Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  The dancers were the exception: there were two or three portraits of a spectacularly beautiful woman, all long legs, narrow waist, filmy clothing, smooth arms, swan’s neck, bright makeup, dark gemstones in equally black hair cut short: her body arched passionately and gracefully toward the ground, poised to give life or to lose it: who knows. I couldn’t identify Mr. Plotnikov in these photos; who knows, who knows. There were no photos of the man acting such and such a role. I understood the reason. He wanted a complete life, not a fragmentary one, he had told me. History wanted to divide it; he resisted. There would be no photo of him in Uncle Vanya or The Seagull (was he blessed with the self-critical humor necessary to play Konstantin Treplev?).

  I heard an invisible wingbeat in the salon, as my attention was drawn to a photo: Mr. Plotnikov standing, in almost the same pose as the ballerina, but this time he was the one leaning—gray hair, his youth gone—over Constancia, dressed in white, my wife at fifteen or sixteen, radiant, holding a child in her lap, a child whose features were difficult to make out, blurry, as if he had moved just as the photo was being taken—but also blurry, I suspected, because of his unformed youth: his age was impossible to determine, but he seemed to be about a year or fifteen months old.

  The three of them, I thought to myself, all three of them, I said over and over again, as I ran upstairs, just as Constancia does when she is mad at me.

  I say ran. It’s not true. The deeper I penetrated into Monsieur Plotnikov’s nineteenth-century house, the more completely I was gripped by torpor, an unaccustomed sluggishness that possessed and divided my body and soul. My body seemed to go in one direction and my soul in the other, a strange mood rose within me as I climbed the stairs, as if the vapors given off by the two rooms, the Russian dining room and the Spanish living room, had united to create a thin but suffocating atmosphere, heightened by the constant noise, a sound of wings beating against the roof of the house. I climbed to a height greater than the distance from one floor to the other, I was aware that I was entering another region, another geographic zone, unexpectedly cool, with the air so thin that I was filled with a false euphoria, though I knew that this signaled the advent of something horrible.

  13

  I needed a rest. I informed my office and the hospital that I would be taking a long vacation. Nobody wanted to point out to me that I could have retired years ago; but I knew what they were thinking: a man like me, so reserved and unsociable, married to a woman no more outgoing, needed his work to feel alive. Retiring is almost redundant for a man like me. Besides, I’m still an excellent surgeon.

  Those mornings, I examined myself in the mirror as I shaved, something that I had not done before; I had always shaved mechanically, without really looking at myself. Now I seemed to be seeing myself for the first time with a clarity brought about by my feeling of abandonment, a feeling that might be Constancia’s way of punishing me for having dared to violate the secret of her friend, Mr. Plotnikov, her friend before I knew her, if the photo in the Spanish room could be believed.

  I looked at the old man in the mirror who was finally seeing himself as others saw him. The old man was me.

  How often we refuse to recognize the advent of old age, putting off what is not only inevitable but also obvious; with how many lies we reject what others can see perfectly well: these eyelids permanently sagging, the dry, bloodshot eyes, the thinning, graying hair that no longer can even feign a youthful virile balding, the involuntary rictus of disgust with oneself; what has become of me, my neck was never flabby, my cheeks were not covered with a web of veins, my nose didn’t used to hang this way. Was I young once?

  Was I once Dr. Whitby Hull, native of Atlanta, Georgia, student of medicine at Emory, soldier in the invasion of Sicily and the Italian boot, student at the University of Seville, on the G.I. Bill, husband of a Spanish woman, resident of Savannah on the shores of the Atlantic after my return, surgeon, man of letters, passionate man, secretive man, guilty man? Old man. A man surrounded by mysteries, things he can’t understand, trying to see across the ocean to the other shore through a bathroom mirror that repeats its accusation: Old man; trying to look past the steam on the glass to the other side of the Atlantic, a razor in my hand.

  Was I once a young Southern doctor doing postgraduate work in Seville? A young man, twenty-eight, with black hair, a strong jaw, tanned and toughened by the campaign in Italy, but revealing his background (his weakness, perhaps) by his baggy blue pinstripe seersucker suit, its pockets stretched out of shape by what I imagined a good American took to Europe in the postwar years: sweets, chocolates, cigarettes. I ended up eating them or smoking them myself. I never even managed to offer them to the Andalusians; the look on their faces stopped me.

