Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  —Respect my last wish. Do not come to my wake tonight or accompany my funeral procession tomorrow. No. Visit me in my house on the day of your death, Gospodin Hull. Our well-being depends on it. Please. I am very tired.

  What could I say, seeing him there on that street-scene stage, with the garbage beginning to distract us from the colonial grandeur of Savannah; what could I tell him, that the day of his funeral I was going to be in Atlanta taking care of patients less lucid, more impatient than he? What could I tell him, to show my respect for something that I understood, I appreciated, I was grateful for, that this was perhaps his final performance, the final act of a career brutally interrupted—I deduced—by political adversity and never taken up again outside Russia.

  —I needed—he explained to me one day, or I imagined or dreamed, I’m no longer sure of the truth—the Russian language, Russian applause, to read the reviews in Russian, but above all I needed the test of the Russian heart in order to present myself in public, acting; I couldn’t communicate as an actor apart from the Russian language, space, applause, time, testimony, intent. Did I understand that, in my country of wild syncretisms, of political pastiche and migratory melting pots and maps stuck up with chewing gum, could I possibly understand?

  What could I tell him, I ask again, except, yes, Mr. Plotnikov, I agree, I will do what you say.

  —Very good. I thank you. I am too tired.

  With that, he bowed and walked stiffly away in the blazing sun to his house next to mine, near Wright Square.

  4

  Almost in spite of myself, I went into the house. I wanted to tell my wife what had happened. I wanted to tell her how deeply Monsieur Plotnikov had disturbed me, enough to make me take the unusual step of interrupting Constancia’s nap. I was beyond observing that tacit prohibition, so great was the turmoil my Russian neighbor had caused in me. But my astonishment grew when I realized that Constancia was not in her bed, that it had not even been slept in. The shutters were closed, but that was normal. And it would have been normal, too, if Constancia, finding she had to leave the house—I looked for her on all three floors and even in the unused cellar—had wanted to tell me she was leaving, but saw me in the rocking chair and, giving me a fond smile, went out without waking me. In that case, a note would have been enough, a few scribbled words, saying:

  —Don’t worry, Whitby. Be back soon.

  And, on returning, what pretext would she give me?

  —I don’t know. I decided to lose myself in the plazas. This is the most beautiful and mysterious aspect of the city—the way one plaza always opens onto another, like a Russian doll.

  And other times: —Remember, Whitby, your wife is Andalusian and we Andalusians don’t accept age, we fight it. Look, who dances peteneras better than an old lady, have you noticed?—she said, laughing, imitating a sexagenarian flamenco dancer.

  I imagined her lying down, nude, in the shade, telling me these things: Sometimes, on dog days like these—understand, love?—I go out looking for water, shade, plazas, a maze of streets, ah, if you knew what it was to be a child in Seville, Whitby, that other city of plazas and mazes and water and shadows … You know, I walk through the streets seeking my past in a different place, do you think that’s madness?

  —You’ve never tried to make friends here, you haven’t even learned English … Even my name gives you trouble— I smiled—

  —Hweetbee Howl— She smiled in turn, and then said to me:

  —I haven’t criticized your Savannah, we’ve made our life here, but leave me my Seville, at least in my imagination, my love, and tell yourself: It’s a good thing Constancia knows how to find the light and water she needs here in my own American South.

  I would laugh then, pleased to think that the South, the South with its names full of vowels—Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas—is the Andalusia of America. And Spain, I tell her, as an old reader of Coustine and Gautier, is the Russia of the West, just as Russia is the Spain of the East. Again I laughed, observing to Constancia that only Russia and Spain had come up with the idea of changing the width of their train tracks to forestall foreign invasion; that is to say, the aggression of other Europeans. What paranoia—I laughed in mock amazement—what love of barriers, whether the steppes or a mountain chain: to be the others, Russians and Spaniards, unassimilatable to Western normality! But, after all—I defended myself against Constancia—perhaps normality is mediocrity.

