Years With Laura Diaz, The (57 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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“You only named those who’d already been named.”
“Everyone you named was already on the blacklist.”
“Between betraying your friends and betraying your country, you chose your country.”
“You said to yourself that if you stayed in the Party, the fountains of your inspiration would dry up.”
“The Party told you how to write, how to think, and you rebelled.”
“First you rebelled against the Party.”
“It horrified you to think that Stalinism could govern in the U.S.A. as it governed in the U.S.S.R.”
“You went to speak before the committee, and you trembled with fear. Here in America, now, was the very thing you feared. Stalinism was interrogating you, but here it was called McCarthyism.”
“You gave not one name.”
“You faced up to McCarthy.”
“Why did you do it when you knew they already knew? To inform on the informers, Harry, to cast infamy on the infamous, Harry.”
“To go back to work, Harry. Until you realized that there was no difference between squealing and not squealing. The studios didn’t give work to reds, but they also didn’t give work to people who admitted being reds and informed on their comrades.”
“It didn’t work, Harry.”
“You knew that anti-Communism had become the refuge of the scum of America.”
“You didn’t name the living. But you also didn’t name the dead.”
“You didn’t name those who’d never been named. You also didn’t name only those who’d already been named.”
“You didn’t even name those who named you, Harry.”
“The Party demanded obedience of you. You said that even though you detested the Party, you weren’t going to submit to the committee. The Party in its best moment was always better than the committee at any moment.”
“My worst moment was not being able to tell my wife what was going on. Suspicion ruined our marriage.”
“My worst moment was living in hiding, in a house where we never turned on the lights so we wouldn’t be summoned by the agents of the committee.”
“My worst moment was knowing that my children were ostracized in school.”
“My worst moment was not telling my children what was happening, even though they already knew it all.”
“My worst moment was having to decide between my socialist ideal and Soviet reality.”
“My worst moment was having to choose between the literary quality of my writing and the dogmatic demands of the Party.”
“My worst moment was choosing between writing well and writing commercially, as the studio wanted.”
“My worst moment was looking into McCarthy’s face and knowing that American democracy was lost.”
“My worst moment was when Congressman John Rankin said to me, Your name isn’t Melvin Ross. Your real name is Emmanuel Rosenberg, and that proves that you’re a fake, a liar, a traitor, a shameful Jew.”
“My worst moment was running into the person who informed on me and seeing him cover his face with his hands in pure shame.”
“My worst moment was when my informer came crying to me to ask forgiveness.”
“My worst moment was being mentioned by those disgusting society columnists, Sokolsky, Winchell, and Hedda Hopper. Their mentioning me was worse than McCarthy. Their ink smelled of shit.”
“My worst moment came when I had to disguise my voice on the telephone to speak to my family and friends without getting them into trouble.”
“They said to my daughter, Your father is a traitor. Don’t have anything to do with him.”
“They said to friends of my son, Do you know who his father is?”
“They said to my neighbors, Stop talking to that family of reds.”
“What did you tell them, Harry Jaffe?”
“Harry Jaffe, rest in peace.”
They all went back to Cuernavaca. Laura Díaz—in consternation, agitated, perplexed—went to get her belongings from the little house in Tepoztlán. She also gathered up her own pain, and Harry’s. She gathered them up and gathered herself up. Alone with Harry’s spirit, she wondered if the pain she was feeling was appropriate, her intelligence told her it wasn’t, that one can only feel one’s own pain, that pain is not transferable. Even though I saw your pain, Harry, I couldn’t feel it as you felt it. Your pain had meaning only through mine. It’s my pain, Laura Díaz’s pain, that’s the only pain I feel. But I can speak in the name of your pain, that I can do. The imagined pain of a man named Harry Jaffe who died of emphysema, drowned in himself, mutilated by air, with fallen wings.
Aside from the three possible ways of responding to the committee—Fredric Bell came to tell her one afternoon, the same day she returned to Mexico City—there was the fourth. It was called Executive Testimony. Witnesses who made public denunciations went through a private rehearsal, and in that case the public event was merely a matter of protocol. What the committee wanted was names. Its thirst for names was insatiable,
sed non satiata.
