Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  The voices, the various emissions, were silenced then by a sudden wind, a summer gust that picked up worn-out dust and discarded papers, whirling and swirling them along the narrow, boxed-in street, forcing Oliva to close the window and the voice from the kitchen to scream at him: —What are you doing? Can’t you help me in the kitchen? Don’t you know it isn’t good to fix a meal when you’re menstruating? Are you going to help me, or would you rather have poisoned soup?

  Rubén Oliva had forgotten she was there.

  —You can fix dinner, Rubén called back, what you can’t do is water the plants. That is true, you could kill the plants if you water them when you are unwell. That is true, Rocío, yes.

  He lay back down on the sofa, raising his arms and resting his head on the joined fingers of his open hands. He closed his eyes as he had closed the window, but in such intense heat the sweat dripped from his forehead, neck, and armpits. The heat from the kitchen added to that of the living room, but Rubén Oliva remained there, with his eyes shut, incapable of getting up and reopening the window that let in the little noises and fading smells of a Sunday afternoon in Madrid, when the unexpected breeze died away and they were shut inside the little four-room flat—living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen—he and his wife, Rocío, who was menstruating and fixing supper.

  And yelling from the kitchen, always complaining, why was he so shiftless, idling there instead of going out to work, others worked on Sunday, he always used to, things were getting so bad for them now that he wasn’t working on Sundays, she could see she was going to have to support the household soon if they didn’t want to live like beggars, just look at them stuck in this pigsty, and in the middle of August, when everyone else had gone to the beach, can you tell me why, listen to me, if you go on this way I’m going to look for work myself, and the way things are, with all the nudity these days, I’ll probably end up posing naked for some magazine, that’s the kind of thing I’ll have to do, why don’t you answer me, you don’t even show me that basic courtesy anymore; yes, said Rubén Oliva, his eyes closed and his mouth shut, like a deaf man or a madman, not even that, just to imagine myself sleeping, imagine myself dreaming, imagine myself dead, or, best of all, as a dead man who is dreaming that he’s alive. That would be perfect, instead of having to listen to Rocío’s complaints from the kitchen; she seemed to read his mind, cutting him with her recriminations: why didn’t he go out, do something, she laughed bitterly, Sundays used to be festive days, unforgettable days, what had happened to him, why was he afraid now, why didn’t he go out and kill, show his courage, yelled Rocío, invisible in the kitchen, almost inaudible as she poured the sputtering oil out of the frying pan, why don’t you fight anymore, why don’t you go out and follow someone, why don’t you pursue glory, fame? So she argued, just so she, by God and His most Holy Mother, could leave Madrid and spend the summer by the sea.

  She gave a cry of pain, but he didn’t stop to ask what had happened and she didn’t come into the living room but contented herself with screaming at him that she had cut a finger opening a tin of sardines, she took more risk, taunted Rocío, opening a tin than he, forever lying on the sofa, in his shorts—with the paper open on his belly and a black bull looking at him from the little screen, recriminating him for his idleness—such a sluggard she had married, and nearly forty, things would only get worse since, as her grandfather used to say, from forty on, no man should get his belly wet, and she had loved him because he was brave, handsome, and young, because he was courageous, and he killed, and …

  Rubén no longer heard her. He smelled her and felt like killing her, but how can you kill the moon, for that was what she was for him, not the sun of his life but, yes, a familiar moon that appeared every night without fail; and although its light was cool, its appearance excited him; and although its sands were sterile, they seemed fertile since its hypnotic movements moved the tides, marked the dates, governed the calendar, and drained the garbage from the world …

  He got up suddenly, put on his shirt and pants and shoes, while she kept on talking from the kitchen, and the children kept repeating over and over the ditty about “Sunday seven!” and as he dressed he only wanted the day to end, the slow and tedious day with its bits of soap operas and scraps of kitchen chatter, snatches of childish rounds and bits of old newspapers, traces of dust and traces of blood; he looked out the window—the waning moon appeared suddenly in the night sky, the moon was always a woman, always a goddess, never a god, unless it was a Spanish saint: San Lunes, Saint Monday, tomorrow, the day of leisure, of old men as lazy as he was (as Rocío would be going on without letup, invisible, bleeding, cut by the open tin, in the kitchen), and Rubén Oliva decided that he would let her go on talking forever, he didn’t even grab a bag or anything, he would leave quickly, before the night ended, when Sunday had passed, he would leave Madrid at the first tolling of San Lunes, go far away from the immortal tedium of Rocío, the filthy moon who was his wife, and the black bull, forever immobile, frozen on the television screen, watching him.

