Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Constancia

1

The old Russian actor Monsieur Plotnikov visited me the very day of his death. He told me that the years would pass and I would come to visit him on the day of my own death.

I didn’t understand his words very well. The heat of Savannah in August is like fitful sleep: you repeatedly seem to shudder awake, you think you’ve opened your eyes, but in fact you’ve only introduced one dream inside another. And, inversely, one reality adheres to another, deforming it until it seems a dream. But it’s nothing more than reality baked at 101°. At the same time, it’s nothing less than this: my deepest dreams on summer afternoons are like the city of Savannah itself, which is a city inside another city inside …

This feeling of being caught in an urban maze is a result of the mysterious plan that gave Savannah as many squares as stars in the heavens, or so it seems. A gridwork regular as a chessboard, beginning with a square from which four, six, eight streets lead off to three, four, five squares from which, finally, twelve, fourteen streets radiate, leading in turn to an infinite number of squares.

The mystery of Savannah, in this respect, is its transparent geometric simplicity. Its labyrinth is the straight line. Its clarity produces, paradoxically, a most oppressive feeling of disorientation. Order is the antechamber of horror, and when my Spanish wife once more opens her old book of Goya prints and stops at the most famous of the Caprichos, I don’t know if I should disturb her fascination by remarking:

— Reason that never sleeps produces monsters.

The immediate reality is simply this: the only solution (for me) is to sit on the porch of my house, in a rocker, with a round fan, trying to see off to the green, slow, fraudulent river, and not being able to make it out, consoling myself with the argument that since I’m in the open air, I must feel cool.

My wife, wiser than I, understands that these old Southern houses were designed to keep out the heat, and she chooses to close the shutters, take off her clothes, and spend the afternoon hours between cool sheets, under a silently revolving ceiling fan. That is something she has done ever since her childhood in Seville. Still, we do have one thing in common — air-conditioning gives us colds and sore throats; so we have agreed never to allow in our home one of those devices that stick out like pimples or scarred stumps from one or two windows of every house in the city.

They are ugly and they make the houses ugly. Savannah’s domestic architecture dates from a period between the end of the eighteenth century and the third quarter of the nineteenth century; that is, the years between the independence of the Union and its severing in the Civil War, when our pride was greater than our sense of reality. The noble edifices of our city are symbols of two commerces, one famous, the other infamous. Cotton and slaves; blacks imported, white fibers exported. As an old Southerner, I appreciate the chromatic irony of this exchange. We sent out messengers as fresh and ethereal as clouds to the world, and in exchange we received flesh charred on the coals of hell. Still, irony is better than guilt, or at least I prefer to cultivate it, especially now that everything for which my ancestors so nobly and stupidly fought has been lost. Some statues survive, it’s true, but now there’s a Hyatt Regency next to the river and a De Soto Hilton behind my house on Drayton Street — proof that the Northern carpetbaggers, the mercenaries who profited from our defeat to annex us to their commerce, their values, their vulgarity, are still winning.

No one escapes these mercantile imperatives, not even I, who have so cultivated an understanding of my region and its history. Every week I travel to Atlanta to minister to my medical clientele, and from the airplane I see that there is no trace of the capital of Georgia, burned by Sherman in 1864. Skyscrapers, supermarkets, urban beltlines, elevators like cages of glass rising, brittle ivy, up the frozen skin of the buildings: plastic magnolias; defeats tasting of strawberry ice cream; history as television mini-series. I spend my Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in Atlanta, and Fridays I return to enjoy the weekend at home. It is my refuge, my asylum, yes. It is my dwelling place.

I return home with the feeling that for us this remains the city we built ourselves (despite the commercial incursions I have mentioned), where we received, to help in its construction, those refugees despite themselves, the blacks, who did not flee freely from Africa (if one can speak in that way about a refugee), but were dragged, in chains, out of their continent. Sometimes, rocking and trying to overcome the heat by thinking of the slow-moving river, or flying over Atlanta and trying to discover a single charred vestige of the past, I ask myself, old and somnolent now, if we have finally atoned for our guilt. How can we be done with it? Or does our well-being depend on our learning how to live with it forever? How long a vigil, I ask myself, does historical violence impose on us? When will we be allowed to rest? I seldom see the blacks of Savannah; I speak to them only when I have to. But I never stop asking what my history all comes down to: how far can or should my personal responsibility extend for injustices I did not commit?

2

I say that rocking in the open air is my strategy for feeling cool. I know that I am lying to myself. It’s just a kind of autosuggestion. But anyone who has lived in extreme climates before artificial climatization knows full well that heat and cold are, more than anything, mental states that, like sex, literature, or power, are accepted or rejected at the very center of your existence, which is the mind. And if the head won’t help us, then let us drink hot coffee in hot climates. That way, the inside and outside temperatures balance out; but, in hot weather, cold upsets the balance and we pay with hours of discomfort for a minute of relief. Would the inverse be true, in cold climates? Does eating ice cream help you through a Russian winter? I must ask Mr. Plotnikov, the next time I see him.

The reader of these hurried notes, which I’m jotting down with the strange sense that I must do so now, before it’s too late, must understand that to say I saw or visited Mr. Plotnikov is to dignify what was really no more than a series of chance encounters. Sometimes there was an element of surprise in them. One time, in a shopping mall, I stopped to take some ID pictures in an automatic photo booth. The curtain was closed and I waited a long time. Some old-fashioned, laced-up black boots attracted my curiosity. When the curtain parted, Mr. Plotnikov appeared. He looked at me and said:

— They make us choose our roles, Gospodin Hull. Just look, an actor obliged to have his picture taken to get a passport, what do you think of that? Don’t you want to wait with me for the four photos to come out of the slot? — he said, taking my arm with his gloved hand. — Whose pictures do you think they will be? The actor? The private man? The Russian citizen? The apprentice set designer? The refugee in America? Who? He laughed, and feeling a little uneasy, I smiled as one smiles at a madman to placate him, for I must say that the old man, despite his apparent calm, also seemed uneasy.

I wondered if I should give in to my curiosity and wait for Mr. Plotnikov’s photographs to appear. I laughed, thinking how we sometimes make ridiculous faces without realizing it, staring at the hidden, shuttered, aggressive eye of the camera. But his question pursued me. Which of our multiple personalities is caught, at any given moment, by a photograph?

Once I met him in the cemetery where I sometimes go to pay a visit to my ancestors. Dressed, as always, in black, he was picking his way gingerly over the red earth. I asked him if he had relatives here. He laughed and, without looking at me, murmured that nobody remembers those who died fifty years ago, no, not twenty, not even ten years lasts the memory of the dead … He walked away slowly, before I could tell him that I was proof to the contrary. I visit and remember two centuries of dead people.

Another summer I ran into him in the shopping mall by the Hyatt Regency, where his old-fashioned mourning clothes were in sharp contrast with the neon lights, the electronic games, the movie marquees. I saw he was very tired and I took his arm; the up-to-date flashiness of the mall, the heat outside, the artificially cooled air inside, seemed too much for him. It was the only time we sat down to talk. He told me about his Russian past, about working as an actor and set designer, how he couldn’t be several things at once, which was why he left Russia, they wouldn’t let him be all he wanted to be, they wanted to compartmentalize his life, here the actor, here the citizen, here, very secretly, the sensual man, the father, the keeper of memory … He made the remark on that occasion, as he incongruously ate pistachio ice cream, that, no matter what, asylum is temporary, one always goes home again, despite popular sayings: —Remember, Gospodin Hull, our past is always with us.

He was playing with a strip of I.D. photos, still damp, waving them gently to dry them. I told him with understandable awkwardness that he was certainly welcome in the United States. He replied that he was tired, very tired.

I reminded him that I was a doctor; if I could help him, he shouldn’t hesitate … I didn’t look at the photographs when he finally put them on the table. But I did notice, out of the corner of my eye, that they weren’t pictures of him but of someone else — I could not see clearly — who had long dark hair. Man or woman? It was during that unisex period when one couldn’t be sure. Another reason to avoid an indiscretion.

He shook his head and acknowledged my kindness not simply by declining my offer but by responding in the same tone: he said no, his problem was not the kind a doctor could cure. He smiled pleasantly.

— I understand — I told him — the distance, the exile. I could not live far from the United States. More precisely, far from the South. As a young man, I studied in Spain, and I love that country. But I could only live in my own.

— Ah—. Mr. Plotnikov looked at me. — And living in your country, do you look back to the past?

