The Years With Laura Diaz

12. Parque de la Lama: 1938

IN 1938, the European democracies caved in to Hitler at the Munich Conference and the Nazis occupied Austria, then Bohemia; the Spanish Republic was in full retreat, falling back on all fronts; Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened, as did Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. On Kristallnacht, Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, and schools all over Germany were burned by SS troops; in the United States, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee, in France Antonin Artaud proposed a “theater of cruelty,” Orson Welles convinced everyone that Martians had invaded New Jersey, Lázaro Cárdenas was nationalizing the oil industry in Mexico, and two rival telephone companies — the Swedish Ericsson and Mexicana, the Mexican national company — simultaneously offered separate telephone services; as luck (bad) would have it, a person signed up with Ericsson could not call someone with Mexicana service and vice versa. This meant that a subscriber to one service had to turn to neighbors, friends, nearby offices, or phone booths to speak to someone with the other service, and vice versa.

“In Mexico, even the telephones are baroque,” Orlando Ximénez declared.

The sheer size of the modern metropolis makes amorous relationships difficult; no one wants to spend an hour in a bus or car in order to enjoy ninety seconds of sex. The telephone enabled lovers to agree on intermediate rendezvous sites. In Paris, pneumatiques, the quick “petits bleus,” brought couples together; lovers opened those little blue envelopes that might contain all the promises of love with more apprehension than if they were telegrams. But in Mexico, during the year of oil expropriation, the year of the Spanish Republic’s last-ditch defense of Madrid, if lovers didn’t also happen to be neighbors and if one had Ericsson and the other Mexicana, they were doomed to invent bizarre, complex, or, as Orlando said, baroque communication networks.

Nonetheless, the first communication between them, the first personal message, could not have been more direct. It was, simply, a meeting of eyes. Later, she would say she was predisposed to what happened, but when she saw him, it was as if she’d never thought about him. They did not exchange glances; each anchored their eyes in those of the other. She asked herself, Why is this man different from all the rest? And he answered in silence, the two of them separated by the hundred other guests at the party, because I’m looking only at you.

“Because he’s looking only at me.”

She wanted to leave; she was frightened by this attraction, so sudden but also so complete, the novelty of the encounter alarmed her, it disturbed her to imagine the consequences of an approach, she thought about everything that might happen — passion, giving herself, guilt, remorse, her husband, her sons; it wasn’t that all these issues would come afterward; involuntarily, instantaneously, they were coming first; everything entered the present moment, as in one of those living rooms where only family ghosts sat down to talk and, serenely, to judge her.

She thought of leaving. She was going to flee. He came over to her as if guessing her thoughts and said, “Stay a little longer.”

They looked directly into each other’s eyes; he was as tall as she, not as tall as her husband, but even before he spoke a word to her, she felt he treated her with respect, and his familiar tone was merely the way Spaniards dealt with one another. His accent was Castilian and his physical appearance, too. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but his hair was quite white, contrasting with the freshness of his skin, which had no notable wrinkles except in his brow. His eyes, his white smile, his straight profile, his courteous but impassioned eyes. His very white complexion, his very black eyes. She wanted to see herself as he saw her.

“Stay a little longer.”

“You’re the boss,” she said impulsively.

“No.” He laughed. “I’m making a suggestion.”

From the first instant, she conceded three virtues to the man: reserve, discretion, and independence, together with impeccable social graces. He wasn’t an upper-class Mexican like so many of those she’d met at the hacienda in San Cayetano or at Carmen Cortina’s cocktail parties. He was a wellborn Spaniard, but in his eyes there was melancholy and in his body a disquiet that fascinated and disturbed her, invited her to penetrate a mystery, and she wondered if this might not be the subtlest trick of a Spanish hidalgo (as she quickly nicknamed him): to present oneself to the world as an enigma.

She tried to penetrate the man’s gaze, his eyes sunk deep in his skull, near the bone, near the brain. The white hair lightened his dark eyes, the same way that here in Mexico it lightens mestizo faces. A dark young man could, with white hair, become a paper-colored old man, as if time had faded his skin.

The hidalgo made her a present of a look that combined adoration with fate. That night, together in bed in the L’Escargot Hotel facing the Parque de la Lama, the two of them caressing each other slowly, over and over, cheeks, hair, temples, he asked her to envy him because he could see her face from various perspectives and, above all, illuminated by the minutes they spent together. What does the light do to a woman’s face, how does a woman’s face depend on the time of day, the light of dawn, morning, midday, sunset, nighttime, what does the light that faces her, outlines her, surprises her from below or crowns her from above, attacks her brutally and without warning in broad daylight or caresses her softly in the half light, what does it say to her face? he asked her, but she had no answers, no wish to have answers, she felt admired and envied because in bed he asked all the questions that she always wanted a man to ask, knowing they were the questions that all women want to be asked at least once in their lives by just one man.

She no longer thought about minutes or hours, she lived with him, beginning that night, in a time without time of amorous passion, a whirlwind of time that dispensed with all the other concerns of life. All the forgotten scenes. Although at dawn on that night, she feared that the time with him, this night with him, had devoured all the previous moments of her life and had also swallowed up this one. She clung to the man’s body, clasped it with the tenacity of ivy, imagining herself without him, absent but unforgettable, saw herself in that possible but totally undesired moment when he would no longer be there even if the memory of him was; the man would no longer be with her but his memory would be with her forever. That was the price she paid from that moment on, and she was pleased, thought it cheap in comparison with the plenitude of the instant. She could not keep from asking herself, in anguish, What does this face, these eyes, this voice without beginning or end mean? From the first moment, she never wanted to lose him.

“Why are you so different from the rest?”

“Because I look only at you.”

She loved the silence that followed sex. She loved that silence right from the first time. It was the hoped-for promise of a shared solitude. She loved the place they’d chosen because it was at the same time a predestined place. The place of lovers. A hotel next to the shady, cool, and secret park within the city. That was how she wanted it. A place that might always be unknown, a mysterious sensuality in a place that everyone but lovers takes to be normal. For all time, she loved the shape of her man’s body, svelte but strong, well proportioned and passionate, discreet and savage, as if the body of the man were a mirror of transformations, an imaginary duel between the creator god and his inevitable beast. Or the animal and the divinity that inhabit us. She’d never known such sudden metamorphoses, from passion to repose, from tranquillity to fire, from serenity to excess. A moist, fertile couple one for the other, each one endlessly divining the other. She told him she would have recognized him anywhere.

“Even feeling around in the dark?”

She nodded. Their bodies joined once again in the free obedience of passion. Outside it was growing light; the park surrounded the hotel with a guard of weeping willows, and one could get lost in the labyrinths of high hedges and even higher trees, whose whispering voices were disorienting and could make anyone lose their way with the sound of rustling leaves in lovers’ ears, so far away from what would come next, so close to what was absent.

“How long has it been since you’ve spent a night away from home?”

“Never, since I came back.”

“Are you going to give an excuse?”

“I think so.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“What excuse will you give?”

“That I spent the night with Frida.”

“Do you have to explain?”

“I have two boys.”

“Do you know the English saying ‘Never complain, never explain’?”

“I think that’s my problem.”

“Explaining or not?”

“I’m going to feel badly about myself if I don’t tell the truth. But I’ll hurt everyone if I do.”

“Haven’t you thought that what’s between you and me is part of our intimate life, and no one has to know about it?”

“Are you saying it’s for the two of us? Do you have to keep quiet or talk?”

“No, I’m only asking you if you know that a married woman can conquer a man.”

“The good thing is that Frida’s telephone is Mexicana and ours is Ericsson. It would be hard for my husband to keep track of my movements.”

He laughed at the telephone complication, but she did not want to ask him if he was married, if he had a sweetheart. She heard him say that a married woman can conquer a man who isn’t her husband, a married woman can go on conquering men, and his words alone were enough to cause an exciting disturbance, almost an unstated temptation, that threw her back into his strong, slim arms, the dark hair around the sex, the hungry lips of the Spaniard, her hidalgo, her lover, her shared man, she realized immediately, he knew she was married, but she in turn imagined he had another woman, except that she could not manage to understand this intuition of another woman, to visualize her, what kind of relationship would Jorge Maura have with the woman who was and was not there?

Laura Daz opted for cowardice. He didn’t tell her who the other woman was or what she was like. She did tell him who her husband was and what he was like, but she wouldn’t say a word to Juan Francisco until Jorge told her about the other woman. Her new lover (Orlando strolled down the street of her memory) was a two-story man. At the entrance to the house, he was reserved, discreet, and comported himself impeccably. Upstairs he was a man who gave of himself, an open man, holding back nothing at all for the time of love. She could not resist the combination, this complete way of being a man both serene and impassioned, open and secret, discreet while clothed, indiscreet when naked. She admitted she’d always wanted a man like that. Here he was, finally, desired forever or invented right now but revealing an eternal desire.

