The Years With Laura Diaz

19. Cuernavaca: 1952

LAURA DOVE into the pool, framed in bougainvillea, and didn’t surface until she reached the far end. On the side, a large group of foreign men and women were chatting, the majority Americans, a few in bathing suits but most of them dressed, the women in full skirts and “Mexican-style” short-sleeved blouses with flower-embroidered bodices, the men in short-sleeved shirts and summer slacks, most of them getting their feet used to huaraches, all of them, every single one of them, holding a drink, all of them guests of the splendid English Communist Fredric Bell, whose house in Cuernavaca had become a sanctuary for the victims of McCarthyite persecution in the United States.

Bell’s wife, Ruth, was an American who balanced the high, dry irony of her British husband with an earthy coarseness, close to the soil, as if she were dragging along her roots in the Chicago slums where she was born. She was a woman from the Great Lakes and immense prairies who by chance had been born on the asphalt of the “big-shouldered city,” in Carl Sandburg’s words. Ruth’s shoulders easily carried her husband, Fredric, and her husband’s friends, she was Sancho Panza to Fredric, the tall, slim Englishman with blue eyes, clear brow, and thin, completely white hair surrounding his freckled skull.

“A Quixote of lost causes,” Basilio Baltazar told Laura.

Ruth had the strength of a steel die, from the tips of her bare toes on the grass to her curly, short gray hair.

“Almost all of them are directors and screenwriters,” Basilio went on as he drove along the recently opened highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, which reduced the trip to only forty-five minutes, “a few professors, but mostly movie people.”

“You’re safe, then, you’re in the minority.” Laura smiled. She had a kerchief tied over her head against the wind blowing over the MG convertible that García Ascot, a Republican poet exiled in Mexico, had lent to his friend Basilio.

“Can you see me as a professor, teaching Spanish literature to proper young ladies at Vassar?” asked Basilio maliciously, as he steered smoothly around the highway curves.

“Is that where you met this gang of reds?”

“No. On the side, I moonlight on weekends — extra, unpaid work at the New School for Social Research in New York. The students there are workers, older people who had no time to get an education. That’s where I met a lot of the people you’re going to meet today.”

She wanted to ask a favor of Basilio, that he not treat her with pity, that he simply relegate the past that both knew to a tranquil, silent memory, the past whose pains and joys leave their marks on our bodies.

“You’re still a beautiful woman.”

“I’m over fifty. A bit.”

“Well, there are women twenty years younger than you who wouldn’t be seen in a one piece bathing suit.”

“I love swimming. I was born next to a lake and grew up on the seacoast.”

Good manners did not let the group take overt notice of her when she dove into the pool, but when she came out, Laura noticed the curious, approving, smiling glances of the gringos gathered for dinner that Saturday in Cuernavaca at the house of the Communist Fredric Bell, and she also saw, as if in a Diego Rivera mural or a King Vidor film, the “crowd,” the simultaneously collective and singular combination of people, appreciated it, knowing that this group of people was united by one thing, persecution, but that each had managed to save his or her individuality. They weren’t a “mass,” no matter how much they believed in such a thing; there was pride in their eyes, in the way they stood, held a glass, or raised their chins, a way of being themselves, which impressed Laura, the visible awareness of wounded dignity and the time needed to regain it. This was an asylum for political convalescents.

She knew something about their stories. Basilio had told her more on the trip, that they had to believe in their own individuality because to transform them into enemies the persecutors had tried first to turn them into a herd, a red flock, lambs of Communism, and then to strip away their singularity.

“Did you go to the tribute to Dimitri Shostakovich at the Waldorf-Astoria?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that he is a prominent figure in Soviet propaganda?”

“All I know is that he’s a great composer.”

“We’re not talking about music here but about subversion.”

“Senator, are you saying that Shostakovich’s music turns the people who listen to it into Communists?”

“Exactly. That’s my conviction as an American patriot. It’s obvious to this committee that you don’t share this conviction.”

“I’m as American as you are.”

“But your heart’s in Moscow.”

