Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (26 page)

It was morning in the fields. Rubén went closer and then paused, studying everything he could see, touching everything he could touch, examining as closely as he could everything of which one day his fingers would miss the touch. Touching, seeing, the rows of bent poplars, seemingly paired like a corps de ballet or a troop of toy soldiers, trees that had witnessed merciless winds, leaning but not fallen, bent by winter storms; opening all his senses to the white flower and dry fruit of lemon mint, to the smell of squeezed lemons and sliced oranges, to the black purple of wild plum and the faint scent of quince, lemon mint, lily, and verbena: he had lain among their shoots since childhood, the trees and flowers of Andalusia were the visible memory of his childhood; now he expected them to wash away all his ills and closed his eyes in an act of thanks because he knew that when he opened them he would be compensated for his dream by the sight of almonds, diamonds caught in a web of sky, and by the scent of muscadine.

But above the vast geometry of the landscape, duplicating the curves and arcs of the Andalusian horizon in its flight, a restless bird with a scythe-like body reminded him of what his Godmother Madreselva, his false, his substitute mother, the childless progenitor, the protector of Rubén's adolescence and that of the other orphan children like him, had told him long ago: Rubén, study the flight of the swallow, which never tires, feeds in flight, sleeps in flight, makes love in flight; watch its long wings like sharp lances of death. If you want to be an apprentice in the ring, you must be like the swallow, cast away your land and adopt no other, though many may welcome you, nomad bird, bird of the steppes—so his Godmother Madreselva had whispered in the boy's ear.

And she had warned him against the basic dangers: beware the thorny contact of the thistle, don't be seduced by its blue leaves, never drink the narcotic and purgative sap of those prickly leaves. Bitter cress, sawtooth nettles, yellow basil, and green pear, they all beckoned to him—to love, use, contemplate, smell, touch, partake of them—and he, in his youth, never felt that he abused what he shared, whether it was the pleasure of contemplation or the equally blessed pleasure of touching, uprooting, trampling, eating, cutting the fruits and flowers, of carrying them to his mama, or, after she died, to his Godmother Madreselva, who gathered together all the children in the town of Aranda, or, when she died, to his sweetheart, and if she died, why, he'd carry them to the Virgin, because even when all our women have died, the Virgin always remains.

—See that the holy thistle doesn't purge you, Rubén.

Instead, he sought the tracks of winters past.

He sought the snows of January as he sought the memory of his childhood in the village, for when he became a man he always compared his childhood with snow. This had never impressed Rocío, or, indeed, anyone else. These were things that were his, only his, that nobody else understood. Andalusia was his intimacy. And this was the ardent summer, without the memory of the winds of January.

He had spent the morning walking through the fields and composing in his mind a song to the wormwood and the swallows, but his poetic flight was interrupted by practical observations; he was surprised, for example, to see the cows lying down, as though forecasting rain, creating their own dry space, warning the unwary pilgrim that the morning, which had begun so blue and fresh a few hours ago, was turning threatening, turning into a day of accumulating clouds and heavy heat … He raised his eyes and met the image of the black bull of Osborne brandy, waiting for him at the entrance to his village.

A breeze blew from the Levant, and the clouds disappeared.

He arrived at the hotel and smelled wax candles, lacquer dishrags, and soap, a different soap, not the soap that is never put in the hotel baths.

He had written to Rocío, trying to make sense of their situation to return to the first days of their love: was that really impossible, as he felt in his heart? and he had tried to explain—would this, too, be futile?—what returning home meant to him, touching and smelling and cutting and eating its fruits and flowers—would she understand?—and he summoned his courage and put his tongue to the gummed flap of the envelope, and the Englishman, who suddenly, out of breath, stopped playing his music-hall ditties and began to ask, sitting with him in the bar, where it was shady at the hottest hour of the day, if he had looked in the shop windows of these little towns where everything was old, none of it was attractive, it was all covered with dust, the signs were from another era, as if the world hadn't undergone a revolution in advertising, he knew because he had worked his whole life in publicity, now he was retired, nothing to do but take care of his garden and his dog, but before … He accompanied his commentary with a commercial jingle played on his harmonica, his eyes bright—and he let out a laugh, wasn't he right, these people live in the past, the sweets in the shops seemed to have been there for twenty years, the clothes in the store windows were out of style, the mannequins were ancient, their wigs were full of lice, and had he noticed the mustaches painted on the male dummies, and how moth-eaten the stuffed female breasts and mannequins were, and the cult of miracles, the saints, the images, papist idolatry everywhere…?

