Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

— Do you at least know where they were buried?

The lawyer shook his head. The war was so terrible; when you think that in Badajoz alone, two thousand innocent people were killed, herded into the bullring and executed. I saw so many senseless murders, Dr. Hull, the gunshot wound between the eyes, that was the signature of certain groups. Do you know the story of the death of Walter Benjamin, the German writer? He was stuck at the French border and his death there was a mistake caused by bureaucratic apathy and terror. That is the most tragic thing of all, Dr. Hull, the number of lives cut short accidentally, by errors, by …

He stopped short; he didn’t want to be found guilty of indulging in personal feelings or personal anecdotes.

— The only reason we know what happened to the couple and their child is that the party that won kept their identity cards. That’s why I’m able to give you any information. You must see the irony in their story, I repeat. Just imagine: the family you are interested in had arranged to have their belongings, their trunks and furniture, shipped to America. And all those things made the journey — they left this ancient land of Andalusia, Doctor, and traveled to the new land of America. Here are the documents. Their belongings arrived, but without their owners. I am truly sorry to have to tell you this, it’s such a sad story … and such an old one.

— 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.