Looking from the hotel window toward the park that first shared dawn, Laura Daz had the conviction that for the first time she and a man were going to see each other and know each other without having to say anything, without explanations or superfluous calculations. Each one would understand everything. Each shared instant would bring them closer together.

Jorge kissed her again, as if he’d divined her completely, mind and body. She could not tear herself away from him, from the flesh, from the body coupled to her own, she wanted to measure and retain her orgasm, she was proclaiming as hers the looks she shared during the orgasm, she wanted all the couples in the world to have as much pleasure as she and Maura had in those moments, it was her most universal, most fervent desire. No man, ever, instead of closing his eyes or turning aside his face, had ever looked into her eyes during his orgasm, wagering that by the mere act of having the two of them see each other’s faces they would come at the same time. And that’s how it happened each time: with their impassioned but conscious looks, they named each other man and woman, woman and man, who make love face to face, the only animals who have sex face to face, seeing each other, look at my open eyes, nothing excites me more than seeing you seeing me, the orgasm became part of the gaze, the gaze into the soul of the orgasm, any other position, any other answer remained a temptation, temptation subdued became the promise of the true, the best, and the next excitement of the lovers.

To face each other and open their eyes when they both came together.

“Let’s desire this for all the lovers of the world, Jorge.”

“For everyone, Laura my love.”

Now he was pacing around the disorder of the hotel room like a cat. She had never seen so much paper tossed around, so many portfolios opened, so much disorder in a man so beautiful and well ordered in everything else. It was as if Jorge Maura did not like the paperwork, as if he were carrying in his briefcases something he could toss aside, something disagreeable, possibly poisonous. He didn’t close up his portfolios, as if he wanted to air them or as if he were hoping that the papers would fly off or an indiscreet chambermaid would read them.

“She wouldn’t understand any of it,” he said with a bitter smile.

“What?”

“Nothing. I hope things work out for the best.”

Laura went back to being the way she was before, but as she never was with him: languid, timid, careless, doting, strong. She went back to that because she knew what would defeat the pulse of desire, and desire could destroy pleasure itself, could become demanding, thoughtless about the woman’s limits and the man’s, making couples become too conscious of their happiness. That is why she was going to introduce the theme of daily life, to calm the destructive tempest which had, since the first night, fatally accompanied pleasure, secretly frightening them. But she did not have to; he anticipated her. Did he really anticipate her, or was it foreseeable that one of the two would descend from passion to action?

Jorge Maura was in Mexico as a representative of the Spanish Republic, which by March 1938 had been reduced to the enclaves of Madrid and Barcelona and, in the south, the Mediterranean territory of Valencia. The Mexican government, under Lázaro Cárdenas, had given diplomatic aid to the Republicans, but this ethical action could not equal the crushing material assistance given to the rebel Francisco Franco by the Nazi and fascist regimes. Nor could it make up for the cowardly abandonment of the Republic by the European democracies: England and France. Berlin and Rome intervened with all their strength in favor of Franco, while Paris and London turned their backs on the “child Republic,” as María Zambrano called it. The tiny flower of Spanish democracy was trampled by everyone, its friends, its enemies, and, at times, its supporters.

Laura Díaz told Jorge she wanted to be everything with him, share everything, know everything, that she was in love with him, madly in love.

Jorge Maura’s expression did not change when he heard her declaration, and Laura did not understand if it was part of his seriousness to listen to her without a word or if the hidalgo was only pausing before beginning his story. Perhaps a bit of both. He wanted her to listen before making any decisions.

“I swear I’ll die if I don’t know everything about you,” she ventured in turn.

Thinking about Spain locked him within himself. He said that Spain for the Spaniards is like Mexico for Mexicans, a painful obsession. Not a hymn of optimism, as their country is for Americans, not a phlegmatic joke as it is for the English, not a sentimental madness (Russians), not a reasonable irony (French), not an aggressive command, as Germans see theirs, but a conflict of halves, of opposed parts, of tugs at the soul — Spain and Mexico, countries of light and shadow.

He began by telling stories, with no commentary, while the two of them strolled among the hedges and pines of the Parque de la Lama. The first thing he told her was how shocked he was at the resemblance between Mexico and Castile. Why had the Spaniards chosen a plateau so like Castile as the site of their first and principal viceroyalty in the New World?

