Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (38 page)

You ask yourself if you alone could see it, if I could not, or if I could see it, too, but let you go alone, seeing what you saw, desiring what you desired.

The windows are bricked up, the balconies closed off, and so you are afraid that the inside door will block your entrance. But your excited touch meets no resistance, nothing stops the impetus that is an extension of your will: an ardent will, as if in preparation for the cloistered fervor that you imagine in this house of zealously guarded entrances. You push the eighteenth-century entry door that appeared to you in the middle of the ruins in the heart of Mexico City. You fear what seems forbidden. You desire an image of a hospitality as warm as the welcome your teacher Ferguson always associates with Glasgow, the city of his ancestors, where a brilliant building, novel and revolutionary, by the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh met the scandalized disapproval of Victorian society and ended up, hypocritically, entombed inside the walls of a museum.

You push open the door, you take a step inside. Then you remember your teacher's lesson: Mexican houses are all blind on the outside; the blank walls around their entrances tell us only that these houses look inward, to the patios, the gardens, the fountains, the porticoes that are their true face.

You push the door, you take a step inside.

3

Then I put down my cup of tea and walked toward the hut. The sounds of the project were the same as always: engines, riveters, excavators, and cranes, their bases buried in muck, overhead the midday sun masked by clouds. The gathering storm accompanied me, swelling up out of the high plateau, practically without warning, bringing on an early darkness.

I rapped my knuckles on the door of the hut. Nobody answered. When I tried to look through the little window, I saw that our promise to Jerónimo Mateos the watchman had been fulfilled: a pane of glass had been put in the window, to protect his mama from the wind and the rain. I rapped again, this time on the glass, and was blinded by the sudden reflection of a red light. I cursed instinctively—against all our entreaties, they had installed the traffic light. Never had they gotten work done so promptly. But once it became a matter of crossing the architects, even the vice of slowness could seem a sin, and they could be efficient for a change. But Heredad Mateos, it seemed, was not about to make any exceptions to our great national sluggishness.

I was tempted to go in, to force the entrance, I always had the excuse of being the architect. The light flashed on the glass again and I heard a groan—aged, this time, and brief, but of an ecstatic intensity—and I knocked on the window again, and then on the door, more loudly, more insistently …

—I'm coming, I'm coming, take it easy …

The old woman opened the door for me and her tortilla face—pocked with cornmeal moles, mealy as a stack of corn cakes, surrounded by cornhusk hairs, lit only by a pair of eyes like hot chiles in the dried, burnt surface of her skin—looked at me curiously, though with no sign of surprise. The candles burned, like the orange eyes of a cat, behind the old woman. She said nothing, but gave me a questioning look that seemed to be echoed by other looks behind her: the lights of the votive candles.

—May I come in?

—What do you want?

She was a small woman, and I am a rather tall man. I tried to see, over the aged woman's cornhusk head, below the votive lights, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe illuminated by the burning tapers, the cot … Señora Heredad seemed to rise up on her toes to block my passage and my view. Embarrassed, uninvited, rude, I found it impossible to say, Señora, you are repairing a bridal gown, I think I recognize it, that is, my brother and I, we both recognized it, and we would like …

—What do you want, señor? Doña Heredad said to me, firmly enough to convey a suggestion of irritation.

—Nothing, señora. I am the architect. I wanted to see if everything was in order, if there was anything you needed.

—Nothing, sir. My son takes care of that. But if I don't work, I'll die of sorrow. Good afternoon.

4

You were alone for some time, getting used to your surprise. You asked me if I saw the same thing you did, or if only you saw it; you asked me if what you saw is true if I saw it and false if I did not share your vision. You ask this constantly now that you are inside the house and you are alone.

You find yourself in a hall that does not match the severe style of the entrance, which you leave behind when the eighteenth-century exterior door closes behind you and becomes an Art Nouveau door through which the luminous child and the dog and even the frog that you hold in your hand had, perhaps, entered: you are blinded by the serpentine plaster roses, the silver fans, the embedded crowns of pearl, glass, and ivory; you move along a gallery that contains nervous peacocks, crystal nests, silver confessionals, zinc washbasins, perfumed by a heavy fragrance of spent flowers, and into a long, narrow passage entirely bare except for a lead umbrella stand—you touch it, as if it were an anchor in the emptiness of the salon. It holds several parasols, some black, others multicolored, and almost a dozen umbrellas, carelessly dumped, still damp, in the lead receptacle—you touch them and you have the feeling that solitude and silence would be complete here if the passage were not illuminated by four lamps, one in each corner, all of them—you touch them, too—made of copper, and the copper painted silver, and with glass drops around the center of the febrile carbon filaments, like the antennas of the first insect that saw the light of the newly created universe.

