It was a style from a long time ago, nobody recalls the way women dressed then. They will all be old tomorrow. But not La Desdichada: the sumptuousness of her wedding gown was everlasting, the train of her dress splendidly elegant. The veil that covered her features revealed the perfection of her pale face, softened by gauze. In her flat satin slippers she appeared proud and proper. Elegant and obedient. An incongruous silver lizard ran out from beneath her motionless skirt, scooting away in trembling zigzags. It was looking for a sunny spot in the display window, and there it stopped, like a satisfied tourist.
Toño
I came to see the dummy in the wedding dress because Bernardo insisted. He said it was a rare sight, in the midst of what he called the crowded vulgarity of Tacuba. He was looking for an oasis in the city. I had long since renounced such things. If one wanted rural backwaters in Mexico, there are more than enough in Michoacán or Veracruz. The city must be what it is, cement, gasoline, and artificial light. I didn’t expect to find Bernardo’s bride in a window, and so it turned out: I didn’t find her, and I wasn’t a bit disappointed.
Our apartment is very small, just a sitting room where Bernardo sleeps and a loft that I go up to at night. In the sitting room there’s a cot that serves as a sofa by day. In the loft is a bed with metal posts and a canopy, which my mother gave me. The kitchen and the bath are one and the same room, at the back of the flat, behind a bead curtain, like in South Sea movies. (Two or three times a month we went to the Cine Iris: we saw Somerset Maugham’s Rain with Joan Crawford and China Seas with Jean Harlow — the sources of certain images we share.) When Bernardo talked about the dummy in the window on Tacuba, I got an odd feeling that what he wanted was to bring home La Desdichada, as he christened her (and I, letting myself be influenced by him, also started calling her that, before I saw her, before I even had proof of her existence).
He wanted to decorate our poor home a little.
Bernardo was reading and translating Nerval back then. He was busy with a sequence of images in the poem El Desdichado: a widower, a heavenly lute, a dead star, a burnt tower; the black sun of melancholy. As he read and translated during our moments of student freedom (long nights, rare sunrises), he told me that in the same way that a constellation of stars shapes itself into the image of a scorpion or a water carrier, so a cluster of syllables tries to form a word and the word (he says) painstakingly seeks its related words (friendly or enemy words) to form an image. The image travels through the entire world to embrace and make peace with its sister image, so long lost or estranged. This, he says, is the birth of metaphor.
I remember him at nineteen, thin and frail, with the compact body of a noble Mexican, delicate, Creole, the child of centuries of physical slightness, but with a strong, solid head like that of a lion, a mane of black wavy hair, and unforgettable eyes: blue enough to rival the sky, vulnerable as a newborn baby’s, powerful as a Spanish kick in the depths of the most silent ocean. Yes, the head of a lion on the body of a hind: a mythological beast, indeed: the adolescent poet, the artist being born.
I saw him as he couldn’t see himself, so I could read the plea in his eyes. Nerval’s poem is, literally, the air of a statue. Not the air around it, but the statue itself, the air of the voice that recites the poem. When he asked me to go see the mannequin, I knew that actually he was asking me:
— Toño, give me a statue. We can’t buy a real one. Maybe the dress-shop mannequin will strike your fancy. You won’t have any trouble picking out the one: she’s dressed as a bride. You can’t miss her. She has the saddest look in the world. As if something terrible happened to her, a long time ago.
At first I couldn’t find her among all the naked mannequins. None of the dummies in the window was wearing clothes. I said to myself, this is the day that they change their outfits. Like living bodies, a dummy without clothes loses its personality. It is a piece of flesh, I mean, of wood. Women with painted faces and marcelled waves, men with painted mustaches and long sideburns. Fixed eyes, colored eyelashes, cheeks like candy glazes, faces like screens. Below those faces with their eyes forever open are bodies of wood, varnished, uniform, lacking a sex, lacking hair, lacking navels. Though they didn’t drip blood, they were exactly like chunks of meat in a butcher’s shop. Yes, they were pieces of flesh.
Then, looking more closely, I examined the window my friend had indicated. Only one of the women had real hair, not painted on wood, but a black wig, a little matted down but high and old-fashioned, with curls. That, I decided, was she. And besides, her eyes could not have been sadder.
Bernardo
When Toño entered with La Desdichada in his arms, I couldn’t bring myself to thank him. That woman of wood embraced the body of my friend the way they say the Christ of Velázquez hangs from his cross: much too comfortably. Toño, who is a typical man of the north, tall and strong, could easily hold her with one arm. La Desdichada’s backside rested on one of Toño’s hands; his other hand was around her waist. Her legs hung down and her head was on his shoulders, her eyes open, her hair disheveled.
He entered with his trophy and I wanted to show him I wasn’t angry, just vexed. Who had asked him to bring her home? I had asked him only to go look at her in the window.
— Put her wherever you like.
He stood her up, her back to us, as if to demonstrate that she was our statue now, our Venus Callipygia of the shapely ass. Statues rest on their feet, like trees (like horses that sleep on their feet?). She looked indecent. A naked mannequin.
— We have to get her some clothes.
Toño
The store on Tacuba Street had already sold the bride’s gown. Bernardo didn’t want to believe me. What did you expect, I said to him, that the dummy would wait for us forever in that display window, dressed as a bride? The purpose of a mannequin is to display clothes to passersby, so that they buy them — the clothes, mind you, not the mannequins. It was pure chance that she was dressed as a bride when you walked by. She might have been showing off a bathing suit for a month without your noticing. Besides, nobody cares about the dummy. What they’re interested in is the outfit, and it has already been sold. The dummy is wood, nobody wants her, look, it’s what in law classes they call a fungible object, one’s as good as another, it’s all the same … Besides, look, she’s missing a finger, the ring finger of her left hand. If she was married, she isn’t anymore.
He wanted to see her dressed as a bride again, and if he couldn’t, at least he wanted to see her dressed. La Desdichada’s nudity bothered him (it also attracted him). Nonetheless, I set her at the head of our humble table, the sort you’d expect of students of “limited resources,” as one said euphemistically in Mexico City in the year 1936.
I gave her a sideways glance, and then I threw over her a Chinese robe that an uncle of mine, an old pederast from Monterrey, had given me when I was fifteen, with these premonitory words: —Some clothes anyone can wear. All of us girls want to look cute.