He was looking at the dry land, the gray brown mountains, the snowy peaks, the cold transparent air, the desolation of the roads, the burros and bare feet, the women dressed in black and covered with shawls, the dignity of the beggars, the beauty of the children, the floral compensation and culinary abundance of two countries dying of hunger. He visited the oases, like this one, of refreshing vegetation, and he felt that he hadn’t changed places, or that he was ubiquitous, and not only physically but. historically because being born Spanish or Mexican transforms experience into destiny.

He loved her and wanted her to know everything about him. Everything about the war and how he lived it. He was a soldier. He obeyed orders. But he rebelled first, the better to obey later on. Because of his social origin, the government first thought to use him on diplomatic missions. He was a descendant of the first reform minister at the turn of the century, Antonio Maura y Montaner; he’d been a disciple of Ortega y Gasset; he’d graduated from the University of Freiburg in Germany: he wanted first to live the war in order to know the truth and then to defend it and negotiate for it if necessary, but first to know it. The truth of experience first. The truth of conclusions later. Experience and conclusion, he told Laura, those are perhaps the complete truth, until the conclusion itself is negated by other experiences.

“I don’t know. I have an immense faith and an immense doubt at the same time. I think certitude is the goal of thought. And I always fear that any system we help to build will end up destroying us. It isn’t easy.”

He fought in the battles at the Jarama River during the winter of 1937. What did he recall of those days? Physical sensations above all. The mist that came out of your mouth. The frozen wind that emptied your eyes. Where are we? That’s the most disconcerting thing in war. You don’t know exactly where you are. A soldier doesn’t carry a map in his head. I didn’t know where I was. We were ordered to execute flanking movements, advances into nothingness, then to scatter so the bombs wouldn’t kill us. That was the biggest confusion in battle. Cold and hunger were constant. The people were always different. It was hard to fix a face or a phrase beyond the day you saw or heard it. Which is why I decided to concentrate on a single person, so the war would have a face, but above all to have company. In order not to be alone in the war. So alone.

I remember I saw a pretty girl one day wearing blue overalls. She had the face of a nun, but she shouted the worst obscenities I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ll always remember her because I never saw her again. Her hair was so black it seemed as blue as midnight. Her thick eyebrows met in a frown of rage. She had a bandage on her nose, and not even that would hide her profile — like that of a wild eagle. But her constant litany of insults camouflaged the prayer she recited silently. Of that I was so convinced that I communicated it to her with my eyes. She understood, got upset, spouted a couple of curses at me, and I answered “Amen.” She was as white as a nun who’s never seen the sun and had whiskers like the women of Galicia. She was pretty for all that, because of all that. Her language was a challenge, not only to the fascists but to death itself. Franco and death were a couple, two big sons of bitches. Sometimes the image of the beautiful woman with the pale blue overalls and the night-blue hair threatens to fade. He laughed. I needed someone as different from her as you are to remember her today. No, both of you were or are tall women.

But she was on her way to the Guadarramas, and I was entrenched at the Jarama. I remember the boys along the highways holding up their fists, serious and squinting into the sun, all with the face of memory. (Do you know that the orphans sent from Guernica to French and English homes scream and cry every time they hear a plane fly over?) Afterward I only remember sad, abandoned places that people passed through very quickly.

Next to a swift, yellow river.

Inside a moist cave full of stalagmites and labyrinths.

Hugging cold and hunger.

The Luftwaffe bombings began.

We knew the Germans didn’t bomb military objectives.

They wanted to keep them intact for Franco.

The Stukas attacked cities and civilians, which caused more destruction and discouragement than blowing up a bridge.

That’s why it was safer to rest on a bridge.

The objective was Guernica.

To teach a lesson.

Making war on the general populace.

Where are we?

Who won?

It doesn’t matter: who survived?

