Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (7 page)

All these strange things were the regular features of my life, they didn't even begin to seem strange until that moment, when I was beginning to connect my presence in the cabin of a jet with the remembrance of my equally present presence on the landing of my neighbor's stairs this morning, slowly approaching the only door on the second floor of the house on Wright Square and pulling it open, having left my slave Constancia at home, my Andalusian slave, in exchange for … what?

In exchange for my life, because without Constancia I was dead.

14

I open the door in the silence.

I open the door to the silence.

It is so absolute a silence that, as I open the door, all the sound in the world seems suspended.

The wings cease beating.

Now there is no noise: nor will there be ever again, the gray emptiness seems to tell me—the luminously gray emptiness that receives me.

The floor of the bedroom is dirt. Black earth, silt, river mud.

In the center of the earthen floor stands a coffin, resting on a circle of red earth.

I know that it is a coffin because it is shaped like one, and is large enough to hold a human body, but its baroque construction reveals a rare level of woodworking skill; the box of worked wood is fashioned to pick up and reflect the pearly light of this region—every surface is cut, angled, opposed to another surface, the infinite surfaces shattering light as if to carry it to some mysterious dimension, the edge of the light of death itself, I don't know, a supreme point that contains and rejects everything, an awesome place, one that I can't begin to describe even today, flying thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic.

But one thing is recognizable, one thing is unmistakable: on the lid of the coffin is sculpted the same image one sees in the royal necropolises and cathedrals of Spain, the reclining figure of a woman, with the loveliest, the largest eyes, the saddest expression, her hands crossed over her breasts; she is dressed in cowl and mantle: popular iconography makes me see this as blue and white, but here all is worked wood and whitewashed walls, black earth and red earth. There are no icons; no full-skirted Virgins, or crucifixes, nothing: only my feet covered with red earth, which I stare at stupidly.

I come to. I try to raise the lid of the coffin. I can't do it. I run my avid fingers over the decorations covering that horrible monument, feeling, without wanting to, the woman's feet, her shoulders, her icy features, the sides of the coffin, the wood carved in facets that break up the very light, and each facet contain a single name, carved in the wood, a Russian name, and I have heard all the names before, in the litany Mr. Plotnikov recited as he followed the red earth paths of the cemetery, names that I am finally beginning to place, names of dead men, executed, driven to suicide, imprisoned, silenced, in the name of what? For what? A powerful sense of hopelessness overwhelms me as I read the names carved on that coffin:
MANDELSTAM ESENIN MAYAKOVSKY KHLEBNIKOV BULGAKOV EISENSTEIN MEYERHOLD BLOK MALEVICH TATLIN RODCHENKO BIELY BABEL
, in exile, surviving, dead or alive, I don't know: I only know that this condition of suffering, which seems so normal, such an essential part of life, as normal as going to the cemetery to read the names of our forebears, becomes upsetting when we see it on the marble wall of the Vietnam war memorial or at the entrance to Auschwitz; but this thought is driven from me by the discovery of a small lock, a tiny hole waiting for the key to open the lid of the coffin in the house of Mr. Plotnikov: in the keyhole's shape I recognize the echo of a form I have seen every day of my life, at least of my life with Constancia, Constancia and her sick dream: her hairpins shaped like little keys, the keys I put in the pocket of my jacket the night Constancia died in my arms, that I pulled out of her hair to keep them from getting lost when she fell, when I carried her to her bed, her hair streaming behind her.

The hairpin shaped like a key fits perfectly in the lock. There is a creaking sound. The lid, with its sculpted figure of a reclining woman, carved in silver, shifts slightly. I get to my feet. I raise the lid. Monsieur Plotnikov, for once dressed completely in white, lies inside the wooden tomb. He holds the skeleton of a child no more than two years old.

I quickly shut the lid and leave the place, feeling the full weight of my sixty-nine years in my knees, my shoulders, the tips of my shoes reddened by another earth, not mine, not ours; I want to be back at Constancia's bedside, even though I know, in the saddest, the most secret part of my heart, that Constancia, my beloved Constancia, my companion, my own sensual, pious Spaniard, my wife, will not be there when I return. Monsieur Plotnikov's warning was like a painful throbbing in my head.

