Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Out of order,” McCarthy shouted back.

  “You, Senator, you’re the red,” said the small, bald man.

  “The witness is about to be in contempt of Congress.”

  “You, Senator, are paid by Moscow.”

  “Take this witness away.”

  “You’re the best propaganda the Kremlin ever invented, Senator McCarthy.”

  “Get him out of here! Take him away!”

  “Do you think that by acting like Stalin you’re defending American democracy? Do you think you can defend democracy by imitating your enemy?” shouted Harry Jaffe. That was the name Basilio Baltazar mentioned. The two of them had been comrades on the Jarama front, along with Vidal, Maura, and Jim. Comrades.

  “Order, order. The witness is in contempt,” shouted McCarthy with his whining kidnapper’s voice, his mouth twisted into an eternal smile of disdain, his beard showing dark only hours after he shaved, his eyes those of an animal chased by itself: Joe McCarthy was like an animal aware of being a man and nostalgic for his earlier freedom as a beast in the jungle.

  Another old man interrupted. The people to blame for the whole thing are the Warner Brothers, who started putting politics into movies, social themes, delinquency, unemployment, abandoned children who slide into a life of crime, the cruelty of prisons, movies that said to America, you’re not innocent anymore, you’re not rural anymore, you live in cities plagued by poverty, exploitation, organized crime, and criminals of all kinds from gangsters to bankers.

  “Just as Brecht said: which is worse, robbing a bank or founding a bank?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s what,” answered the first old man, Laura’s confidant. “A movie is a collective effort. No matter how clever he is, a writer can’t pull the wool over the eyes of Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner and make him see white by putting red in front of him. The man has yet to be born who could trick Mayer by saying to him, Look, this film about noble Russian peasants is really camouflaged praise of Communism. Mayer won’t be conned, because he’s the greatest con man of all. That’s why he was the first to denounce his own workers. The wolf was tricked by the lambs. The wolf got a pardon because he turned over the lambs to the slaughterhouse so he’d be spared the knife. Mayer must have been furious about McCarthy drinking the blood of all the actors and writers he’d hired instead of letting him do it!”

  “Vengeance is sweet, Theodore …”

  “On the contrary. It’s a skimpy diet if you’re not the one drinking the blood of the person who got crucified because you squealed. It’s bitter for the squealer to have to keep his mouth shut, to not be able to brag in private, to have to live with shame.”

  Harry Jaffe got up, lit a cigarette, and walked through the garden. Laura Díaz followed the trail of his firefly, a Camel burning in a dark garden.

  “We’re all responsible for a picture,” the old producer named Theodore continued. “Paul Muni isn’t responsible for Al Capone because he starred in Scarface, or Edward Arnold for plutocratic fascism because he personified it in Meet John Doe. From the producer to the distributor, we’re all responsible for our pictures.”

  “Fuenteovejuna, one for all, all for one,” said Basilio Baltazar. He didn’t care that none of the gringos would recognize this great line from Lope de Vega’s play about a town that stands up and acknowledges its cellective guilt.

  Elsa, the old producer’s wife, said innocently, “Well, who knows if they aren’t right when they say it was one thing to go into social themes during the New Deal and another to exalt Russia during the war.”

  “They were our allies!” Bell exclaimed. “We were supposed to be nice to the Russians!”

  “We were told to promote pro-Soviet sentiment,” Ruth interrupted. “Roosevelt and Churchill asked us to.”

  “And one fine day, someone knocks at your door and you get a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee because you portrayed Stalin as good old Uncle Joe with his pipe and peasant wisdom defending us against Hitler,” said the tall man who looked like an owl because of his heavy tortoiseshell glasses.

  “And wasn’t that the truth?” answered a small man with frizzy, tangled hair that rose to a high, natural topknot. “Didn’t the Russians save us from the Nazis? Remember Stalingrad? Have we already forgotten Stalingrad?”

