Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (24 page)

In other words: her husband forbade Elisia to travel to Madrid; theaters and actresses, although his wife was one of them, were for passing the time, not for making fortunes; but Elisia went anyway, laughing at the old man, and he locked up her costumes and told her, Now show yourself naked on the stage, and she said, I am quite capable of doing so, and she went to Madrid, where the princess who had gotten married in her village presented her with a wardrobe the likes of which had never been seen before in the court at Madrid or anywhere else, for the princess raided the oldest wardrobes in the palace and found in them the forgotten Chinese garments brought to Europe by Marco Polo and the feathered Indian capes that Captain Cortés presented to the Crown after the fall of Mexico, and although Elisia said she wasn't going to dress like a savage, the princess called her both beggar and chooser, Havanera and despot, but Elisia took the Chinese fabrics and the feathered Aztec capes and made them into Empire fantasies, until the Duchess of O——, rival of Princess M——, had copies made of all of Rodríguez's outfits to give to her own favorite actress, Pepa de Hungría, and Elisia gave her outfits to her chambermaids so they would be dressed the same as Pepa, in rags, as Elisia announced in a song, and now no one wanted to compete with her, not La Cartuja or La Caramba, or La Tirana, or any of the other great stage sirens (quick, the gold brocade skirt, the white muslin, the taffeta and rose silk cloak), no orator or singer or dancer, just Elisia Rodríguez, ape, who was all that and more, who was the first to say to hell with written texts, who said what interests people is me, not someone embalmed two hundred years ago, and improvising texts and songs, she resolved to speak of herself, her most intimate affairs, her evolving loves, urgent as her need to feed her legend before the footlights, and while she invented something here and there, she began to feel an increasingly pressing need for real adventures, stories that the people could share, it's true, she lay with that one, you know, ape, you were a witness, your mistress doesn't lie, she spent the night in his palace, we saw her leaving at daybreak, she appeared at the windows, she greeted the doorkeepers, who knew her well, who all loved her because she greeted them all with a smile, and Elisia consolidated her fame singing only of her own loves, her own desires, her own struggles and adventures: that is what the public craved and that is what she gave them, and all she lacked was a special name, which is the symbol of fame, so:

—A name is not enough, one needs a nickname.

And they began, secretly and laughingly, to call Elisia “La Privada,” the private one, and at first everyone thought it was a joke to designate so public a woman that way; and even if its significance was extended later to God's having deprived her of children, other nicknames failed to stick. Not simply Elisia, not La Rodríguez, not the Havanera, not the Barren One: even the seminarian could not effect that amazing conception; the woman was barren. This convinced no one, and although Elisia's fame kept growing, it was fame without a name, which is fame without fame, until the truth became known and shone like the sun and filled everyone with the warmth, feeling, jealousy, the divided emotions that constitute fame itself: Elisia Rodríguez, whispered the growing legion of her lovers, fainted at the climax of love-making: she came and she went!

—La Privada! The deprived! The unconscious one! The fainter!

(All she lacked now was the cape, that's it, and the satin shoes too, and the hairpiece, the great bow of rose silk on her head, ah and the disguised mustache on her upper lip, bah, she had to be a woman with hair, and that scent of garlic, caramba, if I don't eat I die, what do they want, a corpse?, and her eyes were dead beneath her heavy eyebrows, and her eyes were dead, and her eyes—were dead.)

2

Pedro Romero was stark naked in his dressing room and didn't need to look at himself in the mirror to know that his caramel skin didn't show a single scar, not the wound of a single horn. His dark, long, delicate, firm hand had killed 5,582 bulls, but not one had touched him, even though Romero had redefined the art of bullfighting; it was one of the oldest arts in the world, but it was the newest for the public that filled the plazas of Spain to admire—Romero realized—not only their favorite personalities but also themselves, for bullfighters were neither more nor less than the people's triumph, the people doing what they had always done—daring, defying death, surviving—and now being applauded for it, recognized, lavished with fame and fortune for surviving, for lasting another month, when what everyone hoped was that the bull of life would rip you open and send you off to rot once and for all.

