The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  His snakelike eyelids interrogated each of the soldiers. He wanted to be fair. He listened to the arguments. A noisily opened balcony window and a heartrending shriek interrupted them. A woman appeared with a moon-colored face and eyes the color of blackberries, dressed all in black, her head covered, her skin worn transparent by use, like a sheet of paper on which more has been erased than written. Méndez, mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia, paid no attention. He repeated: Speak up.

  “Save her in the name of honor,” said Jorge Maura.

  “I love Pilar,” Basilio Baltazar shouted, more loudly than the woman on the balcony “Save her in the name of love.”

  “She must die in the name of justice.” The mayor planted his hoot on the immaculate sand and stared, looking for support, at the Communist Vidal.

  “Save her despite politics,” he said.

  “Unfavorable winds.” The old man tried to smile, but he remained, ultimately, hieratic. “Unfavorable.”

  Then the woman on the balcony shouted, Have pity! And the mayor told everyone not to confuse his obligation to justice with his wife’s anger, and the woman shouted again from the balcony, You only have obligations as a mayor and a Communist? And the old man again ignored her, speaking only to Vidal, Baltazar, and Maura, I don’t obey my feelings, I obey Spain and the Party.

  “Have you no compassion?” shouted the woman.

  “It’s your fault, Clemencia, you educated her to be a Catholic against my wishes,” the mayor answered finally, turning his back to the woman on the balcony.

  “Don’t embitter what is left of my life, Alvaro.”

  “Bah! Family discord doesn’t take precedence over law.”

  “Sometimes discord is born not of hatred but of too much love,” shouted Clemencia, removing the shawl covering her head and revealing her tousled white hair and her ears overflowing with prophecies. “Our daughter stands exposed, at the city gates. What are you going to do with her?”

  “She’s no longer your daughter. She’s my wife,” said Basilio Baltazar.

  That night, someone let the oxen into the Santa Fe plaza. The fires on the mountain began to go out.

  “The sky is full of lies,” said Clemencia in an opaque voice before closing the balcony shutters.

  (“I must tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

  There seemed to be only one theme at the next meeting in the Café de Paris: violence, its origins, its gestation, its offspring, its relationship with good and evil. Maura espoused the most difficult argument, that it is impossible to ascribe all evil to the fascists, let’s not forget Republican violence, the assassination of Cardinal Soldevila in Zaragoza by the anarchists, the Socialists beating to death members of Franco’s Falange as they exercised on the grounds of the Casa de Campo in 1934-they poked out their eyeballs and urinated in the sockets, that’s what our side did, comrades.

  “They were ours.”

  “And didn’t the fascists later on kill the girl who urinated on their dead?”

  “That’s my argument, comrades,” said Maura, taking the hand of his Mexican lover. “The escalation of Spanish violence always takes us to the war of all against all.”

  “How right the Catalan escamots were in 1934, when they cut the railroad lines to separate Catalonia from Spain forever.” Basilio stared at the joined hands of Jorge and Laura-“Good for you!”-but he felt pain and envy.

  Vidal roared with a laugh as woolly as his sweater. “So we all kill one another behind closed doors in a jolly regional style while the world jerks off!”

  Jorge let go of Laura’s hand and threw his arm over Vidal’s shoulder. I’m not forgetting the mass murders perpetrated by Franco’s people in Badajoz, the murder of Federico Garc a Lorca, or Guernica. That, comrades, was my prologue.

  “Friends, forget the political violence of the past. Forget Spain’s supposed political fatality. This is a war, but it isn’t even ours; it’s been taken away from us; we’re nothing but a rehearsal. Our enemies come from outside Spain; Franco is a puppet, but Hitler, unless we stop him, will conquer the world. Remember, I studied in Germany and saw how the Nazis organized. Forget our miserable Spanish violence. Just wait and see real violence. The violence of evil. Evil, that’s right, with a capital E, organized like a factory in the Ruhr Valley. Our violence is going to look like flamenco dancing or bullfighting,” said Jorge Maura.

  (“I have to tell you about Raquel Alemán.”)

  “And you, Laura D az? You haven’t said a word.”

  She looked down for an instant and then gazed tenderly at each one. Finally, she spoke: “I really enjoy seeing that the hardest fought discussion among men always reveals what they have in common.”

  The three of them blushed simultaneously. Basilio Baltazar saved the situation, which she had not fully understood. “You two are very much in love. How do you measure love in the context of all that’s taking place?”

  Vidal joined in. “Rephrase the question like this: Does only personal happiness count and not the disaster about to engulf millions of people?”

  “I’m asking a different question, Mr. Vidal,” Laura pointed out.

  “Just Vidal. How formal you Mexicans are.”

  “Well then, Mr. Just Vidal. Can the love two people share make up for all the unhappiness in the world?”

  The three men exchanged a look of modesty and compassion.

  “Yes, I suppose there are ways of redeeming the world, whether we’re as solitary as our friend Basilio or as affiliated as I am,” Vidal responded, with mixed humility and arrogance.

  (“I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

  What the Communist said at the end, Laura, Jorge said to her as the two of them strolled alone along Avenida Cinco de Mayo, is true but troubling.

  She told him he seemed reticent-eloquent, of course, but reticent almost always. He was a different Jorge Maura, another one, and she liked him, she swore she did, but she wanted to pause for a moment on the Maura in the café, understand his silence, share the reasons for his silence.

  “You know that none of us dares express his true doubts,” countered Maura, walking toward the Venetian-style building that was Mexico City’s main post office. “The Communists were the strongest because they have the fewest doubts. But that’s why it’s easier for them to commit historical crimes. Don’t misunderstand me. Nazis and Communists are not the same thing. The difference is that Hitler believes in evil, evil is his gospel-conquest, genocide, racism. But Stalin must say he believes in the good, in the freedom of labor, in the disappearance of the state, and in giving to each according to his needs. He recites the gospel of the civil god.”

  “Is that why he fools so many people?”

  “Hitler recites the gospel of the devil. He commits his crimes in the name of evil: that’s his horror. It’s never been seen before. Those who follow him must share his malevolent will, all of them-Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, aristocrats like Papen, low-class scum like Ernst Röhm, Prussian Junkers like Keitel. Stalin commits his crimes in the name of the good, and I don’t know if that isn’t an even greater horror, because those who follow him act in good faith; they’re not fascists but people who are usually good, and when they realize what the Stalinist horror is, Stalin himself eliminates them. Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, all the comrades of the heroic period. Those who refused to follow Stalin because they preferred to follow true Communism all the way to exile or death: aren’t they heroes-Bukharin, Trot sky, Kamenev? Name one Nazi who’s abandoned Hitler out of fidelity to National Socialism.”

  “And what about you, Jorge, my little Spanish boy?”

  “Me, Laura, my little Mexican girl, I’m a Spanish intellectual and, if you like, a gentleman, an aristó, of the kind Robespierre had guillotined.”

  “You have a divided soul, my little Spanish gentleman.”

  “No, I certainly comprehend the Nazi evil as well as the Stalinist betrayal. But I’m also conscious of the nobility of the Spanish Republic, how it is
simply trying to make Spain into a normal modern country, with mutual respect, getting along with one another, and trying to solve our problems, which, damn it all, have been with us since the Goths. And to that essential nobility of the Republic, I sacrifice my doubts, Laura my love. Between the Nazi evil and the Communist betrayal, I’ll choose the Republican heroism of that young gringo (as you call them), that young Jim, who came to the Jarama to die for us.”

  “Jorge, I’m not an idiot. Someone else suffered for the three of you. Something else links you, Baltazar, and Vidal.”

