Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

The monks understood all that. Was it they who, despite all that, wanted to give him the opportunity of risk, of running into the Guardia Civil outside the monastery, of being recognized or betrayed? Or was it he, Maura, who wanted to tempt fate? If so, why? To exempt the monks from responsibility? Or to put himself at risk, to test himself, and above all to deny himself an undeserved security, he said that day of the meeting with Laura, the day she came to see him on Lanzarote? Security to which neither he nor anyone else had a right.

“Why would I lie to you, my love? I’ve come for you. I’m asking you to come back to Mexico with me. I want you to be safe.”

She wanted to understand him. Very frankly, although who knows if wisely, she’d told him I still love you, I need you more than ever, come back with me, forgive me if I’m offering myself so openly to you like this, but I really need you. I’ve never loved anyone the way I still love you.

Then he looked at her in a way that she understood as sad, but that slowly but surely she began to recognize as distant.

Even so, she felt a movement of rejection in herself when he told her he wanted to be in a place where he would be in danger and at the same time need protection, so as not to feel strong. Danger didn’t strip him of power, but it did give him the power to resist, never to feel comfortable.

It was an involuntary rejection. She was seated on the only chair in the cabin while he remained standing, leaning against a bare wall. Why should she be surprised? There was always something monastic and severe in Jorge Maura, even with the occasional lapses. But the practical and spiritual life of this man she loved was always enveloped, as the earth is wrapped in the atmosphere, by a skin of sensuality. She did not know him without his sex. He looked at her and read her mind.

“Don’t think I’m a saint. I’m a ruined narcissist, which is rather different. This island is both my prison and my refuge.”

“You’re like a king who resents that the world hasn’t understood him,” she said, playing with the box of matches, indispensable in this abandoned space untouched by electricity.

“A wounded king, in any case.”

Was he here out of conviction, because of conversion, because she’d become Catholic, and now he was seeking the way to return to the Church, to believe in God? Raquel and Jorge, the other couple.

Jorge laughed. He hadn’t lost his laugh; he wasn’t a martyred saint in some Zurbarán painting, but that’s exactly what he looked like in this space of chiaroscuro which suggested it, which introduced her into a pictorial world where the central figure personified loss of pride as a means of redemption. Yet at the same time, one could see that redemption was his pride. Does God put up with the saint’s pride? Can there be a heroic saint? If God is invisible, can He show himself in the saint?

She raised her eyes and met Maura’s. His face had changed a great deal over the years. He’d had white hair since his twenties, but his eyes hadn’t been so sunken, eyes so enamored of his brain, his face so thin; his white beard accentuated the time that had passed, that in his prolonged youth had been pure, promised time. His face had changed, yet she saw that it was the same; it hadn’t changed, it wasn’t another face, even if it was different.

“I can distance myself from myself but not from my body.” He looked at her as if reading her thoughts.

“Remember that our bodies liked each other a great deal. I’d like to be with you again.”

He told her she was the world, and she said, Tell me then, why can’t you be in the world?

Jorge’s silence was not eloquent, but she went on reading his thoughts, for he gave her no option but that of conjecture. Was he searching for solitude, faith, or both? Was he fleeing the world? Why?

“You’re both in and not in the monastery.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you or aren’t you in the religious community?” She thought he could explain himself to her. He owed it to her after so long. “We always understood each other.”

He answered very indirectly and with a distant smile. He reminded her of things she already knew. He was a privileged disciple of the Spanish and European university system that had evolved when Spain — he smiled — was emerging from the Escorial and entering Europe, licking its wounds after losing the war with the United States and the final loss of its empire in the New World, Cuba and Puerto Rico, always the last colonies. Spain joined Europe thanks to the genius of Ortega y Gasset, and Maura was his disciple. That marked him forever. Then Husserl in Freiburg, along with Raquel … He was a privileged man. He had to argue to be allowed to fight against the enemies of culture, against Franco and the Falange, who with their shit-covered boots sullied the halls of universities shouting Death to Intelligence! He wasn’t allowed: they gave him the acrid taste and swift machine-gun fire at the Jarama, but after that they told him, you’re more useful as a diplomat, a man who can convince others, a loyal emissary … being a Republican of aristocratic origin. He was on the good side. The world was his. Even if he lost it, it would always be his. He felt closer to the people fighting in Madrid and at the Ebro and the Jarama than he did to fascism’s cruel bourgeoisie and vulgar lumpen. He hated Franco, hated Millán Astray and his famous slogan Death to Intelligence! hated Queipo de Llano and his radio programs broadcast from Seville and his challenge to Spanish women to have sex with Moors in Andalusia, where men were real men.

“And now you have nothing.” Laura looked at him devoid of emotion. She was tired of Jorge’s political history.

She wanted to tell him that he was left without the world, but she did not think, did not feel that Jorge Maura had come to Lanzarote to convince God with his sacrifice.

“Because it is a sacrifice, I see that, isn’t it so?”

“You mean that when the war was over I should have gone back to my intellectual vocation, to recall my masters Ortega and Husserl and write?”

“Why not?”

He laughed. “Because it’s a fucking disaster to be creative when you know you’re not Mozart or Keats. Dammit, I got tired of scratching around in my past. There’s nothing in me to justify the pretension of creativity. This came before anything, before you, before Raquel, this is a matter of my own emptiness, my awareness of my own limits, maybe my sterility. Does what I’m saying to you seem awful? Now you want to come along and sell me an illusion, which I don’t believe in but which does make me believe that either you’re a fool or you under estimate my intelligence. Why don’t you just leave me alone, so I can fill the emptiness in my own way? Let me see things for myself, learn if something can still grow in my soul, an idea, a faith, because I swear to you, Laura, my soul is more desolate than this rock landscape you see here … why?”

She embraced him, sank to her knees and embraced his legs, leaning her head against his knees, flushing with shame for the moisture in his cheap gray slacks — they seemed worn out by washing, as if there hadn’t been time for them to dry and they still smelled of urine, and the shirt too, washed quickly and put right back on because it was the only one he had, and the bad odors hadn’t gone away, the smell of an earthly body, an animal body, tired of expelling humors, shit, semen. Jorge my love, my Jorge, I don’t know how to kiss you.

“I just don’t have the strength to go on scratching at my roots. The Spanish and Spanish American malady. Who are we?”

She begged his pardon for having provoked him.

“No, it’s all right. Get up. Let me get a good look at you. You look so clean, so clean …”