Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Just as Brecht said: which is worse, robbing a bank or founding a bank?”

“I’ll tell you what’s what,” answered the first old man, Laura’s confidant. “A movie is a collective effort. No matter how clever he is, a writer can’t pull the wool over the eyes of Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner and make him see white by putting red in front of him. The man has yet to be born who could trick Mayer by saying to him, Look, this film about noble Russian peasants is really camouflaged praise of Communism. Mayer won’t be conned, because he’s the greatest con man of all. That’s why he was the first to denounce his own workers. The wolf was tricked by the lambs. The wolf got a pardon because he turned over the lambs to the slaughterhouse so he’d be spared the knife. Mayer must have been furious about McCarthy drinking the blood of all the actors and writers he’d hired instead of letting him do it!”

“Vengeance is sweet, Theodore …”

“On the contrary. It’s a skimpy diet if you’re not the one drinking the blood of the person who got crucified because you squealed. It’s bitter for the squealer to have to keep his mouth shut, to not be able to brag in private, to have to live with shame.”

Harry Jaffe got up, lit a cigarette, and walked through the garden. Laura Díaz followed the trail of his firefly, a Camel burning in a dark garden.

“We’re all responsible for a picture,” the old producer named Theodore continued. “Paul Muni isn’t responsible for Al Capone because he starred in Scarface, or Edward Arnold for plutocratic fascism because he personified it in Meet John Doe . From the producer to the distributor, we’re all responsible for our pictures.”

“Fuenteovejuna, one for all, all for one,” said Basilio Baltazar. He didn’t care that none of the gringos would recognize this great line from Lope de Vega’s play about a town that stands up and acknowledges its cellective guilt.

Elsa, the old producer’s wife, said innocently, “Well, who knows if they aren’t right when they say it was one thing to go into social themes during the New Deal and another to exalt Russia during the war.”

“They were our allies!” Bell exclaimed. “We were supposed to be nice to the Russians!”

“We were told to promote pro-Soviet sentiment,” Ruth interrupted. “Roosevelt and Churchill asked us to.”

“And one fine day, someone knocks at your door and you get a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee because you portrayed Stalin as good old Uncle Joe with his pipe and peasant wisdom defending us against Hitler,” said the tall man who looked like an owl because of his heavy tortoiseshell glasses.

“And wasn’t that the truth?” answered a small man with frizzy, tangled hair that rose to a high, natural topknot. “Didn’t the Russians save us from the Nazis? Remember Stalingrad? Have we already forgotten Stalingrad?”

“Albert,” countered the tall, myopic man, “I’ll never argue with you. I’ll always agree with a man who walked with me, next to me, both of us in handcuffs because we refused to denounce our comrades to the McCarthy committee. You and I.”

There was more, Harry told Laura one night when the cicadas were raising a racket in the Bells’ garden. It was an entire era: It was the misery of an era, but also its glory.

“Before I went to Spain, I was active in the Black Theater Project with Roosevelt’s WPA, which set off riots in Harlem in 1935. Then Orson Welles put on a black Macbeth that caused a furor and was savagely attacked by the theater critic of The New York Times. The guy died of pneumonia a week after the review appeared. It was voodoo, Laura.” Harry laughed and asked her if it was all right to call her by her first name.

“Of course. Laura,” she said.

“Harry. Harry Jaffe.”

“Yes, Basilio told me about … you.”

“About Jim. About Jorge.”

“Jorge Maura told me the story.”

“No one ever gets the whole story, you know,” said Harry. His tone expressed challenge, sadness, and shame all at once, Laura thought.

“Do you have the whole story, Harry?”

“No, of course not.” The man tried to recover his normal expression. “A writer should never know the whole story. He imagines one part and asks the reader to finish it. A book should never close. The reader should continue it.”

“Not finish it, just continue it?”

Harry agreed, with his balding head and immobile but expressive hands. Jorge had described him on the Jarama front in 1937, compensating for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry said at that time. His faith in Communism expiated his inferiority complexes. He argued a lot, Jorge Maura had recalled, he’d read all the Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” Stalin’s mistakes were mere misdirections. The future was glorious, but Harry Jaffe in Spain was small, nervous, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive — Maura had thought — because he didn’t know just how weak an uncritical political conviction really is.

“I want to save my soul,” Harry would say at the front.

“I want to know fear,” his inseparable friend Jim would say. Jim, the tall, gawky New Yorker, with Harry — Maura would smile — the classic twosome of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Mutt and Jeff, Basilio said now, adding his smile to that of his absent friend.

“So long to neckties,” said Jim and Harry in one voice when Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway went off to report on the war, arguing about which of the two would have the honor of writing the other’s obituary.

The little Jew in jacket and tie.

If the description of the Harry Jaffe of fifteen years earlier was accurate, then that decade and a half had been a century and a half for this man who could not hide his sadness, who perhaps wanted to hide it; but the sadness managed to show itself in his infinitely distant gaze, his tremulously sad mouth, his nervous chin and supernaturally inert hands, controlled with great effort to reveal no genuine enthusiasm or interest. He would sit on his hands. He would clench his fists. He would clasp them desperately under his jaw. Harry’s hands were witness, offended and humiliated, to the vicious cruelty of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy had paralyzed Harry Jaffe’s hands.

“We never win, it’s just not true that at any given moment we triumphed,” said Harry, in a voice as neutral as dust. “There was excitement, oh yes. Plenty of excitement. We Americans like to believe in what we’re doing, and we get excited doing it. How could a moment like the first night of The Cradle Will Rock , Marc Blitzstein’s musical drama, not be one of pleasure, faith, excitement? With its daring, direct reference to events of the day — the automobile strike, riots, police brutality, workers shot in the back and killed? How could we not be excited — indignant! about our production causing a cutoff in the official subsidy for the workers’ theater? They confiscated the sets. The stagehands were fired. And then? We had no theater. So we had the brilliant idea of bringing the play to the scene of the action, to the steel factory. We’d put on a workers’ theater in the workers’ factory.”

How hard for me that look of defeat is turning out to be whenever he opens his eyes, that look of reproach whenever he closes them, thought Laura as she watched him intently, as she always did, the little needy man sitting on a leather armchair in the garden with its view of Cuernavaca, city of refuge, where Hernán Cortés had commanded a stone palace be built, protected by watchtowers and artillery, to escape the heights of the conquered Aztec city, which he destroyed and rebuilt as a Renaissance city laid out on a right-angled grid.