Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  Look: all you have to do is plant a tree less than a meter down for its roots to burn. All you have to do is pour a pitcher of water into a hole, any hole, for it to boil. And if I could have taken refuge in the lava labyrinth that is the underground beehive of Lanzarote, I’d have done it and you’d never have found me. Why did you look for me? How did you find me? No one should know I’m here. You are here, but I don’t dare look at you. This is a lie; you’re here, and I don’t want you to look at me. I don’t want you to compare me to the man you saw for the first time in Mexico eleven years ago—though a millennium has lapsed between that meeting and this one, if it’s true that hell has a history and the devil keeps track of time: the devil too is part of eternity. Now is not ten years ago, when I said,

  “Stay a little longer,” and you’ve probably forgotten our discussions with Basilio Baltazar and Domingo Vidal, and you’re going to laugh, Laura, because all our sense became nonsense, loss, death, inexplicable cruelty, assault on life. What’s left of us, Laura? Only my eyes from ten years ago, when they anchored in yours as yours did in mine, and you asked why I was different from the others, and I answered in silence, “Because I’m only looking at you.”

  Does the truth you see now remain, do you see your old lover, a refugee on one of the Canary Islands, off the African coast, when the last time you saw him was in Mexico, in your arms, in a hotel hidden next to a park of pine and eucalyptus trees? Is this man the same as that one? Do you know what that man was seeking and what this one seeks? Is it the same, or are they two different things? Because this man is seeking, Laura—only to you would I dare say such a thing—this man who loved you is seeking something. Can you look right at me and tell me the truth: what do you see?

  Separated for ten years, with the right to falsify our lives so as to explain our loves and justify what’s happened to our faces. I could lie to you as I lied to myself for years. I didn’t get there in time, that day we separated. The Prinz Eugen had already sailed for Germany when I reached Cuba. I could do nothing. The American government refused to grant asylum to the passengers, all of them Jews fleeing Germany. The Cuban government followed if not the instructions then the example of the United States. Perhaps the situation of the Jews under Hitler still hadn’t penetrated the conscience of the U.S. public. Right-wing politicians were preaching isolationism, were saying that facing up to Hitler was a dangerous illusion, a left wing trap, Hitler had restored order and prosperity to Germany, Hitler was a danger invented by perfidious Albion to draw the Yankees into another fatal European war, Roosevelt was a scoundrel capitalizing on the international crisis to make himself indispensable and win another election and then another. Let Europe commit suicide on her own. Saving Jews was not a popular idea in a country where Jews were not allowed in country clubs, expensive hotels, public swimming pools, as if they were bearers of the plague of Calvary. Roosevelt, was a pragmatic President. He had no support for increasing the number of immigrants approved by Congress. He gave in. Fuck you.

  I could lie to you. I reached Cuba that week when I abandoned you and got permission to board the ship. I had a Spanish diplomatic passport and the captain was a decent man, a sailor of the old school annoyed by the presence on his ship of Gestapo agents. They raised their arms in the fascist salute when they heard I was from Spain. They took it for granted the war was won. I returned their salute. What do symbols matter to me? I wanted to save Raquel.

  My attention was drawn to the extreme youthful beauty of one of the agents, a Siegfried who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, blond and forthright—there was no line on his face between his closely shaven jaw and his cheeks covered with blond down—while his partner, a small man perhaps sixty years old, without his black uniform, boots, and Nazi armband could have been a bank accountant or trolley conductor or marmalade salesman. He used a pince-nez, had a tiny mustache sprouting like two fly wings on either side of the division in his lips which according to Jewish tradition the sword of the God of Israel had opened with one stroke above the mouth of the newborn so they’d forget their immense racial, prenatal memory. The little man’s eyes were lost like two dead herrings in the bottom of the pot that was his shaven head. He wasn’t a policeman at all; he was an executioner.

  They greeted me with raised arms, the little man shouted Long live Franco! I returned the salute.

