Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (23 page)

He did, and distractedly registered the spare furniture in the room, almost nothing but a bed, a chest of drawers by its side, cool candles on it, cold tile floor, fresh curtains blocking out the daylight, an old-fashioned washbasin, a chamber pot his fingers touched under the bed, and dominating everything a great ornate armoire, the only luxury in the room—he looked in vain for an electric light, an outlet, a telephone; he was mixed up, then he thought he understood: he had confused luxury with novelty, with modern comfort, but was it really the same thing? Nothing was modern in this room, and the armoire with its two doors was adorned with a crest of vines, cherubs, and broken columns.

Before sleeping again in each other's arms, he wanted to tell her what he had thought, separated from Rocío in the apartment they shared, something that Rocío didn't understand perhaps, and perhaps not this woman either, but with her it was worth it, worth the risk of not being understood: when we die, we lose the past, that's what we lose, not the future, as he told her …

At midday Monday, on waking again, Rubén Oliva and his lover abandoned themselves to the day, convinced that the day belonged to them, without interruption, rejoicing in their chance encounter on the nocturnal terraces of Madrid. (How many of the young people consummated a marriage of the night as they had, how many only celebrated the nuptials of the spectacle: to show oneself, see, be seen, not touch…?) They confessed that they could hardly see each other in the shifting light of the terraces, she felt the attraction, perhaps because it was Monday, moon day, day of tides, decisive dates, violent currents, overpowering attractions and impulses, she was drawn to him as though magnetized, and he couldn't see her clearly in the whirlwind of artificial light and shade, and that is how it had to be, because she had to tell him that, now that she had seen him, he was …

He covered her mouth gently with his hand, put his lips to her ear, told the woman lying there that it didn't matter, he confessed it wouldn't matter to him if she was a boy, a transvestite, a whore, diseased, dying, nothing mattered to him, because what she had given him, how she had given herself to him, excited him, attracted him, made him feel that every time was the first time, that every repeated act was the beginning of a night of love, so that each time he felt as if he hadn't done it for a year, all of that was what …

Now she covered his mouth with a hand and said: —But I did know you. I picked you because of who you were, not because you were unknown to me.

The words were hardly out of the woman's mouth when the doors of the armoire opened with a heart-stopping thump and two powerful hands, stained, dripping colors from the fingers, threw apart the panels, and a waistcoated, frock-coated body emerged, in a linen shirt and short pants, white silk stockings and country-style shoes, clogs maybe, smeared with mud and cow dung, and this creature jumped onto the bed of love, smeared the sheets with shit and mud, wrapped its hands around the woman's face, and, without paying the slightest attention to Rubén Oliva, smeared the face of his lover with its fingers as it had just smeared the soiled sheets, and Rubén Oliva, paralyzed with astonishment, his head planted on a pillow, unable to move, never knew if those agile, irreverent fingers erased or created, composed or disfigured, while with equal speed and art, and with incredible fury, they traced on the woman's featureless face the deformed arc of a diabolic brow or the semblance of a smile, or if they emptied out her eye sockets, turned the fine nose that Rubén had caressed into a misshapen cabbage and erased the lips that had kissed his, that had told him, I did know you, I chose you because of who you were …

The giant—or perhaps it only appeared so because it was standing on the bed, doubling its size to destroy or create the woman's face with its colors—panted, exhausted, and Rubén Oliva contemplated the woman, her face besmeared, made and unmade, covered by the two floods of flowing tears and a veil of hair; and watching the raging terror that had escaped from the armoire, he finally realized what he had known from the moment he had seen it appear—but what he couldn't believe until, little by little, sweating, he began to overcome his panic: this man, atop his body and clothes and shoes and stooped shoulders, had no head.