(We’re very sorry. You cannot work for us anymore. Our company cannot get involved in controversies.)

“Is it true that you scheduled a festival of Charlie Chaplin movies on your television station?”

“Certainly. Chaplin is a great comic artist.”

“A poor, tragic artist, you mean. He’s a Communist.”

“Possibly. But that has nothing to do with his films.”

“Don’t play dumb with us. The red message gets through without anyone’s realizing it.”

“But, Senator, Chaplin made those silent films before 1917.”

“What happened in 1917?”

“The Soviet Revolution.”

“Well, Charlie Chaplin isn’t only a Communist, he paved the way for the Russian Revolution, that’s what you want to show, a manual for insurrection disguised as comedy …”

(We’re very sorry. The company cannot approve your programming. Our sponsors have threatened to withdraw their support if you go on showing subversive films.)

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

“Yes. So are or have been the fourteen veterans who are with me here before this committee. They were all maimed in the war.”

“The red brigade, ha-ha.”

“We fought in the Pacific for the United States.”

“You fought for the Russians.”

“They were our allies, Senator. But we only killed Japanese.”

“Well, the war’s over. You can go live in Moscow and be happy.”

“We’re loyal Americans, Senator.”

“Prove it. Give the committee the names of other Communists.”

(… in the armed forces, in the State Department, but especially in the movies, in radio, in the new medium of television: the congressional inquisitors loved above all else to investigate movie people, rub elbows with them, appear in photos with Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, who all named names, or with Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, who had the courage to denounce the inquisitors …)

“That was the tactic: strip away our individuality and turn us into either enemies or collaborators, scapegoats or squealers. That was the crime of McCarthyism.”

Laura’s head emerged from the water, and she saw the group around the pool and thought her own thoughts, and for that reason was surprised that she noticed a small man with narrow shoulders, a sad expression, thin hair, and a face so carefully shaven that it looked erased, as if every morning the blade took away his features, which would spend the rest of the day struggling to be reborn and recognized. A loose-fitting, sleeveless khaki shirt and loose trousers of the same color held up by a snakeskin belt of the kind sold in tropical markets where everything is put to use. He was barefoot. His naked feet caressed the grass.

She got out of the pool without taking her eyes off him, although he wasn’t looking at her — or anyone else … Now Laura was out of the water. No one paid attention to her matronly nakedness, more than fifty years old but still attractive. Tall and right-angled, Laura since childhood had had that impulsive and defiant profile, not a little rosebud nose; from childhood had had those almost golden eyes submerged in a veil of shadows, as if age itself were a veil some people are born with, though it’s almost always acquired; had had the thin lips of a Memling madonna, as if she’d never been visited by the angel with the sword that divides the upper lip and banishes oblivion at birth.

“That’s an old Jewish legend,” said Ruth, mixing a new pitcher of martinis. “When we’re born, an angel comes down from heaven with his sword, strikes us between the tips of our noses and our upper lips, and makes this split, which is otherwise inexplicable.” Here Ruth scratched an imaginary mustache, like that of the proto-Communist Chaplin, with an unpolished fingernail. “But according to the legend, he also makes us forget everything we knew before we were born, all the deep memory within the womb, including our parents’ secrets and our grandparents’ triumphs.” “Salud!” said the matriarch of the Cuernavaca tribe in Spanish — a title Laura bestowed on her then and there, as she laughingly told Basilio. Basilio agreed completely. Ruth couldn’t not be like that, and the others wouldn’t admit they needed her. But who doesn’t need a mama? Basilio smiled. Especially if every weekend she prepares a bottomless bowl of spaghetti.

“The witch-hunters publish a rag called Red Channels. They justify themselves by invoking their equally vigilant patriotism and anti-Communism. But neither they nor their publication would prosper if there weren’t denunciations. They began a feverish search for people who could be implicated, sometimes for reasons as far-fetched as listening to Shostakovich or seeing a Chaplin film. Being denounced by Red Channels was the beginning, and the persecution would continue with letters to the suspect’s employers, threatening publicity against the guilty company, intimidating telephone calls to the victim — all culminating in a summons to appear before Congress from the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

“You were going to say something about a mother, Basilio.”

