoon the gods (pickpockets, quick, winged Mercurys, snoops, merchants, restless thieves) denied Rubén Oliva, back among his people, even that: pausing in the center of the plaza of sand where the darting kids and the startled pigeons and the restless heels of the group of singers raised swirls of dirt, Rubén Oliva felt that his town had become no more than a vague memory, incapable of dominating a space that was beginning to be governed by inexplicable laws, all of them — Rubén scanned the sky in vain for an escape: he discovered the swallow — preventing escape from the closed-in plaza.

The hoary, robust old man dropped the wagon and raised his hands to his ears, covering his side-whiskers, crying that his ears hurt, that the effort had burst his eardrums, that the young men and women should sing louder, he couldn’t hear a thing.

For songs, as you well know, are only grief:

If you don’t hear one, you don’t hear the other,

Oh, child of witchcraft, until you die.

He dropped the wagon and at that dusty impact the ground of the plaza suddenly sprouted moist flowers, and Rubén didn’t know if they had arisen from the arid crash of that wagon or if they had rained down from the sky in tribute to the singers, and there were cress and myrtle and lilies and impatiens and morning glories.

Then the night seemed to catch fire inside the houses and the women shelling almonds looked for open doors and ran in to save their possessions from the sudden blaze, but the beautiful woman on the rocker had none, and she was not alarmed, she laughed easily and let the black child go on nursing, and then, when she raised him up for all to see, he was a white boy, just look, look, as white as my milk, white because of my milk, I have transformed him!

The youths, frightened by the cries from the houses, turned away from the deaf old man, shouting to him that he had got what he deserved, trying to prove at his age that he was just as strong as they, but they were stopped in their tracks by the stampede of a herd of neighing horses that suddenly rushed into the square, trampling the flowers, halting the youths.

The old women closed the shutters on the upper floors.

The women who watched from the yellow balconies went inside, shaking their heads sadly.

But others came into the arena, into the confusion, surrounding Rubén Oliva, all of them in the midst of the wild chestnut horses all of them within the suddenly deep blue night: sumptuously dressed women completely indifferent to the fires and the neighing, came through the single narrow lane and entered the square; they were wrapped in capes of raw silk, trailing pear- and orange-colored taffeta, carrying trays bearing teeth, eyes, and tits, so that Rubén was forced to examine the mouths, the empty eye sockets, the mutilated breasts of the women slowly walking in procession, led by a woman more opulent than the others, a woman whose face, wrapped in a cowl, was like a moon girded with emeralds, whose head was crowned by a dead sun with razor-sharp rays, whose bosom sported artificial roses, and from her shoulders to her feet there hung a great triangular cape contrived with elaborate ornamentations of ivory and precious stones, medallions shaped like roses and coiled like metal snakes.

But the woman’s hands, though covered with rings, were empty. Her marked face, her moonlike face, was furrowed by tears, cruel drops, and she didn’t stop crying until her three attendants approached the beautiful woman with the heavy eyebrows and the hair in a bun and struggled with her, and touched the dead eyes to her face, and covered with the severed ones the breasts that had nursed the black boy, and forced open her mouth to fill it with those bloodless teeth; they left her teeth and her eyes and her breasts but they snatched away her child and placed him in the hands of the Lady, and the despoiled woman cried, her eyes full of blood, her mouth full of teeth, her four breasts sticking to her like a bitch’s, but now the Lady stopped crying and smiled, and the procession began again: first, the bejeweled attendants dressed in rich shades of lemon and fig; then the herd of chestnut horses, now tame; behind them, a rebirth of myrtle, four-o’clock, honeysuckle, and morning glory, sweet perfume, the earth transformed into a garden; they led her to the narrow lane and there began a slow ascent to the throne that awaited her motionless, but which now, as she approached with the white child who had been black, began to sway and rose on a wooden platform lifted by bearers hidden beneath its draperies; the deaf old man pulled Rubén Oliva under it and said: Quick, there’s no other way out, and he made him stand behind the draperies, under the throne that was now beginning to move, snaking off, carried by the bearers, including the hoary old man, who had as much trouble lifting the float as before he had had lifting the cart, paying dearly for his effort, perhaps seeking to demonstrate something to the world and to himself, and by his side was Rubén Oliva, watching the deaf old man with thick lips half open, winking his sleepy eye at Rubén: Don’t be a loafer, hey, pull your weight, we have to hoist up the Virgin and carry her through town, through the night, the old man told him, the day is done and the night deals out deception, didn’t he know? It mocks the florid fragrances and sweet caresses of daytime, when you think you are in love with nature and she with you, not realizing that love — the old man almost spit out the words — is impossible between her and ourselves. He asked Rubén to tread firmly, don’t fall, don’t give up, trample the flowers, hard, hard — for we have to kill her to survive, and she demands a final accounting. The old man gave Rubén Oliva a sharp elbow in the ribs, and Rubén realized that he was one among many, one more bearer in the brotherhood that was carrying the Virgin in a nocturnal procession. And if for the average person the night produces monsters, the old man continued, for you they appear by day, for you the day is mad, unreal, and chimeric. What do you do at night, Rubén? Do you dream when you sleep, exhausted by the chimeras of your day? What are you left with? Then welcome to the sleep of reason, now lift, walk, and believe with me that it’s better to live with illusions than to die disabused of them, now lift, heave, haul, you idler, you loafer …