Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (45 page)

—What a good idea it was to build this
temascal
—said Doña Heredad, looking around at the steamy white bath. —It's good here—she said tenderly to the woman who had just given birth.

Then the old seamstress, dressed in black, with her long skirt, her
rebozo,
her cotton stockings and flat shoes, took the baby and placed it in her crude multicolored shopping basket, hailed a bus on Artículo 123 and, after a long ride through the city of sorrows, got off on the broad avenue of La Esplanada, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec.

There, with the shopping basket in her hand, she went patiently from door to door, from one luxurious residence to another, requesting “an offering for this poor mother,” and receiving, from time to time, a bottle of lemonade, the leftovers from a banquet, fried pork or seafood, dry tortillas, a bit of tossed salad. The assiduous woman placed it all in her basket, indifferent to the sounds of cars and trucks and helicopters and motorcycles; oblivious to the black clouds of exhaust fumes, because she knew that none of that affected the child; this child was born without lead in his lungs; each year when he was born, the child was saved from stain, sickness, and death. Presenting him at the doors of Las Lomas, Doña Heredad was oblivious to the noise and pollution. She received alms, but her memory went far beyond the limit of her travails, and in her head she heard the ancient sounds of organ-grinders, itinerant venders, old-clothes sellers, and knife sharpeners filling the ever-expanding, ever more immense terrain of the oldest city of the New World—another city, murmured Doña Heredad Mateos to herself, a pure city, in whose houses the living could rejoin the dead, a small city where people could tell their stories, a city of faith where miracles occurred, even if reasonable people never understood, said Doña Heredad, asking charity for the god child, charity for the newborn, showing the foam-rubber doll with his golden curls and his blue eyes and his white gown with gold edging and his bloody fingers—charity, charity for the child.

Varaville, Normandy, Easter 1987

Tepoztlán, Morelos, Easter 1988

 

B
OOKS BY
C
ARLOS
F
UENTES

Where the Air Is Clear

The Good Conscience

Aura

The Death of Artemio Cruz

A Change of Skin

Terra Nostra

The Hydra Head

Burnt Water

Distant Relations

The Old Gringo

Myself with Others

Christopher Unborn

Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

English translation copyright © 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

All rights reserved

Library of Congress catalog card number: 89-82138

Originally published in Spanish as Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes by Mondadori España, copyright © 1989 by Carlos Fuentes

Published simultaneously in Canada by Harper & Collins, Toronto

First American edition, 1990

“A Lover from Palestine” by Mahmoud Darweesh, translated by B. M. Bennani, from
Splinters of Bone
(Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1974)

The translator acknowledges Carol Christensen for her superb editorial assistance

eISBN 9781466840102

First eBook edition: February 2013