“Ask anyone here about Mady Christians.”

“Mady Christians was an Austrian actress who had the lead in a very famous play, I Remember Mama,” said a man with heavy tortoiseshell glasses. “She taught drama at New York University, but her obsession was protecting political refugees and people displaced by the war.”

“She offered to protect us Spanish exiles,” recalled Basilio. “That’s how I met her. A very beautiful woman, about forty, very blond, with the profile of a Nordic goddess and a look in her eye that said, I won’t give up.”

“She also protected us German writers expelled by the Nazis,” added a man with a square jaw and lifeless eyes. “She created a Committee for the Protection of Those Born Abroad. These were crimes that justified Red Channels’ denouncing her as a Soviet agent.”

“Mady Christians.” Basilio Baltazar smiled fondly. “I saw her before she died. She would be visited by detectives who wouldn’t identify themselves. She got anonymous calls. Hardly anyone offered her parts. One television company did telephone her, but the investigators did their work, and the company withdrew their offer, though they did agree to pay her a fee. How can anyone live with that fear, that uncertainty? So the defender of exiles became an internal exile. ‘This is incredible,’ she managed to say before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty. The playwright Elmer Rice said at her funeral that she represented America’s generosity, that in return she received calumny, persecution, unemployment, and illness. ‘It’s no use appealing to the McCarthyites’ conscience, because they have none.’”

Many pasts were reunited in Fredric Bell’s house, and as she made visit after visit, at first with Basilio but later alone when the anarchist professor had gone back to the virginal order of Vassar College, Laura began to sort out the stories she heard, trying to separate real experience from the wounded justifications, unnecessary or urgent. All of that.

To say there were many different pasts was also to say there were many different personal origins, and among the weekend guests, many of whom were living in Cuernavaca, the Central European Jews were notable — they were the oldest, and they’d gather in circles, husbands and wives together, to tell each other stories about a past that seemed historical but that was barely more than a half century of life. (That’s how quickly U.S. history goes, said Basilio.) They would laugh sometimes as they noted they’d been born in neighboring villages in Poland or just a few miles from the border between Hungary and Bessarabia.

A little old man with trembling hands and jolly eyes explained it to Laura: We were tailors, peddlers, shopkeepers, discriminated against because we were Jews; we emigrated to America, but in New York we were still foreigners, excluded, so we went to California, where there was nothing but sun, sea, and desert, California, where the continent ends, Miss Laura, we all went to that city with the angelic name, many angels, the union with wings that seemed to be waiting for us, Jews from Central Europe, to make our fortunes, Los Angeles, where, as our hostess Ruth tells, a winged being descends from heaven and uses his memory sword to take away what we were and no longer wanted to be. It’s true, we Jews not only invented Hollywood but invented the United States as we wished it to be, dreamed the American Dream better than anyone, Miss Laura, and stocked it with immediately identifiable good guys and bad guys. We always had the good guy win; we linked being good with innocence, gave the hero an innocent girlfriend, created a nonexistent America, rural, small-town, free, where justice always triumphs; and it turns out that’s what Americans wanted to see, or it was how they wanted to see themselves, in a mirror of innocence and goodness where love and justice always triumph, that’s what we gave the Americans, we persecuted Jews of Mitteleuropa. So why are they persecuting us now? Are we Communists? We the idealists?

“Out of order,” McCarthy shouted back.

“You, Senator, you’re the red,” said the small, bald man.

“The witness is about to be in contempt of Congress.”

“You, Senator, are paid by Moscow.”

“Take this witness away.”

“You’re the best propaganda the Kremlin ever invented, Senator McCarthy.”

“Get him out of here! Take him away!”

“Do you think that by acting like Stalin you’re defending American democracy? Do you think you can defend democracy by imitating your enemy?” shouted Harry Jaffe. That was the name Basilio Baltazar mentioned. The two of them had been comrades on the Jarama front, along with Vidal, Maura, and Jim. Comrades.

