Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  —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 …

  —Señora …

  —You are a mason, or a carpenter, or something like that, aren’t you?

  You listen to her with annoyance, irritated, you don’t understand her. But you agree, yes, you are, a manual laborer; and she sighs, perhaps the miracle can be repeated, despite what everyone says; she slowly opens her eyes, the blind nun wipes them with the bloody handkerchief, she doesn’t close them, as if welcoming that stain, murmuring, If he has three fathers, why can’t he have three mothers? And if he has three mothers, why can’t he have had three fathers…?

  You look around you: the eight nuns are there, standing, surrounding the three of you, the woman with the dusky face, the sleeping child, and you, and one holds a harp in her hands, another a guitar, one a staff, another a lead plate, the fifth’s hand has bells on every finger, the sixth a fork, the last a knife, a real dagger pointing at your eyes. You have a horrible feeling that everything unspeakable—sighs, sorrows, griefs—is about to find a voice.

  —No, says the woman, delicately lifting the head of the sleeping child, you don’t have to say anything …

  You manage to say something anyway, in a panic: —The child is already alive. You don’t have to do anything, look at him, he’s sleeping but he’s alive, you babble on a moment before the eight women begin to press up against your body, and you feel those other bodies against you, an intimacy of smells and skin and menstruation, a delicious sensation of bodies naked under green silk, their saliva in your ears, the conch in your mouth; orange silk covered your eyes and the breath of eight women had become a single breath, as fragrant as your nights, as bitter as your mornings, as sweat-drenched as your middays, and in the center of the circle, reserved for you, untouched, immaculate, the woman who was dusk itself, dark, desperate, the moles on her temples tightening like screws, saying come, José María, it took you a long time to arrive, but you are here at last, my love … The woman and her companions speak in unison, pressing against you, surrounding you, suffocating you, shutting you in the tiled bathroom decorated in a pattern of foliage, with porcelain frogs set in the white bathtub that is like a vast bed of water into which you sink … You are suffocated by unwanted kisses, smothered in that bath of steam in which you suddenly remember the maternal womb you have longed to regain before you die, and that other bath floods over you, my brother, Carlos María.

  11

  Those first days, Doña Heredad Mateos sat at the door of the watchman’s hut in a severe black dress, with her shawl sometimes over her head, sometimes hiding her face, when a kind of willful mortification made her hide her features, which nonetheless appeared about to slide from her face like pebbles from the wall of a ruin. At times she would drape the shawl over her shoulders to emphasize various attitudes: majesty, resignation, hope, even a hint of seduction. For all this and more, since its invention, the Mexican shawl, the rebozo, had served, and the aged Doña Heredad employed it with a kind of atavistic wisdom, seated at the entrance of her temporary home, on a rude woven straw chair, with her feet planted in the dust, the points of her black, well-shined shoes peeking out of her da
rk skirts.

  Her breast was covered with scapulars commending her to all the saints, male and female. And by her side, though she never touched it, a cup decorated with flowers, ducks, and frogs silently inviting everyone to leave the contribution that she neither solicited nor, seemingly, touched. The cup was always half full and each twosome entering the hut added a handful of pesos to the pot, but later they began to leave coins and Doña Heredad assessed them out of the corner of her eye, fearing and confirming that some were mere coppers dropped from poor fists, but others—she didn’t reveal her delight—were treasures taken from who knows what hiding places, flowerpots, mattresses, money boxes: testons, silver pesos, even the occasional gold piece.

  So they came in pairs, a woman with a man, a woman with a child, a man with a child, two children, two women, almost never two men, and some left crying, others wearing beatific smiles, most in silence and with their heads bowed, some trying not to laugh, and they were the only ones Doña Heredad favored with a look of icy fury that was like a premonition of what hell reserved for the infidel, and the promise of paradise was reserved for those who left on their knees, repeating Miracle, miracle, miracle, and when the lines grew and began to snake through the construction site and down Calle José María Marroquí, a look of satisfaction appeared on her face, particularly when the aged mother of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos noticed scapulars like hers on the chests of the devout, and even cactus thorns piercing the breasts of the most faithful, and she tried not to feel too happy about the trail of blood left by the knees wounded on the painful climb from the excavations to the shack, since (as my brother Carlos María Vélez would say ironically), in addition to using the direct entrance to the shack from the street, where the engineers had put the much-discussed traffic light, those who felt they didn’t deserve the vision without some penance decided to crawl through the mud, the construction materials, the debris, the barbed wire, the iron rods, and the clutter of the project, to be rewarded with the divine vision inside the shack of Señora Heredad: miracle, miracle, miracle, Madonna and Child, revealed in the window of a humble shack, practically a manger, said a woman to her husband, Bethlehem, O little town of Bethlehem, how still … no, said another man to his wife, I happen to know that they just put the glass in that window; but that doesn’t make it less holy, you heretic, answered his wife icily …

  —Mexico is instant Fellini, I said to a group of engineers (I am José María Vélez), not expecting them to understand me or to see the irony of having discussed to death whether to put in the famous traffic light in order to keep traffic from backing up, and now look, you can’t take a step into Calle José María Marroquí between Independencia and Artículo 123, first because of all the curious and the penitent, and now because of the increasing throng of ice-cream, popcorn, and hot-dog venders and carbonated-water hawkers, competing with the stands that sold tamarind, papaya, and pineapple drinks, and chunks of coconut, and raspberries, and the piles of tricolor banners that began to appear, the sweatshirts with stencils of the Child Jesus and the Holy Virgin in various poses: the Child on the knees of the Mother, the two embracing, he sucking the maternal breast; the steaming sizzling grills with fried tortillas and meat pies and pig cracklings, their spicy smells mixing with those of sputtering candles and heavy incense, which were the prologue to the upright boxes on wooden sawhorses offering holy pictures, Sacred Hearts of silver, novenaries, hymns, Magnificats and other prayers written in ancient, crude, almost archaic characters, on fragile paper, and boxes containing statues of the Good Shepherd, Our Lady of Sorrows, the Immaculate Conception, the Sacred Redeemer, the Wise Child, all of them reflected infinitely in the mirrors of the boxes in which they were set and in the metal of the carts, the windshields of the automobiles, the windows of the stores …

