Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Viva Mi Fama

Sunday

What he would particularly remember about that Sunday was the quiet tedium. Lying on the sofa in T-shirt and briefs to beat the unbearable heat, but wearing his socks out of a sense of decorum even he could not explain, he leaned his head against his raised arms and clenched fists, watching the frozen, repeating image of the black bull in an Osborne brandy ad on the television screen: why should that seductive yet bestial image linger there, inviting us to consume an alcoholic drink, perhaps threatening us — will we be killed, gored by that mercantile bull, if we reject his command: Drink me? Rubén Oliva was about to pose that question to his wife when the voice of the announcer praising the bull’s brandy became smothered by the smells of other, louder voices wafting in from the street, from neighboring balconies and from distant open windows. He heard them as smells because those voices — bits of soap-opera dialogue, commercials like the one he was watching, children’s squeals, domestic squabbles — reached him with the same mixture of faintness and force, immediate yet immediately dissipated, as the kitchen smells that circulated through that lower-class neighborhood. He shook his head; he didn’t distinguish between a newborn’s wail and a whiff of stew. He put his hands back over his eyes and rubbed them, as if his hands could scour out the shadows under his intense green eyes, lost in cavernous depths of dark skin. Surely those eyes shone more brightly because they were ringed by such darkness. They were lively but serene eyes, resigned, always alert, though without illusions that anything could be done with the day’s news. To wake, to sleep, to wake again. He looked back at the television screen, the figure of the bull at once dark and clear, heavy and light, a pasteboard bull that was also flesh and blood, ready to attack if he, Rubén Oliva, didn’t obey the command: Drink!

He got up with a wince, but easily; he wasn’t heavy, he never had to make an effort to stay slim. A doctor had said to him: —It’s heredity, Rubén, you can thank your metabolism. — Centuries of hunger, you mean, he had answered.

He worried sometimes about turning forty within the year, developing a paunch; but no, skinny he was born and skinny he would die. He smiled and, smelling beans cooking in oil, went to the balcony to watch the kids running along Calle Jesús Fucar like him dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals with socks, repeating until everyone was sick of it the tired old comic ditty about the days of the week: “Monday one, Tuesday two, Wednesday three, Thursday four, Friday five, Saturday six,” they sang all together, and then a single voice, “and Sunday seven!” The others laughed and they began another round of the week, ending with another lone voice crying out the “Sunday seven!” business, and the others laughing again. But Sunday would come in turn to each, muttered Rubén Oliva from his balcony, his elbows resting on the iron balustrade, the taunts and the jests divided equally, and then he stopped talking, because talking to yourself was the mania of a deaf man or a madman and he wasn’t even alone, which would have been a third excuse for such a monologue.

The voices, the various emissions, were silenced then by a sudden wind, a summer gust that picked up worn-out dust and discarded papers, whirling and swirling them along the narrow, boxed-in street, forcing Oliva to close the window and the voice from the kitchen to scream at him: —What are you doing? Can’t you help me in the kitchen? Don’t you know it isn’t good to fix a meal when you’re menstruating? Are you going to help me, or would you rather have poisoned soup?

Rubén Oliva had forgotten she was there.

— You can fix dinner, Rubén called back, what you can’t do is water the plants. That is true, you could kill the plants if you water them when you are unwell. That is true, Rocío, yes.

He lay back down on the sofa, raising his arms and resting his head on the joined fingers of his open hands. He closed his eyes as he had closed the window, but in such intense heat the sweat dripped from his forehead, neck, and armpits. The heat from the kitchen added to that of the living room, but Rubén Oliva remained there, with his eyes shut, incapable of getting up and reopening the window that let in the little noises and fading smells of a Sunday afternoon in Madrid, when the unexpected breeze died away and they were shut inside the little four-room flat — living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen — he and his wife, Rocío, who was menstruating and fixing supper.

And yelling from the kitchen, always complaining, why was he so shiftless, idling there instead of going out to work, others worked on Sunday, he always used to, things were getting so bad for them now that he wasn’t working on Sundays, she could see she was going to have to support the household soon if they didn’t want to live like beggars, just look at them stuck in this pigsty, and in the middle of August, when everyone else had gone to the beach, can you tell me why, listen to me, if you go on this way I’m going to look for work myself, and the way things are, with all the nudity these days, I’ll probably end up posing naked for some magazine, that’s the kind of thing I’ll have to do, why don’t you answer me, you don’t even show me that basic courtesy anymore; yes, said Rubén Oliva, his eyes closed and his mouth shut, like a deaf man or a madman, not even that, just to imagine myself sleeping, imagine myself dreaming, imagine myself dead, or, best of all, as a dead man who is dreaming that he’s alive. That would be perfect, instead of having to listen to Rocío’s complaints from the kitchen; she seemed to read his mind, cutting him with her recriminations: why didn’t he go out, do something, she laughed bitterly, Sundays used to be festive days, unforgettable days, what had happened to him, why was he afraid now, why didn’t he go out and kill, show his courage, yelled Rocío, invisible in the kitchen, almost inaudible as she poured the sputtering oil out of the frying pan, why don’t you fight anymore, why don’t you go out and follow someone, why don’t you pursue glory, fame? So she argued, just so she, by God and His most Holy Mother, could leave Madrid and spend the summer by the sea.

She gave a cry of pain, but he didn’t stop to ask what had happened and she didn’t come into the living room but contented herself with screaming at him that she had cut a finger opening a tin of sardines, she took more risk, taunted Rocío, opening a tin than he, forever lying on the sofa, in his shorts — with the paper open on his belly and a black bull looking at him from the little screen, recriminating him for his idleness — such a sluggard she had married, and nearly forty, things would only get worse since, as her grandfather used to say, from forty on, no man should get his belly wet, and she had loved him because he was brave, handsome, and young, because he was courageous, and he killed, and …

Rubén no longer heard her. He smelled her and felt like killing her, but how can you kill the moon, for that was what she was for him, not the sun of his life but, yes, a familiar moon that appeared every night without fail; and although its light was cool, its appearance excited him; and although its sands were sterile, they seemed fertile since its hypnotic movements moved the tides, marked the dates, governed the calendar, and drained the garbage from the world …

He got up suddenly, put on his shirt and pants and shoes, while she kept on talking from the kitchen, and the children kept repeating over and over the ditty about “Sunday seven!” and as he dressed he only wanted the day to end, the slow and tedious day with its bits of soap operas and scraps of kitchen chatter, snatches of childish rounds and bits of old newspapers, traces of dust and traces of blood; he looked out the window — the waning moon appeared suddenly in the night sky, the moon was always a woman, always a goddess, never a god, unless it was a Spanish saint: San Lunes, Saint Monday, tomorrow, the day of leisure, of old men as lazy as he was (as Rocío would be going on without letup, invisible, bleeding, cut by the open tin, in the kitchen), and Rubén Oliva decided that he would let her go on talking forever, he didn’t even grab a bag or anything, he would leave quickly, before the night ended, when Sunday had passed, he would leave Madrid at the first tolling of San Lunes, go far away from the immortal tedium of Rocío, the filthy moon who was his wife, and the black bull, forever immobile, frozen on the television screen, watching him.

Monday

He hurried down Calle Ave María to Atocha and turned back to lose himself in the side streets of Los Desamparados, quickly passing the markets and taverns and tobacco shops, fleeing that confinement, walking down the middle of the street in the August heat, until he came to the fountain of Neptune, source of the invisible waters of La Castellana, and everyone was there, and freedom was there too, and Rubén Oliva — skinny and slick, with his white shirt and black pants, his green eyes and the dark shadows under his eyes — joined the endless summer nighttime stroll, the human river that runs from the Prado to the Columbus monument; Rubén Oliva lost himself for a moment in that sea of people moving without haste but without hesitation, from terrace to terrace, seldom stopping, choosing to see or be seen, beneath neon lights or other times under a single dangling bulb, the crowd lingering on elegant decks with chrome-and-steel furniture or stopping at movable stands covered with circus-like tents: seeing or being seen, the ones sitting in folding chairs watching and being watched by the passing multitude, which in turn observed those who watched and were watched by them; Rubén Oliva had the sudden feeling that he had returned to the Andalusian towns where he had grown up, where the night life of summer took place in the streets, in front of the houses, yet close to the doors, as if everyone were ready to run inside and hide as soon as the first thunderclap or gunshot broke up the peaceful nocturnal gathering of villagers sitting on seats of straw; then the memory of the people and their poverty was driven away by the present scene: Rubén Oliva, surrounded this August night by thousands of people, by boys and girls fifteen to twenty-five young Madrid men and women who were thin like him, but not from generations of hunger or the disasters of war, no, they were thin by choice, from aerobics, strict diets, even anorexia; there was no other place in Spain — said the deaf man, the madman the solitary man — where you could see such fine boys’ and girls’ faces, such willowy figures and such graceful walks, such fashionable summer clothes, such studied haughtiness, such penetrating gazes, such tantalizing flirtations, and yet Rubén Oliva kept scanning these faces for something he could recognize from places completely foreign to these Spanish youths of August — from poor hamlets, miserable towns, villages where boys first fought bulls in the dust by the stables, boys not unlike the stray dogs, the calves, or the roosters they imitated; brushing against these golden youths on that San Lunes dawn, Rubén Oliva saw in new guises the same poses of honor, the tremulous cool, and the disdain of death that is born of the conviction that in Spain, the country of delay, not even death is punctual; all this he saw where it shouldn’t have been, in the half-open lips of a girl bronzed by the sun, her peach skin contrasting with the brightness of her eyes; in the matador look of a tight-assed boy who held the waist of a bare-shouldered girl with silver specks between her braless, bouncing breasts; in the bare, smooth, lazily crossed legs of a girl sitting before an iced coffee or in the infinitely absent look of a boy on whose face a full beard had sprouted at fifteen, abruptly killing off the cherub who still survived in his eyes: it was a way they had of holding a glass, of lighting a cigarette, of crossing their legs, of placing their hands on their sides, of seeing without looking or being seen, becoming invisible to those who looked at them, and saying: I may not live long but I am immortal; or, rather, I’m never going to die, but don’t expect to see me again after tonight; or See in me only what I show you tonight because I don’t give you permission to see anything more; so said the moving bodies, the restless eyes, the laughter of some and the silence of others, prolonging the night before returning to their elegant middle-class homes and standing before their fathers, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the bankers, the notaries, the real estate agents, the tour directors, the hotelkeepers … to ask for money for the next night, money for shopping at Serrano, treating themselves to the indispensable blouse, trying out the shoes without which … It was the village gathering, only now with Benetton and Saint Laurent logos; it was the romantic stroll through the plazas of past years, the boys in one direction, the girls in the other, measuring each other for engagement, marriage, procreation, and death the way a mortician measures the bodies of the clients who one day, inevitably, will visit him and occupy his deluxe coffins. Luxury, lust of death that robs us of the past; but in this Madrid stroll the boys and the girls were not going in opposite directions — they couldn’t, because it was hard to tell them apart; Rubén Oliva, thirty-nine years old, unemployed (for the moment), fed up with his wife, victim of a tedious Sunday, was glad that, even though it was still night, San Lunes had arrived; he was not so different, physically, from the golden youths of Madrid: like them, like almost all Spanish gallants, he had an androgynous quality; but now the good-looking girls had that quality, too — they had more of the moon ways of Mondays than of the mercurial ways of Wednesdays; they were Tuesday’s martial Amazons, yet Friday remained their Venus day—lunes, miércoles, martes, viernes: they were still celestial goddesses, but in a new way for a new day, a way different from the tradition set by their stout, pallid, veiled, doughy, thick-ankled, heavy-hipped predecessors; Rubén Oliva amused himself, as he studied the slow nocturnal stroll, by picking out the boys who appeared to be girls, the women who resembled men, and he felt a sudden vertigo; the march of pleasure and extravagance and ostentation of a rich, European, progressive Spain, where everyone, however grudgingly, paid his taxes and could go to the beach in August, not wanting to be judged, not anymore, or classified so simply by gender, masculine/feminine, no, not now, now even sex was as fluctuating as the sea, which came closer to Madrid in August, because there was nothing the city denied itself, not even the sea, which it brought there through the secret power of the moon, converting Madrid, at daybreak on Monday, San Lunes’s day, into a summer beach of seas and undercurrents and daily menstruations, sewers and purified water.

— Madrid denies itself nothing, said the woman who paused beside him, watching the spectacle, and only her voice told Rubén Oliva that she was a woman, not one of these girls who resembled Tuesday’s warriors more than they did the mercurial girls of Wednesdays; Rubén could not make her out very well because there was a bank of Osborne brandy lights in the terrace where they were standing, and the black bull and the fluorescent glow blinded him and also her, the woman who first appeared as a blaze of light, blind or blinding, seen or seeing, who could tell which …

— I think we’re the only ones here over thirty. The woman smiled, blinded by the light, by the bull, by Rubén Oliva’s own invisibility in that crowd: he could see the sign of the bull more clearly than he could see the woman who was talking to him.

— I can’t see you very well, said Rubén Oliva, lightly touching the woman’s shoulder, as if to move her into the light so that he could see her better, though he realized that this invisible light, this dazzling darkness, was the best light for …

— It doesn’t matter how I look, or what my name is. Don’t take the mystery out of our meeting.

He said she was right, but could she see him?

— Of course — the woman laughed — how do you think you and I have met in the middle of this youthful throng; they used to say never trust anyone over thirty; here, that’s still true.

— Maybe it always will be, for the young. At fifteen, would you trust an old man of forty … well, of thirty-nine? The man laughed.

— I’m willing to imagine that on this entire avenue there are only two people, a man and a woman, over thirty. She smiled.

Rubén Oliva said it seemed a marriage made in heaven, and she replied, in a country where for centuries people had no choice about their own marriages, where they had to obey their fathers’ arrangements, that one could experience the chance, the adventure the excitement of a casual encounter, and decide to prolong it voluntarily, to decide, man, to decide, that was truly a blessing, a wonderful thing indeed …

He couldn’t get a look at her. Each movement, hers, his, hers responding to his, his leg moving forward as if by chance to change her direction, as if making her accept the bullfighter’s will, joined the play of lights — dangling bulbs, neon constellations, errant cars like caravans in the desert, lights of the sea of Madrid, electric sunflowers of night, moonflowers of the city’s eternal undercurrent — Rubén Oliva felt unable to direct, to curb the turns of the woman, to make her yield, to snatch her image from the perpetual flight: what was she like? and she, had she seen him, did she know what he was like?

Hours later, at daybreak, in a loft on Calle Juanelo, their arms around each other in her bed, she asked him if he had not been afraid of her sexual aggression, that she was a prostitute or carried the new plagues of the dying century, and he answered no, she should realize that a man like him took life as it came; true, there were diseases less than deadly, but the only true disease, after all, was death and who could avoid that? and if nobody avoided it, then it was better to face it over and over, by choice. He explained that right away, so she would understand with whom she lay, that the worst thing the world could do to him was no worse than what he could do to himself; for example, if she gave him a fatal disease he could hasten his death, not in the cowardice of suicide, nothing like that, but by giving himself fully to his art, to a profession that justified death at any moment, welcomed and honored it: to die with honor he simply had to do his daily work, and you couldn’t say that about the lawyers, doctors, and businessmen who were the young people’s parents, and whom the young people would inevitably turn into someday — no longer slender, no longer luminous, no longer hermaphroditic, definitively fathers or mothers, potbellied and gray, for sure!

— And you weren’t curious, you never wanted to look at me before sleeping with me?

He shrugged and replied as before, it’s like looking the bull in the face, that’s the most important thing in the ring, never to lose sight of the bull’s face, but at the same time not to lose sight of the public, your cuadrilla, your rivals who are watching you, in fact, not to lose sight even of the water boy, like Gallito did once in Seville — he had to quiet the water boy when he realized his cries were distracting the bull: you have to be aware of everything, sweetheart, can I call you that? Call me what you like, call me whore, actress, consumptive, performer, call me whatever you want, but show me again what you’ve got.

He did, and distractedly registered the spare furniture in the room, almost nothing but a bed, a chest of drawers by its side, cool candles on it, cold tile floor, fresh curtains blocking out the daylight, an old-fashioned washbasin, a chamber pot his fingers touched under the bed, and dominating everything a great ornate armoire, the only luxury in the room — he looked in vain for an electric light, an outlet, a telephone; he was mixed up, then he thought he understood: he had confused luxury with novelty, with modern comfort, but was it really the same thing? Nothing was modern in this room, and the armoire with its two doors was adorned with a crest of vines, cherubs, and broken columns.

Before sleeping again in each other’s arms, he wanted to tell her what he had thought, separated from Rocío in the apartment they shared, something that Rocío didn’t understand perhaps, and perhaps not this woman either, but with her it was worth it, worth the risk of not being understood: when we die, we lose the past, that’s what we lose, not the future, as he told her …

At midday Monday, on waking again, Rubén Oliva and his lover abandoned themselves to the day, convinced that the day belonged to them, without interruption, rejoicing in their chance encounter on the nocturnal terraces of Madrid. (How many of the young people consummated a marriage of the night as they had, how many only celebrated the nuptials of the spectacle: to show oneself, see, be seen, not touch…?) They confessed that they could hardly see each other in the shifting light of the terraces, she felt the attraction, perhaps because it was Monday, moon day, day of tides, decisive dates, violent currents, overpowering attractions and impulses, she was drawn to him as though magnetized, and he couldn’t see her clearly in the whirlwind of artificial light and shade, and that is how it had to be, because she had to tell him that, now that she had seen him, he was …

He covered her mouth gently with his hand, put his lips to her ear, told the woman lying there that it didn’t matter, he confessed it wouldn’t matter to him if she was a boy, a transvestite, a whore, diseased, dying, nothing mattered to him, because what she had given him, how she had given herself to him, excited him, attracted him, made him feel that every time was the first time, that every repeated act was the beginning of a night of love, so that each time he felt as if he hadn’t done it for a year, all of that was what …

Now she covered his mouth with a hand and said: —But I did know you. I picked you because of who you were, not because you were unknown to me.

The words were hardly out of the woman’s mouth when the doors of the armoire opened with a heart-stopping thump and two powerful hands, stained, dripping colors from the fingers, threw apart the panels, and a waistcoated, frock-coated body emerged, in a linen shirt and short pants, white silk stockings and country-style shoes, clogs maybe, smeared with mud and cow dung, and this creature jumped onto the bed of love, smeared the sheets with shit and mud, wrapped its hands around the woman’s face, and, without paying the slightest attention to Rubén Oliva, smeared the face of his lover with its fingers as it had just smeared the soiled sheets, and Rubén Oliva, paralyzed with astonishment, his head planted on a pillow, unable to move, never knew if those agile, irreverent fingers erased or created, composed or disfigured, while with equal speed and art, and with incredible fury, they traced on the woman’s featureless face the deformed arc of a diabolic brow or the semblance of a smile, or if they emptied out her eye sockets, turned the fine nose that Rubén had caressed into a misshapen cabbage and erased the lips that had kissed his, that had told him, I did know you, I chose you because of who you were …

The giant — or perhaps it only appeared so because it was standing on the bed, doubling its size to destroy or create the woman’s face with its colors — panted, exhausted, and Rubén Oliva contemplated the woman, her face besmeared, made and unmade, covered by the two floods of flowing tears and a veil of hair; and watching the raging terror that had escaped from the armoire, he finally realized what he had known from the moment he had seen it appear — but what he couldn’t believe until, little by little, sweating, he began to overcome his panic: this man, atop his body and clothes and shoes and stooped shoulders, had no head.

Tuesday

1

Imagine three spaces, said the headless giant then, three perfect circles that must never touch, three orbs, each circulating in its independent trajectory, with its own reason for being and its own court of satellites: three incomparable and self-sufficient worlds. So, perhaps, are the worlds of the gods. Ours, shamefully, are imperfect. The spheres meet, repel one another, penetrate each other, fertilize, vie against, and kill each other. The circle is not perfect because it is pierced by the tangent or the chord. But imagine only those three spaces: each in its own way is a dressing room, and in the first, a theatrical dressing room, a naked woman is being dressed slowly by her maids, though she isn’t talking to the servants but to her dancing monkey, with white necktie and blue-painted genitals, that swings among the mannequins, and those cloth breasts are the anticipation of the body of his mistress, who addresses her words to the monkey and to whom the monkey, as his day’s prize, addresses itself: its reward will be to jump onto the shoulder of the woman and leave with her for the stage first, to the dinners afterwards, on Sundays to a stroll on San Isidro, and at night, if he behaves well, to the foot of the bed of his mistress and her lover, to disconcert her venereal companions and amuse Elisia Rodríguez, called “La Privada,” queen of the Madrid stage, who can keep her acting glory alive in only one way: each night, before going onstage, she talks to the ape, who is dressed up and secretly bedaubed (for the spectators’ laughter, the families’ scandal, and her lovers’ discomfort: the blue prop noticeable only on certain occasions), and tells him who she is, where she came from, in order to appreciate her own success all the more for having risen from below, as she had, from so godforsaken a town that more than once the princes of the royal house had gone there to marry, because the law decreed that the place where the princes contracted matrimony would remain exempt from paying taxes forever, so they had to go to a place as dirt-poor as that, so its release from taxation would not matter to the Crown — though it did to the princes forced to marry in the ruined church, with crows flying past constantly, and bats too, except when it was daytime and they were asleep, hanging from the corners like shards of sleeping shit, like the shit of the unpaved streets, into which the finest shoes and the shiniest boots sink, where the wagons get stuck, at the mercy of the shoulders of the local studs who, to demonstrate their manhood, would rescue them, at times with their giddy duchesses, rocking amid the smell of sweat, onions, and excrement, and the processions were trailed and swelled by stray dogs and clouds of flies, and flanked by phalanxes of cockroaches in the corners of rude eateries (first let me see myself naked in the mirror, ape, and admit you’ve never seen anything more perfect than this hourglass of silky white skin whose uniformity — you have to season the dish — is barely interrupted by what is revealed at the tip of the tits, the navel, below the arms if I choose to raise them and between the legs if I don’t care to close them), and if that was how the weddings of the princes were, then women like me had betrothals that were long and unbroken: no girl had the right, you hear me, ape? to have a second suitor: you married your first and only one, chosen by your parents, after waiting five years, to make sure of the good intentions and the chastity of all.

— What are you laughing at, you old farts, Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, said then, slapping the shoulders of her maids with feigned annoyance — one, two, three, four — with the end of her fan, although the servants, all of them Mexican, were of stoic cast and were neither frightened nor insulted by their whimsical mistress. If La Privada said to Rufina from Veracruz or Guadalupe from Orizaba, see how high a girl from a town exempted from taxes can climb, the servants, who perhaps were descended from Totonac and Olmec princes, were grateful to have arrived there to lace up the most celebrated performer in Spain, instead of being branded like cattle or lashed like dogs in the colonial haciendas.

If they felt any sorrow (Rufina from Veracruz and Guadalupe from Orizaba, already mentioned, plus Lupe Segunda from Puebla and Petra from Tlaxcala), Elisia Rodríguez did not, as she looked at herself, first naked, then with a single ornament, the fan in her hand, and now they were going to put on her rings — naked, fan, rings, she grew excited on seeing herself in the mirror — and still talking to the ape, never to the Mexicans, who pretended not to hear, she told how she was seduced after the royal wedding by a young Jesuit traveling with the court to chronicle the events, and how the lettered youth, to gain absolution for his sins, concupiscence, and the pregnancy announced by Elisia, had taken her to Barcelona, promised to teach her to read works of theater and poetry, and married her to his uncle, an importer of Cuban goods, an old man undaunted by the institution of chichisveo, which authorized the ménage à trois with the consent of the old husband, who showed off his young wife in public but privately freed her from sexual obligations, granting them to the young man, though with certain conditions, such as his right to watch them, Elisia and the nephew, making love, secretly, naturally, the old man wanted to behave decently, and if they knew he was watching them without their seeing him, perhaps that would excite them even more.

It happened, however, related Elisia, that in a little while the husband began to be annoyed that the beneficiary of the institution was his nephew, and he began to add to his complaints that it didn’t bother him so much that he was his nephew as that he was a priest. Elisia, hearing these retractions, began to believe that her husband desired her, and even began to wonder if he could satisfy her female desires. What made her decide to follow the advice of her husband—“Be mine and mine alone, Elisia”—is that she was annoyed by the contrast between the Jesuit’s flattery of the powerful and his contempt for the weak, which he showed so often that she considered it the true norm of conduct not only of her lover but of the entire Company of Jesus, whereas rich and poor, powerful and weak were treated alike by her husband, a good, honest man. Elisia’s husband said simply that in business one saw the rise and fall of fortunes: the poor of today could be the rich of tomorrow, and vice versa. But then the old man would quickly repeat his formal argument that he was dissolving the agreement of chichisveo because the young man was a priest, not because he was his nephew: nothing demanded respect but religion, he again advised Elisia.

— Religion and, he added quickly, commerce.

And the theater? Elisia, after a few months of his amorous admonishments, decided that there was a lover more varied, neither too permanent nor too fleeting, less faithful perhaps but also less demanding than any individual, momentarily more intense if temporally less enduring. In other words, Elisia wanted the public for her lover, not a naïve seminarian; she wanted the spectators as her beloved, not the writers of plays, and her husband consented to these thousands of lovers, relieved that his precious Elisia, from that forsaken, flea-ridden town that paid no taxes, preferred this form of chichisveo to the other, more traditional kind.

He got her singing teachers and dance masters, he got her speech and voice instructors, he got her as much work as he could find, from religious roles to profane comedies, but Elisia’s wisdom surpassed their teachings (her maids covered her charms with a bodice and for a minute Elisia was dissatisfied, but then she remembered that there were men who had loved her more for her bodice than for her body, she had even discovered one of them kneeling before the actress’s nightstand, kissing her intimate apparel, more excited there than in bed, he wanted to sing a hymn to the inventor of underclothing, but her earthy and practical side simply concluded that everything has its use in this world, where love is king. So her enthusiasm returned, and olé: the pregnancy that frightened the Jesuit was as much a deceit as the bustle the Mexican maids were now pinning on her). Elisia had a bloodhound’s instinct in her butterfly body, and she had arrived in Barcelona when all Spain had but two passions: the theater and the bulls, actresses and bullfighters, and the passion of passions, the rivalry among actresses, or among matadors, the disputes of one group and another, this one bedding that one (quick, it’s getting late, the white stockings, the garters, the sashes for the waist), and her husband doing his Pygmayonnaise number, and you, my Galantine, or something like that, as she said, showing off her learning before her teachers and the Jesuit nephew (the nephew-Jesuit), who gave her lessons in the dramatic arts and in the refinement of diction through recitation of verses, but she felt something different, her heart told her that the theater was the theater, not a repetition of words that nobody understood, but the occasion to display herself before an audience and make them feel that they were part of her, of her life, that they were her friends — and what is more, to reveal her greatest intimacies from the stage; and if her husband, who preferred the footlights to the chichisveo but now showed dangerous inclinations toward the conjugal bed instead of the theatrical boards, didn’t understand that, the members of the court who came to Barcelona to see Elisia did, including Princess M—, who had gotten married in Elisia’s town to spare that poor village from taxes and who imperiously demanded the presence of the entertainer, and Elisia said to tell her she wasn’t an entertainer but a tragedienne.

— Haven’t you seen the Empire styles with which Mam’selle George is dazzling Paris? And the princess said yes, she had seen them, and she wanted Elisia to wear them in Madrid, where she was urged, by royal decree, to present herself, with or without her husband, for he insisted that the best clothing was sold in the shop, and if she went so far from the Catalán port and his business in tobacco, sugar, fruit, rare woods, and all the riches of Havana, who was going to pay for his wife’s singing classes and her stiff silk bows?

In other words: her husband forbade Elisia to travel to Madrid; theaters and actresses, although his wife was one of them, were for passing the time, not for making fortunes; but Elisia went anyway, laughing at the old man, and he locked up her costumes and told her, Now show yourself naked on the stage, and she said, I am quite capable of doing so, and she went to Madrid, where the princess who had gotten married in her village presented her with a wardrobe the likes of which had never been seen before in the court at Madrid or anywhere else, for the princess raided the oldest wardrobes in the palace and found in them the forgotten Chinese garments brought to Europe by Marco Polo and the feathered Indian capes that Captain Cortés presented to the Crown after the fall of Mexico, and although Elisia said she wasn’t going to dress like a savage, the princess called her both beggar and chooser, Havanera and despot, but Elisia took the Chinese fabrics and the feathered Aztec capes and made them into Empire fantasies, until the Duchess of O—, rival of Princess M—, had copies made of all of Rodríguez’s outfits to give to her own favorite actress, Pepa de Hungría, and Elisia gave her outfits to her chambermaids so they would be dressed the same as Pepa, in rags, as Elisia announced in a song, and now no one wanted to compete with her, not La Cartuja or La Caramba, or La Tirana, or any of the other great stage sirens (quick, the gold brocade skirt, the white muslin, the taffeta and rose silk cloak), no orator or singer or dancer, just Elisia Rodríguez, ape, who was all that and more, who was the first to say to hell with written texts, who said what interests people is me, not someone embalmed two hundred years ago, and improvising texts and songs, she resolved to speak of herself, her most intimate affairs, her evolving loves, urgent as her need to feed her legend before the footlights, and while she invented something here and there, she began to feel an increasingly pressing need for real adventures, stories that the people could share, it’s true, she lay with that one, you know, ape, you were a witness, your mistress doesn’t lie, she spent the night in his palace, we saw her leaving at daybreak, she appeared at the windows, she greeted the doorkeepers, who knew her well, who all loved her because she greeted them all with a smile, and Elisia consolidated her fame singing only of her own loves, her own desires, her own struggles and adventures: that is what the public craved and that is what she gave them, and all she lacked was a special name, which is the symbol of fame, so:

— A name is not enough, one needs a nickname.

And they began, secretly and laughingly, to call Elisia “La Privada,” the private one, and at first everyone thought it was a joke to designate so public a woman that way; and even if its significance was extended later to God’s having deprived her of children, other nicknames failed to stick. Not simply Elisia, not La Rodríguez, not the Havanera, not the Barren One: even the seminarian could not effect that amazing conception; the woman was barren. This convinced no one, and although Elisia’s fame kept growing, it was fame without a name, which is fame without fame, until the truth became known and shone like the sun and filled everyone with the warmth, feeling, jealousy, the divided emotions that constitute fame itself: Elisia Rodríguez, whispered the growing legion of her lovers, fainted at the climax of love-making: she came and she went!

— La Privada! The deprived! The unconscious one! The fainter!

(All she lacked now was the cape, that’s it, and the satin shoes too, and the hairpiece, the great bow of rose silk on her head, ah and the disguised mustache on her upper lip, bah, she had to be a woman with hair, and that scent of garlic, caramba, if I don’t eat I die, what do they want, a corpse? and her eyes were dead beneath her heavy eyebrows, and her eyes were dead, and her eyes — were dead.)

2

Pedro Romero was stark naked in his dressing room and didn’t need to look at himself in the mirror to know that his caramel skin didn’t show a single scar, not the wound of a single horn. His dark, long, delicate, firm hand had killed 5,582 bulls, but not one had touched him, even though Romero had redefined the art of bullfighting; it was one of the oldest arts in the world, but it was the newest for the public that filled the plazas of Spain to admire — Romero realized — not only their favorite personalities but also themselves, for bullfighters were neither more nor less than the people’s triumph, the people doing what they had always done — daring, defying death, surviving — and now being applauded for it, recognized, lavished with fame and fortune for surviving, for lasting another month, when what everyone hoped was that the bull of life would rip you open and send you off to rot once and for all.

And yet, naked in that cool, dark dressing room, Pedro Romero felt the fiction of his own body and the virtual sensation of having previously inhabited that body, which so many had loved — he looked down, gauged the bulk of his testicles, as the sword handler would do in a minute to adjust his breeches — but which was, in the end, in a more profound sense, a virgin body, a body that had never been penetrated. He smiled at the thought that all men who aren’t queer are virgins because they always penetrate, they’re never penetrated by the woman; but the bullfighter knew that he had to be penetrated by the bull to lose his macho virginity, and that had never happened to him.

He considered himself, naked, at forty still possessing a nearly perfect figure, a muscular harmony revealed by the soft caramel color of his skin, which accentuated his body’s classic Mediterranean forms, the medium height, strong shoulders, long upper arms, compact chest, flat belly, narrow hips, sensual buttocks over well-formed but short legs, and small feet: a body of bodies, a soft-assed English lover had told him, jealous not just of his tight ass but of the blood beneath his skin, his skin and body molded like almond paste by Phoenician and Greek hands, washed like Holland sheets by waves of Carthaginians and Celts, stormed like a merlon by Roman phalanxes and Visigoth hordes, caressed like ivory by Arab hands, and kissed like crosses by Jewish lips.

It was a body of bodies, too, because more than five thousand pairs of bulls’ horns had failed to wound it; his body had never bled, suppurated, scabbed; it was a good body, at peace with the soul that inhabited it, but also a bad body, bad because it was provocative. It continually exceeded its moral constraint, its sufficiency as the container of Pedro Romero’s soul, exhibiting itself before others, exciting them, saying to them: Look, more than five thousand bulls and not a single wound.

And bad, too, because the body of the bullfighter had the right to do what others could not: to parade itself in public, exposing itself on every side, in the midst of applause, parading its sexual attributes, its tight little ass, its testicles straining beneath the silk the penis that at times was plainly revealed through the breeches that were the perfect mirror for the torero’s sex.

— Dress me, quickly …

— Come on, Figura, you know I can’t do that in less than forty-five minutes, you know that …

— I’m sorry, Sparky. I’m nervous this afternoon.