  Monday

  He hurried down Calle Ave María to Atocha and turned back to lose himself in the side streets of Los Desamparados, quickly passing the markets and taverns and tobacco shops, fleeing that confinement, walking down the middle of the street in the August heat, until he came to the fountain of Neptune, source of the invisible waters of La Castellana, and everyone was there, and freedom was there too, and Rubén Oliva—skinny and slick, with his white shirt and black pants, his green eyes and the dark shadows under his eyes—joined the endless summer nighttime stroll, the human river that runs from the Prado to the Columbus monument; Rubén Oliva lost himself for a moment in that sea of people moving without haste but without hesitation, from terrace to terrace, seldom stopping, choosing to see or be seen, beneath neon lights or other times under a single dangling bulb, the crowd lingering on elegant decks with chrome-and-steel furniture or stopping at movable stands covered with circus-like tents: seeing or being seen, the ones sitting in folding chairs watching and being watched by the passing multitude, which in turn observed those who watched and were watched by them; Rubén Oliva had the sudden feeling that he had returned to the Andalusian towns where he had grown up, where the night life of summer took place in the streets, in front of the houses, yet close to the doors, as if everyone were ready to run inside and hide as soon as the first thunderclap or gunshot broke up the peaceful nocturnal gathering of villagers sitting on seats of straw; then the memory of the people and their poverty was driven away by the present scene: Rubén Oliva, surrounded this August night by thousands of people, by boys and girls fifteen to twenty-five young Madrid men and women who were thin like him, but not from generations of hunger or the disasters of war, no, they were thin by choice, from aerobics, strict diets, even anorexia; there was no other place in Spain—said the deaf man, the madman the solitary man—where you could see such fine boys’ and girls’ faces, such willowy figures and such graceful walks, such fashionable summer clothes, such studied haughtiness, such penetrating gazes, such tantalizing flirtations, and yet Rubén Oliva kept scanning these faces for something he could recognize from places completely foreign to these Spanish youths of August—from poor hamlets, miserable towns, villages where boys first fought bulls in the dust by the stables, boys not unlike the stray dogs, the calves, or the roosters they imitated; brushing against these golden youths on that San Lunes dawn, Rubén Oliva saw in new guises the same poses of honor, the tremulous cool, and the disdain of death that is born of the conviction that in Spain, the country of delay, not even death is punctual; all this he saw where it shouldn’t have been, in the half-open lips of a girl bronzed by the sun, her peach skin contrasting with the brightness of her eyes; in the matador look of a tight-assed boy who held the waist of a bare-shouldered girl with silver specks between her braless, bouncing breasts; in the bare, smooth, lazily crossed legs of a girl sitting before an iced coffee or in the infinitely absent look of a boy on whose face a full beard
had sprouted at fifteen, abruptly killing off the cherub who still survived in his eyes: it was a way they had of holding a glass, of lighting a cigarette, of crossing their legs, of placing their hands on their sides, of seeing without looking or being seen, becoming invisible to those who looked at them, and saying: I may not live long but I am immortal; or, rather, I’m never going to die, but don’t expect to see me again after tonight; or See in me only what I show you tonight because I don’t give you permission to see anything more; so said the moving bodies, the restless eyes, the laughter of some and the silence of others, prolonging the night before returning to their elegant middle-class homes and standing before their fathers, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the bankers, the notaries, the real estate agents, the tour directors, the hotelkeepers … to ask for money for the next night, money for shopping at Serrano, treating themselves to the indispensable blouse, trying out the shoes without which … It was the village gathering, only now with Benetton and Saint Laurent logos; it was the romantic stroll through the plazas of past years, the boys in one direction, the girls in the other, measuring each other for engagement, marriage, procreation, and death the way a mortician measures the bodies of the clients who one day, inevitably, will visit him and occupy his deluxe coffins. Luxury, lust of death that robs us of the past; but in this Madrid stroll the boys and the girls were not going in opposite directions—they couldn’t, because it was hard to tell them apart; Rubén Oliva, thirty-nine years old, unemployed (for the moment), fed up with his wife, victim of a tedious Sunday, was glad that, even though it was still night, San Lunes had arrived; he was not so different, physically, from the golden youths of Madrid: like them, like almost all Spanish gallants, he had an androgynous quality; but now the good-looking girls had that quality, too—they had more of the moon ways of Mondays than of the mercurial ways of Wednesdays; they were Tuesday’s martial Amazons, yet Friday remained their Venus day—lunes, miércoles, martes, viernes: they were still celestial goddesses, but in a new way for a new day, a way different from the tradition set by their stout, pallid, veiled, doughy, thick-ankled, heavy-hipped predecessors; Rubén Oliva amused himself, as he studied the slow nocturnal stroll, by picking out the boys who appeared to be girls, the women who resembled men, and he felt a sudden vertigo; the march of pleasure and extravagance and ostentation of a rich, European, progressive Spain, where everyone, however grudgingly, paid his taxes and could go to the beach in August, not wanting to be judged, not anymore, or classified so simply by gender, masculine/feminine, no, not now, now even sex was as fluctuating as the sea, which came closer to Madrid in August, because there was nothing the city denied itself, not even the sea, which it brought there through the secret power of the moon, converting Madrid, at daybreak on Monday, San Lunes’s day, into a summer beach of seas and undercurrents and daily menstruations, sewers and purified water.

