Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (15 page)

But she, La Desdichada, does not speak, she does not speak …

I think this and surprise myself. Emotion floods over me, I translate it as she
who doesn't speak:
Love, be who you may, named as you're named (name, flame: benighted, be lighted—to name is to bring to life, to flame is to inflame), speak through me, Desdichada, unhappy, unsaid one, trust in the poet, let me be your voice, your word/world. I will make you sound. Speak to me, through me, for me, and in exchange for your voice I swear I will always be true, always true to you. That is my desire, Desdichada, the world is slow to give me what I want, one woman who is mine alone, and I only hers.

Let me draw near your wooden ear, while I'm still under twenty, and tell you: I don't know if the world will ever bring me that one woman, or if so, when. Perhaps to find her I would have to change my ways (my virtue), perhaps I would have to love many women before discovering
this is it,
the one and only, the here and now. And even if I find her, what will become of me then, having loved so many to find that one, telling her that it was all for her and her alone—will she believe me when I tell her that I am a man meant for only one woman?

How can I be believed? How can I prove my sincerity? And if she doesn't believe me, how can I believe in her? It's okay for a nineteen-year-old writer to say these things; perhaps confidence is, after all, the most important thing. But my fear is something known best in adolescence, though never completely forgotten, even if concealed: love is an abyss.

I choose henceforth to put my trust in one woman: will La Desdichada be my abyss, the first, best, and most faithful lover of my life? Toño would laugh. It's easy to count on the fidelity of a wooden doll. No, it's hard, I tell him, for a wooden doll to rely on the fidelity of a man of flesh and blood.

(iii)

Twenty-five years later, I returned from all the cities of the world. I wrote. I loved. I did things that pleased me. I tried to turn them into literature. But the things that pleased me were sufficient unto themselves. They didn't want to be words. Likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes fought among themselves. With luck they became poetry. The poetry of the changing city reflected my own tensions.

I knew the old Waikiki was closing, so I went there one night. The last night it was open. I saw Toño sitting a little ways from me. He had gotten fatter and had an impressive mustache. There was no need to greet each other. What would he think of me, after a quarter of a century? We walked between the tables, the dancing couples, to shake hands and sit down together. All this without speaking a word, while the band played the anthem of all slow dances,
Nereidas.
Then we laughed. We had forgotten the ceremony, the rite that affirmed our public friendship. We stood up. We embraced. We slapped each other on the back, on the waist, Toño, Bernardo, how are you?

We didn't want to reminisce. We didn't want to slip into an easy nostalgia. The Waikiki was taking care of that. We started talking as if no time had gone by. But the end of an era was being celebrated all around us; the city would never be the same, the Expressionist carnival was ending, from now on everything would be much too vast, distant, ground down; tonight marked the end of the theatrics that everyone could share, the witticisms that everyone could repeat, the celebrities that we could celebrate without risk of foreign comparisons: our village, rose-colored, blue, vivid, was going away, it was whirling around us, inviting us to a carnival that was a funeral, the footlights pointed toward the edges of the nightclub full of smoke and sadness so that we were all mixed together: show, audience, whores, Johns, band, masters, servants, slaves: out of this crowd that moved like a sick serpent, two extraordinary figures emerged: a Pierrot and a Columbine in perfect costume: they both wore whiteface, his forehead was black, her tragic smile was painted on with lipstick; he had the black gorget, the shiny white suit of a clown, the black buttons, the satin slippers; Columbine had the white wig, the tiny fairy cap, the white gorget, the white mesh stockings, the ballet slippers; their moonlike faces were both masked.

They came over to us, said our names. Bernardo, welcome to Mexico! Toño, we knew you'd be here! Come on! Today marks the end of the Mexico City we knew, today one city dies and another is born, come with us!

Laughing, we asked their names.

—Ambar.

—Estrella.

—Come with us.

