Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

I saw her from a distance one afternoon, seated on a bench facing the river in Emmett Park. I had been at the hotel buying a pack of cigarettes and was returning home along River Street. I saw her sitting on the bench facing the river and thought, what luck, I will surprise her. Then a young black man, about thirty years old, strong, vigorous, sat down beside Constancia. She looked at the river. He stared down at his tennis shoes with a fixed look. I went a little closer, clutching the cellophane of my cigarette pack. They didn’t see me. The black man spoke to my wife. She looked at the river. I said to myself in a low voice, hoping she might somehow hear me at that distance:

— Don’t show fear. By all you hold dear! If he senses you’re afraid, he might attack. Fear incites them.

Now the black turned to face Constancia, speaking to her insolently. I was going to run to her. Then I noticed that she was answering him, without looking at him. He grabbed my wife’s hand. She did not pull away. She didn’t show fear. Or familiarity. That’s good, I told myself, don’t take chances. I had decided to approach them at a normal speed, give Constancia a kiss on the cheek; we would go back to our house together, along Lincoln Street. Then another black man approached the bench, a younger man, and seemed to ask the other for something. The first man got angry, stood up, the two faced each other wordlessly, the only sound was their hissing, that’s what I particularly noticed, they were hissing like snakes, two black snakes glaring with fury, with blood in their eyes. Never have I seen so much hate concentrated in two human beings, they were trembling, both of them, not touching each other, just looking, the two bodies leaning close to each other.

Constancia got up from the bench and left by Factors Walk, on the other side from where I was standing. I decided to watch her go while the two black men faced each other with a wild tension, though, as far as I could see, no violent consequences. When Constancia disappeared from sight, I lost interest and returned home. She came in a few minutes later. I preferred not to mention the matter. I would end up asking for an explanation, and a marriage is weakened when a spouse has to make explanations. Who excuses accuses. The best course was to maintain a sympathetic silence.

Now, on this dying August afternoon, as the scissors of autumn slowly, mysteriously begin to snip through the heavy air of summer, and it’s not worth the trouble to recall that remote incident in the park, I can almost understand her feeling that love that has complete certainty is not true love; it’s too much like an insurance policy, or, worse yet, a certificate of good conduct. And indifference is the price you pay for it. So perhaps I am thankful for the moments of conflict that Constancia and I experienced in the past; they show that we had to test our marriage, we would not consign it to the indifference of perfect security. How could it be, when something of no importance to me — having a child — was a constant source of frustration and argument throughout the first twenty years of our life together, always raised by her: So you don’t care about having a child? No, I care about having you. Well, I do care about it, I need a child, I can’t have one, you’re a doctor, you know that perfectly well, I can’t, I can’t, and you don’t care at all, or else you care so much that you feign this horrid indifference that hurts me so much, Whitby, that hurts me so …

10

Conscious of the most obvious biological signs, I resigned myself to not having children. Her suffering was clear, but she refused to have any tests done. I urged her to see a doctor to have the problem diagnosed. We couldn’t go on blaming each other. But her determination never to see a doctor was stronger than her frustration, pain, and unhappiness. That’s a perfect example of the hermeticism of our marriage, which couldn’t avoid what might be called intramural problems, even though all outside contacts — friendships, doctors, shopping, social calls, trips — were zealously avoided. On the other hand, we were capable of exploring, usually with good humor, such other possibilities as adoption (but the child would not be of our blood, Whitby, it has to be our blood) or artificial insemination of a surrogate mother (But what if she falls in love with the child and refuses to give it up to us? — We’ll choose a poor woman, so if there’s a dispute the court will award the child to us, since we can assure it a good future …).

— Children don’t need money to have a good future.

— Constancia, you’re your own worst enemy, you’re the devil’s advocate. You think like a gypsy! I laugh then.

— The Virgin was Blessed, she didn’t have to fornicate to bear a child, the Holy Spirit passed through her sex like light through a crystal.

I kissed one of her ears and asked, laughing, if she would like that better than the way we did it. No, she answered, without hesitation, wrapping her arms around my neck and caressing it with her long fingers, proportionally the longest part of her body.

— Don’t think about having children (typically, I resorted to a joke, just the sort that Mr. Plotnikov accused me of); think, rather, that Herod was probably right when he ordered all the male children of Israel to be killed.

At that she tore away from my embrace, screamed, ran to shut herself in her room to fast for an entire day, and then came out, contrite, but I am not inclined to cede my authority, much less my literary authority.

— All right. Where should I start to read your famous library?

— You can begin at the beginning, which is the Bible.

— Never. Only Protestants read that.

— And Catholics?

— Christ, we know it all! We know all about the Holy Virgin, and you, you know nothing about her.

— Very well, Constancia — I laughed then — very well said, my love. You see what heretics we are.

— Come on, Whitby, next thing you’ll have me read the dictionary from A to Z, or something just as stupid.

— So what would you like to read?

— Maybe the stories of all the fallen women.

— You would never finish. And you would have to begin, again, with Eve.

— Then I want to read everything about a fallen child, a sorrowful boy.

That’s how she started reading Kafka, and she threw herself into it, reading the books again and again, moving from biography to fiction and discovering, finally, that he had no better biography than his fiction, and so accepting Kafka on his own terms, as a man with no life other than literature. She said, half in jest (I think), that she would have liked her son to be like him, like that thin, sickly boy with the ears of a bat, who … who could have gone to work for the Spanish national railways.

— A child, please, even one who would be sad …

— Let’s flee to Egypt, Constancia, so Herod can’t kill him.

Then she ran to shut herself in her room and this August afternoon, taking her hand, I’m finally reconciled to this questioning: had Constancia died each time she fled from me and shut herself up for a full day in her bedroom, before coming out, renewed, radiant, to make up, play, and improve our love that would have died of pure perfection, of pure distance, of pure suspicion, of pure incomprehension (— An old woman. — Ignorant. — Sterile ) if not for those incidents? Perhaps our arguments were more than just domestic tiffs; they were more like personal sacrifices made by my delicious Spanish woman on the altar of our domestic, solitary love in a ghostly city — the most ghostly — of the American South. Did Constancia die for me and did our love, so enduring, require nothing, here and now, but that death without end?