Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Read Online Free PDF Page A

deep-set eyes, mole, her hair loose—I kept her silver hairpins in my jacket pocket—and I told myself that I would have to be admitted for her, with her, in her. But her look—which I followed—was still not for me; it was for the Virgin, the votive candle, the window.
    Since I couldn’t leave her, I couldn’t resolve one of the more important questions. Her apparent death, in my arms, for several seconds, displaced the other question: Had Mr. Plotnikov died? I didn’t notice any further activity at his house, but that was not unusual. I never had noticed anything about that unremarkable house, except the night the lights blazed and then went out, all at once in each case. Normally, nothing happened at the house across from ours. It might as well have been vacant. The newspaper was delivered each morning as usual, but there was no mention in it of Plotnikov’s death. Perhaps he had requested that. If he had died, who would attend his wake? I supposed that the Russian actor would keep beside him an icon of the Virgin, fashioned from hammered silver, in which the reality of the metal itself would be more vivid than that of the faint, distant figure of the smiling Virgin, pale ocher, with the Child in her arms, both looking at the faithful old man from the eternal background of orthodox religion, which refuses to come down and tread the earth. Who would bury him?
    I cast a quick look at our Virgin, by Constancia’s bed, the Andalusian madonna, Virgin of bullfighters, processions, tricks, outrageous blasphemies, gypsy dances, ardent bodies. The Russian Virgin never said anything, anywhere; the Andalusian Virgin shouted, here, now. Constancia always said: Andalusia: water, source, and reflection. Alhambra …
    She knew how to speak beautifully, gracefully, with passion and tenderness, but now, in her trance, I set aside our discussions and considered matters on my own account. Her conversation had kept from me many thoughts, which were rendered insubstantial so that they floated away from me like so many little birds, the barest of possibilities in place of the certainties that pin us down. So now one thought weighed on me heavily, horribly, through my long vigil, again and again, despite my conscious and unconscious denials:
    Constancia, tell me, please, how many times have you died before?
    8
    (I sound like the survivor of some catastrophe. It’s not true. Constancia and I are alive, the heat is intense, soporific, I’m sixty-nine, Constancia sixty-one, and now we’re both shut up inside a shuttered room. She is better than I am at beating the heat of these dog days. Can you overcome the heat by showering your floor with wood shavings, like those Constancia has strewn around her bed and priedieu?)
    I don’t know how much of what she says without looking at me, as if I weren’t present, during the long week of her recuperation, is a response to my question: —Constancia, tell me, how many times have you died…?
    I don’t know, I repeat, because I don’t even know if she is talking to me. She says (not to me, she simply speaks) that she only gives voice to dreams and prayers. Of that I haven’t the slightest doubt. She will announce: Last night I dreamed that …; or sometimes she will even say: —I am dreaming that …; and sometimes she will unsettle me by announcing: —I am going to dream that …
    She dreams that: She was a mannequin in a shop. Two wild young men, perhaps students, stole her from her window and took her to live in their studio. They threw dinner parties in her honor. Nobody knew if she, Constancia, was dead or alive, neither the jokesters nor the targets of their prank. The students fell in love with her, argued over her, but in the end destroyed her: or perhaps (the dream is ambiguous) abandoned her to save their masculine friendship. But she triumphed, Madre Ana, madre mía (delirious, she calls this