Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

9

The father and the daughter are going to look at two or three art books together, as they do every night, without discussing what they are going to look at, with the books open on his knees and her lap, pointing out one print or another, from time to time sipping a glass of claret or port, an old custom in the British Isles that has continued through the generations on this side of the Atlantic, he chooses a book of Piranesi prints, lord and master of the infinite, he tells Catarina, the author of engraving’s most absolute light and shade: Roman landscapes and prisons, he points, prisons and vistas without beginning or end, Santiago Ferguson caresses the head of his daughter, the engraving as an infinity symbol lying on its side as you are, alongside my legs, an endless sleep, entrance and exit, liberty and prison, an imprisoned vista, a prison with a view.

— This is what I am offering you. How will you correspond?

She opens her own book, which is resting on her lap. She indicates a photograph of the Teatro Olimpico of Vicenza: she says she prefers Palladio’s public architecture to his domestic architecture; he created uninhabitable Roman temples for the bourgeois of Italy, but for the public, poor and rich alike, he created imaginary cities, prosceniums that refused to be pure theater, instead they extended into streets, alleys, barely visible city vistas, urban mazes that, Catarina Ferguson repeated, as the professor had often said, gave the scene another, an infinite dimension.

— You don’t see it?

— No. I don’t see what you’re talking about.

— It’s the entrance. We are looking at the entrance.

— All I see is the same door as ever, bricked up, the same as always.

— Come with me. I will prove to you that the entrance is there.

— Will you? Has it happened to you, what sometimes happens, that suddenly we seem to see or feel something clearly, something that was there all along but we hadn’t noticed until that moment, when everything comes together around it, and everything stops and falls into place …

— Do you see it, Catarina? Do you see that it’s so? It is …

Later, in each other’s arms, she told him to stop torturing her, it was so tempting to find out about it, but she didn’t want to enter that hateful place ever again, and even though she detested it, and the people who lived there horrified her, still she couldn’t seem to get over the temptation to return to it.

— You don’t believe that there’s a symmetry in all things? Santiago asked her.

— I believe things only happen once.

— In that case, we will never understand each other.

— Very well, Santiago.

— You have to learn to give things that have failed, that have been damaged or destroyed, another chance.

— But not at the expense of my health. I’m sorry.

10

The child falls asleep on the lap of the woman with the dusky face. The nuns wait on her silently, bringing her drinks, plates of rolls; they kneel before her as she sits in one of the low straw chairs surrounded by baskets of eggs and handkerchiefs, scissors and thread, corncobs. Some of the nuns fan her from time to time; others take handkerchiefs and moisten her forehead and bathe her eyes, her lips. The woman, sitting close to the ground, is stroking the child’s hair, which is dry now; he is sleeping, his face calm. She smiles; she tells you that she sees a glint in your eyes which she recognizes; she knows what you were thinking, tell her if she’s right, a nun is a woman, but not a woman one sees every day. Men don’t get used to her in everyday encounters, so they desire her even more ardently; she is hidden, forbidden, veiled, in a convent, in a prison, in an infinite construction where every door conceals another, this one leading to that, and that, and yet another … like the nuns, doesn’t it seem?

You say yes.

That is why they make that response you heard at the end of the meal, she repeats: Desire is like snow in our hands.

And you also repeat: Yes.

She looks tenderly at the sleeping child, and without shifting her gaze, she talks to you, there is never enough time for everything, maybe for animals there is, since they don’t measure time, if they even have any, but for people, well, the ones who manage to become flesh, who possess a body, isn’t it true that they never have all the time they want?

You return her look with your own uncomprehending one; you are sitting in a higher chair, staring down at the woman and the child; no, what she means — she speaks rapidly, in a sad but strong voice — Sister Apollonia takes care of wiping off the saliva that sometimes trickles from her lips — is that nobody ever has enough time for life, even if they live to be a hundred years old; nobody leaves the world feeling they’ve exhausted life; there is always one last hope, an encounter we secretly wish to have, a desire that remains unfulfilled.

Yes …

There is never enough time to know and to taste the world completely, and the nun sighs, stroking the head of the little boy. — My son was denied things, there are things he never experienced. Does that seem incomprehensible to you?

No.

Abruptly, she takes your hand, her eyes shining, and asks, But this time? He could live longer than he did the other time, that’s why he has come back to be reborn, she tells you, that’s why I dared to do it again, they say I don’t have the right, that my child has no right to be born twice, sir (the mutilated nun, Agatha, dries the sweat off her brow), they say it’s monstrous (she squeezes your hand, this time her touch hurts), they say what I’m doing is monstrous, bringing him back into the world a second time (the blind nun, Lucía, carefully cleans the blood flowing from under the woman’s skirts, forming a puddle on the floor), but you have to understand what I’m doing, you have to help me …

— Señora …

— You are a mason, or a carpenter, or something like that, aren’t you?

You listen to her with annoyance, irritated, you don’t understand her. But you agree, yes, you are, a manual laborer; and she sighs, perhaps the miracle can be repeated, despite what everyone says; she slowly opens her eyes, the blind nun wipes them with the bloody handkerchief, she doesn’t close them, as if welcoming that stain, murmuring, If he has three fathers, why can’t he have three mothers? And if he has three mothers, why can’t he have had three fathers…?

You look around you: the eight nuns are there, standing, surrounding the three of you, the woman with the dusky face, the sleeping child, and you, and one holds a harp in her hands, another a guitar, one a staff, another a lead plate, the fifth’s hand has bells on every finger, the sixth a fork, the last a knife, a real dagger pointing at your eyes. You have a horrible feeling that everything unspeakable — sighs, sorrows, griefs — is about to find a voice.

— No, says the woman, delicately lifting the head of the sleeping child, you don’t have to say anything …

You manage to say something anyway, in a panic: —The child is already alive. You don’t have to do anything, look at him, he’s sleeping but he’s alive, you babble on a moment before the eight women begin to press up against your body, and you feel those other bodies against you, an intimacy of smells and skin and menstruation, a delicious sensation of bodies naked under green silk, their saliva in your ears, the conch in your mouth; orange silk covered your eyes and the breath of eight women had become a single breath, as fragrant as your nights, as bitter as your mornings, as sweat-drenched as your middays, and in the center of the circle, reserved for you, untouched, immaculate, the woman who was dusk itself, dark, desperate, the moles on her temples tightening like screws, saying come, José María, it took you a long time to arrive, but you are here at last, my love … The woman and her companions speak in unison, pressing against you, surrounding you, suffocating you, shutting you in the tiled bathroom decorated in a pattern of foliage, with porcelain frogs set in the white bathtub that is like a vast bed of water into which you sink … You are suffocated by unwanted kisses, smothered in that bath of steam in which you suddenly remember the maternal womb you have longed to regain before you die, and that other bath floods over you, my brother, Carlos María.