And Laura watched with horror but didn’t stop him.
“They have to cut off a hand and cut out their tongues.”
And Harry put the knife in his mouth, and Laura screamed and stopped him, snatched the knife out of his hand and embraced him sobbing.
“And they’re sentenced to exile and death,” murmured Harry, almost inaudible, into Laura’s ear.
Early on, Laura had learned to read Harry’s thoughts just as he’d learned to read hers. They were helped by the punctual round of tropical sounds. She’d known it since she was a girl in Veracruz, but had forgotten it when she lived in Mexico City, where noises are accidental, unforeseen, intrusive, shrieking like evil fingernails scratching a school blackboard. But in the tropics the chirping of birds announces the dawn and their symmetrical flight the dusk, nature fraternizes with the church bells ringing matins and vespers, vanilla trees perfume the ambient air when we give it our intermittent attention, and the clusters of harvested beans give an air at once newborn and refined to the cupboards where they’re stored. When Harry sprinkled pepper on his huevos rancheros at breakfast, Laura would glance at the flowering peppers in the garden, yellow jewels set in a fragile airy crown the color of afternoon. There were no delays in the tropics. They went from the garden to the table killing scorpions, first in the house, then hunting preventively in the garden, later under stones. They were white, and Harry laughed as he stepped on them.
“My wife used to tell me to take some sun once in a while. Your stomach is as white as a fish fillet before it’s fried. That’s how these scorpions are.”
“Fish belly,” Laura said, laughing.
“Get out of this fix, she’d tell me, you’re not part of it, you don’t believe in it, your friends aren’t worth all that. And then she’d go back to her usual theme. Your problem isn’t that you’re a Communist, Harry, it’s that you’ve lost your talent.”
And despite everything, he finally did sit down to write, for when all was said and done, he needed to write, and in Tepoztlán he began to do so more regularly, beginning with his mini-biographies of victims like Garfield and Bromberg, who’d been his friends. Why didn’t he write about his enemies, the inquisitors? Why did he write only about the wounded and destroyed people like Garfield and Bromberg, but not about the solid individuals who overcame the drama, didn’t cry, fought, resisted, and, above all, made fun of the monstrous stupidity of the whole trial? Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman… those who came to Mexico, passed through Cuernavaca or stayed there. Why was it that Harry Jaffe said almost nothing about them? Why didn’t he include them in the biographies he was writing in Tepoztlán? Above all, why did he never mention the worst of the lot, the ones who did squeal, who did name names-Edward Dmytryk, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, Larry Parks?
Harry used his shoe to smash a scorpion.
“Evil insects make their nests in the most hostile places and live where there seems to be no life. That’s how Tom Paine described prejudice.”
Laura tried to imagine what Harry was thinking, all the things he didn’t say to her that were passing through his feverish eyes. She didn’t know that Harry was doing the same thing, thinking he could read Laura’s thoughts. He’d watch her from the bed as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror every morning. He could compare the still-young woman he’d met two years before, emerging from the swimming pool framed in bougainvillea, with the fifty-five-year-old lady whose hair, getting grayer and grayer, she arranged simply, in a bun at the nape of her neck, emphasizing her clear forehead and her angular features, her fine, large nose mounted on an easel, her lips as thin as those of a Gothic statue. And all saved by the intelligence and fire of her amber eyes glittering in their shadowy depths.
He also watched her doing the household chores, taking care of the kitchen, making the bed, washing the dishes, preparing the meals, taking long showers, sitting on the toilet, discontinuing the use of sanitary napkins, suffering hot flashes, cuddling up to sleep in a fetal position, while he, Harry, rested straight as a board, until one day they simply exchanged positions, and he slept like a fetus and she stretched out, rigid, like a governess and a child…
He told himself he thought what she thought when she looked at herself in the mirror, when she separated from their tender, nocturnal lovers’ embrace: it’s one thing to be a body, another to be beautiful… How warm and tender it was to embrace and love each other, but above all how healthful, the salvation of love meant forgetting one’s own body and fusing with the body of the other and letting the other absorb my body so as not to think about beauty, not to contemplate oneself apart from the other but blind, united, pure touch, pure pleasure, with no sanctions of ugliness or beauty, which no longer matter in the dark, in the intimate embrace, when each body fuses with the other and they cease contemplating each other outside each other, cease judging themselves outside the couple that couples until it makes one from two and loses all notions of ugliness or beauty, youth or age… Harry said this to himself thinking that Laura was saying it to him, I only contemplate internal beauty in you.