I told him that I thought I had a fair sense of tradition. He looked amused and said that North American history seemed overly selective to him, it was the history of white success, but not of the other realities. The Indian past, for example, or the black, or the Hispanic … All that was left out.

— I am not a chauvinist — I told the old Russian a little defensively. — I think that amnesia has a price. But at least our society has been a melting pot. We have admitted more immigrants than any nation in history.

He shook his head good-naturedly to show that his observations were not meant as a reproach. — No, Gospodin Hull, I myself am the beneficiary of that generosity; how can I criticize it! But I’m talking about — he stopped manipulating his spoonful of pistachio ice cream for a moment — I’m talking about something more than physical immigration, I’m talking about accepting the memory of others, their past … and even their desire to return one day to their homeland.

— Why not? That’s the way it is.

— What you don’t understand is how hard it is to renounce everything, to face the loss of all that we are, not just our possessions but our physical and intellectual powers as well, to leave everything behind like a suitcase and begin anew.

— I hope that everyone who comes to our country feels that we want to give them, in our own way, the strength to make a new beginning.

— And also a grace period?

— Pardon, Mr. Plotnikov?

— Yes, I’m not talking about starting over but of earning a reprieve, do you understand? I’m talking about someday receiving, as a gift, an extra hour of life. Yes, exactly that: don’t we deserve it?

— Yes, of course — I agreed emphatically — of course.

— Ah, that’s good. — Mr. Plotnikov wiped his lips with a paper napkin. — Yes, that’s good. You know, after a while one lives only through the lives of others, when one’s own life has run out.

He put the photos in his jacket pocket.

That was not the first or the last time, over many years, when an unexpected snowfall would cover the red earth of the cemetery or when thunderstorms would turn its paths to mud, that I chanced upon my neighbor the actor Plotnikov walking along the cemetery paths, repeating a sort of litany of names that I sometimes caught snatches of, as he passed near me … Dmitrovich Osip Emilievich Isaac Emmanuelovich Mikhail Afanasievich Sergei Alexandrovich Kazimir Serafimovich Vsevelod Emilievich Vladimir Vladimiro …

3

Now it was August and Mr. Plotnikov (Monsieur Plotnikov, I sometimes call him; whether out of respect, a sense of difference, or mere affectation I know not) came (I remember: it was an unannounced visit) to tell me of his death, but neither the heat of summer outside nor the heat of the hell that according to popular legend awaits actors, who are denied burial in consecrated ground, neither of those seemed to oppress that gentleman, white as a transparent host — white skin, white hair, white lips, pale eyes — but dressed entirely in black, in a turn-of-the-century-style three-piece black suit, a Russian overcoat too big for him, as if another actor had given it to him, with the hem dragging through the dust, the Coca-Cola cans, and the chocolate Mars Bars wrappers. He managed all this with dignity. Making a unique concession to the climate, he carried an open umbrella, black also, as he proceeded with slow and dusty tread: I noticed his sharp patent-leather shoes with little bows on their tips, a detail that gave Mr. Plotnikov the air of a perverse ballerina.

— Gospodin Hull — he greeted me, pointing his umbrella in my direction like a bullfighter taking off his hat to salute the fatal act that will follow the formula courtesy. — Gospodin Hull, I have come to say goodbye.

— Ah, Monsieur Plotnikov — I replied, half asleep — you’re going on a trip.

— You are always joking—. He shook his head disapprovingly. — I have never understood why Americans are always making jokes. This would be very badly received in St. Petersburg, or in Paris.

— Pardon us, sir. Blame all our failings on our being a country of pioneers.

— Bah, so is Russia, but we don’t spend our time guffawing. Bah, you act like hyenas.

I decided not to respond to this last allusion. Mr. Plotnikov snapped his parasol shut, very theatrically, so that the mid-afternoon sun shone straight down on him, accentuating the cavities of his narrow, transparent skull, barely covered by skin growing ever thinner, like a worn-out envelope, finally to reveal the contents of the letter within.

— No, Gospodin Hull, I have come to say goodbye because I am going to die, and I feel it is a basic courtesy to say goodbye to you, who have been a courteous and polite neighbor, in spite of everything.

— I’m sorry that, living right next door, we never …

He interrupted me without smiling: —That is what I am thanking you for. You never imposed unwanted formulas of neighborliness on me.

— Well, thank you, then, Mr. Plotnikov, but I’m sure, to paraphrase a more famous American humorist than me, that you greatly exaggerate the news of your death.

— You can never tell, Gospodin Hull, because my condition is the following …

I had stopped rocking and fanning. I didn’t know whether to give in to my first inclination, which was to laugh, or surrender to the deeper feeling engendered by the sight of this man — so protected by his clothes and yet so mercilessly exposed by a sun that allowed him no more shade than the bony ridges over his eyes and the wrinkles of his aged skin — which was to take his words seriously indeed.

— Yes, sir?

— Gospodin Hull: you will come to visit me only on the day of your own death, to let me know, as I have done today with mine. That is my condition.

— But you will be dead then — I began, logically, almost happily, although I quickly abandoned that tack — I mean, the day I die you will no longer be living …

— Don’t be so sure of that — now he opened the umbrella with nervous haste and shaded himself with it — and respect my last wish. Please. I am so tired.

As I relate this, I recall many of our chance meetings at the corner of Drayton Street and Wright Square, in the cemetery, or in the mall. We never exchanged many words (except the afternoon of the pistachio ice cream), but we were neighbors, and without ever paying each other a formal visit, we passed along snatches of information, like the pieces of a puzzle. What did I know about him, really, on that day when he predicted his death in such a strange manner? What did I know about him? Two or three vague facts: he was a theater actor in Russia, although he really wanted to be a set designer and stop acting. It was the era of Stalinist terror, life was difficult for everyone, as bad for those who submitted as for those who resisted the madness of personal power posing as collective power. Who didn’t suffer? Even the executioners, Mr. Plotnikov said one day, they, too, breathe, and their breath was like a forest felled. He left Russia and found asylum in the United States, which offered it to so many refugees from a Europe convulsed by ideology, in those generous years when America was America; he smiled at me, recalling some Jews, some Spaniards, who couldn’t get through the doors of our democratic refuge. But what could you do; we received so many more, Germans, Poles, Russians, Czechs, French … Politics is the art of limits. Art is the limit of politics.

— Respect my last wish. Do not come to my wake tonight or accompany my funeral procession tomorrow. No. Visit me in my house on the day of your death, Gospodin Hull. Our well-being depends on it. Please. I am very tired.

What could I say, seeing him there on that street-scene stage, with the garbage beginning to distract us from the colonial grandeur of Savannah; what could I tell him, that the day of his funeral I was going to be in Atlanta taking care of patients less lucid, more impatient than he? What could I tell him, to show my respect for something that I understood, I appreciated, I was grateful for, that this was perhaps his final performance, the final act of a career brutally interrupted — I deduced — by political adversity and never taken up again outside Russia.

— I needed — he explained to me one day, or I imagined or dreamed, I’m no longer sure of the truth — the Russian language, Russian applause, to read the reviews in Russian, but above all I needed the test of the Russian heart in order to present myself in public, acting; I couldn’t communicate as an actor apart from the Russian language, space, applause, time, testimony, intent. Did I understand that, in my country of wild syncretisms, of political pastiche and migratory melting pots and maps stuck up with chewing gum, could I possibly understand?

What could I tell him, I ask again, except, yes, Mr. Plotnikov, I agree, I will do what you say.

— Very good. I thank you. I am too tired.

With that, he bowed and walked stiffly away in the blazing sun to his house next to mine, near Wright Square.

4

Almost in spite of myself, I went into the house. I wanted to tell my wife what had happened. I wanted to tell her how deeply Monsieur Plotnikov had disturbed me, enough to make me take the unusual step of interrupting Constancia’s nap. I was beyond observing that tacit prohibition, so great was the turmoil my Russian neighbor had caused in me. But my astonishment grew when I realized that Constancia was not in her bed, that it had not even been slept in. The shutters were closed, but that was normal. And it would have been normal, too, if Constancia, finding she had to leave the house — I looked for her on all three floors and even in the unused cellar — had wanted to tell me she was leaving, but saw me in the rocking chair and, giving me a fond smile, went out without waking me. In that case, a note would have been enough, a few scribbled words, saying:

— Don’t worry, Whitby. Be back soon.

