Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (25 page)

—You can't leave. There you are and there you will stay forever. And although she tried to hide, to take refuge in the darkest corner of the canvas, in the shadows, as if she divined the painter's repugnance, he knew, although he would never say so, that it was an empty threat, because when the canvas left his studio and was seen by other eyes, those eyes would free Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, whom he had captured, from the canvas, and they would give her liberty, releasing her from the prison of the canvas to imprison them, to sleep with those who avidly eyed her, fainting
à son plaisir,
wrapped in the arms of one after another, never directing even a smile toward her true creator, the painter who held his brush suspended in the air, who looked at the actress's empty face and decided not to add features, to leave it in suspense, in ellipsis, and in the actress's stylized hand, raised in a gesture of exiting a stage, he quickly drew a chain, and at the end of the chain he attached a hideous ape with human eyes and a shaved rump, masturbating merrily.

Turning back to the second canvas, he really wanted to stick his brush like a banderilla in the bullfighter's heart, but an unwanted feeling of respect again possessed him (deaf man, deaf man, the waifs cried at him from the wall, as if he could hear them, or they, fools, imagined that they could be heard) and he began to fill in the face with Pedro Romero's noble features, the firm jaw, the elegant, taut cheeks, the small pressed mouth with its slight irregularity, the virile emerging beard, the perfectly straight nose, the fine, separated eyebrows, worthy physical base of a forehead as clear as an Andalusian sky, barely ruffled by a hint of
widow's peak,
as Wellington's elegant officers called the point formed by the hair in the middle of the forehead, which was besieged by the first gray hairs of his fourth decade. Don Francisco was about to give the bullfighter some of his own, all the way down his forehead, and call the painting
The Man with Streaked Hair,
something like that, but that would have meant sacrificing the center of his particular orbit of beauty, the famous eyes, full of competence, serenity, and tenderness, which were the source of Pedro Romero's humanity, and that was sacred, the artist could not joke about it, and all his rancor, his jealousy, his resentment, his malice, even his cleverness (which he was always forgiven) was subjected to a sentiment, weakly traced by the restless brush, not a banderilla, barely a quill, a full caress, a complete embrace that told the model: You are not just what I would like to see in you, to admire or injure you, to portray or caricature you, you are more than I saw in you, and my canvas will be a great canvas, Romero, only if I explore the one thing I'm sure of, which is that you are more than my compassion or judgment of you at this moment; I see you as you are now but I know what you were before and you will continue to be, I see only one side of you, not all four sides, because painting is the art of a single moment's frontal perspective, not a discursive and lineal art, and I lack your genius, Romero, for peril, I can't paint your face and your body, Romero, as you fight a bull, in three dimensions, from four sides, subsuming every one of the angles of both you and the bull, and all the lights in which they are bathed. And as I can't and don't dare do that, I give you this image of your nobility, which is the only one that shows that you are more than the figure painted by your humble and invidious servant Lucifer lusts for lights, Lucientes, Francisco de Goya y.

She huddled on the canvas, naked, faceless, with a horrid chained ape. He hastily painted a butterfly covering her sex, like the ribbons that adorned her hair.

Outside, the urchins cried,
Deaf man, deaf man, deaf man.

And in the whirlwind of sudden nightfall, hundreds of other women, laughing at the artist, preparing their revenge through the pain of the man seduced and abandoned—and what about them? When had they been treated with truth and care? They who dealt to sinners their just deserts—and as he sleeps, his head planted amid the papers and brushes on his worktable, they, the women of the night, fly about his sleeping head, dragging with them other papers with notices so new that they seem old,
There is plenty to suck,
reads one, and
Until death,
says another, and
Of what illness will he die,
asks a third, and all together,
God forgive you,
swathed in their veils, harnessed by mothers preparing to sell them, fanning themselves, rubbing themselves with oil, embalming themselves alive with unguents and powders, straddling brooms, rising in flight, hanging like bats in the corners of churches, carried on winds of dust and garbage, fanning, flying, uncovering tombs, looking for you, Francisco, and casting a final cackle at your face, dreaming and dead, both dead and dreaming.

—But I am the only one who can show the bullfighter and the actress in their true garb. Only I can give them heads. Afterwards, do with me what you will.

