The Years With Laura Diaz

1

“I SHOULD keep my mouth shut forever.”

She wanted to bring him to Mexico City, to a hospital. He wanted to stay in Cuernavaca. They compromised, agreeing to spend some time in Tepoztlán. Laura imagined that the beauty and solitude of the place — a large subtropical valley enclosed by impressive, pyramidal mountains, sheer vertical masses with no slopes or hills leading up to them, erect and challenging like great stone walls raised to protect the fields of sugarcane and heather, rice and oranges — would be a refuge for both of them. Perhaps Harry would decide to start writing again; she’d take care of him, that was her role; she took it on without a second thought. The bond that had formed between them during the past two years was unbreakable; they needed each other.

Tepoztlán would restore the health of her tender, beloved Harry, far away from the constant repetition of tragic events in Cuernavaca. They rented a little house protected but overshadowed by two huge masses: the mountain and an immense church, a fortress monastery built by the Dominicans in competition with nature, as so often happens in Mexico. Harry pointed that out to her, the Mexican tendency to create architectural rivals to nature, imitations of mountains, precipices, deserts. Their little house competed with nothing, which is why Laura. Díaz chose it, because of the simplicity of its naked adobes facing a dirt road traveled more by stray dogs than by human beings. The interior showed that other Mexican ability — to pass from a poor, neglected town to an oasis of green, serene patios with red and green plants, watermelon colors, shining fountains, and cool corridors that seemed to come from far away and never end.

There was only one bedroom with a rough old bed, a minimal bathroom decorated with fragile tiles, and a kitchen like those of Laura’s childhood — no electrical appliances, charcoal-burning braziers that one had to fan to keep blazing, and an icebox that required the iceman’s daily visit for chilling the bottles of Dos Equis that were Harry’s joy. House life centered on the patio and its rattan chairs with leather seats and rattan, leather-topped table. It was hard to write on that table, which was soft and stained by too many circles made by moist beer bottles. The notebooks and pens remained in a bedroom drawer. When Harry did begin to write again, Laura secretly read the pages in the cheap notebooks whose paper absorbed the ink from Harry’s Esterbrook pen. He knew she was reading them; she knew he knew. Neither spoke of it.

Jacob Julius Garfinkle, that was his real name. We grew up together in New York. If you’re a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, you’re born with eyes, nose, mouth, ears, feet, and hands — the whole body — but something else only we have: a chip on your shoulder. You use it to challenge strangers (and who isn’t a stranger if you’re born in a neighborhood like ours?) to knock it off, with either a hard slap or a disdainful finger flick. We all carry that chip, and we all know no one put it there, we were born with it, it’s part of our humiliated poor Italian, Irish, or Jewish (Polish, Russian, Hungarian, but anyway Jewish) immigrant flesh. You see it even more when we strip to take a shower or to make love or to sleep poorly, but even when we’re dressed the chip cuts through the shirt or jacket, shows itself, tells the world, Just try to bother me, just try to insult me, hit me, humiliate me, just go ahead and try. Jacob Julius Garfinkle: I knew him from boyhood. He had the biggest chip of all. He was small, dark, a dark-skinned Jew with a snub nose and smiling cruel lips, mocking and dangerous, like his eyes, like his fighting bantam-rooster posture, his machine-gun way of talking, his always being on the alert — because the challenge was just around the corner, every corner, in every doorway, bad luck could fall off a fire escape, walk out of a bar, find you on a termite-eaten dock by the river … Julie Garfinkle brought the damned streets and dark gutters of New York to the screen. He showed himself naked and vulnerable, but he was armed with courage to fight injustice and come out in defense of all those who’d been born like him, in the immense, eternal ghettos of “Western civilization.” I met him in the Group Theatre. He was the “golden boy” in Clifford Odets’ play of that name, the young violinist who exchanges his talent for success in the ring and is left at the end without hands, fingers, or fists, nothing to attack even Joe Louis (who was also Jewish) or Felix Mendelssohn (who was also black). He’d sign anything. If someone said, Look, Julie, look at the injustices being committed against Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Communists, Russia, homeland of the proletariat, against poor children, against people with onchocerciasis in New Guinea, Julie would sign, he signed everything and his signature was strong, broken, round, like a caress, like a punch, it was sweat like a tear, that’s how my friend Julie Garfinkle was. When they brought him to Hollywood after his success in the Group Theatre, he didn’t stop being the street Quixote he always was. He played himself and he fascinated audiences. He wasn’t handsome, elegant, courteous, or ironic, wasn’t Gary Grant or Gary Cooper. He was John Garfield, the scrappy kid from the mean streets of New York, reborn in Beverly Hills, walking into mansions surrounded by rosebushes with his mud-covered shoes and washing them clean in crystalline swimming pools. Which is why his best role was with Joan Crawford in Humoresque. Again he played the part, like the one at the beginning of his career, of the poor boy with a talent for the violin. But she was equal to him. She looked like a rich aristocrat, the patron of the young genius who springs from the invisible city, but in reality she too is poor, she too has fled from the fringes of society by pretending to be rich, cultured, and elegant to disguise the fact that she too is a kid from the street, an arriviste with hard nails and a smooth ass. Which is why they were so explosive as a couple: they were the same but different. Joan Crawford and John Garfield, she pretended, he didn’t. When the McCarthyite flood poured out of the sewers of America, Julie Garfinkle looked like the perfect character for a congressional investigation. He had an anti American look, suspicious, dark, different, Semitic. And he wasn’t guilty of anything. That was essential for McCarthy: to terrorize the innocent. Julie wasn’t guilty of anything. But they accused him of everything, of signing petitions in favor of Stalin during the Moscow purges, demanding a second front during the war, being a crypto-Communist, financing the Party with the patriotic American money Hollywood paid him, showing himself to favor the poor and dispossessed (that alone was enough to make him suspicious; it would have been better to ask for justice for the rich and powerful). The last time I saw him, his Manhattan apartment was a mess — open drawers, papers scattered everywhere, his wife in despair staring at him as if he were insane, and Julie Garfield looking through checkbooks, portfolios, file cabinets, old books, and worn-out wallets for proof of the checks they alleged he’d signed, shouting, “Why don’t they leave me alone?” He was brave, accepting the invitation from the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he made the mistake that people who believed they were falsely accused made. Merely appearing before the committee was proof enough for its members that the person was guilty. Immediately, all the ultrareactionaries in Hollywood — Ronald Reagan, Adolphe Menjou, Ginger Rogers’ mother — corroborated their suspicion, and then the congressmen would pass on the information to Hollywood gossip columnists. Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, George Sokolsky all lived on the blood of the sacrificed stars, like ink-and-paper Draculas. Then the American Legion would mobilize its forces to picket the movies in which the suspects appeared — John Garfield, for example — not allowing people in. Then the studio producer could say what was said to Garfield: You’re a risk. You put the security of the studio at risk. And fire him. “Ask forgiveness, Julie, confess, and live in peace.” “Name names, Julie, or your career’s over.” Then the tough kid from the streets of New York was reborn, naked and snub-nosed, his fists clenched and voice hoarse. “Only a fool would defend himself against fools like McCarthy. Do you think I’m going to be a prisoner of what a poor devil like Ronald Reagan says? Let me go on believing in my humanity, Harry, let me go on believing I have a soul.” We can’t protect you, Hollywood said at first; then: We can’t employ you anymore; finally: We’re going to give evidence against you. The company, the studio, was more important. “You have to understand, Julie, you’re just one person. We employ thousands of people. Do you want them to die of hunger?” Julie Garfinkle died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. It may be true — he had a bad heart, on the point of bursting — but the fact is he was found dead in bed with one of his many lovers. I believe John Garfield died fornicating, a death to be envied. At his funeral, the rabbi said that Julie arrived like a meteor and left like a meteor. Abraham Polonsky, who directed one of Julie’s last and perhaps greatest films, Force of Evil, said, “He defended his street-boy honor, and they killed him for it.” He was killed. He died. Ten thousand people passed by his coffin to bid him farewell. Communists? Agents sent by Stalin? Standing there weeping was Clifford Odets, author of Golden Boy, glory of the literary left, transformed into an informer by the committee; first he informed on the dead because he thought it couldn’t hurt them, then on the living in order to save himself, then on himself when he, like so many others, said, “I didn’t name anyone who hadn’t already been named.” When Odets walked out of John Garfield’s funeral in tears, a fistfight broke out. Right to the end, Jacob Julius Garfinkle lived by slugging it out in the streets of New York.