  I found her crouching on the prow, next to the mast where the red banner emblazoned with the swastika was flying. She wasn’t looking toward Morro Castle or the city. She was staring at the sea, returned to the sea, as if her gaze could reach all the way back to Freiburg, to our university and our youth.

  I softly touched her shoulder and she had no need to see me, with her eyes closed she clasped my legs, pressing her face against my knees, and wailed with a penitent’s sob, almost a shout, no longer hers, echoing in the Havana sky like a chorus not of Raquel’s voices but as if she were the receptor of a hymn that flew from Europe to lodge in the voice of the woman I’d come to save.

  For the price of my love for you for …

  Our love our …

  “Why won’t anyone help us?” she asked, sobbing. “Why won’t the Americans let us in, why won’t the Cubans give us asylum, why won’t the Pope answer the supplication of his people and mine, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani! why have you abandoned us, am I not one of the four hundred million faithful the Holy Father can mobilize to save me, just me, a Jewish convert to Catholicism?”

  I told her as I caressed her hair that I’d come to save her. Her hair, tousled by the cold tempestuous wind of that February morning in Cuba. I saw Raquel’s windblown hair, the force of the wind, and nevertheless, the flag of the Reich on the prow was hanging, immobile, not waving, as if heavy with lead.

  “You?”

  Raquel raised her dark eyes, her black, unbroken eyebrows, her dark Sephardic skin, her lips half open in prayer and weeping—the similarity to fruit, her long, tremulous nose—and I could see her eyes again.

  I told her I was there to take her off the ship, I’d come to marry her, it was the only way she could stay in the New World, married to me she’d be a Spanish citizen, they wouldn’t be able to touch her, the Cuban authorities agreed, a Cuban judge would come on board to officiate.

  “And what about the captain? Can’t the captain marry us?”

  “No, we’re in Cuban waters.”

  “You’re lying to me. He does have the right to. But he’s afraid. We’re all afraid. These animals have managed to frighten the whole world.”

  I took her in my arms; the ship would sail in a few hours, and no one will ever see again the Jews who were returned to the Reich, no one, Raquel, especially you and the passengers on this ship, you’re guilty of having left and of not having found refuge, listen to the Führer laughing, if no one else wants them, why would I?

  “Why is it that St. Peter’s successor, St. Peter who was a Jewish fisherman, doesn’t speak against those who persecute his descendants, the Jews?”

  I wanted her not to think about that, she was going to be my wife, and then we’d fight together against this evil, because we have finally come to know the face of evil in all the suffering of that time, I said, at least we’ve learned that, now you know what Satan’s face is like, Hitler betrayed Satan by giving him the face God took away from him when He hurled Satan into the abyss: between heaven and hell, a hurricane like this one advancing on Cuba erased Lucifer’s face, left him with a face as blank as a sheet and the sheet fell in the center of the crater of hell covering the devil’s body, awaiting the day of his reappearance just as St. John announced it: And I saw a Beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads … Men worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the Beast, saying, “Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?” And the Beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and that was the Beast imagined by St. John. Now we know who that Beast is. We’re going to fight it. It’s a shit stain on the flag o
f God.

  “My love.”

  “I shall pray as a Catholic for the Jewish people, who were the bearers of the revelation until the advent of Christ.”

  “Christ too had a face.”

  “You mean Christ certainly had a face. He chose to leave the only proof of His appearance.”

  “Then you know the face of good but also the face of evil, the face of Jesus and the face of Hitler—”

  “I don’t want to know the face of good. If I could see God, I would be struck blind. God must never be seen. Faith would die. God doesn’t allow Himself to be seen—so that we may believe in Him.”

  2.

  He had to receive her outside the monastery because the monks did not allow the presence of women, and though they gave him a bare cell, they also arranged for him to have a hut near the town of San Bartolomé. There a hot wind blew which carried dust from the African desert and made it necessary for the peasants to protect their meager plantings with hedges.

  “The whole island is fenced with stone walls to save the harvests, and they even cover the soil with moss to hold in the nighttime moisture for the vines.”

