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.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.15Two, 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
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