It was easy in his case: more and more emaciated, white as a fish belly, said Laura, he wasn’t even a distinguished bald man but a sparsely hairy man with abrupt little tufts that resisted dignified, complete baldness, hair like outcroppings of dry grass on the crown of his head, above his ears, on the back of his scruffy neck. It was more difficult in her case: Laura Díaz’s beauty was intelligible, Harry tried to tell her, it resembled classical beauty which was nothing more than the idea of beauty imposed since the time of the Greeks but which could have been another norm of beauty, that of an Aztec goddess, for example, Coatlicue instead of the Venus de Milo.
“Socrates was an ugly man, Laura. He prayed every night to see his own internal beauty. It was the gift of the gods. Thought, imagination. That was Socrates’ beauty.”
“Didn’t he want others to see it as well?”
“I think his way of speaking was that of a vain man. So vain that he preferred to drink the hemlock rather than admit he was wrong. He wasn’t. He held his ground.”
They always ended up talking about the same thing but they couldn’t get to the bottom of what “the same thing” was. Like the victims of McCarthyism. The opposite of McCarthy’s informers. And now Harry was looking at her looking at herself in the mirror, and he wondered if she saw the same thing he saw, an external body in the process of losing its beauty, or an internal body that was becoming more beautiful. Only making love, only in sexual union did the question cease to have meaning. The body disappeared in order to be only pleasure, and pleasure overwhelmed any possible beauty.
She, on the other hand, did not seem to judge him. She accepted him just as he was, and he felt tempted to be disagreeable, to ask her, Why don’t you color your hair, why don’t you do your hair more stylishly, why has she abandoned all coquetry; he’s looking at me as if I were his nurse or his nanny, he’d like me to turn into a siren, but my poor Odysseus is scuttled, immobile, dissolving in a sea of ashes, drowned by smoke, disappearing little by little in the mist of his four packs of Camels a day whenever Fredric Bell gives him a carton or his five packs of unfiltered Raleighs which taste like soap, he says, whenever he had to put up with the best the corner tobacco stand had to offer.
“The best is sometimes all there is. Here all there is is almost always the worst.”
They went to the Saturday market, and he decided to buy a tree of life. She had no reason to oppose the purchase, but she did. I don’t know why I objected, she thought later on, when they’d stopped speaking to each other for an entire week, in reality those candelabras painted a thousand different colors aren’t ugly and don’t offend anyone even if they aren’t the marvels of folkloric audacity and sensibility he says they are, I don’t know why I told him they’re vulgar kitschy things that only foreigners buy, why don’t you buy some puppets with pink socks or a multicolor mat, or, why not?, a serape for you and a shawl for me?
We’ll sit down in the afternoon protected from the sudden cold that rolls down the mountain, wrapped in Mexican folklore, do you want to lower me to that? Isn’t it enough you watch me so insistently while I fix myself up in front of the mirror, letting me think what he thinks, she’s getting old, doesn’t take care of herself, is going on fifty-six, no longer needs Kotex? On top of that, you want to fill up the house with tourist crap, trees of life, mats, market marionettes? Why don’t you just buy a machete, Harry, the ones with cute inscriptions on the handle, like “I’m like a green chile, hot but tasty,” so the next time you try to cut off your fingers and cut out your tongue you succeed, succeed in feeling sorry for yourself, for what you were and for what you weren’t, for what you are and for what you could have been.