And, on returning, what pretext would she give me?

— I don’t know. I decided to lose myself in the plazas. This is the most beautiful and mysterious aspect of the city — the way one plaza always opens onto another, like a Russian doll.

And other times: —Remember, Whitby, your wife is Andalusian and we Andalusians don’t accept age, we fight it. Look, who dances peteneras better than an old lady, have you noticed? — she said, laughing, imitating a sexagenarian flamenco dancer.

I imagined her lying down, nude, in the shade, telling me these things: Sometimes, on dog days like these — understand, love? — I go out looking for water, shade, plazas, a maze of streets, ah, if you knew what it was to be a child in Seville, Whitby, that other city of plazas and mazes and water and shadows … You know, I walk through the streets seeking my past in a different place, do you think that’s madness?

— You’ve never tried to make friends here, you haven’t even learned English … Even my name gives you trouble— I smiled—

— Hweetbee Howl— She smiled in turn, and then said to me:

— I haven’t criticized your Savannah, we’ve made our life here, but leave me my Seville, at least in my imagination, my love, and tell yourself: It’s a good thing Constancia knows how to find the light and water she needs here in my own American South.

I would laugh then, pleased to think that the South, the South with its names full of vowels — Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas — is the Andalusia of America. And Spain, I tell her, as an old reader of Coustine and Gautier, is the Russia of the West, just as Russia is the Spain of the East. Again I laughed, observing to Constancia that only Russia and Spain had come up with the idea of changing the width of their train tracks to forestall foreign invasion; that is to say, the aggression of other Europeans. What paranoia — I laughed in mock amazement — what love of barriers, whether the steppes or a mountain chain: to be the others, Russians and Spaniards, unassimilatable to Western normality! But, after all — I defended myself against Constancia — perhaps normality is mediocrity.

I think, naturally, of our neighbor, the Russian actor, when the conversation takes this turn. With the skilled touch of the bibliophile, I run my hands over the dark spines and gilded, dusty edges of the books in my library, the coolest and darkest place in the house on Drayton Street, and I secretly pride myself that the flexibility of my hand is a perfect reflection of the quickness of my sexagenarian mind. I was — I am — a man of letters, part of an inheritance that does not flourish in the United States and is kept alive mainly in the South, the land of William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, and its Dulcineas with a pen, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Shirley Ann Grau. I often think that even self-exiled Southerners — I’m talking about diabolically self-destructive gnomes like Truman Capote as well as painfully creative giants like William Styron — are like the carriers of a literary aristocracy that is unwanted in a country that craves proof that its Declaration of Independence is right, that all men are created equal, but what this equality (proposed by a group of exceptionally learned aristocrats, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Adams — the golden youth of the colonies) really means is the triumph of the lowest common denominator. Why do we elect retarded presidents like Reagan if not to prove that all men are equal? We prefer to recognize ourselves in this idiot who talks like us, looks like us, makes our jokes, shares our mental lapses, amnesias, prejudices, obsessions, and confusions, justifying our own mental vulgarity: how consoling! A new Roosevelt a new Kennedy would force us to admire them for what we are not, and that’s an unsettling feeling. Still, I’m a quiet American who sticks pretty close to his library, almost to the point of neglecting my practice, doesn’t need many friends, has chosen to exercise his profession in a modern and impersonal city that shuts down at five, the blacks given over to lassitude and nocturnal violence and the whites locked away in their mansions surrounded by savage dogs and electric fences. And I spend three nights of the week in a hospital room so as to perform heart operations early on Wednesdays and Thursdays. In our time, it is impossible to be a surgeon without the support of a great medical center.

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.

First, over the years, whenever I saw Monsieur Plotnikov he was alone: in the streets and plazas of Savannah, in the pantheon of red earth, occasionally (strange, freakish meetings) in a shopping center near the Hyatt Regency that smells of peanuts, warmed-over pizza, popcorn, and tennis shoes.

Second, I never met Mr. Plotnikov indoors, as the shopping mall has a false interior (as well as a false exterior): it’s a street of glass. I had never been inside his house, across from ours, and he had never been to ours.

And — the third thing — for perfectly natural reasons, as natural as the fact that Constancia had never accompanied me to the hospital in Atlanta and I never had gone with her to a beauty salon, she had never been with me when I met Mr. Plotnikov, either inside or outside any wall.

There was one last fact, the most difficult to reconcile with the rest: Constancia had been dead in my arms for several moments; it was that fact that forced me to ask: Had Mr. Plotnikov died exactly as he had foretold, and, if so, did his death coincide with the play of lights in his house and with the fleeting death of Constancia? Why did I see our neighbor only outdoors, and why had I never run into him with my wife? I will admit to my share of sentimental egoism — these questions had never disturbed my sleep before, they only interested me now because of the melancholy terror I felt on holding Constancia and knowing, with scientific certainty, that Constancia was dead.

But no longer: she lived, she returned to me, to herself, to our life, little by little. And the telephone never stopped ringing.

7

I devoted myself to her for several days. I canceled my appointments and operations in Atlanta. It was an exceptional step. As long as we had been married, Constancia had insisted that only in the most extreme case should I care for her professionally. It would be better if I never saw her as a patient. She would obey any doctor who told her to undress, spread her legs, get on all fours. But she would obey only one lover who told her to do those things: that man was me, her husband, not her doctor. And, as for me, what maddened me from the beginning was that passion for obedience in Constancia, as if my commands became her own desires, as if I merely guessed her own most passionate desires and eagerly and ecstatically followed her lead.

In our forty years together, however, Constancia had never had to see a doctor. She had suffered only minor ailments: colds, digestive upsets, mild insomnia, nose bleeds … It was therefore an emotional experience to have her in my hands (I mean, in my care) for the first time: my patient.

I was waiting for her to regain her lucidity and strength — she spent several days in that half state between trance, prayer, and a sudden smile — so that, together again, like one as before, we would regard what had happened according to our unwritten rules: There are many possibilities; let us weigh them all, one by one, without rushing headlong to any conclusion. But during these first days of her convalescence — what else can I call it? — Constancia was not a woman but a bird, with a bird’s nervous movements, unable to turn her head without her movement’s being cut short by a sort of ornithological tremor — the movement of a winged creature that cannot look ahead, eyes to the front, but only to the sides, confirming with a rapid movement of the left eye some fact suggested by the right. Like an ostrich, or an eagle, or…?

What was she looking at that way, during those days when I asked myself so many questions — Had the actor died? Did the lights announce his death? — and came increasingly to one conclusion, that those phenomena coincided with the fleeting death of Constancia. I took her pulse, pressed my stethoscope to her breast, pried her eyelids open (eagle, ostrich, or…?). With her bird movements she looked at the window that in turn looked toward the house, dark and silent, of Mr. Plotnikov. She looked at the image of the Virgin of the Macarena, immobile, mournful, in her triangular paralysis. She looked at the flickering light of the votive candle. She did not look at me. I looked at her reclining body, her open gown exposing the breasts of a sixty-one-year-old woman who, however, had never had children, her nipples still voluptuous, gifts for my senses, perfect spheres for my touch, my tongue, and especially my sense of fullness, of pregnant reality. They say that we North Americans attach too much sexuality to the breasts, just as South Americans do to the buttocks. But in my house, since I never saw her pregnant, her ample breasts seemed to concentrate that sense of pregnancy that men like to contrast with the ethereal (her face, her eyes) in a woman: earth and air. But Constancia always told me: I am water, I am the source. She was Andalusian. And Andalusia is an Arab land, a land of nomads who arrived from the desert and found the refuge of water. Granada …

I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t abandon her. In other circumstances, I would have called in another doctor, nurses, an ambulance. But that wasn’t possible. If the phenomenon repeated itself, I, only I, should be its witness, nobody else had that right, nobody else — just as Constancia could offer herself erotically on all fours only to me, though she might present her ass to be examined for evidence of cancer. Now I was her lover and I was her doctor, too. She was my case. She couldn’t be admitted to an impersonal hospital. Constancia would not enter any hospital; I saw her, across the passage of time, lying there, lily-white, deep-set eyes, mole, her hair loose — I kept her silver hairpins in my jacket pocket — and I told myself that I would have to be admitted for her, with her, in her. But her look — which I followed — was still not for me; it was for the Virgin, the votive candle, the window.

