Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  When he kneels in front of you, you recognize the child who yesterday, a few hours ago, or perhaps only a few minutes, leapt, glowing, over the excavations on the construction site, who walked in circles around the convent patio holding the woman’s hand, who ate in the refectory, who pricked his finger with a thorn …

  You recognize his bloodstained tunic, but it seems shorter; you recognize his artificially waved hair, but it is not as blond, it’s darker; you recognize his blue eyes, but they are smaller, it’s just his makeup that seems to enlarge them; you recognize his sweet lips, but they are surrounded by the first traces of a nascent down, and when the boy raises his arm to stroke your forehead, he gives off the concentrated odor of armpits and damp hair like a nest waiting for birds to take shelter there; a burrow, you decide as he embraces you and kisses your lips and you are savagely assaulted by the memory of other touches both near and far, because you felt this same touch yesterday, last night, or a second ago, when the woman with the moles on her temples and the face of perpetual dusk kissed you and thanked you and told you …

  —Thank you, says the grown boy.

  Standing close to you, mild, fair, stinking of goat and shit and sweat and fried bread, a boy of the people, a farmhand or a laborer, he tells you that he and his mother are grateful for what you’ve done, and what’s done is done … but now he offers you his hand to help you up, you shake off your drowsiness and try to hurry, we don’t have much time, says the young man, who is strangely old, older every minute, there is never enough time, it’s August and your son will be born in December—thank you—and in January they’ll circumcise him, you know? and in April they’ll kill him, and in May they’ll celebrate him, recalling his death, putting wooden crosses over all the construction sites, you should know this, José María, you should be getting to work, come with me into the corral and the shed …

  You take his hand with its black nails and follow him through the empty refectory and the already sunny patio, you hurry through the clean, dry bathroom, its stained-glass windows no longer steamy, its porcelain frogs dry and rough, no longer suffused with the warm moisture of last night … You and the aging boy go through the gallery of the house—the convent, the retreat, the maternity ward?

  The stained-glass windows with twining floral patterns, the sideboards built into the wall, the bronze ornaments and the crystal drops, the mirrors, are suddenly behind you. The boy opens a door, the light is blinding, you cross another patio, and you have arrived at a shed full of hammers, boards, nails, files, saws, with a strong smell of sawdust.

  Inside, sitting on a cane chair, surrounded by baskets of eggs and handkerchiefs, corncobs and embroidery, the woman with the face of dusk—her face even more shadowy, covered by a blue veil that hides the moles on her temples, which look less like flesh than like parts of the veil—she looks at you and smiles, but she doesn’t put down the gold-trimmed tunic she’s sewing.

  —Thank you, she repeats, letting out a seam, and she gestures to you, inviting you to come into the workroom, pointing out the boards, the nails, and then makes an impatient gesture, telling both the boy and you that you should set to work.

  He knows what he is supposed to do; he sits on the ground by the woman’s side, takes the thorns, and begins to weave them into a crown.

  But you don’t know; she looks at you impatiently; she gets herself under control and again smiles sweetly.

  —It’s necessary to work. You will have to get used to it, she tells you in her gentlest voice, it kills time …

  —If you like your time dead!—the irrepressible boy laughs, sitting by the side of the seamstress.

  She gives him a light smack; he pricks his finger with a thorn; he cries; he brings his bloody finger to his mouth and whines, but this time she does not make a sorrowful face, she has lost the look of despair that he knew …

  —It doesn’t matter, says the woman, it doesn’t matter anymore. Now we will have him with us forever, and every year, when you die, my child, he will come back to make me a child to take your place, in December you’ll be ready for the manger, my child, in April for the cross, and in May …

  She looks up, between her appeal and its answer, to see you better:

  —Isn’t that so, José María?

