The Years with Laura Diaz

Every Place, the Place: 1940

1.

HE WENT TO HAVANA, Washington, New York, Santo Domingo, sent telegrams to her at L’Escargot, sometimes called her house and only spoke if he heard her voice saying, “No, it isn’t Ericsson, it’s Mexicana,” which was their personal code for-no problems, neither husband nor children. Sometimes Maura threw caution to the wind and said something anyway, and she would have to stand there in silence or babble nonsense because her husband or her sons were nearby, no I need the plumber today, or when will that dress be ready?, or how expensive everything is, now that there’s going to be a war, while Jorge would be saying these are the best days of our lives, don’t you think?, why don’t you answer me?, and she would laugh nervously, and he’d begin, what a good thing it was we were impatient, my love, can you imagine if we’d restrained ourselves that first night?, in the name of what were we supposed to be patient?, our lives are slipping away in any case, my adored wife, my “freisch and gay wyf,” as he called her, in playful medieval Spanish, and she silently staring at her husband reading El Nacional or her sons doing their homework, wanting to say to Maura, silently telling him, nothing calmed my desire for life until I met you and now I consider myself satisfied. I don’t ask for anything more, my hidalgo, except for you to come back safe and sound so we can be together in our little room and if you ask me to leave everything behind I would without a moment’s hesitation, my sons, my husband, or my mother couldn’t stop me, only you, because with you I feel I haven’t used up my youth, will you allow me to speak frankly? Yesterday I turned forty-two, and I was sorry you weren’t here so we could celebrate it together, Juan Francisco and Danton forgot completely, only Santiago remembered, and I told him, “It’s our secret, don’t tell them,” and my son told me in a hug that we were accomplices, that would be my happiness, you and I my favorite son, why deny it?, why pretend we love all our children equally, it isn’t so, it isn’t so, there are children who have in themselves what you strongly suspect is lacking in you, children who are more than themselves, children like mirrors of the past and the future, that’s how my Santiago is, the one who did not forget my birthday and who made me think you’ve given me a papal indulgence which a woman my age needs, and if I don’t take it, my hidalgo, the life you’re giving me, I will have no life to give in the times to come to my sons, to my poor husband, my mother.

2.

The death of Leticia, the magnificent and adored Mutti: the central feminine image in Laura D az’s life, the column to which clung all the masculine strands of ivy-the grandfather Don Felipe, the father Don Fernando, the equally adored brother Santiago, the dolorous and doleful Orlando Ximénez, the husband Juan Francisco, the sons brought up by the grandmother while the life of Mexico became calmer after the now distant, cruel turbulence of the Revolution, while Laura and Juan Francisco uselessly sought each other out, while Laura and Orlando put on disguises so as not to see each other and not to be seen-all of them climbers to the balcony of Mother Leticia, all except Jorge Maura, the first man independent of the Veracruz tree trunk of the mother, powerful thanks to her integrity, her care, her rigorous attention to each day’s chores, her discretion, her immense ability to offer confidence, to be there and say nothing.

Leticia was gone, and her death brought back Laura’s childhood memories. Today’s death gives presence to yesterday’s life. Even so, Laura could not remember a single word her mother had spoken. It was as if Leticia’s entire life had been one long sigh hidden by the cloud of activities she organized to make everything proceed properly in the houses in Veracruz and Xalapa. Her speech was her kitchen, her cleanliness, her starched clothing, her well-organized dressers scented with lavender, her four-footed bathtubs, her kettles of boiling water and her pitchers of cold water. Her dialogue was her eyes, her wise silence in understanding and in making others understand without offense or lies, without useless reproach. Her modesty was beloved because it let others imagine the presence of a love protected deep within her, with no need ever to show itself. She had had a hard school: the separation of the first years, when Don Fernando lived in Veracruz and she lived in Catemaco. But that distance was imposed by circumstance: hadn’t it allowed Laura, still a little girl, to join her brother Santiago at exactly the right moment, when the two of them together could be both children and adults, playing first and crying later, with no other contact that might muddy the purity of that memory, the deepest and most beautiful in Laura Díaz’s life? Not a night passes without her dreaming about the face of her young, executed brother, buried at sea, disappearing under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

The day of her mother’s funeral, Laura lived two lives at the same time. She carried out all the rites automatically, followed all the procedures in the wake and the burial, both very solitary. No one from the old families was left in Xalapa. The loss of fortune, fear of the new anticlerical and socialist expropriating governors, the magnetic power of Mexico City, the promise of new opportunities beyond the provincial country estates, illusion and delusion-these had scattered all the old friends and acquaintances far from Xalapa. Laura visited the San Cayetano hacienda. It was a ruin. The waltzes, laughter, the hustle and bustle of servants, the clink of glass against glass, the upright figure of Doña Genoveva Deschamps existed only in Laura’s memory…

Mutti descended into the earth, but in her daughter’s second life that day, past became present, like a history without relics, the city in the mountains appeared suddenly at the seashore, old trees revealed their roots, birds passed over like lightning bolts, rivers filled with ashes emptied into the sea, the very stars were made of dust, and the forest was a hurricane-force scream.

