Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Remember, with a drop of tenderness,

ELZEVIR ALMONTE

That weekend, Basilio Baltazar rented a car, and the two of them drove to Cuernavaca, Laura and her old friend the Spanish anarchist.

LAURA DOVE into the pool, framed in bougainvillea, and didn’t surface until she reached the far end. On the side, a large group of foreign men and women were chatting, the majority Americans, a few in bathing suits but most of them dressed, the women in full skirts and “Mexican-style” short-sleeved blouses with flower-embroidered bodices, the men in short-sleeved shirts and summer slacks, most of them getting their feet used to huaraches, all of them, every single one of them, holding a drink, all of them guests of the splendid English Communist Fredric Bell, whose house in Cuernavaca had become a sanctuary for the victims of McCarthyite persecution in the United States.

Bell’s wife, Ruth, was an American who balanced the high, dry irony of her British husband with an earthy coarseness, close to the soil, as if she were dragging along her roots in the Chicago slums where she was born. She was a woman from the Great Lakes and immense prairies who by chance had been born on the asphalt of the “big-shouldered city,” in Carl Sandburg’s words. Ruth’s shoulders easily carried her husband, Fredric, and her husband’s friends, she was Sancho Panza to Fredric, the tall, slim Englishman with blue eyes, clear brow, and thin, completely white hair surrounding his freckled skull.

“A Quixote of lost causes,” Basilio Baltazar told Laura.

Ruth had the strength of a steel die, from the tips of her bare toes on the grass to her curly, short gray hair.

“Almost all of them are directors and screenwriters,” Basilio went on as he drove along the recently opened highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, which reduced the trip to only forty-five minutes, “a few professors, but mostly movie people.”

“You’re safe, then, you’re in the minority.” Laura smiled. She had a kerchief tied over her head against the wind blowing over the MG convertible that García Ascot, a Republican poet exiled in Mexico, had lent to his friend Basilio.

“Can you see me as a professor, teaching Spanish literature to proper young ladies at Vassar?” asked Basilio maliciously, as he steered smoothly around the highway curves.

“Is that where you met this gang of reds?”

“No. On the side, I moonlight on weekends — extra, unpaid work at the New School for Social Research in New York. The students there are workers, older people who had no time to get an education. That’s where I met a lot of the people you’re going to meet today.”

She wanted to ask a favor of Basilio, that he not treat her with pity, that he simply relegate the past that both knew to a tranquil, silent memory, the past whose pains and joys leave their marks on our bodies.

“You’re still a beautiful woman.”

“I’m over fifty. A bit.”

“Well, there are women twenty years younger than you who wouldn’t be seen in a one piece bathing suit.”

“I love swimming. I was born next to a lake and grew up on the seacoast.”

Good manners did not let the group take overt notice of her when she dove into the pool, but when she came out, Laura noticed the curious, approving, smiling glances of the gringos gathered for dinner that Saturday in Cuernavaca at the house of the Communist Fredric Bell, and she also saw, as if in a Diego Rivera mural or a King Vidor film, the “crowd,” the simultaneously collective and singular combination of people, appreciated it, knowing that this group of people was united by one thing, persecution, but that each had managed to save his or her individuality. They weren’t a “mass,” no matter how much they believed in such a thing; there was pride in their eyes, in the way they stood, held a glass, or raised their chins, a way of being themselves, which impressed Laura, the visible awareness of wounded dignity and the time needed to regain it. This was an asylum for political convalescents.

She knew something about their stories. Basilio had told her more on the trip, that they had to believe in their own individuality because to transform them into enemies the persecutors had tried first to turn them into a herd, a red flock, lambs of Communism, and then to strip away their singularity.

“Did you go to the tribute to Dimitri Shostakovich at the Waldorf-Astoria?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that he is a prominent figure in Soviet propaganda?”

“All I know is that he’s a great composer.”

“We’re not talking about music here but about subversion.”

“Senator, are you saying that Shostakovich’s music turns the people who listen to it into Communists?”

“Exactly. That’s my conviction as an American patriot. It’s obvious to this committee that you don’t share this conviction.”

“I’m as American as you are.”

“But your heart’s in Moscow.”

(We’re very sorry. You cannot work for us anymore. Our company cannot get involved in controversies.)

“Is it true that you scheduled a festival of Charlie Chaplin movies on your television station?”

“Certainly. Chaplin is a great comic artist.”

“A poor, tragic artist, you mean. He’s a Communist.”

“Possibly. But that has nothing to do with his films.”

“Don’t play dumb with us. The red message gets through without anyone’s realizing it.”

“But, Senator, Chaplin made those silent films before 1917.”

“What happened in 1917?”

“The Soviet Revolution.”

“Well, Charlie Chaplin isn’t only a Communist, he paved the way for the Russian Revolution, that’s what you want to show, a manual for insurrection disguised as comedy …”

(We’re very sorry. The company cannot approve your programming. Our sponsors have threatened to withdraw their support if you go on showing subversive films.)

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

“Yes. So are or have been the fourteen veterans who are with me here before this committee. They were all maimed in the war.”

“The red brigade, ha-ha.”

“We fought in the Pacific for the United States.”

“You fought for the Russians.”

“They were our allies, Senator. But we only killed Japanese.”

“Well, the war’s over. You can go live in Moscow and be happy.”

“We’re loyal Americans, Senator.”

“Prove it. Give the committee the names of other Communists.”

(… in the armed forces, in the State Department, but especially in the movies, in radio, in the new medium of television: the congressional inquisitors loved above all else to investigate movie people, rub elbows with them, appear in photos with Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, who all named names, or with Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, who had the courage to denounce the inquisitors …)

“That was the tactic: strip away our individuality and turn us into either enemies or collaborators, scapegoats or squealers. That was the crime of McCarthyism.”

Laura’s head emerged from the water, and she saw the group around the pool and thought her own thoughts, and for that reason was surprised that she noticed a small man with narrow shoulders, a sad expression, thin hair, and a face so carefully shaven that it looked erased, as if every morning the blade took away his features, which would spend the rest of the day struggling to be reborn and recognized. A loose-fitting, sleeveless khaki shirt and loose trousers of the same color held up by a snakeskin belt of the kind sold in tropical markets where everything is put to use. He was barefoot. His naked feet caressed the grass.