Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

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.

I’m not a man who can simply accept mystery. Everything must have an explanation, says the scientist in me; everything must have an inspiration, says the frustrated humanist that I am. My only consolation is that I believe the two attitudes complement rather than exclude each other. Seville is a city of archives. I resolved to follow the faintest lead, like a bloodhound, to examine every scrap of paper (like a bloodhound; yet I was uneasy, I had a constant sensation that the air was stirring over my head, as if a bird of prey were hovering there).

Ah, the world was in such turmoil, the young Sevillian archivist was telling me, we’re just now beginning to put together the records — there were so many people killed, he sighed, guiding me through the maze of boxes covered with peeling labels, in the pale light of the high church windows, all I know is that so many were bombed, murdered. Come back tomorrow.

I was in a hurry. It was the same old story, and I had already spent too much time in Seville. There’s an old saying: See Naples and die. I would change it to Seville, but with this variation: See Seville and never escape from it. There was something urging me on, telling me to find out whatever I could, until I had learned what I wanted to know. The young archivist — who was very proud of his job, and claimed to be eager to help a visitor, a foreigner, an American — showed me some papers that had been sealed, and told me I needed to talk to a certain solicitor, who would have to provide the authorization to open them. I made no attempt to hide my irritation at this bureaucratic complication. The clerk turned off the charm and adopted an official tone, an extremely cool manner. — I have already gone way out of my way for you. Go see the lawyer tomorrow. The matter is entirely in his hands.

Which I did. The lawyer raised some trivial objections and said the same things as the young clerk: —It’s so long ago! But I believe, Dr. Hull, that the best way to heal the wound is to talk about how it was made. Not everyone agrees with me: some people think that if we don’t mention the horror, it will not come back to haunt us.

I looked across at him, sitting in his office with its gray walls and its high ceiling crisscrossed by the sort of light you see in a convent or an old courtroom, likewise high and gray; he had one of those mustaches that only the Spanish know how to cultivate: two thin grayish lines that met precisely above his upper lip, like two trains approaching each other head-on. I thought of Constancia and her fantastic story: the trains arrive on time, but no one is aboard. The official had a dog lying at his feet, a huge mastiff, pure gray, which he kept reaching out to, rubbing the back of its head or offering it something to eat — I couldn’t tell what — from his half-open hand.

The official looked at me sadly, an hidalgo more interested in his own honor than in someone else’s. At least, he was good enough to be specific:

— The people you are interested in, Dr. Hull, came to Spain from Russia in 1929, to escape the political situation there, and then tried to get out of Spain in 1939, to go to America, to flee from our war. Unfortunately, they were detained at the port of Cádiz; Nationalist forces took one look at their Russian passports and decided they had certain political sympathies. The three people — the man, his wife, and the sixteen-month-old child — were murdered in the street by the forces I just mentioned. It was one of the ironies of war.

— They were killed — I repeated stupidly.

— Yes. Forty-nine years ago — said the official, aware that we were both saying the obvious. He shook his head — he seemed to be an intelligent man — and added: —It makes me think of my own family, Dr. Hull. There was no justice to it, the innocent were struck down, the guilty spared.