The Years with Laura Diaz

Lanzarote: 1949

1.

YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE. COME HERE. This island doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage in the African desert. It’s a stone raft detached from Spain. It’s a Mexican volcano that forgot to erupt. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there. By steamer, you will approach a black fortress that leaps out of the Atlantic like a phantom far from Europe. Lanzarote is the stone ship anchored precariously off the sands of Africa, but the stone of the island is hotter than the desert sun.

Everything you see is false, it is our daily cataclysm, it happened last night, it hasn’t had time yet to make itself into history, and it will disappear at any moment, just as it appeared, in the twinkling of an eye. You look at the mountains of fire that dominate the landscape and remember that barely two centuries ago they didn’t exist. The highest and strongest peaks on the island were just born and they were born destroying, burying the humble vineyards in molten lava, and no sooner had the first eruption subsided a hundred years ago, than the volcano yawned again and with its breath burned all the plants and buried all the roofs.

You shouldn’t have come here. What brought you to me again? Nothing of this is real. How could a mountain range of sand and a lake of azure blue stronger than the blue of sea or sky fit within a crater under the sea? How I’d love to meet you under the waves, where you and I could again become like two ghosts of the ocean that was always separating us. Are we going to reunite now, you and I, on a tremulous island where fire is buried alive?

Look: all you have to do is plant a tree less than a meter down for its roots to burn. All you have to do is pour a pitcher of water into a hole, any hole, for it to boil. And if I could have taken refuge in the lava labyrinth that is the underground beehive of Lanzarote, I’d have done it and you’d never have found me. Why did you look for me? How did you find me? No one should know I’m here. You are here, but I don’t dare look at you. This is a lie; you’re here, and I don’t want you to look at me. I don’t want you to compare me to the man you saw for the first time in Mexico eleven years ago-though a millennium has lapsed between that meeting and this one, if it’s true that hell has a history and the devil keeps track of time: the devil too is part of eternity. Now is not ten years ago, when I said,

“Stay a little longer,” and you’ve probably forgotten our discussions with Basilio Baltazar and Domingo Vidal, and you’re going to laugh, Laura, because all our sense became nonsense, loss, death, inexplicable cruelty, assault on life. What’s left of us, Laura? Only my eyes from ten years ago, when they anchored in yours as yours did in mine, and you asked why I was different from the others, and I answered in silence, “Because I’m only looking at you.”

Does the truth you see now remain, do you see your old lover, a refugee on one of the Canary Islands, off the African coast, when the last time you saw him was in Mexico, in your arms, in a hotel hidden next to a park of pine and eucalyptus trees? Is this man the same as that one? Do you know what that man was seeking and what this one seeks? Is it the same, or are they two different things? Because this man is seeking, Laura-only to you would I dare say such a thing-this man who loved you is seeking something. Can you look right at me and tell me the truth: what do you see?

Separated for ten years, with the right to falsify our lives so as to explain our loves and justify what’s happened to our faces. I could lie to you as I lied to myself for years. I didn’t get there in time, that day we separated. The Prinz Eugen had already sailed for Germany when I reached Cuba. I could do nothing. The American government refused to grant asylum to the passengers, all of them Jews fleeing Germany. The Cuban government followed if not the instructions then the example of the United States. Perhaps the situation of the Jews under Hitler still hadn’t penetrated the conscience of the U.S. public. Right-wing politicians were preaching isolationism, were saying that facing up to Hitler was a dangerous illusion, a left wing trap, Hitler had restored order and prosperity to Germany, Hitler was a danger invented by perfidious Albion to draw the Yankees into another fatal European war, Roosevelt was a scoundrel capitalizing on the international crisis to make himself indispensable and win another election and then another. Let Europe commit suicide on her own. Saving Jews was not a popular idea in a country where Jews were not allowed in country clubs, expensive hotels, public swimming pools, as if they were bearers of the plague of Calvary. Roosevelt, was a pragmatic President. He had no support for increasing the number of immigrants approved by Congress. He gave in. Fuck you.

I could lie to you. I reached Cuba that week when I abandoned you and got permission to board the ship. I had a Spanish diplomatic passport and the captain was a decent man, a sailor of the old school annoyed by the presence on his ship of Gestapo agents. They raised their arms in the fascist salute when they heard I was from Spain. They took it for granted the war was won. I returned their salute. What do symbols matter to me? I wanted to save Raquel.