  I think, naturally, of our neighbor, the Russian actor, when the conversation takes this turn. With the skilled touch of the bibliophile, I run my hands over the dark spines and gilded, dusty edges of the books in my library, the coolest and darkest place in the house on Drayton Street, and I secretly pride myself that the flexibility of my hand is a perfect reflection of the quickness of my sexagenarian mind. I was—I am—a man of letters, part of an inheritance that does not flourish in the United States and is kept alive mainly in the South, the land of William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, and its Dulcineas with a pen, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Shirley Ann Grau. I often think that even self-exiled Southerners—I’m talking about diabolically self-destructive gnomes like Truman Capote as well as painfully creative giants like William Styron—are like the carriers of a literary aristocracy that is unwanted in a country that craves proof that its Declaration of Independence is right, that all men are created equal, but what this equality (proposed by a group of exceptionally learned aristocrats, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Adams—the golden youth of the colonies) really means is the triumph of the lowest common denominator. Why do we elect retarded presidents like Reagan if not to prove that all men are equal? We prefer to recognize ourselves in this idiot who talks like us, looks like us, makes our jokes, shares our mental lapses, amnesias, prejudices, obsessions, and confusions, justifying our own mental vulgarity: how consoling! A new Roosevelt a new Kennedy would force us to admire them for what we are not, and that’s an unsettling feeling. Still, I’m a quiet American who sticks pretty close to his library, almost to the point of neglecting my practice, doesn’t need many friends, has chosen to exercise his profession in a modern and impersonal city that shuts down at five, the blacks given over to lassitude and nocturnal violence and the whites locked away in their mansions surrounded by savage dogs and electric fences. And I spend three nights of the week in a hospital room so as to perform heart operations early on Wednesdays and Thursdays. In our time, it is impossible to be a surgeon without the support of a great medical center.

  Yes, for all this, I’m a quiet old American who votes Democratic, of course, and lives in a secret city where he sees no one, is married to an Andalusian woman, talks about death with a Russian, and goes into his library to confirm, within its shadows, the Hispano-Russian eccentricity of the American South: countries with non-standard railway gages.

  —Did you know, Constancia—I say, appealing to her marvelous sense of popular culture, magical and mythic—did you know that Franz Kafka’s uncle was director of Spain’s national railroad in 1909? He was a Mr. Levy, Franz’s mother’s brother, and he heard that his nephew was unhappy in the insurance company in Prague and invited him to come to Madrid to work for the Spanish railways. What do you think, Constancia, of a man who imagines himself awakening one morning transformed into an insect, working for the Spanish railways? Would it have been literature’s loss or the railway’s gain?

  —The trains would have arrived on time—mused Constancia—but without passengers.

  She had never read Kafka, or anything else. But she knew how to use her imagination, and she knew that imagination leads to knowledge. She is from a country where the people know more than the elite, just as in Italy, Mexico, Brazil, or Russia. The people are better than the elite everywhere, in fact, except in the United States, where Faulkner or Lowell or Adams or Didion is superior to its crude and rootless people, stultified by television and beer, unable to generate a cuisine, dependent on the black minority to dance and sing, dependent on its elite to
speak beyond a grunt. Exactly the opposite, if you ask me, a Southerner married to Constancia, exactly the opposite of Andalusia, where culture is in the head and hands of the people.

  Constancia and I have been married forty years and I have to confess right off that the secret of our survival, in a society where seven out of ten marriages end in divorce, is that we do not limit ourselves to a single fixed mental attitude in our daily matrimonial relations. We’re always ready to explore the full range of possibilities in each of our ideas, suggestions, or preferences. In this way, nobody imposes on anyone or harbors lasting grudges; she doesn’t read because she knows, I read because I don’t know, and we meet as a couple in a question that I pose from literature and she answers from wisdom: the trains would have arrived on time, but without passengers.

  For example, when she returns at six o’clock to our house on Drayton Street, the first thing I notice—being a longtime reader of detective novels—is that the tips of Constancia’s shoes are covered with dust. And the second thing I note, in the best Sherlockian tradition, is that the red dust—just the finest film—covering her shoe tips comes from a place I know quite well, a place I visit because my glorious ancestors are buried there, a place I explore because someday Constancia and I will rest there, in that earth colored by Atlantic silt: my land, but facing hers, Georgia on a parallel with Andalusia. And my Georgia, I think, recalling the old exiled Russian, is also parallel with his Georgia.

