Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  “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.”

  “How could we imagine what was going to happen?” Harry said one night, drinking beer at nightfall in the little garden backed by the mountain and redolent of the aromas of the blooming flowers and dying trees. “We American Communists fought first in Spain, then in the war against the Axis. It was the French Communists who really organized the Resistance, the Russian Communists who saved everyone at Stalingrad, who’d have thought that when the war was over being a Communist would be a sin and that all of us Communists would end up on the bonfire? Who?”

  Another cigarette. Another Dos Equis.

  “Being faithful to the impossible. That was our sin.”

  Laura had asked him if he was married, and Harry said he was but he preferred not to talk about it. “It’s all over.” He tried to end the conversation.

  “You know it isn’t. You have to tell me everything. We have to live it together. If we are going to go on living together, Harry.”

  “The rages, the fights, the sermons, the nervousness about the secret meetings, the suspicion that the accusers were right? I married a Communist. Sounds like the title of one of those bad movies they make to justify McCarthyism as patriotism. That’s how the studio magnates expiate their pinko guilt. Fuck them. We’ll see tomorrow.”

  “Were you honest with your wife?”

  “I was weak. I spilled my guts to her. Everything. I told her my doubts. Was what I wrote for the movies valid, or did they make me believe it was good because it served a cause—the cause, the only good cause? Are we paying a very high price for something that wasn’t worth it? And she said to me, Harry, what you write is shit. But not because you’re a Communist, my love. It’s that your little flame went out. See things as they really are. You had talent. Hollywood stole it from you. It was a small talent, but it was a talent. You lost what little you had. That’s what she told me, Laura.”

  “Things will be different with me.”

  “I can’t, I can’t. No more.”

  “I want to live with you.” (In the name of my brother Santiago and my son Santiago, and take care of you now, as I either didn’t know how to or couldn’t take care of them, you understand, you get mad, you ask me not to treat you like a child, and I show you I’m not your mother, Harry, I’m your bitch, you don’t use your mother like an animal, you don’t use your lover that way, your romantic Hollywood sensibility wouldn’t let you, Harry, but in my case, I’m asking you for it, let me be your bitch, even if I bark at you sometimes, I’m not your mother, your wife, or your sister.)

  “Be my bitch.”

  He smoked and drank, attacking his lungs and his blood each time he opened his mouth. She pretended to drink with him, but she drank cider, saying it was whiskey, feeling like a cabaret whore who drinks colored water that her customer takes to be French cognac. She was ashamed of the trick, but she didn’t want to get sick, because if that happened, who would take care of Harry? One day, she’d woken up in Cuernavaca in 1952 and seen the weak, sick man at her side. She’d right away decided that from then on her life would have meaning only if she devoted it to caring for him, taking charge of him, because Laura Díaz’s life was now reduced to that conviction: my life has meaning only if I dedicate it to the life of someone who needs me, if I care for a needy person, giving my love to my love, totally, no conditions, no arrière-pensées, as Orlando would say. This is now the meaning of my life, even if there are arguments, failures to understand, irritations on his or on my part—broken dishes, whole days when we don’t speak to each other, better that way, without those rough spots we’d turn into soft taffy, I’m going to unleash my irritation with him, I’m not going to control it, I’m going to give him his last chance for love, I’m going to love Harry in the name of what can’t wait any longer, I am going to incarnate that moment in my life and it’s already here: I know he’s thinking the same thing, Laura, this is the last chance, what’s between you and me can’t wait any longer, and it’s what was announced, it’s what already happened and yet is happening now, we’re living in anticipation of death because right before our eyes, Laura, the future is unfolding as if it had already taken place.

  “That’s something only the dead know.”

  “I’m going to ask you all a question,” Fredric Bell addressed the usual dinner guests on Cuernavaca weekend. “We all know that during the war and thanks to the war, industry made enormous fortunes. I ask you, should we have gone on strike against the exploiters of labor? We didn’t. We were patriots, nationalists, but we weren’t revolutionaries.”

  “And what if the Nazis had won the war because American workers struck against American capitalists?” asked the epicurean who never took off his bow tie despite the heat.

  “Are you asking me to choose between committing suicide tonight and being shot at dawn tomorrow? Like Rommel?” interjected the man with the square jaw and faded eyes.

  “I’m saying we’re at war, the war isn’t over now and will never be over, the alliances change, one day they win, the next we win, the important thing is not to lose sight of the goal, and the funny thing is that the goal is the origin, do all of you realize that? The goal is the original freedom of mankind,” concluded the Arrow shirt man.

  No, Harry said to Laura, the origin wasn’t freedom, the origin was terror, a struggle against beasts, distrust among brothers, fighting for wife, mother, the patriarchy, keeping the fire going, don’t let it go out, sacrificing the child to keep death away, plague, hurricanes, that was the origin. There never was a Golden Age. There never will be. The thing is you can’t be a good revolutionary if you don’t believe that.

  “And what about McCarthy? And Beria?”

  “They were cynics. They never believed in anything.”