—May God forgive you!

4

—Never marry or begin a journey on Tuesday, an old woman sitting in a corner of the main square told Rubén Oliva as he passed, so discomposed and hurried that only a witch like her—shrouded in a newspaper but with a coquettish little hat made from the front page of
El País
on her grotesque head, to protect her from the midday August sun—could know that the man was going far away, even though it was Tuesday, the dangerous day, the day of naked war, hidden war, war of the soul, on the stage, in the rings, in the shops:
Martes,
Mars' day, the god of war's day, the day of dying, vying, plying, and crying, said a bitch half buried under the garbage in the plaza.

Wednesday

Rubén Oliva raised the open envelope to his lips and was about to lick the gummed border when he was halted by two hardly surprising occurrences. The desk clerk watched him preparing the envelope, writing the name and address, as if Rubén Oliva hadn't the right to such whims, which only added, he seemed to be thinking, to the staff's work load; doesn't the guest, who is as rude as he is foolish, realize that his epistolary follies could not possibly interest anyone and, besides that, interrupted other activities, activities that are truly indispensable to the smooth operation of the hotel: for example, his lively phone conversations with his sweetheart, which required the lines for two hours at a time, or the games he played on that same telephone, refusing to give his name, or giving the concierge's name instead of his own as head desk clerk, or using the slightest pretext to interrupt the examination of accounts and urgent papers, while the telephones rang and the guests waited patiently before the counter, letters pressed to their tongues.

Rubén Oliva didn't have time to insist on his rights before—the second occurrence—an English gentleman with tight lips, watery eyes, and hair like sand, his ruddy nose trembling, paralyzed all circumstantial activity with one slap of his hand on the reception counter, followed by this question of surpassing importance: Why is there no soap in my bath? The desk clerk considered this question for a moment with feigned interest before haughtily responding: Because there is no soap in any of the bathrooms (don't imagine yourself an exception, please!). But the obstinate Englishman insisted: Very well, then, why isn't there soap in any of the baths? And the desk clerk said with marked scorn, seeking approval from the onlookers: Because in Spain we let everyone smell just as he likes.

—I have to go out and buy my own soap?

—No, Mr. Newton. We would be delighted to send the bellboy out for it. Oh, Manuelito, this gentleman is going to tell you what kind of soap he prefers.

—Don't be so pleased with yourself—said Newton—reception desks are the very image of purgatory, not only here, but all over the world.

He invited Rubén Oliva to join him for a glass in the bar to settle his nerves and because, as he said, drinking alone is like masturbating in the bath. A bath, he added, without soap, that is. Rubén Oliva sat with the Englishman, whose manner was peevish, nervous, and ill at ease, but who concentrated on not showing any emotion, through the supernatural control of his stiff upper lip. And not only that, he said, searching unsuccessfully for something in the pockets of his beige poplin suit, which was wrinkled and loose, commodious, yet failing to yield what Mr. Newton searched for so assiduously, while Rubén Oliva watched him with a smile and waited to drink a toast with him, his glass of Jerez slightly raised in cordial expectation, while Newton desperately groped, without saying what he was looking for—mirror, pipe, cigarettes, ballpoint pen?—all the while condemning the age, cold, and dampness of this hotel, which seemed unreal in a country where it was impossible to escape the sun and heat, even in the shadows, whereas in his country, where one strove for light and warmth, you had to endure … He got lost in an endless round of complaints, groping nervously, his upper lip as stiff as ever, and Rubén Oliva stopped waiting for him and drank a sip and thought of repeating to the old, out-of-sorts Englishman what he had just written to Rocío in the unsealed letter he carried in the pocket of his white shirt: it was true, you were right, love, returning to the village is returning to an endless sleep, a long siesta, an eternal midday that he refused to escape on his return, not seeking refuge from the sun at its zenith, as was the custom.