Generally, the witness was summoned to a hotel room and there he or she informed in secret. So the committee already had the names, but that wasn’t enough. The witness had to repeat them in public for the glory of the committee but also in order to defame the informer. There were confusions. The committee would have the informer believe the secret confession was enough. The atmosphere of fear and persecution was such that the witness would delude himself and seize that life preserver, thinking, I’ll be the exception,
they’ll keep my testimony secret. And sometimes there were exceptions, Laura. It’s inexplicable why certain persons who talked in executive session were immediately summoned to public sessions and others weren’t.
“But Harry was brave facing the Senate committee. He told McCarthy, You’re the real Communist, Senator.”
“Yes, he was brave facing the committee.”
“But he wasn’t brave in executive testimony? Did he inform first and recant later? Did he inform on friends first and then denounce the committee in public?”
“Laura, the victims of informers do not inform. All I can tell you is that there are men of good faith who thought, If I mention someone no one suspects, a person against whom they can’t prove anything, I’ll win the committee’s favor and save my own skin. And I won’t be hurting my friends.”
Bell stood up and shook hands with Laura Díaz.
“My friend, if you can take flowers to the graves of Mady Christians and John Garfield, please do it.”
The last thing Laura Díaz said to Harry Jaffe was: I’d rather touch your dead hand than the hand of any man living.
She doesn’t know if Harry heard her. She didn’t even know if Harry was dead or alive.
She’d always been tempted to say to him, I don’t know who your victims were, let me be one of them. She always knew he would have answered, I don’t want life preservers. But I’m your bitch.
Harry said that if there was blame, then he would take it, completely.
“Do I want to save myself?” he would ask with a distant air. “Do I want to save myself with you? We’ll have to find that out together.”
She admitted it was very hard to live reading his mind, without his
ever telling her exactly what had happened. But she quickly repented of her own frankness. She’d understood for years now that Harry Jaffe’s truth would always be a fully endorsed check, undated and with no figure written on it. She loved an oblique man, chained to a double perception, the view of Harry held by the exile group and the view of the group held by Harry.
Laura Díaz went on wondering about the reason for the distance the exiles had kept from Harry, and why, at the same time, they had accepted him as part of the group. Laura wished he would tell her the truth, refusing to accept third-party versions, but he told her without smiling that if it was true that defeat is an orphan and victory has a hundred fathers, it was also the case that lies have many children but truth lacks progeny. Truth is solitary and celibate, which is why people prefer lies. Lies put us in touch with one another, make us happy, make us participants and accomplices. Truth isolates us and transforms us into islands surrounded by a sea of suspicion and envy. That’s why we play so many lying games. Then we won’t have to suffer the solitude of truth.
“Well, then, Harry, what do we know, you and I, about one another?”
“I respect you. You respect me. Together we’re enough.”
“But we’re not enough for the world.”
“That’s true.”
It was true that Harry was exiled in Mexico, like the Hollywood Ten and the others. Communists or not, it didn’t matter. There were some unique cases, like the old Jewish producer Theodore and his wife, Elsa, who hadn’t been accused of anything and who exiled themselves in solidarity; movies—they said—were made in collaboration, eyes wide open, and if someone was guilty of something or the victim of someone else, then all of them, without exception, had to be guilty.
“Fuenteovejuna,
one for all and all for one.” Laura Díaz smiled, remembering Basilio Baltazar.
There were recalcitrant ones who were faithful to Stalin and the U.S.S.R. but disillusioned with Stalinism, who didn’t want to behave
like Stalinists in their own land. “If we Communists were to take over in the United States, we too would slander, exile, and kill dissident writers,” said the man with the pompadour.
“Then we wouldn’t be real Communists. We’d be Russian Stalinists. They are products of a religious authoritarian culture that has nothing to do with Marx’s humanitarianism or Jefferson’s democracy,” answered his tall, nearsighted companion.
“Stalin has corrupted the Communist idea forever, don’t kid yourself.”
“I’m going to go on hoping for democratic socialism.”
Laura, who gave neither face nor name to these voices, blamed herself for not doing so. But she was right: similar arguments were repeated by different voices of different men and women who came and went, were there and then disappeared for good, leaving only their voices floating in the bougainvillea of the Bells’ Cuernavaca garden.
There were also ex-Communists who feared ending up like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in the electric chair for imagined crimes. Or for crimes committed by others. Or for crimes that were alleged in an escalation of suspicion. There were Americans on the left, sincere socialists or “liberals,” deeply concerned by the climate of persecution and betrayal that had been created by a legion of disgusting opportunists. There were friends and relatives of McCarthy’s victims who left the United States to express their solidarity.
What there wasn’t in Cuernavaca was a single informer.
Which of all these categories was the right one for the small, bald, thin, badly dressed man sick with emphysema, plagued by contradictions, whom she had come to love with a love so different from the love she had felt for other men, for Orlando, for Juan Francisco, and especially for Jorge Maura?
Contradictions: Harry was dying of emphysema hut didn’t stop smoking four packs of cigarettes a day because he said he needed them to write, it was a habit he couldn’t break. The problem was, he didn’t write anything but went on smoking. He was watching, with a kind of resigned passion, the great sunsets in the Valley of Morelos when the perfume of laurels overwhelmed his dying breaths.
He breathed with difficulty, and the valley air invaded his lungs
and destroyed them: there was no room for oxygen in his blood. One day his own breath, the breath of a man named Harry Jaffe, escaped from his lungs as water pours from a broken water main, and it invaded his throat until it suffocated him with the very thing his body needed: air.
“If you listen carefully”—the ghost of a grin appeared on the sick man’s face—“you can hear the sound of my lungs, like the snap, crackle, and pop in that cereal. Right, I’m a bowl of Rice Krispies.” He laughed with difficulty. “But I should be Wheaties, breakfast of champions.”
Contradictions: Does he think they don’t know and they do know but don’t say so? Does he know they know and they think he doesn’t know that?
“How would you write about yourself, Harry?”
“I’d have to write history, words I detest.”
“History, or your history?”
“Personal histories have to be forgotten for real history to emerge.”
“But isn’t real history a totality of personal histories?”
“I can’t answer you. Ask me again some other day.”
She thought about the totality of her carnal loves, Orlando, Juan Francisco, Jorge, and Harry; about her family loves, her father Fernando and her Mutti Leticia, her Aunts María de la O, Virginia, and Hilda; her spiritual passions, the two Santiagos. She stopped, upset and cold at the same time. Her other son, Danton, did not appear on any of those personal altars.
Other times she would say to Harry, I don’t know who your victims were, or if there were victims, Harry, maybe you had no victims, but if you did, let me be one more.
He looked at her incredulously and forced her to see herself in the same way. Laura Díaz had never sacrificed herself for anyone. Laura Díaz was no one’s victim. Which is why she could he Harry’s victim, cleanly, gratuitously.
“Why don’t you write?”
“Maybe it would be better if you’d ask me what it means to write.”
“All right, what does it mean?”
“It means descending into yourself, as if you were a mine, so you can emerge again, Laura, emerge into pure air, with my hands full of myself.”
“What do you bring out of the mine—gold, silver, lead?”
“Memory? The mud of memory?”
“Our daily memory.”
“Give us this day our daily memory. It’s pure shit.”
He would have wanted to die in Spain.
“Why?”
“For symmetry. My life and history would have coincided.”
“I know lots of people who think as you do. History should have stopped in Spain when you were all young and all heroes.”
“Spain was salvation. I don’t want to he saved anymore. I told you that already.”
“Then you should get a grip on what followed Spain. Did the guilt continue then?”
“There were lots of innocents, there and here. I can’t save the martyrs. My friend Jim died at the Jarama. I would have died for him. He was innocent. No one was innocent after that.”
“Why, Harry?”
“Because I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t let anyone else be innocent again.”
“Don’t you want to save yourself?”
“Yes.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
But Harry was destroyed; he didn’t save himself, and wasn’t going to die again on the Jarama front. He was going to die of emphysema, not from a Falangist or Nazi bullet, a bullet with a political purpose, he was going to die of an implosion from the physical or moral bullet he carried within himself. Laura wanted to give a name to the destruction that in the last analysis linked her inexorably to a man who no longer had any other company—even to go on destroying himself, with a cigarette or with repentance—but Laura Díaz.
