Fuentes and the Ghost of Goya : CONSTANCIA AND OTHER STORIES FOR VIRGINS <i> by Carlos Fuentes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 340 pp.; 0-374-12886-3) </i>

With his distinctively baroque style shot through with today’s requisite questioning of all literary convention, the celebrated and peripatetic Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes returns to familiar ground in “Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins.” Here, as in his classic 1962 novella “Aura,” Fuentes explores the tragicomic isolation of 20th- Century existence, the emptiness of logic, the power of the artist and our inability to outrun the past.

This is a book also inhabited by the strange ghost of Goya, the great Spanish painter of Spain’s non-heroic age, an era of anarchy and decadence much like our current historical moment. One can’t help but speculate on whether Fuentes sees himself in Goya, who often painted human folly caught in one inextricable grip of life’s dark forces. Like Goya, Fuentes has the gift for savage satire as well as a horror of history’s wreckage.

Although Goya is a main character in the third story, he is drawn into the book from the start. In fact, it happens in the collection’s first story, “Constancia,” on its first page, when we meet an old doctor in Savannah, Ga., who dreams of cities within cities within cities and thinks, “Order is the antechamber of horror, and when my Spanish wife once more opens her old book of Goya prints and stops at the most famous of the Caprichos, I don’t know if I should disturb her fascination by remarking: ‘Reason that never sleeps produces monsters.’ ”

Of course, this inverts the actual words with which Goya titled the print: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Fuentes is warning us. As we enter this collection, we pass into a realm of inverted meanings where paradox rules. Without question, he is attempting to recover some meaning by reordering language. His point may be that now it is reason that must be put to rest, at least for the moment. In Bali, the shadow-puppeteers often say that “demons think in straight lines.”

For Fuentes, the linear mind represses and the price it pays for its repression is that the repressed will return, to haunt us, in new, more monstrous forms and formulas. The result: phantom worlds, parallel realities and bizarre dualities that breed alternative selves living in private hells and fantasy heavens.

Indeed, these five novellas are haunted by the entire specter of the past and the collapse of tradition. Calling our receding century the “age of death,” he obsessively ruminates on the meaning of history. For him, it is a “great ghostly flow . . . a single catastrophe.”

It’s no accident that he quotes Walter Benjamin, a writer who himself was plagued by history and who ultimately became its victim. Fuentes describes Benjamin’s last desperate hours on the French-Spanish border at the maddening height of World War II. “I so desperately want Walter Benjamin to hear this voice,” Fuentes writes, “. . . to hear it as he takes the fatal dose of morphine and falls asleep forever, history’s orphan, progress’ refugee, sorrow’s fugitive, in a tiny room in a hotel in Port Bou . . . .”

Reading these novellas, then, is like walking down an ornate, ominous hall of mirrors. Distorted, sometimes grotesque images reflect and refract into themselves, creating an intricate web of intersections. Within the lines of the interstices are worlds where cities are vast “archival” mazes; where famous actresses faint after orgasms; where a 19th-Century Spanish matador, memorialized by Goya and now disinterred by Fuentes, is a metaphor for the artist; where mannequins in wedding gowns are found alluring, and where male genitalia, both bestial and human, are painted and lacquered.

For the reader’s further entertainment, Fuentes has appended the date and place of each story’s composition. In a period of two years, from the summer of 1986 to the summer of 1988, moving from England to Massachusetts to Spain to France and finally, to Mexico, he penned these Gothic tales of history’s enigmatic presence.

The last novella in the collection, “Reasonable People,” is appropriately set in Mexico City, “the oldest city in the New World.” Twin architects and their professor meet to discuss Utopias in a restaurant located in a section of the city that looks “like a metallic mountain range: twisted, tortured, rough, rusty; several stages in the life of steel were exposed there, like the entrails of an iron-age animal--literal and emblematic--they were bursting out, exposing themselves and revealing their age, the age of the beast, the geology of the city. The deterioration of the iron and concrete amazed us: Only a short time ago they were the very latest and the most modern. Today, Bauhaus sounds like a cry or a sneeze.” More wreckage.

So it is that in this city, set on the edge of history on the ash heap of modernism at a construction site that echoes man’s irrepressible quest to build something permanent in the face of overwhelming impermanence, that a miracle of sorts occurs. The image of the Madonna and Child are mysteriously etched on a glass window. As the word spreads throughout Mexico City, crowds swarm, followed by hawkers and then by a media circus and finally by the army to restore order.

While this fake miracle in the fashion of a long-running television sitcom keeps the masses occupied, a real miracle takes place. Two secular skeptics, “serene rationalists,” see a hole that stretches through several city blocks. It’s a hole in time and one of the architects steps through an entrance and into a past strewn with dead flowers.

Almost 400 years ago, Cervantes published a wonderfully droll novella within a novella, “The Conversation of Two Dogs of the Hospital of the Resurrection at Valladolid.” One of the talking, reasoning canines remarks that miracles “are never experienced with impunity.” And that may well be the moral in this latest collection by Fuentes.