  “Albert,” countered the tall, myopic man, “I’ll never argue with you. I’ll always agree with a man who walked with me, next to me, both of us in handcuffs because we refused to denounce our comrades to the McCarthy committee. You and I.”

  There was more, Harry told Laura one night when the cicadas were raising a racket in the Bells’ garden. It was an entire era: It was the misery of an era, but also its glory.

  “Before I went to Spain, I was active in the Black Theater Project with Roosevelt’s WPA, which set off riots in Harlem in 1935. Then Orson Welles put on a black Macbeth that caused a furor and was savagely attacked by the theater critic of The New York Times. The guy died of pneumonia a week after the review appeared. It was voodoo, Laura.” Harry laughed and asked her if it was all right to call her by her first name.

  “Of course. Laura,” she said.

  “Harry. Harry Jaffe.”

  “Yes, Basilio told me about … you.”

  “About Jim. About Jorge.”

  “Jorge Maura told me the story.”

  “No one ever gets the whole story, you know,” said Harry. His tone expressed challenge, sadness, and shame all at once, Laura thought.

  “Do you have the whole story, Harry?”

  “No, of course not.” The man tried to recover his normal expression. “A writer should never know the whole story. He imagines one part and asks the reader to finish it. A book should never close. The reader should continue it.”

  “Not finish it, just continue it?”

  Harry agreed, with his balding head and immobile but expressive hands. Jorge had described him on the Jarama front in 1937, compensating for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry said at that time. His faith in Communism expiated his inferiority complexes. He argued a lot, Jorge Maura had recalled, he’d read all the Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” Stalin’s mistakes were mere misdirections. The future was glorious, but Harry Jaffe in Spain was small, nervous, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive—Maura had thought—because he didn’t know just how weak an uncritical political conviction really is.

  “I want to save my soul,” Harry would say at the front.

  “I want to know fear,” his inseparable friend Jim would say. Jim, the tall, gawky New Yorker, with Harry—Maura would smile—the classic twosome of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Mutt and Jeff, Basilio said now, adding his smile to that of his absent friend.

  “So long to neckties,” said Jim and Harry in one voice when Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway went off to report on the war, arguing about which of the two would have the honor of writing the other’s obituary.

  The little Jew in jacket and tie.

  If the description of the Harry Jaffe of fifteen years earlier was accurate, then that decade and a half had been a century and a half for this man who could not hide his sadness, who perhaps wanted to hide it; but the sadness managed to show itself in his infinitely distant gaze, his tremulously sad mouth, his nervous chin and supernaturally inert hands, controlled with great effort to reveal no genuine enthusiasm or interest. He would sit on his hands. He would clench his fists. He would clasp them desperately under his jaw. Harry’s hands were witness, offended and humiliated, to the vicious cruelty of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy had paralyzed Harry Jaffe’s hands.

  “We never win, it’s just not true that at any given moment we triumphed,” said Harry, in a voice as neutral as dust. “There was excitement, oh yes. Plenty of excitement. We Americans like to believe in what we�
��re doing, and we get excited doing it. How could a moment like the first night of The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s musical drama, not be one of pleasure, faith, excitement? With its daring, direct reference to events of the day—the automobile strike, riots, police brutality, workers shot in the back and killed? How could we not be excited—indignant! about our production causing a cutoff in the official subsidy for the workers’ theater? They confiscated the sets. The stagehands were fired. And then? We had no theater. So we had the brilliant idea of bringing the play to the scene of the action, to the steel factory. We’d put on a workers’ theater in the workers’ factory.”

  How hard for me that look of defeat is turning out to be whenever he opens his eyes, that look of reproach whenever he closes them, thought Laura as she watched him intently, as she always did, the little needy man sitting on a leather armchair in the garden with its view of Cuernavaca, city of refuge, where Hernán Cortés had commanded a stone palace be built, protected by watchtowers and artillery, to escape the heights of the conquered Aztec city, which he destroyed and rebuilt as a Renaissance city laid out on a right-angled grid.

  “What do you think Cortés would feel if he came back to his palace and found himself in Rivera’s murals painted as a merciless conquistador with reptilian eyes?” Harry asked Laura.

  “Diego makes up for it by painting heroic white horses that shine like armor. He can’t help feeling a certain admiration for the epic. It’s true for all Mexicans,” said Laura, bringing her fingers close to Harry’s.

  “I got a little scholarship after the war. Went to Italy. That’s how Ucello painted medieval battles. Where will you take me tomorrow so I can learn more about Cuernavaca?”

  Together they went to the Borda gardens, where Maximilian of Austria came to take refuge with his pleasures in the hidden, moist, lecherous gardens, far from the imperial court at Chapultepec and the insomniac ambition of his wife, Carlota.

  “Whom he wouldn’t touch because he didn’t want to give her syphilis,” they both said, laughing, at the same time, wiping the beer foam from their lips in Cuernavaca’s main square, Cuauhnáhuac, the place by the trees where Laura Díaz listened to Harry Jaffe and tried to penetrate the mystery hidden in the depths of his story, lightened occasionally with irony.

  “The culture of my youth was a radio culture, blind theater, which is how Orson Welles managed to scare everyone into thinking that a simple adaptation of a work by the other Wells, H. G., was really happening in New Jersey.”

  Laura laughed a lot and asked Harry to listen to the latest chachachá on the tavern’s jukebox:

  The Martians have landed, ha-ha-ha!

  They came down dancing the chachachá!

  “You know?”

  So they took Blitzstein’s drama to the scene of the crime, the steel factory. Which is why the plant managers decided to give the workers a picnic that day, and the workers chose a day in the country over a session of political theater.

  “You know? When they finally put on the play again, the director scattered the actors in the audience. The spotlights would focus on us, and we’d suddenly be revealed. The spot came on me, the light hit me in the face, blinding me, but then I had to speak: ‘Justice. We want justice.’ That was my only line, from the audience. Then the lights went down, and we went home to hear the invisible truth of radio. Hitler used the radio. So did Roosevelt and Churchill. How could I refuse to speak on the radio, when the very government of the United States, the American army, asked me: This is the Voice of America, we have to defeat fascism, Russia is our ally, we have to praise the Soviet Union? What was I going to do? Anti-Soviet propaganda? Just imagine, Laura, me doing anti-Communist propaganda in the middle of a war. They would have shot me as a traitor. But today, the fact that I did it condemns me as an anti-American subversive. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

  He didn’t laugh when he said that. Later, at dinner, the group, about a dozen guests, listened carefully to the old producer Theodore tell the story of Jewish migration to Hollywood, the Jewish creation of Hollywood. But a younger screenwriter, who never took off his bow tie, rudely told him to shut up, every generation has its problems and suffers them in its way, he wasn’t going to feel nostalgia for the Depression, unemployment, lines of freezing men waiting for a cup of watery hot soup, there was no security, no hope, there was only Communism, the Communist Party, why not join the Party?, how could he ever renounce his Communism, when the Party gave him the only security, the only hope of his youth?

  “To deny I was a Communist would be to deny I was young.”

  “Too bad we denied ourselves,” said another guest, a man with distinguished features (he looked like the Arrow shirt man, Harry noted slyly).

  “What do you mean?” asked Theodore.

  “That we weren’t made for success.”

  “Well, we were,” grumbled the old man and his wife in unison. “Elsa and I were. We certainly were.”

  “We weren’t,” retorted the good-looking man, wearing his gray hair well, proud of it. “The Communists weren’t. Being successful was a sin, a kind of sin anyway. And sin demands retribution.”

  “You did all right.” The old man laughed.

  “That was the problem. The retribution. First there was commercial work, done halfheartedly. Scripts for whores and trained dogs. Then compensatory dissipation—whores in bed, whiskey not as well trained as Rin Tin Tin. Finally came panic, Theodore. The realization that we weren’t made for Communism. We were made for pleasure and dissipation. That was the punishment in the end, of course. Denounced and out of work for having been Communists, Theodore. McCarthy as our exterminating angel—it was inevitable. We deserved it, fuck the dirty weasel.”

