Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Tepoztlán would restore the health of her tender, beloved Harry, far away from the constant repetition of tragic events in Cuernavaca. They rented a little house protected but overshadowed by two huge masses: the mountain and an immense church, a fortress monastery built by the Dominicans in competition with nature, as so often happens in Mexico. Harry pointed that out to her, the Mexican tendency to create architectural rivals to nature, imitations of mountains, precipices, deserts. Their little house competed with nothing, which is why Laura. Díaz chose it, because of the simplicity of its naked adobes facing a dirt road traveled more by stray dogs than by human beings. The interior showed that other Mexican ability — to pass from a poor, neglected town to an oasis of green, serene patios with red and green plants, watermelon colors, shining fountains, and cool corridors that seemed to come from far away and never end.

There was only one bedroom with a rough old bed, a minimal bathroom decorated with fragile tiles, and a kitchen like those of Laura’s childhood — no electrical appliances, charcoal-burning braziers that one had to fan to keep blazing, and an icebox that required the iceman’s daily visit for chilling the bottles of Dos Equis that were Harry’s joy. House life centered on the patio and its rattan chairs with leather seats and rattan, leather-topped table. It was hard to write on that table, which was soft and stained by too many circles made by moist beer bottles. The notebooks and pens remained in a bedroom drawer. When Harry did begin to write again, Laura secretly read the pages in the cheap notebooks whose paper absorbed the ink from Harry’s Esterbrook pen. He knew she was reading them; she knew he knew. Neither spoke of it.

Jacob Julius Garfinkle, that was his real name. We grew up together in New York. If you’re a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, you’re born with eyes, nose, mouth, ears, feet, and hands — the whole body — but something else only we have: a chip on your shoulder. You use it to challenge strangers (and who isn’t a stranger if you’re born in a neighborhood like ours?) to knock it off, with either a hard slap or a disdainful finger flick. We all carry that chip, and we all know no one put it there, we were born with it, it’s part of our humiliated poor Italian, Irish, or Jewish (Polish, Russian, Hungarian, but anyway Jewish) immigrant flesh. You see it even more when we strip to take a shower or to make love or to sleep poorly, but even when we’re dressed the chip cuts through the shirt or jacket, shows itself, tells the world, Just try to bother me, just try to insult me, hit me, humiliate me, just go ahead and try. Jacob Julius Garfinkle: I knew him from boyhood. He had the biggest chip of all. He was small, dark, a dark-skinned Jew with a snub nose and smiling cruel lips, mocking and dangerous, like his eyes, like his fighting bantam-rooster posture, his machine-gun way of talking, his always being on the alert — because the challenge was just around the corner, every corner, in every doorway, bad luck could fall off a fire escape, walk out of a bar, find you on a termite-eaten dock by the river … Julie Garfinkle brought the damned streets and dark gutters of New York to the screen. He showed himself naked and vulnerable, but he was armed with courage to fight injustice and come out in defense of all those who’d been born like him, in the immense, eternal ghettos of “Western civilization.” I met him in the Group Theatre. He was the “golden boy” in Clifford Odets’ play of that name, the young violinist who exchanges his talent for success in the ring and is left at the end without hands, fingers, or fists, nothing to attack even Joe Louis (who was also Jewish) or Felix Mendelssohn (who was also black). He’d sign anything. If someone said, Look, Julie, look at the injustices being committed against Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Communists, Russia, homeland of the proletariat, against poor children, against people with onchocerciasis in New Guinea, Julie would sign, he signed everything and his signature was strong, broken, round, like a caress, like a punch, it was sweat like a tear, that’s how my friend Julie Garfinkle was. When they brought him to Hollywood after his success in the Group Theatre, he didn’t stop being the street Quixote he always was. He played himself and he fascinated audiences. He wasn’t handsome, elegant, courteous, or ironic, wasn’t Gary Grant or Gary Cooper. He was John Garfield, the scrappy kid from the mean streets of New York, reborn in Beverly Hills, walking into mansions surrounded by rosebushes with his