Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

When the summer rains soaked the garden and seeped through the house walls, leaving obscure medallion-shaped stains on the skin of the adobe, Harry Jaffe felt he was suffocating and asked Laura Díaz, please, read the pages about John Garfield.

“But there were accused people who didn’t name names and didn’t let themselves become anguished or depressed, isn’t that true, Harry?”

“You met them in Cuernavaca. Some of them were among the Hollywood Ten. And yes, it’s true they had the courage not to talk or let themselves be scared, but most of all they had the courage not to fall into despair, not to commit suicide, not to die. Are they better people for that? Another pal from the Group Theatre, the actor J. Edward Bromberg, asked to be excused from appearing before the committee because of his recent heart attacks. Congressman Francis E. Walker, one of the worst inquisitors, told him that Communists were very skillful at presenting excuses signed by doctors — who no doubt were at the very least red sympathizers. Eddie Bromberg died in London three years ago, Laura. Sometimes, after he was blacklisted, he’d call me to say, Harry, there are always guys standing outside my house, day and night. They take turns, but there’re always two of them in plain sight next to the streetlight, while I spy on them spying on me. I’m constantly waiting for the phone to ring; I never leave the telephone, Harry, they might call me to the committee again, they might call to tell me the role they promised has gone to someone else, or the other way around, they might call me to tempt me with a part on condition that I cooperate, that is, squeal, Harry, this happens five or six times a day, I’m always next to the telephone, tempted, tearing myself to pieces, should I talk or not, should I think about my career or not, I won’t talk, Harry, no, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, Harry, but most of all, Harry, I didn’t want to hurt myself, my loyalty to my comrades was loyalty to myself. I didn’t save them or myself.”

“And you, Harry, are you going to write about yourself?”

“I really feel sick, Laura, give me a beer. Be a good girl …”

Another morning — the parrots were screeching in the sunlight, showing off their crests and wings as if they were announcing a bulletin, good or bad news — as he ate his breakfast Harry answered Laura.

“You only told me about the people who were destroyed for not talking. But you said that others saved themselves, came out stronger for keeping their mouths shut,” Laura persisted.

How can there be innocence when no one’s guilty? quoted Harry. “Dalton Trumbo said that at the beginning of the witch-hunt. During the witch-hunt, he outsmarted the inquisitors, wrote scripts under pseudonyms, won an Oscar under a pseudonym, and the Academy almost shit in its pants it was so angry when Trumbo revealed he was the author. And when it’s all over, I suspect it’ll be Trumbo who will say there were neither heroes nor villains, saints nor devils, only victims, Laura. The day will come when all the accused will be rehabilitated and celebrated as cultural heroes, and the accusers will be accused and degraded as they justly deserve. But Trumbo was right. We’ll all have been victims.”

“Even the inquisitors, Harry?”

“Yes. Even their children change their names. They don’t want to admit they’re the children of the mediocrities who drove hundreds of innocent people to sickness and suicide.”

“Even the informers, Harry?”

“They’re the worst victims. They have the mark of Cain branded on their foreheads.”

Harry took a knife from the fruit bowl and cut his forehead.

And Laura watched with horror but didn’t stop him.

“They have to cut off a hand and cut out their tongues.”

And Harry put the knife in his mouth, and Laura screamed and stopped him, snatched the knife out of his hand and embraced him sobbing.

“And they’re sentenced to exile and death,” murmured Harry, almost inaudible, into Laura’s ear.

Early on, Laura had learned to read Harry’s thoughts just as he’d learned to read hers. They were helped by the punctual round of tropical sounds. She’d known it since she was a girl in Veracruz, but had forgotten it when she lived in Mexico City, where noises are accidental, unforeseen, intrusive, shrieking like evil fingernails scratching a school blackboard. But in the tropics the chirping of birds announces the dawn and their symmetrical flight the dusk, nature fraternizes with the church bells ringing matins and vespers, vanilla trees perfume the ambient air when we give it our intermittent attention, and the clusters of harvested beans give an air at once newborn and refined to the cupboards where they’re stored. When Harry sprinkled pepper on his huevos rancheros at breakfast, Laura would glance at the flowering peppers in the garden, yellow jewels set in a fragile airy crown the color of afternoon. There were no delays in the tropics. They went from the garden to the table killing scorpions, first in the house, then hunting preventively in the garden, later under stones. They were white, and Harry laughed as he stepped on them.

“My wife used to tell me to take some sun once in a while. Your stomach is as white as a fish fillet before it’s fried. That’s how these scorpions are.”

“Fish belly,” Laura said, laughing.

“Get out of this fix, she’d tell me, you’re not part of it, you don’t believe in it, your friends aren’t worth all that. And then she’d go back to her usual theme. Your problem isn’t that you’re a Communist, Harry, it’s that you’ve lost your talent.”

And despite everything, he finally did sit down to write, for when all was said and done, he needed to write, and in Tepoztlán he began to do so more regularly, beginning with his mini-biographies of victims like Garfield and Bromberg, who’d been his friends. Why didn’t he write about his enemies, the inquisitors? Why did he write only about the wounded and destroyed people like Garfield and Bromberg, but not about the solid individuals who overcame the drama, didn’t cry, fought, resisted, and, above all, made fun of the monstrous stupidity of the whole trial? Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman … those who came to Mexico, passed through Cuernavaca or stayed there. Why was it that Harry Jaffe said almost nothing about them? Why didn’t he include them in the biographies he was writing in Tepoztlán? Above all, why did he never mention the worst of the lot, the ones who did squeal, who did name names — Edward Dmytryk, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, Larry Parks?

Harry used his shoe to smash a scorpion.

“Evil insects make their nests in the most hostile places and live where there seems to be no life. That’s how Tom Paine described prejudice.”

Laura tried to imagine what Harry was thinking, all the things he didn’t say to her that were passing through his feverish eyes. She didn’t know that Harry was doing the same thing, thinking he could read Laura’s thoughts. He’d watch her from the bed as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror every morning. He could compare the still-young woman he’d met two years before, emerging from the swimming pool framed in bougainvillea, with the fifty-five-year-old lady whose hair, getting grayer and grayer, she arranged simply, in a bun at the nape of her neck, emphasizing her clear forehead and her angular features, her fine, large nose mounted on an easel, her lips as thin as those of a Gothic statue. And all saved by the intelligence and fire of her amber eyes glittering in their shadowy depths.

He also watched her doing the household chores, taking care of the kitchen, making the bed, washing the dishes, preparing the meals, taking long showers, sitting on the toilet, discontinuing the use of sanitary napkins, suffering hot flashes, cuddling up to sleep in a fetal position, while he, Harry, rested straight as a board, until one day they simply exchanged positions, and he slept like a fetus and she stretched out, rigid, like a governess and a child …