—A child, please, even one who would be sad …
—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 drove me mad.
She arrived in Savannah in a freighter forty years ago and has not moved from this city since. The only thing she brought with her was the prie-dieu and the image of the Macarena, not a single other piece of furniture, not a photo, not a single book, although her trunk contained dark clothes and many religious pictures and prayers to the Virgin Mary. Now, late in her life, she reads Kafka—her sick child, her sad child, as she calls him. She imagines trains that arrive on time but without passengers. Monsieur Plotnikov, on the other hand, never stops moving. It occurs to me that I have never seen him when he wasn’t moving: hurrying out of an automatic photo booth; walking with an almost ethereal slowness along the red paths of the cemetery; looking nervously, as if in flight, at the shops in the commercial gallery of the Hyatt Regency, as if afraid; walking the neighborhood streets that link our houses: walking. Surely he was playing a role, as he said to me one day, before announcing his death to me. Or, indeed, he was playing too many roles; the world wanted him—he told me, or led me to understand, I can’t remember—to be too many people. He was tired, he said before disappearing. I imagined his shoes, worn out from so much walking through the streets and galleries of Savannah, worn shoes covered with the dust of the cemetery.
I asked him once if he shouldn’t resume his acting career in the United States, as so many exiles had done. Mr. Plotnikov was visibly taken aback. Hadn’t I seen them on the videocassettes I rented to escape network programs and commercials? My neighbor didn’t give me time to answer.
—Haven’t you seen them, the greatest interpreters of Piscator in Berlin and of Meyerhold in Moscow, reduced to bit parts, playing waiters, hotel concierges, Russian shopkeepers, and kindly doctors? Gospodin Hull, I am talking about actors like Curt Bois, who electrified Germany in The Last Emperor, a staging by Piscator in which a gigantic shutter framed the action, so that it was possible to enlarge, reduce, or frame the action of the drama, a drama played in front of backdrops that the director had filmed especially, among them a storm on the high seas, a gigantic sea, waves breaking, flooding over the stage, the theater, and the actor, who was the key, the point of reference of this gigantic aperture of the theater to the world. Curt Bois, Alexander Granach, Albert Basserman, Vladimir Sokoloff—do these names mean anything to you, my dear Doctor? Well, they were the greatest, they reinvented acting in Europe. They had no right to play old men on a little screen between two beer commercials.
—They had the right to survive in exile.
—No, Gospodin Doctor. Their only right was to die, executed like Meyerhold or Babel, or in a concentration camp like Mandelstam, to commit suicide like Esenin and Mayakovsky, or to die of despair like Blok, or be silenced forever like Akhmatova.
—If they had waited, they would have been rehabilitated.
—A dead man cannot be rehabilitated. A dead man has to make do with the life that was once his. A dead man lives on the charity of memory. A dead man rehabilitates himself, Doctor, finding life where he can …
—Well, all right. He can find that life in an old film shown on television at 2 a.m.
—No, better to be seen no more than to be seen diminished. That’s why I decided to give up acting and take up stage design, which is by definition essential but transitory. It is the comprehension of the moment, Gospodin Hull, as instantaneous as the lighting invented by Meyerhold, movable lights, now here, suddenly there, displacing the action, showing us how quickly the world can be changed, forcing us to give up a little of ourselves and submit to the diversity, the rapid changes, of the world; ah, to have worked with Meyerhold, Dr. Hull, a man whose superior intelligence put us all in touch with a better world; is that why they killed him? Tell me, you are a doctor, is that why they killed, censured, and drove the best to death? Because we knew how to achieve what they only proclaimed, because if we obtained it, they would no longer be able to promise it? How politics become exhausted, how the arts renew themselves, these are things they didn’t know. Or perhaps they did know and they were afraid. That’s why I wanted to give up acting and become a stage designer. I didn’t want my heart or my voice to survive. I wanted my works to survive for a moment, Mr. Hull, and then disappear, leaving only a memory. But it doesn’t matter. Someone said that being an actor is like sculpting in snow.
Relieved that Constancia was improving, and affected by the memory of my talks with the Russian actor, I collapsed in an easy chair in my living room and began to watch old films. When the library tires me, I relax by watching a nostalgic old film. No doubt, I was unconsciously influenced by thoughts of the Russian stage in selecting the cassette I put into the VCR. It was Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh. Either I was careless or the machine didn’t work properly, and the film began to run backwards. The first thing I saw was the word END, then a screen full of smoke, suddenly a train pulling into the station (on time, without passengers), then the actress reborn from the smoke and the wheels of the train, miraculously revived on the platform where her unforgettable, melancholic face, worldly but pure, like her wine-luminous eyes, said goodbye to the world, and Vivien Leigh portraying Anna Karenina ran quickly backwards. Fascinated, I pushed the pause button on the eternally frozen face of the dead actress. I was stunned by the power I held in my hands to keep life at a standstill, move it forward, return it to the beginning, to give these images a second-level life, an energy that, while it cannot restore Vivien Leigh, the forever dead magnolia, to life, can nonetheless restore these images of her sadness and her youth. I give life every time I push the button. Vivien Leigh is dead; Vivien Leigh lives. She lives and dies playing the role of a Russian woman of the past century. The film is an illustration of the novel. The novel lives each time that it is read. The novel has the past of its dead readers, the present of its living readers, and the future of its readers to come. But in the novel nobody interprets the role of Anna Karenina. When Anna Karenina dies in the Moscow rail station, the actress playing her doesn’t die. The actress dies after she interprets the role. The interpretation of death survives the actress. The ice of the actor Plotnikov becomes the marble of the architect Plotnikov.
