The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  But she was on her way to the Guadarramas, and I was entrenched at the Jarama. I remember the boys along the highways holding up their fists, serious and squinting into the sun, all with the face of memory. (Do you know that the orphans sent from Guernica to French and English homes scream and cry every time they hear a plane fly over?) Afterward I only remember sad, abandoned places that people passed through very quickly.

  Next to a swift, yellow river.

  Inside a moist cave full of stalagmites and labyrinths.

  Hugging cold and hunger.

  The Luftwaffe bombings began.

  We knew the Germans didn’t bomb military objectives.

  They wanted to keep them intact for Franco.

  The Stukas attacked cities and civilians, which caused more destruction and discouragement than blowing up a bridge.

  That’s why it was safer to rest on a bridge.

  The objective was Guernica.

  To teach a lesson.

  Making war on the general populace.

  Where are we?

  Who won?

  It doesn’t matter: who survived?

  Jorge Maura clasped Laura D az. “Laura, we were mistaken in our historical moment. I don’t want to admit anything that would break our faith…”

  The International Brigades began to arrive. General Mola was besieging Madrid with four columns outside the city and his “fifth column” of spies and traitors inside. What invigorated the resistance was the influx of refugees fleeing Franco. The capital was full of them. That was when people starting singing “Madrid, how well you resist” and “The women of Madrid use fascist bombs for curlers.” It wasn’t absolutely true. There were lots of Franco supporters in the city. Half of Madrid had voted against the Popular Front in 1936. And the “tours” made by Republican thugs who went around murdering fascists, priests, and nuns had reduced sympathy for the Republic. I think the arrival of refugees was the greatest defense of Madrid. And if it wasn’t the ladies’ hair curlers, it was a certain suicidal but elegant challenge that set the tone. Writers had taken refuge in a theater, and Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León organized dances in the darkness every night to help dissipate the fear sown by the Luftwaffe. I was one of them, and besides the Spaniards there were many Spanish Americans there: Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and the Mexican painter Siqueiros, who’d given himself the rank of “super-colonel” and who had himself followed around by a shoeshine boy so his cavalry boots could be kept polished. Neruda was slow and sleepy, like an ocean; Vallejo carried hollow-eyed death shrouded under his eyelids. Paz had eyes bluer than the sky, and Siqueiros was a military parade all by himself. We all dressed up in theater costumes from classic Spanish plays like Don Juan, The Leandras, The Vengeance of Don Mendo, and The Mayor of Zalamea. A little bit of everything, all of us dancing on a Madrid rooftop under the bombs, unintentionally illuminated by the German Stukas, drinking champagne. What madness, what joy, what kind of party was that, Laura? Is it risible, reprehensible, or magnificent that a group of poets and painters celebrate life in the midst of death, tell the solemn cloistered enemy attacking us from above to go to hell with his infinite fascist reactionary gloom and his eternal list of prohibitions: purity of blood, purity of religion, sexual purity?

  We already knew what they were like. After the Republic came to power in 1931, they opposed coeducation; when lay education was established they sent their children to school with crucifixes on their breasts, they were the false piety of long skirts and smelly armpits, they were the Goths, enemies of Arabic cleanliness and Jewish thrift; bathing was proof of the Moorish taint, usury was a Hebrew sin. They were the corruptors of language, Laura, you would have to hear them to believe it; they spoke without shame of the values they were defending-the ardent breath of God, the noble home of the nation, the chaste and worthy woman, the fertile furrow of wheat against Republican eunuchs and Jewish Masons, Marxist sirens who introduce exotic ideas into Spain, sowing discord in the field of the robust Spanish Catholic faith; rootless cosmopolites, renegades, mobs thirsty for Spanish and Christian blood, red scum!, and for that reason Alberti’s costume balls on the roof of a theater illuminated by bombs were like a challenge from the other Spain, the one that always saves itself from oppression thanks to its imagination.

  It was there I met two fellows, two Americans, from the International Brigades, which the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti and the French Communist André Marty were put in charge of organizing. Beginning in July 1936, about ten thousand foreign volunteers crossed the Pyrenees and by early November there were about three thousand in Madrid. The phrase of the moment was ¡No pasarán!, “They Shall Not Pass.” The fascists will not pass, but the brigade members will, received with open arms. The cafés filled with foreign soldiers and journalists. The people shouted to all of them, “Long live the Russians!” Among the others was a German Communist, an aristocrat with a fabulous name I’ll never forget: Arnold Friedrich Wieth von Golsenau. He approached me as if he recognized me, saying “Maura” and all my other last names, as if to assimilate the two of us, inducting me at his side into that species of impregnable superiority that is being both an aristocrat and a Communist. He noted my reticence and smiled. “People can trust us, Maura. We have nothing to gain. There can be no doubt about our honesty. A revolution should only be carried out by rich aristocrats, people without inferiority complexes or economic needs. Then there would be no corruption. It’s corruption that ruins revolutions and makes people think that if the old regime was detestable the new one is even more so because while the conservatives offered no hope, the left simply betrayed it.” “Things like that happen,” I answered in a conciliatory way, “because aristocrats and workers always lose revolutions while the bourgeoisie wins them.” “You’re right,” he conceded, “they always have something to win.” “And we,” I reminded him, “always have something to lose.” He laughed hard at that. I didn’t share the cynicism of Golsenau, who was known in the Brigades by his nom de guerre, “Renn.” There were two levels in this war, the level of those who talked war, theorized about it, thought about it, and invented strategies, and the level of the vast majority of the common people, who were everything but common. They were extraordinary and every day demonstrated their limitless bravery. You know, Laura, the first line of fire in all the great battles-Madrid and the Jarama, Brunete and Teruel, the defeat of Mussolini at Guadalajara-was never unmanned. The Republicans, the people, fought to be the first to die. Boys with their fists raised high, men with no shoes, women with the last family loaf of bread between their breasts, militiamen waving their rusty rifles-all fighting in the trenches, the streets, the fields. No one hesitated, no one ran. No one ever saw anything like it before. I was at the Jarama when the fighting intensified, with a thousand African troops arriving under the command of General Orgaz, protected by tanks and by the planes of the Nazi Condor Legion. The Russian tanks on the Republican side held back the fascist advance, and the front moved back and forth between the two, filling the hospitals with wounded and also with the sick, who caught the malaria brought by the Africans. There was some black humor in the situation, up to a point. Moors expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in the name of blood purity were fighting on the side of the German racists against a republican and democratic people supported by the tanks of another totalitarian despot, Joseph Stalin. Almost instinctively, out of liberal sympathy, and because of antipathy to Renn and Togliatti, I became friends with Americans in the Brigade. Their names were Jim and Harry. Harry was a New Yorker, a Jew, motivated by two simple things: hatred of anti-Semitism and faith in Communism. Jim was more complicated. He was the son of a famous journalist and writer from New York and had come to Spain, even though he was very young-he must have been twenty-five then-with press credentials and the support of two famous correspondents, Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway. Those two were competing to see which would have the honor of dying on the Spanish front. I don’t know why you’r
e going to Spain, Hemingway said to Sheean, when the only article you’ll produce is your own obituary, which won’t do you any good, because I’ll be the one to write it. Sheean, a brilliant and good-looking man, quickly shot back: The story of your death will be even more famous, and I’ll write it. Behind them came the tall, awkward, nearsighted one, Jim, and behind him came the little Jew in a jacket and tie, Harry. Sheean and Hemingway went on to be war correspondents, but Jim and Harry stayed to fight. The Jewish boy made up for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. The tall New Yorker, as a matter of principle, immediately lost his glasses and laughed about it, saying it was better to fight without seeing the enemy you were going to kill. Both of them had that New York sense of humor: sentimental, cynical, and, above all, self-mocking. “I want to impress my friends,” Jim would say. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry would say. “I want to know fear,” Jim said. “I want to save my soul,” said Harry. And the two of them: “So long to ties.” Bearded, in sandals, their uniforms more ragged every day, singing songs from The Mikado (!) at the top of their lungs, the Americans were really the wit of our company. Not only did they lose their ties and eyeglasses, they even lost their socks, but they won the goodwill of all, Spaniards and Brigade members. That a nearsighted man like Jim could ask to be allowed to lead a squad on a night scouting mission proves the heroic madness of our war. Harry was more cautious: “We’ve got to go on living in order to go on fighting tomorrow.”

  At the Jarama, notwithstanding the German planes, the Russian tanks, and the International Brigades, it was we, the Spaniards, who fought. Harry admitted it, but he pointed out, They are Spanish Communists. He was right. At the beginning of 1937, the Communist Party had grown from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand members, and by summer it had a million. The defense of Madrid gave them those numbers and that prestige. Stalin’s policies would erase them both. Socialism never had a worse enemy than Stalin. But last year Harry could see only the victory of the proletariat and its Communist vanguard. He would argue all day, he had read the entire corpus of Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” It was his Dominus vobiscum. For Harry, the trial and execution of a Communist as honorable as Bukharin was an accident on the road toward a glorious future. Harry Jaffe was a small, nervous man, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive because he would not recognize the weakness of a political conviction that had not been subjected to criticism. In every detail, he contrasted with the lanky giant Jim, for whom theory was of no importance. “A man knows when he’s right,” he’d say. “So you’ve got to fight for what’s right. It’s simple. Here and now, the Republic is right and the fascists wrong. You’ve got to be with the Republic, and that’s that.” They were like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, except that their La Mancha was called Brooklyn and Queens. Well, actually they were more like Mutt and Jeff, except they were young and serious. I remember Harry and I would smoke and argue, leaning against bridge railings, on the theory that fascists never attacked communication routes. Jim, on the other hand, was always looking for the fighting, requesting the riskiest positions, always in the most advanced line, “looking for my lost glasses,” he would joke. He was a tall, smiling, incredibly courteous man, very delicate in his way of speaking. (“I leave all bad words to my father. I’ve heard him say them so many times that they’ve lost their impact. In New York, there’s the public language of journalism, crime, rude competition, and another, secret language of sensibility, refined regard, and happy solitude. I want to go back and write in that second language, George old boy, but in fact my father and I complement each other. He thanks me for my language, and I thank him for his: What the fuck!” laughed the clumsy, brave giant.) I climbed trees with him to get a view of the Castilian countryside. Despite the wounds that war leaves on the body of the earth, we managed to make out flocks, windmills, carnation-colored afternoons, rose dawns, the girls’ solid legs, the furrows waiting for the trenches to close like scars; this is the land of Cervantes and Goya, I’d say to him, no one can kill it. It’s also the new land of Homer, he’d say back, a land that is born at the same time as the rosy-fingered dawn and the fatal, ruined wrath of men. One day, Jim didn’t come back. Harry and I waited for him all night, at first exchanging glances wordlessly, then joking, whiskey might kill that gringo but gunpowder never will. He never did come back. We all knew he was dead, because in a front like the Jarama anyone who didn’t come back after two days was considered dead. The hospitals never took longer than forty-eight hours to report on the wounded. To keep track of the dead took longer, and at the front the daily casualties added up to hundreds of men. But in Jim’s case, everybody went on asking about him as if he were only lost or absent. Harry and I realized then how all the other soldiers in the Brigade and the Republican army loved him. He’d made himself loved for a thousand reasons, we told each other in that retrospective act which allows us to see and say in death what we never knew how to see or say in life. We’re always blind to what we see and see only what we’ve lost forever. Laura, I somehow convinced myself that only I knew Jim was dead, and that I was keeping him alive so as not to depress Harry and the other comrades who loved the big, well-spoken American. But then I realized we all knew he was dead, and we were all agreeing to lie and say our comrade was still alive.

  “You haven’t seen Jim, have you?”

  “Yes, he said goodbye at dawn.”

  “He had orders. A mission.”

  “If only there was a way to tell him we’re waiting for him.”

  “He told me he knew.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “I know you’re all waiting for me.”

  “He must be sure of that. We’ll wait for him here. And nobody better say he’s dead.”

  “Look, the glasses he was waiting for came in today’s mail.”

  Jorge Maura embraced Laura Díaz. “We were mistaken in our historical moment. I don’t want to admit anything that would break our faith, how I wish we were all heroes, how I want to keep the faith.”

  That morning, Laura D az walked the length of Avenida de los Insurgentes to her house in Colonia Roma. Maura’s emotional earthquake kept running through her body like an internal torrent. It didn’t matter that the Spaniard hadn’t told her anything about his private life. He’d told her everything about his public life: how I wish we were all heroes. How she herself wished she could be heroic. But after hearing Jorge Maura, she knew that heroism isn’t a project that can be willed but a response to imaginable yet unforeseen circumstances. There was nothing heroic in her own life; perhaps someday, thanks to her Spanish lover, she would know how to respond to the challenge of heroism.

  Juan Francisco… sitting on their bed, perhaps waiting for her or perhaps not waiting for her anymore, with an obvious recrimination-Santiago and Danton, our sons, I had to take care of them myself, I’m not asking you where you’ve been-but tied to himself, to the last post of his honor by the promise of never again spying on her, what would she say after four days of unexplained, inexplicable absence, except for what only Laura D az and Jorge Maura could explain: time doesn’t count for lovers, passion is not subject to clocks…?

  “I told the boys your mother was ill and that you had to go to Xalapa.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What more do you want?”

  “Betrayal is harder to stand, Laura.”

  “You think I feel I have a right to everything?”

  “Why? Because one day I turned in a woman and the next I slapped you and the next I had you followed by a detective?”

  “None of that gives me the right to betray you.”

  “Well, then?”

  “You seem to have all the answers today. Answer yourself.”

  Juan Francisco would turn his back on his wife to tell her, in a pained voice, that only one thi
ng gave her all the rights in the world, the right to make her own life and betray him and humiliate him, not a kind of game in which each one scored goals on the other until they were even, no, nothing so simple, the dark, corpulent man would intolerably say, nothing except a broken promise, a deception, I’m not what you thought I was when you met me at the Casino ball, when I arrived with my fame as a valiant revolutionary.

  I’m not a hero.

  But one day you were, Laura wanted both to state it and to ask it, isn’t that true, one day you were? He’d understand and answer as if she had actually asked, how can you maintain lost heroism when age and circumstance no longer authorize it?

  “I’m not very different from the rest. We’re all fighting for the Revolution and against injustice, but also against fatality, Laura, we didn’t want to go on being poor, humiliated, without rights. I’m no exception. Look at all the others. Calles was a poor country schoolteacher, Morones a telegraph operator, now this Fidel Velázquez was a milkman, and the other leaders were peasants, carpenters, electricians, railroad men, how could you think they wouldn’t take advantage and grab opportunity by the tail? Do you know what it is to grow up hungry, six of you sleeping in a shack, half of your brothers dead in childhood, mothers old women at the age of thirty? Tell me if you can’t explain why a man born with his roof three feet above his sleeping pallet in Pénjamo wouldn’t want a thirty-foot ceiling over his head in Polanco? Tell me Morones wasn’t right to give his mother a California-style house, even if it was right next door to where he kept his harem of whores? Damn, to be an honorable revolutionary, see, like that Roosevelt in the United States, you’ve got to be rich first, but if you grew up sleeping on a pallet, you won’t settle for just the pallet, dear, you won’t want ever to go back again to the world of fleas, you even forget the people you left behind, you set yourself up in purgatory as long as you don’t have to go back to hell, and you let the others think whatever they like in the heaven you betrayed, what do you think of me? The truth, Laura, the real truth…”