Harry was too weak to slap her. It was she who felt compassion for him when he raised his hand and she smashed the tree of life on the brick floor and the next day swept up the scattered pieces and threw them into the garbage. Only a week later, she returned alone from the market and put the new tree of life on the shelf opposite the table and chairs where they ate.
Then she tried to make up for her inexplicable hatred for the multicolored structure of angels, fruits, leaves, and tree by deeply inhaling the scent of the plants in the garden, the shine of the rain on the leaves of the banana tree, and, beyond, in her memory, the trees that shaded the coffee bushes, the symmetrical lemon and orange orchards, the fig trees, the red lily, the round crown of the mango tree, the trueno with its tiny yellow flowers that could withstand both hurricane and drought-all the flora of Catemaco. And, at the end of the forest, the ceiba. Covered with spikes. The pointy spines the ceiba produces to protect itself. A trunk covered with swords defending itself so no one gets too close. The ceiba at the end of the road. The ceiba covered with fingers cut off in a single machete stroke by a bandit on the Veracruz, highway.
At dusk, they always sat side by side in the garden. They would talk about everyday things, the price of food in the market, what they’d eat the next day, how long it took for American magazines to reach Tepoztlán (if they ever got there), how kind it was of the Cuernavaca group to send them articles, always articles, never whole newspapers or magazines, what a blessing shortwave radio was, should they go to Cuernavaca to the Ocampo Cinema to see such and such a cowboy movie or the Mexican melodramas that made Laura laugh and Harry cry-but they never visited the Bells’ house, Aristotle’s Academy as Harry called it, he was bored by the eternal discussion, always the same discussion, a three-act tragicomedy.
“The first act is reason. The conviction that brought us to Communism, to sympathize with the left, the cause of the workers, faith in Marx’s arguments and in the Soviet Union as the first workers’ revolutionary state. With that faith, we answered the reality of the Depression, unemployment, the ruin of American capitalism.”
There were fireflies in the garden, but not as many as the intermittent lights given off by the cigarettes Harry chain-smoked, lighting the next with the butt of the last.
“The second act is heroism. First the fight against the economic depression in America, then the war against fascism.”
A brutal fit of coughing interrupted him, a cough so deep and strong that it seemed alien to his body, which was growing thinner and paler by the day. That body could not contain such a deep hurricane in I Harry’s chest.
“The third act is the victimization of men and women of good faith, Communists or simply humanitarians. McCarthy is the same human type as Beria, Stalin’s policeman, or Himmler, Hitler’s policeman. He’s driven by political ambition, because the easy way to get ahead is by joining the anti-Communist chorus that materialized when the hot war ended and the Cold War began. A cold calculation that one could gain power on the basis of ruined reputations. Squealing, anguish, death… and the epilogue…” Harry spread his hands, showing his open palms, his yellow fingers, then shrugged his shoulders and coughed lightly.
It was she who said to him, said to herself, without knowing in what order or how it would be best to communicate it to Harry: the epilogue has to he reflection, the effort of intelligence to understand what happened, why it happened.
“Why do we in America behave the same way they behave in Russia? Why did we become the same thing we said we were fighting? Why are there Berias and McCarthys, all those modern Torquemadas?”
Laura listened, she wanted to tell Harry that the three acts and epilogue in political dramas never appear that way, well ordered and Aristotelian, as Harry would say, mocking the “Academy” in Cuernavaca. They come tangled together, both of them knew that, sense mixed with nonsense, hope with despair, justification with criticism, compassion with disdain.
“If I could only go back to my time in Spain and stay there,” Harry would sometimes say. And, feverishly, turning brutally to Laura, he would go on in a softer and softer but also hoarser voice: “Why don’t you leave me, why are you staying with me?”
