Read Years With Laura Diaz, The Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
Years With Laura Diaz, The (35 page)
To face each other and open their eyes when they both came together.
“Let’s desire this for all the lovers of the world, Jorge.”
“For everyone, Laura my love.”
Now he was pacing around the disorder of the hotel room like a cat. She had never seen so much paper tossed around, so many portfolios opened, so much disorder in a man so beautiful and well ordered in everything else. It was as if Jorge Maura did not like the paperwork, as if he were carrying in his briefcases something he could toss aside, something disagreeable, possibly poisonous. He didn’t close up his portfolios, as if he wanted to air them or as if he were hoping that the papers would fly off or an indiscreet chambermaid would read them.
“She wouldn’t understand any of it,” he said with a bitter smile.
“What?”
“Nothing. I hope things work out for the best.”
Laura went back to being the way she was before, but as she never was with him: languid, timid, careless, doting, strong. She went back to that because she knew what would defeat the pulse of desire, and desire could destroy pleasure itself, could become demanding, thoughtless about the woman’s limits and the man’s, making couples become too conscious of their happiness. That is why she was going to introduce the theme of daily life, to calm the destructive tempest which had,
since the first night, fatally accompanied pleasure, secretly frightening them. But she did not have to; he anticipated her. Did he really anticipate her, or was it foreseeable that one of the two would descend from passion to action?
since the first night, fatally accompanied pleasure, secretly frightening them. But she did not have to; he anticipated her. Did he really anticipate her, or was it foreseeable that one of the two would descend from passion to action?
Jorge Maura was in Mexico as a representative of the Spanish Republic, which by March 1938 had been reduced to the enclaves of Madrid and Barcelona and, in the south, the Mediterranean territory of Valencia. The Mexican government, under Lázaro Cárdenas, had given diplomatic aid to the Republicans, but this ethical action could not equal the crushing material assistance given to the rebel Francisco Franco by the Nazi and fascist regimes. Nor could it make up for the cowardly abandonment of the Republic by the European democracies: England and France. Berlin and Rome intervened with all their strength in favor of Franco, while Paris and London turned their backs on the “child Republic,” as María Zambrano called it. The tiny flower of Spanish democracy was trampled by everyone, its friends, its enemies, and, at times, its supporters.
Laura Díaz told Jorge she wanted to be everything with him, share everything, know everything, that she was in love with him, madly in love.
Jorge Maura’s expression did not change when he heard her declaration, and Laura did not understand if it was part of his seriousness to listen to her without a word or if the hidalgo was only pausing before beginning his story. Perhaps a bit of both. He wanted her to listen before making any decisions.
“I swear I’ll die if I don’t know everything about you,” she ventured in turn.
Thinking about Spain locked him within himself. He said that Spain for the Spaniards is like Mexico for Mexicans, a painful obsession. Not a hymn of optimism, as their country is for Americans, not a phlegmatic joke as it is for the English, not a sentimental madness (Russians), not a reasonable irony (French), not an aggressive command, as Germans see theirs, but a conflict of halves, of opposed parts, of tugs at the soul—Spain and Mexico, countries of light and shadow.
He began by telling stories, with no commentary, while the two of
them strolled among the hedges and pines of the Parque de la Lama. The first thing he told her was how shocked he was at the resemblance between Mexico and Castile. Why had the Spaniards chosen a plateau so like Castile as the site of their first and principal viceroyalty in the New World?
them strolled among the hedges and pines of the Parque de la Lama. The first thing he told her was how shocked he was at the resemblance between Mexico and Castile. Why had the Spaniards chosen a plateau so like Castile as the site of their first and principal viceroyalty in the New World?
He was looking at the dry land, the gray brown mountains, the snowy peaks, the cold transparent air, the desolation of the roads, the burros and bare feet, the women dressed in black and covered with shawls, the dignity of the beggars, the beauty of the children, the floral compensation and culinary abundance of two countries dying of hunger. He visited the oases, like this one, of refreshing vegetation, and he felt that he hadn’t changed places, or that he was ubiquitous, and not only physically but. historically because being born Spanish or Mexican transforms experience into destiny.
He loved her and wanted her to know everything about him. Everything about the war and how he lived it. He was a soldier. He obeyed orders. But he rebelled first, the better to obey later on. Because of his social origin, the government first thought to use him on diplomatic missions. He was a descendant of the first reform minister at the turn of the century, Antonio Maura y Montaner; he’d been a disciple of Ortega y Gasset; he’d graduated from the University of Freiburg in Germany: he wanted first to live the war in order to know the truth and then to defend it and negotiate for it if necessary, but first to know it. The truth of experience first. The truth of conclusions later. Experience and conclusion, he told Laura, those are perhaps the complete truth, until the conclusion itself is negated by other experiences.
“I don’t know. I have an immense faith and an immense doubt at the same time. I think certitude is the goal of thought. And I always fear that any system we help to build will end up destroying us. It isn’t easy.”
He fought in the battles at the Jarama River during the winter of 1937. What did he recall of those days? Physical sensations above all. The mist that came out of your mouth. The frozen wind that emptied your eyes. Where are we? That’s the most disconcerting thing in war. You don’t know exactly where you are. A soldier doesn’t carry a map in
his head. I didn’t know where I was. We were ordered to execute flanking movements, advances into nothingness, then to scatter so the bombs wouldn’t kill us. That was the biggest confusion in battle. Cold and hunger were constant. The people were always different. It was hard to fix a face or a phrase beyond the day you saw or heard it. Which is why I decided to concentrate on a single person, so the war would have a face, but above all to have company. In order not to be alone in the war. So alone.
his head. I didn’t know where I was. We were ordered to execute flanking movements, advances into nothingness, then to scatter so the bombs wouldn’t kill us. That was the biggest confusion in battle. Cold and hunger were constant. The people were always different. It was hard to fix a face or a phrase beyond the day you saw or heard it. Which is why I decided to concentrate on a single person, so the war would have a face, but above all to have company. In order not to be alone in the war. So alone.
I remember I saw a pretty girl one day wearing blue overalls. She had the face of a nun, but she shouted the worst obscenities I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ll always remember her because I never saw her again. Her hair was so black it seemed as blue as midnight. Her thick eyebrows met in a frown of rage. She had a bandage on her nose, and not even that would hide her profile—like that of a wild eagle. But her constant litany of insults camouflaged the prayer she recited silently. Of that I was so convinced that I communicated it to her with my eyes. She understood, got upset, spouted a couple of curses at me, and I answered “Amen.” She was as white as a nun who’s never seen the sun and had whiskers like the women of Galicia. She was pretty for all that, because of all that. Her language was a challenge, not only to the fascists but to death itself. Franco and death were a couple, two big sons of bitches. Sometimes the image of the beautiful woman with the pale blue overalls and the night-blue hair threatens to fade. He laughed. I needed someone as different from her as you are to remember her today. No, both of you were or are tall women.
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 …”
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?
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’re 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.”
¡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’re 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.”
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