“Order, order. The witness is in contempt,” shouted McCarthy with his whining kidnapper’s voice, his mouth twisted into an eternal smile of disdain, his beard showing dark only hours after he shaved, his eyes those of an animal chased by itself: Joe McCarthy was like an animal aware of being a man and nostalgic for his earlier freedom as a beast in the jungle.

Another old man interrupted. The people to blame for the whole thing are the Warner Brothers, who started putting politics into movies, social themes, delinquency, unemployment, abandoned children who slide into a life of crime, the cruelty of prisons, movies that said to America, you’re not innocent anymore, you’re not rural anymore, you live in cities plagued by poverty, exploitation, organized crime, and criminals of all kinds from gangsters to bankers.

“Just as Brecht said: which is worse, robbing a bank or founding a bank?”

“I’ll tell you what’s what,” answered the first old man, Laura’s confidant. “A movie is a collective effort. No matter how clever he is, a writer can’t pull the wool over the eyes of Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner and make him see white by putting red in front of him. The man has yet to be born who could trick Mayer by saying to him, Look, this film about noble Russian peasants is really camouflaged praise of Communism. Mayer won’t be conned, because he’s the greatest con man of all. That’s why he was the first to denounce his own workers. The wolf was tricked by the lambs. The wolf got a pardon because he turned over the lambs to the slaughterhouse so he’d be spared the knife. Mayer must have been furious about McCarthy drinking the blood of all the actors and writers he’d hired instead of letting him do it!”

“Vengeance is sweet, Theodore …”

“On the contrary. It’s a skimpy diet if you’re not the one drinking the blood of the person who got crucified because you squealed. It’s bitter for the squealer to have to keep his mouth shut, to not be able to brag in private, to have to live with shame.”

Harry Jaffe got up, lit a cigarette, and walked through the garden. Laura Díaz followed the trail of his firefly, a Camel burning in a dark garden.

“We’re all responsible for a picture,” the old producer named Theodore continued. “Paul Muni isn’t responsible for Al Capone because he starred in Scarface, or Edward Arnold for plutocratic fascism because he personified it in Meet John Doe. From the producer to the distributor, we’re all responsible for our pictures.”

“Fuenteovejuna, one for all, all for one,” said Basilio Baltazar. He didn’t care that none of the gringos would recognize this great line from Lope de Vega’s play about a town that stands up and acknowledges its cellective guilt.

Elsa, the old producer’s wife, said innocently, “Well, who knows if they aren’t right when they say it was one thing to go into social themes during the New Deal and another to exalt Russia during the war.”

“They were our allies!” Bell exclaimed. “We were supposed to be nice to the Russians!”

“We were told to promote pro-Soviet sentiment,” Ruth interrupted. “Roosevelt and Churchill asked us to.”

“And one fine day, someone knocks at your door and you get a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee because you portrayed Stalin as good old Uncle Joe with his pipe and peasant wisdom defending us against Hitler,” said the tall man who looked like an owl because of his heavy tortoiseshell glasses.

“And wasn’t that the truth?” answered a small man with frizzy, tangled hair that rose to a high, natural topknot. “Didn’t the Russians save us from the Nazis? Remember Stalingrad? Have we already forgotten Stalingrad?”

“Albert,” countered the tall, myopic man, “I’ll never argue with you. I’ll always agree with a man who walked with me, next to me, both of us in handcuffs because we refused to denounce our comrades to the McCarthy committee. You and I.”

There was more, Harry told Laura one night when the cicadas were raising a racket in the Bells’ garden. It was an entire era: It was the misery of an era, but also its glory.

“Before I went to Spain, I was active in the Black Theater Project with Roosevelt’s WPA, which set off riots in Harlem in 1935. Then Orson Welles put on a black Macbeth that caused a furor and was savagely attacked by the theater critic of The New York Times. The guy died of pneumonia a week after the review appeared. It was voodoo, Laura.” Harry laughed and asked her if it was all right to call her by her first name.