My attention was drawn to the extreme youthful beauty of one of the agents, a Siegfried who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, blond and forthright-there was no line on his face between his closely shaven jaw and his cheeks covered with blond down-while his partner, a small man perhaps sixty years old, without his black uniform, boots, and Nazi armband could have been a bank accountant or trolley conductor or marmalade salesman. He used a pince-nez, had a tiny mustache sprouting like two fly wings on either side of the division in his lips which according to Jewish tradition the sword of the God of Israel had opened with one stroke above the mouth of the newborn so they’d forget their immense racial, prenatal memory. The little man’s eyes were lost like two dead herrings in the bottom of the pot that was his shaven head. He wasn’t a policeman at all; he was an executioner.

They greeted me with raised arms, the little man shouted Long live Franco! I returned the salute.

I found her crouching on the prow, next to the mast where the red banner emblazoned with the swastika was flying. She wasn’t looking toward Morro Castle or the city. She was staring at the sea, returned to the sea, as if her gaze could reach all the way back to Freiburg, to our university and our youth.

I softly touched her shoulder and she had no need to see me, with her eyes closed she clasped my legs, pressing her face against my knees, and wailed with a penitent’s sob, almost a shout, no longer hers, echoing in the Havana sky like a chorus not of Raquel’s voices but as if she were the receptor of a hymn that flew from Europe to lodge in the voice of the woman I’d come to save.

For the price of my love for you for…

Our love our…

“Why won’t anyone help us?” she asked, sobbing. “Why won’t the Americans let us in, why won’t the Cubans give us asylum, why won’t the Pope answer the supplication of his people and mine, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani! why have you abandoned us, am I not one of the four hundred million faithful the Holy Father can mobilize to save me, just me, a Jewish convert to Catholicism?”

I told her as I caressed her hair that I’d come to save her. Her hair, tousled by the cold tempestuous wind of that February morning in Cuba. I saw Raquel’s windblown hair, the force of the wind, and nevertheless, the flag of the Reich on the prow was hanging, immobile, not waving, as if heavy with lead.

“You?”

Raquel raised her dark eyes, her black, unbroken eyebrows, her dark Sephardic skin, her lips half open in prayer and weeping-the similarity to fruit, her long, tremulous nose-and I could see her eyes again.

I told her I was there to take her off the ship, I’d come to marry her, it was the only way she could stay in the New World, married to me she’d be a Spanish citizen, they wouldn’t be able to touch her, the Cuban authorities agreed, a Cuban judge would come on board to officiate.

“And what about the captain? Can’t the captain marry us?”

“No, we’re in Cuban waters.”

“You’re lying to me. He does have the right to. But he’s afraid. We’re all afraid. These animals have managed to frighten the whole world.”

I took her in my arms; the ship would sail in a few hours, and no one will ever see again the Jews who were returned to the Reich, no one, Raquel, especially you and the passengers on this ship, you’re guilty of having left and of not having found refuge, listen to the Führer laughing, if no one else wants them, why would I?

“Why is it that St. Peter’s successor, St. Peter who was a Jewish fisherman, doesn’t speak against those who persecute his descendants, the Jews?”

I wanted her not to think about that, she was going to be my wife, and then we’d fight together against this evil, because we have finally come to know the face of evil in all the suffering of that time, I said, at least we’ve learned that, now you know what Satan’s face is like, Hitler betrayed Satan by giving him the face God took away from him when He hurled Satan into the abyss: between heaven and hell, a hurricane like this one advancing on Cuba erased Lucifer’s face, left him with a face as blank as a sheet and the sheet fell in the center of the crater of hell covering the devil’s body, awaiting the day of his reappearance just as St. John announced it: And I saw a Beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads… Men worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the Beast, saying, “Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?” And the Beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and that was the Beast imagined by St. John. Now we know who that Beast is. We’re going to fight it. It’s a shit stain on the flag of God.

“My love.”

“I shall pray as a Catholic for the Jewish people, who were the bearers of the revelation until the advent of Christ.”

“Christ too had a face.”

“You mean Christ certainly had a face. He chose to leave the only proof of His appearance.”

“Then you know the face of good but also the face of evil, the face of Jesus and the face of Hitler-”

“I don’t want to know the face of good. If I could see God, I would be struck blind. God must never be seen. Faith would die. God doesn’t allow Himself to be seen-so that we may believe in Him.”

2.

He had to receive her outside the monastery because the monks did not allow the presence of women, and though they gave him a bare cell, they also arranged for him to have a hut near the town of San Bartolomé. There a hot wind blew which carried dust from the African desert and made it necessary for the peasants to protect their meager plantings with hedges.

