Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Read Free Page B

man of letters, part of an inheritance that does not flourish in the United States and is kept alive mainly in the South, the land of William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, and its Dulcineas with a pen, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Shirley Ann Grau. I often think that even self-exiled Southerners—I’m talking about diabolically self-destructive gnomes like Truman Capote as well as painfully creative giants like William Styron—are like the carriers of a literary aristocracy that is unwanted in a country that craves proof that its Declaration of Independence is right, that all men are created equal, but what this equality (proposed by a group of exceptionally learned aristocrats, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Adams—the golden youth of the colonies) really means is the triumph of the lowest common denominator. Why do we elect retarded presidents like Reagan if not to prove that all men are equal? We prefer to recognize ourselves in this idiot who talks like us, looks like us, makes our jokes, shares our mental lapses, amnesias, prejudices, obsessions, and confusions, justifying our own mental vulgarity: how consoling! A new Roosevelt a new Kennedy would force us to admire them for what we are not, and that’s an unsettling feeling. Still, I’m a quiet American who sticks pretty close to his library, almost to the point of neglecting my practice, doesn’t need many friends, has chosen to exercise his profession in a modern and impersonal city that shuts down at five, the blacks given over to lassitude and nocturnal violence and the whites locked away in their mansions surrounded by savage dogs and electric fences. And I spend three nights of the week in a hospital room so as to perform heart operations early on Wednesdays and Thursdays. In our time, it is impossible to be a surgeon without the support of a great medical center.
    Yes, for all this, I’m a quiet old American who votes Democratic, of course, and lives in a secret city where he sees no one, is married to an Andalusian woman, talks about death with a Russian, and goes into his library to confirm, within its shadows, the Hispano-Russian eccentricity of the American South: countries with non-standard railway gages.
    â€”Did you know, Constancia—I say, appealing to her marvelous sense of popular culture, magical and mythic—did you know that Franz Kafka’s uncle was director of Spain’s national railroad in 1909? He was a Mr. Levy, Franz’s mother’s brother, and he heard that his nephew was unhappy in the insurance company in Prague and invited him to come to Madrid to work for the Spanish railways. What do you think, Constancia, of a man who imagines himself awakening one morning transformed into an insect, working for the Spanish railways? Would it have been literature’s loss or the railway’s gain?
    â€”The trains would have arrived on time—mused Constancia—but without passengers.
    She had never read Kafka, or anything else. But she knew how to use her imagination, and she knew that imagination leads to knowledge. She is from a country where the people know more than the elite, just as in Italy, Mexico, Brazil, or Russia. The people are better than the elite everywhere, in fact, except in the United States, where Faulkner or Lowell or Adams or Didion is superior to its crude and rootless people, stultified by television and beer, unable to generate a cuisine, dependent on the black minority to dance and sing, dependent on its elite to speak beyond a grunt. Exactly the opposite, if you ask me, a Southerner married to Constancia, exactly the opposite of Andalusia, where culture is in the head and hands of the people.
    Constancia and I have been married forty years and I have to confess right off that the secret of our survival, in a society where seven out of ten marriages end in divorce, is that we do not limit ourselves to a single fixed mental attitude in our daily