Since I couldn’t leave her, I couldn’t resolve one of the more important questions. Her apparent death, in my arms, for several seconds, displaced the other question: Had Mr. Plotnikov died? I didn’t notice any further activity at his house, but that was not unusual. I never had noticed anything about that unremarkable house, except the night the lights blazed and then went out, all at once in each case. Normally, nothing happened at the house across from ours. It might as well have been vacant. The newspaper was delivered each morning as usual, but there was no mention in it of Plotnikov’s death. Perhaps he had requested that. If he had died, who would attend his wake? I supposed that the Russian actor would keep beside him an icon of the Virgin, fashioned from hammered silver, in which the reality of the metal itself would be more vivid than that of the faint, distant figure of the smiling Virgin, pale ocher, with the Child in her arms, both looking at the faithful old man from the eternal background of orthodox religion, which refuses to come down and tread the earth. Who would bury him?

I cast a quick look at our Virgin, by Constancia’s bed, the Andalusian madonna, Virgin of bullfighters, processions, tricks, outrageous blasphemies, gypsy dances, ardent bodies. The Russian Virgin never said anything, anywhere; the Andalusian Virgin shouted, here, now. Constancia always said: Andalusia: water, source, and reflection. Alhambra …

She knew how to speak beautifully, gracefully, with passion and tenderness, but now, in her trance, I set aside our discussions and considered matters on my own account. Her conversation had kept from me many thoughts, which were rendered insubstantial so that they floated away from me like so many little birds, the barest of possibilities in place of the certainties that pin us down. So now one thought weighed on me heavily, horribly, through my long vigil, again and again, despite my conscious and unconscious denials:

Constancia, tell me, please, how many times have you died before?

8

(I sound like the survivor of some catastrophe. It’s not true. Constancia and I are alive, the heat is intense, soporific, I’m sixty-nine, Constancia sixty-one, and now we’re both shut up inside a shuttered room. She is better than I am at beating the heat of these dog days. Can you overcome the heat by showering your floor with wood shavings, like those Constancia has strewn around her bed and priedieu?)

I don’t know how much of what she says without looking at me, as if I weren’t present, during the long week of her recuperation, is a response to my question: —Constancia, tell me, how many times have you died…?

I don’t know, I repeat, because I don’t even know if she is talking to me. She says (not to me, she simply speaks) that she only gives voice to dreams and prayers. Of that I haven’t the slightest doubt. She will announce: Last night I dreamed that …; or sometimes she will even say: —I am dreaming that …; and sometimes she will unsettle me by announcing: —I am going to dream that …

She dreams that: She was a mannequin in a shop. Two wild young men, perhaps students, stole her from her window and took her to live in their studio. They threw dinner parties in her honor. Nobody knew if she, Constancia, was dead or alive, neither the jokesters nor the targets of their prank. The students fell in love with her, argued over her, but in the end destroyed her: or perhaps (the dream is ambiguous) abandoned her to save their masculine friendship. But she triumphed, Madre Ana, madre mía (delirious, she calls this name for the first time), and dominated those poor impure lovers, madre mía, slaves to male sexual vanity, which is the worst vanity of all because it excuses everything if you’re a man, but you get away with nothing if you’re a woman, nothing, madre, but she triumphed, she reappeared and looked at them as if they were the wooden dummies; she is alive; she is in her place: Blessed art thou amongst women … you hear me, Mother?

She dreams that: She has been born again, far away, a dark girl, ignorant, almost mute, silenced by centuries of servitude, misery, abuse, rape, violation, contempt, lack of charity, oh, madre mía, this dark girl in a faraway place has nothing, not even hope for all that you and I give unto the world: she has only the tracks of her tears like scars on her face: Full of grace, the Lord is with thee, He sees my bare legs exposed to the sun.

She dreams that: She is giving birth illicitly, knowing that a virgin birth can occur but once, without sin, not twice or three times, like a bitch’s, but she is giving birth again because they killed her son, they didn’t let the poor boy live out his life, and now she wants to have another child secretly, surrounded by women just as secretive as she is, and, thanks to the carpenters, the bricklayers, the architects, who have constructed a secret place, she can have her son there and this time protect him from death: And forgive us our trespasses … Now and at the hour of our death …

She dreams that: She is crossing a bridge during Holy Week and sees her reflection in the water … That the bullring is empty because the matador’s servants have swept away the blood of the bull, so the beast will not return to his refuge in the arena … That a bloody specter follows her from the depths of the tomb where he had been hiding, headless, he who watched and painted the others, she and her lover … That …

Constancia wakes with a cry, murmuring feverishly:

— And blessed is the fruit of thy womb …

She looked at me terrified, without recognizing me, asking me: Why did you abandon me? Why did you leave without me? Why do you make me follow you? Why…?

I comfort her, I take her head between my hands, I reassure her, I haven’t left you, Constancia, here I am, I’m not forcing you to do anything.

9

When Constancia, after two weeks of this, felt well enough to sit up in bed, propped up among her pillows, she slowly regained her sense of my presence.

I didn’t want to let go of her hand, which I had held in mine all the while, as much to express my devotion as to make sure of detecting any sign of what had frightened me previously.

Gradually, we began to discuss our by this time long-standing marriage and, without intending to, the events that might have threatened it. We recalled together, for example, the first time that one of us, then the other, and finally both of us together, realized we were no longer young. It started when she misinterpreted a suggestion of mine, purely professional, about her periods. Since we were not able to have children, I suggested that she could avoid — and, frankly, spare me — the monthly nuisance by having a simple operation. I knew an excellent doctor in Atlanta who would take care of it discreetly …

Constancia stopped me unexpectedly, without attempting to disguise her anger. So that’s how I saw her, as a menopausal old woman, sterile, like a … She screamed and ran to shut herself in her room, and stayed there, without food or water, not letting me enter, for more than twenty-four hours. Days later I made it up to her, in a sense, by giving up the cigarettes I had enjoyed as I worked, was lost in thought, or relaxed after dinner … I told Constancia I was doing it because of a slight heart murmur. Gradually I developed new habits, never asking her to follow my example. I stopped drinking, gave up tennis and squash, even though I knew those sports were good for my circulation: Constancia felt games should be left to the young and were dangerous for older people. Nor did I dare propose a program of jogging (besides, a number of my acquaintances had died with their Adidases on, in the course of those untimely trials).

In that way, I tried to show Constancia that old age is a series of renunciations of what we loved when we were young. I made myself into an example, but when I had done so, I realized that Constancia refused to follow my lead, and, in fact, she gave up nothing. She was always the same, or it might be better to say she still led the same life. She kept house, complaining about the lack of good servants in the United States but making no real effort to obtain domestic help; she saw no one but me, so she did not speak English (and had never wanted to learn it); she punched the buttons of the television set, without watching any particular program for very long; she went to Mass, said her prayers at night, and then delivered herself to a sexual pleasure that would have seemed almost indecent if it hadn’t been preceded by hours of prayer, Constancia kneeling before the votive candles and the image of the Macarena … She broke too many rules, only to convert the exceptions into routines. It annoyed me sometimes, made me ask myself: Why not get a servant and stop complaining? For me, though, staying out of domestic affairs left me time to read, and reading transforms everything, raising it to a higher level of existence, beyond stupid routines.

There’s an entire library here, don’t you realize? I said to her one day, a first-rate library, I assure you, really choice, there are things in it that would interest even an uneducated woman. Has it ever occurred to you to go into the library and read a book, Constancia? Do you believe I’ll always be satisfied with your daytime domesticity and your nighttime passion? When we are old, what are we going to talk about, you and I?

She screamed, ran to her room, again the cloister, and now, twenty or thirty years after my affront, here we are holding hands, both of us old now, and talking, not of books, but of our life together.

This unshakable faith in love, love, our love, might it not be just as much an affront as suggesting that she anticipate her menopause or make a little effort to fill the gaps in her vast Andalusian ignorance? I have said that she was not prepared to give up anything in exchange for my ever-increasing discipline, and in this disparity I saw a profound reflection of our religions: discipline (mine) in return for nothing (hers). And yet, without ever exchanging words on the subject, she acted as if I should thank her for her unreserved availability, her freely giving of herself. This exasperated my Calvinist genes, even though I knew that it was precisely this quality that made my woman so attractive to me. Her library was her prayer, or an exceptional song, or an unexpected danger.