They had left Cuernavaca because the facts remained, and Harry
said he hated things that remained. Why do they accept me at the same time they reject me? asked Laura in Harry’s voice. Because they don’t want to accord me the discriminatory treatment they themselves suffered? Because if I informed secretly they won’t accuse me publicly? Because if I acted in secret, they can’t treat me as an enemy, yet I can’t tell the truth.
“And live in peace?”
“I don’t know who your victims were, Harry. Let me be one.”
If he took refuge in Mexico was it because they went on persecuting him in the United States? Because he went on accusing—if that were the case—the witch-hunters? Because he informed on no one? Or—that’s it—because he did inform? But what kind of squealing did he do, which lets me live among my victims? Should he have denounced himself to the others as an informer? What would he gain by doing that? What? Penitence and credibility? He’d be penitent and then they’d believe in him, look at him, speak to him? Had they all made a mistake, he and they?
(Laura, the informer is impregnable; to attack the credibility of the informer is to undermine the very foundations of the system of informing.
(Did you inform?
(Suppose I did. But also suppose no one knows I did, people think I’m a hero. Isn’t that better for the cause?)
“I assure all of you. He could return, and no one would bother him.”
“No. Inquisitors always find new reasons to persecute.”
“Jews, converted Jews, Muslims, fags, impure races, lack of faith, heresy,” Basilio reminded her during one of his sporadic visits. “The inquisitor never lacks motives. And if one motive fails or grows old, Torquemada pulls a new, unexpected one out of his sleeve. It’s a story with no ending.”
In an embrace at night, making love with the lights out, Harry stifling his cough, Laura in a nightgown to hide a body she no longer liked, they could say things to each other, they could speak with caresses, he could tell her this is the last chance for love, and she could say to him what’s happening now has already been announced, and he,
what already happened, what is happening, you and me is what already happened between you and me, Laura Díaz, Harry Jaffe, she had to suppose, she had to imagine. At breakfast, at the crepuscular cocktail hour, when only a diaphanous martini defended her from the night, and during the night itself, at the time of love, she could imagine answers to his questions.
“But you didn’t talk, did you?”
“No, but they treat me as if I did.”
“True. They insult you. They treat you as if you didn’t matter. Let’s go away from here, just the two of us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if you do have a secret and they respect it, it’s because you don’t seem important to them.”
“You whore, you bitch, you think you can get me to talk with your traps.”
“Men tell whores their problems. Let me be your whore, Harry, talk.”
Harry laughed sarcastically. “Old bitch, old whore.”
She no longer had the capacity for being insulted. She herself had begged him, let me be your bitch.
“Okay, bitch, imagine I talked in secret testimony. But imagine I mentioned only innocent people—Mady, Julie. You follow my logic? I imagined that because they were innocent, the committee wouldn’t touch them. They did touch them. They killed them. I imagined they’d only go after Communists, and for that reason I didn’t name Communists. They swore they’d only go after reds. They didn’t keep their promise. They didn’t imagine the same way I did. That’s why I went from executive session to public session and attacked McCarthy.”
(Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
(You’re the Communist, Senator, you’re the red agent, Moscow pays you, Senator McCarthy, you’re the best propaganda for Communism, Senator.
(Point of order! Contempt! The witness is guilty of contempt of Congress.)
“Is that why I spent a year in jail? Is that why they have no choice
but to respect me and accept me as one of their own? Is that why I’m a hero? But am I also an informer? Do they imagine I informed because I believed no one could prove the unprovable, that Mady Christians or John Garfield was a Communist? Do they think I didn’t understand the logic of the persecution, which was to turn the innocent into victims? Do they imagine I named only innocents because I myself was guilty of innocence? Was it easier to terrorize the innocent rather than the culpable? Could someone say, I was or am a Communist and take the consequences honorably? Is that the logic of terror? Yes, terror is like an invisible vise that crushes you the way emphysema is suffocating me. You can’t do anything, and you end up exhausted, dead, sick, or a suicide. Terror kills the innocent with fear. It’s the inquisitor’s most powerful weapon. Tell me I was an idiot, that I wasn’t able to foresee that.”

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