Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

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:

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