Jorge Maura clasped Laura Daz. “Laura, we were mistaken in our historical moment. I don’t want to admit anything that would break our faith …”

The International Brigades began to arrive. General Mola was besieging Madrid with four columns outside the city and his “fifth column” of spies and traitors inside. What invigorated the resistance was the influx of refugees fleeing Franco. The capital was full of them. That was when people starting singing “Madrid, how well you resist” and “The women of Madrid use fascist bombs for curlers.” It wasn’t absolutely true. There were lots of Franco supporters in the city. Half of Madrid had voted against the Popular Front in 1936. And the “tours” made by Republican thugs who went around murdering fascists, priests, and nuns had reduced sympathy for the Republic. I think the arrival of refugees was the greatest defense of Madrid. And if it wasn’t the ladies’ hair curlers, it was a certain suicidal but elegant challenge that set the tone. Writers had taken refuge in a theater, and Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León organized dances in the darkness every night to help dissipate the fear sown by the Luftwaffe. I was one of them, and besides the Spaniards there were many Spanish Americans there: Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and the Mexican painter Siqueiros, who’d given himself the rank of “super-colonel” and who had himself followed around by a shoeshine boy so his cavalry boots could be kept polished. Neruda was slow and sleepy, like an ocean; Vallejo carried hollow-eyed death shrouded under his eyelids. Paz had eyes bluer than the sky, and Siqueiros was a military parade all by himself. We all dressed up in theater costumes from classic Spanish plays like Don Juan, The Leandras, The Vengeance of Don Mendo, and The Mayor of Zalamea. A little bit of everything, all of us dancing on a Madrid rooftop under the bombs, unintentionally illuminated by the German Stukas, drinking champagne. What madness, what joy, what kind of party was that, Laura? Is it risible, reprehensible, or magnificent that a group of poets and painters celebrate life in the midst of death, tell the solemn cloistered enemy attacking us from above to go to hell with his infinite fascist reactionary gloom and his eternal list of prohibitions: purity of blood, purity of religion, sexual purity?

We already knew what they were like. After the Republic came to power in 1931, they opposed coeducation; when lay education was established they sent their children to school with crucifixes on their breasts, they were the false piety of long skirts and smelly armpits, they were the Goths, enemies of Arabic cleanliness and Jewish thrift; bathing was proof of the Moorish taint, usury was a Hebrew sin. They were the corruptors of language, Laura, you would have to hear them to believe it; they spoke without shame of the values they were defending — the ardent breath of God, the noble home of the nation, the chaste and worthy woman, the fertile furrow of wheat against Republican eunuchs and Jewish Masons, Marxist sirens who introduce exotic ideas into Spain, sowing discord in the field of the robust Spanish Catholic faith; rootless cosmopolites, renegades, mobs thirsty for Spanish and Christian blood, red scum! and for that reason Alberti’s costume balls on the roof of a theater illuminated by bombs were like a challenge from the other Spain, the one that always saves itself from oppression thanks to its imagination.