— That’s not good, Figura. Think of your fame. You may call me Spark, but it’s you who’s the light, the Great Figure of the Ring.

Let me die but let my fame endure — Pedro Romero smiled and let the attendant dress him, slowly: first the long white underpants, then the rose stockings with garters below the knees, next the hairpiece with the pigtail at the nape of the neck; his breeches, which this afternoon were silver and blue, and Sparky matched up the three hooks and eyes on the legs; the shirt that was a wash of white, the suspenders caressing his chest, the yellow cummerbund wrapped around his waist, or rather, it was the man himself wrapped in that mother of clothing, its symbol, its origin, a long ribbon of yellow silk, the cradle of the body, its maternal embrace, its umbilical projection, or so Pedro Romero felt that afternoon, as Sparky tied his narrow necktie, adjusted his majestic vest, his silver caparison, not as strong a shield as the bullfighter’s own armor, which is his heart, and his own natural mane, still silky, even though, like this afternoon’s suit, it was now silver; and finally the black shoes, the laces tied as only Sparky knew how, like two perfect rabbit’s ears.

Are there many people? Ah, a great crowd, Figura, you know, when you’re fighting, everyone shows up, rich and poor, men and women, everyone loves you, they would sell their beds to see you, and how they prepare for the fiesta, how many hours they spend to shine elegantly before you, elegantly as you, Figura, you, the King of the Ring, and then the hours they talk about you, commenting on the fight, looking forward to the next one: there’s a whole world that lives only for you, for your fame …

— Sparky, I’m going to confess something to you. This is my last fight. If the bull kills me, it will be for that reason. If I kill it, I will retire without a single wound.

— You care so much about your body, Figura? What about your fame?

— Don’t insult me. I haven’t yet taken as my motto: Let me endure, even if my fame dies.

— No, Figura, none of that. Look, you are going to fight in the oldest and most beautiful arena in Spain, here in Ronda, and if you die, at least you will be looking upon something beautiful before you close your eyes.

My town: a gash, a deep wound such as I never had, my town like a body with a scab that will not heal, contemplating its own wound from a perpetual watchtower of houses that are whitewashed every year to keep them from dissolving in the sun. Ronda, the most beautiful, because it opens the white wings of death and forces us to see it as our unexpected companion in the mirror of an abyss. Ronda, where our vision soars higher than the eagle.

3

Naked he was not, although those who remembered him young, with his wide-brimmed hat and his cape of braided cloth, or even younger, as he had first arrived in Madrid, in a low-crowned hat and a suit with fringed trousers, would not recognize him in his old age, disheveled, carelessly dressed, unshod, his pants stained (grease? urine?), his shirt sweaty, loose-fitting, hanging open, showing his gray chest, and crowning it all his great giant’s head, unkempt, gray, with sideburns, but not as fierce as the grimace on his thick lips, the eyes veiled by what they had seen, the eyebrows mussed by where they had been, and in spite of that, the high, impertinent, innocent nose, the stubborn, childish nose of an Aragón waif, constantly belying all the rest, belying all the godforsaken waifs, wretched as the river that gave birth to them, shit-assed kids of the Manzanares who wrote on the walls of his estate: Here lives the deaf man.

He didn’t hear the shouting of those or other jerks. Stone-deaf, shut inside his bare workroom, naked — comparatively — as a savage, he who shaped and helped invent a society of unabashed pomp and ostentation, he who gave the ears to every torero, the award to every actress, the medals at every festival, the prizes to every potter, every weaver, every witch, every pimp, every soldier, and every penitent, making them all protagonists, endowing rich and poor with the fame and form they had never had before: now he felt as naked as they who acquired an image at his hands, the hands full of the suns and shades of Francisco de Goya y Luz, lucid, loose, Lucifer, lost cipher, lust for light — Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: even the nobles who had always been painted — they alone, the kings, the aristocracy — now had to see themselves for the first time, full body, just as they were, not as they wished to be seen, and when they did (this was the painter’s miracle, his mystery, perhaps his defeat) they were not threatened, they accepted it: Carlos IV and his degenerate, concupiscent, disloyal, ignorant court, that collective phantasm with eyes frozen by abulia, with mugs lewdly drooling, with powdered wigs instead of brains, and with moles screwing their concave foreheads; Fernando VII and his image of self-satisfied cretinism, active, reckless cretinism, in contrast to that of the bewitched wretch Carlos II, that Goya before Goya, foolishly compassionate, dreaming of a better world, that is, a comprehensible one, that is, one as crazy as he was: they all accepted the painter’s reality, they clung to it, celebrated it, and didn’t realize that they were being seen for the first time, just like the actress, the swordsman, the circus performer, and the peasant, who had never been favored by the court painter’s brush before …

Now, naked and deaf, with no court but the mocking kids painting insults on his fences, without Mexican maids or Andalusian cuadrilla, he felt his abandonment and nakedness reflected in the unsilvered mirrors, the two canvases that for some reason reminded him of a boy’s pants, a rustic skirt: blind canvases, there was nothing on them, everything was in the painter’s head; so onto the imagined canvas he placed the actress, his last desire as an old man: he had loved and been loved and also abandoned by the most beautiful and the cruelest women of his time, and now he went down to Madrid to see this woman on the stage and she never looked at him, she saw only herself, reflected in the public eye, and now he wanted to capture her in this rectangle; he began to outline her entire body with charcoal, there he would put her and from there she would never escape; he quickly drew the naked form, standing, of the coveted woman — this woman was not going to fly off on a broom; this woman was not going to be stolen by death, because he was much older than she (and yet …); this woman was not going to run away with a soldier, an aristocrat, or (who knows?) a bullfighter — he advanced slowly, yet every movement of the deaf old man was like a seismic shock that was felt by the unruly children outside, and they left their own brushes beside the wall and ran away, as if they knew that inside the workroom the other brush, the Great Brush, was outdoing theirs and would not admit of any rival; and now, on the second canvas, he began, in a high-minded spirit, with a restraint that surprised the painter himself, so given to satire, caricature, and the strictures of realism, he began to sketch the torso of a man, without any indication of a head, because the head would naturally be the crown of that grave body, full of dignity and repose; he sketched long, delicate, strong hands, and put in the cape, which he pictured a dark pink velvet, then the jacket, which he saw dark blue, and the waistcoat, which he knew had to be gray, colorless, to give the linen of the front and the neck of the shirt an exceptional whiteness, if only because of the contrast with those serene colors, and then he returned to the first canvas (and, outside, the walnut trees quivered) and he surprised the woman, who was pure silhouette, without features or details, on the point of escaping from the canvas, and the old man laughed (and the walnut trees, terrified, clung to one another), and he said to the woman:

— 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!

It was morning in the fields. Rubén went closer and then paused, studying everything he could see, touching everything he could touch, examining as closely as he could everything of which one day his fingers would miss the touch. Touching, seeing, the rows of bent poplars, seemingly paired like a corps de ballet or a troop of toy soldiers, trees that had witnessed merciless winds, leaning but not fallen, bent by winter storms; opening all his senses to the white flower and dry fruit of lemon mint, to the smell of squeezed lemons and sliced oranges, to the black purple of wild plum and the faint scent of quince, lemon mint, lily, and verbena: he had lain among their shoots since childhood, the trees and flowers of Andalusia were the visible memory of his childhood; now he expected them to wash away all his ills and closed his eyes in an act of thanks because he knew that when he opened them he would be compensated for his dream by the sight of almonds, diamonds caught in a web of sky, and by the scent of muscadine.

But above the vast geometry of the landscape, duplicating the curves and arcs of the Andalusian horizon in its flight, a restless bird with a scythe-like body reminded him of what his Godmother Madreselva, his false, his substitute mother, the childless progenitor, the protector of Rubén’s adolescence and that of the other orphan children like him, had told him long ago: Rubén, study the flight of the swallow, which never tires, feeds in flight, sleeps in flight, makes love in flight; watch its long wings like sharp lances of death. If you want to be an apprentice in the ring, you must be like the swallow, cast away your land and adopt no other, though many may welcome you, nomad bird, bird of the steppes — so his Godmother Madreselva had whispered in the boy’s ear.

And she had warned him against the basic dangers: beware the thorny contact of the thistle, don’t be seduced by its blue leaves, never drink the narcotic and purgative sap of those prickly leaves. Bitter cress, sawtooth nettles, yellow basil, and green pear, they all beckoned to him — to love, use, contemplate, smell, touch, partake of them — and he, in his youth, never felt that he abused what he shared, whether it was the pleasure of contemplation or the equally blessed pleasure of touching, uprooting, trampling, eating, cutting the fruits and flowers, of carrying them to his mama, or, after she died, to his Godmother Madreselva, who gathered together all the children in the town of Aranda, or, when she died, to his sweetheart, and if she died, why, he’d carry them to the Virgin, because even when all our women have died, the Virgin always remains.

— See that the holy thistle doesn’t purge you, Rubén.

Instead, he sought the tracks of winters past.

He sought the snows of January as he sought the memory of his childhood in the village, for when he became a man he always compared his childhood with snow. This had never impressed Rocío, or, indeed, anyone else. These were things that were his, only his, that nobody else understood. Andalusia was his intimacy. And this was the ardent summer, without the memory of the winds of January.

He had spent the morning walking through the fields and composing in his mind a song to the wormwood and the swallows, but his poetic flight was interrupted by practical observations; he was surprised, for example, to see the cows lying down, as though forecasting rain, creating their own dry space, warning the unwary pilgrim that the morning, which had begun so blue and fresh a few hours ago, was turning threatening, turning into a day of accumulating clouds and heavy heat … He raised his eyes and met the image of the black bull of Osborne brandy, waiting for him at the entrance to his village.

A breeze blew from the Levant, and the clouds disappeared.

He arrived at the hotel and smelled wax candles, lacquer dishrags, and soap, a different soap, not the soap that is never put in the hotel baths.

He had written to Rocío, trying to make sense of their situation to return to the first days of their love: was that really impossible, as he felt in his heart? and he had tried to explain — would this, too, be futile? — what returning home meant to him, touching and smelling and cutting and eating its fruits and flowers — would she understand? — and he summoned his courage and put his tongue to the gummed flap of the envelope, and the Englishman, who suddenly, out of breath, stopped playing his music-hall ditties and began to ask, sitting with him in the bar, where it was shady at the hottest hour of the day, if he had looked in the shop windows of these little towns where everything was old, none of it was attractive, it was all covered with dust, the signs were from another era, as if the world hadn’t undergone a revolution in advertising, he knew because he had worked his whole life in publicity, now he was retired, nothing to do but take care of his garden and his dog, but before … He accompanied his commentary with a commercial jingle played on his harmonica, his eyes bright — and he let out a laugh, wasn’t he right, these people live in the past, the sweets in the shops seemed to have been there for twenty years, the clothes in the store windows were out of style, the mannequins were ancient, their wigs were full of lice, and had he noticed the mustaches painted on the male dummies, and how moth-eaten the stuffed female breasts and mannequins were, and the cult of miracles, the saints, the images, papist idolatry everywhere…?

Now he played a Protestant hymn on his harmonica and Rubén Oliva was going to tell him that it was true, nothing had changed, not the sweets, the hats, the mannequins, or the holy images in the shops, why should it, when everyone knew exactly what was sold in the shops, and …

Mr. Newton interrupted him: —Do you know that nobody here will marry a woman who isn’t a virgin?

— Well …

— Do you know that nobody shaves after dinner for fear of ruining his digestion, and nobody invites anyone to dine the way they should, in their houses at civilized hours, but instead they go out for coffee after dining, at one in the morning?

— Well …

— Look, in a palace in Seville I measured the quantity of spit on the floor, which has turned into crusts of stone over the years, centuries of phlegm, marble oysters, sir, revealing the arrogance of those who always depended on legions of slaves to clean up their filth; where would this country be without servants? And another thing …

Without a word Rubén got up and left; the Englishman was still talking to himself. Rubén walked off without paying his part of the tab, as gentlemen ought, just so the Englishman could add to his criticism: freeloaders, ill-mannered brutes.

The town was waking from its siesta.

The heat had not let up, and Rubén followed his own counsel, walking the back streets, sheltered in the shade, rediscovering what he had known since childhood, that all the narrow lanes of this town communicated with one another, feeding into a single narrow entryway. Two- and three-story houses, of varying sizes, beaten down by time, cured with lime like mummies wrapped in white bandages, watched over each route and prevented anyone from leaving. Some were shut up with wooden shutters; others had open balconies of yellowing plaster. Narrow passages with tile roofs and clumps of wild fig trees rising above the buildings, crowns of weeds appearing through all the cracks in the plaza. Clothes hung out to dry. Television antennas. More windows, tightly shuttered. The first denizens of the night began to appear from the upper stories, old village women, cloaked, curious, craning to see him, the outsider, the prodigal son no one knew — was there no one left who had known him as a child? he thought, and almost said, talking to himself like a deaf man.

He watched the first children chasing the pigeons in the dusty square. The whole plaza was sand. The balconies, the upper stories, the shuttered windows and the open windows, all eyes faced the enclosed sand of the plaza: there was only one entrance, fewer than in a bullring; it had only one gate to let the bulls in safely — although it was not safe to guess in what state they would leave. It was a plaza where people turned their backs to their doors. The women came out carrying their cane chairs, locked their doors, and sat in a circle to shell almonds and gossip. The smell of cooking and of urine got stronger. Other women crocheted in silence, and men sat down cautiously with their backs turned. Some young people formed another circle, boys and girls together, and began to clap and sing loud, sorrowful songs, in a rough and halting performance. A beautiful woman with heavy eyebrows, her hair in a bun, sat in a rocking chair as if presiding over the evening; she bared her breast, brought to it a bundle and uncovered the head of a black boy, and offered her breast to him; the boy took it eagerly, her breast’s white blood dripping down his purple lips.

The young men were taunting and teasing a gnarled old man with side-whiskers, gray kinky hair, a turned-up nose, and thick lips, who went over to a broken-down wagon, set his jaw, dribbling spittle as though his mouth were watering for a banquet, tucked up the sleeves of his soiled, loose white shirt, got under the wagon, and hoisted it over his shoulders, while the young men looked on, excited and provoked.

A girl sat in a corner of the plaza with her skirts raised high up her legs to catch the dying rays of sun.

It was the twilight hour and Rubén Oliva was in the center of the plaza, surrounded by all this life.

This was his village, which he had left to live as he had to live, but to save himself, to die in peace, he had to return.

Andalusia was his love, not despite his having left, but because he had left. There was nothing true on this earth, not even solitude, that wasn’t me/us/the other.

But this afternoon the gods (pickpockets, quick, winged Mercurys, snoops, merchants, restless thieves) denied Rubén Oliva, back among his people, even that: pausing in the center of the plaza of sand where the darting kids and the startled pigeons and the restless heels of the group of singers raised swirls of dirt, Rubén Oliva felt that his town had become no more than a vague memory, incapable of dominating a space that was beginning to be governed by inexplicable laws, all of them — Rubén scanned the sky in vain for an escape: he discovered the swallow — preventing escape from the closed-in plaza.

The hoary, robust old man dropped the wagon and raised his hands to his ears, covering his side-whiskers, crying that his ears hurt, that the effort had burst his eardrums, that the young men and women should sing louder, he couldn’t hear a thing.

For songs, as you well know, are only grief:

If you don’t hear one, you don’t hear the other,

Oh, child of witchcraft, until you die.

He dropped the wagon and at that dusty impact the ground of the plaza suddenly sprouted moist flowers, and Rubén didn’t know if they had arisen from the arid crash of that wagon or if they had rained down from the sky in tribute to the singers, and there were cress and myrtle and lilies and impatiens and morning glories.

Then the night seemed to catch fire inside the houses and the women shelling almonds looked for open doors and ran in to save their possessions from the sudden blaze, but the beautiful woman on the rocker had none, and she was not alarmed, she laughed easily and let the black child go on nursing, and then, when she raised him up for all to see, he was a white boy, just look, look, as white as my milk, white because of my milk, I have transformed him!

The youths, frightened by the cries from the houses, turned away from the deaf old man, shouting to him that he had got what he deserved, trying to prove at his age that he was just as strong as they, but they were stopped in their tracks by the stampede of a herd of neighing horses that suddenly rushed into the square, trampling the flowers, halting the youths.

The old women closed the shutters on the upper floors.

The women who watched from the yellow balconies went inside, shaking their heads sadly.

But others came into the arena, into the confusion, surrounding Rubén Oliva, all of them in the midst of the wild chestnut horses all of them within the suddenly deep blue night: sumptuously dressed women completely indifferent to the fires and the neighing, came through the single narrow lane and entered the square; they were wrapped in capes of raw silk, trailing pear- and orange-colored taffeta, carrying trays bearing teeth, eyes, and tits, so that Rubén was forced to examine the mouths, the empty eye sockets, the mutilated breasts of the women slowly walking in procession, led by a woman more opulent than the others, a woman whose face, wrapped in a cowl, was like a moon girded with emeralds, whose head was crowned by a dead sun with razor-sharp rays, whose bosom sported artificial roses, and from her shoulders to her feet there hung a great triangular cape contrived with elaborate ornamentations of ivory and precious stones, medallions shaped like roses and coiled like metal snakes.