  —No, I’m not José María, I am Carlos María. José María is my brother, he stayed above, he chose not to accompany me …

  First a thrush flies overhead, and its wings make a sound like metal in the hollow sky. Then the woman with the twilight face opens her mouth, the sweetness leaves first her lips and then her eyes, she looks at the boy who is sucking the blood from the finger he pricked with the thorn, and she raises her hands to her head again, her look of anguish returns, she whimpers, we’ve been deceived, we have been sent the wrong one, and the boy says it doesn’t matter, Mother, taking her arm in his bloodstained hand, whoever he is, he has done what you wanted, the new child will arrive in December, don’t worry, the child will die, Mother, and I’ll be able to go on living, I’ll grow old finally, Mother, isn’t that what you want, look, I’m growing and I won’t be killed in April, I will grow old, Mother, I will grow old with you, the child will take my place … Mother, it doesn’t matter who fucks you as long as I’m reborn!

  He embraces her and she looks at you without comprehension, as if her entire life depended on certain ceremonies that by being repeated had become in equal part wisdom and folly, and you try to say something to explain the inexplicable, you manage to mumble no, your brother, José María—I—was not deceived, I chose to remain because I was in love with a woman named Catarina and, as I could not have her, I wanted instead to possess her wedding dress, her …

  But they don’t understand a thing you say.

  —Mother, the name doesn’t matter, what matters is what happened …

  —What names do the gods use among themselves? Who knows?

  —You continue conceiving, Mother, the boy said, almost crying now, holding the woman sitting on the cane chair, don’t keep asking these horrible questions, the boy said, crying, pleading with his mother, begging her, and he shows his devotion by his tears, he’s strung tight as a bow, sending the arrows of his misery in every direction, but he surrenders as well, trying to show that he’s been overcome, that the true anguish lies in the son’s breast, in his, not his mother’s, that his sorrow and sense of disillusionment would outshine hers any day, that her tricks and her moods always fall on his shoulders, but it doesn’t matter, he cries, if that’s what it takes to make her happy, he’ll just die again, and now she is the one who is sobbing, no, if it means you don’t have to die every time the dog appears …

  The woman calms down and picks up her sewing, she arranges it in her lap and looks at you, asking herself, asking you, can’t miracles be repeated? How come it’s a miracle to give birth without sin the first time and a crime the second? Isn’t it possible to give birth to two gods, one good, the other bad? Tell me, then, who is going to save the imperfect and the bad, those who most need God?

  Each time his mother asks one of these questions, the boy punctuates it by throwing an egg against the wall. In his face you see the rage of your country, which is the rage of the injured, the humiliated, the impotent, the insulted; you recognize it because you have seen it everywhere, all your life, in school, at work, among the engineers and among the masons, and you were its counterpart—your excessive self-confidence, the arrogance revealed in the ease with which you ignore the obstacles, and the price of those powers, which is insensibility and finally indifference, the twin of death … And then you wonder if the only people spared those destructive extremes were the architect Santiago Ferguson and his daughter, Catarina, if some quality possessed them, and if they possessed some quality that went beyond the humiliation of some and the arrogance of others, and what that quality would be called, that saving grace … It must be something more than what my brother and I say we are: reasonable people. You and I, brother.

  Another egg burs
ts hatefully against the wall and you think of the walls of the architect Ferguson that structure space, opening and unifying it, but none of that concerns the seamstress with the darkened temples. Instead, she’s worrying about a name, more than a man, a name; you had the man, the boy says; I want the name, she replies, because the name is the man, the name is what says what he is, the name is the same as the thing it names, that is my faith, that’s what I believe, what I believe, what I believe …

  But then she quiets down and reaches for two boards, which she makes into a cross. She nails the cross together and hands it to you. You cannot reject their gift, because they’re giving you something—now at last you know—that they expected from you.