And yet, naked in that cool, dark dressing room, Pedro Romero felt the fiction of his own body and the virtual sensation of having previously inhabited that body, which so many had loved—he looked down, gauged the bulk of his testicles, as the sword handler would do in a minute to adjust his breeches—but which was, in the end, in a more profound sense, a virgin body, a body that had never been penetrated. He smiled at the thought that all men who aren't queer are virgins because they always penetrate, they're never penetrated by the woman; but the bullfighter knew that he had to be penetrated by the bull to lose his macho virginity, and that had never happened to him.

He considered himself, naked, at forty still possessing a nearly perfect figure, a muscular harmony revealed by 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, a soft-assed English lover had told him, jealous not just of his tight ass but of the blood beneath his skin, his skin and body molded like almond paste by Phoenician and Greek hands, washed like Holland sheets by waves of Carthaginians and Celts, stormed like a merlon by Roman phalanxes and Visigoth hordes, caressed like ivory by Arab hands, and kissed like crosses by Jewish lips.

It was a body of bodies, too, because more than five thousand pairs of bulls' horns had failed to wound it; his body had never bled, suppurated, scabbed; it was a good body, at peace with the soul that inhabited it, but also a bad body, bad because it was provocative. It continually exceeded its moral constraint, its sufficiency as the container of Pedro Romero's soul, exhibiting itself before others, exciting them, saying to them: Look, more than five thousand bulls and not a single wound.

And bad, too, because the body of the bullfighter had the right to do what others could not: to parade itself in public, exposing itself on every side, in the midst of applause, parading its sexual attributes, its tight little ass, its testicles straining beneath the silk the penis that at times was plainly revealed through the breeches that were the perfect mirror for the torero's sex.

—Dress me, quickly …

—Come on,
Figura,
you know I can't do that in less than forty-five minutes, you know that …

—I'm sorry, Sparky. I'm nervous this afternoon.

—That's not good,
Figura.
Think of your fame. You may call me Spark, but it's you who's the light, the Great Figure of the Ring.

Let me die but let my fame endure—Pedro Romero smiled and let the attendant dress him, slowly: first the long white underpants, then the rose stockings with garters below the knees, next the hairpiece with the pigtail at the nape of the neck; his breeches, which this afternoon were silver and blue, and Sparky matched up the three hooks and eyes on the legs; the shirt that was a wash of white, the suspenders caressing his chest, the yellow cummerbund wrapped around his waist, or rather, it was the man himself wrapped in that mother of clothing, its symbol, its origin, a long ribbon of yellow silk, the cradle of the body, its maternal embrace, its umbilical projection, or so Pedro Romero felt that afternoon, as Sparky tied his narrow necktie, adjusted his majestic vest, his silver caparison, not as strong a shield as the bullfighter's own armor, which is his heart, and his own natural mane, still silky, even though, like this afternoon's suit, it was now silver; and finally the black shoes, the laces tied as only Sparky knew how, like two perfect rabbit's ears.

Are there many people? Ah, a great crowd,
Figura,
you know, when you're fighting, everyone shows up, rich and poor, men and women, everyone loves you, they would sell their beds to see you, and how they prepare for the fiesta, how many hours they spend to shine elegantly before you, elegantly
as
you,
Figura,
you, the King of the Ring, and then the hours they talk about you, commenting on the fight, looking forward to the next one: there's a whole world that lives only for you, for your fame …

—Sparky, I'm going to confess something to you. This is my last fight. If the bull kills me, it will be for that reason. If I kill it, I will retire without a single wound.

—You care so much about your body,
Figura
? What about your fame?

—Don't insult me. I haven't yet taken as my motto: Let me endure, even if my fame dies.

—No,
Figura,
none of that. Look, you are going to fight in the oldest and most beautiful arena in Spain, here in Ronda, and if you die, at least you will be looking upon something beautiful before you close your eyes.

My town: a gash, a deep wound such as I never had, my town like a body with a scab that will not heal, contemplating its own wound from a perpetual watchtower of houses that are whitewashed every year to keep them from dissolving in the sun. Ronda, the most beautiful, because it opens the white wings of death and forces us to see it as our unexpected companion in the mirror of an abyss. Ronda, where our vision soars higher than the eagle.