“The whole island is fenced with stone walls to save the harvests, and they even cover the soil with moss to hold in the nighttime moisture for the vines.”

She looked around the stone hut. There was only a cot, a table with a single chair, some flimsy shelves holding two plates, enough tinware for one person, and half a dozen books.

They gave him the cabin because he was not to feel himself an integral part of the monastery, but also they could say to the authorities, if asked, that he did not live there, that he was an employee, a gardener… When they received him, they made an exception to their rules, but on condition that he take the risk in going and coming, the risk of not feeling completely safe.

Jorge Maura understood the monks’ offer. If a problem arose, they could always say he didn’t live with them, he fulfilled his devotions in the chapel and did domestic work or gardening for them, yes, invisible gardening, sculpting rock, sowing volcanic rock-but he wasn’t under the order’s protection. The proof was that he lived outside the monastery in the town of San Bartolomé, exposed to breathing in the wandering sands from Africa, which seemed to be searching for their water clock, their hourglass for measuring a time that, with no receptacle, would become lost like the sand itself: the desert’s diaspora.

They didn’t put it to him like that, crudely, but they were insistent, fearful. They owed a debt to Maura’s family, whose donations had made possible the construction of the monastery on Lanzarote. It was quite enough that they offered him protection: during the war he had worked with the relief agencies that brought blankets, medicines, and food to the neediest, air-raid victims, prisoners of war, internees in concentration camps, among them many Catholics opposed to Nazism. Hitler had laughed at the Catholic devotion of Franco’s supporters, since for him Catholics were enemies to the same degree that Communists, Jews, and garbage were, and besides, Pope Pius XII never said a word in defense of Catholics or Jews… The Holy Father was a contemptible coward.

Jorge Maura had moved to Stockholm as a “displaced person” and from there had worked with aid agencies organized by the Swedish government and the Red Cross. After the war he’d gone to live in London and become a British subject. England had paid heroically for her earlier abandonment of the Spanish Republic-when Hitler could have been stopped-when during the Blitz, she had to resist the Luft-waffe’s daily bombardments with help from no one. British travelers went back to Spain after the war, but Jorge Maura was not looking for sun or exoticism. He’d fought on the Republican side, and the Francoists’ thirst for vengeance was still not slaked. Would they respect a subject of His Majesty George VI, or would they devise a way to arrest a “red” who’d slipped through their fingers?

The monks understood all that. Was it they who, despite all that, wanted to give him the opportunity of risk, of running into the Guardia Civil outside the monastery, of being recognized or betrayed? Or was it he, Maura, who wanted to tempt fate? If so, why? To exempt the monks from responsibility? Or to put himself at risk, to test himself, and above all to deny himself an undeserved security, he said that day of the meeting with Laura, the day she came to see him on Lanzarote? Security to which neither he nor anyone else had a right.

“Why would I lie to you, my love? I’ve come for you. I’m asking you to come back to Mexico with me. I want you to be safe.”

She wanted to understand him. Very frankly, although who knows if wisely, she’d told him I still love you, I need you more than ever, come back with me, forgive me if I’m offering myself so openly to you like this, but I really need you. I’ve never loved anyone the way I still love you.

Then he looked at her in a way that she understood as sad, but that slowly but surely she began to recognize as distant.

Even so, she felt a movement of rejection in herself when he told her he wanted to be in a place where he would be in danger and at the same time need protection, so as not to feel strong. Danger didn’t strip him of power, but it did give him the power to resist, never to feel comfortable.

It was an involuntary rejection. She was seated on the only chair in the cabin while he remained standing, leaning against a bare wall. Why should she be surprised? There was always something monastic and severe in Jorge Maura, even with the occasional lapses. But the practical and spiritual life of this man she loved was always enveloped, as the earth is wrapped in the atmosphere, by a skin of sensuality. She did not know him without his sex. He looked at her and read her mind.

“Don’t think I’m a saint. I’m a ruined narcissist, which is rather different. This island is both my prison and my refuge.”

“You’re like a king who resents that the world hasn’t understood him,” she said, playing with the box of matches, indispensable in this abandoned space untouched by electricity.

“A wounded king, in any case.”

Was he here out of conviction, because of conversion, because she’d become Catholic, and now he was seeking the way to return to the Church, to believe in God? Raquel and Jorge, the other couple.