It was the moment of temptation. The moment when she experienced doubt. She could pack up and leave. It was possible. She could stay and put up with everything. That too was possible. But she could do neither: neither walk out just like that nor stay passively. She listened to Harry and again and again made the same decision: I’ll stay, but I’ll do something, I won’t just take care of him, I won’t just try to encourage him, I’ll try to understand him, to find out what happened to him, why he knows all the stories of that infamous time and yet doesn’t know his own story, why he won’t tell me, the one who loves him, his story, why…
It was as if he read her mind. It happens with couples linked more by passion than by custom, we read each other’s mind, Harry, a look is enough, a wave of a hand, a feigned distraction, a dream penetrated the same way a body is penetrated sexually, to know what the other is thinking, you’re thinking about Spain, about Jim, about how he saved himself by dying young, how he didn’t have time to become a victim of history, he was a victim of the war, that’s noble, that’s heroic; but being a victim of history, not foreseeing, not dodging history’s blow in time, or not taking its full force when it does hit us, that’s sad, Harry, that’s terrible.
“It’s all been a farce, an error.”
“I love you, Harry, that’s neither a farce nor an error.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I’m not tricking you.”
“Everybody’s tricked me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Everybody.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Why don’t you find out on your own?”
“No, I’d never do anything behind your back.”
“Don’t be a fool. I’m giving you permission. Go ahead, go back to Cuernavaca, ask them about me, tell them I gave you permission, they should tell you the truth.”
“The truth, Harry?”
(The truth is that I love you, Harry, I love you in a different way from the way I once loved my husband, different from the way I loved Orlando Ximénez or even Jorge Maura, I love you the way I loved them, as a woman who lives and sleeps with a man, but with you it’s different, Harry, besides loving you as I loved those men, I love you as I loved my brother Santiago the First and my son Santiago the Second, I love you as if I’d already seen you die, Harry, as I saw my brother, dead and buried with his unfulfilled promise, my son, resigned and handsome, that’s how I love you, Harry, as a son, a brother, and a lover, but with one difference, my love: I loved them as a woman, as a mother, as a lover, and I love you as a bitch, I know neither you nor anyone else will understand me, but I love you as a bitch, I wish I could give birth to you and then bleed to death, that’s the image that makes you different from my husband, my lover, or my sons, my love for you is the love of an animal that would love to put itself in your place and die instead of you, but only at the price of becoming your bitch, I’ve never felt this before and I’d like to explain it to myself and can’t, but that’s how it is and that’s the way it is
, Harry, because only now, at your side, I ask myself questions I never asked before, I ask myself if we deserve this love, I ask myself if it’s love that exists, not you and I, and for that reason I’d like to be your animal, your bleeding, dying bitch, to say that love does exist the way a dog and a bitch exist, I want to take your love and mine away from any romantic idealism, Harry, I want to give your body and mine a last chance by rooting them in the lowest ground but also the most concrete and certain ground, where a dog and a bitch sniff, eat, entangle sexually, separate, forget each other, because I’m going to have to live with your memory when you die, Harry, and my memory of you will never be complete because I don’t know what you did during the terror, you won’t tell me, maybe you were a hero and your humility disguises itself in pugnacious honor, like John Garfield, so you won’t tell me your exploits and make your heart sentimental, you who weep when Libertad Lamarque sings in those movies of hers, but maybe you were a traitor, Harry, a squealer, and that shames you and that’s why you’d like to go back to Spain, be young, die at the side of your young friend Jim in the war and have war and death instead of history and dishonor: which is the truth? I think it’s the first, because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have been accepted in that circle of victims over in Cuernavaca, but it may be the second because they never look at you, never address you, they invite you over and let you sit there, not talking to you but not attacking you, until your chair is like the dock where the accused sits, and you know me and you’re not alone anymore and we should leave Cuernavaca, leave your comrades behind, not hear those arguments repeated ad nauseam anymore.)
“We should have denounced Stalin’s crimes before the war.”
“Don’t kid yourself. You’d have been expelled from the Party. Besides, when you’re up against the enemy you simply have to forget certain things.”
“Still, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have talked about the errors of the Soviet Union among ourselves. We’d have been more human, we’d have defended ourselves better against the McCarthyite assault.”
The Years with Laura Diaz Page 44
