Free Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins by Carlos Fuentes Page B

his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
    I read those lines in a Jumbo 747 flying from Madrid to Atlanta and I tried to imagine the death of the man who wrote them. On September 26, 1940, a wretched group arrived at the border post of Port Bou, the entrance to Spain from a France that had fallen to the Nazis. The group consisted of people seeking asylum. Among them was a nearsighted man with the wild hair and mustache of a Groucho Marx. He had escaped on foot, over the mountains and through vineyards planted in red earth. And all through that journey the nearsighted man didn’t let go of the black suitcase that held his final manuscripts. He kept one hand free to hold on to the thick, metal-framed glasses that rode on his long, thin nose. The refugees presented their documents in Port Bou to Franco’s chief of police, who rejected them: Spain did not admit refugees of unknown nationality. He told them: —Go back where you came from. If you don’t leave by tomorrow, we’ll hand you over to the German authorities.
    The man with the glasses, blinded more by his distress than by the heat, clung to his black suitcase and looked down at his shoes, which were covered with red dirt. His manuscripts mustn’t fall into the hands of the Gestapo. He had three companions, three women who stood near him and wept in despair, Jews (like him), part of a group that had fled from Germany, from a Central Europe devoured by indifference and denial and the utopias of the powerful. As he gazed toward the Mediterranean, Walter Benjamin thought of the Atlantic, which he had planned to cross to America; perhaps the Mediterranean became for him a symbol of a past reduced to ruins that can never be restored to their original state. The first homeland, the heart that cradled the dawn. He wanted to hurl himself toward the Atlantic that I, the American Whitby Hull, am now crossing on wings that are frozen but free, reminding me of the immobile wings of the Angel Benjamin, who saw history accumulate its ruins and was still able to realize his final vision: the ruin reveals the truth because it is what endures; the ruin is history’s permanence.
    Flying back over the Atlantic, I stop trying so hard to reconstruct chronologies, to tie up all the loose ends and solve all the mysteries. Have I learned nothing, then? We are surrounded by enigmas, and what little we understand rationally is merely the exception in an enigmatic world. Reason astonishes us; and to be astonished—to marvel —is like floating in the vast sea surrounding the island of logic—so I tell myself, sitting thirty thousand feet in the air. I remember Vivien Leigh in Anna Karenina; I remember the stage setting for Piscator’s The Last Emperor in Berlin, which my neighbor, the actor, described to me, and I understand why art is the most precise (and precious) symbol of life. Art presents an enigma, but the resolution of the enigma is another enigma.
    I’ll go further. What has been taking place in the sea surrounding my rational island is the rule, not the exception: people causing other people to suffer. Happiness and success are as rare as logic; the most basic human experience is defeat and despair. We Americans cannot remain untouched by that fact. We cannot. The destiny of Walter Benjamin or of Vsevelod Meyerhold is not exceptional. Mine—protected, reasonably happy—and that of my neighbors, is.
    Perhaps that is why they joined me. I let a loud laugh escape, breaking a silence greater than the sound from the wings of the new technological angel: they saw me so well, so healthy, that they attached themselves to me so as to go on living forty-one years after their deaths, the dead child cared for by the father, who drew life from the