Jorge laughed. He hadn’t lost his laugh; he wasn’t a martyred saint in some Zurbarán painting, but that’s exactly what he looked like in this space of chiaroscuro which suggested it, which introduced her into a pictorial world where the central figure personified loss of pride as a means of redemption. Yet at the same time, one could see that redemption was his pride. Does God put up with the saint’s pride? Can there be a heroic saint? If God is invisible, can He show himself in the saint?

She raised her eyes and met Maura’s. His face had changed a great deal over the years. He’d had white hair since his twenties, but his eyes hadn’t been so sunken, eyes so enamored of his brain, his face so thin; his white beard accentuated the time that had passed, that in his prolonged youth had been pure, promised time. His face had changed, yet she saw that it was the same; it hadn’t changed, it wasn’t another face, even if it was different.

“I can distance myself from myself but not from my body.” He looked at her as if reading her thoughts.

“Remember that our bodies liked each other a great deal. I’d like to be with you again.”

He told her she was the world, and she said, Tell me then, why can’t you be in the world?

Jorge’s silence was not eloquent, but she went on reading his thoughts, for he gave her no option but that of conjecture. Was he searching for solitude, faith, or both? Was he fleeing the world? Why?

“You’re both in and not in the monastery.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you or aren’t you in the religious community?” She thought he could explain himself to her. He owed it to her after so long. “We always understood each other.”

He answered very indirectly and with a distant smile. He reminded her of things she already knew. He was a privileged disciple of the Spanish and European university system that had evolved when Spain-he smiled-was emerging from the Escorial and entering Europe, licking its wounds after losing the war with the United States and the final loss of its empire in the New World, Cuba and Puerto Rico, always the last colonies. Spain joined Europe thanks to the genius of Ortega y Gasset, and Maura was his disciple. That marked him forever. Then Husserl in Freiburg, along with Raquel… He was a privileged man. He had to argue to be allowed to fight against the enemies of culture, against Franco and the Falange, who with their shit-covered boots sullied the halls of universities shouting Death to Intelligence! He wasn’t allowed: they gave him the acrid taste and swift machine-gun fire at the Jarama, but after that they told him, you’re more useful as a diplomat, a man who can convince others, a loyal emissary… being a Republican of aristocratic origin. He was on the good side. The world was his. Even if he lost it, it would always be his. He felt closer to the people fighting in Madrid and at the Ebro and the Jarama than he did to fascism’s cruel bourgeoisie and vulgar lumpen. He hated Franco, hated Millán Astray and his famous slogan Death to Intelligence!, hated Queipo de Llano and his radio programs broadcast from Seville and his challenge to Spanish women to have sex with Moors in Andalusia, where men were real men.

“And now you have nothing.” Laura looked at him devoid of emotion. She was tired of Jorge’s political history.

She wanted to tell him that he was left without the world, but she did not think, did not feel that Jorge Maura had come to Lanzarote to convince God with his sacrifice.

“Because it is a sacrifice, I see that, isn’t it so?”

“You mean that when the war was over I should have gone back to my intellectual vocation, to recall my masters Ortega and Husserl and write?”

“Why not?”

He laughed. “Because it’s a fucking disaster to be creative when you know you’re not Mozart or Keats. Dammit, I got tired of scratching around in my past. There’s nothing in me to justify the pretension of creativity. This came before anything, before you, before Raquel, this is a matter of my own emptiness, my awareness of my own limits, maybe my sterility. Does what I’m saying to you seem awful? Now you want to come along and sell me an illusion, which I don’t believe in but which does make me believe that either you’re a fool or you under estimate my intelligence. Why don’t you just leave me alone, so I can fill the emptiness in my own way? Let me see things for myself, learn if something can still grow in my soul, an idea, a faith, because I swear to you, Laura, my soul is more desolate than this rock landscape you see here… why?”

She embraced him, sank to her knees and embraced his legs, leaning her head against his knees, flushing with shame for the moisture in his cheap gray slacks-they seemed worn out by washing, as if there hadn’t been time for them to dry and they still smelled of urine, and the shirt too, washed quickly and put right back on because it was the only one he had, and the bad odors hadn’t gone away, the smell of an earthly body, an animal body, tired of expelling humors, shit, semen. Jorge my love, my Jorge, I don’t know how to kiss you.

“I just don’t have the strength to go on scratching at my roots. The Spanish and Spanish American malady. Who are we?”

She begged his pardon for having provoked him.

“No, it’s all right. Get up. Let me get a good look at you. You look so clean, so clean…”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

By now Laura can’t remember how her lover is standing, with his moist freshly washed old clothes, with a smell of defeat no soap can purge. By now she can’t remember if he is standing or sitting on the cot, if he is looking down or staring out the door. At the ceiling. Or into her eyes.

“What am I trying to tell you? What do you know?”

“I know your biography. From the aristocracy to the Republic to defeat to exile and from there to pride. The pride of Lanzarote.”

“The pride of Lucifer.” Jorge laughed. “You leave a lot of openings, you know?”

“I know. The pride of Lanzarote? That isn’t an opening. It’s right here. It’s today.”

“I clean the monks’ latrines and see impossible drawings on the walls. As if a repentant painter had begun something he never finished and, because he knew it, chose the humblest and most humiliating place in the monastery to begin an enigma. Because what I see or imagine is a mystery, and the place of the mystery is the very spot where the good brothers, whether they want to or not, shit and piss. They are body, and their bodies remind them they can never be wholly spirit, as they’d like. Wholly.”

“Do you think they know? Are they that naive?”

“They have faith.”

God became flesh, said Maura in a kind of controlled exaltation, God stripped Himself of His holy impunity by making Himself man in Christ. That made God as fragile as the human beings who could recognize themselves in Him.

“Is that why we killed Him?”

“Christ became a man so we would recognize ourselves in Him.”

But to be worthy of Christ, we had to sink lower so we wouldn’t be more than what He is.

“A monk should think that when he’s shitting. Jesus did the same, but I do it with more shame. That’s faith. God’s in the pots and pans, St. Teresa said.”

“Was He looking for it?” asked Laura. “Looking for faith?”

“Christ had to abandon an invisible holiness in order to become flesh. Why ask me to become a saint-so I can incarnate a bit of Jesus’ holiness?”

“Do you know what I thought when my son Santiago died? Is this the greatest sorrow in my life?”

“Did you think it was? Or did you wonder if it was?… I’m sorry, Laura.”

“No. I thought that if God takes something from us, it’s because He gave up everything.”

“His own son, Jesus?”

“Yes. can’t help thinking this ever since I lost Santiago. He was the second, did you know? My brother and my son. Both. Santiago the Elder and Santiago the Younger. Both. You’re sorry? Imagine how I feel!”

“Look a bit further. God renounced everything. He had to renounce His own creation, the world, to let us be free.”

God became absent in the name of our freedom, said Jorge, and since we use that freedom for evil and not only for good, God had to become flesh in Christ in order to show us that God could be a man and nonetheless avoid evil.

“That’s our conflict,” Maura went on. “Being free to do evil or good and to know that if I do evil I offend the freedom God gave me, but if I do good, I also offend God because I’m daring to imitate Him, to be like Him, to sin through pride like Lucifer; you yourself said so.”

It was horrible to hear that: Laura took Jorge’s hand.

“What am I saying that is so terrible? Tell me.”

“That God asks us to do something He doesn’t allow. I’ve never heard anything crueler.”

“You haven’t? Well, I’ve seen it.”

3.

Do you know why I resist believing in God? Because I fear seeing Him one day. I fear that if I could see God, I’d be struck blind. I can approach God only to the degree that He distances Himself from me. God needs to be invisible so I can labor over a plausible faith, but at the same time I fear God’s visibility because at that precise moment I’d no longer have faith but proof. Here, read St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel, come with me, Laura, into the darkest night of time, the night when I went out in disguise to seek the beloved so we could be transformed, she into me, my senses suspended, and my neck wounded by a serene hand that says: Look and don’t forget… Who separated me from the beloved, God or the devil?

I saw the beloved fleetingly, for less than ten seconds, when our Swedish Red Cross truck passed by the barbed wire at Buchenwald, and in that instant I saw Raquel lost amid a multitude of prisoners.

It was very difficult to identify anyone in that mass of emaciated, hungry beings in their striped uniforms with the Star of David pinned to their breasts, huddled under blankets ripped by the February cold, clinging one to another. Except her.

If that was what they allowed us to see, what was there behind the visible, what were they hiding from us, didn’t they realize that in showing us this they forced us to imagine the real face, the hidden face? But in offering us this terrible face, weren’t they saying that the worst didn’t exist-no longer existed-that it was the face of death?

I saw Raquel.