  “And what about the people who weren’t Communists, who were wrongly accused, smeared?”

  Everyone turned to see who’d asked that. But the questions seemed to come from nowhere. They seemed to have been said by a ghost. It was the voice of absence. Only Laura, sitting opposite Harry, realized that the Spanish Civil War veteran had thought and perhaps said them, but no one else noticed, because the lady of the house, Ruth, had already changed the tone of the conversation as she served her endless bowl of pasta and sang under her breath:

  You’re going to get me into trouble

  If you keep looking at me like that.

  Harry had said that radio was invisible theater, a call to imagination … and actual theater, what was that?

  “Something that disappears with the applause.”

  “And movies?”

  “The ghost that outlives us all, the speaking, moving portrait we leave behind so we can go on living.”

  “Is that why you went to Hollywood, to write movies?”

  He nodded without looking at her, it was hard for him to look at anyone and everyone avoided looking at him. Little by little Laura realized this fact—so flagrant as to be a mystery, invisible, like a radio program.

  Laura felt she could be the object in Harry’s line of sight because she was new, different, innocent, because she didn’t know the things the others did. But the courtesy all the exiles showed to Harry was impeccable. He turned up every weekend at the Bells’ house. He sat down to dinner with them every Sunday. Only no one looked at him. And when he spoke it was in silence, Laura realized with alarm, no one listened to him, that was why he gave the impression that he never spoke, because no one listened to him but her, only her only I, Laura Díaz, I pay attention to him, and that’s why only she listened to what the solitary man said without his having to open his mouth.

  Before, whom would he talk to? Nature in Cuernavaca was so prodigal, though so different, rather like the Veracruz of Laura Díaz’s childhood.

  It was a perturbed nature, redolent of bougainvillea and verbena, of freshly cut pine and bleeding watermelon, scents of saffron but also of shit and garbage piled in the deep gullies around every orchard, every neighborhood, every house … Would Harry Jaffe speak to that nature—the littl
e New York Jew who’d made his pilgrimage from Manhattan to Spain and from Spain to Hollywood and from Hollywood to Mexico?

  This time Laura was the foreigner in her own homeland, the other to whom this strangely taciturn and solitary man might perhaps speak, not aloud but in the whisper she learned to read on his lips as they became friends and drifted away from the Bells’ red stronghold into the silence of the Borda gardens or the buzz of Cuernavaca’s main square, or the light and careless inebriation at the Hotel Marik’s open-air café, or the cathedral’s peaceful solitude.

  There, Harry pointed out to her that the nineteenth-century murals, in their pious St. Sulpice style, were hiding another fresco that had been painted over, bad taste and clerical hypocrisy having deemed it primitive, cruel, and not especially devout.

  “You know what it is, do you?” asked Laura, not hiding her curiosity and surprise.

  “I do. An angry—very angry—priest told me. What do you see here?”

  “The Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, the Wise Men,” said Laura—though she was thinking about Father Elzevir Almonte and the jewels of the Holy Child of Zongolica.

  “You really don’t know what’s underneath?”

  “No.”

  “The missionary expedition of Mexico’s only saint, St. Felipe de Jesus. Felipe went to convert the Japanese in the seventeenth century. Painted here, but painted over now, are the scenes of danger and terror—rough seas, shipwrecks. The saint’s heroic and solitary sermons. Finally, his crucifixion by the infidels. His slow death agony. A great movie.”

  “His nursemaid said, The day the fig tree blooms, our little Felipe will be a saint. A servant we once had, a man I loved a lot, Zampaya, told me that story.”

  “All that was covered up. By piety. By lies.”

  “A pentimento, Harry?”

  “No, not a repentant painting, but one that pride superimposed on truth. A triumph of simulation. I’m telling you, it’s a movie.”