Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  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.”

  20.

  Tepoztlán: 1954

  1.

  “I SHOULD 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.

  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.

  When the summer rains soaked the garden and seeped through the house walls, leaving obscure medallion-shaped stains on the skin of the adobe, Harry Jaffe felt he was suffocating and asked Laura Díaz, please, read the pages about John Garfield.

  “But there were accused people who didn’t name names and didn’t let themselves become anguished or depressed, isn’t that true, Harry?”

  “You met them in Cuernavaca. Some of them were among the Hollywood Ten. And yes, it’s true they had the courage not to talk or let themselves be scared, but most of all they had the courage not to fall into despair, not to commit suicide, not to die. Are they better people for that? Another pal from the Group Theatre, the actor J. Edward Bromberg, asked to be excused from appearing before the committee because of his recent heart attacks. Congressman Francis E. Walker, one of the worst inquisitors, told him that Communists were very skillful at presenting excuses signed by doctors—who no doubt were at the very least red sympathizers. Edd
ie Bromberg died in London three years ago, Laura. Sometimes, after he was blacklisted, he’d call me to say, Harry, there are always guys standing outside my house, day and night. They take turns, but there’re always two of them in plain sight next to the streetlight, while I spy on them spying on me. I’m constantly waiting for the phone to ring; I never leave the telephone, Harry, they might call me to the committee again, they might call to tell me the role they promised has gone to someone else, or the other way around, they might call me to tempt me with a part on condition that I cooperate, that is, squeal, Harry, this happens five or six times a day, I’m always next to the telephone, tempted, tearing myself to pieces, should I talk or not, should I think about my career or not, I won’t talk, Harry, no, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, Harry, but most of all, Harry, I didn’t want to hurt myself, my loyalty to my comrades was loyalty to myself. I didn’t save them or myself.”

  “And you, Harry, are you going to write about yourself?”

  “I really feel sick, Laura, give me a beer. Be a good girl …”

  Another morning—the parrots were screeching in the sunlight, showing off their crests and wings as if they were announcing a bulletin, good or bad news—as he ate his breakfast Harry answered Laura.

  “You only told me about the people who were destroyed for not talking. But you said that others saved themselves, came out stronger for keeping their mouths shut,” Laura persisted.

  How can there be innocence when no one’s guilty? quoted Harry. “Dalton Trumbo said that at the beginning of the witch-hunt. During the witch-hunt, he outsmarted the inquisitors, wrote scripts under pseudonyms, won an Oscar under a pseudonym, and the Academy almost shit in its pants it was so angry when Trumbo revealed he was the author. And when it’s all over, I suspect it’ll be Trumbo who will say there were neither heroes nor villains, saints nor devils, only victims, Laura. The day will come when all the accused will be rehabilitated and celebrated as cultural heroes, and the accusers will be accused and degraded as they justly deserve. But Trumbo was right. We’ll all have been victims.”