Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Laura Díaz went on wondering about the reason for the distance the exiles had kept from Harry, and why, at the same time, they had accepted him as part of the group. Laura wished he would tell her the truth, refusing to accept third-party versions, but he told her without smiling that if it was true that defeat is an orphan and victory has a hundred fathers, it was also the case that lies have many children but truth lacks progeny. Truth is solitary and celibate, which is why people prefer lies. Lies put us in touch with one another, make us happy, make us participants and accomplices. Truth isolates us and transforms us into islands surrounded by a sea of suspicion and envy. That’s why we play so many lying games. Then we won’t have to suffer the solitude of truth.

“Well, then, Harry, what do we know, you and I, about one another?”

“I respect you. You respect me. Together we’re enough.”

“But we’re not enough for the world.”

“That’s true.”

It was true that Harry was exiled in Mexico, like the Hollywood Ten and the others. Communists or not, it didn’t matter. There were some unique cases, like the old Jewish producer Theodore and his wife, Elsa, who hadn’t been accused of anything and who exiled themselves in solidarity; movies — they said — were made in collaboration, eyes wide open, and if someone was guilty of something or the victim of someone else, then all of them, without exception, had to be guilty.

“Fuenteovejuna, one for all and all for one.” Laura Díaz smiled, remembering Basilio Baltazar.

There were recalcitrant ones who were faithful to Stalin and the U.S.S.R. but disillusioned with Stalinism, who didn’t want to behave like Stalinists in their own land. “If we Communists were to take over in the United States, we too would slander, exile, and kill dissident writers,” said the man with the pompadour.

“Then we wouldn’t be real Communists. We’d be Russian Stalinists. They are products of a religious authoritarian culture that has nothing to do with Marx’s humanitarianism or Jefferson’s democracy,” answered his tall, nearsighted companion.

“Stalin has corrupted the Communist idea forever, don’t kid yourself.”

“I’m going to go on hoping for democratic socialism.”

Laura, who gave neither face nor name to these voices, blamed herself for not doing so. But she was right: similar arguments were repeated by different voices of different men and women who came and went, were there and then disappeared for good, leaving only their voices floating in the bougainvillea of the Bells’ Cuernavaca garden.

There were also ex-Communists who feared ending up like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in the electric chair for imagined crimes. Or for crimes committed by others. Or for crimes that were alleged in an escalation of suspicion. There were Americans on the left, sincere socialists or “liberals,” deeply concerned by the climate of persecution and betrayal that had been created by a legion of disgusting opportunists. There were friends and relatives of McCarthy’s victims who left the United States to express their solidarity.

What there wasn’t in Cuernavaca was a single informer.

Which of all these categories was the right one for the small, bald, thin, badly dressed man sick with emphysema, plagued by contradictions, whom she had come to love with a love so different from the love she had felt for other men, for Orlando, for Juan Francisco, and especially for Jorge Maura?

Contradictions: Harry was dying of emphysema hut didn’t stop smoking four packs of cigarettes a day because he said he needed them to write, it was a habit he couldn’t break. The problem was, he didn’t write anything but went on smoking. He was watching, with a kind of resigned passion, the great sunsets in the Valley of Morelos when the perfume of laurels overwhelmed his dying breaths.

He breathed with difficulty, and the valley air invaded his lungs and destroyed them: there was no room for oxygen in his blood. One day his own breath, the breath of a man named Harry Jaffe, escaped from his lungs as water pours from a broken water main, and it invaded his throat until it suffocated him with the very thing his body needed: air.

“If you listen carefully”—the ghost of a grin appeared on the sick man’s face—“you can hear the sound of my lungs, like the snap, crackle, and pop in that cereal. Right, I’m a bowl of Rice Krispies.” He laughed with difficulty. “But I should be Wheaties, breakfast of champions.”

Contradictions: Does he think they don’t know and they do know but don’t say so? Does he know they know and they think he doesn’t know that?

“How would you write about yourself, Harry?”

“I’d have to write history, words I detest.”

“History, or your history?”

“Personal histories have to be forgotten for real history to emerge.”

“But isn’t real history a totality of personal histories?”

“I can’t answer you. Ask me again some other day.”

She thought about the totality of her carnal loves, Orlando, Juan Francisco, Jorge, and Harry; about her family loves, her father Fernando and her Mutti Leticia, her Aunts María de la O, Virginia, and Hilda; her spiritual passions, the two Santiagos. She stopped, upset and cold at the same time. Her other son, Danton, did not appear on any of those personal altars.

Other times she would say to Harry, I don’t know who your victims were, or if there were victims, Harry, maybe you had no victims, but if you did, let me be one more.

He looked at her incredulously and forced her to see herself in the same way. Laura Díaz had never sacrificed herself for anyone. Laura Díaz was no one’s victim. Which is why she could he Harry’s victim, cleanly, gratuitously.

“Why don’t you write?”

“Maybe it would be better if you’d ask me what it means to write.”

“All right, what does it mean?”

“It means descending into yourself, as if you were a mine, so you can emerge again, Laura, emerge into pure air, with my hands full of myself.”

“What do you bring out of the mine — gold, silver, lead?”

“Memory? The mud of memory?”

“Our daily memory.”

“Give us this day our daily memory. It’s pure shit.”

He would have wanted to die in Spain.

“Why?”

“For symmetry. My life and history would have coincided.”

“I know lots of people who think as you do. History should have stopped in Spain when you were all young and all heroes.”

“Spain was salvation. I don’t want to he saved anymore. I told you that already.”

“Then you should get a grip on what followed Spain. Did the guilt continue then?”

“There were lots of innocents, there and here. I can’t save the martyrs. My friend Jim died at the Jarama. I would have died for him. He was innocent. No one was innocent after that.”

“Why, Harry?”

“Because I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t let anyone else be innocent again.”

“Don’t you want to save yourself?”

“Yes.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

But Harry was destroyed; he didn’t save himself, and wasn’t going to die again on the Jarama front. He was going to die of emphysema, not from a Falangist or Nazi bullet, a bullet with a political purpose, he was going to die of an implosion from the physical or moral bullet he carried within himself. Laura wanted to give a name to the destruction that in the last analysis linked her inexorably to a man who no longer had any other company — even to go on destroying himself, with a cigarette or with repentance — but Laura Díaz.

They had left Cuernavaca because the facts remained, and Harry said he hated things that remained. Why do they accept me at the same time they reject me? asked Laura in Harry’s voice. Because they don’t want to accord me the discriminatory treatment they themselves suffered? Because if I informed secretly they won’t accuse me publicly? Because if I acted in secret, they can’t treat me as an enemy, yet I can’t tell the truth.