A man in uniform was holding her up, a Nazi guard was supporting her, I don’t know if it was because he was ordered to show the compassion of someone helping a person in need; or so that Raquel wouldn’t collapse like a pile of rags; or because between the two, Raquel and the guard, there was a relationship of reciprocal yielding, of tiny favors that to her must have seemed enormous-some extra food, a night in the enemy’s bed, perhaps a simple, human portion of pity; or perhaps because it was just theater, a pantomime of humanity to impress the visitors; for perhaps a new, unforeseeable love between victim and executioner, one as hurt as the other, and both able to withstand the hurt only in the other’s unexpected company, the executioner identified by the pain of his obedience and the victim by the pain of hers-two obedient beings, each one at the orders of someone stronger, Hitler had said it, Raquel repeated it to me, there are only two peoples confronting each other: Germans and Jews.

Perhaps she was saying to me: Do you see why I didn’t leave the ship with you in Havana? I wanted to have happen what is now happening to me. I didn’t want to avoid my destiny.

Then Raquel freed herself from the grasp of the Nazi guard and clasped the barbed wire with her bare hands; between her executioner or lover or protector or shadow and me, Jorge Maura, her university lover, with whom she had one day gone to the Freiburg cathedral and kneeled down side by side with no fear of being ridiculous and prayed out loud:

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

those words we said then with profound intellectual emotion-they came back now, Laura, as a crushing reality, an intolerable fact, not because they came true but precisely because they weren’t possible, the horror of the age had eliminated them yet in a mysterious and marvelous way made them possible, they were the final truth of my swift and terrible encounter with the woman I loved and who loved me…

Raquel stabbed her hands with the wire and then pulled them up from the steel barbs and showed them to me, bleeding like… I don’t know like what, because I don’t know and don’t want to know how to compare Raquel Mendes-Alemán’s beautiful hands with anything, those hands made to touch my body the way she touched the pages of a book or played a Schubert impromptu or touched my arm to warm herself when we walked together during the winter along the Freiburg streets: now her hands were bleeding like Christ’s wounds, and that was what she was showing me, don’t look at my face, look at my hands, don’t feel sorrow for my body, feel compassion for my hands, George, have pity, friend… Thanks for my destiny. Thanks for Havana.

The Nazi commandant who was with us, hiding with a smile the alarm and annoyance Raquel’s act had made him feel, said, fatuously: “See? That story about Buchenwald’s fences being electrified is false.”

“Take care of her hands. Look how they’re bleeding, Herr Kommandant.”

“She touched the barbed wire because she wanted to.”

“Because she’s free?”

“That’s right. That’s right. You said the right thing.”

4.

“I’m weak. You’re all I have left. That’s why I came to Lanzarote.”

“I’m weak.”

They made their way back to the monastery at nightfall. On this night, above all others, Jorge wanted to return to the religious community and confess his carnal weakness. Laura, in her reencounter with Jorge’s body, felt the man’s newness, as if their bodies had never been joined before, as if this time Laura had become flesh as an exception, only to look like herself, and he only to show himself naked to her.

“What are you thinking about?”

“About God advising us to do what He will not allow. To imitate Christ!”

“It isn’t that He doesn’t allow it. It’s that He makes it difficult.”

“I imagine God saying to me all the time, ‘I hate in you the same thing that you’ve hated in others.’”

“Which is?”

He was living here, half protected, indecisive, not knowing if he wanted complete, certain physical and spiritual salvation or risk that would give value to the security. This is why he walked every morning from the monastery to the cabin and back every afternoon, from exposure to refuge, glaring, without so much as blinking, at the Guardia Civil, who had gotten used to him, greeted him, he worked with the brothers, a servant, a minor figure of no importance.

He went from one stone house to the other in the landscape of stone. He imagined a sky of stone and a stone sea, in Lanzarote.

“All day long you’ve been asking me if I believe in God or not, if I’ve recovered the faith of my Catholic culture, my childhood faith-”

“And you haven’t answered me.”

“Why did I become Republican and anticlerical? Because of the hypocrisy and crimes of the Catholic Church, its support for the rich and powerful, its alliance with the pharisees and against Jesus, its disdain for the humble and defenseless, even though it preached exactly the opposite. Did you see the books I have in the cabin?”

“St. John of the Cross and that copy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz we bought together on Tacuba Street… they’re like brother and sister, because he’s a saint and she isn’t. She was humiliated, silenced, her books and poems were taken away, even her paper, ink, and pen.”

“You should take a look at a volume that’s just come out in France. One of the brothers gave it to me. Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil, a Jew converted to Christianity. Read it. She’s an extraordinary philosopher who can actually tell us we should never think about someone we love and from whom we’re separated without imagining that person dead… She does an incredible reading of Homer. She says the Iliad teaches three lessons: never admire power, never disdain those who suffer, and never hate your enemies. Nothing is exempt from fate. She died during the war. Of tuberculosis and hunger, especially hunger, because she refused to eat more than the rations given her Jewish brothers and sisters in the Nazi camps. But she did it as a Christian, in the name of Jesus.”

Jorge Maura stopped for a moment before the black and furrowed earth within sight of Timanfaya. The mountain was a blazing red, like a gospel of fire.

5.

I pardoned all the crimes of history because they were venial sins next to this crime: doing the impossible evil. That’s what the Nazis did. They showed that the unimaginable evil was not only imaginable but possible. With them around, all the centuries of crimes of political power, of churches, armies, and princes fled my memory. What they had done could be imagined. What the Nazis did could not. Until then I thought evil existed but wouldn’t let itself be seen and tried to hide, or presented itself as a necessary means for attaining a good end. You remember that was how Domingo Vidal thought of Stalin’s crimes, as the means to a good end, and besides, they were based on a theory of collective good, Marxism. And Basilio Baltazar sought only the freedom of human beings by any means, by abolishing power, bosses, hierarchies.

Nazism, however, was evil proclaimed out loud, announcing proudly, “I am Evil. I am perfect Evil. I am visible Evil. I am Evil and proud of it. I justify nothing but extermination in the name of Evil. The death of Evil by the hand of Evil. Death as violence and only violence and nothing more than violence, without any redemption and without the weakness of a justification.”

I want to see that woman, I said to the commandant of Buchenwald.

No, you’re mistaken, the woman you named is not here, never has been.

Raquel Mendes-Alemán. That’s her name. I just saw her on the other side of the barbed wire.

No, that woman doesn’t exist.

You have killed her already?

Be careful. Don’t go too far.

She let herself be seen by me and for that you killed her? Because she saw me and recognized me?

No. She doesn’t exist. There’s no record of her. Don’t complicate things. After all, you’re here only because of a gracious concession by the Reich. So you can see how well treated our prisoners are. It isn’t the Hotel Adlon, to be sure, but if you’d come on a Sunday, you’d have seen the prisoners’ orchestra. They played the overture to Parsifal. A Christian opera, did you know that?

I demand to see the registry of prisoners.

The registry?

Don’t play dumb. You people are very orderly. I want to see the registry.

A page in the M’s had been hastily torn out, Laura. They’re so precise, so well organized, they’d allowed the torn binding to show where the page was missing, with the edges rough and jagged like the cliffs on Lanzarote’s mountains.

I never learned anything more about Raquel Mendes-Alemán.

When the war was over, I went back to Buchenwald, but the corpses in the common graves were no longer what they had been, and the cremated bodies became powder for the wigs of Goethe and Schiller, shaking hands in Weirmar, Athens of the North, where Cranach and Bach and Franz Lizst worked. None of those men would ever have invented the motto the Nazis placed over the entrance to the concentration camp. Not the well-known Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You Free, but something infinitely worse: Jedem das Seine, You Get What You Deserve. Raquel. I want to remember her on the prow of the Prinz Eugen anchored in Havana harbor, when I offered to marry her to save her from the holocaust. I want to remember Raquel.

No, she looked at me with her eyes deep as a night of omens, why should I be the exception, the privileged individual?

Her words sufficed, for me, to sum up my whole experience in this half century, which was going to be the paradise of progress and instead was the hell of degradation. Not only the age of fascist and Stalinist horror but of the horror that those who fought against evil could not save themselves from, no one was exempted, Laura! not the English who hid rice from the Bengalis so they wouldn’t have the will to revolt and join Japan during the war, not the Islamic merchants who collaborated with them, not the English who broke the legs of rebels who wanted national independence and refused medical care, not the French who collaborated in Nazi genocide or who cried out against the German occupation but considered the French occupation of Algeria, of Indochina, of Senegal a divine right, not the Americans who kept all the Caribbean and Central American dictators in power with their jails overflowing and their beggars in the streets as long as they supported the United States. Who was saved? Those who lynched blacks, or the blacks who were executed, jailed, forbidden to drink or urinate next to a white in Mississippi, land of Faulkner?

“Starting with us, evil ceased to be a possibility and became an obligation.”

“I don’t want to be pitied, Jorge. I’d rather be persecuted.”

