Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“You know what it is, do you?” asked Laura, not hiding her curiosity and surprise.

“I do. An angry — very angry — priest told me. What do you see here?”

“The Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, the Wise Men,” said Laura — though she was thinking about Father Elzevir Almonte and the jewels of the Holy Child of Zongolica.

“You really don’t know what’s underneath?”

“No.”

“The missionary expedition of Mexico’s only saint, St. Felipe de Jesus. Felipe went to convert the Japanese in the seventeenth century. Painted here, but painted over now, are the scenes of danger and terror — rough seas, shipwrecks. The saint’s heroic and solitary sermons. Finally, his crucifixion by the infidels. His slow death agony. A great movie.”

“His nursemaid said, The day the fig tree blooms, our little Felipe will be a saint. A servant we once had, a man I loved a lot, Zampaya, told me that story.”

“All that was covered up. By piety. By lies.”

“A pentimento, Harry?”

“No, not a repentant painting, but one that pride superimposed on truth. A triumph of simulation. I’m telling you, it’s a movie.”

He invited her, for the first time, to the little house he was renting, surrounded by mangroves. It wasn’t far from the square, but in Cuernavaca one had only to walk a few yards beyond the main streets to find houses almost like lairs, hidden behind high walls painted indigo blue, genuine silent oases — with green lawns, red roof tiles, ocher facades, and thickets running toward black gullies one after the other. It smelled of moisture and decaying trees. Harry’s house had a garden, a brick terrace that was hot all day and freezing at night, a roof of broken tiles, a kitchen where a silent old woman sat immobile with a palm fan in her hands, and a bed-sitting room with its spaces divided by curtains, which transformed the carefully made bed — as if someone would punish Harry if he left his bed unmade — into a secret.

Three open suitcases, full of clothes, papers, and books, clashed with the scrupulous order of the bed.

“Why haven’t you unpacked?”

He hesitated before answering.

“Why?”

“I might leave any time.”

“Where would you go?”

“Home.”

“Home? But you don’t have a home anymore, Harry. This is your home, haven’t you figured that out yet? You’ve lost everything else!” Laura was suspicious and exasperated.

“No, Laura, no, you don’t know when—”

“Why don’t you sit down and get to work?”

“I don’t know what to do, Laura. I’m waiting.”

“Work,” she said, meaning “stay.”

“I’m waiting. In a while. Any time now.”

Laura gave herself to Harry for many reasons: because of his age, because she hadn’t made love since the night Basilio said goodbye before returning to Vassar and she hadn’t had to ask, nor did Basilio, because it was an act of humility and memory, homage to Jorge Maura and Pilar Méndez, only she and he, Laura and Basilio together, could represent their absent lovers tenderly and respectfully, but that act of love between them for love of others had aroused in Laura Díaz an appetite that began to grow, an erotic desire she’d believed was, if not lost, then certainly overshadowed by age, modesty, memory of the dead, a superstitious sense she had of being watched from some dark land by the two Santiagos, by Jorge Maura, by Juan Francisco — the dead or disappeared who lived in a territory where the only business was to spy on her, still in this world, Laura Díaz.

“I don’t want to do anything that would violate my respect for myself.”

“Self-respect, Laura?”

“Self-respect, Harry.”

Now the nearness of Harry in Cuernavaca aroused a new tenderness in her which at first she could not identify. Perhaps it was born from the play of glances in the weekend parties: no one looked at him, he looked at no one, until Laura came, and they looked at each other. Hadn’t her love for Jorge Maura begun that way, with exchanged glances during a party at the house of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo? How different the power of her Spanish lover’s glance from the weakness, not only in the glance but in the entire body of this sad American, disoriented, wounded, humiliated, and in need of affection.

First, Laura embraced him, the two of them sitting on the bed in the little house in the gully. She hugged him as if he were a child, put ting her arms around him, holding his hand, almost cuddling him, asking him to raise his head, to look at her, she wanted to see Harry Jaffe’s true face, not the mask of exile, defeat, and self pity.

“Let me put your things away for you.”

“ Don’t mother me! Fuck you!”

He was right. She was treating him as if he were a weak cowardly child. She had to make him feel, You’re a man, I want to stir up the fire still within you, Harry, even though you no longer feel any passion for success, work, politics, or the rest of humanity — waiting, perhaps, crouched, mocking, like a genie, your sex unable always to say no, the only part of your life, Harry, that maybe goes on saying yes, out of pure animal spirit perhaps, or perhaps because your soul, my soul, has only the stronghold of sex but doesn’t know it.

“Sometimes I imagine sexes like two little dwarfs poking their noses out from between our legs, making fun of us, challenging us to yank them from their tragicomic niche and toss them in the garbage, since they know that no matter how much they torture us we’ll always live with them, the little dwarfs.”

She didn’t want to compare him to anything. He defied comparison. There he was. What she imagined. What he’d forgotten. An impassioned surrender, deferred, noisy, unexpectedly spoken and shouted by both of them, as if they both were being released from a jail that had held them for too long, and right there, at the prison door, on the other side of the bars, was Laura waiting for Harry and Harry waiting for Laura.

“My baby, my baby.”

“We’ll see tomorrow.”

“I’m a rich old Jewish producer who’s got no reason to be here except I want to share the fate of the young Jews this McCarthyite persecution is directed against.”

“Do you know what it means to begin each day saying to yourself, This is the last day I’m going to live in peace?”

“When you hear someone knocking at the door, and you don’t know if it’s thieves, beggars, police, wolves, or just termites …”

“How can you tell if the person who’s come to see you, who’s supposed to be a lifelong friend, hasn’t become an informer, how can you know?”

“I’m exiled in Cuernavaca because I couldn’t stand the idea of being grilled a second time.”

“There is something harder than putting up with persecution against yourself, and that’s looking at betrayal practiced by someone else.”

“Laura, how are we going to reconcile our pain and our shame?”

“My baby, my baby. ”

“ISHOULD keep my mouth shut forever.”

She wanted to bring him to Mexico City, to a hospital. He wanted to stay in Cuernavaca. They compromised, agreeing to spend some time in Tepoztlán. Laura imagined that the beauty and solitude of the place — a large subtropical valley enclosed by impressive, pyramidal mountains, sheer vertical masses with no slopes or hills leading up to them, erect and challenging like great stone walls raised to protect the fields of sugarcane and heather, rice and oranges — would be a refuge for both of them. Perhaps Harry would decide to start writing again; she’d take care of him, that was her role; she took it on without a second thought. The bond that had formed between them during the past two years was unbreakable; they needed each other.