It was there I met two fellows, two Americans, from the International Brigades, which the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti and the French Communist André Marty were put in charge of organizing. Beginning in July 1936, about ten thousand foreign volunteers crossed the Pyrenees and by early November there were about three thousand in Madrid. The phrase of the moment was ¡No pasarán! “They Shall Not Pass.” The fascists will not pass, but the brigade members will, received with open arms. The cafés filled with foreign soldiers and journalists. The people shouted to all of them, “Long live the Russians!” Among the others was a German Communist, an aristocrat with a fabulous name I’ll never forget: Arnold Friedrich Wieth von Golsenau. He approached me as if he recognized me, saying “Maura” and all my other last names, as if to assimilate the two of us, inducting me at his side into that species of impregnable superiority that is being both an aristocrat and a Communist. He noted my reticence and smiled. “People can trust us, Maura. We have nothing to gain. There can be no doubt about our honesty. A revolution should only be carried out by rich aristocrats, people without inferiority complexes or economic needs. Then there would be no corruption. It’s corruption that ruins revolutions and makes people think that if the old regime was detestable the new one is even more so because while the conservatives offered no hope, the left simply betrayed it.” “Things like that happen,” I answered in a conciliatory way, “because aristocrats and workers always lose revolutions while the bourgeoisie wins them.” “You’re right,” he conceded, “they always have something to win.” “And we,” I reminded him, “always have something to lose.” He laughed hard at that. I didn’t share the cynicism of Golsenau, who was known in the Brigades by his nom de guerre, “Renn.” There were two levels in this war, the level of those who talked war, theorized about it, thought about it, and invented strategies, and the level of the vast majority of the common people, who were everything but common. They were extraordinary and every day demonstrated their limitless bravery. You know, Laura, the first line of fire in all the great battles — Madrid and the Jarama, Brunete and Teruel, the defeat of Mussolini at Guadalajara — was never unmanned. The Republicans, the people, fought to be the first to die. Boys with their fists raised high, men with no shoes, women with the last family loaf of bread between their breasts, militiamen waving their rusty rifles — all fighting in the trenches, the streets, the fields. No one hesitated, no one ran. No one ever saw anything like it before. I was at the Jarama when the fighting intensified, with a thousand African troops arriving under the command of General Orgaz, protected by tanks and by the planes of the Nazi Condor Legion. The Russian tanks on the Republican side held back the fascist advance, and the front moved back and forth between the two, filling the hospitals with wounded and also with the sick, who caught the malaria brought by the Africans. There was some black humor in the situation, up to a point. Moors expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in the name of blood purity were fighting on the side of the German racists against a republican and democratic people supported by the tanks of another totalitarian despot, Joseph Stalin. Almost instinctively, out of liberal sympathy, and because of antipathy to Renn and Togliatti, I became friends with Americans in the Brigade. Their names were Jim and Harry. Harry was a New Yorker, a Jew, motivated by two simple things: hatred of anti-Semitism and faith in Communism. Jim was more complicated. He was the son of a famous journalist and writer from New York and had come to Spain, even though he was very young — he must have been twenty-five then — with press credentials and the support of two famous correspondents, Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway. Those two were competing to see which would have the honor of dying on the Spanish front. I don’t know why you’re going to Spain, Hemingway said to Sheean, when the only article you’ll produce is your own obituary, which won’t do you any good, because I’ll be the one to write it. Sheean, a brilliant and good-looking man, quickly shot back: The story of your death will be even more famous, and I’ll write it. Behind them came the tall, awkward, nearsighted one, Jim, and behind him came the little Jew in a jacket and tie, Harry. Sheean and Hemingway went on to be war correspondents, but Jim and Harry stayed to fight. The Jewish boy made up for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. The tall New Yorker, as a matter of principle, immediately lost his glasses and laughed about it, saying it was better to fight without seeing the enemy you were going to kill. Both of them had that New York sense of humor: sentimental, cynical, and, above all, self-mocking. “I want to impress my friends,” Jim would say. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry would say. “I want to know fear,” Jim said. “I want to save my soul,” said Harry. And the two of them: “So long to ties.” Bearded, in sandals, their uniforms more ragged every day, singing songs from The Mikado (!) at the top of their lungs, the Americans were really the wit of our company. Not only did they lose their ties and eyeglasses, they even lost their socks, but they won the goodwill of all, Spaniards and Brigade members. That a nearsighted man like Jim could ask to be allowed to lead a squad on a night scouting mission proves the heroic madness of our war. Harry was more cautious: “We’ve got to go on living in order to go on fighting tomorrow.”

At the Jarama, notwithstanding the German planes, the Russian tanks, and the International Brigades, it was we, the Spaniards, who fought. Harry admitted it, but he pointed out, They are Spanish Communists. He was right. At the beginning of 1937, the Communist Party had grown from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand members, and by summer it had a million. The defense of Madrid gave them those numbers and that prestige. Stalin’s policies would erase them both. Socialism never had a worse enemy than Stalin. But last year Harry could see only the victory of the proletariat and its Communist vanguard. He would argue all day, he had read the entire corpus of Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” It was his Dominus vobiscum. For Harry, the trial and execution of a Communist as honorable as Bukharin was an accident on the road toward a glorious future. Harry Jaffe was a small, nervous man, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive because he would not recognize the weakness of a political conviction that had not been subjected to criticism. In every detail, he contrasted with the lanky giant Jim, for whom theory was of no importance. “A man knows when he’s right,” he’d say. “So you’ve got to fight for what’s right. It’s simple. Here and now, the Republic is right and the fascists wrong. You’ve got to be with the Republic, and that’s that.” They were like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, except that their La Mancha was called Brooklyn and Queens. Well, actually they were more like Mutt and Jeff, except they were young and serious. I remember Harry and I would smoke and argue, leaning against bridge railings, on the theory that fascists never attacked communication routes. Jim, on the other hand, was always looking for the fighting, requesting the riskiest positions, always in the most advanced line, “looking for my lost glasses,” he would joke. He was a tall, smiling, incredibly courteous man, very delicate in his way of speaking. (“I leave all bad words to my father. I’ve heard him say them so many times that they’ve lost their impact. In New York, there’s the public language of journalism, crime, rude competition, and another, secret language of sensibility, refined regard, and happy solitude. I want to go back and write in that second language, George old boy, but in fact my father and I complement each other. He thanks me for my language, and I thank him for his: What the fuck!” laughed the clumsy, brave giant.) I climbed trees with him to get a view of the Castilian countryside. Despite the wounds that war leaves on the body of the earth, we managed to make out flocks, windmills, carnation-colored afternoons, rose dawns, the girls’ solid legs, the furrows waiting for the trenches to close like scars; this is the land of Cervantes and Goya, I’d say to him, no one can kill it. It’s also the new land of Homer, he’d say back, a land that is born at the same time as the rosy-fingered dawn and the fatal, ruined wrath of men. One day, Jim didn’t come back. Harry and I waited for him all night, at first exchanging glances wordlessly, then joking, whiskey might kill that gringo but gunpowder never will. He never did come back. We all knew he was dead, because in a front like the Jarama anyone who didn’t come back after two days was considered dead. The hospitals never took longer than forty-eight hours to report on the wounded. To keep track of the dead took longer, and at the front the daily casualties added up to hundreds of men. But in Jim’s case, everybody went on asking about him as if he were only lost or absent. Harry and I realized then how all the other soldiers in the Brigade and the Republican army loved him. He’d made himself loved for a thousand reasons, we told each other in that retrospective act which allows us to see and say in death what we never knew how to see or say in life. We’re always blind to what we see and see only what we’ve lost forever. Laura, I somehow convinced myself that only I knew Jim was dead, and that I was keeping him alive so as not to depress Harry and the other comrades who loved the big, well-spoken American. But then I realized we all knew he was dead, and we were all agreeing to lie and say our comrade was still alive.

