The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Lower your voice. What’s wrong with you today?”

  “Well,” answered Maura intensely, “I’m looking at that poor, bare foot Indian in a cloak, and I’m seeing him at the same time wearing a striped uniform with a green triangle on his chest because he’s a common criminal and a red triangle because he’s a political agitator and a pink triangle because he’s queer and a black triangle because he’s antisocial and a Star of David because he’s a Jew…”

  Her name is Raquel Mendes-Alemán. They were both students in Freiburg. They had the privilege of studying with Edmund Husserl, not only a great teacher but a philosophic comrade, a presence who guided his students’ independent thought. The sympathetic relationship between Raquel and Jorge crystallized instantly because she was a descendant of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. She spoke the Spanish of the fifteenth century, and her parents read Sephardic newspapers written in the Spanish of the Archpriest of Hita and Fernando de Rojas and sang Hebrew songs in honor of the Spanish land. They had, as Sephardic Jews did, the keys of their old Castilian houses hanging from a nail in their new German houses, in expectation of the desired day-after four and a half centuries-of their return to the Iberian Peninsula.

  “Spain,” prayed Raquel’s parents and relatives at night, “Spain, ungrateful mother, you expelled your Jewish children who loved you so much, but we don’t hold that against you, you are our beloved mother and we don’t want to die before returning one day to you, beloved Spain.”

  Raquel did not join in the prayer because she’d made a drastic decision the year she matriculated at Freiburg. She converted to Catholicism. She explained it to Jorge Maura:

  “I was severely criticized. Even my own family criticized me. They thought I’d become a Catholic so as to avoid the stigma of being a Jew. The Nazis were organizing to seize power. In Weimar Germany, so impoverished and humiliated, there was no doubt who was going to prevail. Germans wanted a strong man for their weak country. I explained that I was not trying to avoid any stigma. It was entirely the opposite. It was a challenge. It was a way of saying to the world, to my family, to the Nazis: Look, we are all Semites. I’m becoming a Catholic because of a fundamental disagreement with my parents. I think the Messiah has already come. His name is Jesus Christ. They still await Him, and that wait blinds them and condemns them to be persecuted, because he who awaits the coming of the Redeemer is always a revolutionary, an element of disorder and violence. On the barricades like Trotsky, camera in hand like Eisenstein, in the classroom like Husserl, the Jew upsets and transforms, disturbs, revolutionizes… They can’t avoid it. It is in their hope of the Redeemer. But if you admit, as I have, Jorge, that the Redeemer has already come into the world, you can change the world in His name without paralyzing yourself with millennial expectations, with hopes that the Second Coming will change everything the moment it happens.”

  “You talk as if the heirs of Jewish messianic thought were modern progressives, even Marxists,” exclaimed Jorge.

  “They are, don’t you realize that?” said Raquel. Her voice was urgent. “And that’s fine. They’re the ones who await the millennial change, and in the meantime their impatience leads them to discover relativity, film, phenomenology, on the one hand, but on the other it induces them to commit all sorts of crime in the name of the promise. Without realizing it, they are executioners of the very future they desire so intensely.”

  “But the worst enemies of the Jews are these Nazis walking the streets in their swastikas and brown uniforms.”

  “It’s because there can’t be two chosen people. It’s either the Jews or the Germans.”

  “But the Jews aren’t killing Germans, Raquel.”

  “There’s the difference. The Hebrew messianic spirit sublimates itself creatively in art, science, philosophy. It becomes creative because otherwise it’s defenseless. The Nazis have no creative talent. They have only a genius for death, they’re the geniuses of death. But fear the day when Israel decides to arm herself and loses her creative genius in the name of military success.”

  “Perhaps the Nazis won’t allow them, as a nation, any other option. Perhaps the Jews will tire of being history’s eternal victims. Sacrificial lambs.”

  “I pray they never become anyone’s executioners. I pray the Jews will never have theirJews.”

  “I hope you realize that the Catholic Church is not innocent of crimes, Raquel. Remember, I’m a Spaniard, and you, in your way, are, too.”

  “I prefer the cynicism of the Catholic Church to the pharisaism of the Communist Church. We Catholics judge…”

  “Bravo for the obsessive plural. I kiss you, my love.”

  “Don’t be a clown, Jorge. I’m telling you, we judge the crimes of the Church because they’re betraying a promise already carried out, an obligation: the imitation of Christ. The Communists can’t judge the crimes of their church because they feel it would betray a promise that is to be carried out in the future. That is still not incarnate.”

  “Are you planning to enter a religious order? Am I going to have to become a Don Juan to seduce you in a convent?”

  “Don’t joke. And keep your hands to yourself, Don Juan.”

  “No, I’m not joking. If I’m following you correctly, this Christian purity that requires obedience to Jesus’ teachings can only be put into practice if you withdraw to a convent. Get thee to a nunnery, Rachel!”

  “No, it must be practiced in the world. Besides, how could I become a nun after knowing you?”

  Together they’d taken Husserl’s courses with an almost sacred devotion. They studied with the master but without realizing his power, because Husserl guided them so discreetly, keeping them independent of him, motivated by him but free thanks to the wings he gave them.

  “Let’s see now, George, what does Husserl mean when he talks about regional psychology?”

  “I think he’s referring to the way of being concrete that emotions, acts, and understanding have. What he’s asking us to do is to suspend our opinion as long as we don’t see all those proofs as original phenomena-in flesh and bone, as he says. First we open our eyes wide to see what’s around us in our so-called region, there, where we really are. Philosophy comes later.”

  They walked a lot at night through the old university city right up to where the Black Forest begins, exploring the walls of the Gothic cathedral, getting lost in the medieval landscapes, crossing the bridges over the Dreisam as it rushes to join the Rhine.

  Freiburg was like an ancient stone queen with her feet in the water and a crown of pines. The two students strolled around it, elaborating and reelaborating the lessons of the day, arm in arm at first, later hand in hand, astonished that Husserl himself was elaborating. He was nervous and noble, with a very high forehead that cleared the way for a concerned brow and menacing eyebrows, his straight nose sniffing out ideas, and his long beard and mustache covering wide lips, as wide as those of some philosophic animal, a mutant that had emerged from the nourishing water of the first creation onto an unknown land, committed to enunciating more ideas than those that fit in a speech. Husserl’s words could not keep pace with his thought.

  Everyone called him “the master.” Naked in the eyes of his students, he proposed to them a philosophy without dogma or conclusions, open at all times to rectification and to the criticism of the professor and his students. Everyone knew that the Husserl of Freiburg was not the Husserl of Halle, where he had invented phenomenology on the basis of a simple proposal: first we accept experience, then we think. Nor was he the Husserl of Göttingen, who had focused his attention on that which has yet to be interpreted, because in it the mystery of things might reside. He was the Husserl of Freiburg, Jorge and Raquel’s teacher, a man for whom humanity’s moral freedom depended on one thing: the vindication of life in the face of everything that threatens it. He was the Husserl who’d seen Europe collapse during the Great War.

  “I don’t understand, George. He’s asking u
s to reduce phenomena to pure consciousness, to a kind of cellar beneath which it cannot be reduced further. Can’t we excavate more, go deeper?”

  “Well, I think that nature, the body, and the mind are in that cellar, as you call it. And that’s quite a lot. E doppo? Where does the old boy want to lead us?”

  As if he were reading his students’ thoughts with his hawklike eyes, which contrasted so savagely with his stiff butterfly collar, his shirt-front, his vest crossed by a watch chain, his old-fashioned black frock coat, his trousers that tended to hang over his short black boots, Husserl told them that after the Great War, Europe’s spiritual world had collapsed, and that if he was preaching a reduction of thought to the very foundations of the mind and of nature, it was only the better to renovate European life, history, society, and language.

  “I can’t conceive of a world without Europe or Europe without Germany. A European Germany that would he part of the best Europe has promised to the world. I’m not, ladies and gentlemen, creating an abstract philosophy. I’m firmly rooted in the best we’ve done. That which can survive us. Our culture. That which can inspire your children and grandchildren. I won’t see it. That’s why I teach it.”

  Then Raquel and Jorge went out to celebrate in a jolly student Keller, which they usually avoided because of its noisy camaraderie, but that night everyone was shocked or amused at the toasts the couple made with their steins of beer on high: To intersubjectivity! To society, language, and the history that relates it all! We are not separated! We are a we, linked by language, community, and past!

  They aroused laughter, sympathy, commotion, and shouts: When are you getting married? Can two philosophers get along in bed? Is it true you’re going to name your first son Socrates? Oh, intersubjectivity, come to me, let me interpenetrate you!

  They went to the cathedral after running their amazed, intelligent, and sensual eyes over the outside, and discovered, in that famous minster, finished at the dawn of the sixteenth century, a perfect illustration of what concerned them, as if Husserl’s lessons had returned not to complement but to revive the tympanum of original sin which here, on one flank of the cathedral, preceded the Creation shown on the archivault. This told us that the Creation redeemed sin and left it behind; the Fall was not the consequence of Creation. There is no Fall, the Freiburg lovers told each other, there is Origin and then there is Creation.

  On the west side of the cathedral, Satan, posing as the Prince of the World, leads a procession that walks away not only from original sin but from divine Creation. Facing this satanic procession, the main door of the cathedral opens, and it is there, not outside but inside, or rather at the very entrance to the interior, that Redemption is described and declared.

  They went through that door, and almost as if at communion, kneeling next to each other, without any fear of seeming ridiculous, they prayed aloud:

  we shall return to ourselves

  we shall think as if we’d founded the world

  we shall be the living subjects of history

  we shall live the world of life

  The Nazis forced Husserl out of Freiburg and out of Germany. The old exile continued teaching in Vienna and Prague, with the Wehrmacht always one step behind him. They allowed him to return to die in his beloved Freiburg, but the philosopher had said, “In the heart of every Jew there is absolutism and martyrdom.” By contrast, his disciple Edith Stein, who became a Carmelite nun after renouncing Israel and converting to Christianity, would say that same year: “Disasters will rain on Germany when God avenges the atrocities committed against the Jews.” It was the year of Kristallnacht, on November 9, organized by Goebbels to destroy synagogues, Jewish businesses, and Jews. Hitler announced his intention to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe once and for all.

