Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (8 page)

—It doesn't matter—I said. —I'm grateful to you. You've been a big help.

He waved away my thanks and stood up. —Dr. Hull, so many people tried to get out in time, to escape, to go to America … Some made it, others didn't … He shrugged. —Too bad your friends did not make it. I'm sincerely sorry.

He was shivering, as if he felt cold, and I noticed that the purebred dog shivered along with its master.

—Fortunately, times have changed, and we are at your service.

—Where was the furniture shipped to? I broke in to ask. —Pardon me? —The family's furniture. Where do the documents say that…? —The port of Savannah, Doctor.

16

I have to know. I cannot rest. I scrutinize all the signs. I wander the streets of Seville. I go back to all the places we had been together. The café where she worked, waiting tables. The plaza where I first met her, sitting on the pavement, sunning herself, her bare legs stretched out in front of her. The house in the Calle de Pajaritos where she had a room and where we made love for the first time. The Church of San Salvador, where she went so often. I did not meet her again, as I secretly hoped I would. There was new life now in all those places. In the patio of Constancia's house an older woman was walking among the orange trees, dressed in an old-fashioned wedding gown. She did not turn to look at me. In the church Constancia went to, another woman discovered a sparrow's nest in a dark corner and cried out in surprise. And in the café where Constancia used to work, a barefoot gypsy began to dance, they insulted her, she insisted she had a right to dance, they told her to leave, and the young woman walked past me, grazing against me, giving me a sad look, and all the while the waiters dressed in coarse white shirts and black bow ties that made them look like pigeons were throwing her out of the café, she kept screaming at them in her peculiar accent: they had no right to persecute her, they ought to let her dance a little more, they should show compassion, and she said it again in her shrill, plaintive voice, they should show some compassion, compassion, just show a little …

I sat down to drink a cup of coffee that autumnal afternoon at the busy corner of Gallegos and Jovellanos, where it meets the bustle of the Calle de Sierpes. She ran into me there; she didn't recognize me. How could she recognize me in the gray-haired old man who bore no resemblance to that American boy, his pockets stuffed with cigarettes and caramels? I still wore the American summer uniform, a lightweight, absorbent seersucker suit with thin blue stripes on a pale blue background, but now the pockets were empty. I would like to emulate the elegance of the Spanish official with his dog, his coolness, his precise mustache, but I am hot, I shave every morning, and I keep no pets; she never wanted animals in the house. I am sixty-nine years old and my head is full of questions that have no answers, that are nothing but loose ends. If Plotnikov died in 1939, how could he know that his mentor, Meyerhold, was killed in 1940 while in solitary confinement in a Moscow prison? How old was Constancia when she married him, if that is what happened, and when she had his son, if the skeleton that I saw was their child and that child was the one whose picture was on the piano with the mantilla? Who was Constancia, daughter, mother, wife, refugee? I had to add, child-mother, child-wife, child-fugitive? The girl I met at twenty aged normally while we lived together. Perhaps before she met me her youth had a different rhythm; perhaps I gave her what we call “normality”; perhaps now she had lost it again, returned to that other temporal rhythm that I knew nothing about. I don't know. The pockets of my summer suit are empty, my eyebrows are white, at six in the afternoon my beard is full of gray bristles.

17

I returned to the United States weighed down by more than sadness, by an ever-growing pain. The Spanish lawyer's reference to Walter Benjamin had led me to the Vértice bookstore in Seville, where I bought a volume of his essays. The illustration on the frontispiece excited my interest: a reproduction of
Angelus Novus,
a painting by Paul Klee. Now, as the plane flew over the Atlantic, I read Walter Benjamin's description of the angel in Klee's painting, and I was filled with emotion, with wonder.

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

I read those lines in a Jumbo 747 flying from Madrid to Atlanta and I tried to imagine the death of the man who wrote them. On September 26, 1940, a wretched group arrived at the border post of Port Bou, the entrance to Spain from a France that had fallen to the Nazis. The group consisted of people seeking asylum. Among them was a nearsighted man with the wild hair and mustache of a Groucho Marx. He had escaped on foot, over the mountains and through vineyards planted in red earth. And all through that journey the nearsighted man didn't let go of the black suitcase that held his final manuscripts. He kept one hand free to hold on to the thick, metal-framed glasses that rode on his long, thin nose. The refugees presented their documents in Port Bou to Franco's chief of police, who rejected them: Spain did not admit refugees of unknown nationality. He told them: —Go back where you came from. If you don't leave by tomorrow, we'll hand you over to the German authorities.

The man with the glasses, blinded more by his distress than by the heat, clung to his black suitcase and looked down at his shoes, which were covered with red dirt. His manuscripts mustn't fall into the hands of the Gestapo. He had three companions, three women who stood near him and wept in despair, Jews (like him), part of a group that had fled from Germany, from a Central Europe devoured by indifference and denial and the utopias of the powerful. As he gazed toward the Mediterranean, Walter Benjamin thought of the Atlantic, which he had planned to cross to America; perhaps the Mediterranean became for him a symbol of a past reduced to ruins that can never be restored to their original state. The first homeland, the heart that cradled the dawn. He wanted to hurl himself toward the Atlantic that I, the American Whitby Hull, am now crossing on wings that are frozen but free, reminding me of the immobile wings of the Angel Benjamin, who saw history accumulate its ruins and was still able to realize his final vision: the ruin reveals the truth because it is what endures; the ruin is history's permanence.

