The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Well, then, Harry, what do we know, you and I, about one another?”

  “I respect you. You respect me. Together we’re enough.”

  “But we’re not enough for the world.”

  “That’s true.”

  It was true that Harry was exiled in Mexico, like the Hollywood Ten and the others. Communists or not, it didn’t matter. There were some unique cases, like the old Jewish producer Theodore and his wife, Elsa, who hadn’t been accused of anything and who exiled themselves in solidarity; movies-they said-were made in collaboration, eyes wide open, and if someone was guilty of something or the victim of someone else, then all of them, without exception, had to be guilty.

  “Fuenteovejuna, one for all and all for one.” Laura Díaz smiled, remembering Basilio Baltazar.

  There were recalcitrant ones who were faithful to Stalin and the U.S.S.R. but disillusioned with Stalinism, who didn’t want to behave like Stalinists in their own land. “If we Communists were to take over in the United States, we too would slander, exile, and kill dissident writers,” said the man with the pompadour.

  “Then we wouldn’t be real Communists. We’d be Russian Stalinists. They are products of a religious authoritarian culture that has nothing to do with Marx’s humanitarianism or Jefferson’s democracy,” answered his tall, nearsighted companion.

  “Stalin has corrupted the Communist idea forever, don’t kid yourself.”

  “I’m going to go on hoping for democratic socialism.”

  Laura, who gave neither face nor name to these voices, blamed herself for not doing so. But she was right: similar arguments were repeated by different voices of different men and women who came and went, were there and then disappeared for good, leaving only their voices floating in the bougainvillea of the Bells’ Cuernavaca garden.

  There were also ex-Communists who feared ending up like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in the electric chair for imagined crimes. Or for crimes committed by others. Or for crimes that were alleged in an escalation of suspicion. There were Americans on the left, sincere socialists or “liberals,” deeply concerned by the climate of persecution and betrayal that had been created by a legion of disgusting opportunists. There were friends and relatives of McCarthy’s victims who left the United States to express their solidarity.

  What there wasn’t in Cuernavaca was a single informer.

  Which of all these categories was the right one for the small, bald, thin, badly dressed man sick with emphysema, plagued by contradictions, whom she had come to love with a love so different from the love she had felt for other men, for Orlando, for Juan Francisco, and especially for Jorge Maura?

  Contradictions: Harry was dying of emphysema hut didn’t stop smoking four packs of cigarettes a day because he said he needed them to write, it was a habit he couldn’t break. The problem was, he didn’t write anything but went on smoking. He was watching, with a kind of resigned passion, the great sunsets in the Valley of Morelos when the perfume of laurels overwhelmed his dying breaths.

  He breathed with difficulty, and the valley air invaded his lungs and destroyed them: there was no room for oxygen in his blood. One day his own breath, the breath of a man named Harry Jaffe, escaped from his lungs as water pours from a broken water main, and it invaded his throat until it suffocated him with the very thing his body needed: air.

  “If you listen carefully”-the ghost of a grin appeared on the sick man’s face-“you can hear the sound of my lungs, like the snap, crackle, and pop in that cereal. Right, I’m a bowl of Rice Krispies.” He laughed with difficulty. “But I should be Wheaties, breakfast of champions.”

  Contradictions: Does he think they don’t know and they do know but don’t say so? Does he know they know and they think he doesn’t know that?

  “How would you write about yourself, Harry?”

  “I’d have to write history, words I detest.”

  “History, or your history?”

  “Personal histories have to be forgotten for real history to emerge.”

  “But isn’t real history a totality of personal histories?”

  “I can’t answer you. Ask me again some other day.”

  She thought about the totality of her carnal loves, Orlando, Juan Francisco, Jorge, and Harry; about her family loves, her father Fernando and her Mutti Leticia, her Aunts María de la O, Virginia, and Hilda; her spiritual passions, the two Santiagos. She stopped, upset and cold at the same time. Her other son, Danton, did not appear on any of those personal altars.