This illumination seems fainter because it contrasts with a torrent of white light that comes through a half-open door, a light as sharp and steely as the blade of a knife.

You walk to the half-open door and enter, covering your eyes with your hand, pausing to get used to the dining room's unfamiliar glow, its high, narrow chairs, mahogany table, walls covered with elegant beige wallpaper, and only gradually do you realize that numerous objects are strewn over the floor where you can trip on them, instead of on the table: on the floor are cornhusks, and vases of water, and flowers—the yellow dianthuses of All Souls' Day, spikenards and calla lilies, gardenias: the heavy odor of dead flowers or, what is the same, flowers for the dead—on the floor are hampers full of fabric, baskets holding thimbles, colored thread, yarn, knitting needles, pins. There is a basket of eggs. There is a chamber pot.

You look up. You search for something else in this dining room, so cleanly conceived but so full of the wrong things, as if the present inhabitants of the place were totally foreign, or were almost enemies of the work of the decorator and the architect, depreciating it, consciously or not. That's what you would like to think, anyway: the inhabitants of this house must hate it, or at least hate its maker and the style he wanted to give it. What most shocks you, more than the objects strewn over the floor, the eggs, or the chamber pot that almost makes you want to smile, are the rustic chairs of woven straw, low to the ground, which seem to defy, even insult, the narrow, high-backed chairs: those chairs like Giacometti statues (Giacometrics) are insulted by the terrestrial, agrarian abundance of everything else in the room (everything else: you sensed a silent conflict in this room between an exclusive, elegant refinement and a gross inclusiveness, an affirmation of the abundance of poverty, as if a chicken coop had been set in the middle of Versailles).

A woman is sitting on one of the low chairs, sewing. The child sitting with her has just pricked his finger with a needle, he sucks it, the woman looks at him sadly, the blood stains the basket of eggs at the woman's feet. A dog enters, barks, and goes out again.

5

For the first time in my life, I stayed and slept in the little office on the construction site: I was wakened by a whistling that I took to be the teapot signaling that the water had come to a boil. It found me asleep in one of our pair of director's chairs; as a joke, we'd had
VELEZ ONE
and
VELEZ TWO
stenciled on their canvas backs, identifying ourselves the way English schools distinguish brothers with the same surnames.

I was sleeping with my legs stretched out and when I woke up I felt a dull but persistent pain in my ankles.

The whistling was coming from the construction area, and from the office I could see a crowd of people running every which way, but converging on the project's entrance, on the watchman's shack. I ran out of the office, not even closing the door behind me—I was upset, afraid I was going to lose what I sought. I might already have lost it. I imagined ways of obtaining that object, of getting hold of it somehow or other.

I made my way through the chill morning mist, through the crowd, people with wool jackets slung over their shoulders, with mufflers around their necks, their hands joined amid the hustle, barring the way to the hut. I am Vélez the architect, it's urgent, let me through, let me through. I couldn't get anywhere and I heard a noise that I found unendurable, almost unspeakable. If I closed my eyes, everything disappeared except that intolerable murmur of the unspeakable: I wanted to identify it, and I pushed my way toward the door of the hut. Sighs. Moans. Wails. A solemn hum came from the watchman's shack, but that high-pitched sadness disguised a celebration. Dressed in black, clasping her hands in prayer one moment, making the Sign of the Cross the next, tears rolling down her cheeks like oil on a burnt tortilla, Doña Heredad Mateos was kneeling before the window of the shack, hissing through her wrinkled lips:

—A miracle, a miracle, a miracle!

Behind her, on the cot, I saw Catarina Ferguson's wedding dress, lying inert, held together with pins, ready to pass into new hands, to dress a young bride, ignorant of the marvelous woman who had filled it once and then forgot it, who, perhaps, gave it to a friend, the friend to a poor relative, she to her servant. And next to Señora Mateos, I could make out a form in the glass that had recently been put into the window; it was as fuzzy as an out-of-focus photograph, vague but three-dimensional, like a holograph, and, obsessed with the bride's gown on the cot, I could not really say what it was; but she, Doña Heredad, proclaimed it:

—The Virgin and the Child! Reunited at last! Praise be to God! A miracle, a miracle, a miracle!