Flying back over the Atlantic, I stop trying so hard to reconstruct chronologies, to tie up all the loose ends and solve all the mysteries. Have I learned nothing, then? We are surrounded by enigmas, and what little we understand rationally is merely the exception in an enigmatic world. Reason astonishes us; and to be astonished—to
marvel
—is like floating in the vast sea surrounding the island of logic—so I tell myself, sitting thirty thousand feet in the air. I remember Vivien Leigh in
Anna Karenina;
I remember the stage setting for Piscator's
The Last Emperor
in Berlin, which my neighbor, the actor, described to me, and I understand why art is the most precise (and precious) symbol of life. Art presents an enigma, but the resolution of the enigma is another enigma.

I'll go further. What has been taking place in the sea surrounding my rational island is the rule, not the exception: people causing other people to suffer. Happiness and success are as rare as logic; the most basic human experience is defeat and despair. We Americans cannot remain untouched by that fact. We cannot. The destiny of Walter Benjamin or of Vsevelod Meyerhold is not exceptional. Mine—protected, reasonably happy—and that of my neighbors, is.

Perhaps that is why they joined me. I let a loud laugh escape, breaking a silence greater than the sound from the wings of the new technological angel: they saw me so well, so healthy, that they attached themselves to me so as to go on living forty-one years after their deaths, the dead child cared for by the father, who drew life from the mother, who was taking her life from me, from me … and now, I considered a tentative explanation, the father had reached his end, and she has gone to rejoin her family, to care for them … tentative, I said. What new mystery surrounds this temporary solution?

While I fly over the Atlantic, I make the greatest effort of my entire life, and I try to imagine Walter Benjamin contemplating the ruins of the Mediterranean; I'm given a package of peanuts, a Bloody Mary, a perfumed napkin to freshen up with, a hot napkin, which I put over my face to keep the stewardess from constantly bothering me, and I think of something else, not a ruin but an endless stream, a gray river, flowing from the Old World to the New, a current of emigrants, fleeing persecution, seeking refuge, and among them I make out a man, a woman, and a child I think I recognize, for an instant, before I lose sight of them, swallowed up in the flood of refugees: the flight from Palestine into Egypt, the flight of the Jews from Spain to the ghettos of the Baltic, the flight from Russia to Germany to Spain to America, the Jews driven into Palestine, the Palestinians driven out of Israel, perpetual flight, a polyphony of pain, a Babel of weeping, endless, endless weeping: these were the voices, the songs of the ruins, the grand chorale of asylum, to escape death in the bonfire of Seville, the tundra of Murmansk, the ovens of Bergen-Belsen … this was the great ghostly flow of history itself, which the angel saw as a single catastrophe.

—Here are your earphones, sir. Classical music on Channel 2, jazz on 3, comedy on 4, Latin music on 5, the movie soundtrack in English on 10 and in Spanish, if you prefer, on 11 …

I plug in the headset and flip around the dial. I stop at a grim voice that is saying, in German:

“His face is turned toward the past … He sees one single catastrophe … A storm is blowing from Paradise…”

I open my eyes. I look at the wings of the plane. The clouds are perfectly still below us. I turn my head and look behind me. There I see the little man with the thick glasses, the mustache, the shoes covered with red dust, the black suitcase full of manuscripts, gazing toward the sea of our origins from the land that expelled the Jews in 1492, the same year America was discovered, the land I am returning to, alone; and on the channel I have selected I hear a voice I recognize from my reading, a voice from the letters written by the Jews expelled from Spain, and also the voice of Constancia, my lover; and, borne on high by a silver angel, unfeeling and blind to both the past and the future, I desperately want Walter Benjamin to hear this voice, the words of my lost wife, to hear it as he takes the fatal dose of morphine and falls asleep forever, history's orphan, progress's refugee, sorrow's fugitive, in a tiny room in a hotel in Port Bou:

Seal me with your eyes.

Take me wherever you are …

Shield me with your eyes.

Take me as a relic …

Take me as a toy, a brick from the house …

When Walter Benjamin was found dead in his room on September 26, 1940, his flight was ended. But his papers disappeared. As did his body: nobody knows where he is buried. But the Franco authorities felt threatened by the incident, so much so that they allowed the three Jewish women who wept by the bed of the writer, who was also Jewish, to enter Spain.

18

How many more managed to escape death? I imagine people would do anything to save themselves, even commit suicide. Anything to reach the other shore. Pardon me, Constancia, for having waited so long to bring you to America … I said it over and over, trying to sleep (despite the stewardesses' offerings); but whenever I shut my eyes, I saw a series of images of brutal death, flight, of the will-to-live morbidly prolonged.

Those were my nightmares. One thought rescued me from them, the thought that, when all was said and done, I still had my home to return to, a haven, and that my trip to Spain had been a thorough exorcism. I thought of Constancia and was grateful to her; perhaps she had assumed all the sins of the world so that I would not have to suffer for them. At least, that's what I wanted to think. I wanted to be sure that when I got back to my house she wouldn't be there, and I swore, as I saw the coast of North America approaching, that I would never again visit the house on Wright Square, that I would never succumb to a desire to find out who rested there. My peace of mind depended on that.

It was already the end of autumn when I returned to Savannah, but a mild Indian summer still lingered in the South, touching everything with a soft glow very different from the colors of the images that filled my mind: blood, powder, and silver; gilded icons, gypsy Virgins, metal wings, red shoes, black suitcases.

Waiting for me was the maze of Savannah, Seville's warring twin, both labyrinthine cities, repositories of the paradoxes and enigmas of two worlds—one called New, the other Old. Which was really the older, I asked myself, as a taxi took me home, which is the newer, and the synthesis of the images that tormented me was a fleeting voice that seemed to speak to me from the sea, between the two worlds:

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: