Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Yes, for all this, I’m a quiet old American who votes Democratic, of course, and lives in a secret city where he sees no one, is married to an Andalusian woman, talks about death with a Russian, and goes into his library to confirm, within its shadows, the Hispano-Russian eccentricity of the American South: countries with non-standard railway gages.

— Did you know, Constancia — I say, appealing to her marvelous sense of popular culture, magical and mythic — did you know that Franz Kafka’s uncle was director of Spain’s national railroad in 1909? He was a Mr. Levy, Franz’s mother’s brother, and he heard that his nephew was unhappy in the insurance company in Prague and invited him to come to Madrid to work for the Spanish railways. What do you think, Constancia, of a man who imagines himself awakening one morning transformed into an insect, working for the Spanish railways? Would it have been literature’s loss or the railway’s gain?

— The trains would have arrived on time — mused Constancia — but without passengers.

She had never read Kafka, or anything else. But she knew how to use her imagination, and she knew that imagination leads to knowledge. She is from a country where the people know more than the elite, just as in Italy, Mexico, Brazil, or Russia. The people are better than the elite everywhere, in fact, except in the United States, where Faulkner or Lowell or Adams or Didion is superior to its crude and rootless people, stultified by television and beer, unable to generate a cuisine, dependent on the black minority to dance and sing, dependent on its elite to speak beyond a grunt. Exactly the opposite, if you ask me, a Southerner married to Constancia, exactly the opposite of Andalusia, where culture is in the head and hands of the people.

Constancia and I have been married forty years and I have to confess right off that the secret of our survival, in a society where seven out of ten marriages end in divorce, is that we do not limit ourselves to a single fixed mental attitude in our daily matrimonial relations. We’re always ready to explore the full range of possibilities in each of our ideas, suggestions, or preferences. In this way, nobody imposes on anyone or harbors lasting grudges; she doesn’t read because she knows, I read because I don’t know, and we meet as a couple in a question that I pose from literature and she answers from wisdom: the trains would have arrived on time, but without passengers.

For example, when she returns at six o’clock to our house on Drayton Street, the first thing I notice — being a longtime reader of detective novels — is that the tips of Constancia’s shoes are covered with dust. And the second thing I note, in the best Sherlockian tradition, is that the red dust — just the finest film — covering her shoe tips comes from a place I know quite well, a place I visit because my glorious ancestors are buried there, a place I explore because someday Constancia and I will rest there, in that earth colored by Atlantic silt: my land, but facing hers, Georgia on a parallel with Andalusia. And my Georgia, I think, recalling the old exiled Russian, is also parallel with his Georgia.

And the third thing I notice is that Constancia notices I’ve noticed, which immediately makes me aware that, as she is aware of everything, she can leave nothing to chance. Which means, in other words, that she wanted me to notice what I noticed, and to know she knew.

5

But there was still one thing I didn’t know that August afternoon when Mr. Plotnikov announced his death and asked me to reciprocate by visiting him the day of mine. And that was the most essential thing: what was Constancia trying to tell me by all her unusual activity on that singular day? That, and not the color of the dirt on her shoes, was the real mystery. I looked at her standing there, at sixty-one still an Andalusian, protecting herself from the fading rays of the sun, Constancia the color of a yellow lily, Constancia of medium height, with short legs, her waist still narrow but her ankles thick, a full bosom and a long neck: deep-set, dark-ringed eyes, a mole on her lip, and her graying hair done up, as always, in a bun. She doesn’t use hair combs, although she does use silver hairpins, of a rare sort, in the shape of keys.

Constancia, at this late-afternoon hour, keeps her back to the window, which, like every other space in the library, is surrounded by books — above, on the sides, and below that opening in the corner of the house that looks across to the opposite corner of Drayton Street and to Wright Square, where Monsieur Plotnikov lives.

I am a bibliophile, as I’ve said, I not only look for the finest leather bindings but I also have my discoveries specially bound: the golden spines were like an aureole around Constancia’s white face, when suddenly, behind her, in Mr. Plotnikov’s house, all the windows, which had been completely dark, lighted up at the same moment.

Constancia had not turned her head, as if she had divined what had happened by my shocked look.

— I think that something has happened in Mr. Plotnikov’s house — I said, trying to sound calm.

— No — Constancia replied, with a look that made my blood run cold — something has happened in the house of Whitby and Constancia.

I don’t know why, but I felt sickened and aged by my wife’s words, which were followed by her flight from the library, up the stairs, to the bedroom, with me frantically trying to catch up with her. Something inside me told me to stop, to go slowly, that Constancia was to blame, forcing me to run upstairs this way, despite my physical condition, but I couldn’t slow down; her speed, her anxious haste, spurred me on: Constancia entered her bedroom, tried to close the door and remove the key, and then gave up and simply knelt at the Spanish prie-dieu that she had brought to our house forty years ago when I completed my postgraduate medical studies in Seville and returned to my home in Georgia with a young, beautiful Andalusian fiancée.

She knelt before the bleached, triangular, wide-skirted image — white gold, silk, and baroque pearls — of our Lady of Hope, the Virgin of the Macarena; she knelt on the worn velvet, clasped her hands, closed her eyes. I cried: Constancia! and ran toward her just as her head bowed down, falling lifeless on the opulent swelling of her breasts. I caught her, took her pulse, scrutinized her vacant eyes. We were in the darkened bedroom; only a votive candle dedicated to the Virgin burned in front of Constancia’s pallid face, and behind her, in the Russian actor’s house, all the lights went out, just as they had come on, all of a sudden.

Constancia took my hand, half opened her eyes, tried to speak the words My love, my love. But I knew, beyond any doubt, that for a few moments, between the time she knelt down and the time she revived in my arms, my wife was, clinically, dead.

6

She slept a long time. Her pallor, icy as a tin roof, kept me at her bedside all that night and the day after. On Monday I forgot to call my office in Atlanta to ask my secretary to cancel my appointments. The telephone never stopped ringing. Constancia’s illness turned my promise to the Russian into something more than a duty, it assumed a strange fatality that I couldn’t help connecting with that obligation. I forgot my own responsibilities.

Keeping watch over my wife, I thought how her illness began when the lights in Mr. Plotnikov’s house went on. Did the lights and her illness also coincide with the death of the actor? I told myself that this was nothing but superstition; I was deducing; simple logic said the Russian actor was dead for two reasons: first, because he predicted it, and second, the signs — lights coming on, then going out, Constancia’s attack — seemed to bear a symbolic spiritual value. From this confusion of cause and effect, I concluded that Constancia’s illness had something to do with the presumed death of Monsieur Plotnikov; I smiled, sighed, and began to think of things that might have escaped me when I was preoccupied with my professional responsibilities, which flowed slow and steady as the river to the sea.