When the summer rains soaked the garden and seeped through the house walls, leaving obscure medallion-shaped stains on the skin of the adobe, Harry Jaffe felt he was suffocating and asked Laura Díaz, please, read the pages about John Garfield.

“But there were accused people who didn’t name names and didn’t let themselves become anguished or depressed, isn’t that true, Harry?”

“You met them in Cuernavaca. Some of them were among the Hollywood Ten. And yes, it’s true they had the courage not to talk or let themselves be scared, but most of all they had the courage not to fall into despair, not to commit suicide, not to die. Are they better people for that? Another pal from the Group Theatre, the actor J. Edward Bromberg, asked to be excused from appearing before the committee because of his recent heart attacks. Congressman Francis E. Walker, one of the worst inquisitors, told him that Communists were very skillful at presenting excuses signed by doctors — who no doubt were at the very least red sympathizers. Eddie Bromberg died in London three years ago, Laura. Sometimes, after he was blacklisted, he’d call me to say, Harry, there are always guys standing outside my house, day and night. They take turns, but there’re always two of them in plain sight next to the streetlight, while I spy on them spying on me. I’m constantly waiting for the phone to ring; I never leave the telephone, Harry, they might call me to the committee again, they might call to tell me the role they promised has gone to someone else, or the other way around, they might call me to tempt me with a part on condition that I cooperate, that is, squeal, Harry, this happens five or six times a day, I’m always next to the telephone, tempted, tearing myself to pieces, should I talk or not, should I think about my career or not, I won’t talk, Harry, no, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, Harry, but most of all, Harry, I didn’t want to hurt myself, my loyalty to my comrades was loyalty to myself. I didn’t save them or myself.”

“And you, Harry, are you going to write about yourself?”

“I really feel sick, Laura, give me a beer. Be a good girl …”

Another morning — the parrots were screeching in the sunlight, showing off their crests and wings as if they were announcing a bulletin, good or bad news — as he ate his breakfast Harry answered Laura.

“You only told me about the people who were destroyed for not talking. But you said that others saved themselves, came out stronger for keeping their mouths shut,” Laura persisted.

How can there be innocence when no one’s guilty? quoted Harry. “Dalton Trumbo said that at the beginning of the witch-hunt. During the witch-hunt, he outsmarted the inquisitors, wrote scripts under pseudonyms, won an Oscar under a pseudonym, and the Academy almost shit in its pants it was so angry when Trumbo revealed he was the author. And when it’s all over, I suspect it’ll be Trumbo who will say there were neither heroes nor villains, saints nor devils, only victims, Laura. The day will come when all the accused will be rehabilitated and celebrated as cultural heroes, and the accusers will be accused and degraded as they justly deserve. But Trumbo was right. We’ll all have been victims.”

“Even the inquisitors, Harry?”

“Yes. Even their children change their names. They don’t want to admit they’re the children of the mediocrities who drove hundreds of innocent people to sickness and suicide.”

“Even the informers, Harry?”

“They’re the worst victims. They have the mark of Cain branded on their foreheads.”

Harry took a knife from the fruit bowl and cut his forehead.

And Laura watched with horror but didn’t stop him.

“They have to cut off a hand and cut out their tongues.”

And Harry put the knife in his mouth, and Laura screamed and stopped him, snatched the knife out of his hand and embraced him sobbing.

“And they’re sentenced to exile and death,” murmured Harry, almost inaudible, into Laura’s ear.

Early on, Laura had learned to read Harry’s thoughts just as he’d learned to read hers. They were helped by the punctual round of tropical sounds. She’d known it since she was a girl in Veracruz, but had forgotten it when she lived in Mexico City, where noises are accidental, unforeseen, intrusive, shrieking like evil fingernails scratching a school blackboard. But in the tropics the chirping of birds announces the dawn and their symmetrical flight the dusk, nature fraternizes with the church bells ringing matins and vespers, vanilla trees perfume the ambient air when we give it our intermittent attention, and the clusters of harvested beans give an air at once newborn and refined to the cupboards where they’re stored. When Harry sprinkled pepper on his huevos rancheros at breakfast, Laura would glance at the flowering peppers in the garden, yellow jewels set in a fragile airy crown the color of afternoon. There were no delays in the tropics. They went from the garden to the table killing scorpions, first in the house, then hunting preventively in the garden, later under stones. They were white, and Harry laughed as he stepped on them.

“My wife used to tell me to take some sun once in a while. Your stomach is as white as a fish fillet before it’s fried. That’s how these scorpions are.”

“Fish belly,” Laura said, laughing.

“Get out of this fix, she’d tell me, you’re not part of it, you don’t believe in it, your friends aren’t worth all that. And then she’d go back to her usual theme. Your problem isn’t that you’re a Communist, Harry, it’s that you’ve lost your talent.”