—Gospodin Hull, you will only come to visit me the day of your own death, to let me know, as I have done today on mine. That is my condition. Remember, our well-being depends on it.

Without Constancia, I was dead.

15

Two, then three days passed and she still hadn't returned home. I didn't want to go back to Mr. Plotnikov's house. I was afraid of finding Constancia in the arms of the old Russian, holding the skeleton of the boy (or girl): it was an image I couldn't bear: another mystery, not a rational solution to one. I didn't want another mystery. I knew that any explanation would only be converted, in its turn, into an enigma. Like the obsessive names of the Russian artists of Plotnikov's generation. The enigma reveals another enigma. In this, art and death resemble each other.

I looked at myself in the mirror: I accused myself: I had abandoned Constancia; I had visited Mr. Plotnikov—violated his tomb, defied his prophecy, since it was not the day he had told me to visit him, the day of my own death. I was still alive, despite Constancia's disappearance, still able to study my lathered face in the bathroom mirror. I—I wrote my name on the mirror with shaving cream,
Whitby Hull
—am not dead; neither the death of my old neighbor nor my forbidden visit to his singular tomb nor the flight of Constancia had killed me. So what would my punishment be? When, where would it strike? Now I watched the blacks of Savannah from my window; I had never been particularly conscious of them before. There they were, the visible manifestation of my sins; they were not where they should have been, on the other side of the ocean, on another continent, in their pagan land, and the fault was mine. I searched in vain for the faces of the two blacks who had approached Constancia in the park that day, who spoke to her, touched her, seemed to fight over her. I searched in vain for the face of my youth in the bathroom mirror or in the scratched window of the airplane.

I am returning as an old man to the place I visited as a youth; perhaps I should have waited, let things run their course, rather than trying to force a solution. I shrug off the question. Whatever I find, it can hardly be more peculiar than the way I have lived my life, reducing all my odd, private, socially unacceptable habits to normality, without even realizing it.

I shrug again. Americans can't bear a mystery, not even someone else's, much less one's own; we need to do something—inactivity kills us—and what I was doing was to visit the city archives of Seville, to find out about Constancia, to verify what I already knew: our marriage record is on file there, I carry a copy of it with me, and I know it by heart: on one side there is information about me—my date of birth, the names of my parents, my profession, my place of residence—and on the other side, information about Constancia Bautista, a single woman, about twenty, parents unknown, thought to be a native of Seville.

But now I went to the clerk's office in Seville to look at the original on file, and when the record book was set down in front of me, I made a discovery: my half of the form was the same as my copy, but Constancia's was not.

I found that while my record was still there, the record of the woman I had undoubtedly married on August 15, 1946, had disappeared. Now my name, my birthdate, my genealogy appeared alone on the form, orphaned, just as Constancia had always been orphaned. Facing my completed column was a blank one.

I was gripped by an inner despair that didn't show in my motor abilities or my exterior demeanor—it was a private feeling of dismay that could be remedied only through more action; my way of reacting complementing Constancia's, my constancy complementing hers (I couldn't help smiling a little—I had started to say
theirs
, instead of
hers
; without intending to, I thought of
them
, the three of them). I opposed action to inaction and it made me feel both righteous and guilty, righteous for accomplishing something, guilty for not leaving things in peace. If the marriage certificate I had carried with me for forty years was false and the original record in the clerk's office of Seville was the true record, who had made the criminal alteration? Again, who else could it have been, it must have been her—or, indeed,
them.
Against whom were my enemies conspiring? For God's sake, why was I being played with this way? My confusion kept me from seeing the facts: nobody had changed the record; the original on file in the clerk's office in Seville was blank; my copy of Constancia's record had simply been filled in. I slammed the register shut and thanked the clerk, who had helped me without noticing a thing.

