Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  Seal me with your eyes

  Take me wherever you are …

  When the taxi stopped in front of my house I took a deep breath, got out my key, and deliberately turned my back on the house on the corner of Drayton Street and Wright Square. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the accumulation—inexplicable—of papers and milk bottles in front of the mud-splattered door of Monsieur Plotnikov’s house.

  My porch, by contrast, was empty, not a single bottle or paper. My heart skipped a beat: Constancia had returned, she was waiting for me … I just had to open the door. I must have given the door a push as I put the key in the lock (I couldn’t help thinking of Constancia’s hairpin), because it seemed to open by itself, and at once all my nightmares came flooding back. But I could no longer think of Constancia alone. They were waiting for me here, inviting me to join them. Never again Constancia by herself:

  —Visit me, Gospodin Hull, on the day of your own death. That is my condition, our well-being depends on it.

  In that instant I accepted the fact that this—the day of my homecoming—would be the day of my death. I was overcome by vertigo, I realized that all the spirits (what else can I call them?) that haunt this story were granted just one thing, a grace period, a few more days of life: in Port Bou, in Moscow, in Seville, in Savannah: why should I be any different? All I needed was the humility to kneel on the shore of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, and pray: Please, one more day of life. Please …

  It took a terrible noise to bring me back to reality; a noise that had to be dishes crashing, glass breaking, confusion … I ran into the house, leaving my suitcase outside. The noise came from the cellar. Constancia, again I thought of Constancia: it was all a nightmare, my love, you have come back, we are together again, it was nothing but a series of coincidences, delusions, misconceptions, Constancia … the only enduring thing is our love. You want us to be together again.

  I ran down the wooden stairs to the cellar. It smelled of smoke, scalded milk, sawdust, and something spicy. I shaded my eyes with my open hand, covered my nose with a handkerchief. They were crouching there, huddled together, their arms around each other, surrounded by the piles of newspaper accumulated during the month I had been away.

  The man—dark, young, mustached, with coarse, wild hair and eyes like a raccoon’s, innocent and suspicious at the same time, wearing a blue shirt and blue pants and old boots—held a doe-eyed woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, her belly swollen, her dress loose, expecting a second child, for she is already holding one, a fifteen- or twenty-month-old, a dark, cheerful child whose big white smile shone out despite the dark terror of his parents.

  Señor, please don’t turn us in.

  Señor, we saw this empty house, nobody was going in or out.

  Señor, for the love of God, don’t report us, don’t send us back to El Salvador, they’ve killed everyone else, we’re the only ones left, we three were the only ones who managed to cross the Lempa River.

  Señor, all the rest were murdered, if you had seen how the bullets rained down on the river that night, lights, planes, gunshots, so that not a single one of our people would be left alive, not a single witness who could raise his voice, would escape the massacre.

  Señor, but we were saved by a miracle, we are the only ones who were spared, so that our child could be born, and we hope someday to go back, but until then we have to live, to bear our children, before we can return, now we cannot live in our country.

  Señor, do not turn us in, look, all these weeks we’ve been here I haven’t been idle.

  Señor, look here, right here, I found your woodworking tools, I was a carpenter in my village, I have been repairing things in your house, there are many chairs with broken legs, many tables that oh! that creaked like coffins.

  Señor, I fixed them all, look, I even made you a new table and four new chairs, the way we used to make them back home, so nice, I hope you like them.

  Señor, look, my wife and the little one haven’t drunk your milk for nothing, I haven’t eaten your bread without giving you anything for it.

  Señor, if you knew. They would kill you just as a warning, that’s what they said, nobody knew when they would come to kill us, they killed children, they killed women, and old people too, they didn’t spare a soul, only we escaped: don’t make us go back, for the love of God, by what is dearest to you, save us.