Night and day ceased to exist.

When the world without Leticia dawned, it was decimated.

Only the perfume of Xalapa’s eternal rain woke Laura Díaz from her reverie, so she could say to María de la O: “Now for certain, Auntie, now for certain you’ll have to come with us to Mexico City.”

But María de la O said nothing. She would never say another word. She would affirm. She would negate. With her head. Leticia’s death left her wordless, and when Laura picked up her aunt’s valise to leave the Xalapa house, the old mulatta stopped and slowly turned around and around, as if she and only she could convoke all the family ghosts, give them a place, confirm them as family members. Laura was deeply touched as she watched the last of the Kelsen sisters bid farewell to the Veracruz house, the one who’d arrived dispossessed and marked, to be redeemed by a good man, Fernando Díaz, for whom doing good was as natural as breathing.

Soon picks and shovels would demolish the Xalapa house on Bocanegra Street with its useless entry gate for useless horse drawn carriages or aged gas-guzzling Isotta-Fraschinis. The eaves that protected the house from the constant drizzle that blew in from the mountains would disappear, as would the interior patio, its huge porcelain flowerpots, encrusted with bits of glass, the kitchen with its fires of diamondlike coal and its humble stone corn grinders and palm-leaf fans, the dining room and the pictures of the rascal nipped by the dog. María de la O rescued only her sisters’ silver napkin rings. The picks and shovels would soon be there.

María de la O, last witness to the provincial past of her family line, put up no resistance when Laura led her to the station for the Interoceanic train. She went as gently as Leticia’s cadaver had gone to the Xalapa cemetery to be laid next to the body of her husband. What was she going to do except imitate her dead sister and pretend that she could go on animating her lineage in the only manner left to her: immobile and silent as a dead woman, but discreet and respectful as her unforgettable sister, she who as a girl on her birthday dressed in white and went out on the patio of the Catemaco house to sing:

on the twelfth of May

the Virgin dressed in white

came walking into sight

with her coat so gay...

Because at the moment of her death, María de la O’s memories of her sister Leticia and her niece Laura blended together.

3.

One day, a year earlier, Jorge Maura hastily returned from Washington, and Laura Díaz attributed his mood-the haste, the sadness-to the inevitable: On January 26, Franco’s forces took Barcelona and advanced toward Gerona; the civilian population began its diaspora through the Pyrenees.

“Barcelona,” said Laura. “That’s where Armonía Aznar came from.”

“The woman who lived in your house, whom you never saw?”

“Yes. My own brother Santiago was with the anarcho-syndicalists.”

“You’ve told me very little about him.”

“Two loves of that size won’t fit in my mouth at the same time.” She smiled. “He was a very brilliant boy, very handsome and brave. He was like the Scarlet Pimpernel”-now she laughed nervously-“posing like a glamorous fellow to cover up his political activity. He’s my saint, he gave his life for his ideas, he was shot when he was twenty.”

Jorge Maura kept a disturbing silence. For the first time, Laura saw him lower his head, and she realized he’d always held his Ibero Roman head high and proud, a touch arrogantly. She assumed it was because the two of them were entering the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, where Maura insisted on taking her as an homage to Doña Leticia, whom he’d never met.

“Are you a Catholic?”

“Laura, I think that in Spain and Spanish America even atheists are Catholics. Besides, I don’t want to leave Mexico without understanding why the Virgin is the symbol of Mexico’s national unity. Did you know that the Spanish royal troops would shoot the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe during the war of independence?”

“You’re leaving Mexico?” asked Laura, keeping her tone neutral. “Then the Virgin isn’t protecting me.”

He shrugged his shoulders in a way that meant: I’m always leaving and returning, why are you so surprised? They were kneeling side by side in the first pew, facing the altar of the Virgin, whose image, Laura, explained to Jorge, framed and protected by glass, was imprinted on the mantle of a humble Indian, Juan Diego, a tameme or porter to whom the Mother of God appeared one day in December 1531, when the Spanish conquest was barely over, on Tepeyac Hill, a place where an Aztec goddess had been worshipped.

“How clever the Spaniards were in the sixteenth century,” said Maura, smiling. “No sooner had they carried off the military conquest than they set about the spiritual conquest. They destroy-well, we destroy-a culture and its religion, but we give the conquered people our own culture invested with Indian symbols or perhaps we give them back their own culture with European symbols.”

“That’s true. Here we call her the Dark Virgin. That’s the difference. She isn’t white. She’s the mother whom the Indian orphans needed.”

“She’s everything, can you imagine anything more ingenious? She’s a Christian and Indian Virgin, but she’s also the Virgin of Israel, the Jewish mother of the long-awaited Messiah. On top of that, she has an Arabic name, Guadalupe, river of wolves. How many cultures for the price of a single image!”

Their dialogue was interrupted by an underground hymn that was born behind them and advanced from the door of the basilica like an ancient echo that did not spring from the voices of the pilgrims but accompanied them or, perhaps, received them from earlier centuries. Jorge looked toward the choir, but there was no one, neither organist nor singing children, where they might have been. The procession was accompanied by its own cantata, low and monotonous, like all Indian music in Mexico. Even so, it could not drown out the noise of knees being painfully dragged along the stones. Everyone was moving forward on their knees, some with lighted candles in their hands, others with their arms crossed in front of them, others with their fists held tight to their faces. The women carried scapulars, the men nopal leaves over their bare, bloody chests. Some faces were veiled by gauze masks tied behind the head that transformed their features into mere outlines struggling to reveal themselves. The prayers spoken in low voices were like the trilling of birds, high and low chirping-totally unlike the even tone of the Castilian tongue, Maura realized, a language measured in neutral tones that made its angers, its orders, and its speeches all the stronger; here there wasn’t a single voice that one could conceive of as growing angry, giving orders, or speaking to the others except in a tone of advice, perhaps that of destiny, but they have faith, Maura raised his voice, yes, Laura moved forward, they have faith, what’s wrong, Jorge, why are you talking that way?, but she could not understand, you can’t understand, Laura, then explain it to me, tell me, Maura, answered Laura, ready not to give in to the tremor of doubt, to barely controlled rage, the ironic humor of Jorge Maura in the Basilica of Guadalupe, watching a procession of devout Indians enter, people whose faith had no questions, a pure faith sustained by an imagination open to every credulous belief: It’s true because it’s unbelievable, repeated Jorge, suddenly carried away from the place where he was and the person who he was and the person whom he was with, the Basilica of Guadalupe, Laura Díaz, she felt it with an irrepressible force, there was nothing she could do, all that was left to her was to listen, she wasn’t going to stop the torrent of passion that the entering procession of barefoot Mexican Indians unleashed in Maura, smashing his serene discourse, his rational reflection into a thousand pieces and throwing him into a whirlwind of memories, premonitions, defeats that spun around a single word, faith, faith, what is faith?, why do these Indians have faith?, why did my teacher Edmund Husserl have faith in philosophy?, why did my lover Raquel have faith in Christ?, why did Basilio, Vidal, and I have faith in Spain?, why did Pilar Méndez have faith in Franco?, why did her father the mayor have faith in Communism?, why did the Germans have faith in Nazism?, why do these destitute men and women dying of hunger, who have never received any compensation from the God they adore, have faith?, why do we believe and act in the name of our faith knowing full well we shall never be rewarded for the sacrifices faith imposes on us as a test?, toward what were these poor of the Lord advancing?, who, who, was the crucified figure Jorge Maura was now staring at, because the procession hadn’t come to see Christ but His Mother, believing completely that she conceived without sin, that the Holy Spirit impregnated her, that a randy carpenter was not the true father of Jesus?, did any one of the penitents approaching the altar of Guadalupe on their knees know that Mary’s conception was not immaculate?, why don’t we, I, Jorge Maura and you, Laura Díaz, believe in that?, what do we believe in, you and I?, can we together believe in God because He stripped himself of the sacred impunity of Jehovah by making himself a man in Christ?, can we believe in God because Christ made God so fragile that we human beings could recognize ourselves in Him?, Laura, but in order to be worthy of Christ do we have to abase ourselves even more, so we won’t be more than He?, is that our tragedy, is that our disgrace, that to have faith in Christ and be worthy of His redemption, we must be unworthy of Him, less than He is, sinners, murderers, lechers, full of pride, that the true test of faith is accepting that God asks us to do what He doesn’t allow?, is there a single Indian in this temple who thinks this?, no, Jorge, none, I can’t imagine it, do we have to be as good and simple and beyond temptation as these humble beings to be worthy of God, or do we have to be as rational and vain as you and I and Raquel Mendes-Alemán and Pilar Méndez and her father the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia to be worthy of what we don’t believe?, the faith of the Mexican Indian or the faith of the German philosopher or the faith of the Jewish woman who converts to Christianity or the faith of the militant fascist or the militant Communist?, which could be, for God Himself, the best, the truest faith of all?, tell me, Laura, tell me about it, Jorge…

“Lower your voice. What’s wrong with you today?”

“Well,” answered Maura intensely, “I’m looking at that poor, bare foot Indian in a cloak, and I’m seeing him at the same time wearing a striped uniform with a green triangle on his chest because he’s a common criminal and a red triangle because he’s a political agitator and a pink triangle because he’s queer and a black triangle because he’s antisocial and a Star of David because he’s a Jew…”

Her name is Raquel Mendes-Alemán. They were both students in Freiburg. They had the privilege of studying with Edmund Husserl, not only a great teacher but a philosophic comrade, a presence who guided his students’ independent thought. The sympathetic relationship between Raquel and Jorge crystallized instantly because she was a descendant of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. She spoke the Spanish of the fifteenth century, and her parents read Sephardic newspapers written in the Spanish of the Archpriest of Hita and Fernando de Rojas and sang Hebrew songs in honor of the Spanish land. They had, as Sephardic Jews did, the keys of their old Castilian houses hanging from a nail in their new German houses, in expectation of the desired day-after four and a half centuries-of their return to the Iberian Peninsula.

“Spain,” prayed Raquel’s parents and relatives at night, “Spain, ungrateful mother, you expelled your Jewish children who loved you so much, but we don’t hold that against you, you are our beloved mother and we don’t want to die before returning one day to you, beloved Spain.”

Raquel did not join in the prayer because she’d made a drastic decision the year she matriculated at Freiburg. She converted to Catholicism. She explained it to Jorge Maura:

“I was severely criticized. Even my own family criticized me. They thought I’d become a Catholic so as to avoid the stigma of being a Jew. The Nazis were organizing to seize power. In Weimar Germany, so impoverished and humiliated, there was no doubt who was going to prevail. Germans wanted a strong man for their weak country. I explained that I was not trying to avoid any stigma. It was entirely the opposite. It was a challenge. It was a way of saying to the world, to my family, to the Nazis: Look, we are all Semites. I’m becoming a Catholic because of a fundamental disagreement with my parents. I think the Messiah has already come. His name is Jesus Christ. They still await Him, and that wait blinds them and condemns them to be persecuted, because he who awaits the coming of the Redeemer is always a revolutionary, an element of disorder and violence. On the barricades like Trotsky, camera in hand like Eisenstein, in the classroom like Husserl, the Jew upsets and transforms, disturbs, revolutionizes… They can’t avoid it. It is in their hope of the Redeemer. But if you admit, as I have, Jorge, that the Redeemer has already come into the world, you can change the world in His name without paralyzing yourself with millennial expectations, with hopes that the Second Coming will change everything the moment it happens.”

“You talk as if the heirs of Jewish messianic thought were modern progressives, even Marxists,” exclaimed Jorge.

“They are, don’t you realize that?” said Raquel. Her voice was urgent. “And that’s fine. They’re the ones who await the millennial change, and in the meantime their impatience leads them to discover relativity, film, phenomenology, on the one hand, but on the other it induces them to commit all sorts of crime in the name of the promise. Without realizing it, they are executioners of the very future they desire so intensely.”

“But the worst enemies of the Jews are these Nazis walking the streets in their swastikas and brown uniforms.”

“It’s because there can’t be two chosen people. It’s either the Jews or the Germans.”

“But the Jews aren’t killing Germans, Raquel.”

“There’s the difference. The Hebrew messianic spirit sublimates itself creatively in art, science, philosophy. It becomes creative because otherwise it’s defenseless. The Nazis have no creative talent. They have only a genius for death, they’re the geniuses of death. But fear the day when Israel decides to arm herself and loses her creative genius in the name of military success.”

“Perhaps the Nazis won’t allow them, as a nation, any other option. Perhaps the Jews will tire of being history’s eternal victims. Sacrificial lambs.”

“I pray they never become anyone’s executioners. I pray the Jews will never have theirJews.”

“I hope you realize that the Catholic Church is not innocent of crimes, Raquel. Remember, I’m a Spaniard, and you, in your way, are, too.”

“I prefer the cynicism of the Catholic Church to the pharisaism of the Communist Church. We Catholics judge…”

“Bravo for the obsessive plural. I kiss you, my love.”

“Don’t be a clown, Jorge. I’m telling you, we judge the crimes of the Church because they’re betraying a promise already carried out, an obligation: the imitation of Christ. The Communists can’t judge the crimes of their church because they feel it would betray a promise that is to be carried out in the future. That is still not incarnate.”

“Are you planning to enter a religious order? Am I going to have to become a Don Juan to seduce you in a convent?”

“Don’t joke. And keep your hands to yourself, Don Juan.”

“No, I’m not joking. If I’m following you correctly, this Christian purity that requires obedience to Jesus’ teachings can only be put into practice if you withdraw to a convent. Get thee to a nunnery, Rachel!”

“No, it must be practiced in the world. Besides, how could I become a nun after knowing you?”

Together they’d taken Husserl’s courses with an almost sacred devotion. They studied with the master but without realizing his power, because Husserl guided them so discreetly, keeping them independent of him, motivated by him but free thanks to the wings he gave them.

“Let’s see now, George, what does Husserl mean when he talks about regional psychology?”

“I think he’s referring to the way of being concrete that emotions, acts, and understanding have. What he’s asking us to do is to suspend our opinion as long as we don’t see all those proofs as original phenomena-in flesh and bone, as he says. First we open our eyes wide to see what’s around us in our so-called region, there, where we really are. Philosophy comes later.”