Now he played a Protestant hymn on his harmonica and Rubén Oliva was going to tell him that it was true, nothing had changed, not the sweets, the hats, the mannequins, or the holy images in the shops, why should it, when everyone knew exactly what was sold in the shops, and …

Mr. Newton interrupted him: —Do you know that nobody here will marry a woman who isn't a virgin?

—Well …

—Do you know that nobody shaves after dinner for fear of ruining his digestion, and nobody invites anyone to dine the way they should, in their houses at civilized hours, but instead they go out for coffee after dining, at one in the morning?

—Well …

—Look, in a palace in Seville I measured the quantity of spit on the floor, which has turned into crusts of stone over the years, centuries of phlegm, marble oysters, sir, revealing the arrogance of those who always depended on legions of slaves to clean up their filth; where would this country be without servants? And another thing …

Without a word Rubén got up and left; the Englishman was still talking to himself. Rubén walked off without paying his part of the tab, as gentlemen ought, just so the Englishman could add to his criticism: freeloaders, ill-mannered brutes.

The town was waking from its siesta.

The heat had not let up, and Rubén followed his own counsel, walking the back streets, sheltered in the shade, rediscovering what he had known since childhood, that all the narrow lanes of this town communicated with one another, feeding into a single narrow entryway. Two- and three-story houses, of varying sizes, beaten down by time, cured with lime like mummies wrapped in white bandages, watched over each route and prevented anyone from leaving. Some were shut up with wooden shutters; others had open balconies of yellowing plaster. Narrow passages with tile roofs and clumps of wild fig trees rising above the buildings, crowns of weeds appearing through all the cracks in the plaza. Clothes hung out to dry. Television antennas. More windows, tightly shuttered. The first denizens of the night began to appear from the upper stories, old village women, cloaked, curious, craning to see him, the outsider, the prodigal son no one knew—was there no one left who had known him as a child? he thought, and almost said, talking to himself like a deaf man.

He watched the first children chasing the pigeons in the dusty square. The whole plaza was sand. The balconies, the upper stories, the shuttered windows and the open windows, all eyes faced the enclosed sand of the plaza: there was only one entrance, fewer than in a bullring; it had only one gate to let the bulls in safely—although it was not safe to guess in what state they would leave. It was a plaza where people turned their backs to their doors. The women came out carrying their cane chairs, locked their doors, and sat in a circle to shell almonds and gossip. The smell of cooking and of urine got stronger. Other women crocheted in silence, and men sat down cautiously with their backs turned. Some young people formed another circle, boys and girls together, and began to clap and sing loud, sorrowful songs, in a rough and halting performance. A beautiful woman with heavy eyebrows, her hair in a bun, sat in a rocking chair as if presiding over the evening; she bared her breast, brought to it a bundle and uncovered the head of a black boy, and offered her breast to him; the boy took it eagerly, her breast's white blood dripping down his purple lips.

The young men were taunting and teasing a gnarled old man with side-whiskers, gray kinky hair, a turned-up nose, and thick lips, who went over to a broken-down wagon, set his jaw, dribbling spittle as though his mouth were watering for a banquet, tucked up the sleeves of his soiled, loose white shirt, got under the wagon, and hoisted it over his shoulders, while the young men looked on, excited and provoked.

A girl sat in a corner of the plaza with her skirts raised high up her legs to catch the dying rays of sun.

It was the twilight hour and Rubén Oliva was in the center of the plaza, surrounded by all this life.

This was his village, which he had left to live as he had to live, but to save himself, to die in peace, he had to return.

Andalusia was his love, not despite his having left, but because he had left. There was nothing true on this earth, not even solitude, that wasn't me/us/the other.

But this afternoon the gods (pickpockets, quick, winged Mercurys, snoops, merchants, restless thieves) denied Rubén Oliva, back among his people, even that: pausing in the center of the plaza of sand where the darting kids and the startled pigeons and the restless heels of the group of singers raised swirls of dirt, Rubén Oliva felt that his town had become no more than a vague memory, incapable of dominating a space that was beginning to be governed by inexplicable laws, all of them—Rubén scanned the sky in vain for an escape: he discovered the swallow—preventing escape from the closed-in plaza.

The hoary, robust old man dropped the wagon and raised his hands to his ears, covering his side-whiskers, crying that his ears hurt, that the effort had burst his eardrums, that the young men and women should sing louder, he couldn't hear a thing.

For songs, as you well know, are only grief:

If you don't hear one, you don't hear the other,

Oh, child of witchcraft, until you die.