But the woman’s hands, though covered with rings, were empty. Her marked face, her moonlike face, was furrowed by tears, cruel drops, and she didn’t stop crying until her three attendants approached the beautiful woman with the heavy eyebrows and the hair in a bun and struggled with her, and touched the dead eyes to her face, and covered with the severed ones the breasts that had nursed the black boy, and forced open her mouth to fill it with those bloodless teeth; they left her teeth and her eyes and her breasts but they snatched away her child and placed him in the hands of the Lady, and the despoiled woman cried, her eyes full of blood, her mouth full of teeth, her four breasts sticking to her like a bitch’s, but now the Lady stopped crying and smiled, and the procession began again: first, the bejeweled attendants dressed in rich shades of lemon and fig; then the herd of chestnut horses, now tame; behind them, a rebirth of myrtle, four-o’clock, honeysuckle, and morning glory, sweet perfume, the earth transformed into a garden; they led her to the narrow lane and there began a slow ascent to the throne that awaited her motionless, but which now, as she approached with the white child who had been black, began to sway and rose on a wooden platform lifted by bearers hidden beneath its draperies; the deaf old man pulled Rubén Oliva under it and said: Quick, there’s no other way out, and he made him stand behind the draperies, under the throne that was now beginning to move, snaking off, carried by the bearers, including the hoary old man, who had as much trouble lifting the float as before he had had lifting the cart, paying dearly for his effort, perhaps seeking to demonstrate something to the world and to himself, and by his side was Rubén Oliva, watching the deaf old man with thick lips half open, winking his sleepy eye at Rubén: Don’t be a loafer, hey, pull your weight, we have to hoist up the Virgin and carry her through town, through the night, the old man told him, the day is done and the night deals out deception, didn’t he know? It mocks the florid fragrances and sweet caresses of daytime, when you think you are in love with nature and she with you, not realizing that love — the old man almost spit out the words — is impossible between her and ourselves. He asked Rubén to tread firmly, don’t fall, don’t give up, trample the flowers, hard, hard — for we have to kill her to survive, and she demands a final accounting. The old man gave Rubén Oliva a sharp elbow in the ribs, and Rubén realized that he was one among many, one more bearer in the brotherhood that was carrying the Virgin in a nocturnal procession. And if for the average person the night produces monsters, the old man continued, for you they appear by day, for you the day is mad, unreal, and chimeric. What do you do at night, Rubén? Do you dream when you sleep, exhausted by the chimeras of your day? What are you left with? Then welcome to the sleep of reason, now lift, walk, and believe with me that it’s better to live with illusions than to die disabused of them, now lift, heave, haul, you idler, you loafer …

Rubén Oliva licked the gummed edge of the envelope and cut his tongue.

Thursday

1

The deaf old man recalled how as a boy, when he came from Fuendetodos to Zaragoza to watch the procession, he had wanted to be under the throne, alongside the porters, hidden by the corduroy curtains of the float, peering through them to spy the legs of the women on the balconies, especially when the procession would stop for some reason, and the tolling of the bells was like a holy dispensation to listen more closely to the rustle of petticoats and the rubbing of legs and the wagging of hips and the tapping of heels, and he imagined couples embracing in the streets, loving …

But in Seville, said the deaf man, when a pause is imposed by the street song, la saeta, it’s like a cry for help in the desert, everyone disappears, and only the Virgin and the person who is singing to her remain. Seville becomes invisible then, and of all the invisible ones the most invisible of all are those who carry the throne of the Virgin, as he is doing now, the ones who can feel themselves alone with the Virgin, carrying her like Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders, along with the symbols of Holy Mary, palm and cypress and olive, mirrors and stairs, fountains, doors, enclosed gardens, the evening star, the entire universe, and, above all, the tower, the tower of David, the ivory tower, the Giralda, which he glimpsed, looking for legs and finding legs, looking through the panting line of porters and finding, if not the erotic life that he had imagined, at least the popular life that was once again the material sustenance of life itself. In Seville, as in Madrid, in this year of grace 1806, on the brink of all the disasters of war, the past century’s libertine dream was capriciously prolonged — its festive and egalitarian customs, the people and the nobility all mixed together — for the nobility had taken to imitating the people, going to popular fandangos, thronging into bullrings and theaters, adulating bullfighters and actresses, the dukes dressing up like banderilleros, the duchesses like chulaponas, and in the center of this whirlwind, before history claimed its due and festival turned to warfare and warfare to guerrilla struggle and guerrilla struggle to revolution and revolution, ah, revolution to government and constitution and law, and law to despotism, before all that, it was he, it was Don Francisco de Goya y Lost Senses, who showed the people to the aristocracy, and what is more, who showed the people to themselves.

He left Madrid amid the waving washerwomen, the peddlers, the jugglers, the chestnut venders whom he had endowed with faces and true dignity for the first time, and now in Seville he was welcomed with waves and cheered through the streets by guilds of dyers and silk mercers, weavers of linen and dealers in gold thread, all those who labored in the making of the cloaks and mantles, skirts and hoods, veils and tunics of all that divine seraglio: La Virgin del Rocío, La Señora de los Reyes, La Macarena, and La Trianera; in the old deaf man passing among them wearing a crowned hat and a gray frock coat the workers recognized one of themselves, the son of a gilder from Fuendetodos, the artisan who was who he was because he had done what he had done: canvases, engravings, murals, independent of any explanation, felt rather than revealed: he has presented us to the world, and, more important, to ourselves, who lived like blind people, not recognizing ourselves, not recognizing our strength …

But he, Don Francisco de Goya y Light Sensors, didn’t want to hear about recognition this Maundy Thursday night in Seville; all he wanted was to take off his hat and his frock coat, to be again what he wanted to be, a worker, a gilder, an artisan, a member of the guild, in his shirtsleeves, his shirt open at the neck, unkempt and sweaty, barefoot, carrying the tower that was the Virgin alongside the porters, hidden from those who applauded him because they recognized themselves in him, when he secretly wanted them to recognize something else, the way he had exposed the excitements of perversion and imaginative sexual intimacy. He introduced the most obscure people to themselves, but especially he introduced man and woman in darkness he put them beneath this float and this procession, wrapped them in sheets as if in sacred robes and sighs, and showed them, as he was doing now, carrying the weight of the world, wrapped in the sheets as the porters scrambled beneath the skirts of the Virgin and as the whole town mingled in the narrow lanes of Seville.

He felt alone and soiled and tired. He had to prove that he was still strong. Strong not just as an artist but also as a man. He bore the throne of the Virgin and panted among the panters, protected by the billowing skirts of the Virgin, the virgins of Seville: he saw nothing. And then he remembered that he was the king of the keyhole, the most lucid and cruel spy ever. As a reward, he was allowed to look through locks, to glimpse flesh drained of color, clenched in carnal embrace by the side of the sepulcher, to expose in black and white what that flesh could do in its mad effort to hold back time, to drive away death and consecrate life.

2

This, many years later, is what the old man saw through the keyhole of his canvas. A fresh, bare one, though already populated in his mind by a jumbled confusion of sheets and flesh clamoring to emerge, and again he paused before the empty canvas like a village gossip in front of the lovers’ door at the hour when a nocturnal wind from the Levant silenced the rest of the world, and the lovers too, and the old man hesitated: Should he allow them to appear or not? Should he let them inhabit his canvas? And he looked at them through that keyhole — at her, coated with a lubricating oil like a second skin over her totally naked body, with the exception of her sex, which was covered by a butterfly, inviting her masculine companion to bring close his own sex, a scythe of flesh, or rather a swallow, a black swooping bird that never rested, that never ceased its flight, that ate and fornicated in the air, to bring that bird to the butterfly, as if she, the woman of thick eyebrows and tight lips, bathed in oil, could gore him: dragonfly against dragonfly, wing against wing, you will find I am not defenseless, you will find I am not as before, an unshielded, lubricated hole; now the scythe of your sex must first defeat my butterfly, and my butterfly bites, be careful, and soars, and pricks, and punctures, I warn you, never again will you find me defenseless, and then he takes her by the waist and turns her over with a single motion, places her face-down with a single stroke, exposing to the lover and the watcher her avid buttocks, lubricated, easy to penetrate, and he enters her from behind, not in the anus but in the sweet vagina, proffered, half open, oiled, shaved, reduced to the impalpable and invisible down of puberty, the shaved mons veneris covered by the butterfly, which now flew away to keep from being crushed, revealing the woman’s pubic mound, already darkened, despite the morning shave, by a heavy, quick rebirth of stubble, member and membrane rejoined; you also have a hole: as if obeying its mistress, the butterfly alighted between the man’s small, raised buttocks and tickled him there, and he came and came again, praising her, thanking her for his victory, Elisia, Elisia, you can transport me with nothing but a look, how can you give me more than this, for which I can never repay you; yes, Romero, do me as you would a bull, stick me, Romero, as you would like to stick the bull but don’t dare, macho bullfighter, because you don’t want to admit that the bull is your stud and you are two lost fags, except the bull wants to impale you and you don’t want to be impaled, now stick me as you would stick the bull, make me come as you would make that impossible couple, the butterfly and the bull, come together, Romero, the unchanging sun and the moon that waxes and wanes to become a claw, rend me Romero, your claw, love me, your whore, only a claw, lover, and then again to swell, to grow, aren’t you jealous, sun, constant one, immutable, in your suit of eternal lights, while the universe whirls in circles around your waist, and although your rays scorch them all you cannot reach them with your shaft of fire, for the night renders you impotent?

— The shame, the shame …

— I gave you everything, and you, nothing.

— The shame, the shame.

— Make me dance naked for you, murmured La Privada, and at the very moment of orgasm she fainted in the arms of Pedro Romero.

The painter, watching the scene through the white view hole of his canvas, felt a twinge of sadness and envy, it was proper that there should be so much envy in Spain, where there was so much to be coveted, but nothing as much as this, the desirable body of the bullfighter embracing the waist of the inanimate, desirable body of the actress, who appeared dead, giving the matador this supreme trophy, the reenactment of the agony in each act of love, because that is what Goya most feared and most envied: that this serious woman of joined brows and downy upper lip, Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, fainted every time they made love.

Who could stop adoring her after knowing that?

Men would leave her but they would neither forget her nor stop loving her passionately, never, never.

— No man has ever left me. I have sacrificed all my best lovers so as to be the first to break away. Everything comes to an end …

Pedro Romero and Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, remained asleep, naked, arms around each other, barely covered by a heavily starched sheet that seemed to have a life of its own, bodies and clothes soiled by a bath of oil that was like the blood of the two of them, their bodies joined by a pleasure that separated them, all the secrets of the bodies slipping away in a perpetual flight that the old painter paused to contemplate as one contemplates a Muslim patio where the stone is constantly turning to water, returning to stone, and in water and stone finds no face or object other than the word of God …

This he saw, his heart steeled, faithful witness to the love-making of the matador Pedro Romero and the actress Elisia Rodríguez, his eyes coldly watching, but his heart bitter and his gut wrenched with fire.

This he saw. What he rapidly rendered on his canvas was black-and-white, drained of color, a double-washed sky, dark gray and impure white, the black stone of a cemetery in place of the starched bed, and the bodies dressed, standing, but the man dead, dressed in white frock coat and tie, and white shoes, stockings, and pants, as if for his First Communion, but the occasion was death, the corpse of the man with his eyes closed and his mouth open in agony, without grace, without butterflies, without adornment, held by the unkempt woman, close-browed, emaciated, grasping the head and the waist of the dead man. He, fainted forever, dead in Goya’s engraving, not she, awake in her sorrow.

For once she had been abandoned.

He signed it in the corner and titled it Love and Death.

He looked at the drawing, the drawing looked at him. The dead man opened his eyes and looked at him. The woman turned her head and looked at him. There was no need for words. They had appeared, they were going to appear, with or without him. They had defeated him. They needed him only to form the triangle that would make the act more exciting: the old man watched the act only to excite the young lovers. With or without him, they were going to appear. In 1806, when all this happened, or in 1821, when Goya painted it in his Quinta del Sordo, or even today, when all this is happening.

3

Don Francisco Goya y Lost Census bought a pistachio ice cream in the sweet shop on the Plaza del Salvador, turned down Villegas, and entered the small plaza of Jesús de la Pasión, where the famous actress Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, was performing this Holy Saturday of the Resurrection. Out of the corner of his eye the old painter, licking his green ice, saw the bridal shops that were the dominant businesses in the square, which was called the Plaza del Pan when Cervantes wrote there, and he mockingly compared the organdy and tulle outfits with the hoods and long skirts of the Virgins carried in procession through Seville. Of course, the skirts that draped the Virgin from waist to ground, like those on the mannequins in the shops, only served to cover a taper, the underlying wooden structure of the image, which has features carved only on its face and hands.

La Privada, Elisia Rodríguez, in contrast, was dressed as a Maja, with low-cut Empire gown and shoes of silver silk, her splendid body not reduced to hands and face. Had he seen her? Of course he had, he had even painted her. But it would be truer to say that, because he had painted her, he had seen her. But now the painter was crossing a patio rimmed with orange trees whose dropped fruit lay rotting on the cobblestones, coming to see the model, to ask her to pose nude for him.

She received him out of curiosity. Is he famous? she asked her lover, Pedro Romero, and the bullfighter said he was, he was a famous son of Aragón, a peasant, but also a painter of the court and all that; they said he was a genius.

Is he amusing? At times, answered Romero, when he paints attractive things, festivals, parasols, kids playing, girls running, bulls in the plaza, all that. He paints kings — very ugly he paints them, but if they like it, what can you do? And then he paints dreadful, awful things, women with monkey faces, women selling their daughters, witches, old women fucking, horrible things. And you, has he painted you? Once, from a distance, awaiting the charge in the ring, and another time, killing. He’s told me he wants to do a canvas that will make me immortal. Well, my immortality is no more than two passes of the cape and a flourish over the head of the bull. The rest, Elisia, I will never see, nor you either. Come on, dance naked just for me.

He took off his high hat. He wasn’t going to hide his years. His hoary crest sprang out, freed from its high, narrow prison. They exchanged banalities, sweets, drinks, thanks, compliments, praises, candied egg yolks, and then he repeated that he wanted to paint her. And she said she already knew that, through Romero. And he said that Romero neither knew nor, perhaps, approved of what he wanted. And what was that? Then the old deaf painter, looking at her in a way that seemed to say “I have eyes, all the rest has failed me, but I have eyes, and my blood throbs,” said simply that actresses die. She knew that; he ate an egg yolk as if to seal the comment. They die, he continued, and if they get lucky they die young and beautiful, but if their luck fails them they lose their youth and beauty: then they are nothing. I know that, replied La Privada, that’s why I live for today, and that is my message every time I love or sing or dance or eat: there is nothing better waiting for me, this is today and tomorrow; and only today is real for me — only today. No, but there is a way of surviving, continued the old man. I know, she said, a painting. Yes, but nude, señora.

— You’re asking for yourself? she asked him, suddenly switching to the familiar form of address.

— Yes, and for your lover, too. Someday, one of you will die. The two bodies that are so drawn to each other will be separated. Not by choice, not in anger, not at all, but by something that cruelly crushes our will and our whim. We are born separate, we meet, and in the end, death will separate us again. That is intolerable.

— For you, perhaps. I, truthfully …

— No. Elisia … I may call you Elisia?… For your lover and, yes, for me, too, it would be so, it would be intolerable to cease to love only because death intervened.

— So you like me?

— I desire you.

— Then you may have me, Paco, you may take all of me for yourself, in fact and not in a painting, but on one condition sweetie …

Sitting there, a little stooped over, his high hat in his gnarled, agile hands, the serious hands of an artist and a teamster, the deaf man felt stripped. The actress ran to an ornate Tabasco wooden chest she had gotten from her servant Guadalupe, knelt down, opened it, poked among the clothes, releasing an intense smell of musk, and she extracted something that was wrapped in lace shawls, and from inside that, a green velvet case, and, with sensual urgency mixed with religious respect, with the delicacy of her long, loving, digging fingers, which could be claws when she wished, feathers if she pleased, the actress finally pulled from the case a portrait, which she showed to the painter. His eyesight already faded, he held it in front of his nose, smelling, more than anything, the whiff of sulfur that clung to the portrait, an odor that even a heretic like Don Francisco de Goya y Lucifers associated with the Malignant One, Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Satan, and was this his portrait, the portrait of the devil himself? Why not? Intense green eyes set in dark sockets dominated his fine features, giving them a kind of resignation that Goya associated with his own demons, and looking from the portrait to the woman who offered him that diabolic image, Goya leapt from painting to grammar, only the non-possessive pronoun defined this otherwise ordinary and unusual man, who had been captured in a portrait of repulsive fidelity.