“Of course. Laura,” she said.

“Harry. Harry Jaffe.”

“Yes, Basilio told me about … you.”

“About Jim. About Jorge.”

“Jorge Maura told me the story.”

“No one ever gets the whole story, you know,” said Harry. His tone expressed challenge, sadness, and shame all at once, Laura thought.

“Do you have the whole story, Harry?”

“No, of course not.” The man tried to recover his normal expression. “A writer should never know the whole story. He imagines one part and asks the reader to finish it. A book should never close. The reader should continue it.”

“Not finish it, just continue it?”

Harry agreed, with his balding head and immobile but expressive hands. Jorge had described him on the Jarama front in 1937, compensating for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry said at that time. His faith in Communism expiated his inferiority complexes. He argued a lot, Jorge Maura had recalled, he’d read all the Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” Stalin’s mistakes were mere misdirections. The future was glorious, but Harry Jaffe in Spain was small, nervous, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive — Maura had thought — because he didn’t know just how weak an uncritical political conviction really is.

“I want to save my soul,” Harry would say at the front.

“I want to know fear,” his inseparable friend Jim would say. Jim, the tall, gawky New Yorker, with Harry — Maura would smile — the classic twosome of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Mutt and Jeff, Basilio said now, adding his smile to that of his absent friend.

“So long to neckties,” said Jim and Harry in one voice when Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway went off to report on the war, arguing about which of the two would have the honor of writing the other’s obituary.

The little Jew in jacket and tie.

If the description of the Harry Jaffe of fifteen years earlier was accurate, then that decade and a half had been a century and a half for this man who could not hide his sadness, who perhaps wanted to hide it; but the sadness managed to show itself in his infinitely distant gaze, his tremulously sad mouth, his nervous chin and supernaturally inert hands, controlled with great effort to reveal no genuine enthusiasm or interest. He would sit on his hands. He would clench his fists. He would clasp them desperately under his jaw. Harry’s hands were witness, offended and humiliated, to the vicious cruelty of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy had paralyzed Harry Jaffe’s hands.

“We never win, it’s just not true that at any given moment we triumphed,” said Harry, in a voice as neutral as dust. “There was excitement, oh yes. Plenty of excitement. We Americans like to believe in what we’re doing, and we get excited doing it. How could a moment like the first night of The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s musical drama, not be one of pleasure, faith, excitement? With its daring, direct reference to events of the day — the automobile strike, riots, police brutality, workers shot in the back and killed? How could we not be excited — indignant! about our production causing a cutoff in the official subsidy for the workers’ theater? They confiscated the sets. The stagehands were fired. And then? We had no theater. So we had the brilliant idea of bringing the play to the scene of the action, to the steel factory. We’d put on a workers’ theater in the workers’ factory.”

How hard for me that look of defeat is turning out to be whenever he opens his eyes, that look of reproach whenever he closes them, thought Laura as she watched him intently, as she always did, the little needy man sitting on a leather armchair in the garden with its view of Cuernavaca, city of refuge, where Hernán Cortés had commanded a stone palace be built, protected by watchtowers and artillery, to escape the heights of the conquered Aztec city, which he destroyed and rebuilt as a Renaissance city laid out on a right-angled grid.

“What do you think Cortés would feel if he came back to his palace and found himself in Rivera’s murals painted as a merciless conquistador with reptilian eyes?” Harry asked Laura.

“Diego makes up for it by painting heroic white horses that shine like armor. He can’t help feeling a certain admiration for the epic. It’s true for all Mexicans,” said Laura, bringing her fingers close to Harry’s.

“I got a little scholarship after the war. Went to Italy. That’s how Ucello painted medieval battles. Where will you take me tomorrow so I can learn more about Cuernavaca?”

Together they went to the Borda gardens, where Maximilian of Austria came to take refuge with his pleasures in the hidden, moist, lecherous gardens, far from the imperial court at Chapultepec and the insomniac ambition of his wife, Carlota.