They walked a lot at night through the old university city right up to where the Black Forest begins, exploring the walls of the Gothic cathedral, getting lost in the medieval landscapes, crossing the bridges over the Dreisam as it rushes to join the Rhine.

Freiburg was like an ancient stone queen with her feet in the water and a crown of pines. The two students strolled around it, elaborating and reelaborating the lessons of the day, arm in arm at first, later hand in hand, astonished that Husserl himself was elaborating. He was nervous and noble, with a very high forehead that cleared the way for a concerned brow and menacing eyebrows, his straight nose sniffing out ideas, and his long beard and mustache covering wide lips, as wide as those of some philosophic animal, a mutant that had emerged from the nourishing water of the first creation onto an unknown land, committed to enunciating more ideas than those that fit in a speech. Husserl’s words could not keep pace with his thought.

Everyone called him “the master.” Naked in the eyes of his students, he proposed to them a philosophy without dogma or conclusions, open at all times to rectification and to the criticism of the professor and his students. Everyone knew that the Husserl of Freiburg was not the Husserl of Halle, where he had invented phenomenology on the basis of a simple proposal: first we accept experience, then we think. Nor was he the Husserl of Göttingen, who had focused his attention on that which has yet to be interpreted, because in it the mystery of things might reside. He was the Husserl of Freiburg, Jorge and Raquel’s teacher, a man for whom humanity’s moral freedom depended on one thing: the vindication of life in the face of everything that threatens it. He was the Husserl who’d seen Europe collapse during the Great War.

“I don’t understand, George. He’s asking us to reduce phenomena to pure consciousness, to a kind of cellar beneath which it cannot be reduced further. Can’t we excavate more, go deeper?”

“Well, I think that nature, the body, and the mind are in that cellar, as you call it. And that’s quite a lot. E doppo? Where does the old boy want to lead us?”

As if he were reading his students’ thoughts with his hawklike eyes, which contrasted so savagely with his stiff butterfly collar, his shirt-front, his vest crossed by a watch chain, his old-fashioned black frock coat, his trousers that tended to hang over his short black boots, Husserl told them that after the Great War, Europe’s spiritual world had collapsed, and that if he was preaching a reduction of thought to the very foundations of the mind and of nature, it was only the better to renovate European life, history, society, and language.

“I can’t conceive of a world without Europe or Europe without Germany. A European Germany that would he part of the best Europe has promised to the world. I’m not, ladies and gentlemen, creating an abstract philosophy. I’m firmly rooted in the best we’ve done. That which can survive us. Our culture. That which can inspire your children and grandchildren. I won’t see it. That’s why I teach it.”

Then Raquel and Jorge went out to celebrate in a jolly student Keller, which they usually avoided because of its noisy camaraderie, but that night everyone was shocked or amused at the toasts the couple made with their steins of beer on high: To intersubjectivity! To society, language, and the history that relates it all! We are not separated! We are a we, linked by language, community, and past!

They aroused laughter, sympathy, commotion, and shouts: When are you getting married? Can two philosophers get along in bed? Is it true you’re going to name your first son Socrates? Oh, intersubjectivity, come to me, let me interpenetrate you!

They went to the cathedral after running their amazed, intelligent, and sensual eyes over the outside, and discovered, in that famous minster, finished at the dawn of the sixteenth century, a perfect illustration of what concerned them, as if Husserl’s lessons had returned not to complement but to revive the tympanum of original sin which here, on one flank of the cathedral, preceded the Creation shown on the archivault. This told us that the Creation redeemed sin and left it behind; the Fall was not the consequence of Creation. There is no Fall, the Freiburg lovers told each other, there is Origin and then there is Creation.

On the west side of the cathedral, Satan, posing as the Prince of the World, leads a procession that walks away not only from original sin but from divine Creation. Facing this satanic procession, the main door of the cathedral opens, and it is there, not outside but inside, or rather at the very entrance to the interior, that Redemption is described and declared.

They went through that door, and almost as if at communion, kneeling next to each other, without any fear of seeming ridiculous, they prayed aloud:

we shall return to ourselves

we shall think as if we’d founded the world

we shall be the living subjects of history

we shall live the world of life

The Nazis forced Husserl out of Freiburg and out of Germany. The old exile continued teaching in Vienna and Prague, with the Wehrmacht always one step behind him. They allowed him to return to die in his beloved Freiburg, but the philosopher had said, “In the heart of every Jew there is absolutism and martyrdom.” By contrast, his disciple Edith Stein, who became a Carmelite nun after renouncing Israel and converting to Christianity, would say that same year: “Disasters will rain on Germany when God avenges the atrocities committed against the Jews.” It was the year of Kristallnacht, on November 9, organized by Goebbels to destroy synagogues, Jewish businesses, and Jews. Hitler announced his intention to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe once and for all.

