Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

The Nazi commandant who was with us, hiding with a smile the alarm and annoyance Raquel’s act had made him feel, said, fatuously: “See? That story about Buchenwald’s fences being electrified is false.”

“Take care of her hands. Look how they’re bleeding, Herr Kommandant.”

“She touched the barbed wire because she wanted to.”

“Because she’s free?”

“That’s right. That’s right. You said the right thing.”

“I’m weak. You’re all I have left. That’s why I came to Lanzarote.”

“I’m weak.”

They made their way back to the monastery at nightfall. On this night, above all others, Jorge wanted to return to the religious community and confess his carnal weakness. Laura, in her reencounter with Jorge’s body, felt the man’s newness, as if their bodies had never been joined before, as if this time Laura had become flesh as an exception, only to look like herself, and he only to show himself naked to her.

“What are you thinking about?”

“About God advising us to do what He will not allow. To imitate Christ!”

“It isn’t that He doesn’t allow it. It’s that He makes it difficult.”

“I imagine God saying to me all the time, ‘I hate in you the same thing that you’ve hated in others.’”

“Which is?”

He was living here, half protected, indecisive, not knowing if he wanted complete, certain physical and spiritual salvation or risk that would give value to the security. This is why he walked every morning from the monastery to the cabin and back every afternoon, from exposure to refuge, glaring, without so much as blinking, at the Guardia Civil, who had gotten used to him, greeted him, he worked with the brothers, a servant, a minor figure of no importance.

He went from one stone house to the other in the landscape of stone. He imagined a sky of stone and a stone sea, in Lanzarote.

“All day long you’ve been asking me if I believe in God or not, if I’ve recovered the faith of my Catholic culture, my childhood faith—”

“And you haven’t answered me.”

“Why did I become Republican and anticlerical? Because of the hypocrisy and crimes of the Catholic Church, its support for the rich and powerful, its alliance with the pharisees and against Jesus, its disdain for the humble and defenseless, even though it preached exactly the opposite. Did you see the books I have in the cabin?”

“St. John of the Cross and that copy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz we bought together on Tacuba Street … they’re like brother and sister, because he’s a saint and she isn’t. She was humiliated, silenced, her books and poems were taken away, even her paper, ink, and pen.”

“You should take a look at a volume that’s just come out in France. One of the brothers gave it to me. Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil, a Jew converted to Christianity. Read it. She’s an extraordinary philosopher who can actually tell us we should never think about someone we love and from whom we’re separated without imagining that person dead … She does an incredible reading of Homer. She says the Iliad teaches three lessons: never admire power, never disdain those who suffer, and never hate your enemies. Nothing is exempt from fate. She died during the war. Of tuberculosis and hunger, especially hunger, because she refused to eat more than the rations given her Jewish brothers and sisters in the Nazi camps. But she did it as a Christian, in the name of Jesus.”

Jorge Maura stopped for a moment before the black and furrowed earth within sight of Timanfaya. The mountain was a blazing red, like a gospel of fire.

I pardoned all the crimes of history because they were venial sins next to this crime: doing the impossible evil. That’s what the Nazis did. They showed that the unimaginable evil was not only imaginable but possible. With them around, all the centuries of crimes of political power, of churches, armies, and princes fled my memory. What they had done could be imagined. What the Nazis did could not. Until then I thought evil existed but wouldn’t let itself be seen and tried to hide, or presented itself as a necessary means for attaining a good end. You remember that was how Domingo Vidal thought of Stalin’s crimes, as the means to a good end, and besides, they were based on a theory of collective good, Marxism. And Basilio Baltazar sought only the freedom of human beings by any means, by abolishing power, bosses, hierarchies.

Nazism, however, was evil proclaimed out loud, announcing proudly, “I am Evil. I am perfect Evil. I am visible Evil. I am Evil and proud of it. I justify nothing but extermination in the name of Evil. The death of Evil by the hand of Evil. Death as violence and only violence and nothing more than violence, without any redemption and without the weakness of a justification.”

I want to see that woman, I said to the commandant of Buchenwald.

No, you’re mistaken, the woman you named is not here, never has been.

Raquel Mendes-Alemán. That’s her name. I just saw her on the other side of the barbed wire.

No, that woman doesn’t exist.

You have killed her already?

Be careful. Don’t go too far.

She let herself be seen by me and for that you killed her? Because she saw me and recognized me?

No. She doesn’t exist. There’s no record of her. Don’t complicate things. After all, you’re here only because of a gracious concession by the Reich. So you can see how well treated our prisoners are. It isn’t the Hotel Adlon, to be sure, but if you’d come on a Sunday, you’d have seen the prisoners’ orchestra. They played the overture to Parsifal. A Christian opera, did you know that?

I demand to see the registry of prisoners.

The registry?

Don’t play dumb. You people are very orderly. I want to see the registry.

A page in the M’s had been hastily torn out, Laura. They’re so precise, so well organized, they’d allowed the torn binding to show where the page was missing, with the edges rough and jagged like the cliffs on Lanzarote’s mountains.

I never learned anything more about Raquel Mendes-Alemán.

When the war was over, I went back to Buchenwald, but the corpses in the common graves were no longer what they had been, and the cremated bodies became powder for the wigs of Goethe and Schiller, shaking hands in Weirmar, Athens of the North, where Cranach and Bach and Franz Lizst worked. None of those men would ever have invented the motto the Nazis placed over the entrance to the concentration camp. Not the well-known Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You Free, but something infinitely worse: Jedem das Seine, You Get What You Deserve. Raquel. I want to remember her on the prow of the Prinz Eugen anchored in Havana harbor, when I offered to marry her to save her from the holocaust. I want to remember Raquel.

No, she looked at me with her eyes deep as a night of omens, why should I be the exception, the privileged individual?

Her words sufficed, for me, to sum up my whole experience in this half century, which was going to be the paradise of progress and instead was the hell of degradation. Not only the age of fascist and Stalinist horror but of the horror that those who fought against evil could not save themselves from, no one was exempted, Laura! not the English who hid rice from the Bengalis so they wouldn’t have the will to revolt and join Japan during the war, not the Islamic merchants who collaborated with them, not the English who broke the legs of rebels who wanted national independence and refused medical care, not the French who collaborated in Nazi genocide or who cried out against the German occupation but considered the French occupation of Algeria, of Indochina, of Senegal a divine right, not the Americans who kept all the Caribbean and Central American dictators in power with their jails overflowing and their beggars in the streets as long as they supported the United States. Who was saved? Those who lynched blacks, or the blacks who were executed, jailed, forbidden to drink or urinate next to a white in Mississippi, land of Faulkner?