Tuesday
1

Imagine three spaces, said the headless giant then, three perfect circles that must never touch, three orbs, each circulating in its independent trajectory, with its own reason for being and its own court of satellites: three incomparable and self-sufficient worlds. So, perhaps, are the worlds of the gods. Ours, shamefully, are imperfect. The spheres meet, repel one another, penetrate each other, fertilize, vie against, and kill each other. The circle is not perfect because it is pierced by the tangent or the chord. But imagine only those three spaces: each in its own way is a dressing room, and in the first, a theatrical dressing room, a naked woman is being dressed slowly by her maids, though she isn't talking to the servants but to her dancing monkey, with white necktie and blue-painted genitals, that swings among the mannequins, and those cloth breasts are the anticipation of the body of his mistress, who addresses her words to the monkey and to whom the monkey, as his day's prize, addresses itself: its reward will be to jump onto the shoulder of the woman and leave with her for the stage first, to the dinners afterwards, on Sundays to a stroll on San Isidro, and at night, if he behaves well, to the foot of the bed of his mistress and her lover, to disconcert her venereal companions and amuse Elisia Rodríguez, called “La Privada,” queen of the Madrid stage, who can keep her acting glory alive in only one way: each night, before going onstage, she talks to the ape, who is dressed up and secretly bedaubed (for the spectators' laughter, the families' scandal, and her lovers' discomfort: the blue prop noticeable only on certain occasions), and tells him who she is, where she came from, in order to appreciate her own success all the more for having risen from below, as she had, from so godforsaken a town that more than once the princes of the royal house had gone there to marry, because the law decreed that the place where the princes contracted matrimony would remain exempt from paying taxes forever, so they had to go to a place as dirt-poor as that, so its release from taxation would not matter to the Crown—though it did to the princes forced to marry in the ruined church, with crows flying past constantly, and bats too, except when it was daytime and they were asleep, hanging from the corners like shards of sleeping shit, like the shit of the unpaved streets, into which the finest shoes and the shiniest boots sink, where the wagons get stuck, at the mercy of the shoulders of the local studs who, to demonstrate their manhood, would rescue them, at times with their giddy duchesses, rocking amid the smell of sweat, onions, and excrement, and the processions were trailed and swelled by stray dogs and clouds of flies, and flanked by phalanxes of cockroaches in the corners of rude eateries (first let me see myself naked in the mirror, ape, and admit you've never seen anything more perfect than this hourglass of silky white skin whose uniformity—you have to season the dish—is barely interrupted by what is revealed at the tip of the tits, the navel, below the arms if I choose to raise them and between the legs if I don't care to close them), and if that was how the weddings of the princes were, then women like me had betrothals that were long and unbroken: no girl had the right, you hear me, ape? to have a second suitor: you married your first and only one, chosen by your parents, after waiting five years, to make sure of the good intentions and the chastity of all.

—What are you laughing at, you old farts, Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, said then, slapping the shoulders of her maids with feigned annoyance—one, two, three, four—with the end of her fan, although the servants, all of them Mexican, were of stoic cast and were neither frightened nor insulted by their whimsical mistress. If La Privada said to Rufina from Veracruz or Guadalupe from Orizaba, see how high a girl from a town exempted from taxes can climb, the servants, who perhaps were descended from Totonac and Olmec princes, were grateful to have arrived there to lace up the most celebrated performer in Spain, instead of being branded like cattle or lashed like dogs in the colonial haciendas.

If they felt any sorrow (Rufina from Veracruz and Guadalupe from Orizaba, already mentioned, plus Lupe Segunda from Puebla and Petra from Tlaxcala), Elisia Rodríguez did not, as she looked at herself, first naked, then with a single ornament, the fan in her hand, and now they were going to put on her rings—naked, fan, rings, she grew excited on seeing herself in the mirror—and still talking to the ape, never to the Mexicans, who pretended not to hear, she told how she was seduced after the royal wedding by a young Jesuit traveling with the court to chronicle the events, and how the lettered youth, to gain absolution for his sins, concupiscence, and the pregnancy announced by Elisia, had taken her to Barcelona, promised to teach her to read works of theater and poetry, and married her to his uncle, an importer of Cuban goods, an old man undaunted by the institution of
chichisveo,
which authorized the ménage à trois with the consent of the old husband, who showed off his young wife in public but privately freed her from sexual obligations, granting them to the young man, though with certain conditions, such as his right to watch them, Elisia and the nephew, making love, secretly, naturally, the old man wanted to behave decently, and if they knew he was watching them without their seeing him, perhaps that would excite them even more.