And despite everything, he finally did sit down to write, for when all was said and done, he needed to write, and in Tepoztlán he began to do so more regularly, beginning with his mini-biographies of victims like Garfield and Bromberg, who’d been his friends. Why didn’t he write about his enemies, the inquisitors? Why did he write only about the wounded and destroyed people like Garfield and Bromberg, but not about the solid individuals who overcame the drama, didn’t cry, fought, resisted, and, above all, made fun of the monstrous stupidity of the whole trial? Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman … those who came to Mexico, passed through Cuernavaca or stayed there. Why was it that Harry Jaffe said almost nothing about them? Why didn’t he include them in the biographies he was writing in Tepoztlán? Above all, why did he never mention the worst of the lot, the ones who did squeal, who did name names — Edward Dmytryk, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, Larry Parks?

Harry used his shoe to smash a scorpion.

“Evil insects make their nests in the most hostile places and live where there seems to be no life. That’s how Tom Paine described prejudice.”

Laura tried to imagine what Harry was thinking, all the things he didn’t say to her that were passing through his feverish eyes. She didn’t know that Harry was doing the same thing, thinking he could read Laura’s thoughts. He’d watch her from the bed as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror every morning. He could compare the still-young woman he’d met two years before, emerging from the swimming pool framed in bougainvillea, with the fifty-five-year-old lady whose hair, getting grayer and grayer, she arranged simply, in a bun at the nape of her neck, emphasizing her clear forehead and her angular features, her fine, large nose mounted on an easel, her lips as thin as those of a Gothic statue. And all saved by the intelligence and fire of her amber eyes glittering in their shadowy depths.

He also watched her doing the household chores, taking care of the kitchen, making the bed, washing the dishes, preparing the meals, taking long showers, sitting on the toilet, discontinuing the use of sanitary napkins, suffering hot flashes, cuddling up to sleep in a fetal position, while he, Harry, rested straight as a board, until one day they simply exchanged positions, and he slept like a fetus and she stretched out, rigid, like a governess and a child …

He told himself he thought what she thought when she looked at herself in the mirror, when she separated from their tender, nocturnal lovers’ embrace: it’s one thing to be a body, another to be beautiful … How warm and tender it was to embrace and love each other, but above all how healthful, the salvation of love meant forgetting one’s own body and fusing with the body of the other and letting the other absorb my body so as not to think about beauty, not to contemplate oneself apart from the other but blind, united, pure touch, pure pleasure, with no sanctions of ugliness or beauty, which no longer matter in the dark, in the intimate embrace, when each body fuses with the other and they cease contemplating each other outside each other, cease judging themselves outside the couple that couples until it makes one from two and loses all notions of ugliness or beauty, youth or age … Harry said this to himself thinking that Laura was saying it to him, I only contemplate internal beauty in you.

It was easy in his case: more and more emaciated, white as a fish belly, said Laura, he wasn’t even a distinguished bald man but a sparsely hairy man with abrupt little tufts that resisted dignified, complete baldness, hair like outcroppings of dry grass on the crown of his head, above his ears, on the back of his scruffy neck. It was more difficult in her case: Laura Díaz’s beauty was intelligible, Harry tried to tell her, it resembled classical beauty which was nothing more than the idea of beauty imposed since the time of the Greeks but which could have been another norm of beauty, that of an Aztec goddess, for example, Coatlicue instead of the Venus de Milo.

“Socrates was an ugly man, Laura. He prayed every night to see his own internal beauty. It was the gift of the gods. Thought, imagination. That was Socrates’ beauty.”

“Didn’t he want others to see it as well?”

“I think his way of speaking was that of a vain man. So vain that he preferred to drink the hemlock rather than admit he was wrong. He wasn’t. He held his ground.”

They always ended up talking about the same thing but they couldn’t get to the bottom of what “the same thing” was. Like the victims of McCarthyism. The opposite of McCarthy’s informers. And now Harry was looking at her looking at herself in the mirror, and he wondered if she saw the same thing he saw, an external body in the process of losing its beauty, or an internal body that was becoming more beautiful. Only making love, only in sexual union did the question cease to have meaning. The body disappeared in order to be only pleasure, and pleasure overwhelmed any possible beauty.

She, on the other hand, did not seem to judge him. She accepted him just as he was, and he felt tempted to be disagreeable, to ask her, Why don’t you color your hair, why don’t you do your hair more stylishly, why has she abandoned all coquetry; he’s looking at me as if I were his nurse or his nanny, he’d like me to turn into a siren, but my poor Odysseus is scuttled, immobile, dissolving in a sea of ashes, drowned by smoke, disappearing little by little in the mist of his four packs of Camels a day whenever Fredric Bell gives him a carton or his five packs of unfiltered Raleighs which taste like soap, he says, whenever he had to put up with the best the corner tobacco stand had to offer.

“The best is sometimes all there is. Here all there is is almost always the worst.”

They went to the Saturday market, and he decided to buy a tree of life. She had no reason to oppose the purchase, but she did. I don’t know why I objected, she thought later on, when they’d stopped speaking to each other for an entire week, in reality those candelabras painted a thousand different colors aren’t ugly and don’t offend anyone even if they aren’t the marvels of folkloric audacity and sensibility he says they are, I don’t know why I told him they’re vulgar kitschy things that only foreigners buy, why don’t you buy some puppets with pink socks or a multicolor mat, or, why not? a serape for you and a shawl for me? We’ll sit down in the afternoon protected from the sudden cold that rolls down the mountain, wrapped in Mexican folklore, do you want to lower me to that? Isn’t it enough you watch me so insistently while I fix myself up in front of the mirror, letting me think what he thinks, she’s getting old, doesn’t take care of herself, is going on fifty-six, no longer needs Kotex? On top of that, you want to fill up the house with tourist crap, trees of life, mats, market marionettes? Why don’t you just buy a machete, Harry, the ones with cute inscriptions on the handle, like “I’m like a green chile, hot but tasty,” so the next time you try to cut off your fingers and cut out your tongue you succeed, succeed in feeling sorry for yourself, for what you were and for what you weren’t, for what you are and for what you could have been.

Harry was too weak to slap her. It was she who felt compassion for him when he raised his hand and she smashed the tree of life on the brick floor and the next day swept up the scattered pieces and threw them into the garbage. Only a week later, she returned alone from the market and put the new tree of life on the shelf opposite the table and chairs where they ate.

Then she tried to make up for her inexplicable hatred for the multicolored structure of angels, fruits, leaves, and tree by deeply inhaling the scent of the plants in the garden, the shine of the rain on the leaves of the banana tree, and, beyond, in her memory, the trees that shaded the coffee bushes, the symmetrical lemon and orange orchards, the fig trees, the red lily, the round crown of the mango tree, the trueno with its tiny yellow flowers that could withstand both hurricane and drought — all the flora of Catemaco. And, at the end of the forest, the ceiba. Covered with spikes. The pointy spines the ceiba produces to protect itself. A trunk covered with swords defending itself so no one gets too close. The ceiba at the end of the road. The ceiba covered with fingers cut off in a single machete stroke by a bandit on the Veracruz, highway.

At dusk, they always sat side by side in the garden. They would talk about everyday things, the price of food in the market, what they’d eat the next day, how long it took for American magazines to reach Tepoztlán (if they ever got there), how kind it was of the Cuernavaca group to send them articles, always articles, never whole newspapers or magazines, what a blessing shortwave radio was, should they go to Cuernavaca to the Ocampo Cinema to see such and such a cowboy movie or the Mexican melodramas that made Laura laugh and Harry cry — but they never visited the Bells’ house, Aristotle’s Academy as Harry called it, he was bored by the eternal discussion, always the same discussion, a three-act tragicomedy.

“The first act is reason. The conviction that brought us to Communism, to sympathize with the left, the cause of the workers, faith in Marx’s arguments and in the Soviet Union as the first workers’ revolutionary state. With that faith, we answered the reality of the Depression, unemployment, the ruin of American capitalism.”

There were fireflies in the garden, but not as many as the intermittent lights given off by the cigarettes Harry chain-smoked, lighting the next with the butt of the last.

“The second act is heroism. First the fight against the economic depression in America, then the war against fascism.”

A brutal fit of coughing interrupted him, a cough so deep and strong that it seemed alien to his body, which was growing thinner and paler by the day. That body could not contain such a deep hurricane in I Harry’s chest.

“The third act is the victimization of men and women of good faith, Communists or simply humanitarians. McCarthy is the same human type as Beria, Stalin’s policeman, or Himmler, Hitler’s policeman. He’s driven by political ambition, because the easy way to get ahead is by joining the anti-Communist chorus that materialized when the hot war ended and the Cold War began. A cold calculation that one could gain power on the basis of ruined reputations. Squealing, anguish, death … and the epilogue …” Harry spread his hands, showing his open palms, his yellow fingers, then shrugged his shoulders and coughed lightly.

It was she who said to him, said to herself, without knowing in what order or how it would be best to communicate it to Harry: the epilogue has to he reflection, the effort of intelligence to understand what happened, why it happened.

“Why do we in America behave the same way they behave in Russia? Why did we become the same thing we said we were fighting? Why are there Berias and McCarthys, all those modern Torquemadas?”

Laura listened, she wanted to tell Harry that the three acts and epilogue in political dramas never appear that way, well ordered and Aristotelian, as Harry would say, mocking the “Academy” in Cuernavaca. They come tangled together, both of them knew that, sense mixed with nonsense, hope with despair, justification with criticism, compassion with disdain.

“If I could only go back to my time in Spain and stay there,” Harry would sometimes say. And, feverishly, turning brutally to Laura, he would go on in a softer and softer but also hoarser voice: “Why don’t you leave me, why are you staying with me?”

It was the moment of temptation. The moment when she experienced doubt. She could pack up and leave. It was possible. She could stay and put up with everything. That too was possible. But she could do neither: neither walk out just like that nor stay passively. She listened to Harry and again and again made the same decision: I’ll stay, but I’ll do something, I won’t just take care of him, I won’t just try to encourage him, I’ll try to understand him, to find out what happened to him, why he knows all the stories of that infamous time and yet doesn’t know his own story, why he won’t tell me, the one who loves him, his story, why …

It was as if he read her mind. It happens with couples linked more by passion than by custom, we read each other’s mind, Harry, a look is enough, a wave of a hand, a feigned distraction, a dream penetrated the same way a body is penetrated sexually, to know what the other is thinking, you’re thinking about Spain, about Jim, about how he saved himself by dying young, how he didn’t have time to become a victim of history, he was a victim of the war, that’s noble, that’s heroic; but being a victim of history, not foreseeing, not dodging history’s blow in time, or not taking its full force when it does hit us, that’s sad, Harry, that’s terrible.

“It’s all been a farce, an error.”

“I love you, Harry, that’s neither a farce nor an error.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I’m not tricking you.”

“Everybody’s tricked me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Everybody.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“Why don’t you find out on your own?”

“No, I’d never do anything behind your back.”

“Don’t be a fool. I’m giving you permission. Go ahead, go back to Cuernavaca, ask them about me, tell them I gave you permission, they should tell you the truth.”

“The truth, Harry?”

(The truth is that I love you, Harry, I love you in a different way from the way I once loved my husband, different from the way I loved Orlando Ximénez or even Jorge Maura, I love you the way I loved them, as a woman who lives and sleeps with a man, but with you it’s different, Harry, besides loving you as I loved those men, I love you as I loved my brother Santiago the First and my son Santiago the Second, I love you as if I’d already seen you die, Harry, as I saw my brother, dead and buried with his unfulfilled promise, my son, resigned and handsome, that’s how I love you, Harry, as a son, a brother, and a lover, but with one difference, my love: I loved them as a woman, as a mother, as a lover, and I love you as a bitch, I know neither you nor anyone else will understand me, but I love you as a bitch, I wish I could give birth to you and then bleed to death, that’s the image that makes you different from my husband, my lover, or my sons, my love for you is the love of an animal that would love to put itself in your place and die instead of you, but only at the price of becoming your bitch, I’ve never felt this before and I’d like to explain it to myself and can’t, but that’s how it is and that’s the way it is, Harry, because only now, at your side, I ask myself questions I never asked before, I ask myself if we deserve this love, I ask myself if it’s love that exists, not you and I, and for that reason I’d like to be your animal, your bleeding, dying bitch, to say that love does exist the way a dog and a bitch exist, I want to take your love and mine away from any romantic idealism, Harry, I want to give your body and mine a last chance by rooting them in the lowest ground but also the most concrete and certain ground, where a dog and a bitch sniff, eat, entangle sexually, separate, forget each other, because I’m going to have to live with your memory when you die, Harry, and my memory of you will never be complete because I don’t know what you did during the terror, you won’t tell me, maybe you were a hero and your humility disguises itself in pugnacious honor, like John Garfield, so you won’t tell me your exploits and make your heart sentimental, you who weep when Libertad Lamarque sings in those movies of hers, but maybe you were a traitor, Harry, a squealer, and that shames you and that’s why you’d like to go back to Spain, be young, die at the side of your young friend Jim in the war and have war and death instead of history and dishonor: which is the truth? I think it’s the first, because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have been accepted in that circle of victims over in Cuernavaca, but it may be the second because they never look at you, never address you, they invite you over and let you sit there, not talking to you but not attacking you, until your chair is like the dock where the accused sits, and you know me and you’re not alone anymore and we should leave Cuernavaca, leave your comrades behind, not hear those arguments repeated ad nauseam anymore.)

“We should have denounced Stalin’s crimes before the war.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You’d have been expelled from the Party. Besides, when you’re up against the enemy you simply have to forget certain things.”

“Still, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have talked about the errors of the Soviet Union among ourselves. We’d have been more human, we’d have defended ourselves better against the McCarthyite assault.”

“How could we imagine what was going to happen?” Harry said one night, drinking beer at nightfall in the little garden backed by the mountain and redolent of the aromas of the blooming flowers and dying trees. “We American Communists fought first in Spain, then in the war against the Axis. It was the French Communists who really organized the Resistance, the Russian Communists who saved everyone at Stalingrad, who’d have thought that when the war was over being a Communist would be a sin and that all of us Communists would end up on the bonfire? Who?”

Another cigarette. Another Dos Equis.

“Being faithful to the impossible. That was our sin.”

Laura had asked him if he was married, and Harry said he was but he preferred not to talk about it. “It’s all over.” He tried to end the conversation.

“You know it isn’t. You have to tell me everything. We have to live it together. If we are going to go on living together, Harry.”

“The rages, the fights, the sermons, the nervousness about the secret meetings, the suspicion that the accusers were right? I married a Communist. Sounds like the title of one of those bad movies they make to justify McCarthyism as patriotism. That’s how the studio magnates expiate their pinko guilt. Fuck them. We’ll see tomorrow.”

“Were you honest with your wife?”

“I was weak. I spilled my guts to her. Everything. I told her my doubts. Was what I wrote for the movies valid, or did they make me believe it was good because it served a cause — the cause, the only good cause? Are we paying a very high price for something that wasn’t worth it? And she said to me, Harry, what you write is shit. But not because you’re a Communist, my love. It’s that your little flame went out. See things as they really are. You had talent. Hollywood stole it from you. It was a small talent, but it was a talent. You lost what little you had. That’s what she told me, Laura.”

“Things will be different with me.”

“I can’t, I can’t. No more.”

“I want to live with you.” (In the name of my brother Santiago and my son Santiago, and take care of you now, as I either didn’t know how to or couldn’t take care of them, you understand, you get mad, you ask me not to treat you like a child, and I show you I’m not your mother, Harry, I’m your bitch, you don’t use your mother like an animal, you don’t use your lover that way, your romantic Hollywood sensibility wouldn’t let you, Harry, but in my case, I’m asking you for it, let me be your bitch, even if I bark at you sometimes, I’m not your mother, your wife, or your sister.)

“Be my bitch.”

He smoked and drank, attacking his lungs and his blood each time he opened his mouth. She pretended to drink with him, but she drank cider, saying it was whiskey, feeling like a cabaret whore who drinks colored water that her customer takes to be French cognac. She was ashamed of the trick, but she didn’t want to get sick, because if that happened, who would take care of Harry? One day, she’d woken up in Cuernavaca in 1952 and seen the weak, sick man at her side. She’d right away decided that from then on her life would have meaning only if she devoted it to caring for him, taking charge of him, because Laura Díaz’s life was now reduced to that conviction: my life has meaning only if I dedicate it to the life of someone who needs me, if I care for a needy person, giving my love to my love, totally, no conditions, no arrière-pensées, as Orlando would say. This is now the meaning of my life, even if there are arguments, failures to understand, irritations on his or on my part — broken dishes, whole days when we don’t speak to each other, better that way, without those rough spots we’d turn into soft taffy, I’m going to unleash my irritation with him, I’m not going to control it, I’m going to give him his last chance for love, I’m going to love Harry in the name of what can’t wait any longer, I am going to incarnate that moment in my life and it’s already here: I know he’s thinking the same thing, Laura, this is the last chance, what’s between you and me can’t wait any longer, and it’s what was announced, it’s what already happened and yet is happening now, we’re living in anticipation of death because right before our eyes, Laura, the future is unfolding as if it had already taken place.

“That’s something only the dead know.”

“I’m going to ask you all a question,” Fredric Bell addressed the usual dinner guests on Cuernavaca weekend. “We all know that during the war and thanks to the war, industry made enormous fortunes. I ask you, should we have gone on strike against the exploiters of labor? We didn’t. We were patriots, nationalists, but we weren’t revolutionaries.”

“And what if the Nazis had won the war because American workers struck against American capitalists?” asked the epicurean who never took off his bow tie despite the heat.

“Are you asking me to choose between committing suicide tonight and being shot at dawn tomorrow? Like Rommel?” interjected the man with the square jaw and faded eyes.

“I’m saying we’re at war, the war isn’t over now and will never be over, the alliances change, one day they win, the next we win, the important thing is not to lose sight of the goal, and the funny thing is that the goal is the origin, do all of you realize that? The goal is the original freedom of mankind,” concluded the Arrow shirt man.

No, Harry said to Laura, the origin wasn’t freedom, the origin was terror, a struggle against beasts, distrust among brothers, fighting for wife, mother, the patriarchy, keeping the fire going, don’t let it go out, sacrificing the child to keep death away, plague, hurricanes, that was the origin. There never was a Golden Age. There never will be. The thing is you can’t be a good revolutionary if you don’t believe that.

“And what about McCarthy? And Beria?”

“They were cynics. They never believed in anything.”

“I respect your drama, Harry. I swear I respect you a great deal.”

“Don’t waste your time, Laura. Come here and give me a kiss.”

When Harry died, Laura Díaz went back to Cuernavaca to tell the exiles. They were all together, as they were every Saturday night, and Ruth was dishing out huge servings of pasta. Laura saw that while the cast had changed, the parts were the same, and the absences were made up for with new recruits. McCarthy never tired of looking for victims, the stain of persecution was spreading like an oil spill on the sea, like pus from a penis. The old producer Theodore died, and his wife, Elsa, wouldn’t last long without him; the tall, nearsighted man with tortoiseshell glasses had a chance to make a movie in France, and the small man with the curly hair and pompadour could write Hollywood screenplays under a pseudonym, using a “front.”