mud-covered shoes and washing them clean in crystalline swimming pools. Which is why his best role was with Joan Crawford in Humoresque. Again he played the part, like the one at the beginning of his career, of the poor boy with a talent for the violin. But she was equal to him. She looked like a rich aristocrat, the patron of the young genius who springs from the invisible city, but in reality she too is poor, she too has fled from the fringes of society by pretending to be rich, cultured, and elegant to disguise the fact that she too is a kid from the street, an arriviste with hard nails and a smooth ass. Which is why they were so explosive as a couple: they were the same but different. Joan Crawford and John Garfield, she pretended, he didn’t. When the McCarthyite flood poured out of the sewers of America, Julie Garfinkle looked like the perfect character for a congressional investigation. He had an anti American look, suspicious, dark, different, Semitic. And he wasn’t guilty of anything. That was essential for McCarthy: to terrorize the innocent. Julie wasn’t guilty of anything. But they accused him of everything, of signing petitions in favor of Stalin during the Moscow purges, demanding a second front during the war, being a crypto-Communist, financing the Party with the patriotic American money Hollywood paid him, showing himself to favor the poor and dispossessed (that alone was enough to make him suspicious; it would have been better to ask for justice for the rich and powerful). The last time I saw him, his Manhattan apartment was a mess — open drawers, papers scattered everywhere, his wife in despair staring at him as if he were insane, and Julie Garfield looking through checkbooks, portfolios, file cabinets, old books, and worn-out wallets for proof of the checks they alleged he’d signed, shouting, “Why don’t they leave me alone?” He was brave, accepting the invitation from the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he made the mistake that people who believed they were falsely accused made. Merely appearing before the committee was proof enough for its members that the person was guilty. Immediately, all the ultrareactionaries in Hollywood — Ronald Reagan, Adolphe Menjou, Ginger Rogers’ mother — corroborated their suspicion, and then the congressmen would pass on the information to Hollywood gossip columnists. Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, George Sokolsky all lived on the blood of the sacrificed stars, like ink-and-paper Draculas. Then the American Legion would mobilize its forces to picket the movies in which the suspects appeared — John Garfield, for example — not allowing people in. Then the studio producer could say what was said to Garfield: You’re a risk. You put the security of the studio at risk. And fire him. “Ask forgiveness, Julie, confess, and live in peace.” “Name names, Julie, or your career’s over.” Then the tough kid from the streets of New York was reborn, naked and snub-nosed, his fists clenched and voice hoarse. “Only a fool would defend himself against fools like McCarthy. Do you think I’m going to be a prisoner of what a poor devil like Ronald Reagan says? Let me go on believing in my humanity, Harry, let me go on believing I have a soul.” We can’t protect you, Hollywood said at first; then: We can’t employ you anymore; finally: We’re going to give evidence against you. The company, the studio, was more important. “You have to understand, Julie, you’re just one person. We employ thousands of people. Do you want them to die of hunger?” Julie Garfinkle died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. It may be true — he had a bad heart, on the point of bursting — but the fact is he was found dead in bed with one of his many lovers. I believe John Garfield died fornicating, a death to be envied. At his funeral, the rabbi said that Julie arrived like a meteor and left like a meteor. Abraham Polonsky, who directed one of Julie’s last and perhaps greatest films, Force of Evil , said, “He defended his street-boy honor, and they killed him for it.” He was killed. He died. Ten thousand people passed by his coffin to bid him farewell. Communists? Agents sent by Stalin? Standing there weeping was Clifford Odets, author of Golden Boy, glory of the literary left, transformed into an informer by the committee; first he informed on the dead because he thought it couldn’t hurt them, then on the living in order to save himself, then on himself when he, like so many others, said, “I didn’t name anyone who hadn’t already been named.” When Odets walked out of John Garfield’s funeral in tears, a fistfight broke out. Right to the end, Jacob Julius Garfinkle lived by slugging it out in the streets of New York.