Nobody had ever painted such dark skin, such a white shirt, the Adam’s apple in his throat, all so offensively exact. The weary gaze of the painter was led over all the realistic details of the painting, the cracks in the lips, the stubble of the beard, the deep blue of the background. Nothing is artificial, exclaimed the artist, nothing is artistic here, this is devilry, not its representation, this is the devil because this is pure reality, without art, he cried, possessed now by the terror that surely she and her repulsive lover, the subject of the portrait, wanted to instill in him. There is no art in this, Elisia, this is reality, this portrait is the man himself, reduced to this immobile and trapped condition, transformed into a pygmy by the art of witchcraft. This is not a painting, Elisia, what is it? the painter asked in anguish, reduced to one of her possessions, exactly as she had wanted him to be, as he read the living but motionless eyes, without art, of the man-portrait, disabused, disillusioned, despairing, disturbed, deconstructed, destroyed …

— If you paint me like this, I will let you see me naked …

— But this isn’t painting, it’s witchcraft.

— I know, silly, a witch friend gave it to me, and she told me, Elisia, you come from a flea-bitten town where the princes married to avoid losing taxes, and you will never understand what this is that I’m giving you, you must find a painter or a poet to put a name to this painting that I’m giving you because you are my most loyal pupil …

God forgive you, said the painter, imagining the horror in the triangular union of the aged witch, the young Elisia, and this man who was the devil himself in a portrait.

— But the witch said to me: Elisia, although this man is very handsome and well endowed, I warn you of one thing …

— Good advice.

— This man is not yet born, this is the portrait of someone who does not yet exist, and if you want him you are going to have to wait many years …

— Until your death!

— Then, Paco, you must make me a painting the same as this, so that my portrait and that of this man who has not yet been born can meet someday, and we can love each other, together at last, he and I.

4

He gave up the thought of painting her as he would have wanted but he wanted her as he couldn’t paint her. She was free with her favors and this famous old man amused her, he told her things she didn’t understand, he was held as much by the sexual pleasure that she knew how to give him as by the challenge that he couldn’t accept: to paint her a companion portrait to the one she had shown him and then returned to its place in her chest.

Of course, she didn’t stop seeing Romero in Seville, she returned with him to Madrid, and Goya, who in any case, had to return to “the city and court” (as Madrid is known), followed them. That was the humiliating thing. He had to return anyway, but now it appeared that he was following them. He longed for what he didn’t dare request. Something more than the careless love she gave him and the passionate love — he watched them through a keyhole — she gave the bullfighter. He was an old man, famous but old, deaf, a little blind, over seventy; his own lovers had all died or he had broken with them, or sometimes they had broken with him. But passion’s ring of flames still blazed, and in its center was a man, Francisco de Goya y Lightning, luminance, lucidity. But now he was only Paco Goya y Lucinderella.

He watched the lovers through the keyholes of his canvases. Once he even tried to sneak into the apartment of La Privada, but he could get no farther than a closed balcony where he almost fell down to Calle Redondilla and cracked his skull. Yet he managed to see something, though he couldn’t hear a thing, and they suspected nothing. But he could distinguish once again, so exalted was it, so commanding an act, the orgasmic climax of Elisia’s fainting. But not with him, with him that never happened, for him she never fainted as she was doing now, stiffening and trembling one moment and collapsing in the bullfighter’s arms the next.

Was it only with Pedro Romero that La Privada fainted? Or would people say: —Everyone made her faint with pleasure, except Francisco de Goya y Lost Sensations?

Spying on them, he would have liked to join them through a generous, possible act of communication. He imagined that it would be like carrying the Virgin in the procession. He was unable to see, under that throne, but his feet and his sense of direction told him that all the streets and lanes of Seville communicated with each other, from the Cinco Llagas Hospital to the Casa de las Dueñas to the Patio de Banderas and Huerta del Pilar and, through the tunnel beneath the Guadalquivir, to the glories of Triana. That was the law of water, universally communicating, springs with gorges and rivulets, and those with rivers, and rivers with lakes, and those with waterfalls, and the falls with the deltas and those with the ocean and the vastness of the sea with the darkness of the depths. Why should the beds of the world be any different, why shouldn’t they all communicate with one another, not a single door shut, not a single padlock or clasp, not a single obstacle to desire, to the text, the tact, the satisfaction of the bed?

He wanted the two of them — Elisia and Romero — to invite him to be part of the final, shared lust; what did it matter to them, if he was going to die before them? Romero would retire from the ring, Goya would paint the bullfighter his immortal canvas, more immortal than his immortal manner of awaiting the bull stock-still; she might die before the two men, but that would be an aberration: it would be natural that he, the painter, would die before the others and leave the painted canvas of the loves of Goya and Elisia, of Elisia and Romero, of the three together, a canvas more immortal than that fraud she showed one afternoon in Seville, between servings of cakes and candied egg yolks, which he accepted, still stuffed with ice cream, his belly swelling, about to reply to the world with a sonorous and catastrophic belch. What did it matter to them, if he was going to die before they did? Then he realized, horrified, that the portrait she showed him in Seville was an intolerable thing. A brutal reality, an incomprehensible portrait made by no one, a canvas without an artist. How could it be! Could any canvas surpass that brutal realistic fidelity that La Privada revealed to Goya, saying: —Paco, make me a portrait like this one?

Death was going to cast the three of them to the four winds before love united them. That thought was killing Goya. He was an old man and he didn’t dare ask for what he wanted. He couldn’t endure the scorn, the mockery, the simple denial. He didn’t know what Elisia whispered in Romero’s ear:

— He’s an old tightwad. He never brings me anything. He doesn’t bring me what you do, sweet things, honey and bread …

— I’ve never brought you rich things. Who are you confusing me with?

— With no one, Romero: you bring me sweet things, not sweets but sweetness, because you know I’m endearing …

— You’re a flirt, Elisia …

— But him: nothing. A tightwad, a miser. No woman can love that sort of man. He lacks those attentions. He may be a genius, but he doesn’t know anything about women. Whereas you, my treasure …

— I bring you almonds, Elisia, bitter pears and olives in oil, so you are forced to draw sweetness out of my body.

— Lover, how you talk, how you flatter, stop talking now and come here.

— Here I am, all of me, Elisia.

— I’m waiting. I’m not impatient, Romero.

— That’s what I’ve always said, you have to wait for the bull to get to you, that’s how it discovers death.

The painter didn’t hear them but he didn’t dare tell them what his heart desired.

— But if only I could watch, only watch … I have never wanted anything else …

Did they think of him as they fornicated? At least to this extent: they thought of him when they wanted what a painter could not refuse: a witness.

But he had to be honest with himself. She denied him something else. With Romero, she fainted when she came. With him, she did not. She denied him the fainting.

Then, shut within his estate, with the children shouting insults that he didn’t hear and scrawling on his wall, he rapidly sketched and painted three works, and in the first the three of them were lying in a bed of rumpled sheets, Romero, Elisia, and Goya, but she had two faces on the same pillow, and one of her faces was gazing passionately at Pedro Romero while she embraced him feverishly, and Pedro Romero also had two faces, one for the pleasure of Elisia, the other for the friendship with the painter, just as she, too, had a second face for the painter, and she winked at him while he kissed her, and at the same time she looked ardently at the bullfighter, and there were frogs and snakes and jesters with fingers at their lips surrounding them, not a triangle now but a sextet of deceptions and betrayals, a gray hole of corruption.

In the second painting she ascended skyward in her actress costume, her bun, and her flat shoes, but with her naked body, defeated, aged, straddling a broom, impaled by death’s own member, and accompanying her in her flight were the blind bats, the ever-vigilant owl, the swallows as tireless as eternal entreaties, and the preying vultures, eaters of filth, bearing the actress up to the false sky that was the paradise of the theater, the cupola of laughter, obscenities, and belches, the snap of whips, the farts, and the hissing that no clamor of paid applauders could silence: La Privada ascended to receive her final face, which Goya gave her, not warning her this time, as he had before (You will die alone, with me and without your lover); but using her as a warning, making her a witch, an empty hide, as her rival La Pepa de Hungría had once described her; he was the final arbiter of the face of the actress who had once asked him to portray her for eternity, as she was, in reality, without art. And that was what the artist could not give her, even though it cost him the supreme sexual gift of the despot: fainting at the moment of climax.

He also finished the third painting, that of Pedro Romero. He accentuated, if possible, the nobility, the beauty of that forty-year-old face, the calmness of the hand that had killed 5,892 bulls. But the spirit of the artist was not generous. — Take my head, he said to the painting of the bullfighter, and give me your body.

He opened a window to let in a little fresh air. And then the actress, the despot, the witch that he himself had imprisoned in the painting, mounted her broom and flew away cackling, chortling, laughing at her creator, spitting saliva and obscenities onto his gray head, saving herself like a swallow on the nocturnal breeze of Madrid.

5

Old and barefoot, his thick lips open and cracked, begging for water and air like a true penitent, he carried the Virgin of Seville on his shoulders.

— Actresses die, but Virgins do not.

That was when he remembered that, as covered as she was, this Most Holy Virgin whose throne he carried was no more modest than Elisia Rodríguez, when La Privada, naked, told him: You never give me anything, so I won’t give you anything either, and she pulled forward her fantastic black hair and covered her entire body with it, like a skirt, looking at Goya through the curtain of hair and saying vulgarly:

— Come on, don’t look so shocked, where there’s hair there is pleasure.

Friday

1

She asked the boys to test themselves alone first, to find out their capacities and then return and tell her their experiences, while she spent her days between cooking chick-peas and running to the henhouse, stopping from time to time to stand with her arms crossed by the wattle fence that separated her house from the immense cattle pastures.

The house should have been very large to hold all those boys, mostly orphans, some still of school age, others already masons, bakers, and café waiters, but all unhappy with their work, their poverty, their short, all too recent childhood, their rapid, hopeless aging. Their useless lives.

But the house was not large; there was little more than a corral, the kitchen, two bare rooms where the boys slept on sacks, and the señora’s bedroom, where she kept her relics, which were just some mementos of other kids, before the present group, and nothing from before that. It was known she had no husband. Or children. But if someone flung that in her face, she would answer that she had more children than if she had been married a hundred times. Parents, brothers, or sisters, who really knew? She had simply shown up at the village, appearing one fine day from among some rocks covered with prickly pear along a chestnut-lined path. Alone, hard, resolute, and sad, so skinny and dry that it wasn’t clear if she was a woman or a man, with a wide hat and a patched cape on her shoulder, a cigar between her teeth, she inspired many nicknames: Dry-Bone, Hammerhead, Boldface, No Fruit, Crow’s Foot, Cigar.

It was easy and even amusing to give her nicknames, once everyone realized that her severe appearance did not imply malice but simply a kind of sober distance. But who could say if those nicknames really fit her. She gave shelter to orphan boys, and when the village was scandalized and demanded that the dry, tall, thin woman give up that perverse practice, nobody else was inclined to take them in, so, through sheer indifference, by default, they let her continue, although from time to time a suspicious (and perhaps envious) spinster would ask:

— And why doesn’t she take in orphan girls?

But there was always some other old lady, even more suspicious and imaginative, who would ask if they wanted to give the impression that they had a whorehouse of young girls in their village.

And there the matter ended.

So they let her continue her solitary labors, taking care of the boys. She stayed alone every night, watching them go off as soon as Venus, the evening star, rose; early in the morning, after her rest, she reappeared at the wattle fence, when Venus was the last light to retire from the sky and the boys returned from their nocturnal roamings. The woman and the star had the same schedule.

So, in a sense, for her every day was Friday, the day of the goddess of love, a day governed by the appearance and disappearance of Venus, the evening star, which in the sky’s great game was also the morning star, as if the firmament itself were the best teacher of a long, eternal pass, like the passes Juan Belmonte made in bullfights she saw when she was a girl. Despite all that, nobody in the town thought of calling her Venus. With her cape and her broad hat, her multiple skirts, and her leather boots, she held on to a single beauty trick, they said — she, as unpainted as an Andalusian midday, with her face cracked by early aging, her eyes buried deep in their sockets, her rabbit’s teeth! — and that was to put two cucumber slices on her temples, which was a well-known protection against wrinkles; but the apothecary said no, it’s a cure for fainting, she thinks that will drive away migraines and faints, she has no faith in my science, she is an ignorant countrywoman. Poor kids.

And although the apothecary added another nickname — Cucumbers — the boys called her Mother, Madre, and when she told them not to and said they should call her Madrina, Godmother, they called her Madreselva, Honeysuckle, by instinct, seeing her as that spreading plant, flowering and aromatic, that was the only adornment of her poor house and was there, like her, for everyone, naturally, like the landscape that spread before the boys’ eyes, from the oaks to the hills to the windswept pass, embracing everything, gardens, houses, and fields, and ending in the prickly-pear-covered rocks through which Madreselva had entered this town to take charge of the unfortunate but ambitious boys.

2

Rubén Oliva waited impatiently for the night. He had the gift of seeing the night during the day, beyond the spreading fields of sunflowers that were the day’s escutcheon, vegetable planets that drew the sun to the earth, sky magnets on the earth, ambassadors of the heavens, flourishing in July and dead in August, scorched by the very sun they mimicked. His land taught Rubén that the sun that gives the day can also take it away; his Andalusian land was a world of sun and shade, where even the saints belonged to one or the other, so that he felt excited but also guilty to realize that his pleasures, his intoxications, were of the night; was it Madreselva’s fault, the children wondered, as they waited for the last candles of the sun to be extinguished before going out to test themselves, when sunflowers became moonflowers, they slipped through the hedges, leapt the wattle fences, and danced past the barbs in the grazing range, stripped by the bank of the river, its water deep and cold even in the summer, felt the first chilling thrill of the caressing nocturnal water flowing through their legs, and floated along the banks, grasping the corkwood branches, feeling their bodies cooled and refreshed by the liquid breath of the river, and then suddenly they would feel the slap of dung that told them they were nearing what they sought, blindly, gropingly, in the darkest hour of the night, the hour when Madreselva urged them to go out, blind, in search of the beast: groping through the unlit corral, the boys’ bodies brushing those of the calves, which they imagined black, only black, nobody wanted any other color, fighting body to body, bull and matador-child locked in their private dance, bound to each other, if I let the body of the bull elude me, the bull will kill me, I have to cling to that body, Madreselva, remembering the cool water between my legs and on my chest, where now I feel the animal’s throbbing hide, his breath, his mouth by mine the black sweat of his skin brushing my breast, my belly, my nascent male down joined to the sweaty bristles of the calf’s hide, hair to hair, my penis and testicles lacquered, caressed, threatened, painted by the enemy love of the beast that I have to keep pressed against my fifteen-year-old body, not just to feel, Mamaserva, Motherserf, but to survive: that is why you send us here, night after night, to learn to fight without fear, otherwise one cannot be a matador, there must be pleasure bound to that enormous danger, Ma, and I, your newest liege, am only happy fighting bulls by night, thrusting blindly in the dark, with nobody watching, acquiring a pleasure and a vice that will be bound together all my life, Honeysuckle, the pleasure of fighting bulls without an audience, without giving pleasure to anyone except myself and the bull, and letting the bull make the thrusts, letting him seek me, fight me, attack me, so that I feel the thrill of being attacked, immobile, without ever feinting, deceiving my dangerous companion on those nights, my first nights as a man.

At times, the ranch guards detected those nocturnal intrusions and ran after us, shouting, brandishing sticks if there were any at hand, firing into the air, but without any real ill will, because even the cattleman knew that sooner or later these kids would be what kept his business from failing. But when the guards set dogs on the boys, even the watchmen questioned the goodwill of the cattleman.

When she heard about that, Madreselva made an agreement with the cattleman that, once their nocturnal apprenticeship was completed, the boys could continue their lessons in the ring at the hacienda, with her as the teacher, and she told the cattleman that, if he liked, the older boys could handle the preparations, but once it was time for the lesson, she would be in charge, she would throw off her hat and cape, her wide lock of hair blinding her and she puffing it away from her face to be able to see; she would be dressed in a short Andalusian outfit with leather leg coverings, she would teach the kids, and especially Rubén Oliva, because in that child’s dark eyes, and in the shadows under his eyes, she saw a longing for the night, she would tell them the three cardinal commands, parar, keep the feet still, templar, move the cloth slowly, mandar, make the bull obey the cloth, those three verbs are the watchwords of the bullfighter, they are more your mothers than the ones you have lost, and that means you must lead the bull where you want him to be, not where he wants to be …

— Don’t worry, said Madreselva, looking at Rubén more than at the others, at the end it will be just you and the bull, face to face, seeing yourself and seeing death in the face of the other. Only one of you is going to come out alive: you or the bull. And the art of bullfighting lies in reaching that point legitimately, with skill. You will see.