We took taxi after taxi, the four of us squeezed in together, breathing the intense perfume of those strange creatures. It was the last night of the city we had known. The ball at San Carlos, where they took us that night (the perfumed couple, Pierrot and Columbine), was the annual saturnalia of the university students, who cast aside the medieval prohibitions of the Royal, Holy University of Mexico amid the Neoclassicism of the eighteenth-century palace's stone staircases and columns: disguises, drinks, abandon, the always threatening movement of the crowd carried away by the dance, the drunkenness, the sensuality on display, the lights like waves; who was going to dance with Ambar, who with Estrella: which was the man, which was the woman, what would our hands tell us when we danced first with Columbine, then with Pierrot? And how easily the two were able to avoid our touch so that we were left without sex, with only perfume and movement. We were drunk. But we justified intoxication with a thousand excuses: seeing each other after so many years, the night, the dance, the company of this couple, the city celebrating its death, the suspicion I formed in the taxi, when we all climbed in and Estrella ordered: “Let's have one for the road at Las Veladoras”—an outdoor bar lit by votive lamps: could it be Arturo Ogarrio and his girlfriend, his double? I asked Toño No, he answered, they're too young, the best thing would be to pull off their masks, find out for sure. So we tried, and they both shrieked in androgynous voices, screamed horribly, squealed as pigs would if we took their hind legs and castrated them, and they cried for the taxi driver to stop, they're killing us, and the flustered driver came to a stop, they got out, we were in front of the cathedral, Ambar and Estrella ran past the iron gate into the churchyard and on into the splendid cave of carved stone.

We followed them inside, but our search was futile. Pierrot and Columbine had disappeared into the bowels of the cathedral. Something told me that Toño and I had not come here to find them. Sacred, profane, cathedral, cabaret, school, Orozco's mural, the carnival of San Carlos, the agony of Mexico; I felt dizzy, I grasped a gilded screen in front of a dark side altar. I tried to catch Toño's eye. He didn't look at me. Toño was holding on to the screen with both hands and gazing intently at the altar behind it. It was dawn and some religious women who had been there for four centuries knelt down one more time, wrapped in black shawls as always, with skins like yellow onions. Toño didn't look at them. The incense made me nauseated, the smell of rotting spikenard. Toño stared fixedly at the altar.

The Virgin, with her cowl, her gown of ivory and gold, and her velvet cape, was weeping as she gazed at her dead Son lying cradled in her arms. The Christ of Mexico, wounded like a bullfighter, cut to pieces in a great, never-ending
corrida,
bathed in blood, gored: His wounds would never heal, that's why His Mother cried; although He came back to life, He was wounded, caught by the bull. She rested her feet on the horns of a bull, and she wept. Down her cheeks rolled huge black tears, like the ones on the Pierrot who wouldn't let me take off his mask. He never stopped bleeding, she never stopped crying.

Now I joined in the contemplation of the Virgin. Her sculptor had given her a face of classic features, a straight nose and nicely spaced eyes, languid, half open, and a tiny, tight mouth painted to look like a ribbon. Her chin was a little prognathous, like the Infantas of Velázquez. She also had a long neck, perfect for her gorget, which was like Columbine's. At last she had found her niche. At last the cause, the background of her misery, her
des-dicha,
became clear. She opens her arms to ask mercy for her Son, and her praying hands, open, don't quite touch the object of her passion. The ring finger of her left hand is missing. Her long eyelids, like a lizard's, look at us half-closed, look at Toño and me as if we are lifeless wooden dolls. Her eyes are infinitely sad. As if they had witnessed a great unhappiness
in another time.

Toño

… The air became so filthy, the city so sprawling and remote, our destinies were fulfilled, accomplished—we were what we were, writers, journalists, bureaucrats, editors, politicians, businessmen, no longer “will be,” but “were,” back in those years, when the air was so …

Vineyard Haven,

Massachusetts

Summer 1986

The Prisoner of Las Lomas

To Valerio Adami, for a Sicilian story

 

1

As incredible as this story is, I might as well begin at the beginning and continue straight on to the end. Easy to say. The minute I get set to begin, I realize I begin with an enigma. It follows that difficulties ensue. Oh, fuck! It can't be helped: the story begins with a mystery; my hope, I swear, is that by the end you'll understand everything. That you will understand me. You'll see: I leave out nothing. But the truth is that when I entered the sickroom of Brigadier General Prisciliano Nieves on February 23, 1960, in the British hospital then located in the Avenida Mariano Escobedo (present site of the Camino Real Hotel, to orient my younger listeners), I myself had to believe in the enigma, or what I was planning would not succeed. I want to be understood. The mystery was true. (The truth was the mystery.) But if I was not myself convinced of it, I would not convince the old and astute Brigadier Nieves, not even on his sickbed.