  “I respect your drama, Harry. I swear I respect you a great deal.”

  “Don’t waste your time, Laura. Come here and give me a kiss.”

  When Harry died, Laura Díaz went back to Cuernavaca to tell the exiles. They were all together, as they were every Saturday night, and Ruth was dishing out huge servings of pasta. Laura saw that while the cast had changed, the parts were the same, and the absences were made up for with new recruits. McCarthy never tired of looking for victims, the stain of persecution was spreading like an oil spill on the sea, like pus from a penis. The old producer Theodore died, and his wife, Elsa, wouldn’t last long without him; the tall, nearsighted man with tortoiseshell glasses had a chance to make a movie in France, and the small man with the curly hair and pompadour could write Hollywood screenplays under a pseudonym, using a “front.”

  Others went on living in Mexico, keeping company with Fredric Bell, protected by people on the Mexican left like the Riveras or the photographer Gabriel Figueroa, and always faithful to the arguments that would let them live, remember, argue, deaden the pain of the growing list of those who were persecuted, excluded, jailed, exiled, those who committed suicide, those who disappeared. They became deaf to the footfalls of old age, pretended to be blind to the certain if minute changes in the mirror. Now Laura Díaz was a mirror for the Cuernavaca exiles. She told them, Harry is dead, and they all suddenly became older. Yet at the same time Laura felt with visible emotion that each and every one of them shone like sparks from the same fire. For a second, when she gave them the simple message, Harry is dead, the fear that pursued them all, even the bravest—the fear that was Joe McCarthy’s best-trained bloodhound nipping at the heels of the “reds”—dissipated in a kind of sigh of final relief. Without a word, they were all telling Laura that Harry would not be tormenting himself anymore. Nor
would he torment them.

  The looks of the American refugees in Cuernavaca were enough to precipitate in her heart an intolerable memory of everything Harry Jaffe had been—his tenderness and his anger, his bravery and his cowardice, his political pain translated into physical pain. His affliction, Harry her lover as an afflicted being, nothing more.

  The English Bell remarked that those who were summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee could do one of four things.

  They could invoke the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression and association. The risk in this was of being charged with contempt of Congress and going to jail. Which is what happened to the Hollywood Ten.

  The second option was to invoke the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which allows all citizens the right of not incriminating themselves. Those who opted to “take the Fifth” risked losing their jobs and appearing on blacklists. Which is what had happened to most of the Cuernavaca exiles.

  The third possibility was to inform, to name names and hope the studios would give you work.

  Then something extraordinary happened. All of the seventeen guests, along with Bell, his wife, and Laura, went down the highway to the little Tepoztlán cemetery where Harry Jaffe was buried. There was moonlight, and the modest graves decorated with flowers stretched out at the foot of Tepozteco’s impressive height; its three-story pyramid descended to the blue, rose, white, and green crosses as if they weren’t graves but just another kind of flower in the Mexican tropics. An always premature cold fell over Tepoztlán in the evening, and the gringos had brought jackets, shawls, and even parkas.

  They were right to do so. Despite the bright moonlight, the mountains cast an immense shadow over the valley, and they themselves, these persecuted exiles, moved as if they were reflections, like the dark wings of a distant eagle, a bird that one day looks at itself in the mirror and no longer recognizes what it sees, because it imagined itself one way and the mirror shows it wasn’t that at all.

  Then, in the Tepoztec night, under the light of the moon, as if in a final Group Theatre presentation (the last curtain before closing on an empty house), each one of the exiles said something over the grave of Harry Jaffe, the man admitted to the group but whom no one had looked at except Laura Díaz, who arrived one day, dove into the bougainvillea-framed pool, and surfaced opposite her poor, disgraced, sick love.

  “You only named those who’d already been named.”

  “Everyone you named was already on the blacklist.”

  “Between betraying your friends and betraying your country, you chose your country.”

  “You said to yourself that if you stayed in the Party, the fountains of your inspiration would dry up.”

  “The Party told you how to write, how to think, and you rebelled.”

  “First you rebelled against the Party.”

  “It horrified you to think that Stalinism could govern in the U.S.A. as it governed in the U.S.S.R.”

  “You went to speak before the committee, and you trembled with fear. Here in America, now, was the very thing you feared. Stalinism was interrogating you, but here it was called McCarthyism.”

  “You gave not one name.”

  “You faced up to McCarthy.”

  “Why did you do it when you knew they already knew? To inform on the informers, Harry, to cast infamy on the infamous, Harry.”

  “To go back to work, Harry. Until you realized that there was no difference between squealing and not squealing. The studios didn’t give work to reds, but they also didn’t give work to people who admitted being reds and informed on their comrades.”

  “It didn’t work, Harry.”

  “You knew that anti-Communism had become the refuge of the scum of America.”

  “You didn’t name the living. But you also didn’t name the dead.”

  “You didn’t name those who’d never been named. You also didn’t name only those who’d already been named.”

  “You didn’t even name those who named you, Harry.”