  Other times she would say to Harry, I don’t know who your victims were, or if there were victims, Harry, maybe you had no victims, but if you did, let me be one more.

  He looked at her incredulously and forced her to see herself in the same way. Laura Díaz had never sacrificed herself for anyone. Laura Díaz was no one’s victim. Which is why she could he Harry’s victim, cleanly, gratuitously.

  “Why don’t you write?”

  “Maybe it would be better if you’d ask me what it means to write.”

  “All right, what does it mean?”

  “It means descending into yourself, as if you were a mine, so you can emerge again, Laura, emerge into pure air, with my hands full of myself.”

  “What do you bring out of the mine-gold, silver, lead?”

  “Memory? The mud of memory?”

  “Our daily memory.”

  “Give us this day our daily memory. It’s pure shit.”

  He would have wanted to die in Spain.

  “Why?”

  “For symmetry. My life and history would have coincided.”

  “I know lots of people who think as you do. History should have stopped in Spain when you were all young and all heroes.”

  “Spain was salvation. I don’t want to he saved anymore. I told you that already.”

  “Then you should get a grip on what followed Spain. Did the guilt continue then?”

  “There were lots of innocents, there and here. I can’t save the martyrs. My friend Jim died at the Jarama. I would have died for him. He was innocent. No one was innocent after that.”

  “Why, Harry?”

  “Because I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t let anyone else be innocent again.”

  “Don’t you want to save yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “With me?”

  “Yes.”

  But Harry was destroyed; he didn’t save himself, and wasn’t going to die again on the Jarama front. He was going to die of emphysema, not from a Falangist or Nazi bullet, a bullet with a political purpose, he was going to die of an implosion from the physical or moral bullet he carried within himself. Laura wanted to give a name to the destruction that in the last analysis linked her inexorably to a man who no longer had any other company-even to go on destroying himself, with a cigarette or with repentance-but Laura Díaz.

  They had left Cuernavaca because the facts remained, and Harry said he hated things that remained. Why do they accept me at the same time they reject me? asked Laura in Harry’s voice. Because they don’t want to accord me the discriminatory treatment they themselves suffered? Because if I informed secretly they won’t accuse me publicly? Because if I acted in secret, they can’t treat me as an enemy, yet I can’t tell the truth.

  “And live in peace?”

  “I don’t know who your victims were, Harry. Let me be one.”

  If he took refuge in Mexico was it because they went on persecuting him in the United States? Because he went on accusing-if that were the case-the witch-hunters? Because he informed on no one? Or-that’s it-because he did inform? But what kind of squealing did he do, which lets me live among my victims? Should he have denounced himself to the others as an informer? What would he gain by doing that? What? Penitence and credibility? He’d be penitent and then they’d believe in him, look at him, speak to him? Had they all made a mistake, he and they?

  (Laura, the informer is impregnable; to attack the credibility of the informer is to undermine the very
foundations of the system of informing.

  (Did you inform?

  (Suppose I did. But also suppose no one knows I did, people think I’m a hero. Isn’t that better for the cause?)

  “I assure all of you. He could return, and no one would bother him.”

  “No. Inquisitors always find new reasons to persecute.”

  “Jews, converted Jews, Muslims, fags, impure races, lack of faith, heresy,” Basilio reminded her during one of his sporadic visits. “The inquisitor never lacks motives. And if one motive fails or grows old, Torquemada pulls a new, unexpected one out of his sleeve. It’s a story with no ending.”

  In an embrace at night, making love with the lights out, Harry stifling his cough, Laura in a nightgown to hide a body she no longer liked, they could say things to each other, they could speak with caresses, he could tell her this is the last chance for love, and she could say to him what’s happening now has already been announced, and he, what already happened, what is happening, you and me is what already happened between you and me, Laura Díaz, Harry Jaffe, she had to suppose, she had to imagine. At breakfast, at the crepuscular cocktail hour, when only a diaphanous martini defended her from the night, and during the night itself, at the time of love, she could imagine answers to his questions.