I saw her from a distance one afternoon, seated on a bench facing the river in Emmett Park. I had been at the hotel buying a pack of cigarettes and was returning home along River Street. I saw her sitting on the bench facing the river and thought, what luck, I will surprise her. Then a young black man, about thirty years old, strong, vigorous, sat down beside Constancia. She looked at the river. He stared down at his tennis shoes with a fixed look. I went a little closer, clutching the cellophane of my cigarette pack. They didn’t see me. The black man spoke to my wife. She looked at the river. I said to myself in a low voice, hoping she might somehow hear me at that distance:

— Don’t show fear. By all you hold dear! If he senses you’re afraid, he might attack. Fear incites them.

Now the black turned to face Constancia, speaking to her insolently. I was going to run to her. Then I noticed that she was answering him, without looking at him. He grabbed my wife’s hand. She did not pull away. She didn’t show fear. Or familiarity. That’s good, I told myself, don’t take chances. I had decided to approach them at a normal speed, give Constancia a kiss on the cheek; we would go back to our house together, along Lincoln Street. Then another black man approached the bench, a younger man, and seemed to ask the other for something. The first man got angry, stood up, the two faced each other wordlessly, the only sound was their hissing, that’s what I particularly noticed, they were hissing like snakes, two black snakes glaring with fury, with blood in their eyes. Never have I seen so much hate concentrated in two human beings, they were trembling, both of them, not touching each other, just looking, the two bodies leaning close to each other.

Constancia got up from the bench and left by Factors Walk, on the other side from where I was standing. I decided to watch her go while the two black men faced each other with a wild tension, though, as far as I could see, no violent consequences. When Constancia disappeared from sight, I lost interest and returned home. She came in a few minutes later. I preferred not to mention the matter. I would end up asking for an explanation, and a marriage is weakened when a spouse has to make explanations. Who excuses accuses. The best course was to maintain a sympathetic silence.

Now, on this dying August afternoon, as the scissors of autumn slowly, mysteriously begin to snip through the heavy air of summer, and it’s not worth the trouble to recall that remote incident in the park, I can almost understand her feeling that love that has complete certainty is not true love; it’s too much like an insurance policy, or, worse yet, a certificate of good conduct. And indifference is the price you pay for it. So perhaps I am thankful for the moments of conflict that Constancia and I experienced in the past; they show that we had to test our marriage, we would not consign it to the indifference of perfect security. How could it be, when something of no importance to me — having a child — was a constant source of frustration and argument throughout the first twenty years of our life together, always raised by her: So you don’t care about having a child? No, I care about having you. Well, I do care about it, I need a child, I can’t have one, you’re a doctor, you know that perfectly well, I can’t, I can’t, and you don’t care at all, or else you care so much that you feign this horrid indifference that hurts me so much, Whitby, that hurts me so …

10

Conscious of the most obvious biological signs, I resigned myself to not having children. Her suffering was clear, but she refused to have any tests done. I urged her to see a doctor to have the problem diagnosed. We couldn’t go on blaming each other. But her determination never to see a doctor was stronger than her frustration, pain, and unhappiness. That’s a perfect example of the hermeticism of our marriage, which couldn’t avoid what might be called intramural problems, even though all outside contacts — friendships, doctors, shopping, social calls, trips — were zealously avoided. On the other hand, we were capable of exploring, usually with good humor, such other possibilities as adoption (but the child would not be of our blood, Whitby, it has to be our blood) or artificial insemination of a surrogate mother (But what if she falls in love with the child and refuses to give it up to us? — We’ll choose a poor woman, so if there’s a dispute the court will award the child to us, since we can assure it a good future …).

— Children don’t need money to have a good future.

— Constancia, you’re your own worst enemy, you’re the devil’s advocate. You think like a gypsy! I laugh then.

— The Virgin was Blessed, she didn’t have to fornicate to bear a child, the Holy Spirit passed through her sex like light through a crystal.

I kissed one of her ears and asked, laughing, if she would like that better than the way we did it. No, she answered, without hesitation, wrapping her arms around my neck and caressing it with her long fingers, proportionally the longest part of her body.

— Don’t think about having children (typically, I resorted to a joke, just the sort that Mr. Plotnikov accused me of); think, rather, that Herod was probably right when he ordered all the male children of Israel to be killed.

At that she tore away from my embrace, screamed, ran to shut herself in her room to fast for an entire day, and then came out, contrite, but I am not inclined to cede my authority, much less my literary authority.

— All right. Where should I start to read your famous library?

— You can begin at the beginning, which is the Bible.

— Never. Only Protestants read that.

— And Catholics?

— Christ, we know it all! We know all about the Holy Virgin, and you, you know nothing about her.

— Very well, Constancia — I laughed then — very well said, my love. You see what heretics we are.

— Come on, Whitby, next thing you’ll have me read the dictionary from A to Z, or something just as stupid.

— So what would you like to read?

— Maybe the stories of all the fallen women.

— You would never finish. And you would have to begin, again, with Eve.

— Then I want to read everything about a fallen child, a sorrowful boy.

That’s how she started reading Kafka, and she threw herself into it, reading the books again and again, moving from biography to fiction and discovering, finally, that he had no better biography than his fiction, and so accepting Kafka on his own terms, as a man with no life other than literature. She said, half in jest (I think), that she would have liked her son to be like him, like that thin, sickly boy with the ears of a bat, who … who could have gone to work for the Spanish national railways.

— A child, please, even one who would be sad …

— Let’s flee to Egypt, Constancia, so Herod can’t kill him.

Then she ran to shut herself in her room and this August afternoon, taking her hand, I’m finally reconciled to this questioning: had Constancia died each time she fled from me and shut herself up for a full day in her bedroom, before coming out, renewed, radiant, to make up, play, and improve our love that would have died of pure perfection, of pure distance, of pure suspicion, of pure incomprehension (—An old woman. — Ignorant. — Sterile) if not for those incidents? Perhaps our arguments were more than just domestic tiffs; they were more like personal sacrifices made by my delicious Spanish woman on the altar of our domestic, solitary love in a ghostly city — the most ghostly — of the American South. Did Constancia die for me and did our love, so enduring, require nothing, here and now, but that death without end?

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:

— 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.

The room on the other side of the foyer was the reception room and it was decorated in a conspicuously Spanish style. There was a piano with a lace shawl tossed over it. The furniture was Moorish and the painting, in the style of Romero de Torres, showed bullfighters and gypsies, gold flowers and red satin capes. On the shawl were a group of photographs in silver frames. I didn’t recognize their subjects; all the photos, I realized as I looked at them, were from the period before the Spanish Civil War. There were men in the uniforms of the Imperial Russian Army, and others in uniforms of the Moroccan infantry. The women, all dressed in white, belonged to a generation caught between the virtues of the past century and the unavoidable (and anticipated) sins of the new one; they resisted giving up their bustles, cameos, and elaborate hairstyles, just as Monsieur Plotnikov clung to his old-fashioned clothing.

The dancers were the exception: there were two or three portraits of a spectacularly beautiful woman, all long legs, narrow waist, filmy clothing, smooth arms, swan’s neck, bright makeup, dark gemstones in equally black hair cut short: her body arched passionately and gracefully toward the ground, poised to give life or to lose it: who knows. I couldn’t identify Mr. Plotnikov in these photos; who knows, who knows. There were no photos of the man acting such and such a role. I understood the reason. He wanted a complete life, not a fragmentary one, he had told me. History wanted to divide it; he resisted. There would be no photo of him in Uncle Vanya or The Seagull (was he blessed with the self-critical humor necessary to play Konstantin Treplev?).

I heard an invisible wingbeat in the salon, as my attention was drawn to a photo: Mr. Plotnikov standing, in almost the same pose as the ballerina, but this time he was the one leaning — gray hair, his youth gone — over Constancia, dressed in white, my wife at fifteen or sixteen, radiant, holding a child in her lap, a child whose features were difficult to make out, blurry, as if he had moved just as the photo was being taken — but also blurry, I suspected, because of his unformed youth: his age was impossible to determine, but he seemed to be about a year or fifteen months old.

The three of them, I thought to myself, all three of them, I said over and over again, as I ran upstairs, just as Constancia does when she is mad at me.

I say ran. It’s not true. The deeper I penetrated into Monsieur Plotnikov’s nineteenth-century house, the more completely I was gripped by torpor, an unaccustomed sluggishness that possessed and divided my body and soul. My body seemed to go in one direction and my soul in the other, a strange mood rose within me as I climbed the stairs, as if the vapors given off by the two rooms, the Russian dining room and the Spanish living room, had united to create a thin but suffocating atmosphere, heightened by the constant noise, a sound of wings beating against the roof of the house. I climbed to a height greater than the distance from one floor to the other, I was aware that I was entering another region, another geographic zone, unexpectedly cool, with the air so thin that I was filled with a false euphoria, though I knew that this signaled the advent of something horrible.

