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.