“Whom he wouldn’t touch because he didn’t want to give her syphilis,” they both said, laughing, at the same time, wiping the beer foam from their lips in Cuernavaca’s main square, Cuauhnáhuac, the place by the trees where Laura Díaz listened to Harry Jaffe and tried to penetrate the mystery hidden in the depths of his story, lightened occasionally with irony.

“The culture of my youth was a radio culture, blind theater, which is how Orson Welles managed to scare everyone into thinking that a simple adaptation of a work by the other Wells, H. G., was really happening in New Jersey.”

Laura laughed a lot and asked Harry to listen to the latest chachachá on the tavern’s jukebox:

The Martians have landed, ha-ha-ha!

They came down dancing the chachachá!

“You know?”

So they took Blitzstein’s drama to the scene of the crime, the steel factory. Which is why the plant managers decided to give the workers a picnic that day, and the workers chose a day in the country over a session of political theater.

“You know? When they finally put on the play again, the director scattered the actors in the audience. The spotlights would focus on us, and we’d suddenly be revealed. The spot came on me, the light hit me in the face, blinding me, but then I had to speak: ‘Justice. We want justice.’ That was my only line, from the audience. Then the lights went down, and we went home to hear the invisible truth of radio. Hitler used the radio. So did Roosevelt and Churchill. How could I refuse to speak on the radio, when the very government of the United States, the American army, asked me: This is the Voice of America, we have to defeat fascism, Russia is our ally, we have to praise the Soviet Union? What was I going to do? Anti-Soviet propaganda? Just imagine, Laura, me doing anti-Communist propaganda in the middle of a war. They would have shot me as a traitor. But today, the fact that I did it condemns me as an anti-American subversive. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

He didn’t laugh when he said that. Later, at dinner, the group, about a dozen guests, listened carefully to the old producer Theodore tell the story of Jewish migration to Hollywood, the Jewish creation of Hollywood. But a younger screenwriter, who never took off his bow tie, rudely told him to shut up, every generation has its problems and suffers them in its way, he wasn’t going to feel nostalgia for the Depression, unemployment, lines of freezing men waiting for a cup of watery hot soup, there was no security, no hope, there was only Communism, the Communist Party, why not join the Party? how could he ever renounce his Communism, when the Party gave him the only security, the only hope of his youth?

“To deny I was a Communist would be to deny I was young.”

“Too bad we denied ourselves,” said another guest, a man with distinguished features (he looked like the Arrow shirt man, Harry noted slyly).

“What do you mean?” asked Theodore.

“That we weren’t made for success.”

“Well, we were,” grumbled the old man and his wife in unison. “Elsa and I were. We certainly were.”

“We weren’t,” retorted the good-looking man, wearing his gray hair well, proud of it. “The Communists weren’t. Being successful was a sin, a kind of sin anyway. And sin demands retribution.”

“You did all right.” The old man laughed.

“That was the problem. The retribution. First there was commercial work, done halfheartedly. Scripts for whores and trained dogs. Then compensatory dissipation — whores in bed, whiskey not as well trained as Rin Tin Tin. Finally came panic, Theodore. The realization that we weren’t made for Communism. We were made for pleasure and dissipation. That was the punishment in the end, of course. Denounced and out of work for having been Communists, Theodore. McCarthy as our exterminating angel — it was inevitable. We deserved it, fuck the dirty weasel.”

“And what about the people who weren’t Communists, who were wrongly accused, smeared?”

Everyone turned to see who’d asked that. But the questions seemed to come from nowhere. They seemed to have been said by a ghost. It was the voice of absence. Only Laura, sitting opposite Harry, realized that the Spanish Civil War veteran had thought and perhaps said them, but no one else noticed, because the lady of the house, Ruth, had already changed the tone of the conversation as she served her endless bowl of pasta and sang under her breath:

You’re going to get me into trouble

If you keep looking at me like that.

Harry had said that radio was invisible theater, a call to imagination … and actual theater, what was that?