He was, as I said, a general. You know that already. I was a young lawyer who had recently received my degree—news for you and for me. I knew everything about him. He, nothing about me. So when I found the door to his private room in the hospital ajar and pushed it open, he didn't recognize me, but neither did he draw back. Lax as security is in Mexican hospitals, there was no reason for the brigadier to be alarmed. I saw him lying there in one of those beds that are like the throne of death, a white throne, as if cleanliness were the compensation that dying offers us. His name
Nieves
means
snow,
but lying in all that bleached linen he was like a fly in milk. The brigadier was very dark, his head was shaved, his mouth a long, sourish crack, his eyes masked by two thick, livid veils. But why describe him, when he was so soon gone? You can look up his photo in the Casasola Archives.

Who knows why he was dying? I went by his house and they said to me:

—The general's bad.

—It's just he's so old.

I scarcely noticed them. The one who spoke first seemed a cook, the second a young girl servant. I made out a sort of majordomo inside the house, and there was a gardener tending the roses outside. You see: only of the gardener was I able to say definitely, that man is a gardener. The others were just one thing or another. They didn't exist for me.

But the brigadier did. Propped up in his hospital bed, surrounded by a parapet of cushions, he looked at me as he must have looked at his troops the day he singlehandedly saved the honor of his regiment, of the Northeast Corps, almost of the very Revolution, and maybe even of the country itself—why not?—in the encounter of La Zapotera, when the wild Colonel Andrés Solomillo, who confused extermination with justice, occupied the Santa Eulalia sugar mill and lined both masters and workers against its wall to face the firing squad, saying the servants were as bad as those they served.

—The one who holds the cow is as bad as the one who slaughters it.

So said Solomillo, helping himself to the possessions of the Escalona family, masters of the hacienda: quickly grabbing all the gold coins he'd found in the library, behind the complete works of Auguste Comte, he proposed to Prisciliano: —Take these, my captain, so that for once those who are as hungry as you and I may be invited to the banquet of life.

Prisciliano Nieves—the legend goes—not only refused the gold his superior offered him but, when it came time for the execution, he placed himself between the firing squad and the condemned and said to Colonel Andrés Solomillo: —The soldiers of the Revolution are neither murderers nor thieves. These poor people are guilty of nothing. Separate the poor from the rich, please.

What happened then—so the story goes—was this: the colonel, furious, told Prisciliano that if he didn't shut up he would be the second feature in the morning's firing; Prisciliano shouted to the troops not to kill other poor people; the squad hesitated; Solomillo gave the order to fire at Prisciliano; Prisciliano gave the order to fire at the colonel; and in the end the squad obeyed Prisciliano:

—Mexican soldiers do not murder the people, because they are the people, said Prisciliano beside the body of Solomillo, and the soldiers cheered him and felt satisfied.

This phrase, associated ever since with the fame, the life, and the virtues of the instantly Colonel and soon-to-be Brigadier General Don Prisciliano Nieves, surely would be engraved on the base of his monument:
THE HERO OF SANTA EULALIA
.

And now here I come, forty-five years later, to put a damper on the final glory of General Prisciliano Nieves.

—General Nieves, listen carefully. I know the truth of what happened that morning in Santa Eulalia.

The maraca that sounded in the throat of my brigadier Prisciliano Nieves was not his death rattle, not yet. In the dim light of the hospital, my middle-class lawyer's young breath smelling of Sen-Sen mixed with Don Prisciliano's ancient respiration, a drumroll scented of chloroform and
chile chipotle.
No, my general, don't die without signing here. For your honor, my general: worry no more about your honor, and rest in peace.