Then Madreselva gave the first lesson, how to stop a calf that had newly emerged from the cow as though from the belly of a mythological mother, fully armed, already in possession of all its powers, watch, Rubén, don’t get distracted, don’t make faces, the bull appears before you as a force of nature, and if you don’t want to turn that into a force of art, you might as well become a baker: measure yourself against those horns, cross yourself with them, Rubén, place yourself before the horns, and go, boy, go to the opposite horn, or the bull is going to kill you. Here is the bull galloping toward you. Poor thing, what will you do?

Then Madreselva gave her second lesson, how to cargar la suerte, to move the cloth to turn the bull away, not let the attacking bull do what nature tells it, but instead what it is told by the bullfighter, who is there for that purpose, not at the mercy of fortune but controlling it with his cape, never relinquishing the beauty and magic of the pass, boys; put your leg forward, so, making the bull change direction and go into the field of battle — put your leg forward, Rubén, bend at the hip, don’t break the pass, summon the bull, Rubén, the bull moves, why don’t you! You’re not listening to me, boy, why do you stand there like a statue, letting the bull do whatever it wants? If you don’t take charge now, make it obey, the bull will be fighting you, and not you the bull, the way it should be …

But, after that, nobody was going to move Rubén Oliva.

The bull took charge; the bullfighter was rooted in place.

Rubén was rooted in place.

What did Madreselva say, gritting her rabbit’s teeth, puffing from her lower lip to blow the ashen tuft from her forehead?

— You have to break the bull’s charge, Rubén.

— I won’t take the advantage, Ma.

— It’s not advantage, cunt, it’s leading the bull where it doesn’t want to go, so you can fight it better. That is what Domingo Ortega said — you know more than the maestro, I suppose?

— I don’t move, Ma. Let the bull take control.

— What do you want from bullfighting, boy! said Madreselva then, expressing her annoyance, which she knew was reprehensible but necessary.

— That everyone’s heart should stop when they see me fight the bull, Ma.

— That’s good, boy. That is art.

— That they should all feel like a thousand cowards in face of a brave man.

— That’s bad, boy, very bad, what you said. That’s vanity.

— Then let my fame endure.

She taught them — always quoting Domingo Ortega, for in her opinion there had never been a bullfighter more intelligent and more in control and aware of his every move — that there is nothing more difficult for the bullfighter than to think when facing the bull. She asked them to think of bullfighting as a battle not just between two bodies but between two faces: the bull looks at us, she taught them, and what we must do is reveal its death to it: the bull must see its death in the cape, which is the bullfighter’s face in the ring. And we must see our death in the face of the bull. Between those two deaths lies the art of bullfighting. Remember: two deaths. Someday you will know that the bullfighter is mortal, that it is the bull who does not die.

So taught the insatiable madwoman, whose mother and father could have been a bull and a cow, or perhaps a calf and a bullfighter, who could tell, seeing her there, an image of dust, the statue of a brown and barren sun, a star as cracked as the lips and hands of this woman teacher, who showed them how to feint, to be slow to kill, to take advantage of the bull’s speed, for the bull is a rough beast that must be smoothed, posed and disposed by the bullfighter’s art, thus, thus, thus, and Madreselva made the slowest, the longest, the most elegant passes that pack of forsaken, deceived boys had ever seen, recognizing in the woman’s long, decisive passes a power that they wanted for themselves; Madreselva not only taught them to be bullfighters in the feverish September mornings that succeeded the fiery death of the sunflowers, she also taught them to be men, to have self-respect, to command with elegant, long, and …

— Deceitful passes, said the rebellious Rubén, what you call feinting is only deceit, Ma …

— And what would you do, maestro? Madreselva crossed her arms.

The proud, imperious boy told her then to play the bull, form its horns with her fists and rush straight at him, neither of them dodging, neither she nor he, neither the false bull nor the incipient torero, and she became for that moment the captive cow, and she appraised the proud, gaunt figure of this Rubén Oliva, puffed up with puerile but impassioned honor, and she, mother-bull, did what he asked: against her judgment as his teacher, she charged full-out at Rubén, and he did not guide her with his cape as she had shown them, he remained as motionless as a statue, combining the passes as she wanted, but without any of the feints she called for, instinctively he fought her face, beautifully, moving her though not moving himself, dominating the bull without commanding it, showing it its death as she wanted, as she had done.

And then Rubén Oliva spoiled it all, after he ended the series of passes, unable to resist the temptation to make a triumphal flourish, saluting, acknowledging, freezing his hips, and flashing his black eyes as though to outshine the sun, while she, the teacher, the mistress, called Dry-Bone in the village and Madreselva, Ma, Maresca by her disciples, each according to his own stone-deaf Spanish, language of the country of the deaf and therefore of the brave, of those who can’t hear good advice or the voice of danger, while she shouted with fury, Beggar! Sponge! Don’t ask for an ovation you don’t deserve — if you deserve it, they will give it to you without your making a fool of yourself, but what other chance did he have, he answered softly, wrapping his arms around Madreselva, asking her forgiveness, though she knew he was not repentant: the boy was going to be that kind of bullfighter, daring, stiff, and stubborn, demanding that the public admire his triumphal pass, his courage, his consummate manliness, the exhibition of his masculinity before the multitudes, which was permitted, encouraged, which the bullring authorized and which Rubén Oliva was not going to forgo, sacrificing instead the art which he considered deceit — breaking the savage force of the bull. They would always applaud his statue-like pose, his refusal to cargar la suerte, to direct the bull, the way Manolete won his acclaim. — This one doesn’t dodge, they said, he exposes himself to death right in front of us. He welcomes the thrust of the horns. Just like Manolete!

And she was resigned yet determined, and she asked them to time the passes they made at the calves; resting now, a light between her rabbit’s teeth, more mannish than ever, Dry-Mother, Sea-of-Sand, Junglemother, what should they call her? she made them track each bull’s speed, to encapsulate that speed within the matador’s own rhythm, because otherwise the bull would trap theirs in his, boys, slowly, listen to the metronome, each time, slower, slower, longer, until it’s more than the bull can do to rend cape or body.

Or body. That was the sensual longing that possessed Rubén Oliva: naked, at night, pressed against the body of the bull that he had to hold to keep from being stuck, divining the body of the enemy in a mortal embrace, all wet, emerging out of the cold river into that heated contact with the beast.

3

When Madreselva felt she had no more to teach them, she told those eleven, as she had told others on other graduation days, to prepare their bundles, get their hats, and go out into the bullfighting villages together to try their fortunes. She liked the number 11 because she was superstitious sometimes and like a witch she believed that when a 1 turns on another, the world becomes a mirror, in itself it sees itself and there it stops: beyond, it leads too far, to transgression, to crime. The witch was there to warn, not to entice. She was an exorcist, not a temptress.

Besides, she thought eleven generations of boys with a passion for the ring were not only sufficient but even significant, and signifying; she imagined them on the roads of Spain, reproducing themselves, eleven thousand matadors, the perfect reply to its eleven thousand virgins; and perhaps the two bands — matadors and virgins — would meet, and then Troy would blaze again. For they would meet in freedom, not by force.

She had her rules, and everyone accepted them, except Rubén Oliva. Who but he would have the cheek to go and wake her, a comic hat perched jauntily on his black hair, tieless though his shirt was buttoned to the neck, in a threadbare vest, peasant pants, with leather boots and empty hands: he had borrowed an old cape to throw over his shoulder to announce that he was a bullfighter.

No, she was enraged because Rubén Oliva entered without knocking and surprised her with her skirts up, rolling a cigarette on her thigh, which was fat and fine, in contrast with the rest of her body: no, she was enraged, dropping her skirts and hastily putting her breeches back on, as if magically to revert to her role of female bullfighter, you are not even an apprentice yet, don’t affect a guise you have not attained, don’t be impatient, don’t imagine the world is yours for the picking — the world is not your oyster, believe me, your wretched youth is stamped all over your rags and bags, and if that’s not enough, it’s plain to see in the hunger etched on your face, Rubén, which neither I nor anyone else will ever erase, because from now on your only thought will be where to sleep, what to eat, who to hump, and even if you get rich, even if you’re a millionaire, someone like you will still have a rogue’s mentality, you’ll just want to make it through the day and wake up alive the next and have a plate of lentils, even if they are cold.

She laced the legs of her trousers and added: You will never be an aristocrat, my Rubén, mornings will always torment you.

But we are all going together, we’ll help each other, said Rubén, still so much of a child.

No, there are only ten of you now, said Madreselva, taking his hand, forgetting her leather breeches and her tobacco: his Mareseca whom he longed to kiss and embrace.

Pepe is staying here, she said, anxiously.

With you, Ma?

No, he will return to the bakery.

What will become of him?

He will never leave here. But you will, said Madreselva, the rest of you will escape, you won’t be caught in a poor town, in a bad job, boring, the same thing over and over, like a long night in hell, you’ll be far from the bricks and ovens and kitchens and nails, far from the noise of cowbells that turns you deaf and the smell of cowshit and the threat of the white hounds, you will be far from here …

He hugged her and he felt no breasts — his own adolescent chest was rounder, it retained the lingering fullness of childhood; he was a cherub with a sword, an angel whose eyes were cruelly ringed, but whose cheeks remained soft.

All he did was repeat that the eleven of them, no, the ten, would go together and help one another.

Ha, laughed Madreselva, surprised by his embrace but not rejecting it, you will go together and sleep together and walk together and fight together and keep each other warm, first you were eleven, now you are ten, one day you will be five, and in the end one man will be left, alone, with the bull.

No, that’s not what we want, we’re going to be different, Ma.

Sure, boy, that’s right. But when you’re alone, remember me. Remember what I tell you: on Sundays you are going to see yourself face to face with the bull, then you’ll be saved from your solitude.

She pulled away from the boy and finished dressing, telling him: You are stubbornness itself, you will let the bull kill you to keep from wielding your cape, from luring the bull away from you.

When a matador dies of old age, in bed, does he die in peace? Rubén watched her put on her jacket.

Who knows?

I will remember you, Ma. But what is going to become of you?

I am ready to leave this town. I am going, too.

Where did you come from, Ma?

Look, said the dry, cracked woman with cucumbers on her temples, with her unruly hair hanging over her brow and a black cigarette between her yellow fingers, look, she said after a while, let’s just go without asking questions; things may be bad someplace else, but they’ve got to be better than here. I took care of you, boy, I gave you a profession; now just leave. Don’t ask me any more questions.

You talk as if you saved me from something, Ma.

Here you have no choice — he looked into her eyes, the eyes of his false mother — here you have to obey, there are too many people with nothing here, serving too few people with much, there are too many people here, and so they are used like cattle; you cannot be chaste that way, Rubén, when you’re one of that abundant, docile herd, when they call you and tell you to do this or that, you do it or you are punished or you are driven out, there’s no alternative. What they call sexual liberty really exists only in the fields, only in poor, lonely regions full of servants and cows. You obey. You must. There is no one to turn to. You are a servant, you are used, you are meat, you become part of a lie. The masters do whatever they want with you, for you are their servant, always, but especially when there are no other servants around to see what the masters do with you.

She smiled and gave Rubén a pat on the rump. It was the most intimate and loving gesture of her life. As far as he traveled, Rubén still would feel that hard and loving hand on his backside, far from the burnt sunflowers and the goatbells sounded by the wind of the Levant, leaving behind the superb firs and horses of Andalusia, which are white at birth but which Rubén Oliva found to be black on his return. Now he was going far away, to the salt flats and estuaries, the landscapes of electric towers and the mountains of garbage.

Saturday

— Don Francisco de Goya y Lucientes!

— What are you doing in Cádiz?

— Looking for my head, friend.

— Why, what happened?

— Are you blind? Can’t you see it’s missing?

— I did think something was odd.

— But don’t dodge the question, what happened?

— I don’t know. Who knows what becomes of your body after you’re dead?

— So how do you know you don’t have a head?

— I died in Bordeaux in April of 1826.

— So far away!

— So sad!

— You couldn’t know. Those were dangerous times. The absolutists came to Madrid and persecuted every liberal they saw. They called themselves the Hundred Thousand Sons of San Luis. I only called myself Francisco de Goya …

— Y Lost Census …

— The kids stopped writing “deaf man” on the wall of my estate — instead, the absolutists wrote “Francophile.” So I fled to France. I was seventy-eight years old when I was exiled to Bordeaux.

— So far from Spain.

— Why did you have to paint the French, Paco.

— Why did you have to paint guerrillas, Francisco.

— Why did you have to paint for the court, Lost Senses.

— But what happened to your head, son, lopped off that way?

— I don’t remember.

— So where did they bury you, Paco?

— First in Bordeaux, where I died at age eighty-two. Then I was exhumed; they were going to send me back to Spain in 1899, but when the Spanish consul opened the coffin, he saw my skeleton didn’t have a head. He sent a wind message to the Spanish government …

— It’s called a telegraph, Paco, a telegraph …

— We didn’t have those in my day. Anyway, the message read: SKELETON GOYA NO HEAD: AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS.

— And what did the government say? Come on, Paco, don’t leave us hanging, you always were such a …

— SEND GOYA, HEAD OR NO HEAD. I was exhumed five times, friends, from Bordeaux to Madrid and from San Isidro, where I painted the festivals, to San Antonio de la Florida, where I painted frescoes, five burials, and the boxes they put me in kept getting smaller every time, every time I had fewer bones and they were more brittle, every time I left more dust behind, so that now I’m about to disappear completely. My head foretold my destiny: it just disappeared a little before the rest.

— Who knows, my friend? France was filthy with mad phrenologists, crazy for science. Who knows, maybe you ended up a measure of genius — what a joke! — like a barometer or a shoehorn.

— Or maybe an inkwell for some other genius.

— Who knows? That was a century in love with death, the romantic nineteenth. The next century, yours, consummated that desire. I’d rather go headless than have to witness your time, the age of death.

— What are you saying, Paco? We’re lolling in the lap of luxury here.

— Don’t interrupt, Uncle Corujo.

— Hey, aren’t we all part of the gang here, Aunt Mezuca? What’s wrong with a little gossip?

— And who said anything about being part of the gang, you stunted old fool?

— It’s okay, part of the gang, old wives’ tales, old men’s chatter, call it anything you like, what are you going to do here in Cádiz, where the streets are so narrow, and hotter than in Ecija, and lovers can touch fingers from one window to the next …

— And have to listen to the chatter of gossipmongers like you, Uncle Soleche …

— Shut your mouth, you old hen …

— Don Francisco was saying …

— Thanks for the respect, son. A lot of times we dead ones don’t even get that. I just wanted to say that my case is not unique. Science takes absolute liberties with death. Maybe scientists are the last animists. The soul has gone, to heaven or hell, and the remains are just vile matter. That’s how the French phrenologists must have seen me. I don’t know whether I prefer the sacred fetishism of Spain or the soulless, anemic Cartesianism of France.

— The eyes of St. Lucy.

— The tits of St. Agatha.

— The teeth of St. Apollonia.

— The arm of St. Theresa in Tormes.

— And that of Alvaro Obregón in San Angel.

— And where is the leg of Santa Anna?

— The blood of San Pantaleón in Madrid, which dries up in bad times.

— Yes, in England, my skull might have been the inkwell of some romantic poet.

— Did what happened to you, Paco, happen to anyone else?

— Of course. Speaking of England, poor Laurence Sterne, with whom I often chat, because his books are something like written premonitions of my Caprichos, though less biting, and …

— You’re digressing, Paco …

— Sorry. My friend Sterne says that digression is the sun of life. Digression is the root of his writing, because it attacks the authority of the center, he says, it rebels against the tyranny of form, and …

— Paco, Paco, you’re straying, man! What happened to your friend Sterne?

— Oh, nothing, except when he died in London in 1768 his corpse disappeared from its tomb a few days after his burial.

— Like your head, Paco …

— No, Larry was luckier. His body was stolen by some students from Cambridge, knockabouts and idlers the way they all are, who were celebrating the rites of May in June, whiling away their white nights, using him for their anatomy experiments. Laurence says nobody needed to dissect him because he was more dried up and full of parasites than mistletoe, but since he had written so brilliantly of prenatal life, he approved of someone prolonging his postmortal life, if you can call it that. They returned it — the corpse, I mean — to its tomb, a little the worse for wear.

— Then your case is unique.

— Not at all. Where are the heads of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, of Sydney Carton and of the Princesse de Lamballe?

— Oh, crime, how many liberties are committed in your name!

— And the wheel keeps on rolling, Roland!

— You bet. But Byron, who’s my neighbor these days — though not a sociable one — had his brains stolen when it was discovered that they were the biggest in recorded history. And that’s nothing. There’s a guy who’s more sullen than anyone in my parts, he looks like a Ronda highwayman, a masher and slasher for sure. Dillinger he’s called, John Dillinger, and I always think Dildo-ger, because when they cut him down leaving a theater …

— It was a movie house, Paco.

— In my day we didn’t have those. A theater, I say, and when they did the autopsy they found he had a bigger dick than Emperor Charles V had titles, so they lopped it right off and stuck it in a jar of disinfectant, and there is the outlaw’s John Thomas to this very day, in case anyone wants to compare sizes, and die of envy.