  She looked around the stone hut. There was only a cot, a table with a single chair, some flimsy shelves holding two plates, enough tinware for one person, and half a dozen books.

  They gave him the cabin because he was not to feel himself an integral part of the monastery, but also they could say to the authorities, if asked, that he did not live there, that he was an employee, a gardener … When they received him, they made an exception to their rules, but on condition that he take the risk in going and coming, the risk of not feeling completely safe.

  Jorge Maura understood the monks’ offer. If a problem arose, they could always say he didn’t live with them, he fulfilled his devotions in the chapel and did domestic work or gardening for them, yes, invisible gardening, sculpting rock, sowing volcanic rock—but he wasn’t under the order’s protection. The proof was that he lived outside the monastery in the town of San Bartolomé, exposed to breathing in the wandering sands from Africa, which seemed to be searching for their water clock, their hourglass for measuring a time that, with no receptacle, would become lost like the sand itself: the desert’s diaspora.

  They didn’t put it to him like that, crudely, but they were insistent, fearful. They owed a debt to Maura’s family, whose donations had made possible the construction of the monastery on Lanzarote. It was quite enough that they offered him protection: during the war he had worked with the relief agencies that brought blankets, medicines, and food to the neediest, air-raid victims, prisoners of war, internees in concentration camps, among them many Catholics opposed to Nazism. Hitler had laughed at the Catholic devotion of Franco’s supporters, since for him Catholics were enemies to the same degree that Communists, Jews, and garbage were, and besides, Pope Pius XII never said a word in defense of Catholics or Jews … The Holy Father was a contemptible coward.

  Jorge Maura had moved to Stockholm as a “displaced person” and from there had worked with aid agencies organized by the Swedish government and the Red Cross. After the war he’d gone to live in London and become a British subject. England had paid heroically for her earlier abandonment of the Spanish Republic—when Hitler could have been stopped—when during the Blitz, she had to resist the Luft-waffe’s daily bombardments with help from no one. British travelers went back to Spain after the war, but Jorge Maura was not looking for sun or exoticism. He’d fought on the Republican side, and the Francoists’ thirst for vengeance was still not slaked. Would they respect a subject of His Majesty George VI, or would they devise a way to arrest a “red” who’d slipped through their fingers?

  The monks understood all that. Was it they who, despite all that, wanted to give him the opportunity of risk, of running into the Guardia Civil outside the monastery, of being recognized or betrayed? Or was it he, Maura, who wanted to tempt fate? If so, why? To exempt the monks from responsibility? Or to put himself at risk, to test himself, and above all to deny himself an undeserved security, he said that day of the meeting with Laura, the day she came to see him on Lanzarote? Security to which neither he nor anyone else had a right.

  “Why would I lie to you, my love? I’ve come for you. I’m asking you to come back to Mexico with me. I want you to be safe.”

  She wanted to understand him. Very frankly, although who knows if wisely, she’d told him I still love you, I need you more than ever, come back with me, forgive me if I’m offering myself so openly to you like this, but I really need you. I’ve never loved anyone the way I still love you.

  Then he looked at her in a way that she understood as sad, but that slowly but surely she began to recognize as distant.

  Even so, she felt a movement of rejection in herself when he told her he wanted to be in a place where he would be in danger and at the same time need protection, so as not to feel strong. Danger didn’t strip him of power, but it did give him the power to resist, never to feel comfortable.

  It was an involuntary rejection. She was seated on the only chair in the cabin while he remained standing, leaning against a bare wall. Why should she be surprised? There was always something monastic and severe in Jorge Maura, even with the occasional lapses. But the practical and spiritual life of this man she loved was always enveloped, as the earth is wrapped in the atmosphere, by a skin of sensuality. She did not know him without his sex. He looked at her and read her mind.

  “Don’t think I’m a saint. I’m a ruined narcissist, which is rather different. This island is both my prison and my refuge.”

  “You’re like a king who resents that the world hasn’t understood him,” she said, playing with the box of matches, indispensable in this abandoned space untouched by electricity.

  “A wounded king, in any case.”

  Was he here out of conviction, because of conversion, because she’d become Catholic, and now he was seeking the way to return to the Church, to believe in God? Raquel and Jorge, the other couple.

  Jorge laughed. He hadn’t lost his laugh; he wasn’t a martyred saint in some Zurbarán painting, but that’s exactly what he looked like in this space of chiaroscuro which suggested it, which introduced her into a pictorial world where the central figure personified loss of pride as a means of redemption. Yet at the same time, one could see that redemption was his pride. Does God put up with the saint’s pride? Can there be a heroic saint? If God is invisible, can He show himself in the saint?

  She raised her eyes and met Maura’s. His face had changed a great deal over the years. He’d had white hair since his twenties, but his eyes hadn’t been so sunken, eyes so enamored of his brain, his face so thin; his white beard accentuated the time that had passed, that in his prolonged youth had been pure, promised time. His face had changed, yet she saw that it was the same; it hadn’t changed, it wasn’t another face, even if it was different.

  “I can distance myself from myself but not from my body.” He looked at her as if reading her thoughts.

  “Remember that our bodies liked each other a great deal. I’d like to be with you again.”

  He told her she was the world, and she said, Tell me then, why can’t you be in the world?

  Jorge’s silence was not eloquent, but she went on reading his thoughts, for he gave her no option but that of conjecture. Was he searching for solitude, faith, or both? Was he fleeing the world? Why?

  “You’re both in and not in the monastery.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you or aren’t you in the religious community?” She thought he could explain himself to her. He owed it to her after so long. “We always understood each other.”

  He answered very indirectly and with a distant smile. He reminded her of things she already knew. He was a privileged disciple of the Spanish and European university system that had evolved when Spain—he smiled—was emerging from the Escorial and entering Europe, licking its wounds after losing the war with the United States and the final los
s of its empire in the New World, Cuba and Puerto Rico, always the last colonies. Spain joined Europe thanks to the genius of Ortega y Gasset, and Maura was his disciple. That marked him forever. Then Husserl in Freiburg, along with Raquel … He was a privileged man. He had to argue to be allowed to fight against the enemies of culture, against Franco and the Falange, who with their shit-covered boots sullied the halls of universities shouting Death to Intelligence! He wasn’t allowed: they gave him the acrid taste and swift machine-gun fire at the Jarama, but after that they told him, you’re more useful as a diplomat, a man who can convince others, a loyal emissary … being a Republican of aristocratic origin. He was on the good side. The world was his. Even if he lost it, it would always be his. He felt closer to the people fighting in Madrid and at the Ebro and the Jarama than he did to fascism’s cruel bourgeoisie and vulgar lumpen. He hated Franco, hated Millán Astray and his famous slogan Death to Intelligence!, hated Queipo de Llano and his radio programs broadcast from Seville and his challenge to Spanish women to have sex with Moors in Andalusia, where men were real men.

  “And now you have nothing.” Laura looked at him devoid of emotion. She was tired of Jorge’s political history.

  She wanted to tell him that he was left without the world, but she did not think, did not feel that Jorge Maura had come to Lanzarote to convince God with his sacrifice.

  “Because it is a sacrifice, I see that, isn’t it so?”

  “You mean that when the war was over I should have gone back to my intellectual vocation, to recall my masters Ortega and Husserl and write?”

  “Why not?”

  He laughed. “Because it’s a fucking disaster to be creative when you know you’re not Mozart or Keats. Dammit, I got tired of scratching around in my past. There’s nothing in me to justify the pretension of creativity. This came before anything, before you, before Raquel, this is a matter of my own emptiness, my awareness of my own limits, maybe my sterility. Does what I’m saying to you seem awful? Now you want to come along and sell me an illusion, which I don’t believe in but which does make me believe that either you’re a fool or you under estimate my intelligence. Why don’t you just leave me alone, so I can fill the emptiness in my own way? Let me see things for myself, learn if something can still grow in my soul, an idea, a faith, because I swear to you, Laura, my soul is more desolate than this rock landscape you see here … why?”