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 walclass="underline" 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 perpetuaclass="underline" 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
La Desdichada
To the friends of the Sabbath table,
Max Aub, Joaquín Diez-Canedo, Jaime García Terrés,
Bernardo Giner de los Ríos, Jorge González Durán,
Hugo Latorre Cabal, José Luis Martínez, Abel Quezada,
and, above all, to José Alvarado,
who made me understand this story
Toño
… In those years we studied at the National Preparatory School, where Orozco and Rivera had painted their frescoes, and we went to a Chinese café on the corner of San Ildefonso and República Argentina, we dipped sweet rolls in café au lait and discussed the books that we bought in the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore when we had the money or in the used bookstores on República de Cuba when we didn’t: we wanted to be writers, they wanted us to be lawyers and politicians; we were just a couple of self-taught guys who had been delivered onto the imagination of a city that, high though it was, gave you the secret sensation of being buried, even though it was then still the color of marble and burnt-out volcano and was filled with the ringing of silver bells and smelled of pineapple and coriander, and the air was so …
Bernardo
Today I saw La Desdichada for the first time. Toño and I have taken a small apartment together, the local equivalent of the garret in Parisian bohemia, in the Calle de Tacuba near the San Ildefonso school. The good thing is, it’s a commercial street. We didn’t like going out to shop, but two single students have to take care of themselves without letting on that they could use a mother figure. So we alternated domestic duties. We were from the provinces and we had no women — mothers, sisters, girlfriends, nurses — to take care of us. Not even a maid.
Tacuba was an elegant street during the viceroyalty. Today the most hideous commercialism has taken hold of it. I come from Guadalajara, a city still unspoiled, so I notice it. Toño is from industrialized Monterrey, and that makes everything here seem romantically beautiful and pure to him, even though there isn’t a ground floor on this street that hasn’t been taken over by a furniture shop, a mortuary, or a tailor’s. You have to look higher up — I say to Toño, his introspective eyes shielded by eyebrows thick as beetles — to visualize the nobility of this street, its serene proportions, its façades of soft red stone, its escutcheons of white stone inscribed with the names of vanished families, its niches acting as a refuge for saints and pigeons. Toño smiled and called me a romantic, for expecting beauty, even goodness, to descend from spiritual heights. I’m a secular Christian who has substituted Art with a capital A for god with a lowercase g. Toño said that poetry is to be found in the shoe-store windows. I looked at him reproachfully. Who in those days hadn’t read Neruda and repeated his credo of the poetry of the immediate, the streets of the city, the specters in the windows? I prefer to look up at the ironwork balconies and their peeling shutters.
The window I was distractedly looking at closed suddenly, and when I lowered my eyes they were reflected in a store window. My eyes, like a body apart from me — my Lazarus, my drudge — dove into the water of the glass and, swimming there, discovered what the window hid: what it displayed. It was a woman in a bridal gown. But whereas other mannequins in this street — which Toño and I walked through every day, hardly noticing it, accustomed by now to the plurally ugly and the singularly lovely of our city — were made forgettable by their struggle to be fashionably up-to-date, this woman caught my eye because her dress was old-fashioned, buttoned clear to the throat.