I'm not a man who can simply accept mystery. Everything must have an explanation, says the scientist in me; everything must have an inspiration, says the frustrated humanist that I am. My only consolation is that I believe the two attitudes complement rather than exclude each other. Seville is a city of archives. I resolved to follow the faintest lead, like a bloodhound, to examine every scrap of paper (like a bloodhound; yet I was uneasy, I had a constant sensation that the air was stirring over my head, as if a bird of prey were hovering there).

Ah, the world was in such turmoil, the young Sevillian archivist was telling me, we're just now beginning to put together the records—there were so many people killed, he sighed, guiding me through the maze of boxes covered with peeling labels, in the pale light of the high church windows, all I know is that so many were bombed, murdered. Come back tomorrow.

I was in a hurry. It was the same old story, and I had already spent too much time in Seville. There's an old saying: See Naples and die. I would change it to Seville, but with this variation: See Seville and never escape from it. There was something urging me on, telling me to find out whatever I could, until I had learned what I wanted to know. The young archivist—who was very proud of his job, and claimed to be eager to help a visitor, a foreigner, an American—showed me some papers that had been sealed, and told me I needed to talk to a certain solicitor, who would have to provide the authorization to open them. I made no attempt to hide my irritation at this bureaucratic complication. The clerk turned off the charm and adopted an official tone, an extremely cool manner. —I have already gone way out of my way for you. Go see the lawyer tomorrow. The matter is entirely in his hands.

Which I did. The lawyer raised some trivial objections and said the same things as the young clerk: —It's so long ago! But I believe, Dr. Hull, that the best way to heal the wound is to talk about how it was made. Not everyone agrees with me: some people think that if we don't mention the horror, it will not come back to haunt us.

I looked across at him, sitting in his office with its gray walls and its high ceiling crisscrossed by the sort of light you see in a convent or an old courtroom, likewise high and gray; he had one of those mustaches that only the Spanish know how to cultivate: two thin grayish lines that met precisely above his upper lip, like two trains approaching each other head-on. I thought of Constancia and her fantastic story: the trains arrive on time, but no one is aboard. The official had a dog lying at his feet, a huge mastiff, pure gray, which he kept reaching out to, rubbing the back of its head or offering it something to eat—I couldn't tell what—from his half-open hand.

The official looked at me sadly, an hidalgo more interested in his own honor than in someone else's. At least, he was good enough to be specific:

—The people you are interested in, Dr. Hull, came to Spain from Russia in 1929, to escape the political situation there, and then tried to get out of Spain in 1939, to go to America, to flee from our war. Unfortunately, they were detained at the port of Cádiz; Nationalist forces took one look at their Russian passports and decided they had certain political sympathies. The three people—the man, his wife, and the sixteen-month-old child—were murdered in the street by the forces I just mentioned. It was one of the ironies of war.

—They were killed—I repeated stupidly.

—Yes. Forty-nine years ago—said the official, aware that we were both saying the obvious. He shook his head—he seemed to be an intelligent man—and added: —It makes me think of my own family, Dr. Hull. There was no justice to it, the innocent were struck down, the guilty spared.

—Do you at least know where they were buried?

The lawyer shook his head. The war was so terrible; when you think that in Badajoz alone, two thousand innocent people were killed, herded into the bullring and executed. I saw so many senseless murders, Dr. Hull, the gunshot wound between the eyes, that was the signature of certain groups. Do you know the story of the death of Walter Benjamin, the German writer? He was stuck at the French border and his death there was a mistake caused by bureaucratic apathy and terror. That is the most tragic thing of all, Dr. Hull, the number of lives cut short accidentally, by errors, by …

He stopped short; he didn't want to be found guilty of indulging in personal feelings or personal anecdotes.

—The only reason we know what happened to the couple and their child is that the party that won kept their identity cards. That's why I'm able to give you any information. You must see the irony in their story, I repeat. Just imagine: the family you are interested in had arranged to have their belongings, their trunks and furniture, shipped to America. And all those things made the journey—they left this ancient land of Andalusia, Doctor, and traveled to the new land of America. Here are the documents. Their belongings arrived, but without their owners. I am truly sorry to have to tell you this, it's such a sad story … and such an old one.