It was the same year that Jorge Maura met Laura Díaz in Mexico and Raquel Mendes-Alemán, with the Star of David sewn to her bosom, greeted the SS in the streets with the shout “Christ be blessed!” which she repeated on the ground, bloody, kicked, and punched. “Christ be blessed!”

On March 3, 1939, the Prinz Eugen of the Lloyd Trieste line sailed from Hamburg with 224 Jewish passengers on board, all convinced they would be the last to leave Germany after the terror of Kristallnacht, and saved because of a series of circumstances, some attributable to the Nazis’ mathematical madness-who is Jewish? only the child of Jewish parents, but what about the child with one Jewish parent? what about those with fewer than three Aryan grandparents, etc., etc., traced back through the generations to Abraham-others to the wealth of certain Jews who could buy freedom by turning over to the Nazis their money, paintings, homes, furniture (this was the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family, when Austria was annexed to the Reich); still others thanks to old friends who were now Nazis but who kept a warm memory of Jewish friends; others deriving from amorous favors granted to a high-ranking officer in the regime in order to save parents and siblings, as Judith did in the Bible, though this Holofernes was immortal:; still others indebted to consular officials who, with or without their government’s authorization, interceded on behalf of individual Jews.

The same day the SS beat her, Raquel began to wear the cross of Christ next to the Star of David, †, with the result that she was locked into her small apartment in Hamburg, the double provocation meaning that the SS would be waiting at the door of her house with ferocious dogs, clubs, warning her, come out, if you dare, Jewish whore, rotten seed of Abraham, Slavic infestation, Levantine flea, gypsy chancre, come out, if you dare, Andalusian hetaira, try to find food, scrape around in the corners of your pigsty, pig that you are, eat dust and cockroaches, if Jews can eat gold, they can also eat rats.

The neighbors were warned that if they gave me food, their rations would be taken away, if they did it again, they would be sent to a camp. I, Raquel Mendes-Alemán, decided to die of hunger for the sake of my Jewish race and my Catholic religion; I decided, George, to be the absolute witness of my age, and I knew I would have no salvation when the Nazis declared that “our worst enemies are the Jewish Catholics.” It was then I opened my window and shouted into the street, “St. Paul said, I am a Jew! I am a Jew!” and my neighbors threw stones at me and two minutes later a burst of machine-gun fire broke my windows and I had to curl up in a corner, until the Mexican consul, Salvador Elizondo, arrived with a safe-conduct pass and told me you’d interceded so I could board the Prinz Eugen and escape to the freedom of the New World. I’d sworn I would stay in Germany and die in Germany as testimony to my faith in Christ and Moses. Then I gave in, my distant love, and I knew why-not out of fear of them, not out of fear that I’d be taken to one of those places whose names we all knew by then-Dachau, Oranienburg, Buchenwald-but out of shame that my own Church and my own Father, the Pope, did not raise their voices to defend us, to defend all Jews, but also Catholic Jews like me. Rome made me an orphan, Pius XII never spoke in defense of the human race, George, so it was not only that he did not speak up for the Jews but that the Holy Father never extended his hand to the human race. You did, Mexico did. There would be no better opportunity than the Prinz Eugen, which was going to take us to America. The Mexican President, Lázaro Cárdenas, was going to speak with Franklin Roosevelt to allow us to disembark in Florida.

During the nine-day crossing, I became friendly with the other Jewish fugitives. Some were shocked at my Catholic faith, others understood me, but all thought it was a failed trick on my part to escape the concentration camps. There are no uniform communities, but Husserl was right when he asked us, Can’t we all return to a world where life can start over again, where we can find ourselves again as fellow human beings?

I wanted to take communion, but the Lutheran pastor on board refused to administer it. I reminded him that his legal function on a ship was to be nondenominational and to attend to all faiths. He had the effrontery to say to me, Sister, these are not legal times.

I’m a provocateur, George, I admit it. But don’t accuse me of pride, of the Greek hubris we learned about in Freiburg. I’m a humble provocateur. Every day during our collective breakfast in the dining room, the first thing I did was take a piece of bread in one hand, make the sign of the cross with the other, and say in an even voice, “This is my body,” before putting it in my mouth. I scandalize, irritate, annoy. The captain tells me, you’re putting the other passengers of your race in danger. I laugh in his face. “This is the first time we’ve been persecuted for racial reasons, do you realize that, Herr Kapitan? We’ve always been persecuted for religious reasons.” A lie. Ferdinand and Isabella chased us out of Spain to protect their “purity of blood.” But the captain had his answer. “Frau Mendes, there are agents of the German government on board. They’re watching all of us. They are fully prepared to use the slightest pretext to abort this voyage. If they permitted it, it was as a concession to Roosevelt in exchange for which the United States would maintain its limited quotas for the admission of German Jews. Each party is putting the other to the test. You must understand that. This is how the Führer always proceeds. We have a small opportunity. Control yourself. Don’t throw away the chance to save yourself and your comrades. Control yourself.”