Others went on living in Mexico, keeping company with Fredric Bell, protected by people on the Mexican left like the Riveras or the photographer Gabriel Figueroa, and always faithful to the arguments that would let them live, remember, argue, deaden the pain of the growing list of those who were persecuted, excluded, jailed, exiled, those who committed suicide, those who disappeared. They became deaf to the footfalls of old age, pretended to be blind to the certain if minute changes in the mirror. Now Laura Díaz was a mirror for the Cuernavaca exiles. She told them, Harry is dead, and they all suddenly became older. Yet at the same time Laura felt with visible emotion that each and every one of them shone like sparks from the same fire. For a second, when she gave them the simple message, Harry is dead, the fear that pursued them all, even the bravest — the fear that was Joe McCarthy’s best-trained bloodhound nipping at the heels of the “reds”—dissipated in a kind of sigh of final relief. Without a word, they were all telling Laura that Harry would not be tormenting himself anymore. Nor would he torment them.

The looks of the American refugees in Cuernavaca were enough to precipitate in her heart an intolerable memory of everything Harry Jaffe had been — his tenderness and his anger, his bravery and his cowardice, his political pain translated into physical pain. His affliction, Harry her lover as an afflicted being, nothing more.

The English Bell remarked that those who were summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee could do one of four things.

They could invoke the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression and association. The risk in this was of being charged with contempt of Congress and going to jail. Which is what happened to the Hollywood Ten.

The second option was to invoke the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which allows all citizens the right of not incriminating themselves. Those who opted to “take the Fifth” risked losing their jobs and appearing on blacklists. Which is what had happened to most of the Cuernavaca exiles.

The third possibility was to inform, to name names and hope the studios would give you work.

Then something extraordinary happened. All of the seventeen guests, along with Bell, his wife, and Laura, went down the highway to the little Tepoztlán cemetery where Harry Jaffe was buried. There was moonlight, and the modest graves decorated with flowers stretched out at the foot of Tepozteco’s impressive height; its three-story pyramid descended to the blue, rose, white, and green crosses as if they weren’t graves but just another kind of flower in the Mexican tropics. An always premature cold fell over Tepoztlán in the evening, and the gringos had brought jackets, shawls, and even parkas.

They were right to do so. Despite the bright moonlight, the mountains cast an immense shadow over the valley, and they themselves, these persecuted exiles, moved as if they were reflections, like the dark wings of a distant eagle, a bird that one day looks at itself in the mirror and no longer recognizes what it sees, because it imagined itself one way and the mirror shows it wasn’t that at all.

Then, in the Tepoztec night, under the light of the moon, as if in a final Group Theatre presentation (the last curtain before closing on an empty house), each one of the exiles said something over the grave of Harry Jaffe, the man admitted to the group but whom no one had looked at except Laura Díaz, who arrived one day, dove into the bougainvillea-framed pool, and surfaced opposite her poor, disgraced, sick love.

“You only named those who’d already been named.”

“Everyone you named was already on the blacklist.”

“Between betraying your friends and betraying your country, you chose your country.”

“You said to yourself that if you stayed in the Party, the fountains of your inspiration would dry up.”

“The Party told you how to write, how to think, and you rebelled.”

“First you rebelled against the Party.”

“It horrified you to think that Stalinism could govern in the U.S.A. as it governed in the U.S.S.R.”

“You went to speak before the committee, and you trembled with fear. Here in America, now, was the very thing you feared. Stalinism was interrogating you, but here it was called McCarthyism.”

“You gave not one name.”

“You faced up to McCarthy.”

“Why did you do it when you knew they already knew? To inform on the informers, Harry, to cast infamy on the infamous, Harry.”

“To go back to work, Harry. Until you realized that there was no difference between squealing and not squealing. The studios didn’t give work to reds, but they also didn’t give work to people who admitted being reds and informed on their comrades.”

“It didn’t work, Harry.”

“You knew that anti-Communism had become the refuge of the scum of America.”

“You didn’t name the living. But you also didn’t name the dead.”

“You didn’t name those who’d never been named. You also didn’t name only those who’d already been named.”

“You didn’t even name those who named you, Harry.”

“The Party demanded obedience of you. You said that even though you detested the Party, you weren’t going to submit to the committee. The Party in its best moment was always better than the committee at any moment.”

“My worst moment was not being able to tell my wife what was going on. Suspicion ruined our marriage.”

“My worst moment was living in hiding, in a house where we never turned on the lights so we wouldn’t be summoned by the agents of the committee.”

“My worst moment was knowing that my children were ostracized in school.”

“My worst moment was not telling my children what was happening, even though they already knew it all.”

“My worst moment was having to decide between my socialist ideal and Soviet reality.”

“My worst moment was having to choose between the literary quality of my writing and the dogmatic demands of the Party.”

“My worst moment was choosing between writing well and writing commercially, as the studio wanted.”

“My worst moment was looking into McCarthy’s face and knowing that American democracy was lost.”

“My worst moment was when Congressman John Rankin said to me, Your name isn’t Melvin Ross. Your real name is Emmanuel Rosenberg, and that proves that you’re a fake, a liar, a traitor, a shameful Jew.”

“My worst moment was running into the person who informed on me and seeing him cover his face with his hands in pure shame.”

“My worst moment was when my informer came crying to me to ask forgiveness.”

“My worst moment was being mentioned by those disgusting society columnists, Sokolsky, Winchell, and Hedda Hopper. Their mentioning me was worse than McCarthy. Their ink smelled of shit.”

“My worst moment came when I had to disguise my voice on the telephone to speak to my family and friends without getting them into trouble.”

“They said to my daughter, Your father is a traitor. Don’t have anything to do with him.”

“They said to friends of my son, Do you know who his father is?”

“They said to my neighbors, Stop talking to that family of reds.”

“What did you tell them, Harry Jaffe?”

“Harry Jaffe, rest in peace.”

They all went back to Cuernavaca. Laura Díaz — in consternation, agitated, perplexed — went to get her belongings from the little house in Tepoztlán. She also gathered up her own pain, and Harry’s. She gathered them up and gathered herself up. Alone with Harry’s spirit, she wondered if the pain she was feeling was appropriate, her intelligence told her it wasn’t, that one can only feel one’s own pain, that pain is not transferable. Even though I saw your pain, Harry, I couldn’t feel it as you felt it. Your pain had meaning only through mine. It’s my pain, Laura Díaz’s pain, that’s the only pain I feel. But I can speak in the name of your pain, that I can do. The imagined pain of a man named Harry Jaffe who died of emphysema, drowned in himself, mutilated by air, with fallen wings.

Aside from the three possible ways of responding to the committee — Fredric Bell came to tell her one afternoon, the same day she returned to Mexico City — there was the fourth. It was called Executive Testimony. Witnesses who made public denunciations went through a private rehearsal, and in that case the public event was merely a matter of protocol. What the committee wanted was names. Its thirst for names was insatiable, sed non satiata. Generally, the witness was summoned to a hotel room and there he or she informed in secret. So the committee already had the names, but that wasn’t enough. The witness had to repeat them in public for the glory of the committee but also in order to defame the informer. There were confusions. The committee would have the informer believe the secret confession was enough. The atmosphere of fear and persecution was such that the witness would delude himself and seize that life preserver, thinking, I’ll be the exception, they’ll keep my testimony secret. And sometimes there were exceptions, Laura. It’s inexplicable why certain persons who talked in executive session were immediately summoned to public sessions and others weren’t.

