“What do you think Cortés would feel if he came back to his palace and found himself in Rivera’s murals painted as a merciless conquistador with reptilian eyes?” Harry asked Laura.
“Diego makes up for it by painting heroic white horses that shine like armor. He can’t help feeling a certain admiration for the epic. It’s true for all Mexicans,” said Laura, bringing her fingers close to Harry’s.
“I got a little scholarship after the war. Went to Italy. That’s how Ucello painted medieval battles. Where will you take me tomorrow so I can learn more about Cuernavaca?”
Together they went to the Borda gardens, where Maximilian of Austria came to take refuge with his pleasures in the hidden, moist, lecherous gardens, far from the imperial court at Chapultepec and the insomniac ambition of his wife, Carlota.
“Whom he wouldn’t touch because he didn’t want to give her syphilis,” they both said, laughing, at the same time, wiping the beer foam from their lips in Cuernavaca’s main square, Cuauhnáhuac, the place by the trees where Laura Díaz listened to Harry Jaffe and tried to penetrate the mystery hidden in the depths of his story, lightened occasionally with irony.
“The culture of my youth was a radio culture, blind theater, which is how Orson Welles managed to scare everyone into thinking that a simple adaptation of a work by the other Wells, H. G., was really happening in New Jersey.”
Laura laughed a lot and asked Harry to listen to the latest chachachá on the tavern’s jukebox:
The Martians have landed, ha-ha-ha!
They came down dancing the chachachá!
“You know?”
So they took Blitzstein’s drama to the scene of the crime, the steel factory. Which is why the plant managers decided to give the workers a picnic that day, and the workers chose a day in the country over a session of political theater.
“You know? When they finally put on the play again, the director scattered the actors in the audience. The spotlights would focus on us, and we’d suddenly be revealed. The spot came on me, the light hit me in the face, blinding me, but then I had to speak: ‘ Justice. We want justice.’ That was my only line, from the audience. Then the lights went down, and we went home to hear the invisible truth of radio. Hitler used the radio. So did Roosevelt and Churchill. How could I refuse to speak on the radio, when the very government of the United States, the American army, asked me: This is the Voice of America, we have to defeat fascism, Russia is our ally, we have to praise the Soviet Union? What was I going to do? Anti-Soviet propaganda? Just imagine, Laura, me doing anti-Communist propaganda in the middle of a war. They would have shot me as a traitor. But today, the fact that I did it condemns me as an anti-American subversive. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
He didn’t laugh when he said that. Later, at dinner, the group, about a dozen guests, listened carefully to the old producer Theodore tell the story of Jewish migration to Hollywood, the Jewish creation of Hollywood. But a younger screenwriter, who never took off his bow tie, rudely told him to shut up, every generation has its problems and suffers them in its way, he wasn’t going to feel nostalgia for the Depression, unemployment, lines of freezing men waiting for a cup of watery hot soup, there was no security, no hope, there was only Communism, the Communist Party, why not join the Party? how could he ever renounce his Communism, when the Party gave him the only security, the only hope of his youth?
“To deny I was a Communist would be to deny I was young.”
“Too bad we denied ourselves,” said another guest, a man with distinguished features (he looked like the Arrow shirt man, Harry noted slyly).
“What do you mean?” asked Theodore.
“That we weren’t made for success.”
“Well, we were,” grumbled the old man and his wife in unison. “Elsa and I were. We certainly were.”
“We weren’t,” retorted the good-looking man, wearing his gray hair well, proud of it. “The Communists weren’t. Being successful was a sin, a kind of sin anyway. And sin demands retribution.”
“You did all right.” The old man laughed.
“That was the problem. The retribution. First there was commercial work, done halfheartedly. Scripts for whores and trained dogs. Then compensatory dissipation — whores in bed, whiskey not as well trained as Rin Tin Tin. Finally came panic, Theodore. The realization that we weren’t made for Communism. We were made for pleasure and dissipation. That was the punishment in the end, of course. Denounced and out of work for having been Communists, Theodore. McCarthy as our exterminating angel — it was inevitable. We deserved it, fuck the dirty weasel.”
“And what about the people who weren’t Communists, who were wrongly accused, smeared?”
Everyone turned to see who’d asked that. But the questions seemed to come from nowhere. They seemed to have been said by a ghost. It was the voice of absence. Only Laura, sitting opposite Harry, realized that the Spanish Civil War veteran had thought and perhaps said them, but no one else noticed, because the lady of the house, Ruth, had already changed the tone of the conversation as she served her endless bowl of pasta and sang under her breath:
You’re going to get me into trouble
If you keep looking at me like that.
Harry had said that radio was invisible theater, a call to imagination … and actual theater, what was that?
“Something that disappears with the applause.”
“And movies?”
“The ghost that outlives us all, the speaking, moving portrait we leave behind so we can go on living.”
“Is that why you went to Hollywood, to write movies?”
He nodded without looking at her, it was hard for him to look at anyone and everyone avoided looking at him. Little by little Laura realized this fact — so flagrant as to be a mystery, invisible, like a radio program.
Laura felt she could be the object in Harry’s line of sight because she was new, different, innocent, because she didn’t know the things the others did. But the courtesy all the exiles showed to Harry was impeccable. He turned up every weekend at the Bells’ house. He sat down to dinner with them every Sunday. Only no one looked at him. And when he spoke it was in silence, Laura realized with alarm, no one listened to him, that was why he gave the impression that he never spoke, because no one listened to him but her, only her only I, Laura Díaz, I pay attention to him, and that’s why only she listened to what the solitary man said without his having to open his mouth.
Before, whom would he talk to? Nature in Cuernavaca was so prodigal, though so different, rather like the Veracruz of Laura Díaz’s childhood.
It was a perturbed nature, redolent of bougainvillea and verbena, of freshly cut pine and bleeding watermelon, scents of saffron but also of shit and garbage piled in the deep gullies around every orchard, every neighborhood, every house … Would Harry Jaffe speak to that nature — the little New York Jew who’d made his pilgrimage from Manhattan to Spain and from Spain to Hollywood and from Hollywood to Mexico?
This time Laura was the foreigner in her own homeland, the other to whom this strangely taciturn and solitary man might perhaps speak, not aloud but in the whisper she learned to read on his lips as they became friends and drifted away from the Bells’ red stronghold into the silence of the Borda gardens or the buzz of Cuernavaca’s main square, or the light and careless inebriation at the Hotel Marik’s open-air café, or the cathedral’s peaceful solitude.
There, Harry pointed out to her that the nineteenth-century murals, in their pious St. Sulpice style, were hiding another fresco that had been painted over, bad taste and clerical hypocrisy having deemed it primitive, cruel, and not especially devout.
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