George, my love, it was all in vain. The American authorities did not allow us to disembark in Miami. The captain was ordered to go to Havana and wait for the American permit. It didn’t come. Roosevelt is constrained by public opinion, which is averse to allowing more foreigners in the United States. The quotas, they say, are filled. No one speaks up on our behalf. No one. I’ve been told that under the previous pope, Pius XI, an encyclical had been prepared about the “unity of the human race threatened by racists and anti-Semites,” but he died before promulgating it. My Church is not defending us. Democracy is not defending us. George, I depend on you. George, please save me. Come to Havana before your Raquel can no longer even weep. Didn’t Jesus say, “When you are persecuted, flee to another city”? Christ be praised!

4.

MAURA: Let me ask you something, Vidal. Doesn’t the ideal you defend become impossible whenever an individual is murdered for the sin of thinking with us but differently from us? Because all of us defend the Republic and oppose fascists, but we’re all different, I mean that Azaña is different from Prieto or Companys or Durruti, and José Díaz is different from Largo Caballero, as Enrique Lister is different from Juana Negrín. But none of them individually or taken as a group is like Franco, Mola, Serrano Súñer, or the repressor from Asturias, Doval.

VIDAL: We haven’t excluded anyone. There’s room for everyone in the broad front of the left-wing movements.

MAURA: As long as the left is struggling for power. But when it gets power, the Communist Party sets about eliminating all those who don’t think as you do.

VIDAL: For instance?

MAURA: Bukharin.

VIDAL: Pick another man, one who isn’t a traitor.

MAURA: Victor Serge. And another question: is it revolutionary to take no interest in the fate of a comrade stripped of public position, deported without trial, separated forever from friends and family, just because he’s only an individual and a singular, solitary individual doesn’t count in the grand collective epic of history? I don’t see Bukharin’s treason. He might have saved Russia from Stalin’s terror with his project for a pluralist, human, free socialism, which would have been stronger for all those reasons.

VIDAL: Let’s get this over with, and revenons à nos moutons. What should the Republic have done, as far as you, Maura and Baltazar, are concerned, to reconcile victory and ethics?

MAURA: Life has to be changed, Rimbaud said. The world has to be changed, Marx said. They are both wrong. We have to diversify life. We have to pluralize the world. We have to give up the romantic illusion that humanity will be happy only if it recovers its lost unity. We have to give up the illusion of totality. The word says it all: there’s only a slight difference between the desire for totality and totalitarian reality.

VIDAL: You’ve got a perfect right to disdain unity. But without unity you can’t win a war.

MAURA: But you do win a better society-isn’t that what we all want?-

VIDAL: What do you mean, Maura?

MAURA:-by placing a value on difference.

VIDAL: And identity?

MAURA: Identity fortifies a culture of differences. Or do you think that a liberated humanity would be a perfectly united humanity, identical, uniform?

VIDAL: There’s no logic to what you’re saying.

MAURA: That’s because logic is only a thing, it’s a way of saying, Only this has meaning. You, as a Marxist, should think about dialectic, which at least offers an option, this or that.

VIDAL: And gives you unity in synthesis.

MAURA: And immediately redivides into thesis and antithesis.

VIDAL: So what do you believe in?

MAURA: In both and more. Does that seem insane to you?

VIDAL: No. But politically useless.

BALTAZAR: May I say something, my Socratic friends? I don’t believe in a happy millennium. I believe in the opportunities of freedom. All the time. Every day. Unlike the poet B��cquer’s swallows-let them pass, and they will not return. And if I have to choose the lesser of two evils, I’d rather choose neither. I think politics is secondary to personal integrity, because without that it isn’t worthwhile living in society. And I’m very afraid that if we, the Republic that we all are, give no proof that we value morality above means, the people will turn their backs on us and follow the fascists, because fascism has no doubts about immorality though we may.

MAURA: And your conclusion, Basilio?

BALTAZAR: That the true revolutionary cannot talk about revolution because nothing deserves that name in today’s world. The way you can identify real revolutionaries is by the fact that they never talk about revolution. And yours, Jorge?

MAURA: I find myself between two truths. One is that the world is going to save itself, the other that it’s doomed. Both are true in a double sense. Corrupt society is doomed, but so is revolutionary society.

VIDAL: And you, Laura Díaz? You haven’t said a word. What do you think of all this, comrade?

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

“You two are very much in love,” said Basilio Baltazar, looking at Jorge and Laura. “How do you measure love in the context of everything that’s going on?”

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,” said Laura Díaz. “Can the love two people share make up for all the unhappiness in the world?”

“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.