He remembered that as a child, right here in the towns of Andalusia, he knew one thing, which was that in the heat of the day the towns were emptied of people; Rubén, the town is yours, the people hide in the cool shadows and sleep while you, Rubén, walk along the narrow streets that are your only defense against the sun, seeing how they protect you from the blaze, and you dream of returning to them someday, at two in the afternoon, with a beautiful foreigner, teaching her how to use the labyrinth of shadows to avoid the sun; Rubén, don't hide from it, acknowledge it and defy it and even adore it, because you have a holy trinity in your soul where God the father is the sun, his crucified son is the shadow, and the holy spirit is the night, dissolving the troubles and joys of the past day and mounting forces for the next: today is Wednesday, said the Englishman, who had finally found a harmonica in the back pocket of his pants and, holding the instrument in his hands, got ready to raise it to his lips, and after announcing that Wednesday was Woden's day, a day of commerce and robbery, so that it was not surprising that he found himself in this den of thieves, he began to play the old ballad of “Narcissus come kiss us,” while Rubén Oliva regarded him with an understanding smile and would have liked to tell him that his complaints didn't matter, he accepted them with good humor, but the Englishman must know that he, Rubén Oliva, was revisiting his hometown, or a town like his, which was much the same, and for him—whether it was Tuesday, day of war, or Wednesday, day of commerce, or Friday, Venus's day—all the days, except one, were waiting days, holy days because, like the Mass, they repeated an eternal rhythm—the same morning, noon, and night, winter, spring, and summer, as certain as the continuity of life, and the stages of that daily ceremony were repeated also in Rubén Oliva's soul, as he would have liked to explain to the Englishman who resisted the pain of Spain with a harmonica and a barroom tune: they were identical yet distinct rhythms; as if Rubén, in some mysterious way that he hardly dared attempt to put into words, were always the exception that could arrest and express the forces of nature that surrounded him at birth and would continue to surround him one day when he would die but the world would not.

Therefore, he returned to his village when things had turned sour for him, when things became incomprehensible, exhausting, or nebulously dangerous; he returned as if to reassure himself that it was all still there, in its place, and consequently that the world was at peace; and he always arrived at daybreak, not to miss a single testimony of the land: Rubén Oliva returned to Andalusia, as today, traveling in the middle of the fleeing night, anxious to come near, to see from the windows of the blazing train the first glimmers of dawn, when the Andalusian fields became a blue sea under the starry morning sky, a blue field of light, a field of azure that appeared on waking, first and fleetingly, as an illusion of ocean depths and only gradually, in the growing light of day, acquired a third and unfolding dimension, always still, yet ever changing in the light that woke it to increasingly beautiful and variable forms.

First, from his village's hillside, Rubén Oliva would discover that geometry of graceful inclination formed by the distant ridge and the valley that lay between: all day the ridge would remain hazy, spectral, as if it held for all the world, like a treasure, the blue of night, which elsewhere was freed by the dawn from its gauzy veil; the ridge remained a veiled night, the valley an open abyss, terrible as the claws of a devouring Saturn, and between the hills and the gorge unfolded a rolling geometry, always gradual, never precipitous; each decline, offering its accompanying curve of ascent to the light, had its own pattern of silvery olives and patches of sunflowers gathered like yellow flocks. At the height of day the sun would blank it all out, but the afternoon, Rubén knew, would restore all the variety of light, reflecting first the sunflowers, which were a group of captured planets; then the silver of the olives like threads being spun for Holy Week; and finally a spectacular bath of mustard, ocher, and sepia, depending on the afternoon light, while the white town fought to maintain an eternal midday in the face of their colors. Rubén Oliva had wanted to tell the Englishman that the whiteness of the walls was a necessity, not a vanity: it was because of the age of these towns, through which all races had passed, forcing them to whitewash the walls every year or die away: only the lime preserved those bones worn out by the battles of time.

Rubén Oliva had wanted to explain something else to the Englishman, that his love for his land's setting and for the landscape of the town itself brought both joy and sadness: joy because they grew along with him, sadness because someday they would remain there without him, he would not see them anymore. For Rubén, this sentiment was the most important, the most insistent of all, present in him, in his body and mind, whenever he observed the landscape or loved a woman, or, loving the world and a woman, wasn't sure whether keeping them alive or killing them would gain him victory. Would that be a crime or a tribute? Who best to kill, the woman or the bull, he or death itself?
What's that? What are you talking about? Why do you always mutter everything between your teeth, you want me to believe I'm going deaf? Ah, now look, I've cut myself opening this can! Stop distracting me, Rubén, or you won't get dinner!