He dropped the wagon and at that dusty impact the ground of the plaza suddenly sprouted moist flowers, and Rubén didn't know if they had arisen from the arid crash of that wagon or if they had rained down from the sky in tribute to the singers, and there were cress and myrtle and lilies and impatiens and morning glories.

Then the night seemed to catch fire inside the houses and the women shelling almonds looked for open doors and ran in to save their possessions from the sudden blaze, but the beautiful woman on the rocker had none, and she was not alarmed, she laughed easily and let the black child go on nursing, and then, when she raised him up for all to see, he was a white boy, just look, look, as white as my milk, white because of my milk, I have transformed him!

The youths, frightened by the cries from the houses, turned away from the deaf old man, shouting to him that he had got what he deserved, trying to prove at his age that he was just as strong as they, but they were stopped in their tracks by the stampede of a herd of neighing horses that suddenly rushed into the square, trampling the flowers, halting the youths.

The old women closed the shutters on the upper floors.

The women who watched from the yellow balconies went inside, shaking their heads sadly.

But others came into the arena, into the confusion, surrounding Rubén Oliva, all of them in the midst of the wild chestnut horses all of them within the suddenly deep blue night: sumptuously dressed women completely indifferent to the fires and the neighing, came through the single narrow lane and entered the square; they were wrapped in capes of raw silk, trailing pear- and orange-colored taffeta, carrying trays bearing teeth, eyes, and tits, so that Rubén was forced to examine the mouths, the empty eye sockets, the mutilated breasts of the women slowly walking in procession, led by a woman more opulent than the others, a woman whose face, wrapped in a cowl, was like a moon girded with emeralds, whose head was crowned by a dead sun with razor-sharp rays, whose bosom sported artificial roses, and from her shoulders to her feet there hung a great triangular cape contrived with elaborate ornamentations of ivory and precious stones, medallions shaped like roses and coiled like metal snakes.

But the woman's hands, though covered with rings, were empty. Her marked face, her moonlike face, was furrowed by tears, cruel drops, and she didn't stop crying until her three attendants approached the beautiful woman with the heavy eyebrows and the hair in a bun and struggled with her, and touched the dead eyes to her face, and covered with the severed ones the breasts that had nursed the black boy, and forced open her mouth to fill it with those bloodless teeth; they left her teeth and her eyes and her breasts but they snatched away her child and placed him in the hands of the Lady, and the despoiled woman cried, her eyes full of blood, her mouth full of teeth, her four breasts sticking to her like a bitch's, but now the Lady stopped crying and smiled, and the procession began again: first, the bejeweled attendants dressed in rich shades of lemon and fig; then the herd of chestnut horses, now tame; behind them, a rebirth of myrtle, four-o'clock, honeysuckle, and morning glory, sweet perfume, the earth transformed into a garden; they led her to the narrow lane and there began a slow ascent to the throne that awaited her motionless, but which now, as she approached with the white child who had been black, began to sway and rose on a wooden platform lifted by bearers hidden beneath its draperies; the deaf old man pulled Rubén Oliva under it and said: Quick, there's no other way out, and he made him stand behind the draperies, under the throne that was now beginning to move, snaking off, carried by the bearers, including the hoary old man, who had as much trouble lifting the float as before he had had lifting the cart, paying dearly for his effort, perhaps seeking to demonstrate something to the world and to himself, and by his side was Rubén Oliva, watching the deaf old man with thick lips half open, winking his sleepy eye at Rubén: Don't be a loafer, hey, pull your weight, we have to hoist up the Virgin and carry her through town, through the night, the old man told him, the day is done and the night deals out deception, didn't he know? It mocks the florid fragrances and sweet caresses of daytime, when you think you are in love with nature and she with you, not realizing that love—the old man almost spit out the words—is impossible between her and ourselves. He asked Rubén to tread firmly, don't fall, don't give up, trample the flowers, hard, hard—for we have to kill her to survive, and she demands a final accounting. The old man gave Rubén Oliva a sharp elbow in the ribs, and Rubén realized that he was one among many, one more bearer in the brotherhood that was carrying the Virgin in a nocturnal procession. And if for the average person the night produces monsters, the old man continued, for you they appear by day, for you the day is mad, unreal, and chimeric. What do you do at night, Rubén? Do you dream when you sleep, exhausted by the chimeras of your day? What are you left with? Then welcome to the sleep of reason, now lift, walk, and believe with me that it's better to live with illusions than to die disabused of them, now lift, heave, haul, you idler, you loafer …