The Years with Laura Diaz

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

“You haven’t seen Jim, have you?”

“Yes, he said goodbye at dawn.”

“He had orders. A mission.”

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

“He told me he knew.”

“What did he tell you?”

“I know you’re all waiting for me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks.”

“That’s it?”

“What more do you want?”

“Betrayal is harder to stand, Laura.”

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

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

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

“Well, then?”

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

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

I’m not a hero.

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

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

They had no answers, just questions. What did you do, Juan Fancisco? Were you a hero who tired of being one? Was your heroism a lie? Why have you never told me of your past? Did you want to start over from zero with me? Did you think I’d be offended that you praised yourself? Did you expect, as actually did happen, that someone else would do it for you? That others would fill my ears with your legend without your having to emphasize it or correct it or deny it? Was it enough for you that I heard what others said about you, that was my proof, to believe what others said, and believe in you with something more than knowledge, with pure, blind love? Because that’s how you treated me at first, like a faithful and silent little wife, knitting in the living room next door while you planned the