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.