  13

  Between the faithful and the doubting, between the troops and the television teams, the engineer Pérez made his way toward the shack where Doña Heredad Mateos was being filmed for the evening news, dressed in her Adidas outfit, and he shouted to the foreman, Rudecindo Alvarado, turn off the traffic light, and to the believers who were inside the shelter, did they see anything now, and yes, they answered yes, yes, because they were seeing what they wanted to see, the engineer shouted, see if you can find someone without mud in his eyes and a frog in his throat, someone who sees and speaks clearly, you and you, look, they’re going by, and you two, don’t say no, look, what do you see, frankly? nothing, nothing but a sheet of glass, right? just put in, and now, Rudecindo, turn on the traffic light that shines in the window of the shack, and now if I’m not mistaken, now the figures appear again, right? It’s only an optical illusion, a reflection of the prints the old lady stuck on the wall when she moved in here to do her sewing, it’s the candles under and in front of the prints, combined with the light of the traffic signal, which never goes off but is always changing from red to green to yellow, that’s what causes the reflection of the Mother and the Child, are you satisfied? Now go back to your homes, break it up, nothing’s going on here, and you, good woman, you can keep the proceeds from what you started, nobody is going to take them from you, don’t worry, cash the check they gave you to wear that sports logo, and God be with you, señora, I tell you nothing has happened here, and you, Jerónimo, go back to work, nobody is being accused of anything, but we have to put an end to this farce and get back to work, we’re way behind schedule.

  —And my dress? said Doña Heredad, managing to look impassive through it all.

  —What do you want, señora? Dress any way you like, pink pants or black skirts, it’s all the same to me.

  —My wedding dress, I mean.

  —Ooooh … Aren’t you a little old for that kind of game, you old flirt?

  —The one I was sewing, where is it? Who took it? asked Doña Heredad.

  She was about to cry Thief! Stop, thief! and Pérez the engineer was afraid that there was no limit to the capacity of the old woman, Señora Mateos, for inciting riots, when a silhouette appeared against the suffocating alkaline, midday sun that announced the approach of an afternoon storm; from the depths of the construction site the architect appeared, one of the Vélez twins, who knows which, it was impossible to tell them apart, walked toward them, followed by a dog. He carried a cross in his hands, two boards nailed together, and he reached the watchman’s shack and scrambled up some stones and planted the cross firmly on the roof.

  14

  When they led you out of the Art Nouveau house which looked Neoclassical from the outside, the toothless nun Apollonia, followed by the mutilated nun Agatha and the blind nun Lucía, dressed entirely in orange silk, Agatha with her braids entwined with flowers, Apollonia in her straw hat, and Lucía with a shepherd’s staff, you wanted to think that it was your teacher, Don Santiago, who led you here, asking you to view the ordinary with fresh eyes so as to make it yield its secret, which for the architect is the composition of a dispersed and hidden structure that only the artist knows how to see and reunite. You ask yourself if your brother—I, José María—couldn’t or didn’t want to see what you saw, or, seeing it, chose to pretend that he hadn’t, that the lodestone wasn’t there but in the watchman’s shack, where Catarina Ferguson’s wedding dress lay, waiting.

  Before you answered your own question, you were blinded by the glare of the midday sun, as the door of the house swung open and the nuns said these parting words, my brother:

  —Leave us. Don’t worry about us.

  —A nun is only a forgotten bride.

  —And never bring us flowers.

  —Do you know what the dead feel when flowers are put on their graves? The flowers feel like nails. The living don’t know that. Only the dead know. Each flower is one more nail in the coffin.

  —Don’t ever come back. Please.

  —Leave us in peace. Please.

  —They are nails. They are sweet-smelling poison.

  —Your work here is completed, said the blind Lucía.

  —Things are as they are, said the mutilated Agatha.

  —The dates can change, said the toothless Apollonia.

  —But nothing can change the fatality of time, said the blind Lucía, and she opened the door onto the light of a Mexican noon.

