Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Surrounded by its twelfth-century wall, the town of Santa Fe de Palencia has a unique center, a kind of urban navel from which flows the entire history of a community. Its main plaza is a bullring, an arena of very yellow sand waiting for the other color of the Spanish flag to be poured onto it, a plaza that instead of having seats on the sunny or shady side is surrounded by houses with huge shuttered windows, open on Sundays so that people can watch the bullfights, which give vitality and strength to the town. There is only one way into the large, enclosed plaza.

The three Republican soldiers have entered this singular town center, where the mayor, Don Alvaro Méndez, a Communist, is waiting for them. He is not uniformed, but wears a short vest over his big belly, a collarless shirt, and spurless boots. His most attractive feature is his face, with its bushy eyebrows, arched like the entrance to a mosque; his eyes have been veiled for some time by aging eyelids, one would have to search for the hard, secret shine in the depths of that invisible gaze. The faces of the three soldiers are, in contrast, open, frank, and astonished. The old man reads them and says I’m only doing my duty, you saw the Roman gate? it’s not a party question, it’s a matter of law, this city is legal because it is Republican, it isn’t a city in revolt on the side of fascism, it’s a city governed legitimately by an elected Communist mayor, I, Alvaro Méndez, who must do his duty, no matter how terrible and painful it may be.

“It’s unjust,” said Basilio Baltazar through his tightly closed teeth.

“I’ll tell you something, Basilio, and I’m not going to repeat it,” said the mayor, standing in the center of the bullring with its yellow sand and closed windows, with curious women in black peering through the cracks. “There is fidelity in obeying just orders, but there is a higher fidelity in obeying unjust orders.”

“No.” Basilio held back the shout boiling in his throat. “The greater fidelity consists in disobeying unjust orders.”

She betrayed us, said the mayor. She informed the enemy about Republican positions in the mountains. Look at those lights up there, look at those fires on the mountains, flying from peak to peak, fed by all of us in the name of all of us, think of those fires as instant moons, those torches of wood and hay, giving birth to others, a pelt of fire: well, those are the fiery fences of the Republic, the wall we’ve imposed on ourselves to protect us from the fascists. “She told them.” The mayor’s voice trembled with a rage more fiery than the peaks. “She told them that if they put out those lights we’d be fooled and lower our guard. She told them to put out the fires on the mountains, kill the Republican torch bearers one by one, and then you’ll be able to take this seduced, defenseless town in the name of Franco, our savior.”

His snakelike eyelids interrogated each of the soldiers. He wanted to be fair. He listened to the arguments. A noisily opened balcony window and a heartrending shriek interrupted them. A woman appeared with a moon-colored face and eyes the color of blackberries, dressed all in black, her head covered, her skin worn transparent by use, like a sheet of paper on which more has been erased than written. Méndez, mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia, paid no attention. He repeated: Speak up.

“Save her in the name of honor,” said Jorge Maura.

“I love Pilar,” Basilio Baltazar shouted, more loudly than the woman on the balcony “Save her in the name of love.”

“She must die in the name of justice.” The mayor planted his hoot on the immaculate sand and stared, looking for support, at the Communist Vidal.

“Save her despite politics,” he said.

“Unfavorable winds.” The old man tried to smile, but he remained, ultimately, hieratic. “Unfavorable.”

Then the woman on the balcony shouted, Have pity! And the mayor told everyone not to confuse his obligation to justice with his wife’s anger, and the woman shouted again from the balcony, You only have obligations as a mayor and a Communist? And the old man again ignored her, speaking only to Vidal, Baltazar, and Maura, I don’t obey my feelings, I obey Spain and the Party.

“Have you no compassion?” shouted the woman.

“It’s your fault, Clemencia, you educated her to be a Catholic against my wishes,” the mayor answered finally, turning his back to the woman on the balcony.

“Don’t embitter what is left of my life, Alvaro.”

“Bah! Family discord doesn’t take precedence over law.”

“Sometimes discord is born not of hatred but of too much love,” shouted Clemencia, removing the shawl covering her head and revealing her tousled white hair and her ears overflowing with prophecies. “Our daughter stands exposed, at the city gates. What are you going to do with her?”

“She’s no longer your daughter. She’s my wife,” said Basilio Baltazar.

That night, someone let the oxen into the Santa Fe plaza. The fires on the mountain began to go out.

“The sky is full of lies,” said Clemencia in an opaque voice before closing the balcony shutters.

(“I must tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

There seemed to be only one theme at the next meeting in the Café de Paris: violence, its origins, its gestation, its offspring, its relationship with good and evil. Maura espoused the most difficult argument, that it is impossible to ascribe all evil to the fascists, let’s not forget Republican violence, the assassination of Cardinal Soldevila in Zaragoza by the anarchists, the Socialists beating to death members of Franco’s Falange as they exercised on the grounds of the Casa de Campo in 1934—they poked out their eyeballs and urinated in the sockets, that’s what our side did, comrades.

“They were ours.”

“And didn’t the fascists later on kill the girl who urinated on their dead?”

“That’s my argument, comrades,” said Maura, taking the hand of his Mexican lover. “The escalation of Spanish violence always takes us to the war of all against all.”

“How right the Catalan escamots were in 1934, when they cut the railroad lines to separate Catalonia from Spain forever.” Basilio stared at the joined hands of Jorge and Laura—“Good for you!”—but he felt pain and envy.

Vidal roared with a laugh as woolly as his sweater. “So we all kill one another behind closed doors in a jolly regional style while the world jerks off!”

Jorge let go of Laura’s hand and threw his arm over Vidal’s shoulder. I’m not forgetting the mass murders perpetrated by Franco’s people in Badajoz, the murder of Federico Garc a Lorca, or Guernica. That, comrades, was my prologue.

“Friends, forget the political violence of the past. Forget Spain’s supposed political fatality. This is a war, but it isn’t even ours; it’s been taken away from us; we’re nothing but a rehearsal. Our enemies come from outside Spain; Franco is a puppet, but Hitler, unless we stop him, will conquer the world. Remember, I studied in Germany and saw how the Nazis organized. Forget our miserable Spanish violence. Just wait and see real violence. The violence of evil. Evil, that’s right, with a capital E, organized like a factory in the Ruhr Valley. Our violence is going to look like flamenco dancing or bullfighting,” said Jorge Maura.

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

“And you, Laura D az? You haven’t said a word.”

She looked down for an instant and then gazed tenderly at each one. Finally, she spoke: “I really enjoy seeing that the hardest fought discussion among men always reveals what they have in common.”