  Señor …

  I don’t know why I hesitated, discomposed and irresolute, thinking confusedly that I was no more than a mediator between all these stories, a point between one sorrow and another, between one hope and the next, between two languages, two memories, two ages, and two deaths, and if for a moment this minor role—my role as an intermediary—had upset me, now it no longer did, now I accepted and welcomed it, I was honored to be the intermediary between realities that I could not comprehend, much less control, but which appeared before me and said to me: You owe us nothing, except that you are still alive, and you cannot abandon us to exile, death, and oblivion. Give us a little more life, even if you call it memory, what does it matter to you?

  I saw the refugee couple with their child and I wanted to tell them about Constancia, but that wasn’t important now, it no longer mattered to me that I had been used in that way. I am glad that every day you were able to take a little more life for yourself and that you were able to cross the street and go up the stairs to Mr. Plotnikov. I only regret that we were unable to save the child. Or perhaps he was already dead when he got here, one small box among the larger ones containing pianos and furniture and coffins, the boxes you sent from Spain, before they killed you … As I stand next to the Salvadoran couple and their child, I picture the overhanging windows of the port of Cádiz, the old women hiding behind the curtains, secretly watching the ships departing for America, bearing the sailors, the fugitives, the dead. I see the glass-enclosed balcony in Cádiz, one bloody afternoon when the wind from the Levant is bending the bare trunks and thick branches of the pines, as a ship departs carrying the furniture, the shawls, the photographs, the paintings and icons of a Russian family, departs with a dead man and child hiding among their possessions, which arrived in Savannah and were moved into the house across the way during the night, while a girl lies among the shriveled sunflowers of the end of summer and the Levantine breeze ruffles her black hair, as the voice of the father, lover, husband, son, tells her, Stay here, be reborn here, let us die, but you must go on living, Constancia, in our name, don’t let yourself be vanquished, don’t let yourself be destroyed by the violence of history, you must live, Constancia, you mustn’t yield to exile, you must stem the tide of fugitives, at least save yourself, dear daughter, mother, sister, don’t let yourself be pulled under by the current of exile, you at least remain, grow, be a sign: they survived here. Protect us with your memory, seal us with your eyes … Now, looking at the new refugees from a country near my own, I remember the conversations I used to have with Monsieur Plotnikov and I see Constancia slain among dead sunflowers and quiet tidal flats at the gates of Cádiz, and she is answering, Take me wherever you are, take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow, take me as a toy, a brick from the house … Imploring.

  I imagine, I can only imagine; I do not know anything, even though I have felt the pain of separation, being far from the one I love, have felt it deeply, to the point of tears. But now I can only imagine them—Constancia, Plotnikov, the dead child—because I finally see them as part of something greater, something I had not understood before. How long, Constancia, did you give life—my life—to your dead? It doesn’t matter. I am living now. Perhaps you didn’t die in Cádiz near the end of the Civil War—ah said the young Sevillian clerk, the world was in such turmoil, we are just beginning to reconstruct the facts, there were so many killed, so many survivors, too, so many resurrections, so many who were officially dead who were really only in hiding—you may have been waiting patiently, for me or someone like me to come and take you to America, to be near what really mattered t
o you: the two of them, who were already here.

  How long, Constancia, did you give life—my life—to your dead? It doesn’t matter. I am alive now. You are where you wanted to be. Comfort your dead. Hold fast to them.

  As I hesitated, I thought about these things before doing what I had to do, which was to walk toward them slowly, approach them slowly, go toward the man, the woman, the child, surrounded by their poor bundles and my old newspapers, the sawdust on the floor, the hammer and saw, the sawhorses, the images of the Virgin tacked up on the wall: my house, lived in forever, lived in again.

  19

  Every night, the lights of Mr. Plotnikov’s house come on. I stubbornly ignore them. The brightness comes in my windows and reflects off the gilded spines of my books. I try to close my eyes. But the summons is perpetual: they call to me. Later the lights go out.

  And I will go to rejoin Constancia only on the day of my own death. The old actor warned me: Come to visit me, Gospodin Hull, on the day of your death. We are waiting. Our well-being depends on it. Never forget!

