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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Constancia
La Desdichada
The Prisoner of Las Lomas
Viva Mi Fama
Reasonable People
Books by Carlos Fuentes
Copyright
Constancia
Seal me with your eyes.
Take me wherever you are …
Shield me with your eyes.
Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow …
Take me as a toy, a brick from the house
So that our children will remember to return.
Mahmud Darwish, cited by Edward Said in “Reflections on Exile”
For Sadri and Kate, the refuge of friendship
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 ma
n? 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 th
an 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.
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Page 1