6

You wanted to speak to them and you stepped forward to say something, to call out, to ask them … The bells rang and the woman and child hurried on, without looking at you. The child smoothed his curly hair and white tunic, the woman threw a heavy cloak over her shoulders and with nervous, awkward fingers arranged a white cowl on her head, leaving the ends loose under her chin.

The child took the woman's hand and held it as the sound of the bells swelled. They opened a door and went into a colonial patio, another negation—you notice at once—of the previous styles, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. Now the colonnades supported four arched porticoes, and chest-high screens that allowed—allowed
you
—to observe the woman's anxious arrival, holding the child's hand, at the center of the bare patio—it had neither garden nor fountain, only implacably naked stones—and to see the pair join the women who were walking there, together in the rain, protected by their umbrellas, walking in circles, Indian-file, one behind the other, one of them lightly touching the shoulder of the woman in front of her from time to time: but the woman with the child, not protected by an umbrella, seemed to be looking for something, as the ends of her cowl whipped against her cheeks, and the child, who was holding her hand, let the rain wet his face and mat down his blond curls, his eyes closed, wearing a grimace that was half gleeful and half perverse.

They all walk like that—the nine women and the child—in circles, in the rain, for more than an hour, not acknowledging your presence, but not asking you to leave, as you feared they might at first—one of the women, in a straw hat and pink brocade dress, even approaches you and touches your hand, though without looking at you—and the others, also without looking at you, make a huge clamor as soon as she touches you. You try to distinguish between their laughter, exclamations, bawls, groans, sobs, complaints, moans, exultations, but, unable to, you turn your attention to what those figures in the rain are looking at and what each is carrying in the hand that doesn't hold an umbrella. They give you an oppressive sensation of dynamic abulia, a paradox, but it seems to describe them because they don't take a single step that isn't slow and solemn, and there isn't a single one of their gestures that isn't deliberate. In one hand, each holds an umbrella; in the other, they carry various objects, shielding them from the rain. The first a basket and the second a shepherd's staff. The third a bag full of teeth and the fourth a tray holding bread that's been sliced in two. The fifth wears bells on her fingers and the sixth has a chameleon clasped in her fist. The seventh holds a guitar and the eighth a sprig of flowers. Only the ninth woman does not hold an object—instead, she holds the hand of the drenched child with his eyes closed.

They all wear cloaks draped over their shoulders like shadows.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the woman with the shepherd's staff raises it and dashes it against your hands; you cry out; they, too, cry, and you drop the frog that you had been holding in your fist. They laugh, flee, the patio is a confusion of umbrellas and water splashing, and the bread falls, and the teeth roll in the puddles, chattering madly, and the dog with the wounded rump, which had been watching them silently, now lets loose a howl, takes the frog in its muzzle and runs toward the convent.

7

They said they couldn't see anything from the outside, it was just an old lady's craziness, seamstresses get too wrapped up in themselves, they're alone too much, with nothing but their thoughts, pretty soon they end up needing glasses, why should anybody believe her? And she answers that they should go in one by one, or two together, and then they will see what
she
saw on the windowpane in her bedroom. He saw what he had been afraid of, just what he had been trying to avoid, publicity, idle gossip—and the worst thing was that the people who were gathered around the shack wanted to believe, they were hoping that this would turn out to be a true miracle, that they would be the witnesses who would tell everybody else about it, since the worst thing about miracles was the way, after you saw them, you had to tell somebody else about them for them to be believed, and it was the same thing here at the shack of Doña Heredad Mateos, mother of Jerónimo the watchman of the same last name, where from outside you couldn't see anything, and if you went into the little space you could see the señora was telling the truth. When you looked at the glass, the figures stood out clearly, so close together they were like one, the Virgin with the Child in her arms, a recognizable silhouette, the Madonna and the Child who was conceived without sin, with halos around them as white as snow: it's splendid, if a little blurry, but you can't see it from outside, you understand? only from in here. You have to go in one at a time, or by twos, that would be better, by twos so there won't be malicious talk, you can see it only in here, in the shack where, as luck would have it, Señora Heredad Mateos was staying, the one who set out the orange votive lights and the images of the Virgin in the back, the one who brought all these precious bridal gowns, which, if it's proper to think such a thing, are the dresses of the wife of heaven, Holy Mary full of grace, who conceived without sin.