13

I needed a rest. I informed my office and the hospital that I would be taking a long vacation. Nobody wanted to point out to me that I could have retired years ago; but I knew what they were thinking: a man like me, so reserved and unsociable, married to a woman no more outgoing, needed his work to feel alive. Retiring is almost redundant for a man like me. Besides, I’m still an excellent surgeon.

Those mornings, I examined myself in the mirror as I shaved, something that I had not done before; I had always shaved mechanically, without really looking at myself. Now I seemed to be seeing myself for the first time with a clarity brought about by my feeling of abandonment, a feeling that might be Constancia’s way of punishing me for having dared to violate the secret of her friend, Mr. Plotnikov, her friend before I knew her, if the photo in the Spanish room could be believed.

I looked at the old man in the mirror who was finally seeing himself as others saw him. The old man was me.

How often we refuse to recognize the advent of old age, putting off what is not only inevitable but also obvious; with how many lies we reject what others can see perfectly well: these eyelids permanently sagging, the dry, bloodshot eyes, the thinning, graying hair that no longer can even feign a youthful virile balding, the involuntary rictus of disgust with oneself; what has become of me, my neck was never flabby, my cheeks were not covered with a web of veins, my nose didn’t used to hang this way. Was I young once?

Was I once Dr. Whitby Hull, native of Atlanta, Georgia, student of medicine at Emory, soldier in the invasion of Sicily and the Italian boot, student at the University of Seville, on the G.I. Bill, husband of a Spanish woman, resident of Savannah on the shores of the Atlantic after my return, surgeon, man of letters, passionate man, secretive man, guilty man? Old man. A man surrounded by mysteries, things he can’t understand, trying to see across the ocean to the other shore through a bathroom mirror that repeats its accusation: Old man; trying to look past the steam on the glass to the other side of the Atlantic, a razor in my hand.

Was I once a young Southern doctor doing postgraduate work in Seville? A young man, twenty-eight, with black hair, a strong jaw, tanned and toughened by the campaign in Italy, but revealing his background (his weakness, perhaps) by his baggy blue pinstripe seersucker suit, its pockets stretched out of shape by what I imagined a good American took to Europe in the postwar years: sweets, chocolates, cigarettes. I ended up eating them or smoking them myself. I never even managed to offer them to the Andalusians; the look on their faces stopped me.

As I shaved in front of my mirror, looking at an old face but picturing it young, I felt that I wanted to go back there. The key, if not to the mystery, at least to my life with Constancia, had to be there, in her native country, in the period after the war. A Southerner, a reader of Washington Irving and the Tales of the Alhambra, I decided to go to Andalusia. That’s where I met Constancia, when she was twenty and I was twenty-nine or thirty. That’s where we fell in love. What did she have when I met her? Nothing. She served tables in a café. She had no family. They had all died in the war, the wars. She lived alone. She tended her room. She went to Mass every day. Was it chance that I met her in the middle of the plaza of El Salvador, sitting with her face to the sun, sunning herself, legs stretched out in front of her on the hot paving stones — not looking up at me. Why did I feel so attracted to this unusual creature? Was she a symbol of Andalusian youth, this woman sitting in the street, facing the sun with her eyes shut, her open palms pressed against the hot ground of summer, inviting me with her closed eyes to sit beside her?

She lived alone. She tended her room. She went often to Mass. Nobody knew how to make love like her. She waited tables in a neighborhood café in Santa Cruz. But I already said that. She was my Andalusian Galatea, I was going to shape her; excitedly, I felt myself the agent of civilization, the bearer of spiritual values, which did not conflict with prosperity, with the practical dimension of things. I was so sure of myself, of my country, my tradition, my language, and therefore so sure I could transform this virtually unlettered girl, who spoke no English: I decided — with a nod to the ghost of Henry James — that Pygmalion would be an American for a change, bringing to life the European Galatea, plucked from the banks of the Guadalquivir in the oldest land of Europe: Andalusia, the Tartessus of the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Andalusia was pure because it was impure: a land conquered, ravaged. We returned together and I set up my practice in Atlanta and my house in Savannah. The rest you know.

Only now, flying first-class from Atlanta to Madrid, surrounded by the aseptic terror of airplanes, the universal scent of petrified air and inflammable plastic and food heated in a microwave oven, did I hazard a look down from my height of thirty thousand feet, first at the fleeting earth, then quickly at the eternal sea, and try to think, with some semblance of reason, about a scene that assailed me with memory’s peculiar lucidity, the scene that was waiting for me when I reached Monsieur Plotnikov’s second floor. A narrow window faced the street. The other walls were covered with a pale yellow paper, a thin silver thread running through it; light from the window revealed a single door (I pressed my feverish face against the cool window of the airplane): a single window at the end of the hall. I said thank you: they’d brought me a Bloody Mary I didn’t ask for; I said thank you stupidly, removing my cheek from the window; I didn’t have to choose, like saying I didn’t have to suffer.

There was a single door, with the light shining on it (I looked at the pilots’ door, which opened and closed incessantly, it wouldn’t shut properly, it opened and closed over an infinite space), and I walked toward it. Suddenly I caught a glimpse (I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what the pilots see) of the strangeness of the life that Constancia and I had led together for forty years, an entirely normal life, completely predictable (as normal as going to the airport in Atlanta and boarding a jumbo jet to Madrid). The strangeness was precisely that, the normality of my practice and my operations, my skill with surgical instruments, and in compensation for my hours of work, the time I spent reading at home or, before I gave it up, playing tennis and squash with men I didn’t know, who accepted me because I am what I appear to be.

I don’t know whether it was stranger to be flying over the Atlantic on my way to Madrid, as if released from a long spell, or to be a Southern doctor of solitary habits, to have a wife who never goes anywhere with me, who, as you know, doesn’t speak English, who is very Spanish, very Catholic, very reclusive — we don’t have children, we don’t see neighbors — but who gives herself to me completely and gratifies my vanity perfectly, a vanity not just male but American (I admitted it then, flying on the wings of our domestic technology) — taking care of a helpless person — and Southern (I told myself with the silent, hermetic eloquence distilled from a mixture of vodka and tomato juice) — having a household slave. (And the murmur from the wings of the plane resembles the murmur of the invisible wings in Plotnikov’s funereal home.)

All these strange things were the regular features of my life, they didn’t even begin to seem strange until that moment, when I was beginning to connect my presence in the cabin of a jet with the remembrance of my equally present presence on the landing of my neighbor’s stairs this morning, slowly approaching the only door on the second floor of the house on Wright Square and pulling it open, having left my slave Constancia at home, my Andalusian slave, in exchange for … what?

In exchange for my life, because without Constancia I was dead.

14

I open the door in the silence.

I open the door to the silence.

It is so absolute a silence that, as I open the door, all the sound in the world seems suspended.

The wings cease beating.

Now there is no noise: nor will there be ever again, the gray emptiness seems to tell me — the luminously gray emptiness that receives me.

The floor of the bedroom is dirt. Black earth, silt, river mud.

In the center of the earthen floor stands a coffin, resting on a circle of red earth.

I know that it is a coffin because it is shaped like one, and is large enough to hold a human body, but its baroque construction reveals a rare level of woodworking skill; the box of worked wood is fashioned to pick up and reflect the pearly light of this region — every surface is cut, angled, opposed to another surface, the infinite surfaces shattering light as if to carry it to some mysterious dimension, the edge of the light of death itself, I don’t know, a supreme point that contains and rejects everything, an awesome place, one that I can’t begin to describe even today, flying thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic.

But one thing is recognizable, one thing is unmistakable: on the lid of the coffin is sculpted the same image one sees in the royal necropolises and cathedrals of Spain, the reclining figure of a woman, with the loveliest, the largest eyes, the saddest expression, her hands crossed over her breasts; she is dressed in cowl and mantle: popular iconography makes me see this as blue and white, but here all is worked wood and whitewashed walls, black earth and red earth. There are no icons; no full-skirted Virgins, or crucifixes, nothing: only my feet covered with red earth, which I stare at stupidly.