  “But you didn’t talk, did you?”

  “No, but they treat me as if I did.”

  “True. They insult you. They treat you as if you didn’t matter. Let’s go away from here, just the two of us.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because if you do have a secret and they respect it, it’s because you don’t seem important to them.”

  “You whore, you bitch, you think you can get me to talk with your traps.”

  “Men tell whores their problems. Let me be your whore, Harry, talk.”

  Harry laughed sarcastically. “Old bitch, old whore.”

  She no longer had the capacity for being insulted. She herself had begged him, let me be your bitch.

  “Okay, bitch, imagine I talked in secret testimony. But imagine I mentioned only innocent people-Mady, Julie. You follow my logic? I imagined that because they were innocent, the committee wouldn’t touch them. They did touch them. They killed them. I imagined they’d only go after Communists, and for that reason I didn’t name Communists. They swore they’d only go after reds. They didn’t keep their promise. They didn’t imagine the same way I did. That’s why I went from executive session to public session and attacked McCarthy.”

  (Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

  (You’re the Communist, Senator, you’re the red agent, Moscow pays you, Senator McCarthy, you’re the best propaganda for Communism, Senator.

  (Point of order! Contempt! The witness is guilty of contempt of Congress.)

  “Is that why I spent a year in jail? Is that why they have no choice but to respect me and accept me as one of their own? Is that why I’m a hero? But am I also an informer? Do they imagine I informed because I believed no one could prove the unprovable, that Mady Christians or John Garfield was a Communist? Do they think I didn’t understand the logic of the persecution, which was to turn the innocent into victims? Do they imagine I named only innocents because I myself was guilty of innocence? Was it easier to terrorize the innocent rather than the culpable? Could someone say, I was or am a Communist and take the consequences honorably? Is that the logic of terror? Yes, terror is like an invisible vise that crushes you the way emphysema is suffocating me. You can’t do anything, and you end up exhausted, dead, sick, or a suicide. Terror kills the innocent with fear. It’s the inquisitor’s most powerful weapon. Tell me I was an idiot, that I wasn’t able to foresee that.”

  “Why didn’t the inquisitors denounce you, why didn’t they reveal that you’d talked in secret session?”

  “Because if they revealed my double game, they would also reveal their own. They would have lost an ace from their deck. They kept their mouths shut about my betrayal, they ultimately made martyrs of the people I named, which was no problem for them, because they had their list of victims prepared beforehand. An informer only confirmed publicly what they wanted to hear. Many more witnesses denounced Mady Christians and John Garfield, publicly. That’s why they said nothing about my informing. They jailed me for rebelliousness, sent me to jail, and when I got out, I had to go into exile. Either way, they defeated me, made me impossible for myself.”

  “Do your friends in Cuernavaca know all that?”

  “I don’t know, Laura. But I suppose they do. They’re divided. For them it’s good to have me among them as a martyr, better than expelling me as an informer. But they don’t talk to me or look me in the eye.”

  She begged him to leave Cuernavaca with her; both of them, alone, elsewhere, could give each other what two solitary beings can give each other, two losers, together we can be what we are what we aren’t. Let’s go before an immense void swallows us up, my love, let’s die in secret, with all our secrets, let’s go, my love.

  “I swear I’ll keep my mouth shut forever.”

  21.

  Colonia Roma: 1957

  1.

  WHEN AN EARTHQUAKE SHOOK Mexico City in July 1957, Laura Díaz was staring out at the night from the roof ter race of her old house on Avenida Sonora. Breaking her own rule, she was smoking a cigarette. In honor of Harry. He’d died three years before, but her devout love had left her full of unanswered questions, had burdened her with blocked mental horizons. Her heart was still alive, but she had no man and had lost the one she loved. Also, she’d just turned fifty-nine.

