Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Well, my hidalgo, won’t my presence annoy your comrades?”

“I want you to be there, Laura.”

“At least you could warn them.”

“They already know you’re coming with me because you are me and that’s that. And if they don’t understand, they can get lost.”

That afternoon they were going to discuss a theme: the role of the Communist Party in the war. Vidal, Jorge pointed out to Laura as they went into the café, would speak for the Communists and Baltazar for the anarchists. That was arranged.

“And you?”

“Listen to me and decide for yourself.”

The two discussants greeted Laura with open hearts. She was surprised that they both talked of the war as if they were living a year or two before what was currently taking place. The Republic was not only staring defeat in the face. This was defeat. On the other hand, from a distance, Octavio Barreda’s face expressed simple curiosity: who was with that gal Laura Díaz, who’d gone with the Riveras to Detroit when Frida lost the child? Villaurrutia and Gorostiza shrugged.

A dialogue began that Laura could instantly see was scripted or anyway predictable, as if each discussant had a role in a play. But then even this impression had already been determined by what Maura had said. Vidal began, as if following an invisible cue, arguing that the Communists had saved the Republic in 1936 and 1937, that without them Madrid would have fallen in the winter of 1937. Neither the militias nor the people’s army could have withstood the street disorder in Madrid and in the factories, the lack of food and transportation, without the order imposed by the Party.

“You’re forgetting all the others,” Baltazar reminded him. “Those who agreed that the Republic should be saved but who did not agree with you.”

Vidal furrowed his brow but burst into laughter. It wasn’t a matter of disagreement but of doing what was most effective to save the Republic. We Communists imposed order on those who wanted anarchic pluralism in the midst of war, people like you, Baltazar.

“Was a series of small-scale civil wars preferable — anarchists on one side, militiamen on the other, Communists against everyone else, and everyone against us, handing victory to the enemy, who was surely united?” Vidal scratched his unshaven chin.

Basilio Baltazar was silent for a moment, and Laura thought, This man’s trying to remember his lines, but his confusion is authentic and perhaps the mistake is mine, and this has to do with a pain I don’t know.

“But the fact is, we’ve lost,” said the melancholy Basilio after a time.

“We probably would have lost sooner without Communist discipline,” said Vidal in an all too neutral tone, as if he respected Basilio’s absent pain, anticipating the anarchist’s likely question: Are you asking whether we lost because the Communist Party put its interests and the interests of the Soviet Union above those of the collective interests of the Spanish people? Well, I’ll respond by saying that the interests of the Party and the Spanish people coincided, that the Soviet Union helped all of us, not only the Party, with arms and funds. All of us.

“The Communist Party helped Spain,” concluded Vidal, and he started hard at Jorge Maura, as if everyone knew that the next speech was his, except that Basilio Baltazar interrupted on a sudden impulse. Unforeseen by anyone but all the more notable because he asked his question in a hushed tone: “But what was Spain? I say it wasn’t only the Communists, it was us, the anarchists, it was liberals, and parliamentary democrats, but the Party first isolated and then annihilated everyone who wasn’t Communist, then strengthened itself and imposed its will by weakening the other Republicans and mocking any hope that wasn’t the Party’s. They preached unity but practiced division.

“That’s why we lost,” said Baltazar after a pause, his eyes averted, so averted that Laura guessed night away that this was something more personal than a political argument.

“You’re very quiet, Maura,” Vidal turned to say, respecting Baltazar’s silence.

“Well”—Jorge smiled—“I see that I’m drinking coffee and Vidal has a beer, but Basilio has already grown fond of tequila.”

“I don’t want to disguise the fact that we disagree.”

“No,” said Vidal.

“Not at all,” said Baltazar rather quickly.

Maura thought that Spain was more than Spain. He’d always held that opinion. Spain was the rehearsal for the fascists’ general war against the entire world. If Spain fell, Europe and the rest of the world would fall …

(“I have to tell you about Raquel Alemán.”)

“Excuse me for being the devil’s advocate.” Vidal smiled in his peculiar way. He was the first man to enter a café in extremely formal Mexico City wearing a sweater of rough wool, as if he’d just come from a factory. “Just imagine if the revolution had triumphed in Spain. What would have happened then? Well, then Germany would have invaded us,” said the devil.

“But Germany has already invaded us,” Basilio Baltazar interrupted, with his quiet desperation. “Spain is already occupied by Hitler. What are you defending or fearing, comrade?”

“What I fear is a disorganized Republican triumph that only post pones the fascists’ true, permanent triumph.”

Vidal drank his beer like a camel who’s happened on an oasis in the desert.

“You mean that would be better than Franco, so we could fight him later in a general war against the Italians, the Germans, and the Spanish fascists?” Basilio’s tone suggested an even higher level of desperation.

“That’s what my devil says, Basilio. The Nazis fooled the whole world. They’re soaking up all of Europe, and no one puts up any resistance. The French and English are either naive or cowards, and they think that they can negotiate with Hitler. It’s only here that the Nazis don’t fool anyone.”

“Here? In Mexico?” Laura smiled to relieve the tension.

“Pardon, pardon mille fois,” laughed Vidal. “Only in Spain.”

“No, excuse me, please.” Laura smiled again. “I understand your ‘here,’ Mr. Vidal. I would have said ‘here in Mexico’ if I were in Spain.”

“What are you drinking?” Basilio asked her.

“Chocolate. It’s a custom of ours. You grind it first, then add hot water. My Mutti, I mean, my mother …”

“Well.” Vidal went back to his argument. “Let’s have thick chocolate and clear conclusions, if you don’t mind. If the Nazis win in Spain, perhaps Europe will wake up. They’ll see the horror. We already know what it is. Perhaps in order to win the big war we have to lose the battle of Spain so as to alert the world against this evil. Spain, the battle, la petite guerre d’Espagne.” Vidal twisted his lips and suppressed a smile.

Jorge slept badly, talking in his sleep all night, got up to drink water, then to urinate, then to sit in an armchair with a distracted look on his face, observed by naked Laura, also nervous, satisfied after sex with Jorge but sensing with alarm that the sex was not for her, but a way of seeking relief …

“Talk to me. I want to know. I have a right to know, Jorge. I love you. What’s happening? What happened?”

It is a beautiful but harsh nation, as if dying slowly and not wanting anyone to see its agony but at the same time wanting a witness of its mortal beauty. The marks of centuries are stamped on its face, one after another starting with the Iberians, a savage gold helmet with the same value as a clay pot. A Roman gate that endures, eaten away by time and by storms, like a marker of power and a notice of legitimacy. A great medieval city wall, the belt around the Castilian town and its defense against Islam — which nonetheless seeps in everywhere, in the Spanish words for pillow, for terrace, for the bath of cleanliness and for abominable pleasures, for the artichoke whose leaves we pull off like an edible carnation, in the semicircular arches of Christian churches, in the Moorish decoration on doors and windows near the synagogue — empty, ruined, persecuted internally by abandonment and oblivion …