I come to. I try to raise the lid of the coffin. I can’t do it. I run my avid fingers over the decorations covering that horrible monument, feeling, without wanting to, the woman’s feet, her shoulders, her icy features, the sides of the coffin, the wood carved in facets that break up the very light, and each facet contain a single name, carved in the wood, a Russian name, and I have heard all the names before, in the litany Mr. Plotnikov recited as he followed the red earth paths of the cemetery, names that I am finally beginning to place, names of dead men, executed, driven to suicide, imprisoned, silenced, in the name of what? For what? A powerful sense of hopelessness overwhelms me as I read the names carved on that coffin: MANDELSTAM ESENIN MAYAKOVSKY KHLEBNIKOV BULGAKOV EISENSTEIN MEYERHOLD BLOK MALEVICH TATLIN RODCHENKO BIELY BABEL, in exile, surviving, dead or alive, I don’t know: I only know that this condition of suffering, which seems so normal, such an essential part of life, as normal as going to the cemetery to read the names of our forebears, becomes upsetting when we see it on the marble wall of the Vietnam war memorial or at the entrance to Auschwitz; but this thought is driven from me by the discovery of a small lock, a tiny hole waiting for the key to open the lid of the coffin in the house of Mr. Plotnikov: in the keyhole’s shape I recognize the echo of a form I have seen every day of my life, at least of my life with Constancia, Constancia and her sick dream: her hairpins shaped like little keys, the keys I put in the pocket of my jacket the night Constancia died in my arms, that I pulled out of her hair to keep them from getting lost when she fell, when I carried her to her bed, her hair streaming behind her.

The hairpin shaped like a key fits perfectly in the lock. There is a creaking sound. The lid, with its sculpted figure of a reclining woman, carved in silver, shifts slightly. I get to my feet. I raise the lid. Monsieur Plotnikov, for once dressed completely in white, lies inside the wooden tomb. He holds the skeleton of a child no more than two years old.

I quickly shut the lid and leave the place, feeling the full weight of my sixty-nine years in my knees, my shoulders, the tips of my shoes reddened by another earth, not mine, not ours; I want to be back at Constancia’s bedside, even though I know, in the saddest, the most secret part of my heart, that Constancia, my beloved Constancia, my companion, my own sensual, pious Spaniard, my wife, will not be there when I return. Monsieur Plotnikov’s warning was like a painful throbbing in my head.

— Gospodin Hull, you will only come to visit me the day of your own death, to let me know, as I have done today on mine. That is my condition. Remember, our well-being depends on it.

Without Constancia, I was dead.

15

Two, then three days passed and she still hadn’t returned home. I didn’t want to go back to Mr. Plotnikov’s house. I was afraid of finding Constancia in the arms of the old Russian, holding the skeleton of the boy (or girl): it was an image I couldn’t bear: another mystery, not a rational solution to one. I didn’t want another mystery. I knew that any explanation would only be converted, in its turn, into an enigma. Like the obsessive names of the Russian artists of Plotnikov’s generation. The enigma reveals another enigma. In this, art and death resemble each other.

I looked at myself in the mirror: I accused myself: I had abandoned Constancia; I had visited Mr. Plotnikov — violated his tomb, defied his prophecy, since it was not the day he had told me to visit him, the day of my own death. I was still alive, despite Constancia’s disappearance, still able to study my lathered face in the bathroom mirror. I–I wrote my name on the mirror with shaving cream, Whitby Hull—am not dead; neither the death of my old neighbor nor my forbidden visit to his singular tomb nor the flight of Constancia had killed me. So what would my punishment be? When, where would it strike? Now I watched the blacks of Savannah from my window; I had never been particularly conscious of them before. There they were, the visible manifestation of my sins; they were not where they should have been, on the other side of the ocean, on another continent, in their pagan land, and the fault was mine. I searched in vain for the faces of the two blacks who had approached Constancia in the park that day, who spoke to her, touched her, seemed to fight over her. I searched in vain for the face of my youth in the bathroom mirror or in the scratched window of the airplane.

I am returning as an old man to the place I visited as a youth; perhaps I should have waited, let things run their course, rather than trying to force a solution. I shrug off the question. Whatever I find, it can hardly be more peculiar than the way I have lived my life, reducing all my odd, private, socially unacceptable habits to normality, without even realizing it.

I shrug again. Americans can’t bear a mystery, not even someone else’s, much less one’s own; we need to do something — inactivity kills us — and what I was doing was to visit the city archives of Seville, to find out about Constancia, to verify what I already knew: our marriage record is on file there, I carry a copy of it with me, and I know it by heart: on one side there is information about me — my date of birth, the names of my parents, my profession, my place of residence — and on the other side, information about Constancia Bautista, a single woman, about twenty, parents unknown, thought to be a native of Seville.

But now I went to the clerk’s office in Seville to look at the original on file, and when the record book was set down in front of me, I made a discovery: my half of the form was the same as my copy, but Constancia’s was not.

I found that while my record was still there, the record of the woman I had undoubtedly married on August 15, 1946, had disappeared. Now my name, my birthdate, my genealogy appeared alone on the form, orphaned, just as Constancia had always been orphaned. Facing my completed column was a blank one.

I was gripped by an inner despair that didn’t show in my motor abilities or my exterior demeanor — it was a private feeling of dismay that could be remedied only through more action; my way of reacting complementing Constancia’s, my constancy complementing hers (I couldn’t help smiling a little — I had started to say theirs, instead of hers; without intending to, I thought of them, the three of them). I opposed action to inaction and it made me feel both righteous and guilty, righteous for accomplishing something, guilty for not leaving things in peace. If the marriage certificate I had carried with me for forty years was false and the original record in the clerk’s office of Seville was the true record, who had made the criminal alteration? Again, who else could it have been, it must have been her — or, indeed, them. Against whom were my enemies conspiring? For God’s sake, why was I being played with this way? My confusion kept me from seeing the facts: nobody had changed the record; the original on file in the clerk’s office in Seville was blank; my copy of Constancia’s record had simply been filled in. I slammed the register shut and thanked the clerk, who had helped me without noticing a thing.

I’m not a man who can simply accept mystery. Everything must have an explanation, says the scientist in me; everything must have an inspiration, says the frustrated humanist that I am. My only consolation is that I believe the two attitudes complement rather than exclude each other. Seville is a city of archives. I resolved to follow the faintest lead, like a bloodhound, to examine every scrap of paper (like a bloodhound; yet I was uneasy, I had a constant sensation that the air was stirring over my head, as if a bird of prey were hovering there).

Ah, the world was in such turmoil, the young Sevillian archivist was telling me, we’re just now beginning to put together the records — there were so many people killed, he sighed, guiding me through the maze of boxes covered with peeling labels, in the pale light of the high church windows, all I know is that so many were bombed, murdered. Come back tomorrow.

I was in a hurry. It was the same old story, and I had already spent too much time in Seville. There’s an old saying: See Naples and die. I would change it to Seville, but with this variation: See Seville and never escape from it. There was something urging me on, telling me to find out whatever I could, until I had learned what I wanted to know. The young archivist — who was very proud of his job, and claimed to be eager to help a visitor, a foreigner, an American — showed me some papers that had been sealed, and told me I needed to talk to a certain solicitor, who would have to provide the authorization to open them. I made no attempt to hide my irritation at this bureaucratic complication. The clerk turned off the charm and adopted an official tone, an extremely cool manner. — I have already gone way out of my way for you. Go see the lawyer tomorrow. The matter is entirely in his hands.

Which I did. The lawyer raised some trivial objections and said the same things as the young clerk: —It’s so long ago! But I believe, Dr. Hull, that the best way to heal the wound is to talk about how it was made. Not everyone agrees with me: some people think that if we don’t mention the horror, it will not come back to haunt us.

I looked across at him, sitting in his office with its gray walls and its high ceiling crisscrossed by the sort of light you see in a convent or an old courtroom, likewise high and gray; he had one of those mustaches that only the Spanish know how to cultivate: two thin grayish lines that met precisely above his upper lip, like two trains approaching each other head-on. I thought of Constancia and her fantastic story: the trains arrive on time, but no one is aboard. The official had a dog lying at his feet, a huge mastiff, pure gray, which he kept reaching out to, rubbing the back of its head or offering it something to eat — I couldn’t tell what — from his half-open hand.