  Now I devote myself to the family that asked me for asylum, I reach out to them and hold them tight, don’t worry, stay here, we will do woodworking together, it’s something for an old man to do, a retired surgeon, I have some skill with my hands. Stay here, but take these pencils, some paper, pens; if they come for you, remember that these things cannot be confiscated, so you can communicate with me if they put you in jail, so you can demand legal aid; pencils, paper, pens: carry them with you always. What else can you do? Ceramics? Ah, the soil here is good for that, we’ll buy a potter’s wheel, you can teach me, we’ll make plates, vases, flowerpots (for lemon balm, verbena …), my hands will not be idle, pottery makes use of the senses, my hands need to feel, don’t worry, stay here, don’t go yet, hold on to me, there are still so many things we have to do.

  Trinity College

  Cambridge

  July 6, 1987

  La Desdichada

  To the friends of the Sabbath table,

  Max Aub, Joaquín Diez-Canedo, Jaime García Terrés,

  Bernardo Giner de los Ríos, Jorge González Durán,

  Hugo Latorre Cabal, José Luis Martínez, Abel Quezada,

  and, above all, to José Alvarado,

  who made me understand this story

  Toño

  … In those years we studied at the National Preparatory School, where Orozco and Rivera had painted their frescoes, and we went to a Chinese café on the corner of San Ildefonso and República Argentina, we dipped sweet rolls in café au lait and discussed the books that we bought in the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore when we had the money or in the used bookstores on República de Cuba when we didn’t: we wanted to be writers, they wanted us to be lawyers and politicians; we were just a couple of self-taught guys who had been delivered onto the imagination of a city that, high though it was, gave you the secret sensation of being buried, even though it was then still the color of marble and burnt-out volcano and was filled with the ringing of silver bells and smelled of pineapple and coriander, and the air was so …

  Bernardo

  Today I saw La Desdichada for the first time. Toño and I have taken a small apartment together, the local equivalent of the garret in Parisian bohemia, in the Calle de Tacuba near the San Ildefonso school. The good thing is, it’s a commercial street. We didn’t like going out to shop, but two single students have to take care of themselves without letting on that they could use a mother figure. So we alternated domestic duties. We were from the provinces and we had no women—mothers, sisters, girlfriends, nurses—to take care of us. Not even a maid.

  Tacuba was an elegant street during the viceroyalty. Today the most hideous commercialism has taken hold of it. I come from Guadalajara, a city still unspoiled, so I notice it. Toño is from industrialized Monterrey, and that makes everything here seem romantically beautiful and pure to him, even though there isn’t a ground floor on this street that hasn’t been taken over by a furniture shop, a mortuary, or a tailor’s. You have to look higher up—I say to Toño, his introspective eyes shielded by eyebrows thick as beetles—to visualize the nobility of this street, its serene proportions, its façades of soft red stone, its escutcheons of white stone inscribed with the names of vanished families, its niches acting as a refuge for saints and pigeons. Toño smiled and called me a romantic, for expecting beauty, even goodness, to descend from spiritual heights. I’m a secular Christian who has substituted Art with a capital A for god with a lowercase g. Toño said that poetry is to be found in the shoe-store windows. I looked at him reproachfully. Who in those days hadn’t read Neruda and repeated his credo of the poetry of the immediate, the streets of the city, the specters in the windows? I prefer to look up at the ironwork balconies and their peeling shutters.

  The window I was distractedly looking at closed suddenly, and when I lowered my eyes they were reflected in a store window. My eyes, like a body apart from me—my Lazarus, my drudge—dove into the water of the glass and, swimming there, discovered what the window hid: what it displayed. It was a woman in a bridal gown. But whereas other mannequins in this street—which Toño and I walked through every day, hardly noticing it, accustomed by now to the plurally ugly and the singularly lovely of our city—were made forgettable by their struggle to be fashionably up-to-date, this woman caught my eye because her dress was old-fashioned, buttoned clear to the throat.