3

Naked he was not, although those who remembered him young, with his wide-brimmed hat and his cape of braided cloth, or even younger, as he had first arrived in Madrid, in a low-crowned hat and a suit with fringed trousers, would not recognize him in his old age, disheveled, carelessly dressed, unshod, his pants stained (grease? urine?), his shirt sweaty, loose-fitting, hanging open, showing his gray chest, and crowning it all his great giant's head, unkempt, gray, with sideburns, but not as fierce as the grimace on his thick lips, the eyes veiled by what they had seen, the eyebrows mussed by where they had been, and in spite of that, the high, impertinent, innocent nose, the stubborn, childish nose of an Aragón waif, constantly belying all the rest, belying all the godforsaken waifs, wretched as the river that gave birth to them, shit-assed kids of the Manzanares who wrote on the walls of his estate:
Here lives the deaf man.

He didn't hear the shouting of those or other jerks. Stone-deaf, shut inside his bare workroom, naked—comparatively—as a savage, he who shaped and helped invent a society of unabashed pomp and ostentation, he who gave the ears to every torero, the award to every actress, the medals at every festival, the prizes to every potter, every weaver, every witch, every pimp, every soldier, and every penitent, making them all
protagonists,
endowing rich and poor with the fame and form they had never had before:
now
he felt as naked as they who acquired an image at his hands, the hands full of the suns and shades of Francisco de Goya y Luz, lucid, loose, Lucifer, lost cipher, lust for light—Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: even the nobles who had always been painted—they alone, the kings, the aristocracy—now had to see themselves for the first time, full body, just as they were, not as they wished to be seen, and when they did (this was the painter's miracle, his mystery, perhaps his defeat) they were not threatened, they accepted it: Carlos IV and his degenerate, concupiscent, disloyal, ignorant court, that collective phantasm with eyes frozen by abulia, with mugs lewdly drooling, with powdered wigs instead of brains, and with moles screwing their concave foreheads; Fernando VII and his image of self-satisfied cretinism, active, reckless cretinism, in contrast to that of the bewitched wretch Carlos II, that Goya before Goya, foolishly compassionate, dreaming of a better world, that is, a comprehensible one, that is, one as crazy as he was: they all accepted the painter's reality, they clung to it, celebrated it, and didn't realize that they were being seen for the first time, just like the actress, the swordsman, the circus performer, and the peasant, who had never been favored by the court painter's brush before …

Now, naked and deaf, with no court but the mocking kids painting insults on his fences, without Mexican maids or Andalusian cuadrilla, he felt his abandonment and nakedness reflected in the unsilvered mirrors, the two canvases that for some reason reminded him of a boy's pants, a rustic skirt: blind canvases, there was nothing on them, everything was in the painter's head; so onto the imagined canvas he placed the actress, his last desire as an old man: he had loved and been loved and also abandoned by the most beautiful and the cruelest women of his time, and now he went down to Madrid to see this woman on the stage and she never looked at him, she saw only herself, reflected in the public eye, and now he wanted to capture her in this rectangle; he began to outline her entire body with charcoal, there he would put her and from there she would never escape; he quickly drew the naked form, standing, of the coveted woman—this woman was not going to fly off on a broom; this woman was not going to be stolen by death, because he was much older than she (and yet …); this woman was not going to run away with a soldier, an aristocrat, or (who knows?) a bullfighter—he advanced slowly, yet every movement of the deaf old man was like a seismic shock that was felt by the unruly children outside, and they left their own brushes beside the wall and ran away, as if they knew that inside the workroom the other brush, the Great Brush, was outdoing theirs and would not admit of any rival; and now, on the second canvas, he began, in a high-minded spirit, with a restraint that surprised the painter himself, so given to satire, caricature, and the strictures of realism, he began to sketch the torso of a man, without any indication of a head, because the head would naturally be the crown of that grave body, full of dignity and repose; he sketched long, delicate, strong hands, and put in the cape, which he pictured a dark pink velvet, then the jacket, which he saw dark blue, and the waistcoat, which he knew had to be gray, colorless, to give the linen of the front and the neck of the shirt an exceptional whiteness, if only because of the contrast with those serene colors, and then he returned to the first canvas (and, outside, the walnut trees quivered) and he surprised the woman, who was pure silhouette, without features or details, on the point of escaping from the canvas, and the old man laughed (and the walnut trees, terrified, clung to one another), and he said to the woman: