Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

— What harm did they do, Gospodin Hull? Whom did they hurt, tell me? Never had there been such a constellation of talent! What tremendous power for a country! To have at the same time poets like Blok, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, to have filmmakers like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Dziga, my friend Dziga Vertov, Dziga Vertov, Dziga Kaufmann, the kinok, Dr. Hull, mad about movies, so likable! and novelists like Babel and Khlebnikov and Biely, and dramatists like Bulgakov, and my teachers, the creators of all the new forms, my friend Rodchenko reinventing lighting, my friend Malevich exploring the limits of color, my friend Tatlin inviting us to construct parallel forms of the world, not imitations of the world, but new worlds accessible to everyone, unique and unrepeatable, within that other world; all, Gospodin Hull, enriching the world that contained them by offering new perspectives. What harm did they do? How strong my country could have been with all that talent! What madness caused them to be sacrificed? I died in time, my dear Doctor. Meyerhold was the greatest genius of the theater. He was my teacher. He created marvels, but did not go along with a theory he considered sterile, the vile product of three factors: bureaucratic lack of imagination, desire to make political theory coincide with artistic practice, and fear that exceptions would weaken the institutions of power. Was that a reason for arresting him, carrying him off to a Moscow jail, and shooting him there, without a trial, on February 2, 1940, a date I will never forget, Dr. Hull? I ask you again: Was that a reason to kill Meyerhold, for not accepting a theory of art that would have prevented him from creating? Maybe so, maybe Meyerhold was more dangerous than he or his betrayers suspected. It’s the only explanation, Gospodin Hull, why the slashed and mutilated woman, Meyerhold’s lover, was found in the couple’s apartment the day Meyerhold was arrested. Such cruelty, such sorrow. And such fear. A woman knifed to death only to augment her lover’s pain.

He remained silent awhile, before saying to me, in the calmest voice in the world: Why, Dr. Hull, why, why so much pointless suffering? Your profession is to heal, perhaps you can tell me.

12

If Constancia had died a little after each of our conjugal quarrels, it was also true that she always recovered quickly and that our love had grown each time. We discussed how we didn’t need to justify ourselves; we respected the reciprocal intimacy that the demand for justification would have violated. She always recovered.

But in every instance my wife’s recovery took longer than before. September found the invalid still not out of bed. The situation was becoming difficult. I didn’t dare, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, to put her in a hospital. The perfectly mortal calm of a summer in Savannah only increased my indolence. After the first Monday of September, Labor Day in the United States (which, unlike the rest of the world, does not celebrate May 1, the day the workers were martyred in Chicago: in the United States there are no unhappy days, one doesn’t celebrate death, one doesn’t remember violence), a buzz of activity returned to the city and I felt my spirits stirring dangerously. I had to do something. My passivity, which may only have prolonged Constancia’s illness, was beginning to tell on my own health.

To leave her alone would be an act of abandonment. That, at least, is how she would see it, and that’s what her sorrowful and increasingly hollow eyes told me whenever I went out for a few minutes, perhaps half an hour, or went to the bathroom, or got something to eat, milk and cereal, toast with jam … The night I allowed myself the luxury of watching Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina on television, I fell asleep for a moment and woke with a start to see Constancia’s face superimposed on that of the British actress on the screen. I gave out a strangled cry. There was a crackling noise and the screen went black, but I was sure that Constancia was in the room, that she had come down from her bedroom, and that the face on the screen was her reflection, not my imagination playing tricks on me. I reached out for her in the darkness, afraid that she had fainted: Constancia hadn’t spoken. I touched her. She withdrew from my touch when I reached out to her, but then she touched me, several times, in an unwanted manner, vulgar, forward even … She touched me, but I couldn’t touch her; it was as if she could hear me without seeing me. I heard the soft sound of beating wings, and when the lights came on, I went up to the bedroom and found her kneeling before the full-skirted image of the Virgin. I came up behind her. I embraced her. I kissed her neck, her ears. Her eyes darted nervously, as if they had an alien life of their own … As I knelt beside her, my knees became covered with wood shavings.

Every day the newspaper and the milk arrived at my doorstep, the mail was delivered, nobody called me from Atlanta, everything went on as always, but our diet lacked fresh vegetables, we’d run out of toothpaste, the bar of soap was just a sliver.

She would sleep at unexpected times. Then, before falling asleep, she would say: —I am going to dream that … or, on waking, announced: —I dreamed that …

I wanted to surprise her in the act of saying: —I am dreaming that … to absent myself and make her believe that my absence was only part of her dream. Now I understood that dreaming, along with sex and religion (prayer and love), was Constancia’s true literature; apart from that vast oneiric, erotic, and sacred novel which she dreamed herself, she needed only one story in her life, the story of that unfortunate son who, sorrow of sorrows, pity of pities, could wake up one morning metamorphosed into an insect.

— I am dreaming that … the insect begged for mercy, and nobody granted it, except me, I am the only one to come to him and …

That was my justification for leaving her; my cue for abandoning her, hearing her say I am dreaming; I would go downstairs to the vestibule, open the mahogany door, its beveled glass covered by a cotton shade, tiptoe over the wooden porch, cross Drayton Street to the corner of Wright Square, go up the stone steps of the house where Monsieur Plotnikov lived, trip over the bottles of milk piled up on the porch — curdled milk, yellowed, with greenish mold on the top — the newspapers, carelessly tossed, and though carefully folded into rubber bands, their big Cyrillic characters visible …

(I don’t understand why milkmen insist on carrying out their job so inexorably, so mechanically, even though they can see that the milk already there is going bad. The person who delivers the newspapers — I’ve seen him — is a boy who goes by on a bicycle and expertly tosses the paper onto the porch. His careless haste is understandable, whereas the milkman is announcing to the world that the house is uninhabited. That anyone could go in and rob it. Milkmen are always accomplices: in adultery, in robbery.)

I touched the copper doorknob apprehensively. The door opened. Nobody had locked Mr. Plotnikov’s house. I walked into a perfectly ordinary foyer, no different from ours: an umbrella stand, a mirror, the stairs to the second floor right by the door, inviting one to go up. It was a house in the so-called Federal style, symmetrical in design but secret in its details: an old window unexpectedly looking out over an impenetrable tropical garden of bamboo and ferns; a window protruding like a mysterious island from the rest of the continent; the plaster eagles, escutcheons victory banners, and military drums. And on each side of the narrow vestibule, a salon, a dining room.

I went into the Russian’s dining room, with its heavy furniture, an ornate samovar set up in the center of a table with massive legs and a white tablecloth; its dishes with popular Russian decorations, and the walls holding not the icons I had imagined there but two paintings in that academic style that was equally popular with Czarist nobility and Soviet commissars: one of the paintings depicted the quintessential outdoor scene, a troika, a family going out for a ride: excitement, overcoats, fur rugs, caps, covers, the snowstorm, the steppe, birch trees, an endless horizon … The other painting, all interior, showed a dim bedroom, a bed in which a young woman lay dead. By her side, standing, a doctor, his satchel on the floor, feeling for her pulse. The composition called for her pale arm to be extended, for the doctor to hold her long, thin hand. In a film (for example, Anna Karenina with a different ending) the doctor would have shaken his head sadly. Here, the dramatic commentary was provided by a babushka sitting in a wing chair in the foreground, consoling a child in a nightgown who stares heavenward with angelic eyes to the infinite that infuses the bedroom.