Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

She got out of the pool without taking her eyes off him, although he wasn’t looking at her — or anyone else … Now Laura was out of the water. No one paid attention to her matronly nakedness, more than fifty years old but still attractive. Tall and right-angled, Laura since childhood had had that impulsive and defiant profile, not a little rosebud nose; from childhood had had those almost golden eyes submerged in a veil of shadows, as if age itself were a veil some people are born with, though it’s almost always acquired; had had the thin lips of a Memling madonna, as if she’d never been visited by the angel with the sword that divides the upper lip and banishes oblivion at birth.

“That’s an old Jewish legend,” said Ruth, mixing a new pitcher of martinis. “When we’re born, an angel comes down from heaven with his sword, strikes us between the tips of our noses and our upper lips, and makes this split, which is otherwise inexplicable.” Here Ruth scratched an imaginary mustache, like that of the proto-Communist Chaplin, with an unpolished fingernail. “But according to the legend, he also makes us forget everything we knew before we were born, all the deep memory within the womb, including our parents’ secrets and our grandparents’ triumphs.” “Salud! ” said the matriarch of the Cuernavaca tribe in Spanish — a title Laura bestowed on her then and there, as she laughingly told Basilio. Basilio agreed completely. Ruth couldn’t not be like that, and the others wouldn’t admit they needed her. But who doesn’t need a mama? Basilio smiled. Especially if every weekend she prepares a bottomless bowl of spaghetti.

“The witch-hunters publish a rag called Red Channels . They justify themselves by invoking their equally vigilant patriotism and anti-Communism. But neither they nor their publication would prosper if there weren’t denunciations. They began a feverish search for people who could be implicated, sometimes for reasons as far-fetched as listening to Shostakovich or seeing a Chaplin film. Being denounced by Red Channels was the beginning, and the persecution would continue with letters to the suspect’s employers, threatening publicity against the guilty company, intimidating telephone calls to the victim — all culminating in a summons to appear before Congress from the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

“You were going to say something about a mother, Basilio.”

“Ask anyone here about Mady Christians.”

“Mady Christians was an Austrian actress who had the lead in a very famous play, I Remember Mama,” said a man with heavy tortoiseshell glasses. “She taught drama at New York University, but her obsession was protecting political refugees and people displaced by the war.”

“She offered to protect us Spanish exiles,” recalled Basilio. “That’s how I met her. A very beautiful woman, about forty, very blond, with the profile of a Nordic goddess and a look in her eye that said, I won’t give up.”

“She also protected us German writers expelled by the Nazis,” added a man with a square jaw and lifeless eyes. “She created a Committee for the Protection of Those Born Abroad. These were crimes that justified Red Channels’ denouncing her as a Soviet agent.”

“Mady Christians.” Basilio Baltazar smiled fondly. “I saw her before she died. She would be visited by detectives who wouldn’t identify themselves. She got anonymous calls. Hardly anyone offered her parts. One television company did telephone her, but the investigators did their work, and the company withdrew their offer, though they did agree to pay her a fee. How can anyone live with that fear, that uncertainty? So the defender of exiles became an internal exile. ‘This is incredible,’ she managed to say before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty. The playwright Elmer Rice said at her funeral that she represented America’s generosity, that in return she received calumny, persecution, unemployment, and illness. ‘It’s no use appealing to the McCarthyites’ conscience, because they have none.’”

Many pasts were reunited in Fredric Bell’s house, and as she made visit after visit, at first with Basilio but later alone when the anarchist professor had gone back to the virginal order of Vassar College, Laura began to sort out the stories she heard, trying to separate real experience from the wounded justifications, unnecessary or urgent. All of that.

To say there were many different pasts was also to say there were many different personal origins, and among the weekend guests, many of whom were living in Cuernavaca, the Central European Jews were notable — they were the oldest, and they’d gather in circles, husbands and wives together, to tell each other stories about a past that seemed historical but that was barely more than a half century of life. (That’s how quickly U.S. history goes, said Basilio.) They would laugh sometimes as they noted they’d been born in neighboring villages in Poland or just a few miles from the border between Hungary and Bessarabia.

A little old man with trembling hands and jolly eyes explained it to Laura: We were tailors, peddlers, shopkeepers, discriminated against because we were Jews; we emigrated to America, but in New York we were still foreigners, excluded, so we went to California, where there was nothing but sun, sea, and desert, California, where the continent ends, Miss Laura, we all went to that city with the angelic name, many angels, the union with wings that seemed to be waiting for us, Jews from Central Europe, to make our fortunes, Los Angeles, where, as our hostess Ruth tells, a winged being descends from heaven and uses his memory sword to take away what we were and no longer wanted to be. It’s true, we Jews not only invented Hollywood but invented the United States as we wished it to be, dreamed the American Dream better than anyone, Miss Laura, and stocked it with immediately identifiable good guys and bad guys. We always had the good guy win; we linked being good with innocence, gave the hero an innocent girlfriend, created a nonexistent America, rural, small-town, free, where justice always triumphs; and it turns out that’s what Americans wanted to see, or it was how they wanted to see themselves, in a mirror of innocence and goodness where love and justice always triumph, that’s what we gave the Americans, we persecuted Jews of Mitteleuropa. So why are they persecuting us now? Are we Communists? We the idealists?

“Out of order,” McCarthy shouted back.

“You, Senator, you’re the red,” said the small, bald man.

“The witness is about to be in contempt of Congress.”

“You, Senator, are paid by Moscow.”

“Take this witness away.”

“You’re the best propaganda the Kremlin ever invented, Senator McCarthy.”

“Get him out of here! Take him away!”

“Do you think that by acting like Stalin you’re defending American democracy? Do you think you can defend democracy by imitating your enemy?” shouted Harry Jaffe. That was the name Basilio Baltazar mentioned. The two of them had been comrades on the Jarama front, along with Vidal, Maura, and Jim. Comrades.

“Order, order. The witness is in contempt,” shouted McCarthy with his whining kidnapper’s voice, his mouth twisted into an eternal smile of disdain, his beard showing dark only hours after he shaved, his eyes those of an animal chased by itself: Joe McCarthy was like an animal aware of being a man and nostalgic for his earlier freedom as a beast in the jungle.

Another old man interrupted. The people to blame for the whole thing are the Warner Brothers, who started putting politics into movies, social themes, delinquency, unemployment, abandoned children who slide into a life of crime, the cruelty of prisons, movies that said to America, you’re not innocent anymore, you’re not rural anymore, you live in cities plagued by poverty, exploitation, organized crime, and criminals of all kinds from gangsters to bankers.