— Did you envy Pedro Romero, Paco?

— I wanted to live to be a hundred, like Titian. I died at eighty-two, and I don’t know if I had already lost my head.

— Romero died at eighty.

— I didn’t know that. He doesn’t reside in our district.

— He retired from the ring at forty.

— Hold on, I know that story better than anyone.

— That’s enough, old woman, you’ll fall clean out the window, you’d better get yourself off to bed.

— Oh, I know all about it.

— Come on, don’t be childish.

— Oh, let me tell Don Paco the whole story, before I die of frustration …

— Who do you think you are, Aunt Mezuca, the morning paper?

— Listen here: Pedro Romero was the greatest bullfighter of his day. He killed 5,588 fierce bulls. But he was never touched by a single horn. When he was buried at eighty, his body didn’t have a single scar, see, not even a little scratch this big.

— It was a perfect body, a nearly perfect figure, with a muscular harmony revealed in the soft caramel color of his skin, which accentuated his body’s classic Mediterranean forms, the medium height, strong shoulders, long upper arms, compact chest, flat belly, narrow hips, sensual buttocks over well-formed but short legs, and small feet: a body of bodies, crowned by a noble head, firm jaw, elegant, taut cheeks, virile emerging beard, perfectly straight nose, fine, separated eyebrows, clear forehead, widow’s peak, serene, dark eyes …

— And how you know that, Don Francisco?

— I painted him.

— All of him?

— No, only the face and a hand. The rest was just his cape. But to fight bulls, Pedro Romero, who stood to receive the bull as no one had ever done before, and who froze for the kill as nobody had ever done either, and who, between stops and commands, bequeathed us the luxury of the most beautiful, uninterrupted series of passes that had ever been seen …

— And olé …

— And recontraolé …

— Well, to fight bulls that way, Pedro Romero had only his eyes, those were his weapons — he looked at the bull and thought as he faced the beast.

— Just his eyes!

— No, also a way of fighting bulls by making them see their death in the cape. He invented the encounter, the only one permitted, my Cádiz friends, between the nature that we kill to survive and the nature that for once excuses us for our crime … only in the bullring.

— And in war, too, Paco, if you consider how we excuse our crimes here in Cádiz.

— No, old man, a man never has to kill another man to survive; to kill your brother is unpardonable. If we don’t kill nature, we don’t live, but we can live without killing other people. We would like to receive nature’s pardon for killing her, but she denies us that, she turns her back on us, and instead condemns us to see ourselves in history. I assure you, my Cádiz friends, that it’s in our loss of nature and our meeting with history that we create art. Painting, I …

— And the bullfight, Romero …

— And love, La Privada …

— I invented both of them.

— They existed without you, Goya.

— All that remains of Romero is a single painting and two engravings. Mine. Of Elisia there remain a painting and twenty engravings. All mine.

— Simply lines, Paquirri, just lines, but not life, not that.

— Where do we find lines in nature? I see only light and dark bodies, advancing and receding planes, reliefs and concavities …

— And what about those bodies that approach, Don Paco, and the ones that recede, what about them?

— Where’s the body of Elisia Rodríguez?

— She died young. She was thirty.

— And what did you give her, Goya?

— What she didn’t have: age. I painted her wrinkled, toothless, wasted, absurdly persisting in using unguents, vapors, pomades, and powders to rejuvenate herself.

— Until death!

— Surrounded by monkeys and lapdogs and gossips and ridiculous fops; the final few spectators of her faded glory …

— Wait till you’ve been anointed!

— But La Privada escaped from me, she died young …

— Her final fainting, Paco.

— La Privada who denied you the pleasure of seeing her dazed in your arms when you made love …

— Oh, listen, listen to this, everyone, window to window: Elisia Rodríguez never fainted with Don Paco de Goya, with everyone else, yes …

— Shut up, damn it …

— Hey, Don Paco, don’t get worked up, here in Cádiz we laugh at everything …

— Nothing between us …

— I gave you everythin’, but you, nothin’.

— And that’s the way it was!

— No, the reason La Privada didn’t faint for me was that she had to stay wide awake to tell me things about our people, she wanted me to know them; listen, her fainting was just a pretext so she could sleep anyway, and not be bothered, once she had got what she …

— And did they let her sleep in peace?

— Except for a few dense fellows who would shake her by the neck trying to wake her …

— Poor La Privada: how many times was she doused with cold water to wake her from her trance!

— How many pinches on the arm!

— How many slaps on the rear!

— How many times did she get her feet tickled!

— But not with me. With me she always stayed awake to tell me things. She told me about a little dog she loved that fell in a well where no one could get it, he couldn’t grab the ropes they lowered, bulls have horns but dogs have only the eyes of sad and defenseless men, which call to us and ask our help, and we can’t give it …

— Elisia Rodríguez told you that?

— As if to a deaf man, shouting in my ear, that’s the way she told me her stories. How was she going to faint with me, if I was her immortality!

— And the witches’ Sabbath, Goya …

— And the starving beggars, cold soup dribbling down their lips, the infinite bitterness of being old, deaf, impotent, mortal …

— Keep going …

— She told me how the people in her town amused themselves by burying the young men up to their thighs in sand and giving them clubs to fight to the death, and how that torture became a regular custom and then, without anyone forcing it on them, the men took it up as a way of resolving disputes of honor — buried, clubbing each other, killing each other …

— What didn’t La Privada know…?

— Daughter of those flea-bitten towns where the princes went to marry to spare the most miserable districts from taxes …

— Stop shouting, you old fool…!

— Daughter of centuries of hunger …

— You’ll never escape!

— She was a child of misery, misery was her true homeland, her dowry, but she had such intelligence, such strength, such will, that she broke through the circle of poverty, escaped with a Jesuit, married a trader, reached the highest heights, was celebrated, loved, and she exercised her blessed will …

— All fall down!

— They all fall, and if she didn’t give me her fainting, Elisia gave me something better: her memories, which were the same as her vision, both bright and bitter, realistic, of the world …

— You have a golden beak, Paquirri!

— Because I might have had that black vision, since I was old and deaf and disabused, but that she, young, celebrated, desired, that she possessed it, and not only that, that she, at twenty, knew the cynicism and corruption of the world more clearly than I with all my art, that brought more to my art than all the years of my long life: she saw first, and clearly, what my broad pallet brushes then tried to reproduce in the deaf man’s estate. I think La Privada had to know everything about the world because she knew she was going to leave it soon.

— Of what illness did she die?

— What everyone died of then: obstructed bowels, the miserable colic.

— It’s called cancer, Paco.

— There was no such thing in my time.

— Why was she so sensitive?

— She had no choice, if she wanted to be what all the generations of her race had not been. She existed in the name of the past of her village and her family. She refused to say to that past: You are dead, I am alive, you can go on rotting. Instead, she told them: Come with me, sustain me with your memories, with your experience, let’s even the accounts, no one will ever make us lower our eyes again while they take the bread from our hands. Never again.

— Nobody knows himself!

— She did. She was my secret sorceress, and I didn’t deny her that image: I painted her as a goddess and as a witch, I painted her younger than she ever was, and I painted her older than she would ever be. A sorceress, friends, is an esoteric being, and that curious word means: I cause to enter, I introduce. She introduced me, flesh in flesh, sleep in sleep, and reason in reason, for each of our thoughts, each of our desires and our bodies, has a double of its own insufficiency and its own dissatisfaction. She knew it: you think that a thing is yours alone, she told me between bites of cookies (she was very fond of sweets), but soon you discover that only what belongs to everyone belongs to you. You think the world exists only in your head, and she sighed, sticking a candied yolk in her mouth, but you soon learn that you exist only in the head of the world.

— Oh, you’re making me hungry.

— I see Elisia on the stage, and I see her and feel her in bed. I see her strip off her clothes in her bath and at the same time I see her carried in a litter so that the people of Madrid, who can’t afford the theater admission, can render her homage. I see her alive and I see her dead. I see her dead and I see her alive. And it’s not that she gave me more than she gave others; she just gave me everything more intensely.

— You mean, as they say these days, in a more representative manner?

— Exactly. Cayetana de Alba came down with her charms to the people. Elisia Rodríguez ascended with her charms, thanks to the people, because she was one of them. She didn’t hide her disillusionment, bitterness, and misery from the people when, despite her fame and fortune, she was plagued with them. I was witness to that encounter: the popular, famous actress and the anonymous people from whence she came. That’s why I follow her, even though I’m headless, I can’t leave her alone, I interrupt her lovemaking, I frighten her new lovers, I trail her in her nocturnal affairs through our cities, so different from before, but secretly so faithful to themselves …

— And you, Goya, who came from Fuendetodos in Aragón …

— A town that makes you shudder just to look at it!

— Yes, I follow her in her nocturnal affairs, in search of love, in the free time this hell where we live grants us to leave and roam outside. She doesn’t want to lose the source, she returns, and that keeps her alive. I keep my sanity to surprise her when she’s with someone else and plaster her face with pigment, to disfigure her and frighten the poor unwitting stud she’s picked up for the night, huddled under the sheets.

— Two of a kind!

— Don Francisco and Doña Elisia!

— The painter and the actress!

— May they never rest in holy ground!

— May they always want something!

— May they always have to leave their graves at night to find what they’re missing!

— The third party.

— The other.

— The lover.

— Pedro Romero.

— He got away from them.

— He lived eighty years.

— A bullfighter who died in bed.

— Not a scar on his body.

— Him they did bury in consecrated ground, even though he was, in his way, both artist and actor.

— Lie: nobody escapes from hell.

— Sooner or later, they all fall.

— Death merely confirms the laws of gravity.

— But we ascend, too.

— We all have a double of our own dissatisfaction.

— Don Francisco Goya y Lost Scents.

— You think that you put the world in your canvases and you created the world in your art and nothing remained of that mud except this dust. What do we know except what you taught us!

— This dust!

— I didn’t invent anything, Christ! I only showed those who showed themselves. I made known the unknown who wanted to be known. Come high, come low: see yourselves. Ladies, gentlemen: see yourselves, see yourselves.

— Here comes the bogeyman.

— They dug you up five times, Paco, to see if your head had reappeared.

— Nothin’.

— But Romero, nobody was curious to see if his skeleton was all there or if his bones had invisible cuts.

— Nothin’.

— And she?

— She, yes, everyone wanted to know if she, who had been so beautiful and had died so young, was going to outlive death. What would her remains be like? To ask that was secretly to ask: What would her ghost be like?

— Goya and Romero agreed to bury her secretly, so that the curious could not find her. Isn’t that true, Don Paco?

— Not only true but sad.

— Look, Goya, only in death did you complete your ménage à trois.

— No, we didn’t want others to see her, and we didn’t want to see her either. But some years later, when nostalgia erased the sins of La Privada, her miserable natal town, which, although exempt from taxes, remained impoverished, tried to benefit from the enduring fame of the actress. The village leaders said they were sure Elisia Rodríguez had left something in her will for the town of her birth. She was faithful to her origins, you know that. But nobody found any such paper. Had she been buried with the will in her hands? Exhumation was requested. All the curious came to see if the beauty of the famous entertainer — or tragédienne, as she preferred to be called — had overcome death. Romero betrayed the secret of her grave; he said he was always ready to aid the authorities. He was old, established, respected, the founder of a dynasty of bullfighters.

— Did you go along with him, Don Francisco?

— No. I said no, and I began a painting, a picture of angels, moreover, in the poor, secret corner of the church where she was now so private, Elisia. The mobs stepped over my paint jars, making a rainbow to death and an obscene gesture at me.

— And then?

— They exhumed her right then and there.

— And then?

— When they opened the coffin, they saw that nothing remained of the body of the beautiful Elisia.

— She had risen!

— Pray for her!

— Nothing was left but the worm-eaten bun crowning the actress’s skull. La Privada was bone and dust.

— Caramba!

— But then from that dust a butterfly flew out and I laughed, I stopped painting, put on my cape and hat, and left, laughing like crazy.

— Her bun by her buns.

— The butterfly in her cunt!

— Who would believe it!

— Until death!

— What did you do, Don Francisco!

— I followed the butterfly.

— Touch my fingers, sweetie, my balcony faces yours and I’m so cold, in the middle of August.

— Our streets are so narrow!

— Our sea is so vast!

— Cádiz, little silver teacup.

— Cádiz, the balcony of Spain facing America.

— Cádiz, the double: American shores, Andalusian lanes.

— Reach out your window to touch my hand.

— You, nothin’.

— I gave you everythin’, and you, nothin’.

— Nobody marries a woman who is not a virgin.

— Don’t shave after eating.

— The noble Spaniard and his dog tremble with cold after dining.

— Let death find me in Spain, so it will be late in coming.

— Titian: one hundred years.

— Elisia Rodríguez: thirty.

— Pedro Romero: eighty.

— Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: eighty-two.

— Rubén Oliva, Rubén Oliva, Rubén Oliva.

— Six bulls, six.

— When?

— Tomorrow, Sunday, at exactly 6 p.m.

— Where?

— In the royal grounds at Ronda.

— Are you going to go?

— I always go to see Oliva.

— Why? He’s a disaster.

— You just never saw him when he wasn’t.

— When?

— Sixteen years ago, at least.

— Where?

— Also in Ronda.

— And what happened?

— Nothing, except nobody alive has seen a performance that could compare, except Manuel Rodríguez. There was never anything like it, since Manolete. That fellow stood in the center of the plaza like a statue, without moving, violating all the rules of the fight. Letting the horned beast do what it wanted with him. Exposing himself to death every minute. Not raising a hand to the bull. Refusing to fight, exposing himself to death. As if he wanted to embrace the bull. Closing his eyes when it came near, almost enticing it: Oh, bull, don’t leave me, let’s perform the ceremony together. And that’s how the fight went: with love for the bull, Rubén Oliva inviting it to his domain as he had always entered the bull’s, refusing to cargar la suerte, to control the bull with his cape, refusing to trade the steel for the aluminum blade, fighting with steel the whole time. That first bull of Rubén Oliva’s did not have time, gentlemen, to orient itself, to back off, to find a middle ground, to paw the ground. Rubén Oliva didn’t let it, and when the bull asked for death, Rubén Oliva gave it to it. It was madness.

— But he never repeated the deed.

— Correction: he hasn’t repeated it yet.

— You’re still waiting, eh?

— Maestro, when you’ve seen the best fight of your life, you can die in peace. The bad thing is that this bullfighter neither retires nor dies.

— It seems to me that this Rubén Oliva has conned you all and lives on the fame of his first fight, knowing he’ll never repeat it.

— May his fame endure!

— Well, if the fellow wants to live on that …

— Look: this is what makes bullfighting bad: a bullfighter keeps coming back for years and years even though he’s terrible, because, from one fight to the next, hope is reborn, and the final disillusionment is sometimes years in coming. Rubén Oliva is a scoundrel, he was good only once. We’ll see if he can ever repeat that day.

— Twenty years, for Rubén Oliva.

— And you’re going to Ronda to see him fight.

— Yes, who knows, maybe tomorrow he’ll surprise us.

— Tomorrow Rubén Oliva will be forty.

— The same age as Pedro Romero when he retired from the ring.

— Well, let’s wish him luck.

— That he won’t get pelted with pillows!

— Poor Rubén Oliva!

— You know him, Paco?

— Nobody knows him.

— Look, Paco. Here’s his photo in Diario 16.

— But this can’t be the man you’ve been talking about!

— This isn’t Rubén Oliva? Well then, even his own mother was mistaken, but you, Don Francisco, you dare to…?

— This is not Rubén Oliva …

— Who is it, then?

— This is the portrait without an artist that Elisia Rodríguez showed me one day, saying: If you paint me, I’ll let you see me naked, I’ll faint in your arms, I’ll …

— You told me, Paco: a witch gave it to her and told her, Elisia, find a painter who can put a name to this portrait …

— Which is not a portrait but a photograph …

— In my time, we didn’t have those …

— Rubén Oliva.

— It’s not a portrait, it’s the man himself, reduced to this frozen, imprisoned condition …

— It’s the man-portrait.

— Rubén Oliva …

— I followed the butterfly through the night, I found it in the arms of this man, fainting. I took La Privada’s face, painted it and unpainted it, made it and destroyed it, that is my power, but this man, this man I couldn’t touch, because he’s identical to his portrait, there’s nothing to paint, there’s nothing to add, it drove me crazy!

— Nobody knows him.

— Don Francisco.

— Headless.

— Y Lost Sentiments.

— Try to sleep, Auntie Mezuca.

— Boys, in this heat you can’t even talk.

— Silver teacup.

— Balcony of Andalusia.

— Vast sea.

— Narrow streets.

— Touch hands from window to window.

— Nobody knows himself.

Sunday

It seemed that the afternoon darkened.

— García Lorca, Mariana Pineda

1

He was dressed in the Palace of Salvatierra, by Sparky, his sword handler, watched gravely by an old friend, Perico of Ronda, who had served him fifteen years before. His suit was on a chair waiting for him when he entered the large stone-and-stucco room whose balcony faced the steep gorge dividing the city.

