Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

First, over the years, whenever I saw Monsieur Plotnikov he was alone: in the streets and plazas of Savannah, in the pantheon of red earth, occasionally (strange, freakish meetings) in a shopping center near the Hyatt Regency that smells of peanuts, warmed-over pizza, popcorn, and tennis shoes.

Second, I never met Mr. Plotnikov indoors, as the shopping mall has a false interior (as well as a false exterior): it’s a street of glass. I had never been inside his house, across from ours, and he had never been to ours.

And — the third thing — for perfectly natural reasons, as natural as the fact that Constancia had never accompanied me to the hospital in Atlanta and I never had gone with her to a beauty salon, she had never been with me when I met Mr. Plotnikov, either inside or outside any wall.

There was one last fact, the most difficult to reconcile with the rest: Constancia had been dead in my arms for several moments; it was that fact that forced me to ask: Had Mr. Plotnikov died exactly as he had foretold, and, if so, did his death coincide with the play of lights in his house and with the fleeting death of Constancia? Why did I see our neighbor only outdoors, and why had I never run into him with my wife? I will admit to my share of sentimental egoism — these questions had never disturbed my sleep before, they only interested me now because of the melancholy terror I felt on holding Constancia and knowing, with scientific certainty, that Constancia was dead.

But no longer: she lived, she returned to me, to herself, to our life, little by little. And the telephone never stopped ringing.

7

I devoted myself to her for several days. I canceled my appointments and operations in Atlanta. It was an exceptional step. As long as we had been married, Constancia had insisted that only in the most extreme case should I care for her professionally. It would be better if I never saw her as a patient. She would obey any doctor who told her to undress, spread her legs, get on all fours. But she would obey only one lover who told her to do those things: that man was me, her husband, not her doctor. And, as for me, what maddened me from the beginning was that passion for obedience in Constancia, as if my commands became her own desires, as if I merely guessed her own most passionate desires and eagerly and ecstatically followed her lead.

In our forty years together, however, Constancia had never had to see a doctor. She had suffered only minor ailments: colds, digestive upsets, mild insomnia, nose bleeds … It was therefore an emotional experience to have her in my hands (I mean, in my care) for the first time: my patient.

I was waiting for her to regain her lucidity and strength — she spent several days in that half state between trance, prayer, and a sudden smile — so that, together again, like one as before, we would regard what had happened according to our unwritten rules: There are many possibilities; let us weigh them all, one by one, without rushing headlong to any conclusion. But during these first days of her convalescence — what else can I call it? — Constancia was not a woman but a bird, with a bird’s nervous movements, unable to turn her head without her movement’s being cut short by a sort of ornithological tremor — the movement of a winged creature that cannot look ahead, eyes to the front, but only to the sides, confirming with a rapid movement of the left eye some fact suggested by the right. Like an ostrich, or an eagle, or…?

What was she looking at that way, during those days when I asked myself so many questions — Had the actor died? Did the lights announce his death? — and came increasingly to one conclusion, that those phenomena coincided with the fleeting death of Constancia. I took her pulse, pressed my stethoscope to her breast, pried her eyelids open (eagle, ostrich, or…?). With her bird movements she looked at the window that in turn looked toward the house, dark and silent, of Mr. Plotnikov. She looked at the image of the Virgin of the Macarena, immobile, mournful, in her triangular paralysis. She looked at the flickering light of the votive candle. She did not look at me. I looked at her reclining body, her open gown exposing the breasts of a sixty-one-year-old woman who, however, had never had children, her nipples still voluptuous, gifts for my senses, perfect spheres for my touch, my tongue, and especially my sense of fullness, of pregnant reality. They say that we North Americans attach too much sexuality to the breasts, just as South Americans do to the buttocks. But in my house, since I never saw her pregnant, her ample breasts seemed to concentrate that sense of pregnancy that men like to contrast with the ethereal (her face, her eyes) in a woman: earth and air. But Constancia always told me: I am water, I am the source. She was Andalusian. And Andalusia is an Arab land, a land of nomads who arrived from the desert and found the refuge of water. Granada …

I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t abandon her. In other circumstances, I would have called in another doctor, nurses, an ambulance. But that wasn’t possible. If the phenomenon repeated itself, I, only I, should be its witness, nobody else had that right, nobody else — just as Constancia could offer herself erotically on all fours only to me, though she might present her ass to be examined for evidence of cancer. Now I was her lover and I was her doctor, too. She was my case. She couldn’t be admitted to an impersonal hospital. Constancia would not enter any hospital; I saw her, across the passage of time, lying there, lily-white, deep-set eyes, mole, her hair loose — I kept her silver hairpins in my jacket pocket — and I told myself that I would have to be admitted for her, with her, in her. But her look — which I followed — was still not for me; it was for the Virgin, the votive candle, the window.

Since I couldn’t leave her, I couldn’t resolve one of the more important questions. Her apparent death, in my arms, for several seconds, displaced the other question: Had Mr. Plotnikov died? I didn’t notice any further activity at his house, but that was not unusual. I never had noticed anything about that unremarkable house, except the night the lights blazed and then went out, all at once in each case. Normally, nothing happened at the house across from ours. It might as well have been vacant. The newspaper was delivered each morning as usual, but there was no mention in it of Plotnikov’s death. Perhaps he had requested that. If he had died, who would attend his wake? I supposed that the Russian actor would keep beside him an icon of the Virgin, fashioned from hammered silver, in which the reality of the metal itself would be more vivid than that of the faint, distant figure of the smiling Virgin, pale ocher, with the Child in her arms, both looking at the faithful old man from the eternal background of orthodox religion, which refuses to come down and tread the earth. Who would bury him?

I cast a quick look at our Virgin, by Constancia’s bed, the Andalusian madonna, Virgin of bullfighters, processions, tricks, outrageous blasphemies, gypsy dances, ardent bodies. The Russian Virgin never said anything, anywhere; the Andalusian Virgin shouted, here, now. Constancia always said: Andalusia: water, source, and reflection. Alhambra …

She knew how to speak beautifully, gracefully, with passion and tenderness, but now, in her trance, I set aside our discussions and considered matters on my own account. Her conversation had kept from me many thoughts, which were rendered insubstantial so that they floated away from me like so many little birds, the barest of possibilities in place of the certainties that pin us down. So now one thought weighed on me heavily, horribly, through my long vigil, again and again, despite my conscious and unconscious denials: