Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Lower your voice. What’s wrong with you today?”

“Well,” answered Maura intensely, “I’m looking at that poor, bare foot Indian in a cloak, and I’m seeing him at the same time wearing a striped uniform with a green triangle on his chest because he’s a common criminal and a red triangle because he’s a political agitator and a pink triangle because he’s queer and a black triangle because he’s antisocial and a Star of David because he’s a Jew …”

Her name is Raquel Mendes-Alemán. They were both students in Freiburg. They had the privilege of studying with Edmund Husserl, not only a great teacher but a philosophic comrade, a presence who guided his students’ independent thought. The sympathetic relationship between Raquel and Jorge crystallized instantly because she was a descendant of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. She spoke the Spanish of the fifteenth century, and her parents read Sephardic newspapers written in the Spanish of the Archpriest of Hita and Fernando de Rojas and sang Hebrew songs in honor of the Spanish land. They had, as Sephardic Jews did, the keys of their old Castilian houses hanging from a nail in their new German houses, in expectation of the desired day — after four and a half centuries — of their return to the Iberian Peninsula.

“Spain,” prayed Raquel’s parents and relatives at night, “Spain, ungrateful mother, you expelled your Jewish children who loved you so much, but we don’t hold that against you, you are our beloved mother and we don’t want to die before returning one day to you, beloved Spain.”

Raquel did not join in the prayer because she’d made a drastic decision the year she matriculated at Freiburg. She converted to Catholicism. She explained it to Jorge Maura:

“I was severely criticized. Even my own family criticized me. They thought I’d become a Catholic so as to avoid the stigma of being a Jew. The Nazis were organizing to seize power. In Weimar Germany, so impoverished and humiliated, there was no doubt who was going to prevail. Germans wanted a strong man for their weak country. I explained that I was not trying to avoid any stigma. It was entirely the opposite. It was a challenge. It was a way of saying to the world, to my family, to the Nazis: Look, we are all Semites. I’m becoming a Catholic because of a fundamental disagreement with my parents. I think the Messiah has already come. His name is Jesus Christ. They still await Him, and that wait blinds them and condemns them to be persecuted, because he who awaits the coming of the Redeemer is always a revolutionary, an element of disorder and violence. On the barricades like Trotsky, camera in hand like Eisenstein, in the classroom like Husserl, the Jew upsets and transforms, disturbs, revolutionizes … They can’t avoid it. It is in their hope of the Redeemer. But if you admit, as I have, Jorge, that the Redeemer has already come into the world, you can change the world in His name without paralyzing yourself with millennial expectations, with hopes that the Second Coming will change everything the moment it happens.”

“You talk as if the heirs of Jewish messianic thought were modern progressives, even Marxists,” exclaimed Jorge.

“They are, don’t you realize that?” said Raquel. Her voice was urgent. “And that’s fine. They’re the ones who await the millennial change, and in the meantime their impatience leads them to discover relativity, film, phenomenology, on the one hand, but on the other it induces them to commit all sorts of crime in the name of the promise. Without realizing it, they are executioners of the very future they desire so intensely.”

“But the worst enemies of the Jews are these Nazis walking the streets in their swastikas and brown uniforms.”

“It’s because there can’t be two chosen people. It’s either the Jews or the Germans.”

“But the Jews aren’t killing Germans, Raquel.”

“There’s the difference. The Hebrew messianic spirit sublimates itself creatively in art, science, philosophy. It becomes creative because otherwise it’s defenseless. The Nazis have no creative talent. They have only a genius for death, they’re the geniuses of death. But fear the day when Israel decides to arm herself and loses her creative genius in the name of military success.”

“Perhaps the Nazis won’t allow them, as a nation, any other option. Perhaps the Jews will tire of being history’s eternal victims. Sacrificial lambs.”

“I pray they never become anyone’s executioners. I pray the Jews will never have their Jews.”

“I hope you realize that the Catholic Church is not innocent of crimes, Raquel. Remember, I’m a Spaniard, and you, in your way, are, too.”

“I prefer the cynicism of the Catholic Church to the pharisaism of the Communist Church. We Catholics judge …”

“Bravo for the obsessive plural. I kiss you, my love.”

“Don’t be a clown, Jorge. I’m telling you, we judge the crimes of the Church because they’re betraying a promise already carried out, an obligation: the imitation of Christ. The Communists can’t judge the crimes of their church because they feel it would betray a promise that is to be carried out in the future. That is still not incarnate.”

“Are you planning to enter a religious order? Am I going to have to become a Don Juan to seduce you in a convent?”

“Don’t joke. And keep your hands to yourself, Don Juan.”

“No, I’m not joking. If I’m following you correctly, this Christian purity that requires obedience to Jesus’ teachings can only be put into practice if you withdraw to a convent. Get thee to a nunnery, Rachel!”

“No, it must be practiced in the world. Besides, how could I become a nun after knowing you?”

Together they’d taken Husserl’s courses with an almost sacred devotion. They studied with the master but without realizing his power, because Husserl guided them so discreetly, keeping them independent of him, motivated by him but free thanks to the wings he gave them.

“Let’s see now, George, what does Husserl mean when he talks about regional psychology?”

“I think he’s referring to the way of being concrete that emotions, acts, and understanding have. What he’s asking us to do is to suspend our opinion as long as we don’t see all those proofs as original phenomena — in flesh and bone, as he says. First we open our eyes wide to see what’s around us in our so-called region, there, where we really are. Philosophy comes later.”

They walked a lot at night through the old university city right up to where the Black Forest begins, exploring the walls of the Gothic cathedral, getting lost in the medieval landscapes, crossing the bridges over the Dreisam as it rushes to join the Rhine.

Freiburg was like an ancient stone queen with her feet in the water and a crown of pines. The two students strolled around it, elaborating and reelaborating the lessons of the day, arm in arm at first, later hand in hand, astonished that Husserl himself was elaborating. He was nervous and noble, with a very high forehead that cleared the way for a concerned brow and menacing eyebrows, his straight nose sniffing out ideas, and his long beard and mustache covering wide lips, as wide as those of some philosophic animal, a mutant that had emerged from the nourishing water of the first creation onto an unknown land, committed to enunciating more ideas than those that fit in a speech. Husserl’s words could not keep pace with his thought.

Everyone called him “the master.” Naked in the eyes of his students, he proposed to them a philosophy without dogma or conclusions, open at all times to rectification and to the criticism of the professor and his students. Everyone knew that the Husserl of Freiburg was not the Husserl of Halle, where he had invented phenomenology on the basis of a simple proposal: first we accept experience, then we think. Nor was he the Husserl of Göttingen, who had focused his attention on that which has yet to be interpreted , because in it the mystery of things might reside. He was the Husserl of Freiburg, Jorge and Raquel’s teacher, a man for whom humanity’s moral freedom depended on one thing: the vindication of life in the face of everything that threatens it. He was the Husserl who’d seen Europe collapse during the Great War.