I remember my peripatetic conversations with Mr. Plotnikov, and I ask myself if he was right to prefer the theatrical container—stage de
sign—to the contained—the action, the movement, the words, the faces. Turning off the television set, tonight, I reject my own thoughts, I tell myself that it’s distinctions like the ones I’ve just formulated—form, content; glass, water; dwelling, inhabitants; inn, guests—that destroyed my exiled neighbor and his generation of artists. Better to save the cassette of Anna Karenina for another, better occasion, I decide, reflecting on the fact that what seems to be form if you look at it one way is content if you look at it from a different perspective, and vice versa. I admit that none of this really makes up for or reduces the pain of the old actor’s sad speech, one day, on the incongruous stage of the commercial center by the Hyatt Regency:
—What harm did they do, Gospodin Hull? Whom did they hurt, tell me? Never had there been such a constellation of talent! What tremendous power for a country! To have at the same time poets like Blok, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, to have filmmakers like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Dziga, my friend Dziga Vertov, Dziga Vertov, Dziga Kaufmann, the kinok, Dr. Hull, mad about movies, so likable! and novelists like Babel and Khlebnikov and Biely, and dramatists like Bulgakov, and my teachers, the creators of all the new forms, my friend Rodchenko reinventing lighting, my friend Malevich exploring the limits of color, my friend Tatlin inviting us to construct parallel forms of the world, not imitations of the world, but new worlds accessible to everyone, unique and unrepeatable, within that other world; all, Gospodin Hull, enriching the world that contained them by offering new perspectives. What harm did they do? How strong my country could have been with all that talent! What madness caused them to be sacrificed? I died in time, my dear Doctor. Meyerhold was the greatest genius of the theater. He was my teacher. He created marvels, but did not go along with a theory he considered sterile, the vile product of three factors: bureaucratic lack of imagination, desire to make political theory coincide with artistic practice, and fear that exceptions would weaken the institutions of power. Was that a reason for arresting him, carrying him off to a Moscow jail, and shooting him there, without a trial, on February 2, 1940, a date I will never forget, Dr. Hull? I ask you again: Was that a reason to kill Meyerhold, for not accepting a theory of art that would have prevented him from creating? Maybe so, maybe Meyerhold was more dangerous than he or his betrayers suspected. It’s the only explanation, Gospodin Hull, why the slashed and mutilated woman, Meyerhold’s lover, was found in the couple’s apartment the day Meyerhold was arrested. Such cruelty, such sorrow. And such fear. A woman knifed to death only to augment her lover’s pain.
He remained silent awhile, before saying to me, in the calmest voice in the world: Why, Dr. Hull, why, why so much pointless suffering? Your profession is to heal, perhaps you can tell me.
12
If Constancia had died a little after each of our conjugal quarrels, it was also true that she always recovered quickly and that our love had grown each time. We discussed how we didn’t need to justify ourselves; we respected the reciprocal intimacy that the demand for justification would have violated. She always recovered.
But in every instance my wife’s recovery took longer than before. September found the invalid still not out of bed. The situation was becoming difficult. I didn’t dare, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, to put her in a hospital. The perfectly mortal calm of a summer in Savannah only increased my indolence. After the first Monday of September, Labor Day in the United States (which, unlike the rest of the world, does not celebrate May 1, the day the workers were martyred in Chicago: in the United States there are no unhappy days, one doesn’t celebrate death, one doesn’t remember violence), a buzz of activity returned to the city and I felt my spirits stirring dangerously. I had to do something. My passivity, which may only have prolonged Constancia’s illness, was beginning to tell on my own health.
