Years With Laura Diaz, The (48 page)
Read Years With Laura Diaz, The Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
She never fully understood that request, especially when she remembered another overheard conversation between the brothers, when Danton told Santiago that the good thing about the body is that it can satisfy us at any moment, and Santiago told him it can also betray us at any moment; and that’s why you’ve got to catch pleasure on the fly, replied Danton, and Santiago: “Other satisfactions cost dearly, you have to work for them,” and then both in one voice:
“They escape from us
,” followed by a shared fraternal laugh.
“They escape from us
,” followed by a shared fraternal laugh.
Danton was afraid of nothing but sickness and death. That’s true of many men. They can fight hand to hand in a trench but be unable to endure witnessing the pain of childbirth. He sought and found pretexts for not visiting his parents’ house on Avenida Sonora. He preferred to telephone, ask for Santiago even though Santiago hated telephones—the most horrifying distraction ever invented to torture artists, how
great it was when he was a boy and there were the two systems, Ericsson and Mexicana, when it was hard to communicate.
great it was when he was a boy and there were the two systems, Ericsson and Mexicana, when it was hard to communicate.
He looked at Laura.
That was before the sicknesses followed one after the other ever more rapidly, and the doctors could find no explanation for the boy’s increasing weakness, his low resistance to infection, the incomprehensible wearing down of his immunological system, and what the doctors didn’t say, what only Laura D
az said, my son has to live out his own life, I’ll see to that, nothing—not sicknesses, not useless medicines, not medical advice—matters to me, what I must give my son is everything my son should have if he were going to live for a hundred years, I’m going to give my son the love, the satisfaction, the conviction that he lacked nothing in the years of his life, nothing, nothing, nothing.
az said, my son has to live out his own life, I’ll see to that, nothing—not sicknesses, not useless medicines, not medical advice—matters to me, what I must give my son is everything my son should have if he were going to live for a hundred years, I’m going to give my son the love, the satisfaction, the conviction that he lacked nothing in the years of his life, nothing, nothing, nothing.She watched over him at night as he slept, wondering, what can I save of my son the artist that will last beyond the echo of death? Surprised, she admitted that she wanted not only that her son might have what he deserved but that she, Laura Díaz, might have what her son could give her. He needed to receive. She did, too. She wanted to give. Did he?
Like all painters, Santiago the Younger, when he could still move freely, liked to step back from his paintings, to see them at a certain distance.
“I look for them as if they were lovers, but I re-create them as ghosts.” He tried to laugh.
She answered those words in silence later on, when Santiago could no longer get out of bed, and she had to lie down next to him to console him, to be literally at his side, supporting him. “I don’t want to be deprived of you.”
She didn’t want to be deprived, she meant, of that part of herself that was her son.
“Tell me your plans, your ideas.”
“You speak as if I were going to live a hundred years.”
“A century fits into a day of success,” whispered Laura, with no fear of banality.
Santiago simply laughed. “Is being successful worthwhile?”
“No,” she surmised. “Sometimes absence, silence are better.”
Laura was not going to compile a list of things a boy of great talent, dying at the age of twenty-six, was not going to do, to know, to enjoy. The young painter was like a frame without a painting which she would have liked to fill with her own experiences and with their shared promises, she would have liked to bring her son to Detroit to see Diego’s mural in the Arts Institute, she would have liked both of them to go to the legendary museums, the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Mauritshuis, the Prado.
She would have wanted …
Sleeping with you, entering your bed, extracting from nearness and dreams the forms, visions, challenges, the very strength I wish I could give you when I touch you, when I whisper in your ear, your final weakness threatens me more than it does you and I want to test your strength, tell you that your strength and mine depend on each other, that my caresses, Santiago, are your caresses, those you didn’t have, will never have, accept my nearness, accept the body of your mother, do nothing, son, I bore you, I carried you inside me, I am you and you are me, what I do is what you would do, your heat is my heat, my body is your body, do nothing, I’ll do it for you, say nothing, I’ll say it for you, forget this night, I’ll remember it always for you.
