Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

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 to 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.