  It was a style from a long time ago, nobody recalls the way women dressed then. They will all be old tomorrow. But not La Desdichada: the sumptuousness of her wedding gown was everlasting, the train of her dress splendidly elegant. The veil that covered her features revealed the perfection of her pale face, softened by gauze. In her flat satin slippers she appeared proud and proper. Elegant and obedient. An incongruous silver lizard ran out from beneath her motionless skirt, scooting away in trembling zigzags. It was looking for a sunny spot in the display window, and there it stopped, like a satisfied tourist.

  Toño

  I came to see the dummy in the wedding dress because Bernardo insisted. He said it was a rare sight, in the midst of what he called the crowded vulgarity of Tacuba. He was looking for an oasis in the city. I had long since renounced such things. If one wanted rural backwaters in Mexico, there are more than enough in Michoacán or Veracruz. The city must be what it is, cement, gasoline, and artificial light. I didn’t expect to find Bernardo’s bride in a window, and so it turned out: I didn’t find her, and I wasn’t a bit disappointed.

  Our apartment is very small, just a sitting room where Bernardo sleeps and a loft that I go up to at night. In the sitting room there’s a cot that serves as a sofa by day. In the loft is a bed with metal posts and a canopy, which my mother gave me. The kitchen and the bath are one and the same room, at the back of the flat, behind a bead curtain, like in South Sea movies. (Two or three times a month we went to the Cine Iris: we saw Somerset Maugham’s Rain with Joan Crawford and China Seas with Jean Harlow—the sources of certain images we share.) When Bernardo talked about the dummy in the window on Tacuba, I got an odd feeling that what he wanted was to bring home La Desdichada, as he christened her (and I, letting myself be influenced by him, also started calling her that, before I saw her, before I even had proof of her existence).

  He wanted to decorate our poor home a little.

  Bernardo was reading and translating Nerval back then. He was busy with a sequence of images in the poem El Desdichado: a widower, a heavenly lute, a dead star, a burnt tower; the black sun of melancholy. As he read and translated during our moments of student freedom (long nights, rare sunrises), he told me that in the same way that a constellation of stars shapes itself into the image of a scorpion or a water carrier, so a cluster of syllables tries to form a word and the word (he says) painstakingly seeks its related words (friendly or enemy words) to form an image. The image travels through the entire world to embrace and make peace with its sister image, so long lost or estranged. This, he says, is the birth of metaphor
.

  I remember him at nineteen, thin and frail, with the compact body of a noble Mexican, delicate, Creole, the child of centuries of physical slightness, but with a strong, solid head like that of a lion, a mane of black wavy hair, and unforgettable eyes: blue enough to rival the sky, vulnerable as a newborn baby’s, powerful as a Spanish kick in the depths of the most silent ocean. Yes, the head of a lion on the body of a hind: a mythological beast, indeed: the adolescent poet, the artist being born.

  I saw him as he couldn’t see himself, so I could read the plea in his eyes. Nerval’s poem is, literally, the air of a statue. Not the air around it, but the statue itself, the air of the voice that recites the poem. When he asked me to go see the mannequin, I knew that actually he was asking me:

  —Toño, give me a statue. We can’t buy a real one. Maybe the dress-shop mannequin will strike your fancy. You won’t have any trouble picking out the one: she’s dressed as a bride. You can’t miss her. She has the saddest look in the world. As if something terrible happened to her, a long time ago.

  At first I couldn’t find her among all the naked mannequins. None of the dummies in the window was wearing clothes. I said to myself, this is the day that they change their outfits. Like living bodies, a dummy without clothes loses its personality. It is a piece of flesh, I mean, of wood. Women with painted faces and marcelled waves, men with painted mustaches and long sideburns. Fixed eyes, colored eyelashes, cheeks like candy glazes, faces like screens. Below those faces with their eyes forever open are bodies of wood, varnished, uniform, lacking a sex, lacking hair, lacking navels. Though they didn’t drip blood, they were exactly like chunks of meat in a butcher’s shop. Yes, they were pieces of flesh.

  Then, looking more closely, I examined the window my friend had indicated. Only one of the women had real hair, not painted on wood, but a black wig, a little matted down but high and old-fashioned, with curls. That, I decided, was she. And besides, her eyes could not have been sadder.