Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Rubén Oliva licked the gummed edge of the envelope and cut his tongue.

Thursday

1

The deaf old man recalled how as a boy, when he came from Fuendetodos to Zaragoza to watch the procession, he had wanted to be under the throne, alongside the porters, hidden by the corduroy curtains of the float, peering through them to spy the legs of the women on the balconies, especially when the procession would stop for some reason, and the tolling of the bells was like a holy dispensation to listen more closely to the rustle of petticoats and the rubbing of legs and the wagging of hips and the tapping of heels, and he imagined couples embracing in the streets, loving …

But in Seville, said the deaf man, when a pause is imposed by the street song, la saeta, it’s like a cry for help in the desert, everyone disappears, and only the Virgin and the person who is singing to her remain. Seville becomes invisible then, and of all the invisible ones the most invisible of all are those who carry the throne of the Virgin, as he is doing now, the ones who can feel themselves alone with the Virgin, carrying her like Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders, along with the symbols of Holy Mary, palm and cypress and olive, mirrors and stairs, fountains, doors, enclosed gardens, the evening star, the entire universe, and, above all, the tower, the tower of David, the ivory tower, the Giralda, which he glimpsed, looking for legs and finding legs, looking through the panting line of porters and finding, if not the erotic life that he had imagined, at least the popular life that was once again the material sustenance of life itself. In Seville, as in Madrid, in this year of grace 1806, on the brink of all the disasters of war, the past century’s libertine dream was capriciously prolonged — its festive and egalitarian customs, the people and the nobility all mixed together — for the nobility had taken to imitating the people, going to popular fandangos, thronging into bullrings and theaters, adulating bullfighters and actresses, the dukes dressing up like banderilleros, the duchesses like chulaponas, and in the center of this whirlwind, before history claimed its due and festival turned to warfare and warfare to guerrilla struggle and guerrilla struggle to revolution and revolution, ah, revolution to government and constitution and law, and law to despotism, before all that, it was he, it was Don Francisco de Goya y Lost Senses, who showed the people to the aristocracy, and what is more, who showed the people to themselves.

He left Madrid amid the waving washerwomen, the peddlers, the jugglers, the chestnut venders whom he had endowed with faces and true dignity for the first time, and now in Seville he was welcomed with waves and cheered through the streets by guilds of dyers and silk mercers, weavers of linen and dealers in gold thread, all those who labored in the making of the cloaks and mantles, skirts and hoods, veils and tunics of all that divine seraglio: La Virgin del Rocío, La Señora de los Reyes, La Macarena, and La Trianera; in the old deaf man passing among them wearing a crowned hat and a gray frock coat the workers recognized one of themselves, the son of a gilder from Fuendetodos, the artisan who was who he was because he had done what he had done: canvases, engravings, murals, independent of any explanation, felt rather than revealed: he has presented us to the world, and, more important, to ourselves, who lived like blind people, not recognizing ourselves, not recognizing our strength …

But he, Don Francisco de Goya y Light Sensors, didn’t want to hear about recognition this Maundy Thursday night in Seville; all he wanted was to take off his hat and his frock coat, to be again what he wanted to be, a worker, a gilder, an artisan, a member of the guild, in his shirtsleeves, his shirt open at the neck, unkempt and sweaty, barefoot, carrying the tower that was the Virgin alongside the porters, hidden from those who applauded him because they recognized themselves in him, when he secretly wanted them to recognize something else, the way he had exposed the excitements of perversion and imaginative sexual intimacy. He introduced the most obscure people to themselves, but especially he introduced man and woman in darkness he put them beneath this float and this procession, wrapped them in sheets as if in sacred robes and sighs, and showed them, as he was doing now, carrying the weight of the world, wrapped in the sheets as the porters scrambled beneath the skirts of the Virgin and as the whole town mingled in the narrow lanes of Seville.

He felt alone and soiled and tired. He had to prove that he was still strong. Strong not just as an artist but also as a man. He bore the throne of the Virgin and panted among the panters, protected by the billowing skirts of the Virgin, the virgins of Seville: he saw nothing. And then he remembered that he was the king of the keyhole, the most lucid and cruel spy ever. As a reward, he was allowed to look through locks, to glimpse flesh drained of color, clenched in carnal embrace by the side of the sepulcher, to expose in black and white what that flesh could do in its mad effort to hold back time, to drive away death and consecrate life.

2

This, many years later, is what the old man saw through the keyhole of his canvas. A fresh, bare one, though already populated in his mind by a jumbled confusion of sheets and flesh clamoring to emerge, and again he paused before the empty canvas like a village gossip in front of the lovers’ door at the hour when a nocturnal wind from the Levant silenced the rest of the world, and the lovers too, and the old man hesitated: Should he allow them to appear or not? Should he let them inhabit his canvas? And he looked at them through that keyhole — at her, coated with a lubricating oil like a second skin over her totally naked body, with the exception of her sex, which was covered by a butterfly, inviting her masculine companion to bring close his own sex, a scythe of flesh, or rather a swallow, a black swooping bird that never rested, that never ceased its flight, that ate and fornicated in the air, to bring that bird to the butterfly, as if she, the woman of thick eyebrows and tight lips, bathed in oil, could gore him: dragonfly against dragonfly, wing against wing, you will find I am not defenseless, you will find I am not as before, an unshielded, lubricated hole; now the scythe of your sex must first defeat my butterfly, and my butterfly bites, be careful, and soars, and pricks, and punctures, I warn you, never again will you find me defenseless, and then he takes her by the waist and turns her over with a single motion, places her face-down with a single stroke, exposing to the lover and the watcher her avid buttocks, lubricated, easy to penetrate, and he enters her from behind, not in the anus but in the sweet vagina, proffered, half open, oiled, shaved, reduced to the impalpable and invisible down of puberty, the shaved mons veneris covered by the butterfly, which now flew away to keep from being crushed, revealing the woman’s pubic mound, already darkened, despite the morning shave, by a heavy, quick rebirth of stubble, member and membrane rejoined; you also have a hole: as if obeying its mistress, the butterfly alighted between the man’s small, raised buttocks and tickled him there, and he came and came again, praising her, thanking her for his victory, Elisia, Elisia, you can transport me with nothing but a look, how can you give me more than this, for which I can never repay you; yes, Romero, do me as you would a bull, stick me, Romero, as you would like to stick the bull but don’t dare, macho bullfighter, because you don’t want to admit that the bull is your stud and you are two lost fags, except the bull wants to impale you and you don’t want to be impaled, now stick me as you would stick the bull, make me come as you would make that impossible couple, the butterfly and the bull, come together, Romero, the unchanging sun and the moon that waxes and wanes to become a claw, rend me Romero, your claw, love me, your whore, only a claw, lover, and then again to swell, to grow, aren’t you jealous, sun, constant one, immutable, in your suit of eternal lights, while the universe whirls in circles around your waist, and although your rays scorch them all you cannot reach them with your shaft of fire, for the night renders you impotent?