Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (39 page)

—They're going to ruin the dresses, he said to her.

—We never know how the Lady will choose to come to us.

—It's dangerous, let me take care of them …

—Here they stay. Otherwise, what will the Virgin wear, tell me that…?

—I swear that as soon as this is over you'll get them back.

—Praised be the Lord, who sent His wife and His Son here, where they could receive lodging and even clothing, a thousand times praise the Lord!

Doña Heredad Mateos gave me (José María Vélez) a look with her eyes of hot chile, her tortilla face marked by pocks of corn.

—And you know, the Son of God is a most venerable Child.

—By all you hold dearest, señora, do not give that dress to anyone!

8

The nine women are gathered around the wooden table, sitting in the high-backed Art Nouveau chairs. At last you can see them clearly, although the child, sitting next to you, constantly tugs at your sleeve and tells you stories—wicked tales, slanders—about the women in the refectory. They pour cups of chocolate from a steaming pitcher and pass the sweet rolls hot from the oven, and the fair child, whose hair is limp from the rain, picks up a corner of the tablecloth to rub it dry, with an impudent laugh at the women, who continue eating impassively, without even glancing in his direction. He will talk only to you, the stranger, but his remarks are intended for the women, who are now revealed in all their splendor—they've taken off their rain capes and are dressed in silks, brocades, multicolored shawls; their collective beauty is enhanced by the brilliance of pink and green, orange and pale yellow. The table is heaped with flowers and fruits and they extend pale, fine hands to take the fruit, to arrange the bouquets, to serve the chocolate, but they never speak to one another, the malicious child is the only one who says anything, pointing his finger from one to another, until he stops to dry his hair and wipe the grit from his eyelashes and shouts at them: Nuns! Whores!

They just eat and sip their cups of chocolate, except the woman who accompanied the child from the beginning. She sits with her elbows on the table and her head between her hands, perfectly still, staring into empty space, in despair. The others are lovely women, from Sonora or Sinaloa would be your guess if they were Mexicans, although you doubt it—Andalusian, Sicilian, Greek, their skin never touched by the sun or by the hand of man, the little boy tells you with a wink, they would rather die than be touched (you try to pierce the lowered gaze, the shadows of the thick eyelashes, of the woman dressed in orange silk, who briefly raises her eyes, looks at you, and veils her eyes again, after that single savage glance). That's it, that's it, says the child, look at her, so sweet and pure, she has always been accused of entering convents just to seduce the nuns. And the one next to her, do you like her? (the perfect oval of her cinnamon face has a single flaw, a five o'clock shadow above her lip), well, don't kid yourself, she has nothing to do with the work of man, as the priests say; she dressed up as a man to keep from being violated by men and ended up accused of fathering her landlady's son! That's why she wound up here, to give her old bones a rest—what a way to go!

This story amuses its narrator enormously, and he laughs until he sputtered and choked, pointing his finger at the girl with the mustache and the short chestnut hair. She serves the steaming chocolate while the child subsides; your drink immediately congeals in your cup; the bread turns cold at your touch. You seek the dark eyes of the woman with braids twisted like wagon wheels around her ears, who is dressed in a pink brocade dress buttoned up to the neck: that one would do anything to save herself from men, continued the child. Look at the rolls on her plate: do they resemble tits? Well, that's what they are, they're hers, cut off when she refused to give herself to a Roman soldier. Agatha, show the gentleman, entertain our illustrious guest. You lower your eyes as Agatha unbuttons her blouse and reveals her scars, to the hoarse laugh of the boy.

—Sometimes she carries bread, sometimes bells, it's terribly symbolic: the tintinnabulation of toasted tits, get it? And look at the next one, Lucía, you hear me? Look up, poor little Lucy! Lift your veil, let our visitor see the empty sockets where your eyes used to be, you preferred being blinded to being screwed, didn't you? So now you chew your eyes, served up like fried eggs on your plate …

He laughed like crazy, exposing his bloodstained baby teeth, pointing with his finger, getting more worked up since he met with no argument, like a precocious drunkard, commanding the woman with long mahogany hair to open her mouth and show her gums, Apollonia, not a tooth, see, not a single molar, ideal for cocksucking (he laughed harder and harder), a second vagina, the toothless mouth of the dentifrical saint, shake your bag of teeth, Apollonia; which she does, and they all hurry to do something without his asking. The girl with the straw hat, instead of putting the lizard she is holding into her mouth, tries to put herself into the mouth of the lizard; the blind woman takes the fried eggs from her plate and puts them in her empty eyesockets; Apollonia takes the teeth out of her bag and puts them in her mouth; and the child shrieks with laughter and shouts: They just won't fuck! They just want to get away from men! From repulsed suitors! From unsatisfied fathers! From raging soldiers! Better dead than bed! The convent is their refuge from male aggression, see, they tried to seduce me, I'd like to see them try again; and one woman begins to play the guitar, another the harp—beautiful women, women the color of spikenard and lemon, cinnamon women and pearl women, lilting as an endless autumn, silent as the heart of summer, silky and lacy as a contemplative sea: they don't look at the child, the child points at them with his tiny finger, the finger injured by the needle; the woman who accompanies him holds her head in her hands, she lowers her arms, she makes me look at her, she is the only one who isn't beautiful, she is a dusky woman with moles on her temples, she reaches out and drops a thorn from the rose on the table. Come, she says to the child, and the child resists, he says no, she doesn't repeat her command, she just looks at him, he closes his eyes and puts out his hand, she gives him the thorn, he takes it, and without opening his eyes, he pricks his index finger with it.

His blood flows. The women around the table cry, their voices join in a mournful chorus, the guitarist and the harpist keep on playing, Sister Lucía raises her eyelids and reveals the endless labyrinth of her empty gaze, Sister Apollonia opens her toothless mouth, Sister Margarita tries to force her nose into the lizard's mouth, Sister Agatha shows the purple scars on her chest, Sister Marina licks her mustache, Sister Casilda places a rope around her neck, the dusky woman calls out their names, as if introducing them to me and the child, who is beside himself and runs to sit on his chamber pot; he makes a face, he stops crying, he screams with worn-out pleasure, and hurrying back to the table with the pot in his hand, he empties it among the roses and the bread. The shit is hard, the shit is golden, the shit is gold. Miracle! Miracle!

—Desire is like snow in our hands, says the melancholy woman who accompanies the child, gold is nothing to us. Look at the dog; he doesn't know what gold is. But he recognizes shit.

Carlos María: for a long time they hadn't looked at you, and you hadn't spoken to them, and in that indifference that combines silence and separation, all you see is a whirl of colors, taffetas, silks, roses, baskets, guitars, doe eyes, peach skin, and cascading hair, and you, too, feel distanced, as if you were watching yourself through opera glasses from the upper balcony of a theater, the
paradise
of the spectator, absent and present, seeing but seeming absent, tacitly ignored and yet represented, there and not there, part of a rite, a link in the ceremony being celebrated—you suddenly realize—with or without you, but which has been practiced a thousand and one times in preparation for this moment when you are there, absent and present, seeing without being seen, in a theater of the sacred, which seems cruel and bloody to you, the spectator, because it is caught between the style the work demands and the style the spectator provides, it is the midpoint—you stare intently at the child's pricked finger—between the conception of the sacred and its execution. One can conceive of God without a body, but action requires a body. The child looks at you and runs over to you to put his arms around your waist, growling like a little animal. It is only then that you realize that the floor of this refectory is not made of ordinary red tiles but of dried blood turned to brick.

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 …