“You haven’t seen Jim, have you?”

“Yes, he said goodbye at dawn.”

“He had orders. A mission.”

“If only there was a way to tell him we’re waiting for him.”

“He told me he knew.”

“What did he tell you?”

“I know you’re all waiting for me.”

“He must be sure of that. We’ll wait for him here. And nobody better say he’s dead.”

“Look, the glasses he was waiting for came in today’s mail.”

Jorge Maura embraced Laura Díaz. “We were mistaken in our historical moment. I don’t want to admit anything that would break our faith, how I wish we were all heroes, how I want to keep the faith.”

That morning, Laura Daz walked the length of Avenida de los Insurgentes to her house in Colonia Roma. Maura’s emotional earthquake kept running through her body like an internal torrent. It didn’t matter that the Spaniard hadn’t told her anything about his private life. He’d told her everything about his public life: how I wish we were all heroes. How she herself wished she could be heroic. But after hearing Jorge Maura, she knew that heroism isn’t a project that can be willed but a response to imaginable yet unforeseen circumstances. There was nothing heroic in her own life; perhaps someday, thanks to her Spanish lover, she would know how to respond to the challenge of heroism.

Juan Francisco … sitting on their bed, perhaps waiting for her or perhaps not waiting for her anymore, with an obvious recrimination — Santiago and Danton, our sons, I had to take care of them myself, I’m not asking you where you’ve been — but tied to himself, to the last post of his honor by the promise of never again spying on her, what would she say after four days of unexplained, inexplicable absence, except for what only Laura Daz and Jorge Maura could explain: time doesn’t count for lovers, passion is not subject to clocks …?

“I told the boys your mother was ill and that you had to go to Xalapa.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s it?”

“What more do you want?”

“Betrayal is harder to stand, Laura.”

“You think I feel I have a right to everything?”

“Why? Because one day I turned in a woman and the next I slapped you and the next I had you followed by a detective?”

“None of that gives me the right to betray you.”

“Well, then?”

“You seem to have all the answers today. Answer yourself.”

Juan Francisco would turn his back on his wife to tell her, in a pained voice, that only one thing gave her all the rights in the world, the right to make her own life and betray him and humiliate him, not a kind of game in which each one scored goals on the other until they were even, no, nothing so simple, the dark, corpulent man would intolerably say, nothing except a broken promise, a deception, I’m not what you thought I was when you met me at the Casino ball, when I arrived with my fame as a valiant revolutionary.

I’m not a hero.

But one day you were, Laura wanted both to state it and to ask it, isn’t that true, one day you were? He’d understand and answer as if she had actually asked, how can you maintain lost heroism when age and circumstance no longer authorize it?