“Something that disappears with the applause.”

“And movies?”

“The ghost that outlives us all, the speaking, moving portrait we leave behind so we can go on living.”

“Is that why you went to Hollywood, to write movies?”

He nodded without looking at her, it was hard for him to look at anyone and everyone avoided looking at him. Little by little Laura realized this fact — so flagrant as to be a mystery, invisible, like a radio program.

Laura felt she could be the object in Harry’s line of sight because she was new, different, innocent, because she didn’t know the things the others did. But the courtesy all the exiles showed to Harry was impeccable. He turned up every weekend at the Bells’ house. He sat down to dinner with them every Sunday. Only no one looked at him. And when he spoke it was in silence, Laura realized with alarm, no one listened to him, that was why he gave the impression that he never spoke, because no one listened to him but her, only her only I, Laura Díaz, I pay attention to him, and that’s why only she listened to what the solitary man said without his having to open his mouth.

Before, whom would he talk to? Nature in Cuernavaca was so prodigal, though so different, rather like the Veracruz of Laura Díaz’s childhood.

It was a perturbed nature, redolent of bougainvillea and verbena, of freshly cut pine and bleeding watermelon, scents of saffron but also of shit and garbage piled in the deep gullies around every orchard, every neighborhood, every house … Would Harry Jaffe speak to that nature — the little New York Jew who’d made his pilgrimage from Manhattan to Spain and from Spain to Hollywood and from Hollywood to Mexico?

This time Laura was the foreigner in her own homeland, the other to whom this strangely taciturn and solitary man might perhaps speak, not aloud but in the whisper she learned to read on his lips as they became friends and drifted away from the Bells’ red stronghold into the silence of the Borda gardens or the buzz of Cuernavaca’s main square, or the light and careless inebriation at the Hotel Marik’s open-air café, or the cathedral’s peaceful solitude.

There, Harry pointed out to her that the nineteenth-century murals, in their pious St. Sulpice style, were hiding another fresco that had been painted over, bad taste and clerical hypocrisy having deemed it primitive, cruel, and not especially devout.

“You know what it is, do you?” asked Laura, not hiding her curiosity and surprise.

“I do. An angry — very angry — priest told me. What do you see here?”

“The Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, the Wise Men,” said Laura — though she was thinking about Father Elzevir Almonte and the jewels of the Holy Child of Zongolica.

“You really don’t know what’s underneath?”

“No.”

“The missionary expedition of Mexico’s only saint, St. Felipe de Jesus. Felipe went to convert the Japanese in the seventeenth century. Painted here, but painted over now, are the scenes of danger and terror — rough seas, shipwrecks. The saint’s heroic and solitary sermons. Finally, his crucifixion by the infidels. His slow death agony. A great movie.”

“His nursemaid said, The day the fig tree blooms, our little Felipe will be a saint. A servant we once had, a man I loved a lot, Zampaya, told me that story.”

“All that was covered up. By piety. By lies.”

“A pentimento, Harry?”

“No, not a repentant painting, but one that pride superimposed on truth. A triumph of simulation. I’m telling you, it’s a movie.”

He invited her, for the first time, to the little house he was renting, surrounded by mangroves. It wasn’t far from the square, but in Cuernavaca one had only to walk a few yards beyond the main streets to find houses almost like lairs, hidden behind high walls painted indigo blue, genuine silent oases — with green lawns, red roof tiles, ocher facades, and thickets running toward black gullies one after the other. It smelled of moisture and decaying trees. Harry’s house had a garden, a brick terrace that was hot all day and freezing at night, a roof of broken tiles, a kitchen where a silent old woman sat immobile with a palm fan in her hands, and a bed-sitting room with its spaces divided by curtains, which transformed the carefully made bed — as if someone would punish Harry if he left his bed unmade — into a secret.

Three open suitcases, full of clothes, papers, and books, clashed with the scrupulous order of the bed.

“Why haven’t you unpacked?”

He hesitated before answering.

“Why?”

“I might leave any time.”

“Where would you go?”