  It’s true, you would have liked to say to the nuns, but I shall forget everything the minute I step out the door, except these four things: that nuns are only women who are rarely seen; that since they drink shadows they are always fresh; that flowers are like nails in the coffins of the dead; and that in December, perhaps, a child of yours will be born here. Only about this last do you have any doubts, just as the woman and the boy seemed to waver between two possibilities. Will a new child be born in December to prevent the other child you conceived from dying in April, the one who grows old or fades away before your eyes? But if the child you know is going to grow old and die much later and the new child is going to die in his place at the beginning of spring, will it be necessary to create a new sacrificial child each year who will assume, indefinitely, the death of the glowing child? Who will be the annual father of the sacrificial child? This year it was you, though they were expecting your brother, the carpenter José María. Does it matter who fertilizes the mother, how many pricks have entered and will enter the blessed and fertile belly of the dark woman? Or, perhaps, the boy you know will die, forsaken, in April, and each year a new child will be substituted, to be born in December and, growing rapidly, to die in April. In either case, the mother will be impregnated every year. This was your year … But of the dog you have no doubts; he guided you here and now he is showing you the way back. You realize that you had only noticed his injured rump, not his yellow body, streaked and stinking, not the melancholy eyes that perhaps give gold its value.

  15

  When I was young I made a trip to Scotland, my grandparents’ country, Santiago Ferguson told his daughter, Catarina. For me, that visit was both an inspiration and a reproach. In Glasgow, I encountered the past.

  —Is that where you want to die?

  —No.

  —Then do you know where you want to die?

  —Yes, in Wells Cathedral, he told her, he told us, far from anything that reminds me of all the things I don’t wish to remember, in the place that least resembles what we have created here. In a church without Virgins.

  After his burial she told us a story: the day he visited the Mackintosh house in Glasgow, Santiago Ferguson left his companions and lost himself in the labyrinth of those three buildings that fit one inside the other, like stacked Chinese boxes: a modern municipal building made of concrete, a prison posing as an art museum, and, at the heart of the architecture, the reconstruction (sorrowful, secret, shameful, Catarina) of the home of the Mackintosh family.

  But as he became more and more lost in astonishment (labyrinth: maze, amazement, repeated Ferguson, possessed by that astonishment), two things happened simultaneously.

  First of all, he felt the various styles of architecture, infinite and wonderful, shifting before him: Palladian theaters, prisons designed by Piranesi, Jeffersonian lookouts above t
he clouds of Virginia, Art Nouveau palaces in the Chihuahua desert, all telling him (as he, always teaching, tells her, tells Catarina) that the word “labyrinth” also denotes a poem that can be read backwards and forwards and makes sense either way.

  At the same time, he felt that he was losing control of his movements.

  The first sensation filled him with the special ecstasy associated with one of his most singular notions, that of an ideal communication between all human constructions. In the bold, the adventurous mind of Santiago Ferguson (our teacher, our father, her husband, your lover), architecture was the simple and complex approximation to an imagined and unattainable model. Through these ideas, Ferguson flirted with the simultaneously tempting and horrifying notion of a perfect symmetry that would be as much the origin as the fate of the universe.

  Then we remembered that in class, as we tried to comprehend the mysterious web our teacher had woven around our lives without our realizing it, Santiago Ferguson vigorously rejected the concept of unity. He called it the “ultimate Romantic nostalgia.” But he considered equally detestable the notion of fragmentation, which he said was the devil’s own work.

  —The blithe Romantic identification of subject and object not only repulses me (it was as though we were still in his class, hanging on his every word); it terrifies me.

  He made a sweeping gesture in the air. His blackboard remained empty. —It is a totalitarian idea, impossible physically, but enslaving mentally and politically, because it sanctions the excesses of those who would first impose it and then maintain it as the supreme, unassailable virtue.

  Then he startled us, pounding his hands together twice, saying first—to see if we’d been dozing—that unity—now listen!—is no virtue, and, second, he scraped his chalk across the board to make our nerves stand on end, so we would be sure to hear:

  —I fear happiness at any price. I fear imposed unity, but I have no desire for fragmentation either. Therefore, I am an architect. Ab ovum.