“But Harry was brave facing the Senate committee. He told McCarthy, You’re the real Communist, Senator.”

“Yes, he was brave facing the committee.”

“But he wasn’t brave in executive testimony? Did he inform first and recant later? Did he inform on friends first and then denounce the committee in public?”

“Laura, the victims of informers do not inform. All I can tell you is that there are men of good faith who thought, If I mention someone no one suspects, a person against whom they can’t prove anything, I’ll win the committee’s favor and save my own skin. And I won’t be hurting my friends.”

Bell stood up and shook hands with Laura Díaz.

“My friend, if you can take flowers to the graves of Mady Christians and John Garfield, please do it.”

The last thing Laura Díaz said to Harry Jaffe was: I’d rather touch your dead hand than the hand of any man living.

She doesn’t know if Harry heard her. She didn’t even know if Harry was dead or alive.

2

She’d always been tempted to say to him, I don’t know who your victims were, let me be one of them. She always knew he would have answered, I don’t want life preservers. But I’m your bitch.

Harry said that if there was blame, then he would take it, completely.

“Do I want to save myself?” he would ask with a distant air. “Do I want to save myself with you? We’ll have to find that out together.”

She admitted it was very hard to live reading his mind, without his ever telling her exactly what had happened. But she quickly repented of her own frankness. She’d understood for years now that Harry Jaffe’s truth would always be a fully endorsed check, undated and with no figure written on it. She loved an oblique man, chained to a double perception, the view of Harry held by the exile group and the view of the group held by Harry.

Laura Díaz went on wondering about the reason for the distance the exiles had kept from Harry, and why, at the same time, they had accepted him as part of the group. Laura wished he would tell her the truth, refusing to accept third-party versions, but he told her without smiling that if it was true that defeat is an orphan and victory has a hundred fathers, it was also the case that lies have many children but truth lacks progeny. Truth is solitary and celibate, which is why people prefer lies. Lies put us in touch with one another, make us happy, make us participants and accomplices. Truth isolates us and transforms us into islands surrounded by a sea of suspicion and envy. That’s why we play so many lying games. Then we won’t have to suffer the solitude of truth.

“Well, then, Harry, what do we know, you and I, about one another?”

“I respect you. You respect me. Together we’re enough.”

“But we’re not enough for the world.”

“That’s true.”

It was true that Harry was exiled in Mexico, like the Hollywood Ten and the others. Communists or not, it didn’t matter. There were some unique cases, like the old Jewish producer Theodore and his wife, Elsa, who hadn’t been accused of anything and who exiled themselves in solidarity; movies — they said — were made in collaboration, eyes wide open, and if someone was guilty of something or the victim of someone else, then all of them, without exception, had to be guilty.

“Fuenteovejuna, one for all and all for one.” Laura Díaz smiled, remembering Basilio Baltazar.

There were recalcitrant ones who were faithful to Stalin and the U.S.S.R. but disillusioned with Stalinism, who didn’t want to behave like Stalinists in their own land. “If we Communists were to take over in the United States, we too would slander, exile, and kill dissident writers,” said the man with the pompadour.

“Then we wouldn’t be real Communists. We’d be Russian Stalinists. They are products of a religious authoritarian culture that has nothing to do with Marx’s humanitarianism or Jefferson’s democracy,” answered his tall, nearsighted companion.

“Stalin has corrupted the Communist idea forever, don’t kid yourself.”

“I’m going to go on hoping for democratic socialism.”

Laura, who gave neither face nor name to these voices, blamed herself for not doing so. But she was right: similar arguments were repeated by different voices of different men and women who came and went, were there and then disappeared for good, leaving only their voices floating in the bougainvillea of the Bells’ Cuernavaca garden.

There were also ex-Communists who feared ending up like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in the electric chair for imagined crimes. Or for crimes committed by others. Or for crimes that were alleged in an escalation of suspicion. There were Americans on the left, sincere socialists or “liberals,” deeply concerned by the climate of persecution and betrayal that had been created by a legion of disgusting opportunists. There were friends and relatives of McCarthy’s victims who left the United States to express their solidarity.

What there wasn’t in Cuernavaca was a single informer.

Which of all these categories was the right one for the small, bald, thin, badly dressed man sick with emphysema, plagued by contradictions, whom she had come to love with a love so different from the love she had felt for other men, for Orlando, for Juan Francisco, and especially for Jorge Maura?

Contradictions: Harry was dying of emphysema hut didn’t stop smoking four packs of cigarettes a day because he said he needed them to write, it was a habit he couldn’t break. The problem was, he didn’t write anything but went on smoking. He was watching, with a kind of resigned passion, the great sunsets in the Valley of Morelos when the perfume of laurels overwhelmed his dying breaths.

He breathed with difficulty, and the valley air invaded his lungs and destroyed them: there was no room for oxygen in his blood. One day his own breath, the breath of a man named Harry Jaffe, escaped from his lungs as water pours from a broken water main, and it invaded his throat until it suffocated him with the very thing his body needed: air.

“If you listen carefully”—the ghost of a grin appeared on the sick man’s face—“you can hear the sound of my lungs, like the snap, crackle, and pop in that cereal. Right, I’m a bowl of Rice Krispies.” He laughed with difficulty. “But I should be Wheaties, breakfast of champions.”

Contradictions: Does he think they don’t know and they do know but don’t say so? Does he know they know and they think he doesn’t know that?

“How would you write about yourself, Harry?”

“I’d have to write history, words I detest.”

“History, or your history?”

“Personal histories have to be forgotten for real history to emerge.”

“But isn’t real history a totality of personal histories?”

“I can’t answer you. Ask me again some other day.”

She thought about the totality of her carnal loves, Orlando, Juan Francisco, Jorge, and Harry; about her family loves, her father Fernando and her Mutti Leticia, her Aunts María de la O, Virginia, and Hilda; her spiritual passions, the two Santiagos. She stopped, upset and cold at the same time. Her other son, Danton, did not appear on any of those personal altars.

Other times she would say to Harry, I don’t know who your victims were, or if there were victims, Harry, maybe you had no victims, but if you did, let me be one more.

He looked at her incredulously and forced her to see herself in the same way. Laura Díaz had never sacrificed herself for anyone. Laura Díaz was no one’s victim. Which is why she could he Harry’s victim, cleanly, gratuitously.

“Why don’t you write?”