  “The Party demanded obedience of you. You said that even though you detested the Party, you weren’t going to submit to the committee. The Party in its best moment was always better than the committee at any moment.”

  “My worst moment was not being able to tell my wife what was going on. Suspicion ruined our marriage.”

  “My worst moment was living in hiding, in a house where we never turned on the lights so we wouldn’t be summoned by the agents of the committee.”

  “My worst moment was knowing that my children were ostracized in school.”

  “My worst moment was not telling my children what was happening, even though they already knew it all.”

  “My worst moment was having to decide between my socialist ideal and Soviet reality.”

  “My worst moment was having to choose between the literary quality of my writing and the dogmatic demands of the Party.”

  “My worst moment was choosing between writing well and writing commercially, as the studio wanted.”

  “My worst moment was looking into McCarthy’s face and knowing that American democracy was lost.”

  “My worst moment was when Congressman John Rankin said to me, Your name isn’t Melvin Ross. Your real name is Emmanuel Rosenberg, and that proves that you’re a fake, a liar, a traitor, a shameful Jew.”

  “My worst moment was running into the person who informed on me and seeing him cover his face with his hands in pure shame.”

  “My worst moment was when my informer came crying to me to ask forgiveness.”

  “My worst moment was being mentioned by those disgusting society columnists, Sokolsky, Winchell, and Hedda Hopper. Their mentioning me was worse than McCarthy. Their ink smelled of shit.”

  “My worst moment came when I had to disguise my voice on the telephone to speak to my family and friends without getting them into trouble.”

  “They said to my daughter, Your father is a traitor. Don’t have anything to do with him.”

  “They said to friends of my son, Do you know who his father is?”

  “They said to my neighbors, Stop talking to that family of reds.”

  “What did you tell them, Harry Jaffe?”

  “Harry Jaffe, rest in peace.”

  They all went back to Cuernavaca. Laura Díaz—in consternation, agitated, perplexed—went to get her belongings from the little house in Tepoztlán. She also gathered up her own pain, and Harry’s. She gathered them up and gathered herself up. Alone with Harry’s spirit, she wondered if the pain she was feeling was appropriate, her intelligence told her it wasn’t, that one can only feel one’s own pain, that pain is not transferable. Even though I saw your pain, Harry, I couldn’t feel it as you felt it. Your pain had meaning only through mine. It’s my pain, Laura Díaz’s pain, that’s the only pain I feel. But I can speak in the name of your pain, that I can do. The imagined pain of a man named Harry Jaffe who died of emphysema, drowned in himself, mutilated by air, with fallen wings.

  Aside from the three possible ways of responding to the committee—Fredric Bell came to tell her one afternoon, the same day she returned to Mexico City—there was the fourth. It was called Executive Testimony. Witnesses who made public denunciations went through a private rehearsal, and in that case the public event was merely a matter of protocol. What the committee wanted was names. Its thirst for names was insatiable, sed non satiata. Generally, the witness was summoned to a hotel room and there he or she informed in secret. So the committee already had the names, but that wasn’t enough. The witness had to repeat them in public for the glory of the committee but also in order to defame the informer. There were confusions. The committee would have the informer believe the secret confession was enough. The atmosphere of fear and persecution was such that the witness would delude himself and seize that life preserver, thinking, I’ll be the exception, they’ll keep my testimony secret. And sometimes there were exceptions, Laura. It’s inexplicable why certain
persons who talked in executive session were immediately summoned to public sessions and others weren’t.

  “But Harry was brave facing the Senate committee. He told McCarthy, You’re the real Communist, Senator.”

  “Yes, he was brave facing the committee.”

  “But he wasn’t brave in executive testimony? Did he inform first and recant later? Did he inform on friends first and then denounce the committee in public?”

  “Laura, the victims of informers do not inform. All I can tell you is that there are men of good faith who thought, If I mention someone no one suspects, a person against whom they can’t prove anything, I’ll win the committee’s favor and save my own skin. And I won’t be hurting my friends.”

  Bell stood up and shook hands with Laura Díaz.

  “My friend, if you can take flowers to the graves of Mady Christians and John Garfield, please do it.”

  The last thing Laura Díaz said to Harry Jaffe was: I’d rather touch your dead hand than the hand of any man living.

  She doesn’t know if Harry heard her. She didn’t even know if Harry was dead or alive.

  2.

  She’d always been tempted to say to him, I don’t know who your victims were, let me be one of them. She always knew he would have answered, I don’t want life preservers. But I’m your bitch.

  Harry said that if there was blame, then he would take it, completely.

  “Do I want to save myself?” he would ask with a distant air. “Do I want to save myself with you? We’ll have to find that out together.”

  She admitted it was very hard to live reading his mind, without his ever telling her exactly what had happened. But she quickly repented of her own frankness. She’d understood for years now that Harry Jaffe’s truth would always be a fully endorsed check, undated and with no figure written on it. She loved an oblique man, chained to a double perception, the view of Harry held by the exile group and the view of the group held by Harry.