  (“I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

  Standing with her back to the wall that ran around Santa Fe de Palencia, wrapped in a mantle of savage black skins, her blond hair tossed by the swirling wind from the mountain, Pilar Méndez watched the hilltop bonfires go out one by one. She did not smile to affirm her triumph-treason to her father, victory for her, strengthening her conviction that to help her side was like helping God-though her spirits sank when she heard the footsteps of the three Republican soldiers advancing from the Roman gate to that space of restless dust and bellowing oxen which she, Pilar Méndez, occupied in the name of her God, beyond any political faith, because the Nationals and the Falange were with God and they, the others, her father, Don Alvaro, and the three soldiers, were victims of the devil without knowing it, thinking they were on the good side, it was they, all of them, the reds, who burned down churches and shot priests and raped nuns: Domingo, Vidal, Jorge Maura, and Basilio Baltazar, her love, her burning tenderness, the man in her life, her husband already without any need of sacraments, walking through the dust and the oxen and the wind and the dead fires toward her, the woman standing fast against the wall of the dying city wrapped in a long mantle of dead black animals, a Spanish blonde, a Visigothic goddess with blue eyes and a mane as yellow as the sand in the bullring.

  What were these three men going to say to her?

  What could they say?

  Not a word. Only the sight of Basilio Baltazar like a double arrow of life’s inseparable pain and pleasure. Her lover felt like a price, the price one paid to invert the order of life, which was love, thought Pilar Méndez as she watched the three men approach.

  Basilio knelt and wrapped his arms around her knees, endlessly repeating my love my love my cunt my tits don’t take anything away my treasure, Pilar I adore you.

  “You, Domingo Vidal, Communist enemy?” asked Pilar to the other man, to strengthen herself against Basilio Baltazar’s amatory grief.

  Vidal nodded his shaved head, his militia cap in his hands, as if Pilar were the Virgin of Sorrows.

  “You, Jorge Maura, aristocrat traitor, gone over to the reds?”

  Jorge embraced her, and she howled like an animal, yet an animal capable of repugnance, but Maura said, I’m not letting you go, you must understand, you’re sentenced to death, understand me?, you’re to be executed at dawn, your own father has ordered you shot, your father the mayor your father Alvaro Méndez, he’s going to kill you despite all our begging, despite your mother…

  Pilar Méndez’s insane laugh pulled a horrified Baltazar to his feet. My mother? laughed Pilar like some wild animal, a most beautiful hyena, a Medusa without a gaze, my mother, is there anyone who desires my death more than my badly named mother Clemencia, the pig, she who made me devout until death, she who implanted the idea of sin and hell in me?, that woman doesn’t want my life, she wants my martyr’s death, the death of a virgin who believes, the fool, virgin, Basilio, you hear her, Basilio, what do you win by the fact that Clemencia my mother saw us the afternoon you tore out my virginity, you nibbled it bite by bite, you spit out my bloody membrane as if it were snot or a rotten host, Basilio, remember?, and you penetrated me the way a wolf penetrates a she-wolf from behind, up the ass, without seeing my face; that you remember, in the old house without furniture where you took me, my adored love, my only man, you think you have the right to save me when my own mother wants me dead, a martyr for the Movement, a saint who saves her own conscience, Clemencia the well named, the mother who hates me because I didn’t marry as she wished, I gave myself to a poor boy with suspicious ideas, my handsome, adored Basilio Baltazar, why have you come here, what are you and your friends trying to do, you’ve gone mad, you don’t know you’re all my enemies, you don’t know I’m against you, I’d have all of you shot in the name of Spain and Franco, I don’t want thorns to grow on the old paths of Spanish death, I want to wash them away with my blood…

  Vidal brutally covered her mouth as if he were closing a sewer, Maura made her cross her arms, Baltazar again knelt at her feet. Each of them had his own words, but they all said the same thing, we want to save you, come with us, look at the fires that have still not gone out on the hills, we’ll find refuge there, your father has done his duty, he’s given the order for you to be shot at dawn, we aren’t going to do our duty, come with us, let us save you, Pilar, even if the price is our own death.