  —Madrid denies itself nothing, said the woman who paused beside him, watching the spectacle, and only her voice told Rubén Oliva that she was a woman, not one of these girls who resembled Tuesday’s warriors more than they did the mercurial girls of Wednesdays; Rubén could not make her out very well because there was a bank of Osborne brandy lights in the terrace where they were standing, and the black bull and the fluorescent glow blinded him and also her, the woman who first appeared as a blaze of light, blind or blinding, seen or seeing, who could tell which …

  —I think we’re the only ones here over thirty. The woman smiled, blinded by the light, by the bull, by Rubén Oliva’s own invisibility in that crowd: he could see the sign of the bull more clearly than he could see the woman who was talking to him.

  —I can’t see you very well, said Rubén Oliva, lightly touching the woman’s shoulder, as if to move her into the light so that he could see her better, though he realized that this invisible light, this dazzling darkness, was the best light for …

  —It doesn’t matter how I look, or what my name is. Don’t take the mystery out of our meeting.

  He said she was right, but could she see him?

  —Of course—the woman laughed—how do you think you and I have met in the middle of this youthful throng; they used to say never trust anyone over thirty; here, that’s still true.

  —Maybe it always will be, for the young. At fifteen, would you trust an old man of forty … well, of thirty-nine? The man laughed.

  —I’m willing to imagine that on this entire avenue there are only two people, a man and a woman, over thirty. She smiled.

  Rubén Oliva said it seemed a marriage made in heaven, and she replied, in a country where for centuries people had no choice about their own marriages, where they had to obey their fathers’ arrangements, that one could experience the chance, the adventure the excitement of a casual encounter, and decide to prolong it voluntarily, to decide, man, to decide, that was truly a blessing, a wonderful thing indeed …

  He couldn’t get a look at her. Each movement, hers, his, hers responding to his, his leg moving forward as if by chance to change her direction, as if making her accept the bullfighter’s will, joined the play of lights—dangling bulbs, neon constellations, errant cars like caravans in the desert, lights of the sea of Madrid, electric sunflowers of night, moonflowers of the city’s eternal undercurrent—Rubén Oliva felt unable to direct, to curb the turns of the woman, to make her yield, to snatch her image from the perpetual flight: what was she like? and she, had she seen him, did she know what he was like?

  Hours later, at daybreak, in a loft on Calle Juanelo, their arms around each other in her bed, she asked him if he had not been afraid of her sexual aggression, that she was a prostitute or carried the new plagues of the dying century, and he answered no, she should realize that a man like him took life as it came; true, there were diseases less than deadly, but the only true disease, after all, was death and who could avoid that? and if nobody avoided it, then it was better to face it over and over, by choice. He explained that right away, so she would understand with whom she lay, that the worst thing the world could do to him was no worse than what he could do to himself; for example, if she gave him a fatal disease he could hasten his death, not in the cowardice of suicide, nothing like that, but by giving himself fully to his art, to a profession that justified death at any moment, welcomed and honored it: to die with honor he simply had to do his daily work, and you couldn’t say that about the lawyers, doctors, and businessmen who were the young people’s parents, and whom the young people would inevitably turn into someday—no longer slender, no longer luminous, no longer hermaphroditic, definitively fathers or mothers, potbellied and gray, for sure!

  —And you weren’t curious, you never wanted to look at me before sleeping with me?

  He shrugged and replied as before, it’s like looking the bull in the face, that’s the most important thing in the ring, never to lose sight of the bull’s face, but at the same time not to lose sight of the public, your cuadrilla, your rivals who are watching you, in fact, not to lose sight even of the water boy, like Gallito did once in Seville—he had to quiet the water boy when he realized his cries were distracting the bull: you have to be aware of everything, sweetheart, can I call you that? Call me what you like, call me whore, actress, consumptive, performer, call me whatever you want, but show me again what you’ve got.

  He did, and distractedly registered the spare furniture in the room, almost nothing but a bed, a chest of drawers by its side, cool candles on it, cold tile floor, fresh curtains blocking out the daylight, an old-fashioned washbasin, a chamber pot his fingers touched under the bed, and dominating everything a great ornate armoire, the only luxury in the room—he looked in vain for an electric light, an outlet, a telephone; he was mixed up, then he thought he understood: he had confused luxury with novelty, with modern comfort, but was it really the same thing? Nothing was modern in this room, and the armoire with its two doors was adorned with a crest of vines, cherubs, and broken columns.

  Before sleeping again in each other’s arms, h
e wanted to tell her what he had thought, separated from Rocío in the apartment they shared, something that Rocío didn’t understand perhaps, and perhaps not this woman either, but with her it was worth it, worth the risk of not being understood: when we die, we lose the past, that’s what we lose, not the future, as he told her …

  At midday Monday, on waking again, Rubén Oliva and his lover abandoned themselves to the day, convinced that the day belonged to them, without interruption, rejoicing in their chance encounter on the nocturnal terraces of Madrid. (How many of the young people consummated a marriage of the night as they had, how many only celebrated the nuptials of the spectacle: to show oneself, see, be seen, not touch…?) They confessed that they could hardly see each other in the shifting light of the terraces, she felt the attraction, perhaps because it was Monday, moon day, day of tides, decisive dates, violent currents, overpowering attractions and impulses, she was drawn to him as though magnetized, and he couldn’t see her clearly in the whirlwind of artificial light and shade, and that is how it had to be, because she had to tell him that, now that she had seen him, he was …