  And the third thing I notice is that Constancia notices I’ve noticed, which immediately makes me aware that, as she is aware of everything, she can leave nothing to chance. Which means, in other words, that she wanted me to notice what I noticed, and to know she knew.

  5

  But there was still one thing I didn’t know that August afternoon when Mr. Plotnikov announced his death and asked me to reciprocate by visiting him the day of mine. And that was the most essential thing: what was Constancia trying to tell me by all her unusual activity on that singular day? That, and not the color of the dirt on her shoes, was the real mystery. I looked at her standing there, at sixty-one still an Andalusian, protecting herself from the fading rays of the sun, Constancia the color of a yellow lily, Constancia of medium height, with short legs, her waist still narrow but her ankles thick, a full bosom and a long neck: deep-set, dark-ringed eyes, a mole on her lip, and her graying hair done up, as always, in a bun. She doesn’t use hair combs, although she does use silver hairpins, of a rare sort, in the shape of keys.

  Constancia, at this late-afternoon hour, keeps her back to the window, which, like every other space in the library, is surrounded by books—above, on the sides, and below that opening in the corner of the house that looks across to the opposite corner of Drayton Street and to Wright Square, where Monsieur Plotnikov lives.

  I am a bibliophile, as I’ve said, I not only look for the finest leather bindings but I also have my discoveries specially bound: the golden spines were like an aureole around Constancia’s white face, when suddenly, behind her, in Mr. Plotnikov’s house, all the windows, which had been completely dark, lighted up at the same moment.

  Constancia had not turned her head, as if she had divined what had happened by my shocked look.

  —I think that something has happened in Mr. Plotnikov’s house—I said, trying to sound calm.

  —No—Constancia replied, with a look that made my blood run cold—something has happened in the house of Whitby and Constancia.

  I don’t know why, but I felt sickened and aged by my wife’s words, which were followed by her flight from the library, up the stairs, to the bedroom, with me frantically trying to catch up with her. Something inside me told me to stop, to go slowly, that Constancia was to blame, forcing me to run upstairs this way, despite my physical condition, but I couldn’t slow down; her speed, her anxious haste, spurred me on: Constancia entered her bedroom, tried to close the door and remove the key, and then gave up and simply knelt at the Spanish prie-dieu that she had brought to our house forty years ago when I completed my postgraduate medical studies in Seville and returned to my home in Georgia with a young, beautiful Andalusian fiancée.

  She knelt before the bleached, triangular, wide-skirted image—white gold, silk, and baroque pearls—of our Lady of Hope, the Virgin of the Macarena; she knelt on the worn velvet, clasped her hands, closed her eyes. I cried: Constancia! and ran toward her just as her head bowed down, falling lifeless on the opulent swelling of her breasts. I caught her, took her pulse, scrutinized her vacant eyes. We were in the darkened bedroom; only a votive candle dedicated to the Virgin burned in front of Constancia’s pallid face, and behind her, in the Russian actor’s house, all the lights went out, just as they had come on, all of a sudden.

  Constancia took my hand, half opened her eyes, tried to speak the words My love, my love. But I knew, beyond any doubt, that for a few moments, between the time she knelt down and the time she revived in my arms, my wife was, clinically, dead.

  6

  She slept a long time. Her pallor, icy as a tin roof, kept me at her bedside all that night and the day after. On Monday I forgot to call my office in Atlanta to ask my secretary to cancel my appointments. The telephone never stopped ringing. Constancia’s illness turned my promise to the Russian into something more than a duty, it assumed a strange fatality that I couldn’t help connecting with that obligation. I forgot my own responsibilities.

  Keeping watch over my wife, I thought how her illness began when the lights in Mr. Plotnikov’s house went on. Did the lights and her illness also coincide with the death of the actor? I told myself that this was nothing but superstition; I was deducing; simple logic said the Russian actor was dead for two reasons: first, because he predicted it, and second, the signs—lights coming on, then going out, Constancia’s attack—seemed to bear a symbolic spiritual value. From this confusion of cause and effect, I concluded that Constancia’s illness had something to do with the presumed death of Monsieur Plotnikov; I smiled, sighed, and began to think of things that might have escaped me when I was preoccupied with my professional responsibilities, which flowed slow and steady as the river to the sea.