To leave her alone would be an act of abandonment. That, at least, is how she would see it, and that’s what her sorrowful and increasingly hollow eyes told me whenever I went out for a few minutes, perhaps half an hour, or went to the bathroom, or got something to eat, milk and cereal, toast with jam … The night I allowed myself the luxury of watching Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina on television, I fell asleep for a moment and woke with a start to see Constancia’s face superimposed on that of the British actress on the screen. I gave out a strangled cry. There was a crackling noise and the screen went black, but I was sure that Constancia was in the room, that she had come down from her bedroom, and that the face on the screen was her reflection, not my imagination playing tricks on me. I reached out for her in the darkness, afraid that she had fainted: Constancia hadn’t spoken. I touched her. She withdrew from my touch when I reached out to her, but then she touched me, several times, in an unwanted manner, vulgar, forward even … She touched me, but I couldn’t touch her; it was as if she could hear me without seeing me. I heard the soft sound of beating wings, and when the lights came on, I went up to the bedroom and found her kneeling before the full-skirted image of the Virgin. I came up behind her. I embraced her. I kissed her neck, her ears. Her eyes darted nervously, as if they had an alien life of their own … As I knelt beside her, my knees became covered with wood shavings.
Every day the newspaper and the milk arrived at my doorstep, the mail was delivered, nobody called me from Atlanta, everything went on as always, but our diet lacked fresh vegetables, we’d run out of toothpaste, the bar of soap was just a sliver.
She would sleep at unexpected times. Then, before falling asleep, she would say: —I am going to dream that … or, on waking, announced: —I dreamed that …
I wanted to surprise her in the act of saying: —I am dreaming that … to absent myself and make her believe that my absence was only part of her dream. Now I understood that dreaming, along with sex and religion (prayer and love), was Constancia’s true literature; apart from that vast oneiric, erotic, and sacred novel which she dreamed herself, she needed only one story in her life, the story of that unfortunate son who, sorrow of sorrows, pity of pities, could wake up one morning metamorphosed into an insect.
—I am dreaming that … the insect begged for mercy, and nobody granted it, except me, I am the only one to come to him and …
That was my justification for leaving her; my cue for abandoning her, hearing her say I am dreaming; I would go downstairs to the vestibule, open the mahogany door, its beveled glass covered by a cotton shade, tiptoe over the wooden porch, cross Drayton Street to the corner of Wright Square, go up the stone steps of the house where Monsieur Plotnikov lived, trip over the bottles of milk piled up on the porch—curdled milk, yellowed, with greenish mold on the top—the newspapers, carelessly tossed, and though carefully folded into rubber bands, their big Cyrillic characters visible …
(I don’t understand why milkmen insist on carrying out their job so inexorably, so mechanically, even though they can see that the milk already there is going bad. The person who delivers the newspapers—I’ve seen him—is a boy who goes by on a bicycle and expertly tosses the paper onto the porch. His careless haste is understandable, whereas the milkman is announcing to the world that the house is uninhabited. That anyone could go in and rob it. Milkmen are always accomplices: in adultery, in robbery.)
I touched the copper doorknob apprehensively. The door opened. Nobody had locked Mr. Plotnikov’s house. I walked into a perfectly ordinary foyer, no different from ours: an umbrella stand, a mirror, the stairs to the second floor right by the door, inviting one to go up. It was a house in the so-called Federal style, symmetrical in design but secret in its details: an old window unexpectedly looking out over an impenetrable tropical garden of bamboo and ferns; a window protruding like a mysterious island from the rest of the continent; the plaster eagles, escutcheons victory banners, and military drums. And on each side of the narrow vestibule, a salon, a dining room.
I went into the Russian’s dining room, with its heavy furniture, an ornate samovar set up in the center of a table with massive legs and a white tablecloth; its
dishes with popular Russian decorations, and the walls holding not the icons I had imagined there but two paintings in that academic style that was equally popular with Czarist nobility and Soviet commissars: one of the paintings depicted the quintessential outdoor scene, a troika, a family going out for a ride: excitement, overcoats, fur rugs, caps, covers, the snowstorm, the steppe, birch trees, an endless horizon … The other painting, all interior, showed a dim bedroom, a bed in which a young woman lay dead. By her side, standing, a doctor, his satchel on the floor, feeling for her pulse. The composition called for her pale arm to be extended, for the doctor to hold her long, thin hand. In a film (for example, Anna Karenina with a different ending) the doctor would have shaken his head sadly. Here, the dramatic commentary was provided by a babushka sitting in a wing chair in the foreground, consoling a child in a nightgown who stares heavenward with angelic eyes to the infinite that infuses the bedroom.
The room on the other side of the foyer was the reception room and it was decorated in a conspicuously Spanish style. There was a piano with a lace shawl tossed over it. The furniture was Moorish and the painting, in the style of Romero de Torres, showed bullfighters and gypsies, gold flowers and red satin capes. On the shawl were a group of photographs in silver frames. I didn’t recognize their subjects; all the photos, I realized as I looked at them, were from the period before the Spanish Civil War. There were men in the uniforms of the Imperial Russian Army, and others in uniforms of the Moroccan infantry. The women, all dressed in white, belonged to a generation caught between the virtues of the past century and the unavoidable (and anticipated) sins of the new one; they resisted giving up their bustles, cameos, and elaborate hairstyles, just as Monsieur Plotnikov clung to his old-fashioned clothing.