  As I shaved in front of my mirror, looking at an old face but picturing it young, I felt that I wanted to go back there. The key, if not to the mystery, at least to my life with Constancia, had to be there, in her native country, in the period after the war. A Southerner, a reader of Washington Irving and the Tales of the Alhambra, I decided to go to Andalusia. That’s where I met Constancia, when she was twenty and I was twenty-nine or thirty. That’s where we fell in love. What did she have when I met her? Nothing. She served tables in a café. She had no family. They had all died in the war, the wars. She lived alone. She tended her room. She went to Mass every day. Was it chance that I met her in the middle of the plaza of El Salvador, sitting with her face to the sun, sunning herself, legs stretched out in front of her on the hot paving stones—not looking up at me. Why did I feel so attracted to this unusual creature? Was she a symbol of Andalusian youth, this woman sitting in the street, facing the sun with her eyes shut, her open palms pressed against the hot ground of summer, inviting me with her closed eyes to sit beside her?

  She lived alone. She tended her room. She went often to Mass. Nobody knew how to make love like her. She waited tables in a neighborhood café in Santa Cruz. But I already said that. She was my Andalusian Galatea, I was going to shape her; excitedly, I felt myself the agent of civilization, the bearer of spiritual values, which did not conflict with prosperity, with the practical dimension of things. I was so sure of myself, of my country, my tradition, my language, and therefore so sure I could transform this virtually unlettered girl, who spoke no English: I decided—with a nod to the ghost of Henry James—that Pygmalion would be an American for a change, bringing to life the European Galatea, plucked from the banks of the Guadalquivir in the oldest land of Europe: Andalusia, the Tartessus of the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Andalusia was pure because it was impure: a land conquered, ravaged. We returned together and I set up my practice in Atlanta and my house in Savannah. The rest you know.

  Only now, flying first-class from Atlanta to Madrid, surrounded by the aseptic terror of airplanes, the universal scent of petrified air and inflammable plastic and food heated in a microwave oven, did I hazard a look down from my height of thirty thousand feet, first at the fleeting earth, then quickly at the eternal sea, and try to think, with some semblance of reason, about a scene that assailed me with memory’s peculiar lucidity, the scene that was waiting for me when I reached Monsieur Plotnikov’s second floor. A narrow window faced the street. The other walls were covered with a pale yellow paper, a thin silver thread running through it; light from the window revealed a single door (I pressed my feverish face against the cool window of the airplane): a single window at the end of the hall. I said thank you: they’d brought me a Bloody Mary I didn’t ask for; I said thank you stupidly, removing my cheek from the window; I didn’t have to choose, like saying I didn’t have to suffer.

  There was a single door, with the light shining on it (I looked at the pilots’ door, which opened and closed incessantly, it wouldn’t shut properly, it opened and closed over an infinite space), and I walked toward it. Suddenly I caught a glimpse (I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what the pilots see) of the strangeness of the life that Constancia and I had led together for forty years, an entirely normal life, com
pletely predictable (as normal as going to the airport in Atlanta and boarding a jumbo jet to Madrid). The strangeness was precisely that, the normality of my practice and my operations, my skill with surgical instruments, and in compensation for my hours of work, the time I spent reading at home or, before I gave it up, playing tennis and squash with men I didn’t know, who accepted me because I am what I appear to be.

  I don’t know whether it was stranger to be flying over the Atlantic on my way to Madrid, as if released from a long spell, or to be a Southern doctor of solitary habits, to have a wife who never goes anywhere with me, who, as you know, doesn’t speak English, who is very Spanish, very Catholic, very reclusive—we don’t have children, we don’t see neighbors—but who gives herself to me completely and gratifies my vanity perfectly, a vanity not just male but American (I admitted it then, flying on the wings of our domestic technology)—taking care of a helpless person—and Southern (I told myself with the silent, hermetic eloquence distilled from a mixture of vodka and tomato juice)—having a household slave. (And the murmur from the wings of the plane resembles the murmur of the invisible wings in Plotnikov’s funereal home.)

  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.