  It was the same year that Jorge Maura met Laura Díaz in Mexico and Raquel Mendes-Alemán, with the Star of David sewn to her bosom, greeted the SS in the streets with the shout “Christ be blessed!” which she repeated on the ground, bloody, kicked, and punched. “Christ be blessed!”

  On March 3, 1939, the Prinz Eugen of the Lloyd Trieste line sailed from Hamburg with 224 Jewish passengers on board, all convinced they would be the last to leave Germany after the terror of Kristallnacht, and saved because of a series of circumstances, some attributable to the Nazis’ mathematical madness-who is Jewish? only the child of Jewish parents, but what about the child with one Jewish parent? what about those with fewer than three Aryan grandparents, etc., etc., traced back through the generations to Abraham-others to the wealth of certain Jews who could buy freedom by turning over to the Nazis their money, paintings, homes, furniture (this was the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family, when Austria was annexed to the Reich); still others thanks to old friends who were now Nazis but who kept a warm memory of Jewish friends; others deriving from amorous favors granted to a high-ranking officer in the regime in order to save parents and siblings, as Judith did in the Bible, though this Holofernes was immortal:; still others indebted to consular officials who, with or without their government’s authorization, interceded on behalf of individual Jews.

  The same day the SS beat her, Raquel began to wear the cross of Christ next to the Star of David, †, with the result that she was locked into her small apartment in Hamburg, the double provocation meaning that the SS would be waiting at the door of her house with ferocious dogs, clubs, warning her, come out, if you dare, Jewish whore, rotten seed of Abraham, Slavic infestation, Levantine flea, gypsy chancre, come out, if you dare, Andalusian hetaira, try to find food, scrape around in the corners of your pigsty, pig that you are, eat dust and cockroaches, if Jews can eat gold, they can also eat rats.

  The neighbors were warned that if they gave me food, their rations would be taken away, if they did it again, they would be sent to a camp. I, Raquel Mendes-Alemán, decided to die of hunger for the sake of my Jewish race and my Catholic religion; I decided, George, to be the absolute witness of my age, and I knew I would have no salvation when the Nazis declared that “our worst enemies are the Jewish Catholics.” It was then I opened my window and shouted into the street, “St. Paul said, I am a Jew! I am a Jew!” and my neighbors threw stones at me and two minutes later a burst of machine-gun fire broke my windows and I had to curl up in a corner, until the Mexican consul, Salvador Elizondo, arrived with a safe-conduct pass and told me you’d interceded so I could board the Prinz Eugen and escape to the freedom of the New World. I’d sworn I would stay in Germany and die in Germany as testimony to my faith in Christ and Moses. Then I gave in, my distant love, and I knew why-not out of fear of them, not out of fear that I’d be taken to one of those places whose names we all knew by then-Dachau, Oranienburg, Buchenwald-but out of shame that my own Church and my own Father, the Pope, did not raise their voices to defend us, to defend all Jews, but also Catholic Jews like me. Rome made me an orphan, Pius XII never spoke in defense of the human race, George, so it was not only that he did not speak up for the Jews but that the Holy Father never extended his hand to the human race. You did, Mexico did. There would be no better opportunity than the Prinz Eugen, which was going to take us to America. The Mexican President, Lázaro Cárdenas, was going to speak with Franklin Roosevelt to allow us to disembark in Florida.

  During the nine-day crossing, I became friendly with the other Jewish fugitives. Some were shocked at my Catholic faith, others understood me, but all thought it was a failed trick on my part to escape the concentration camps. There are no uniform communities, but Husserl was right when he asked us, Can’t we all return to a world where life can start over again, where we can find ourselves again as fellow human beings?

  I wanted to take communion, but the Lutheran pastor on board refused to administer it. I reminded him that his legal function on a ship was to be nondenominational and to attend to all faiths. He had the effrontery to say to me, Sister, these are not legal times.

  I’m a provocateur, George, I admit it. But don’t accuse me of pride, of the Greek hubri
s we learned about in Freiburg. I’m a humble provocateur. Every day during our collective breakfast in the dining room, the first thing I did was take a piece of bread in one hand, make the sign of the cross with the other, and say in an even voice, “This is my body,” before putting it in my mouth. I scandalize, irritate, annoy. The captain tells me, you’re putting the other passengers of your race in danger. I laugh in his face. “This is the first time we’ve been persecuted for racial reasons, do you realize that, Herr Kapitan? We’ve always been persecuted for religious reasons.” A lie. Ferdinand and Isabella chased us out of Spain to protect their “purity of blood.” But the captain had his answer. “Frau Mendes, there are agents of the German government on board. They’re watching all of us. They are fully prepared to use the slightest pretext to abort this voyage. If they permitted it, it was as a concession to Roosevelt in exchange for which the United States would maintain its limited quotas for the admission of German Jews. Each party is putting the other to the test. You must understand that. This is how the Führer always proceeds. We have a small opportunity. Control yourself. Don’t throw away the chance to save yourself and your comrades. Control yourself.”