The official looked at me sadly, an hidalgo more interested in his own honor than in someone else’s. At least, he was good enough to be specific:

— The people you are interested in, Dr. Hull, came to Spain from Russia in 1929, to escape the political situation there, and then tried to get out of Spain in 1939, to go to America, to flee from our war. Unfortunately, they were detained at the port of Cádiz; Nationalist forces took one look at their Russian passports and decided they had certain political sympathies. The three people — the man, his wife, and the sixteen-month-old child — were murdered in the street by the forces I just mentioned. It was one of the ironies of war.

— They were killed — I repeated stupidly.

— Yes. Forty-nine years ago — said the official, aware that we were both saying the obvious. He shook his head — he seemed to be an intelligent man — and added: —It makes me think of my own family, Dr. Hull. There was no justice to it, the innocent were struck down, the guilty spared.

— Do you at least know where they were buried?

The lawyer shook his head. The war was so terrible; when you think that in Badajoz alone, two thousand innocent people were killed, herded into the bullring and executed. I saw so many senseless murders, Dr. Hull, the gunshot wound between the eyes, that was the signature of certain groups. Do you know the story of the death of Walter Benjamin, the German writer? He was stuck at the French border and his death there was a mistake caused by bureaucratic apathy and terror. That is the most tragic thing of all, Dr. Hull, the number of lives cut short accidentally, by errors, by …

He stopped short; he didn’t want to be found guilty of indulging in personal feelings or personal anecdotes.

— The only reason we know what happened to the couple and their child is that the party that won kept their identity cards. That’s why I’m able to give you any information. You must see the irony in their story, I repeat. Just imagine: the family you are interested in had arranged to have their belongings, their trunks and furniture, shipped to America. And all those things made the journey — they left this ancient land of Andalusia, Doctor, and traveled to the new land of America. Here are the documents. Their belongings arrived, but without their owners. I am truly sorry to have to tell you this, it’s such a sad story … and such an old one.

— It doesn’t matter — I said. — I’m grateful to you. You’ve been a big help.

He waved away my thanks and stood up. — Dr. Hull, so many people tried to get out in time, to escape, to go to America … Some made it, others didn’t … He shrugged. — Too bad your friends did not make it. I’m sincerely sorry.

He was shivering, as if he felt cold, and I noticed that the purebred dog shivered along with its master.

— Fortunately, times have changed, and we are at your service.

— Where was the furniture shipped to? I broke in to ask. — Pardon me? — The family’s furniture. Where do the documents say that…? — The port of Savannah, Doctor.

16

I have to know. I cannot rest. I scrutinize all the signs. I wander the streets of Seville. I go back to all the places we had been together. The café where she worked, waiting tables. The plaza where I first met her, sitting on the pavement, sunning herself, her bare legs stretched out in front of her. The house in the Calle de Pajaritos where she had a room and where we made love for the first time. The Church of San Salvador, where she went so often. I did not meet her again, as I secretly hoped I would. There was new life now in all those places. In the patio of Constancia’s house an older woman was walking among the orange trees, dressed in an old-fashioned wedding gown. She did not turn to look at me. In the church Constancia went to, another woman discovered a sparrow’s nest in a dark corner and cried out in surprise. And in the café where Constancia used to work, a barefoot gypsy began to dance, they insulted her, she insisted she had a right to dance, they told her to leave, and the young woman walked past me, grazing against me, giving me a sad look, and all the while the waiters dressed in coarse white shirts and black bow ties that made them look like pigeons were throwing her out of the café, she kept screaming at them in her peculiar accent: they had no right to persecute her, they ought to let her dance a little more, they should show compassion, and she said it again in her shrill, plaintive voice, they should show some compassion, compassion, just show a little …

I sat down to drink a cup of coffee that autumnal afternoon at the busy corner of Gallegos and Jovellanos, where it meets the bustle of the Calle de Sierpes. She ran into me there; she didn’t recognize me. How could she recognize me in the gray-haired old man who bore no resemblance to that American boy, his pockets stuffed with cigarettes and caramels? I still wore the American summer uniform, a lightweight, absorbent seersucker suit with thin blue stripes on a pale blue background, but now the pockets were empty. I would like to emulate the elegance of the Spanish official with his dog, his coolness, his precise mustache, but I am hot, I shave every morning, and I keep no pets; she never wanted animals in the house. I am sixty-nine years old and my head is full of questions that have no answers, that are nothing but loose ends. If Plotnikov died in 1939, how could he know that his mentor, Meyerhold, was killed in 1940 while in solitary confinement in a Moscow prison? How old was Constancia when she married him, if that is what happened, and when she had his son, if the skeleton that I saw was their child and that child was the one whose picture was on the piano with the mantilla? Who was Constancia, daughter, mother, wife, refugee? I had to add, child-mother, child-wife, child-fugitive? The girl I met at twenty aged normally while we lived together. Perhaps before she met me her youth had a different rhythm; perhaps I gave her what we call “normality”; perhaps now she had lost it again, returned to that other temporal rhythm that I knew nothing about. I don’t know. The pockets of my summer suit are empty, my eyebrows are white, at six in the afternoon my beard is full of gray bristles.

17

I returned to the United States weighed down by more than sadness, by an ever-growing pain. The Spanish lawyer’s reference to Walter Benjamin had led me to the Vértice bookstore in Seville, where I bought a volume of his essays. The illustration on the frontispiece excited my interest: a reproduction of Angelus Novus, a painting by Paul Klee. Now, as the plane flew over the Atlantic, I read Walter Benjamin’s description of the angel in Klee’s painting, and I was filled with emotion, with wonder.

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

I read those lines in a Jumbo 747 flying from Madrid to Atlanta and I tried to imagine the death of the man who wrote them. On September 26, 1940, a wretched group arrived at the border post of Port Bou, the entrance to Spain from a France that had fallen to the Nazis. The group consisted of people seeking asylum. Among them was a nearsighted man with the wild hair and mustache of a Groucho Marx. He had escaped on foot, over the mountains and through vineyards planted in red earth. And all through that journey the nearsighted man didn’t let go of the black suitcase that held his final manuscripts. He kept one hand free to hold on to the thick, metal-framed glasses that rode on his long, thin nose. The refugees presented their documents in Port Bou to Franco’s chief of police, who rejected them: Spain did not admit refugees of unknown nationality. He told them: —Go back where you came from. If you don’t leave by tomorrow, we’ll hand you over to the German authorities.

The man with the glasses, blinded more by his distress than by the heat, clung to his black suitcase and looked down at his shoes, which were covered with red dirt. His manuscripts mustn’t fall into the hands of the Gestapo. He had three companions, three women who stood near him and wept in despair, Jews (like him), part of a group that had fled from Germany, from a Central Europe devoured by indifference and denial and the utopias of the powerful. As he gazed toward the Mediterranean, Walter Benjamin thought of the Atlantic, which he had planned to cross to America; perhaps the Mediterranean became for him a symbol of a past reduced to ruins that can never be restored to their original state. The first homeland, the heart that cradled the dawn. He wanted to hurl himself toward the Atlantic that I, the American Whitby Hull, am now crossing on wings that are frozen but free, reminding me of the immobile wings of the Angel Benjamin, who saw history accumulate its ruins and was still able to realize his final vision: the ruin reveals the truth because it is what endures; the ruin is history’s permanence.

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.

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.

19

Every night, the lights of Mr. Plotnikov’s house come on. I stubbornly ignore them. The brightness comes in my windows and reflects off the gilded spines of my books. I try to close my eyes. But the summons is perpetual: they call to me. Later the lights go out.

And I will go to rejoin Constancia only on the day of my own death. The old actor warned me: Come to visit me, Gospodin Hull, on the day of your death. We are waiting. Our well-being depends on it. Never forget!

Now I devote myself to the family that asked me for asylum, I reach out to them and hold them tight, don’t worry, stay here, we will do woodworking together, it’s something for an old man to do, a retired surgeon, I have some skill with my hands. Stay here, but take these pencils, some paper, pens; if they come for you, remember that these things cannot be confiscated, so you can communicate with me if they put you in jail, so you can demand legal aid; pencils, paper, pens: carry them with you always. What else can you do? Ceramics? Ah, the soil here is good for that, we’ll buy a potter’s wheel, you can teach me, we’ll make plates, vases, flowerpots (for lemon balm, verbena …), my hands will not be idle, pottery makes use of the senses, my hands need to feel, don’t worry, stay here, don’t go yet, hold on to me, there are still so many things we have to do.

Trinity College

Cambridge

July 6, 1987