  The memory filled her days and sometimes, as now, her nights. Ever since Harry’s death and her return to Mexico City, she was sleeping less than she once had. The fate of her American lover obsessed her. She did not want to classify Harry Jaffe as a failure, because she didn’t want to blame his failure either on McCarthyite persecution or on his own internal collapse. She didn’t want to admit that persecution or no persecution Harry had stopped writing because he had had nothing to say. He’d taken refuge in the witch-hunt.

  Her doubts persisted. Did the persecution begin just when Harry’s abilities failed him, or had he already lost them? Then was the persecution a mere pretext to turn sterility into heroism? It wasn’t his fault. He wanted to die in Spain, at the Jarama with his buddy Jim, when ideas and life were identical for him, when nothing separated them, when, Laura, I didn’t suffer this damned alienation…

  From the terrace, as she thought about her poor Harry, Laura Díaz could contemplate, on her left, the dark tide of the sleeping forest, its treetops undulating like the breathing in and out of an ancient sleeping monarch on his throne of trees and crowned by his stone castle.

  To the right, far away, the gilded Angel of Independence added to its own painted gleam the glow of spotlights outlining its air-borne silhouette, golden damsel of the Porfirio Díaz era disguised as a Greek goddess but representing, like a celestial transvestite, the virile angel of a feminine saga, Independence… The he/she Angel held up a laurel branch in his/her right hand, stretched his/her wings, and began a flight-but not the one intended, a flight that instead was catastrophic, brutal, and abrupt, from the top of the airy column into the very air, then crashing into shattered pieces at the base of its own pedestal, a fall like Lucifer’s, the ruined he/she Angel vanquished by the shaking earth.

  Laura Díaz saw the Angel fall and-who knows why?-thought that it wasn’t the Angel but Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who had posed mythically for the sculptor Enrique Alciati, never imagining that one day her beautiful effigy, her entire body, would fall to pieces at the foot of the slender commemorative column. She watched the treetops ebb and flow and she watched the Angel fall but, more than anything else, she felt her own house creaking, snapping apart like the Angel’s wings, breaking into pieces like a fried tortilla between the teeth of the monstrous city-where she’d toured with Orlando Ximénez one night to see the face of its true misery, the invisib
le misery, the most horrible of all, the misery that didn’t dare show itself because it could beg for nothing, and because no one would give it anything anyway.

  She waited for the earthquake to wear itself out.

  The best thing to do was to stay where she was. There was no other way to fight that underground force, one had to resign oneself to it and then overcome it with its mirror opposite: immobility.

  She’d only once before experienced a serious tremor, in 1943, when the city quavered because of an extraordinary event: as a peasant in Michoacán was plowing his field, smoke began to pour out of a hole, and out of the hole emerged, in just a few hours, as if the earth had really borne it, a baby volcano, Paricutín, vomiting stone, lava, sparks. Every night its glow was visible from farther and farther away. The Paricutín phenomenon was amusing, astonishing, but comprehensible precisely because so bizarre (the name of the place was unpronounceably Tarascan: Paranguaritécuaro, abbreviated to Paricutín). A country where a volcano can appear overnight, out of nowhere, is a country where anything can happen…

  The 1957 earthquake was crueler, faster, dry, and it slashed the sleeping body of Mexico City like a machete. When calm returned, Laura carefully walked down the cast-iron circular stairs to the bedroom floor and found things scattered every which way: armoires and drawers, toothbrushes, glasses and soaps, pumice stones and sponges, and on the ground floor pictures hung at crazy angles, not a single light burning, plates broken, parsley knocked over, bottles of Electropura water smashed in pieces.

  It was worse outside. When she stepped out onto the street, Laura could see the full and savage damage the house had suffered. The facade looked not so much smashed as if it had been slashed with a knife, peeled like an orange, uninhabitable…