Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

11

Constancia doesn’t travel anywhere. We were married in Seville in 1946. I had to return to Atlanta to take my exams. She asked me to go ahead and get the house ready. She would follow me. She had to arrange her papers, say her farewells to family and friends in the four corners of the peninsula and gather the furniture she had left with aunts and cousins, and so forth. I found the house in Savannah and waited for her here, gazing out at the sea that would bring her to me: there was only one thing I could think of in the entire world, and that was the Andalusian girl, so fresh and graceful, so amorous and wild, who smelled of earth and balm and lily and verbena, who sunned herself in the plazas of Seville, as if throwing down a challenge to death, because Constancia, like the stars, was enemy of the day, and it was in bed, in the darkness — nocturnal or artificial — that her games flowed forth and her games drove me mad.

She arrived in Savannah in a freighter forty years ago and has not moved from this city since. The only thing she brought with her was the prie-dieu and the image of the Macarena, not a single other piece of furniture, not a photo, not a single book, although her trunk contained dark clothes and many religious pictures and prayers to the Virgin Mary. Now, late in her life, she reads Kafka — her sick child, her sad child, as she calls him. She imagines trains that arrive on time but without passengers. Monsieur Plotnikov, on the other hand, never stops moving. It occurs to me that I have never seen him when he wasn’t moving: hurrying out of an automatic photo booth; walking with an almost ethereal slowness along the red paths of the cemetery; looking nervously, as if in flight, at the shops in the commercial gallery of the Hyatt Regency, as if afraid; walking the neighborhood streets that link our houses: walking. Surely he was playing a role, as he said to me one day, before announcing his death to me. Or, indeed, he was playing too many roles; the world wanted him — he told me, or led me to understand, I can’t remember — to be too many people. He was tired, he said before disappearing. I imagined his shoes, worn out from so much walking through the streets and galleries of Savannah, worn shoes covered with the dust of the cemetery.

I asked him once if he shouldn’t resume his acting career in the United States, as so many exiles had done. Mr. Plotnikov was visibly taken aback. Hadn’t I seen them on the videocassettes I rented to escape network programs and commercials? My neighbor didn’t give me time to answer.

— Haven’t you seen them, the greatest interpreters of Piscator in Berlin and of Meyerhold in Moscow, reduced to bit parts, playing waiters, hotel concierges, Russian shopkeepers, and kindly doctors? Gospodin Hull, I am talking about actors like Curt Bois, who electrified Germany in The Last Emperor, a staging by Piscator in which a gigantic shutter framed the action, so that it was possible to enlarge, reduce, or frame the action of the drama, a drama played in front of backdrops that the director had filmed especially, among them a storm on the high seas, a gigantic sea, waves breaking, flooding over the stage, the theater, and the actor, who was the key, the point of reference of this gigantic aperture of the theater to the world. Curt Bois, Alexander Granach, Albert Basserman, Vladimir Sokoloff — do these names mean anything to you, my dear Doctor? Well, they were the greatest, they reinvented acting in Europe. They had no right to play old men on a little screen between two beer commercials.

— They had the right to survive in exile.

— No, Gospodin Doctor. Their only right was to die, executed like Meyerhold or Babel, or in a concentration camp like Mandelstam, to commit suicide like Esenin and Mayakovsky, or to die of despair like Blok, or be silenced forever like Akhmatova.

— If they had waited, they would have been rehabilitated.

— A dead man cannot be rehabilitated. A dead man has to make do with the life that was once his. A dead man lives on the charity of memory. A dead man rehabilitates himself, Doctor, finding life where he can …

— Well, all right. He can find that life in an old film shown on television at 2 a.m.

— No, better to be seen no more than to be seen diminished. That’s why I decided to give up acting and take up stage design, which is by definition essential but transitory. It is the comprehension of the moment, Gospodin Hull, as instantaneous as the lighting invented by Meyerhold, movable lights, now here, suddenly there, displacing the action, showing us how quickly the world can be changed, forcing us to give up a little of ourselves and submit to the diversity, the rapid changes, of the world; ah, to have worked with Meyerhold, Dr. Hull, a man whose superior intelligence put us all in touch with a better world; is that why they killed him? Tell me, you are a doctor, is that why they killed, censured, and drove the best to death? Because we knew how to achieve what they only proclaimed, because if we obtained it, they would no longer be able to promise it? How politics become exhausted, how the arts renew themselves, these are things they didn’t know. Or perhaps they did know and they were afraid. That’s why I wanted to give up acting and become a stage designer. I didn’t want my heart or my voice to survive. I wanted my works to survive for a moment, Mr. Hull, and then disappear, leaving only a memory. But it doesn’t matter. Someone said that being an actor is like sculpting in snow.

Relieved that Constancia was improving, and affected by the memory of my talks with the Russian actor, I collapsed in an easy chair in my living room and began to watch old films. When the library tires me, I relax by watching a nostalgic old film. No doubt, I was unconsciously influenced by thoughts of the Russian stage in selecting the cassette I put into the VCR. It was Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh. Either I was careless or the machine didn’t work properly, and the film began to run backwards. The first thing I saw was the word END, then a screen full of smoke, suddenly a train pulling into the station (on time, without passengers), then the actress reborn from the smoke and the wheels of the train, miraculously revived on the platform where her unforgettable, melancholic face, worldly but pure, like her wine-luminous eyes, said goodbye to the world, and Vivien Leigh portraying Anna Karenina ran quickly backwards. Fascinated, I pushed the pause button on the eternally frozen face of the dead actress. I was stunned by the power I held in my hands to keep life at a standstill, move it forward, return it to the beginning, to give these images a second-level life, an energy that, while it cannot restore Vivien Leigh, the forever dead magnolia, to life, can nonetheless restore these images of her sadness and her youth. I give life every time I push the button. Vivien Leigh is dead; Vivien Leigh lives. She lives and dies playing the role of a Russian woman of the past century. The film is an illustration of the novel. The novel lives each time that it is read. The novel has the past of its dead readers, the present of its living readers, and the future of its readers to come. But in the novel nobody interprets the role of Anna Karenina. When Anna Karenina dies in the Moscow rail station, the actress playing her doesn’t die. The actress dies after she interprets the role. The interpretation of death survives the actress. The ice of the actor Plotnikov becomes the marble of the architect Plotnikov.

I remember my peripatetic conversations with Mr. Plotnikov, and I ask myself if he was right to prefer the theatrical container — stage design — to the contained — the action, the movement, the words, the faces. Turning off the television set, tonight, I reject my own thoughts, I tell myself that it’s distinctions like the ones I’ve just formulated — form, content; glass, water; dwelling, inhabitants; inn, guests — that destroyed my exiled neighbor and his generation of artists. Better to save the cassette of Anna Karenina for another, better occasion, I decide, reflecting on the fact that what seems to be form if you look at it one way is content if you look at it from a different perspective, and vice versa. I admit that none of this really makes up for or reduces the pain of the old actor’s sad speech, one day, on the incongruous stage of the commercial center by the Hyatt Regency: