Years With Laura Diaz, The (56 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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“Don’t be a fool. I’m giving you permission. Go ahead, go back to
Cuernavaca, ask them about me, tell them I gave you permission, they should tell you the truth.”
“The truth, Harry?”
(The truth is that I love you, Harry, I love you in a different way from the way I once loved my husband, different from the way I loved Orlando Ximénez or even Jorge Maura, I love you the way I loved them, as a woman who lives and sleeps with a man, but with you it’s different, Harry, besides loving you as I loved those men, I love you as I loved my brother Santiago the First and my son Santiago the Second, I love you as if I’d already seen you die, Harry, as I saw my brother, dead and buried with his unfulfilled promise, my son, resigned and handsome, that’s how I love you, Harry, as a son, a brother, and a lover, but with one difference, my love: I loved them as a woman, as a mother, as a lover, and I love you as a bitch, I know neither you nor anyone else will understand me, but I love you as a bitch, I wish I could give birth to you and then bleed to death, that’s the image that makes you different from my husband, my lover, or my sons, my love for you is the love of an animal that would love to put itself in your place and die instead of you, but only at the price of becoming your bitch, I’ve never felt this before and I’d like to explain it to myself and can’t, but that’s how it is and that’s the way it is, Harry, because only now, at your side, I ask myself questions I never asked before, I ask myself if we deserve this love, I ask myself if it’s love that exists, not you and I, and for that reason I’d like to be your animal, your bleeding, dying bitch, to say that love does exist the way a dog and a bitch exist, I want to take your love and mine away from any romantic idealism, Harry, I want to give your body and mine a last chance by rooting them in the lowest ground but also the most concrete and certain ground, where a dog and a bitch sniff, eat, entangle sexually, separate, forget each other, because I’m going to have to live with your memory when you die, Harry, and my memory of you will never be complete because I don’t know what you did during the terror, you won’t tell me, maybe you were a hero and your humility disguises itself in pugnacious honor, like John Garfield, so you won’t tell me your exploits and make your heart sentimental,
you who weep when Libertad Lamarque sings in those movies of hers, but maybe you were a traitor, Harry, a squealer, and that shames you and that’s why you’d like to go back to Spain, be young, die at the side of your young friend Jim in the war and have war and death instead of history and dishonor: which is the truth? I think it’s the first, because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have been accepted in that circle of victims over in Cuernavaca, but it may be the second because they never look at you, never address you, they invite you over and let you sit there, not talking to you but not attacking you, until your chair is like the dock where the accused sits, and you know me and you’re not alone anymore and we should leave Cuernavaca, leave your comrades behind, not hear those arguments repeated ad nauseam anymore.)
“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.

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