“I’m not very different from the rest. We’re all fighting for the Revolution and against injustice, but also against fatality, Laura, we didn’t want to go on being poor, humiliated, without rights. I’m no exception. Look at all the others. Calles was a poor country schoolteacher, Morones a telegraph operator, now this Fidel Velázquez was a milkman, and the other leaders were peasants, carpenters, electricians, railroad men, how could you think they wouldn’t take advantage and grab opportunity by the tail? Do you know what it is to grow up hungry, six of you sleeping in a shack, half of your brothers dead in childhood, mothers old women at the age of thirty? Tell me if you can’t explain why a man born with his roof three feet above his sleeping pallet in Pénjamo wouldn’t want a thirty-foot ceiling over his head in Polanco? Tell me Morones wasn’t right to give his mother a California-style house, even if it was right next door to where he kept his harem of whores? Damn, to be an honorable revolutionary, see, like that Roosevelt in the United States, you’ve got to be rich first, but if you grew up sleeping on a pallet, you won’t settle for just the pallet, dear, you won’t want ever to go back again to the world of fleas, you even forget the people you left behind, you set yourself up in purgatory as long as you don’t have to go back to hell, and you let the others think whatever they like in the heaven you betrayed, what do you think of me? The truth, Laura, the real truth …”

They had no answers, just questions. What did you do, Juan Fancisco? Were you a hero who tired of being one? Was your heroism a lie? Why have you never told me of your past? Did you want to start over from zero with me? Did you think I’d be offended that you praised yourself? Did you expect, as actually did happen, that someone else would do it for you? That others would fill my ears with your legend without your having to emphasize it or correct it or deny it? Was it enough for you that I heard what others said about you, that was my proof, to believe what others said, and believe in you with something more than knowledge, with pure, blind love? Because that’s how you treated me at first, like a faithful and silent little wife, knitting in the living room next door while you planned the future of Mexico with the other leaders in the dining room, remember? Tell me, which of your myths am I going to transmit to our sons, the complete truth, the half-truth, the part of your life I imagine to be good, the part I imagine to be bad, which part of their father will touch Danton, which Santiago?

“What part of your life serves the lives of your sons best?”

“Do you know something, Laura? In catechism they tell you there’s original sin and that’s why we’re the way we are.”

“I only believe in the original mystery. Which will yours be?”

“Don’t make me laugh, stupid. If it’s a mystery, there’s no way to know it.”

Only time, dissipated like smoke, would reveal the truth of Juan Francisco López Greene, the labor leader from Tabasco. Now she was wrapped in the love of a wholly different man, fervently desired. Jorge Maura is my real husband, Jorge Maura should have been my sons’ real father, she imagined as she walked from the Parque de la Lama that March morning, fully intending, as soon as she reached her house, to tell her husband, I have a lover, a marvelous man, I’d give everything for him, I’d leave everything for him, I’d leave you, my sons.

She would tell him before the boys came home from school. But they had the day off: everyone was going to the Zócalo to celebrate the nationalization of the oil industry by President Cárdenas, a valiant revolutionary who had faced up to the foreign companies, ordering them to leave, recovering the wealth of the nation

the subsoil

the veins of the devil

the English companies that stole the communal lands of Tamaulipas

the Dutch companies that used paid assassins as white guards against the unions

the gringo leaders who received Mexican workers sitting down with their backs to them

gringos, Dutch, English, they all left with their white engineers and their blueprints and the wells filled with salt water

the first Mexican engineer to arrive at Poza Rica had no idea what to say to the worker who came over to ask, “Boss, should I empty the pail of water down the tube now?”

and for that reason the four of them, Juan Francisco and Laura, Danton and Santiago, were squeezed together that afternoon in the crowd in the Zócalo, between the Cathedral and the city hall, their eyes fixed on the main balcony of the Palace and on the revolutionary President, Lázaro Cárdenas, who had taught a lesson to the foreign exploiters, the eternal bloodsuckers of Mexican labor and wealth, The oil is ours! The sea of people in the square cheered Cárdenas and Mexico, the rich ladies donated their jewels and the poor women their hens to help pay the expropriation debt, London and The Hague severed diplomatic relations with Mexico, the oil belongs to the Mexicans, fine, let them drink it, let’s see who’ll buy it, a boycotted Cárdenas had to sell oil to Hitler and Mussolini while he was sending rifles to the Spanish Republic, and in the crowd Jorge Maura watched Laura Díaz and her family from a distance. Laura recognized him. Jorge took off his hat and said hello to all of them. Juan Francisco stared at the man with curiosity, and Laura silently communicated to him, I couldn’t, my love, I couldn’t, forgive me, see me again, I’ll call you, you have Mexicana and I have Ericsson …