It happened, however, related Elisia, that in a little while the husband began to be annoyed that the beneficiary of the institution was his nephew, and he began to add to his complaints that it didn't bother him so much that he was his nephew as that he was a priest. Elisia, hearing these retractions, began to believe that her husband desired her, and even began to wonder if he could satisfy her female desires. What made her decide to follow the advice of her husband—“Be mine and mine alone, Elisia”—is that she was annoyed by the contrast between the Jesuit's flattery of the powerful and his contempt for the weak, which he showed so often that she considered it the true norm of conduct not only of her lover but of the entire Company of Jesus, whereas rich and poor, powerful and weak were treated alike by her husband, a good, honest man. Elisia's husband said simply that in business one saw the rise and fall of fortunes: the poor of today could be the rich of tomorrow, and vice versa. But then the old man would quickly repeat his formal argument that he was dissolving the agreement of
chichisveo
because the young man was a priest, not because he was his nephew: nothing demanded respect but religion, he again advised Elisia.

—Religion and, he added quickly, commerce.

And the theater? Elisia, after a few months of his amorous admonishments, decided that there was a lover more varied, neither too permanent nor too fleeting, less faithful perhaps but also less demanding than any individual, momentarily more intense if temporally less enduring. In other words, Elisia wanted the public for her lover, not a naïve seminarian; she wanted the spectators as her beloved, not the writers of plays, and her husband consented to these thousands of lovers, relieved that his precious Elisia, from that forsaken, flea-ridden town that paid no taxes, preferred this form of
chichisveo
to the other, more traditional kind.

He got her singing teachers and dance masters, he got her speech and voice instructors, he got her as much work as he could find, from religious roles to profane comedies, but Elisia's wisdom surpassed their teachings (her maids covered her charms with a bodice and for a minute Elisia was dissatisfied, but then she remembered that there were men who had loved her more for her bodice than for her body, she had even discovered one of them kneeling before the actress's nightstand, kissing her intimate apparel, more excited there than in bed, he wanted to sing a hymn to the inventor of underclothing, but her earthy and practical side simply concluded that everything has its use in this world, where love is king. So her enthusiasm returned, and
olé:
the pregnancy that frightened the Jesuit was as much a deceit as the bustle the Mexican maids were now pinning on her). Elisia had a bloodhound's instinct in her butterfly body, and she had arrived in Barcelona when all Spain had but two passions: the theater and the bulls, actresses and bullfighters, and the passion of passions, the rivalry among actresses, or among matadors, the disputes of one group and another, this one bedding that one (quick, it's getting late, the white stockings, the garters, the sashes for the waist), and her husband doing his Pygmayonnaise number, and you, my Galantine, or something like that, as she said, showing off her learning before her teachers and the Jesuit nephew (the nephew-Jesuit), who gave her lessons in the dramatic arts and in the refinement of diction through recitation of verses, but she felt something different, her heart told her that the theater was the theater, not a repetition of words that nobody understood, but the occasion to display herself before an audience and make them feel that they were part of her, of her life, that they were her friends—and what is more, to reveal her greatest intimacies from the stage; and if her husband, who preferred the footlights to the
chichisveo
but now showed dangerous inclinations toward the conjugal bed instead of the theatrical boards, didn't understand that, the members of the court who came to Barcelona to see Elisia did, including Princess M——, who had gotten married in Elisia's town to spare that poor village from taxes and who imperiously demanded the presence of the entertainer, and Elisia said to tell her she wasn't an entertainer but a tragedienne.

—Haven't you seen the Empire styles with which Mam'selle George is dazzling Paris? And the princess said yes, she had seen them, and she wanted Elisia to wear them in Madrid, where she was urged, by royal decree, to present herself, with or without her husband, for he insisted that the best clothing was sold in the shop, and if she went so far from the Catalán port and his business in tobacco, sugar, fruit, rare woods, and all the riches of Havana, who was going to pay for his wife's singing classes and her stiff silk bows?