Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

— Paco, Paco, you’re straying, man! What happened to your friend Sterne?

— Oh, nothing, except when he died in London in 1768 his corpse disappeared from its tomb a few days after his burial.

— Like your head, Paco …

— No, Larry was luckier. His body was stolen by some students from Cambridge, knockabouts and idlers the way they all are, who were celebrating the rites of May in June, whiling away their white nights, using him for their anatomy experiments. Laurence says nobody needed to dissect him because he was more dried up and full of parasites than mistletoe, but since he had written so brilliantly of prenatal life, he approved of someone prolonging his postmortal life, if you can call it that. They returned it — the corpse, I mean — to its tomb, a little the worse for wear.

— Then your case is unique.

— Not at all. Where are the heads of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, of Sydney Carton and of the Princesse de Lamballe?

— Oh, crime, how many liberties are committed in your name!

— And the wheel keeps on rolling, Roland!

— You bet. But Byron, who’s my neighbor these days — though not a sociable one — had his brains stolen when it was discovered that they were the biggest in recorded history. And that’s nothing. There’s a guy who’s more sullen than anyone in my parts, he looks like a Ronda highwayman, a masher and slasher for sure. Dillinger he’s called, John Dillinger, and I always think Dildo-ger, because when they cut him down leaving a theater …

— It was a movie house, Paco.

— In my day we didn’t have those. A theater, I say, and when they did the autopsy they found he had a bigger dick than Emperor Charles V had titles, so they lopped it right off and stuck it in a jar of disinfectant, and there is the outlaw’s John Thomas to this very day, in case anyone wants to compare sizes, and die of envy.

— Did you envy Pedro Romero, Paco?

— I wanted to live to be a hundred, like Titian. I died at eighty-two, and I don’t know if I had already lost my head.

— Romero died at eighty.

— I didn’t know that. He doesn’t reside in our district.

— He retired from the ring at forty.

— Hold on, I know that story better than anyone.

— That’s enough, old woman, you’ll fall clean out the window, you’d better get yourself off to bed.

— Oh, I know all about it.

— Come on, don’t be childish.

— Oh, let me tell Don Paco the whole story, before I die of frustration …

— Who do you think you are, Aunt Mezuca, the morning paper?

— Listen here: Pedro Romero was the greatest bullfighter of his day. He killed 5,588 fierce bulls. But he was never touched by a single horn. When he was buried at eighty, his body didn’t have a single scar, see, not even a little scratch this big.

— It was a perfect body, a nearly perfect figure, with a muscular harmony revealed in 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, crowned by a noble head, firm jaw, elegant, taut cheeks, virile emerging beard, perfectly straight nose, fine, separated eyebrows, clear forehead, widow’s peak, serene, dark eyes …

— And how you know that, Don Francisco?

— I painted him.

— All of him?

— No, only the face and a hand. The rest was just his cape. But to fight bulls, Pedro Romero, who stood to receive the bull as no one had ever done before, and who froze for the kill as nobody had ever done either, and who, between stops and commands, bequeathed us the luxury of the most beautiful, uninterrupted series of passes that had ever been seen …

— And olé …

— And recontraolé …

— Well, to fight bulls that way, Pedro Romero had only his eyes, those were his weapons — he looked at the bull and thought as he faced the beast.

— Just his eyes!

— No, also a way of fighting bulls by making them see their death in the cape. He invented the encounter, the only one permitted, my Cádiz friends, between the nature that we kill to survive and the nature that for once excuses us for our crime … only in the bullring.

— And in war, too, Paco, if you consider how we excuse our crimes here in Cádiz.

— No, old man, a man never has to kill another man to survive; to kill your brother is unpardonable. If we don’t kill nature, we don’t live, but we can live without killing other people. We would like to receive nature’s pardon for killing her, but she denies us that, she turns her back on us, and instead condemns us to see ourselves in history. I assure you, my Cádiz friends, that it’s in our loss of nature and our meeting with history that we create art. Painting, I …

— And the bullfight, Romero …

— And love, La Privada …

— I invented both of them.

— They existed without you, Goya.

— All that remains of Romero is a single painting and two engravings. Mine. Of Elisia there remain a painting and twenty engravings. All mine.

— Simply lines, Paquirri, just lines, but not life, not that.

— Where do we find lines in nature? I see only light and dark bodies, advancing and receding planes, reliefs and concavities …

— And what about those bodies that approach, Don Paco, and the ones that recede, what about them?

— Where’s the body of Elisia Rodríguez?

— She died young. She was thirty.

— And what did you give her, Goya?

— What she didn’t have: age. I painted her wrinkled, toothless, wasted, absurdly persisting in using unguents, vapors, pomades, and powders to rejuvenate herself.

— Until death!

— Surrounded by monkeys and lapdogs and gossips and ridiculous fops; the final few spectators of her faded glory …

— Wait till you’ve been anointed!

— But La Privada escaped from me, she died young …

— Her final fainting, Paco.

— La Privada who denied you the pleasure of seeing her dazed in your arms when you made love …

— Oh, listen, listen to this, everyone, window to window: Elisia Rodríguez never fainted with Don Paco de Goya, with everyone else, yes …

— Shut up, damn it …

— Hey, Don Paco, don’t get worked up, here in Cádiz we laugh at everything …

— Nothing between us …

— I gave you everythin’, but you, nothin’.

— And that’s the way it was!

— No, the reason La Privada didn’t faint for me was that she had to stay wide awake to tell me things about our people, she wanted me to know them; listen, her fainting was just a pretext so she could sleep anyway, and not be bothered, once she had got what she …

— And did they let her sleep in peace?

— Except for a few dense fellows who would shake her by the neck trying to wake her …

— Poor La Privada: how many times was she doused with cold water to wake her from her trance!

— How many pinches on the arm!

— How many slaps on the rear!

— How many times did she get her feet tickled!

— But not with me. With me she always stayed awake to tell me things. She told me about a little dog she loved that fell in a well where no one could get it, he couldn’t grab the ropes they lowered, bulls have horns but dogs have only the eyes of sad and defenseless men, which call to us and ask our help, and we can’t give it …

— Elisia Rodríguez told you that?

— As if to a deaf man, shouting in my ear, that’s the way she told me her stories. How was she going to faint with me, if I was her immortality!

— And the witches’ Sabbath, Goya …