“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”
“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”
“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”
They wouldn’t say it, ever. Santiago loved as if he were dreaming. Laura dreamed as if she were loving. Their bodies became again as they were at the beginning, the seed of each one in the womb of the other. She was reborn in him. He killed her in one single night. She did not want to think about anything. She allowed fugitive, whirling, lost images to pass through her mind, the perfume of the rain in Xalapa, the tree of smoke in Catemaco, the jewel-encrusted goddess in El Zapotal, the bloody hands washing themselves in the river, the green
stick in the desert, the araucaria tree in Veracruz, the river flowing with a shriek into the Gulf, the five chairs on the balcony opposite Chapultepec, the six place settings and the napkins rolled up in their silver rings, the doll Li Po, Santiago her brother sinking dead into the sea, the severed fingers of Grandmother Cosima, the arthritic fingers of Aunt Hilda trying to play the piano, the ink-stained fingers of the poet aunt, Virginia, the urgent busy fingers of Mutti Leticia preparing a
huachinango
in the Catemaco, the Veracruz, the Xalapa kitchens, Auntie’s swollen feet dancing
danzones
in the Plaza de Armas, Orlando’s open arms inviting her to waltz at the hacienda, the love of Jorge, love, love …
stick in the desert, the araucaria tree in Veracruz, the river flowing with a shriek into the Gulf, the five chairs on the balcony opposite Chapultepec, the six place settings and the napkins rolled up in their silver rings, the doll Li Po, Santiago her brother sinking dead into the sea, the severed fingers of Grandmother Cosima, the arthritic fingers of Aunt Hilda trying to play the piano, the ink-stained fingers of the poet aunt, Virginia, the urgent busy fingers of Mutti Leticia preparing a
huachinango
in the Catemaco, the Veracruz, the Xalapa kitchens, Auntie’s swollen feet dancing
danzones
in the Plaza de Armas, Orlando’s open arms inviting her to waltz at the hacienda, the love of Jorge, love, love …
“Thank you. Didn’t you know?”
“What else? Something else.”
“Don’t leave the birdcages open.”
“They’d come back. They are good and loving birds.”
“But cats aren’t like that.”
She hugged him tight. She did not close her eyes, hugging her son. She looked around, the white frames, the already finished paintings leaning one against the other like sleeping infantrymen, an army of colors, a parade of possible looks that would be able or never would be able to give their momentary life to the canvas, each one the owner of a double existence, that of being looked at and not.
“I dreamed about what happens to the paintings when they lock up the museums and they’re left alone all night.”
That was Santiago the Younger’s theme. The naked couples that look at each other and never touch, as if they knew, modestly, they were being looked at. The bodies in his paintings were not beautiful, not classical, they had a certain emaciated, even demonic aspect. They were a temptation, not that of coupling but that of being seen, surprised, in the moment of constituting themselves as a couple. That was their beauty, expressed in pale gray or very tenuous rose tones, where the flesh stood out like an intrusion unforeseen by God, as if in the artistic world of Santiago, God had not conceived of this intruder, his rival, the human being.
“Don’t think I’m just resigning myself to not living. I’m not. resigning
myself to not working. I don’t know, for days now, the sun hasn’t shone on my head in the morning as it used to before. Would you open the curtains, Mama?”
myself to not working. I don’t know, for days now, the sun hasn’t shone on my head in the morning as it used to before. Would you open the curtains, Mama?”
After opening the curtains so the light would come in, Laura turned around to look at Santiago’s bed. Her son was no longer there. All that remained was a silent lament floating in the air.
Lanzarote: 1949
Y
OU SHOULDN’T HAVE. COME HERE. This island doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage in the African desert. It’s a stone raft detached from Spain. It’s a Mexican volcano that forgot to erupt. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there. By steamer, you will approach a black fortress that leaps out of the Atlantic like a phantom far from Europe. Lanzarote is the stone ship anchored precariously off the sands of Africa, but the stone of the island is hotter than the desert sun.
OU SHOULDN’T HAVE. COME HERE. This island doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage in the African desert. It’s a stone raft detached from Spain. It’s a Mexican volcano that forgot to erupt. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there. By steamer, you will approach a black fortress that leaps out of the Atlantic like a phantom far from Europe. Lanzarote is the stone ship anchored precariously off the sands of Africa, but the stone of the island is hotter than the desert sun.
Everything you see is false, it is our daily cataclysm, it happened last night, it hasn’t had time yet to make itself into history, and it will disappear at any moment, just as it appeared, in the twinkling of an eye. You look at the mountains of fire that dominate the landscape and remember that barely two centuries ago they didn’t exist. The highest and strongest peaks on the island were just born and they were born destroying, burying the humble vineyards in molten lava, and no sooner had the first eruption subsided a hundred years ago, than the
volcano yawned again and with its breath burned all the plants and buried all the roofs.
volcano yawned again and with its breath burned all the plants and buried all the roofs.
You shouldn’t have come here. What brought you to me again? Nothing of this is real. How could a mountain range of sand and a lake of azure blue stronger than the blue of sea or sky fit within a crater under the sea? How I’d love to meet you under the waves, where you and I could again become like two ghosts of the ocean that was always separating us. Are we going to reunite now, you and I, on a tremulous island where fire is buried alive?
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.”
,” 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?
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.
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.
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 …
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?”
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.
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 of God.
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 of 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.”
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.
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?
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 loss 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.
Europe, licking its wounds after losing the war with the United States and the final loss 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?”
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?”
She embraced him, sank to her knees and embraced his legs, leaning her head against his knees, flushing with shame for the moisture in his cheap gray slacks—they seemed worn out by washing, as if there hadn’t been time for them to dry and they still smelled of urine, and the shirt too, washed quickly and put right back on because it was the only one he had, and the bad odors hadn’t gone away, the smell of an earthly body, an animal body, tired of expelling humors, shit, semen. Jorge my love, my Jorge, I don’t know how to kiss you.
“I just don’t have the strength to go on scratching at my roots. The Spanish and Spanish American malady. Who are we?”
She begged his pardon for having provoked him.
“No, it’s all right. Get up. Let me get a good look at you. You look so clean, so clean …”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
By now Laura can’t remember how her lover is standing, with his moist freshly washed old clothes, with a smell of defeat no soap can purge. By now she can’t remember if he is standing or sitting on the cot, if he is looking down or staring out the door. At the ceiling. Or into her eyes.
“What am I trying to tell you? What do you know?”
“I know your biography. From the aristocracy to the Republic to defeat to exile and from there to pride. The pride of Lanzarote.”
“The pride of Lucifer.” Jorge laughed. “You leave a lot of openings, you know?”
“I know. The pride of Lanzarote? That isn’t an opening. It’s right here. It’s today.”
“I clean the monks’ latrines and see impossible drawings on the walls. As if a repentant painter had begun something he never finished
and, because he knew it, chose the humblest and most humiliating place in the monastery to begin an enigma. Because what I see or imagine is a mystery, and the place of the mystery is the very spot where the good brothers, whether they want to or not, shit and piss. They are body, and their bodies remind them they can never be wholly spirit, as they’d like. Wholly.”
and, because he knew it, chose the humblest and most humiliating place in the monastery to begin an enigma. Because what I see or imagine is a mystery, and the place of the mystery is the very spot where the good brothers, whether they want to or not, shit and piss. They are body, and their bodies remind them they can never be wholly spirit, as they’d like. Wholly.”
“Do you think they know? Are they that naive?”
“They have faith.”
God became flesh, said Maura in a kind of controlled exaltation, God stripped Himself of His holy impunity by making Himself man in Christ. That made God as fragile as the human beings who could recognize themselves in Him.
“Is that why we killed Him?”
“Christ became a man so we would recognize ourselves in Him.”
But to be worthy of Christ, we had to sink lower so we wouldn’t be more than what He is.
“A monk should think that when he’s shitting. Jesus did the same, but I do it with more shame. That’s faith. God’s in the pots and pans, St. Teresa said.”
“Was He looking for it?” asked Laura. “Looking for faith?”
“Christ had to abandon an invisible holiness in order to become flesh. Why ask me to become a saint—so I can incarnate a bit of Jesus’ holiness?”
“Do you know what I thought when my son Santiago died? Is this the greatest sorrow in my life?”
“Did you think it was? Or did you wonder if it was? … I’m sorry, Laura.”
“No. I thought that if God takes something from us, it’s because He gave up everything.”
“His own son, Jesus?”
“Yes. can’t help thinking this ever since I lost Santiago. He was the second, did you know? My brother and my son. Both. Santiago the Elder and Santiago the Younger. Both. You’re sorry? Imagine how I feel!”
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