  “Why, Jorge?” asked Laura Díaz.

  In spite of the war. In spite of the Republic. In spite of her father’s will. My daughter must die in the name of justice said the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia. She must be saved in the name of love said Basilio Baltazar. She must be saved in spite of political logic said Domingo Vidal. She must be saved in the name of honor said Jorge Maura.

  “My two friends looked at me and understood. I didn’t have to explain. It isn’t enough that we do things in the name of love or justice. It is honor that sanctioned us. Honor in exchange for justice? That’s the dilemma I saw on the face of Domingo Vidal. Betrayal or beauty? That’s what Basilio Baltazar’s loving eyes were asking me. I looked at the three of them, stripped of everything but the bare skin of truth, that fatal afternoon against the medieval walls and the Roman gate, surrounded by mountains that were going out, I saw the three, Pilar, Basilio, Domingo, as an emblematic group, Laura, the reason why no one but I understood then and now you too because I’m telling you. This is the reason. The need for beauty supersedes the need for justice. The interlocking trio-woman, lover, adversary-was not resolving itself in either justice or love; it was an act of necessary beauty, based on honor.”

  What can the duration of a sculpture be when it is incarnated not by statues but by living beings threatened with death?

  Sculptural perfection-honor and beauty triumphing over betrayal and justice-dissolved when Jorge whispered to the woman, Run away with us to the mountains, save yourself, because if you don’t the four of us will die here together, and she, between her clenched teeth, answered, I’m human, I haven’t learned anything; even though Basilio begged, nothing is won without compassion, come with us, run away, there’s time; and she, I’m like a dog for death, I smell it and I follow it until I get killed, I’m not going to give the three of you the satisfaction, I can smell death, all the graves in this country are open, there’s no home left to us but the grave.

  “Your father and mother at least. Save yourself for them.”

  Pilar stared at them with an incendiary shock on her face and began to laugh insanely. “But you understand nothing. Do you think I’m dying just out of loyalty to the Movement?”

  Her laughter kept her apart for a few seconds. “I’m dying so my father and mother will hate each other forever. So they’ll never forgive each other.”

  (I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.)

  “I think you’re one of those men who are only loyal to themselves if they’re loyal to their friends,” said Laura, leaning her head against Jorge’s shoulder.

  “No.” He sighed with fatigue. “I’m a man who’s angry with himself because he doesn’t know how to explain the truth and avoid lies.”

  “Perhaps you’re strong because you doubt things, my Spanish boy. I think I figured that out tonight.”

  They crossed Aquiles Serdán and passed under the marble portico of the Palace of Fine Arts.

  “I just said it now in the café, my love, we’re all condemned. I confess I hate all systems,
mine and the others’.”

  VIDAL: Now do you see? Victory will not be achieved without order. Let’s win or lose now, victorious today or defeated tomorrow, we’re going to need order and unity, hierarchies of command and discipline. Without them, we’ll always be beaten, because they do have order, unity, command, and discipline.

  BALTAZAR: Well, in that case, what’s the difference between Hitler’s implacable discipline and Stalin’s?

  VIDAL: The ends, Basilio. Hitler wants a world of slaves. Stalin wants a world of free men. Even though their means may be equally violent, their ends are totally different.

  “Vidal’s right,” laughed Laura. “You’re closer to the anarchist than to the Communist.”

  Jorge stopped short opposite a poster at the Palace of Fine Arts. “No one was playing a part this afternoon, Laura. Vidal really is a Communist. Basilio really is an anarchist. I didn’t tell you the truth. I thought that way the two of us, you and I, could stand at a certain distance from the debate.”

  They stood in silence for a while, staring at the poster’s black letters on yellow paper, improperly fastened to a wooden frame unworthy of the marbles and bronzes in the Palace of Fine Arts. Jorge looked at Laura.

  “Forgive me. How beautiful you are.”