The clothes set out on the chair were the ghost of fame. Rubén Oliva stripped and looked out at the city of Ronda, trying to define it, to explain it. Swallows, those birds that never rested, flew overhead, and with the fluidity of an unforgettable song they seemed to recall some distant words to Rubén’s ear, which until then had been as naked as the rest of him. My village. A deep wound. A body like an open scar. Contemplating its own wound from a watchtower of whitewashed houses: Ronda, where our vision soars higher than the eagle.

Sparky helped him put on his long white underpants, and although Perico was watching them, Rubén Oliva felt that he was alone. The sense of absence persisted while he was helped into the stockings held up by garters under the knee. Sparky fastened the three symmetrical hooks and eyes on the legs as Rubén looked for something he failed to find outside the balcony. The attendant helped him put on his shirt, his braces, his cummerbund, and his tie. Perico went out to see if the car was ready, and Sparky began to help Rubén put on his vest and one-piece coat. But he didn’t want any more help. Sparky discreetly withdrew and the bullfighter fastened his vest and adjusted its fit.

He was barefoot. Now Sparky knelt before him, helping him put on his black shoes, and the eyes of the bullfighter met those of the sword handler as they followed the swift, soaring flight of the swallows, their eyes blinded by the afternoon summer sun that moved so slowly and was so distant from his own agony.

— What time is it?

— Five-twenty.

— Let’s go to the plaza.

He arrived in an apple-green suit of lights, and gazed up at the high iron balcony, the pediment facing the Royal Display Grounds, as if expecting to see someone there waiting for him. Time had been shattered into isolated moments, separated from each other by the absence of memory. He tried to remember the events just prior to his dressing. How had he gotten here? Who had hired him? What was the date? He knew the day: it was Sunday, Sunday seven, that’s what the boys outside the bullring sang, Saturday six and Sunday seven, but time was still fragmented, discontinuous, and all he could remember was that Perico of Ronda had told him that some very important people were coming from Cádiz, and from Seville, Jerez, and Antequera, too; but it was the people from Cádiz who had come to the house to warn him: —Tell the Figura we’re going to be out there, see if he’ll give us the great fight he owes us this time.

The words were almost a threat, and that was what Rubén Oliva found disconcerting and bitter. But no, he was sure it was just well-wishing. He made a great effort to concentrate, to tie it all together, everything that had been happening, acts, thoughts, memories, desires, the ebb and flow of the day, a succession of distinct moments, yet linked to each other, like the passes he would string together this afternoon, if he was favored by luck and was able to overcome the strange state that held his will; in it, time seemed to have been ruptured, as though many distinct moments, from different times, had taken residence in the house of time that was his soul. He had always been a man of the present. That was what his profession demanded, that he banish memory; in the ring, memory is no more than a longing for the sweetest, the most peaceful times: it is, in the ring, the presentiment of death.

To live in the moment, but a moment tied to all other moments, like a stupendous series of passes, that’s how to drive away nostalgia and fear, the past that is lost to us and the future that awaits us when we die. He thought of all that, kneeling before a wide-skirted, rosy Virgin, with her Child on her knees, in the chapel on the plaza. The angels flying above her were the true crown on that queen, but Rubén Oliva found them unsettling: they were angels with incense burners, and on their faces were mocking smiles, almost grimaces, which distanced them from ironic complicity, setting them apart from the central figure of the Virgin? the Mother? Their smiles made him wonder what they had been perfuming. He thought they gave off a miasma of perspiration and the dark humors of long, tiring, penitent pilgrimages.

And there was something else he wished he knew: what had happened between his prayer imploring the Virgin for protection (he couldn’t remember it, but that’s what it had to have been) so that he would come safely out of the ring he had not yet entered, and his arrival just now at the entrance, where, alone with his cuadrilla, he was getting ready for the bullfight, suddenly realizing that this was a cattleman’s contest, that he, Rubén Oliva, would fight six bulls in the next three hours. He would have the opportunity — six opportunities — to prove that his previous fight, which was so renowned, had not been a fluke after all. Now, with luck, he could show that he was capable of defeating fear, not once but six times.

— I’m not afraid this time — he said, loud enough for the sword handler to hear when he hung the bullfighter’s cape over Rubén’s left shoulder.

— Figura … If I may … said Sparky, embarrassed, not meeting the bullfighter’s eyes, arranging the cape over Rubén’s left hand, and leaving his right hand free to hold the hat, which Rubén Oliva dropped and the swordhandler picked up, alarmed, putting it back in Rubén’s hand without a word, just as the music announcing the beginning of the fight was heard.

Then Rubén entered the arena, and he experienced the unexpected, and it was simply fear, simple fear, the perfectly banal horror of dying right in the middle of his debate with himself, before he could answer the questions: am I a good artist, am I a true bullfighter, can I give a good performance today, or is that no longer possible, and will I die, will I live to see forty, or is it too late? Those questions had always been provisional (which was natural, Rubén Oliva told himself), because all the while he was fighting the interminable fight, there was a public in front of him and around him that was going to give or withhold their applause, their sympathy, the trophies of the fight. But not this time: this time, the public did not exist for him.

Nervously, breaking an almost sacred tradition, he looked behind him, but his cuadrilla showed no surprise, they seemed to see a normality that he was denied: the two stories, the hundred thirty-six columns, the sixty-eight arches, the four sections of the plaza of Ronda full of people turned toward Rubén Oliva, anxious to see if he would fulfill his promise this time. The picadors looked at the crowd, the banderilleros looked at the crowd, but Rubén Oliva did not.

He walked into the glory of the arena, perspiring not from the familiar burden of the suit of lights which he wore, or from the secondary fear that its weight would plant him motionless in this beach of blood. He was not afraid of that, even when Sparky gave him the look he knew so well, the one that said you’ve forgotten something, Rubén, you’re not doing it right. What, what have I forgotten, Sparky?

— You forgot to salute the president’s box, Figura, the sword handler murmured as he removed the display cape and gave him the one he would use in the bullfight.

Rubén Oliva assumed his position, the heavy cape, starched and stiff, held between his spread-out legs. The eighteen pounds of thick fabric seemed to rest on the flimsy pedestal of his dancer’s shoes. It was a ballet of sun and shade, the matador thought, standing there waiting for the first bull, an instinctive decision, waiting in the ring rather than watching the bull from the entrance to assess its color, its temperament, its speed, which might differ from the bullfighter’s expectations.

He moved forward and halted, presenting his cape like a shield to the bull, which came tearing out of the pen to its encounter with Rubén Oliva, who was without fear that afternoon because he couldn’t see anyone in the seats; he looked first at the sun and the shade and then adjusted himself to meet the bull, halting him with a feint of the cape, making a long pass, as timeless as the two singular presences Rubén Oliva recognized at that moment: not the bull, not the public, but the sun and the moon; that was what he thought during the eternal first pass that he made at the wild animal, black as the night of the moon in its half of the arena, raging against the sun that occupied the other half, which was Rubén, blazing in the ring, a luminous puppet, a golden apple, the matador.

It was the longest pass of his life because he didn’t make it, it was made by the sun he had become, the sun he had envisioned in his endless agony, Rubén Oliva, prisoner of the sky, pierced through by the rays of the sun that was himself, Rubén Oliva, who held the fighting cape over the sand, not ceding his place in the center of the sky to the picadors, who were impatient, alarmed, satisfied, envious, astonished, afraid perhaps that this time Rubén would offer what he was offering — what the public, invisible to the bullfighter, acknowledged with a growing roar: the olés that rained down on him from the sky, broad and round as pieces of gold, fading in the shadows, as if the promised victory were a fruit of Tantalus, and the moon, residing in the shadowed stands, said to the bullfighter, not yet, everything requires a period of gestation, life’s beginning, rest, so pause now, feint now, give us a display of art that will never be forgotten: your slowness was such, Rubén (the shadows told him, the moon told him), that the bull didn’t even graze your cape, now show us something more than your adolescent valor, when you clung to the dark bulls and rubbed your sex against their skin; now show us the courage of distance, of domination, of the possibility that the bull will cease to obey, will pierce you, transforming you from an artist into a hero.

He heard the voice of Madreselva in his ear: —Their hearts should stop beating when they watch you fight a bull.

— Yes, Mother, said the matador, the good people will doze off if they see a bullfighter who is in no danger, who is indolent, slow, untouched. Let me be brave.

— Be careful, said the woman with the unruly forelock and the cucumbers on her temples, this is a fierce bull, fed on grasses, broad beans, and chick-peas. Don’t rub his horn!

Which is just what Rubén Oliva did, and the five thousand spectators that he couldn’t see cried out in shock at the bullfighter of the night, the swordsman of the moon, who seemed to be returning to his first adventures, crossing the river naked to fight the forbidden beasts in the darkness, intimate in the closeness it imposed in those first fights, sensing the warm proximity, the humid breath, the quick invisibility of the bull, blind as his master.

The public he couldn’t see screamed, the cuadrilla cried out, but on that afternoon of bulls in Ronda, Rubén Oliva did not release the animal, would not yield despite the second admonition: he had violated the rules, he knew it, he would receive nothing, neither the ear nor the tail, no matter how excellent his fight, because he had defied authority.

He had violated the ceremony of the sun and the moon, of the solar Prometheus condemned if he used his freedom but also damned if he didn’t use it, of a Diana who waxed and waned, changeable yet regular in her tides, washing over the plaza, draining it away from the bullfighter. Now, as it grew late, the public of the shadows, the only audience that remained for him, left him stranded, alone in the arena’s pool of light.

— Leave me alone, leave me alone, that was all Rubén Oliva asked that afternoon, and let’s see who will dare to stop him, to oppose him, when he throws off his fighting cape and stands still for a moment (“They think I’m mad, the emptiness of the plaza stares me in the face, accusing me: he’s gone mad”), and Sparky, with tears in his eyes, ran to give him the discolored red muleta, the cloth wrapped around the shining steel, as if urging him, end it, Figura, do what you have to do, but kill this first bull, and then see if you can kill the five that are waiting, if the authorities don’t expel you from the Royal Display Grounds of Ronda, this afternoon and forever. It’s madness, Rubencillo! Worse than madness! It’s a crime what you did, a transgression of authority. The bull was dangerous and brave; it was of good breeding, it hadn’t backed off, nor was there reason for it to do so: it had not shed a drop of blood, it raised its head and looked at Rubén Oliva, the madman of the ring, who beckoned it again, immobile, refusing to cargar la suerte, to manipulate the cape, defying his teacher Madreselva, stopping the hearts of the audience, ignoring the looks telling him to do what he was supposed to do.

The bull charged and Rubén Oliva stood motionless, resolved not to feint with the cape but to let the bull do what he wanted; his head high, his gaze defiant, not even looking at the bull, seeing instead, for the first time — although he knew that they had been watching him from the moment he had dazedly entered the ring, forgetting the rules, neglecting to salute the president’s box — two pairs of eyes concentrated entirely on him, on him alone.

Now he saw them and he knew that if he had not been able to see anyone in the stands, only the sun and the moon, it was because the sun and the moon were the only ones who had seen him. The big-headed man, with his high hat and unruly white side-whiskers, his turned-up nose and his thick-lipped, sarcastic mouth, looked at him with the eloquent look of one who has seen everything and knows that nothing can be done.

— Now is the time.

The woman with heavy eyebrows that met over her nose, with hair on her upper lip, with the high, curled hairstyle of another age crowned by a pink silk topknot, exposed her breast, offering it to a black child so he could nurse, and fixed Rubén with a pitying but peremptory look that commanded him:

— To the death, Rubén.

— You won’t escape this time, Pedro.

— There it goes, Rubén.

— Bravísimo, Pedro.

— What a sacrifice, Rubén!

— Of what illness will you die, Pedro?

— In bed?

— In the ring?

— Old?

— Young?

— Neither more nor less.

— Rubén Oliva.

— Pedro Romero.

He wanted to fight the bull face-on, to kill from the receiving end, using the ploy of the wrist. But the bull never lowered his head. The bull looked at him the way the woman with the bows and the man in the top hat had looked at him, demanding: One of us is going to die. How can you imagine you can kill me, when I am immortal?

And if he could have spoken, Rubén Oliva would have answered: Come to me, attack me, and discover your death. You are right. The bullfighter is mortal, the bull is not, that is nature.

And if Madreselva had been there, she would have cried: No, look at the bull, you don’t have the right to choose, boy, take the muleta in your left hand, so, and the sword in your right, so, at least show that you have chosen the volapié, the “flying while running” technique, keep the sword low, see if this virgin bull lowers its head a little and discovers its death instead of yours, boy: Do what I tell you, son (like a tide, like a drain, like a sewer, the dry, smoke-choked voice of the woman coursed through the shells of Rubén Oliva’s ears), now bury your sword in the cross of this virgin bull, where the shoulders meet the spine of this defiant female male, this cunt, this prick, obey me, I only want to save your life!

— No, Madreselva, let the bull come to me and discover its death that way …

— Oh, my son, oh, Rubén Oliva, was all the bullfighter’s god mother could say when at that moment and eternally he was gored by the virgin bull and began to die for the first time that summer afternoon in Ronda.

— Oh, my men, oh, Pedro, and oh, Rubén, who made you be so much alike? said Elisia Rodríguez, La Privada, from her seat of that moment, when Rubén Oliva and Pedro Romero began to die together that summer afternoon in Ronda.

— Oh, my rival, oh, Pedro Romero, how could you imagine that you were going to exist outside my portrait, said Don Francisco de Goya y So Sorry from his seat beside La Privada’s, at that moment, when Pedro Romero began to die in a bullring for the first time, the very one where he had killed his first bull.

But while Elisia Rodríguez felt the loss of the pleasure that only they, her lovers, had given her and that her toreros now had withdrawn, Goya looked at the dead body and said to the torero that he would have painted him for eternity, immortal, truly identical to how he was in life, but in the canvas that he painted …

More than five thousand bulls killed and not a single gore, Pedro Romero, who had retired at forty, who had died at eighty without a single wound on his body: how could he imagine, and Don Francisco de Goya y Lucifer laughed, that he could escape the destiny my picture gave him? How could he imagine that he could reappear in a different picture that wasn’t by Don Paco de Goya y Losthishead, a natural portrait, without art, with no space for the imagination, a reproduction indistinguishable from what Romero was in life, as though he were sufficient unto himself …

— Without my painting … Oh, Pedro Romero, forgive me for killing you this time in the fine ring of Ronda, but I cannot allow you to return to life and go around competing with my portrait of you, I cannot permit that; I cannot allow Elisia to go looking for you among the street stands and the bullrings, outside the destiny I gave you when I painted you together …

No, certainly not: he could not allow what she told him, before, can’t you see, the witch showed him to me in that magic portrait, and now here he is, throbbing and pale, throbbing and impaled, and you, headless, you dirty old fool! No, certainly not, repeated the old man with the high silk hat and the crooked mouth, surrounded by women as dark and tremulous as the afternoon, as death.

Between being gored and dying, the torero raised his eyes to the sky, and, as the plaza of Ronda is not very high, he felt that he was in the middle of a field, or a mountain, or the very sky that the bloody eyes of Rubén Oliva were contemplating. The plaza of Ronda is part of the nature that surrounds it, and, who knows, perhaps that is why Rubén Oliva, that Sunday, fixed his eyes on an audience of flowers and birds and trees, everything he knew and loved in childhood, and throughout his life, seeing the arches of the plaza covered with jasmine and four-o’clocks, and decking the spandrels with blackthorn, basil, and verbena, and spewing impatiens and balm gentle over the rosettes of the cornice, twin streams flowing over the roof tiles, where cranes nest and robins flutter. He heard the mocking voice of the kite, directing his attention to the sky where it was tracing its graceful curves. Rubén Oliva, through the blood of his eyelids, looked for one final time at the sun and the moon, and at last he saw that the light of the most recent, the nighttime star reached him forty years late, while the light of the sun that he was seeing now for the last time was only eight minutes old.

Rubén Oliva looked into space and knew, finally, that he had spent his whole life watching the passage of time.

And then he felt that nature had abandoned the land forever.

First he closed his own eyes to die for the first time.

Then he closed the eyes of the bullfighter Pedro Romero, who had just died, gored, at forty, as he was retiring from the bullring in the Royal Display Grounds of Ronda, beside Rubén, inside Rubén.

He no longer heard the voice that said: My land, Ronda, the most beautiful because it opens the white wings of death and makes us see it as our inseparable companion in the mirror of the abyss.

He no longer heard the actress’s cry of terror, or the nursing boy’s wail, or the cackle of the old painter in his silk hat.

2

Rocío, the wife of Rubén Oliva, put aside her kitchen affairs for a moment, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the black bull of Osborne brandy on the television screen, and, attracted by the young group in the street singing that childish round about Sunday seven, she looked out from the balcony and said with amazed delight, Rubén, Rubén, come and look, the sea has come to Madrid.

Ronda

July 31, 1988