Those were the last words of Raquel that I heard. I don’t know if I suffer because I didn’t save her or because of her suffering. But the way she looked at her executioner in the camp, more than the way she looked at me, told me that right until the last minute Raquel affirmed her humanity and left me a question I’d always live with: what is the virtue of your virtue, my love, the love of my love, the justice of my justice, the compassion of my compassion?

“I want to share your suffering, the way you share the suffering of your people. That is the love of my love.”

6.

Laura left Jorge on the island. She boarded the little ship knowing she would never return. Jorge Maura would never again be a clearly delineated figure for her, only a haze rising from a past that was always present, whose identification would be final proof that he was there even if he no longer existed.

Go on, she said, be a saint, be a hermit, climb up and sit alone on top of your column in the desert, be a comfortable martyr without martyrdom.

He said she was very hard on him.

She answered, because I love you. “Why are you hiding on an island? It would have been better if you’d stayed in Mexico. There’s no hiding place better than Mexico City.”

“I don’t have the strength anymore. Forgive me.”

“Well, you’re a Spaniard. You can be sure that death will be late in reaching you.”

Was the meeting so painful for her?

“No, it’s that I’ve learned to fear those who deform me with their love, not those who hate me. When you went to Cuba, I asked myself a thousand times, can I live without him, can I live without his support? I badly needed your support to create a world of my own that I wouldn’t have to sacrifice to anyone I loved. You gave it to me, you know, you supported me so that I could return to my home and tell the truth to my family, whatever happened. Without your love supporting me, I never would have dared. Without your memory, I would have been just one more adulteress. With you, no one dared cast the first stone against me. I feel free because you are with me.”

“Laura, the worst is over. Calm down. Understand that I stay here alone of my own free will.”

“Alone? That word I don’t understand. How are you going to be religious without the world, how are you going to reach God without leaving yourself? You see how you live halfway between the monastery and the world. Do you think the cloistered monks who forbid the presence of women have already found God, you think they can find Him without the world? How pretentious you are, pretentious bastard! Are you going to purge the sins of the twentieth century hiding away on this stone island? You are the very pride you detest. You are your own Lucifer. How are you going to have your pride pardoned, Jorge, you bastard?”

“By imagining that God says to me: I hate in you the same thing you’ve hated in others.”

“Imagining? Only that?”

“Listening, Laura.”

“Do you know something? I leave here admiring your indifference and your serene wisdom. Which I don’t have.”

“Raquel is buried in an unmarked grave, mixed with hundreds of other naked bodies. Can we be more than she? I’m not better. I’m different. Just like you.”

“Why do you think you’re liberated?” she asked incredulously.

“Because you came to see me filled with incredulity. You’re the truly incredulous person here. As I was before. I’m finding health seeing a human being with less faith than I. What insignificant things we are, Laura.”

She asked him to answer the question she’d been asking since she reached Lanzarote. (You shouldn’t have come here. This island doesn’t exist. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there.) Do you believe or don’t you?

“Which is like asking, is Christianity true or false? And I answer that your question has no importance. What I want to find out here on Lanzarote, halfway between monastic life and life as you understand it, between security and danger, is whether faith can give meaning to the madness of being here on earth.”

What had he discovered?

“That the life of Christ is always possible for a Christian, but no one dares imitate it.”

“No one dares, or no one can?”

“It’s that they think that being like Christ is acting as Christ acted-raising the dead, multiplying loaves… they transform Christ into an active ideology. Laura, Christ only seeks us if we don’t believe in Him. Christ finds us if we don’t look for Him. It’s Pascal’s truth: you found me because you didn’t seek me. That is my truth today. Go away, Laura. Realize I have no joy. Every afternoon on this island is very sad.”

I came because your place was empty, Laura said to herself as she left the nocturnal coast of Lanzarote, sailing for Tenerife, as the night became black and the island red. I couldn’t bear it anymore. It’s dangerous, living in a vacant space, nostalgic for the life my son didn’t have and the love you took away from me. But I lost my son, and you lost Raquel. We both gave up something precious. Perhaps God, if He exists, recognizes that loss and takes note of our sorrows, each of them. Now I no longer want to think about you. To think about you consoles me too much and keeps my imagination going. I want to renounce you completely. I never met you.

When they had separated at the monastery entrance, Laura had waited for a moment, confused. Why wouldn’t they let a woman in? She saw that nothing was keeping her from entering, from looking for Jorge just once more, from feeling his hot lips for the last time, from repeating the words that would now be unspoken for all time.

I love you.

He was on all fours in the solitary refectory, licking the floor with his tongue, tenacious, disciplined, tile after tile.