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

to bear a child, the Holy Spirit passed through her sex like light through a crystal.
    I kissed one of her ears and asked, laughing, if she would like that better than the way we did it. No, she answered, without hesitation, wrapping her arms around my neck and caressing it with her long fingers, proportionally the longest part of her body.
    â€”Don’t think about having children (typically, I resorted to a joke, just the sort that Mr. Plotnikov accused me of); think, rather, that Herod was probably right when he ordered all the male children of Israel to be killed.
    At that she tore away from my embrace, screamed, ran to shut herself in her room to fast for an entire day, and then came out, contrite, but I am not inclined to cede my authority, much less my literary authority.
    â€”All right. Where should I start to read your famous library?
    â€”You can begin at the beginning, which is the Bible.
    â€”Never. Only Protestants read that.
    â€”And Catholics?
    â€”Christ, we know it all! We know all about the Holy Virgin, and you, you know nothing about her.
    â€”Very well, Constancia—I laughed then—very well said, my love. You see what heretics we are.
    â€”Come on, Whitby, next thing you’ll have me read the dictionary from A to Z, or something just as stupid.
    â€”So what would you like to read?
    â€”Maybe the stories of all the fallen women.
    â€”You would never finish. And you would have to begin, again, with Eve.
    â€”Then I want to read everything about a fallen child, a sorrowful boy.
    That’s how she started reading Kafka, and she threw herself into it, reading the books again and again, moving from biography to fiction and discovering, finally, that he had no better biography than his fiction, and so accepting Kafka on his own terms, as a man with no life other than literature. She said, half in jest (I think), that she would have liked her son to be like him, like that thin, sickly boy with the ears of a bat, who … who could have gone to work for the Spanish national railways.
    â€”A child, please, even one who would be sad …
    â€”Let’s flee to Egypt, Constancia, so Herod can’t kill him.
    Then she ran to shut herself in her room and this August afternoon, taking her hand, I’m finally reconciled to this questioning: had Constancia died each time she fled from me and shut herself up for a full day in her bedroom, before coming out, renewed, radiant, to make up, play, and improve our love that would have died of pure perfection, of pure distance, of pure suspicion, of pure incomprehension (— An old woman. — Ignorant. — Sterile ) if not for those incidents? Perhaps our arguments were more than just domestic tiffs; they were more like personal sacrifices made by my delicious Spanish woman on the altar of our domestic, solitary love in a ghostly city—the most ghostly—of the American South. Did Constancia die for me and did our love, so enduring, require nothing, here and now, but that death without end?
    11
    Constancia doesn’t travel anywhere. We were married in Seville in 1946. I had to return to Atlanta to take my exams. She asked me to go ahead and get the house ready. She would follow me. She had to arrange her papers, say her farewells to family and friends in the four corners of the peninsula and gather the furniture she had left with aunts and cousins, and so forth. I found the house in Savannah and waited for her here, gazing out at the sea that would bring her to me: there was only one thing I could think of in the entire world, and that was the Andalusian girl, so fresh and graceful, so amorous and wild, who smelled of earth and balm and lily and verbena, who sunned herself in the plazas of Seville, as if throwing down a challenge to death, because Constancia, like the stars, was enemy of the day, and it was in bed, in the darkness—nocturnal or artificial—that her games flowed forth and her games