Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

The three of them blushed simultaneously. Basilio Baltazar saved the situation, which she had not fully understood. “You two are very much in love. How do you measure love in the context of all that’s taking place?”

Vidal joined in. “Rephrase the question like this: Does only personal happiness count and not the disaster about to engulf millions of people?”

“I’m asking a different question, Mr. Vidal,” Laura pointed out.

“Just Vidal. How formal you Mexicans are.”

“Well then, Mr. Just Vidal. Can the love two people share make up for all the unhappiness in the world?”

The three men exchanged a look of modesty and compassion.

“Yes, I suppose there are ways of redeeming the world, whether we’re as solitary as our friend Basilio or as affiliated as I am,” Vidal responded, with mixed humility and arrogance.

(“I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

What the Communist said at the end, Laura, Jorge said to her as the two of them strolled alone along Avenida Cinco de Mayo, is true but troubling.

She told him he seemed reticent — eloquent, of course, but reticent almost always. He was a different Jorge Maura, another one, and she liked him, she swore she did, but she wanted to pause for a moment on the Maura in the café, understand his silence, share the reasons for his silence.

“You know that none of us dares express his true doubts,” countered Maura, walking toward the Venetian-style building that was Mexico City’s main post office. “The Communists were the strongest because they have the fewest doubts. But that’s why it’s easier for them to commit historical crimes. Don’t misunderstand me. Nazis and Communists are not the same thing. The difference is that Hitler believes in evil, evil is his gospel — conquest, genocide, racism. But Stalin must say he believes in the good, in the freedom of labor, in the disappearance of the state, and in giving to each according to his needs. He recites the gospel of the civil god.”

“Is that why he fools so many people?”

“Hitler recites the gospel of the devil. He commits his crimes in the name of evil: that’s his horror. It’s never been seen before. Those who follow him must share his malevolent will, all of them — Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, aristocrats like Papen, low-class scum like Ernst Röhm, Prussian Junkers like Keitel. Stalin commits his crimes in the name of the good, and I don’t know if that isn’t an even greater horror, because those who follow him act in good faith; they’re not fascists but people who are usually good, and when they realize what the Stalinist horror is, Stalin himself eliminates them. Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, all the comrades of the heroic period. Those who refused to follow Stalin because they preferred to follow true Communism all the way to exile or death: aren’t they heroes — Bukharin, Trot sky, Kamenev? Name one Nazi who’s abandoned Hitler out of fidelity to National Socialism.”

“And what about you, Jorge, my little Spanish boy?”

“Me, Laura, my little Mexican girl, I’m a Spanish intellectual and, if you like, a gentleman, an aristó, of the kind Robespierre had guillotined.”

“You have a divided soul, my little Spanish gentleman.”

“No, I certainly comprehend the Nazi evil as well as the Stalinist betrayal. But I’m also conscious of the nobility of the Spanish Republic, how it is simply trying to make Spain into a normal modern country, with mutual respect, getting along with one another, and trying to solve our problems, which, damn it all, have been with us since the Goths. And to that essential nobility of the Republic, I sacrifice my doubts, Laura my love. Between the Nazi evil and the Communist betrayal, I’ll choose the Republican heroism of that young gringo (as you call them), that young Jim, who came to the Jarama to die for us.”

“Jorge, I’m not an idiot. Someone else suffered for the three of you. Something else links you, Baltazar, and Vidal.”

(“I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

Standing with her back to the wall that ran around Santa Fe de Palencia, wrapped in a mantle of savage black skins, her blond hair tossed by the swirling wind from the mountain, Pilar Méndez watched the hilltop bonfires go out one by one. She did not smile to affirm her triumph — treason to her father, victory for her, strengthening her conviction that to help her side was like helping God — though her spirits sank when she heard the footsteps of the three Republican soldiers advancing from the Roman gate to that space of restless dust and bellowing oxen which she, Pilar Méndez, occupied in the name of her God, beyond any political faith, because the Nationals and the Falange were with God and they, the others, her father, Don Alvaro, and the three soldiers, were victims of the devil without knowing it, thinking they were on the good side, it was they, all of them, the reds, who burned down churches and shot priests and raped nuns: Domingo, Vidal, Jorge Maura, and Basilio Baltazar, her love, her burning tenderness, the man in her life, her husband already without any need of sacraments, walking through the dust and the oxen and the wind and the dead fires toward her, the woman standing fast against the wall of the dying city wrapped in a long mantle of dead black animals, a Spanish blonde, a Visigothic goddess with blue eyes and a mane as yellow as the sand in the bullring.

What were these three men going to say to her?

What could they say?

Not a word. Only the sight of Basilio Baltazar like a double arrow of life’s inseparable pain and pleasure. Her lover felt like a price, the price one paid to invert the order of life, which was love, thought Pilar Méndez as she watched the three men approach.

Basilio knelt and wrapped his arms around her knees, endlessly repeating my love my love my cunt my tits don’t take anything away my treasure, Pilar I adore you.

“You, Domingo Vidal, Communist enemy?” asked Pilar to the other man, to strengthen herself against Basilio Baltazar’s amatory grief.

Vidal nodded his shaved head, his militia cap in his hands, as if Pilar were the Virgin of Sorrows.

“You, Jorge Maura, aristocrat traitor, gone over to the reds?”

Jorge embraced her, and she howled like an animal, yet an animal capable of repugnance, but Maura said, I’m not letting you go, you must understand, you’re sentenced to death, understand me? you’re to be executed at dawn, your own father has ordered you shot, your father the mayor your father Alvaro Méndez, he’s going to kill you despite all our begging, despite your mother …

Pilar Méndez’s insane laugh pulled a horrified Baltazar to his feet. My mother? laughed Pilar like some wild animal, a most beautiful hyena, a Medusa without a gaze, my mother, is there anyone who desires my death more than my badly named mother Clemencia, the pig, she who made me devout until death, she who implanted the idea of sin and hell in me? that woman doesn’t want my life, she wants my martyr’s death, the death of a virgin who believes, the fool, virgin, Basilio, you hear her, Basilio, what do you win by the fact that Clemencia my mother saw us the afternoon you tore out my virginity, you nibbled it bite by bite, you spit out my bloody membrane as if it were snot or a rotten host, Basilio, remember? and you penetrated me the way a wolf penetrates a she-wolf from behind, up the ass, without seeing my face; that you remember, in the old house without furniture where you took me, my adored love, my only man, you think you have the right to save me when my own mother wants me dead, a martyr for the Movement, a saint who saves her own conscience, Clemencia the well named, the mother who hates me because I didn’t marry as she wished, I gave myself to a poor boy with suspicious ideas, my handsome, adored Basilio Baltazar, why have you come here, what are you and your friends trying to do, you’ve gone mad, you don’t know you’re all my enemies, you don’t know I’m against you, I’d have all of you shot in the name of Spain and Franco, I don’t want thorns to grow on the old paths of Spanish death, I want to wash them away with my blood …