Jorge kissed her again, as if he’d divined her completely, mind and body. She could not tear herself away from him, from the flesh, from the body coupled to her own, she wanted to measure and retain her orgasm, she was proclaiming as hers the looks she shared during the orgasm, she wanted all the couples in the world to have as much pleasure as she and Maura had in those moments, it was her most universal, most fervent desire. No man, ever, instead of closing his eyes or turning aside his face, had ever looked into her eyes during his orgasm, wagering that by the mere act of having the two of them see each other’s faces they would come at the same time. And that’s how it happened each time: with their impassioned but conscious looks, they named each other man and woman, woman and man, who make love face to face, the only animals who have sex face to face, seeing each other, look at my open eyes, nothing excites me more than seeing you seeing me, the orgasm became part of the gaze, the gaze into the soul of the orgasm, any other position, any other answer remained a temptation, temptation subdued became the promise of the true, the best, and the next excitement of the lovers.
To face each other and open their eyes when they both came together.
“Let’s desire this for all the lovers of the world, Jorge.”
“For everyone, Laura my love.”
Now he was pacing around the disorder of the hotel room like a cat. She had never seen so much paper tossed around, so many portfolios opened, so much disorder in a man so beautiful and well ordered in everything else. It was as if Jorge Maura did not like the paperwork, as if he were carrying in his briefcases something he could toss aside, something disagreeable, possibly poisonous. He didn’t close up his portfolios, as if he wanted to air them or as if he were hoping that the papers would fly off or an indiscreet chambermaid would read them.
“She wouldn’t understand any of it,” he said with a bitter smile.
“What?”
“Nothing. I hope things work out for the best.”
Laura went back to being the way she was before, but as she never was with him: languid, timid, careless, doting, strong. She went back to that because she knew what would defeat the pulse of desire, and desire could destroy pleasure itself, could become demanding, thoughtless about the woman’s limits and the man’s, making couples become too conscious of their happiness. That is why she was going to introduce the theme of daily life, to calm the destructive tempest which had, since the first night, fatally accompanied pleasure, secretly frightening them. But she did not have to; he anticipated her. Did he really anticipate her, or was it foreseeable that one of the two would descend from passion to action?
Jorge Maura was in Mexico as a representative of the Spanish Republic, which by March 1938 had been reduced to the enclaves of Madrid and Barcelona and, in the south, the Mediterranean territory of Valencia. The Mexican government, under Lazaro Cardenas, had given diplomatic aid to the Republicans, but this ethical action could not equal the crushing material assistance given to the rebel Francisco Franco by the Nazi and fascist regimes. Nor could it make up for the cowardly abandonment of the Republic by the European democracies: England and France. Berlin and Rome intervened with all their strength in favor of Franco, while Paris and London turned their backs on the “child Republic,” as Maria Zambrano called it. The tiny flower of Spanish democracy was trampled by everyone, its friends, its enemies, and, at times, its supporters.
Laura Diaz told Jorge she wanted to be everything with him, share everything, know everything, that she was in love with him, madly in love.
Jorge Maura’s expression did not change when he heard her declaration, and Laura did not understand if it was part of his seriousness to listen to her without a word or if the hidalgo was only pausing before beginning his story. Perhaps a bit of both. He wanted her to listen before making any decisions.
“I swear I’ll die if I don’t know everything about you,” she ventured in turn.
Thinking about Spain locked him within himself. He said that Spain for the Spaniards is like Mexico for Mexicans, a painful obsession. Not a hymn of optimism, as their country is for Americans, not a phlegmatic joke as it is for the English, not a sentimental madness (Russians), not a reasonable irony (French), not an aggressive command, as Germans see theirs, but a conflict of halves, of opposed parts, of tugs at the soul-Spain and Mexico, countries of light and shadow.
He began by telling stories, with no commentary, while the two of them strolled among the hedges and pines of the Parque de la Lama. The first thing he told her was how shocked he was at the resemblance between Mexico and Castile. Why had the Spaniards chosen a plateau so like Castile as the site of their first and principal viceroyalty in the New World?
He was looking at the dry land, the gray brown mountains, the snowy peaks, the cold transparent air, the desolation of the roads, the burros and bare feet, the women dressed in black and covered with shawls, the dignity of the beggars, the beauty of the children, the floral compensation and culinary abundance of two countries dying of hunger. He visited the oases, like this one, of refreshing vegetation, and he felt that he hadn’t changed places, or that he was ubiquitous, and not only physically but. historically because being born Spanish or Mexican transforms experience into destiny.
He loved her and wanted her to know everything about him. Everything about the war and how he lived it. He was a soldier. He obeyed orders. But he rebelled first, the better to obey later on. Because of his social origin, the government first thought to use him on diplomatic missions. He was a descendant of the first reform minister at the turn of the century, Antonio Maura y Montaner; he’d been a disciple of Ortega y Gasset; he’d graduated from the University of Freiburg in Germany: he wanted first to live the war in order to know the truth and then to defend it and negotiate for it if necessary, but first to know it. The truth of experience first. The truth of conclusions later. Experience and conclusion, he told Laura, those are perhaps the complete truth, until the conclusion itself is negated by other experiences.
“I don’t know. I have an immense faith and an immense doubt at the same time. I think certitude is the goal of thought. And I always fear that any system we help to build will end up destroying us. It isn’t easy.”
He fought in the battles at the Jarama River during the winter of 1937. What did he recall of those days? Physical sensations above all. The mist that came out of your mouth. The frozen wind that emptied your eyes. Where are we? That’s the most disconcerting thing in war. You don’t know exactly where you are. A soldier doesn’t carry a map in his head. I didn’t know where I was. We were ordered to execute flanking movements, advances into nothingness, then to scatter so the bombs wouldn’t kill us. That was the biggest confusion in battle. Cold and hunger were constant. The people were always different. It was hard to fix a face or a phrase beyond the day you saw or heard it. Which is why I decided to concentrate on a single person, so the war would have a face, but above all to have company. In order not to be alone in the war. So alone.
I remember I saw a pretty girl one day wearing blue overalls. She had the face of a nun, but she shouted the worst obscenities I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ll always remember her because I never saw her again. Her hair was so black it seemed as blue as midnight. Her thick eyebrows met in a frown of rage. She had a bandage on her nose, and not even that would hide her profile-like that of a wild eagle. But her constant litany of insults camouflaged the prayer she recited silently. Of that I was so convinced that I communicated it to her with my eyes. She understood, got upset, spouted a couple of curses at me, and I answered “Amen.” She was as white as a nun who’s never seen the sun and had whiskers like the women of Galicia. She was pretty for all that, because of all that. Her language was a challenge, not only to the fascists but to death itself. Franco and death were a couple, two big sons of bitches. Sometimes the image of the beautiful woman with the pale blue overalls and the night-blue hair threatens to fade. He laughed. I needed someone as different from her as you are to remember her today. No, both of you were or are tall women.
But she was on her way to the Guadarramas, and I was entrenched at the Jarama. I remember the boys along the highways holding up their fists, serious and squinting into the sun, all with the face of memory. (Do you know that the orphans sent from Guernica to French and English homes scream and cry every time they hear a plane fly over?) Afterward I only remember sad, abandoned places that people passed through very quickly.
Next to a swift, yellow river.
Inside a moist cave full of stalagmites and labyrinths.
Hugging cold and hunger.
The Luftwaffe bombings began.
We knew the Germans didn’t bomb military objectives.
They wanted to keep them intact for Franco.
The Stukas attacked cities and civilians, which caused more destruction and discouragement than blowing up a bridge.