The look on Vidal’s face did not escape Basilio or Jorge. Laura saw it but did not know how to understand it. What her intuition told her was that this was the tertulia of farewells, that there was a tension, a sadness, a resignation, a modesty, and, encompassing them all, a love in those exchanged glances which was the prelude to a fatal separation. For that reason the arguments were as definitive as a tombstone. They were farewells: visions lost forever, they were the lies in heaven that on earth are called politics. Between the two lies, we construct a painful truth, history. But what was there in Basilio Baltazar’s brilliant, sad eyes but a bed with the traces of love, what was there in Domingo Vidal’s frowning gaze but a parade of visions lost forever, what was there in Jorge’s melancholy and sensual face, her own Jorge Maura…? And what was there, farther back, in the eyes of the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia but the public secret that he’d ordered his own daughter shot to prove he loved a country, Spain, and an ideology, Communism? And in the eyes of Clemencia standing before the mirror, was there only the repugnant vision of an ultra-pious, hypocritical old lady satisfied with suppressing the beauty and youth of her possible rival, her own daughter?

Basilio embraced Jorge and told him, “We’ve wept so much that we’ll know the future when it comes.”

“Life goes on,” said Vidal in farewell, embracing both comrades at the same time.

“And fortune ebbs and flows, brother,” said Maura.

“Let’s grab opportunity by the tail.” Vidal moved away from them, laughing. “Let’s not mock fortune, and let’s put aside intemperate pleasures. We’ll see one another in Mexico.”

But they were in Mexico. They said goodbye in the same place where they met. Were the three speaking in the name of defeat? No, thought Laura D az, they are speaking in the name of what is now beginning, exile, and exile has no country, it isn’t named Mexico, Argentina, or England. Exile is another country.

5.

They covered her mouth with a bandage and ordered all the windows surrounding the Santa Fe plaza shut. Nevertheless, as if nothing could silence the scandal of her death, great shouts, barbarous shouts that perhaps only the woman condemned to death could hear, harassed her all the way from the Roman gate to the bullring. Unless, that is, the neighbors lied, because that dawn they all swore they heard shouts or songs that came from the depth of the dying night.

The windows were closed. The victim was gagged. Only Pilar Méndez’s eyes were shouting-her mouth was shut, as if the execution had already taken place. “Gag her,” begged Clemencia, the wife of the justice-bound mayor, “the only thing I don’t want is to hear her shout, I don’t want to know what she shouted.” “It will be a clean execution. Don’t get worked up.”

I can smell death, Pilar Méndez was saying to herself, stripped now of her fur mantle, wearing only a Carmelite robe that did not hide her nipples, feet bare, feeling with her feet and her sense of smell, I can smell death, all the graves of Spain are open, what will be left of Spain but the blood the wolves will drink? We Spaniards are hounds of death, we smell it, and we follow it until we’re killed.

Perhaps that was what she thought. Or perhaps the three friends, soldiers of the Republic, thought it when they stayed outside the city gates. They were all ears, attentive only to the report of the rifles that would announce the death of the woman for whom they were ready to give more than their own lives, their honor as Republican soldiers, and also their honor as men united forever by the defense of a woman loved by one of them.

They say that at the end she was dragged through the sand, raising the dust of the plaza until she was covered with dirt and disappeared in a granulated cloud. The truth is, at that dawn, fire and rain, mortal enemies, sealed a pact and fell together on the town of Santa Fe de Palencia, silencing the thunder of the rifles when Basilio, Domingo, and Jorge took root in the world as a final homage to the life of a sacrificed woman. They looked at one another and ran to the mountains to advise the outposts not to put out the fires, that the citadel of the Republic had not fallen.

“What proof do you have?”

A handful of ashes in their hands.

They did not see the autumn river clogged with leaves, struggling to be reborn from the dry summer.

They did not imagine that the ice of the coming winter would paralyze the wings of eagles in midair.

They were very far away when the crowd’s shouting whipped like a scourge the plaza where Pilar Méndez was shot and where her father the mayor said to the people, I acted for the Party and for the Republic, and didn’t dare glance at the shutter through which his wife, Clemencia, glared at him with satisfied hatred, secretly saying to him, Tell them, tell them the truth, you didn’t order her killed, the one who hated her was her mother, I killed her even though I loved her, even though the two of us were followers of Franco, in the same party, both Catholics, but different in age and beauty: Clemencia ran to her bedroom mirror, tried to recover in her aged face the features of her dead daughter, Pilar dead would be less than an unsatisfied old woman plagued with hot flashes and the rumors that remained buried between her legs. She superimposed the features of her young daughter over her own old ones.

“Don’t put out the fires. The city has not surrendered.”

Laura and Jorge walked along Cinco de Mayo in the direction of the Alameda. Basilio strolled off in the opposite direction, toward the Cathedral. Vidal signaled to stop the Roma-Mérida bus and caught it on the run. But each one looked back to see the others one last time, as if they were sending a final message. “Never abandon the friend who was with you in disaster. Friends save one another or die together.”