“Home.”

“Home? But you don’t have a home anymore, Harry. This is your home, haven’t you figured that out yet? You’ve lost everything else!” Laura was suspicious and exasperated.

“No, Laura, no, you don’t know when—”

“Why don’t you sit down and get to work?”

“I don’t know what to do, Laura. I’m waiting.”

“Work,” she said, meaning “stay.”

“I’m waiting. In a while. Any time now.”

Laura gave herself to Harry for many reasons: because of his age, because she hadn’t made love since the night Basilio said goodbye before returning to Vassar and she hadn’t had to ask, nor did Basilio, because it was an act of humility and memory, homage to Jorge Maura and Pilar Méndez, only she and he, Laura and Basilio together, could represent their absent lovers tenderly and respectfully, but that act of love between them for love of others had aroused in Laura Díaz an appetite that began to grow, an erotic desire she’d believed was, if not lost, then certainly overshadowed by age, modesty, memory of the dead, a superstitious sense she had of being watched from some dark land by the two Santiagos, by Jorge Maura, by Juan Francisco — the dead or disappeared who lived in a territory where the only business was to spy on her, still in this world, Laura Díaz.

“I don’t want to do anything that would violate my respect for myself.”

“Self-respect, Laura?”

“Self-respect, Harry.”

Now the nearness of Harry in Cuernavaca aroused a new tenderness in her which at first she could not identify. Perhaps it was born from the play of glances in the weekend parties: no one looked at him, he looked at no one, until Laura came, and they looked at each other. Hadn’t her love for Jorge Maura begun that way, with exchanged glances during a party at the house of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo? How different the power of her Spanish lover’s glance from the weakness, not only in the glance but in the entire body of this sad American, disoriented, wounded, humiliated, and in need of affection.

First, Laura embraced him, the two of them sitting on the bed in the little house in the gully. She hugged him as if he were a child, put ting her arms around him, holding his hand, almost cuddling him, asking him to raise his head, to look at her, she wanted to see Harry Jaffe’s true face, not the mask of exile, defeat, and self pity.

“Let me put your things away for you.”

“Don’t mother me! Fuck you!”

He was right. She was treating him as if he were a weak cowardly child. She had to make him feel, You’re a man, I want to stir up the fire still within you, Harry, even though you no longer feel any passion for success, work, politics, or the rest of humanity — waiting, perhaps, crouched, mocking, like a genie, your sex unable always to say no, the only part of your life, Harry, that maybe goes on saying yes, out of pure animal spirit perhaps, or perhaps because your soul, my soul, has only the stronghold of sex but doesn’t know it.

“Sometimes I imagine sexes like two little dwarfs poking their noses out from between our legs, making fun of us, challenging us to yank them from their tragicomic niche and toss them in the garbage, since they know that no matter how much they torture us we’ll always live with them, the little dwarfs.”

She didn’t want to compare him to anything. He defied comparison. There he was. What she imagined. What he’d forgotten. An impassioned surrender, deferred, noisy, unexpectedly spoken and shouted by both of them, as if they both were being released from a jail that had held them for too long, and right there, at the prison door, on the other side of the bars, was Laura waiting for Harry and Harry waiting for Laura.

“My baby, my baby.”

“We’ll see tomorrow.”

“I’m a rich old Jewish producer who’s got no reason to be here except I want to share the fate of the young Jews this McCarthyite persecution is directed against.”

“Do you know what it means to begin each day saying to yourself, This is the last day I’m going to live in peace?”

“When you hear someone knocking at the door, and you don’t know if it’s thieves, beggars, police, wolves, or just termites …”

“How can you tell if the person who’s come to see you, who’s supposed to be a lifelong friend, hasn’t become an informer, how can you know?”

“I’m exiled in Cuernavaca because I couldn’t stand the idea of being grilled a second time.”

“There is something harder than putting up with persecution against yourself, and that’s looking at betrayal practiced by someone else.”

“Laura, how are we going to reconcile our pain and our shame?”

“My baby, my baby.”