  Then one morning a thousand colored balloons appeared bearing the image of the Virgin and Child and a phosphorescent advertisement for Oasis Condoms proclaiming: Men, Be Prepared—Only the Virgin Conceived without Sin; but even this excess could not divert my attention, which remained fixed on the entrance and exit of the shack. I looked over the heads of the faithful, grateful for the way the penitents bowed low, so I could guard, from a distance, the purity of the wedding dress that lay on the cot, the painstaking, prolonged work of restoring it having been abandoned by the woman of the hour, Doña Heredad, mother of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos, the humble mother and son singled out for the blessing of the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus, who had visited them and so allowed the people to taste, to savor, to share in the sacred glory, and only then the police appeared to ensure that order was maintained, and later the truckloads of soldiers arrived to impose it once and for all, when the crowds bearing placards claiming violations of the Constitution and championing a progressive lay society, free of superstition, were on the point of confronting other, Catholic crowds, crying: Christ the King Lives! Christianity Yes, Communism No! and the dialectic discourses were drowned out by Hail Marys in which hope was tempered with the benediction and that with the anticipation of the eternal, the celestial tower, ivory tower, tower of David, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus …

  But what really caught my eye, in the line waiting to enter and witness the miracle, was that pair of unbelievers, the engineer Pérez and the foreman Rudecindo Alvarado. Of course, the engineer could be playing doubting Thomas: until I see, I refuse to believe; and Rudecindo’s agnosticism had already cost him an injured hand when he tried to capture the vision of the glowing child. Engineer Pérez and foreman Alvarado entered gravely, the engineer circumspect Rudecindo with his head bowed, into the shack of Doña Heredad Mateos.

  —And the Day of the Holy Cross I did say a thousand times Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Jerónimo Mateos struck his chest, kneeling beside his mother, who when she saw the television cameras coming told her son to guard her post and not let anyone by, she had to change fast so she’d look her best on television, and José María was afraid she would come back wearing the wedding dress, ruining it just so she’d be suitably decked out; but no Doña Heredad Mateos reappeared, not in her black clothes, but in a pink jacket and pink running pants, a big Adidas logo on her breast and new white tennis shoes bearing the same trademark, and I, taking advantage of the confusion and of the sudden shower that disrupted everything and confused the couple inside the shack and the other people who went in to take refuge, I slipped inside, feeling less than a man and more than a god—I, José María, your brother—no more, no less than a fleeting drop, mobile, unattainable, of mercury; a winged thief, I hurried into the shack while Doña Heredad was outside cursing the heavens that had betrayed her with rain just as the television cameras arrived, and I, your brother, touched the wedding dress with incredulous fingers, then I clasped it passionately, embracing it, closing my eyes, as Catarina closed them in her embrace, repeatedly kissing the hem, caressing the jewels sewn to the dress, giving thanks for the miracle of having rescued that lost object of my desire, of my erotic memory. Who would take it away from me? You? Don’t you have your own vision, brother, and your own object? And don’t Professor Ferguson and Catarina and even Doña Heredad, and the absent mother of our unattainable love? You have your own vision and your own desire, brother; never give them up. And don’t take mine away from me.

  12

  Exhausted, you wake up enveloped in a dripping skin; that is the first thing you notice, and your first question is whether it is your skin or that of some wet animal protecting you from the attack of another animal. That is what your sense of touch tells you. Your sense of smell detects the heavy fragrance of dried flowers, flowers that have withered and died.

  Your soaked skin; the dry odor. The trembling of a pack of hounds that passed and pissed on you.

  It tastes of gall; you spit it out and the spoon that the toothless nun forces between your gritted teeth falls out. You also smell the patched, urine-drenched, sweaty clothes of the group of nuns
who surround you and take care of you; they buzz around like a cloud of bees in a hive, and you search in vain for the woman with the moles on her temples—she is the one you are looking for—but you hear instead—now you can hear it—a soft step approaching you, but the nuns, hearing that same step, seem to want to block out the voice that is getting closer, so they begin to talk animatedly, in no particular order, but keeping to a common theme: I left my house dressed as a man to keep my father from raping me, I begged my brother to kill me to avoid marriage to an old lecher, I threw myself on the soldier’s sword and told him this is the only thing of yours that will penetrate me, they tore out my teeth, they gouged out my eyes, they cut off my breasts, so that I wouldn’t fornicate, so that I’d be worthy of heaven, to preserve my sanctity, blind, toothless, mutilated, but chaste, brides of Our Lord Jesus Christ and mothers of the Baby Jesus and servants of the Holy Virgin …

  Then comes a voice from within the circle of women, laughing.

  He comes forward, still laughing, exclaiming: —Leave me alone with my father!

  You see a familiar figure approaching, holding one hand up as if in blessing, but all the while smirking possessively; the other hand holds a curse, he has a whip, which he raises (still blessing with the other hand) to lash at the nuns, who moan and fly away like frightened bats.