“Maybe it would be better if you’d ask me what it means to write.”

“All right, what does it mean?”

“It means descending into yourself, as if you were a mine, so you can emerge again, Laura, emerge into pure air, with my hands full of myself.”

“What do you bring out of the mine — gold, silver, lead?”

“Memory? The mud of memory?”

“Our daily memory.”

“Give us this day our daily memory. It’s pure shit.”

He would have wanted to die in Spain.

“Why?”

“For symmetry. My life and history would have coincided.”

“I know lots of people who think as you do. History should have stopped in Spain when you were all young and all heroes.”

“Spain was salvation. I don’t want to he saved anymore. I told you that already.”

“Then you should get a grip on what followed Spain. Did the guilt continue then?”

“There were lots of innocents, there and here. I can’t save the martyrs. My friend Jim died at the Jarama. I would have died for him. He was innocent. No one was innocent after that.”

“Why, Harry?”

“Because I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t let anyone else be innocent again.”

“Don’t you want to save yourself?”

“Yes.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

But Harry was destroyed; he didn’t save himself, and wasn’t going to die again on the Jarama front. He was going to die of emphysema, not from a Falangist or Nazi bullet, a bullet with a political purpose, he was going to die of an implosion from the physical or moral bullet he carried within himself. Laura wanted to give a name to the destruction that in the last analysis linked her inexorably to a man who no longer had any other company — even to go on destroying himself, with a cigarette or with repentance — but Laura Díaz.

They had left Cuernavaca because the facts remained, and Harry said he hated things that remained. Why do they accept me at the same time they reject me? asked Laura in Harry’s voice. Because they don’t want to accord me the discriminatory treatment they themselves suffered? Because if I informed secretly they won’t accuse me publicly? Because if I acted in secret, they can’t treat me as an enemy, yet I can’t tell the truth.

“And live in peace?”

“I don’t know who your victims were, Harry. Let me be one.”

If he took refuge in Mexico was it because they went on persecuting him in the United States? Because he went on accusing — if that were the case — the witch-hunters? Because he informed on no one? Or — that’s it — because he did inform? But what kind of squealing did he do, which lets me live among my victims? Should he have denounced himself to the others as an informer? What would he gain by doing that? What? Penitence and credibility? He’d be penitent and then they’d believe in him, look at him, speak to him? Had they all made a mistake, he and they?

(Laura, the informer is impregnable; to attack the credibility of the informer is to undermine the very foundations of the system of informing.

(Did you inform?

(Suppose I did. But also suppose no one knows I did, people think I’m a hero. Isn’t that better for the cause?)

“I assure all of you. He could return, and no one would bother him.”

“No. Inquisitors always find new reasons to persecute.”

“Jews, converted Jews, Muslims, fags, impure races, lack of faith, heresy,” Basilio reminded her during one of his sporadic visits. “The inquisitor never lacks motives. And if one motive fails or grows old, Torquemada pulls a new, unexpected one out of his sleeve. It’s a story with no ending.”

In an embrace at night, making love with the lights out, Harry stifling his cough, Laura in a nightgown to hide a body she no longer liked, they could say things to each other, they could speak with caresses, he could tell her this is the last chance for love, and she could say to him what’s happening now has already been announced, and he, what already happened, what is happening, you and me is what already happened between you and me, Laura Díaz, Harry Jaffe, she had to suppose, she had to imagine. At breakfast, at the crepuscular cocktail hour, when only a diaphanous martini defended her from the night, and during the night itself, at the time of love, she could imagine answers to his questions.

“But you didn’t talk, did you?”

“No, but they treat me as if I did.”

“True. They insult you. They treat you as if you didn’t matter. Let’s go away from here, just the two of us.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if you do have a secret and they respect it, it’s because you don’t seem important to them.”

“You whore, you bitch, you think you can get me to talk with your traps.”

“Men tell whores their problems. Let me be your whore, Harry, talk.”

Harry laughed sarcastically. “Old bitch, old whore.”

She no longer had the capacity for being insulted. She herself had begged him, let me be your bitch.

“Okay, bitch, imagine I talked in secret testimony. But imagine I mentioned only innocent people — Mady, Julie. You follow my logic? I imagined that because they were innocent, the committee wouldn’t touch them. They did touch them. They killed them. I imagined they’d only go after Communists, and for that reason I didn’t name Communists. They swore they’d only go after reds. They didn’t keep their promise. They didn’t imagine the same way I did. That’s why I went from executive session to public session and attacked McCarthy.”

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

(You’re the Communist, Senator, you’re the red agent, Moscow pays you, Senator McCarthy, you’re the best propaganda for Communism, Senator.

(Point of order! Contempt! The witness is guilty of contempt of Congress.)

“Is that why I spent a year in jail? Is that why they have no choice but to respect me and accept me as one of their own? Is that why I’m a hero? But am I also an informer? Do they imagine I informed because I believed no one could prove the unprovable, that Mady Christians or John Garfield was a Communist? Do they think I didn’t understand the logic of the persecution, which was to turn the innocent into victims? Do they imagine I named only innocents because I myself was guilty of innocence? Was it easier to terrorize the innocent rather than the culpable? Could someone say, I was or am a Communist and take the consequences honorably? Is that the logic of terror? Yes, terror is like an invisible vise that crushes you the way emphysema is suffocating me. You can’t do anything, and you end up exhausted, dead, sick, or a suicide. Terror kills the innocent with fear. It’s the inquisitor’s most powerful weapon. Tell me I was an idiot, that I wasn’t able to foresee that.”

“Why didn’t the inquisitors denounce you, why didn’t they reveal that you’d talked in secret session?”

“Because if they revealed my double game, they would also reveal their own. They would have lost an ace from their deck. They kept their mouths shut about my betrayal, they ultimately made martyrs of the people I named, which was no problem for them, because they had their list of victims prepared beforehand. An informer only confirmed publicly what they wanted to hear. Many more witnesses denounced Mady Christians and John Garfield, publicly. That’s why they said nothing about my informing. They jailed me for rebelliousness, sent me to jail, and when I got out, I had to go into exile. Either way, they defeated me, made me impossible for myself.”

“Do your friends in Cuernavaca know all that?”

“I don’t know, Laura. But I suppose they do. They’re divided. For them it’s good to have me among them as a martyr, better than expelling me as an informer. But they don’t talk to me or look me in the eye.”

She begged him to leave Cuernavaca with her; both of them, alone, elsewhere, could give each other what two solitary beings can give each other, two losers, together we can be what we are what we aren’t. Let’s go before an immense void swallows us up, my love, let’s die in secret, with all our secrets, let’s go, my love.

“I swear I’ll keep my mouth shut forever.”