Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“What are you trying to tell me?”

By now Laura can’t remember how her lover is standing, with his moist freshly washed old clothes, with a smell of defeat no soap can purge. By now she can’t remember if he is standing or sitting on the cot, if he is looking down or staring out the door. At the ceiling. Or into her eyes.

“What am I trying to tell you? What do you know?”

“I know your biography. From the aristocracy to the Republic to defeat to exile and from there to pride. The pride of Lanzarote.”

“The pride of Lucifer.” Jorge laughed. “You leave a lot of openings, you know?”

“I know. The pride of Lanzarote? That isn’t an opening. It’s right here. It’s today.”

“I clean the monks’ latrines and see impossible drawings on the walls. As if a repentant painter had begun something he never finished and, because he knew it, chose the humblest and most humiliating place in the monastery to begin an enigma. Because what I see or imagine is a mystery, and the place of the mystery is the very spot where the good brothers, whether they want to or not, shit and piss. They are body, and their bodies remind them they can never be wholly spirit, as they’d like. Wholly.”

“Do you think they know? Are they that naive?”

“They have faith.”

God became flesh, said Maura in a kind of controlled exaltation, God stripped Himself of His holy impunity by making Himself man in Christ. That made God as fragile as the human beings who could recognize themselves in Him.

“Is that why we killed Him?”

“Christ became a man so we would recognize ourselves in Him.”

But to be worthy of Christ, we had to sink lower so we wouldn’t be more than what He is.

“A monk should think that when he’s shitting. Jesus did the same, but I do it with more shame. That’s faith. God’s in the pots and pans, St. Teresa said.”

“Was He looking for it?” asked Laura. “Looking for faith?”

“Christ had to abandon an invisible holiness in order to become flesh. Why ask me to become a saint — so I can incarnate a bit of Jesus’ holiness?”

“Do you know what I thought when my son Santiago died? Is this the greatest sorrow in my life?”

“Did you think it was? Or did you wonder if it was? … I’m sorry, Laura.”

“No. I thought that if God takes something from us, it’s because He gave up everything.”

“His own son, Jesus?”

“Yes. can’t help thinking this ever since I lost Santiago. He was the second, did you know? My brother and my son. Both. Santiago the Elder and Santiago the Younger. Both. You’re sorry? Imagine how I feel!”

“Look a bit further. God renounced everything. He had to renounce His own creation, the world, to let us be free.”

God became absent in the name of our freedom, said Jorge, and since we use that freedom for evil and not only for good, God had to become flesh in Christ in order to show us that God could be a man and nonetheless avoid evil.

“That’s our conflict,” Maura went on. “Being free to do evil or good and to know that if I do evil I offend the freedom God gave me, but if I do good, I also offend God because I’m daring to imitate Him, to be like Him, to sin through pride like Lucifer; you yourself said so.”

It was horrible to hear that: Laura took Jorge’s hand.

“What am I saying that is so terrible? Tell me.”

“That God asks us to do something He doesn’t allow. I’ve never heard anything crueler.”

“You haven’t? Well, I’ve seen it.”

Do you know why I resist believing in God? Because I fear seeing Him one day. I fear that if I could see God, I’d be struck blind. I can approach God only to the degree that He distances Himself from me. God needs to be invisible so I can labor over a plausible faith, but at the same time I fear God’s visibility because at that precise moment I’d no longer have faith but proof. Here, read St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel, come with me, Laura, into the darkest night of time, the night when I went out in disguise to seek the beloved so we could be transformed, she into me, my senses suspended, and my neck wounded by a serene hand that says: Look and don’t forget … Who separated me from the beloved, God or the devil?

I saw the beloved fleetingly, for less than ten seconds, when our Swedish Red Cross truck passed by the barbed wire at Buchenwald, and in that instant I saw Raquel lost amid a multitude of prisoners.

It was very difficult to identify anyone in that mass of emaciated, hungry beings in their striped uniforms with the Star of David pinned to their breasts, huddled under blankets ripped by the February cold, clinging one to another. Except her.

If that was what they allowed us to see, what was there behind the visible, what were they hiding from us, didn’t they realize that in showing us this they forced us to imagine the real face, the hidden face? But in offering us this terrible face, weren’t they saying that the worst didn’t exist — no longer existed — that it was the face of death?

I saw Raquel.

A man in uniform was holding her up, a Nazi guard was supporting her, I don’t know if it was because he was ordered to show the compassion of someone helping a person in need; or so that Raquel wouldn’t collapse like a pile of rags; or because between the two, Raquel and the guard, there was a relationship of reciprocal yielding, of tiny favors that to her must have seemed enormous — some extra food, a night in the enemy’s bed, perhaps a simple, human portion of pity; or perhaps because it was just theater, a pantomime of humanity to impress the visitors; for perhaps a new, unforeseeable love between victim and executioner, one as hurt as the other, and both able to withstand the hurt only in the other’s unexpected company, the executioner identified by the pain of his obedience and the victim by the pain of hers — two obedient beings, each one at the orders of someone stronger, Hitler had said it, Raquel repeated it to me, there are only two peoples confronting each other: Germans and Jews.

Perhaps she was saying to me: Do you see why I didn’t leave the ship with you in Havana? I wanted to have happen what is now happening to me. I didn’t want to avoid my destiny.

Then Raquel freed herself from the grasp of the Nazi guard and clasped the barbed wire with her bare hands; between her executioner or lover or protector or shadow and me, Jorge Maura, her university lover, with whom she had one day gone to the Freiburg cathedral and kneeled down side by side with no fear of being ridiculous and prayed out loud:

we shall return to ourselves

we shall think as if we’d founded the world

we shall be the living subjects of history

we shall live the world of life

those words we said then with profound intellectual emotion — they came back now, Laura, as a crushing reality, an intolerable fact, not because they came true but precisely because they weren’t possible, the horror of the age had eliminated them yet in a mysterious and marvelous way made them possible, they were the final truth of my swift and terrible encounter with the woman I loved and who loved me …

Raquel stabbed her hands with the wire and then pulled them up from the steel barbs and showed them to me, bleeding like … I don’t know like what, because I don’t know and don’t want to know how to compare Raquel Mendes-Alemán’s beautiful hands with anything, those hands made to touch my body the way she touched the pages of a book or played a Schubert impromptu or touched my arm to warm herself when we walked together during the winter along the Freiburg streets: now her hands were bleeding like Christ’s wounds, and that was what she was showing me, don’t look at my face, look at my hands, don’t feel sorrow for my body, feel compassion for my hands, George, have pity, friend … Thanks for my destiny. Thanks for Havana.