  First, over the years, whenever I saw Monsieur Plotnikov he was alone: in the streets and plazas of Savannah, in the pantheon of red earth, occasionally (strange, freakish meetings) in a shopping center near the Hyatt Regency that smells of peanuts, warmed-over pizza, popcorn, and tennis shoes.

  Second, I never met Mr. Plotnikov indoors, as the shopping mall has a false interior (as well as a false exterior): it’s a street of glass. I had never been inside his house, across from ours, and he had never been to ours.

  And—the third thing—for perfectly natural reasons, as natural as the fact that Constancia had never accompanied me to the hospital in Atlanta and I never had gone with her to a beauty salon, she had never been with me when I met Mr. Plotnikov, either inside or outside any wall.

  There was one last fact, the most difficult to reconcile with the rest: Constancia had been dead in my arms for several moments; it was that fact that forced me to ask: Had Mr. Plotnikov died exactly as he had foretold, and, if so, did his death coincide with the play of lights in his house and with the fleeting death of Constancia? Why did I see our neighbor only outdoors, and why had I never run into him with my wife? I will admit to my share of sentimental egoism—these questions had never disturbed my sleep before, they only interested me now because of the melancholy terror I felt on holding Constancia and knowing, with scientific certainty, that Constancia was dead.

  But no longer: she lived, she returned to me, to herself, to our life, little by little. And the telephone never stopped ringing.

  7

  I devoted myself to her for several days. I canceled my appointments and operations in Atlanta. It was an exceptional step. As long as we had been married, Constancia had insisted that only in the most extreme case should I care for her professionally. It would be better if I never saw her as a patient. She would obey any doctor who to
ld her to undress, spread her legs, get on all fours. But she would obey only one lover who told her to do those things: that man was me, her husband, not her doctor. And, as for me, what maddened me from the beginning was that passion for obedience in Constancia, as if my commands became her own desires, as if I merely guessed her own most passionate desires and eagerly and ecstatically followed her lead.

  In our forty years together, however, Constancia had never had to see a doctor. She had suffered only minor ailments: colds, digestive upsets, mild insomnia, nose bleeds … It was therefore an emotional experience to have her in my hands (I mean, in my care) for the first time: my patient.

  I was waiting for her to regain her lucidity and strength—she spent several days in that half state between trance, prayer, and a sudden smile—so that, together again, like one as before, we would regard what had happened according to our unwritten rules: There are many possibilities; let us weigh them all, one by one, without rushing headlong to any conclusion. But during these first days of her convalescence—what else can I call it?—Constancia was not a woman but a bird, with a bird’s nervous movements, unable to turn her head without her movement’s being cut short by a sort of ornithological tremor—the movement of a winged creature that cannot look ahead, eyes to the front, but only to the sides, confirming with a rapid movement of the left eye some fact suggested by the right. Like an ostrich, or an eagle, or…?

  What was she looking at that way, during those days when I asked myself so many questions—Had the actor died? Did the lights announce his death?—and came increasingly to one conclusion, that those phenomena coincided with the fleeting death of Constancia. I took her pulse, pressed my stethoscope to her breast, pried her eyelids open (eagle, ostrich, or…?). With her bird movements she looked at the window that in turn looked toward the house, dark and silent, of Mr. Plotnikov. She looked at the image of the Virgin of the Macarena, immobile, mournful, in her triangular paralysis. She looked at the flickering light of the votive candle. She did not look at me. I looked at her reclining body, her open gown exposing the breasts of a sixty-one-year-old woman who, however, had never had children, her nipples still voluptuous, gifts for my senses, perfect spheres for my touch, my tongue, and especially my sense of fullness, of pregnant reality. They say that we North Americans attach too much sexuality to the breasts, just as South Americans do to the buttocks. But in my house, since I never saw her pregnant, her ample breasts seemed to concentrate that sense of pregnancy that men like to contrast with the ethereal (her face, her eyes) in a woman: earth and air. But Constancia always told me: I am water, I am the source. She was Andalusian. And Andalusia is an Arab land, a land of nomads who arrived from the desert and found the refuge of water. Granada …