The Years with Laura Diaz

Mama?”

After opening the curtains so the light would come in, Laura turned around to look at Santiago’s bed. Her son was no longer there. All that remained was a silent lament floating in the air.

17.

Lanzarote: 1949

1.

YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE. COME HERE. This island doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage in the African desert. It’s a stone raft detached from Spain. It’s a Mexican volcano that forgot to erupt. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there. By steamer, you will approach a black fortress that leaps out of the Atlantic like a phantom far from Europe. Lanzarote is the stone ship anchored precariously off the sands of Africa, but the stone of the island is hotter than the desert sun.

Everything you see is false, it is our daily cataclysm, it happened last night, it hasn’t had time yet to make itself into history, and it will disappear at any moment, just as it appeared, in the twinkling of an eye. You look at the mountains of fire that dominate the landscape and remember that barely two centuries ago they didn’t exist. The highest and strongest peaks on the island were just born and they were born destroying, burying the humble vineyards in molten lava, and no sooner had the first eruption subsided a hundred years ago, than the volcano yawned again and with its breath burned all the plants and buried all the roofs.

You shouldn’t have come here. What brought you to me again? Nothing of this is real. How could a mountain range of sand and a lake of azure blue stronger than the blue of sea or sky fit within a crater under the sea? How I’d love to meet you under the waves, where you and I could again become like two ghosts of the ocean that was always separating us. Are we going to reunite now, you and I, on a tremulous island where fire is buried alive?

Look: all you have to do is plant a tree less than a meter down for its roots to burn. All you have to do is pour a pitcher of water into a hole, any hole, for it to boil. And if I could have taken refuge in the lava labyrinth that is the underground beehive of Lanzarote, I’d have done it and you’d never have found me. Why did you look for me? How did you find me? No one should know I’m here. You are here, but I don’t dare look at you. This is a lie; you’re here, and I don’t want you to look at me. I don’t want you to compare me to the man you saw for the first time in Mexico eleven years ago-though a millennium has lapsed between that meeting and this one, if it’s true that hell has a history and the devil keeps track of time: the devil too is part of eternity. Now is not ten years ago, when I said,

“Stay a little longer,” and you’ve probably forgotten our discussions with Basilio Baltazar and Domingo Vidal, and you’re going to laugh, Laura, because all our sense became nonsense, loss, death, inexplicable cruelty, assault on life. What’s left of us, Laura? Only my eyes from ten years ago, when they anchored in yours as yours did in mine, and you asked why I was different from the others, and I answered in silence, “Because I’m only looking at you.”

Does the truth you see now remain, do you see your old lover, a refugee on one of the Canary Islands, off the African coast, when the last time you saw him was in Mexico, in your arms, in a hotel hidden next to a park of pine and eucalyptus trees? Is this man the same as that one? Do you know what that man was seeking and what this one seeks? Is it the same, or are they two different things? Because this man is seeking, Laura-only to you would I dare say such a thing-this man who loved you is seeking something. Can you look right at me and tell me the truth: what do you see?

Separated for ten years, with the right to falsify our lives so as to explain our loves and justify what’s happened to our faces. I could lie to you as I lied to myself for years. I didn’t get there in time, that day we separated. The Prinz Eugen had already sailed for Germany when I reached Cuba. I could do nothing. The American government refused to grant asylum to the passengers, all of them Jews fleeing Germany. The Cuban government followed if not the instructions then the example of the United States. Perhaps the situation of the Jews under Hitler still hadn’t penetrated the conscience of the U.S. public. Right-wing politicians were preaching isolationism, were saying that facing up to Hitler was a dangerous illusion, a left wing trap, Hitler had restored order and prosperity to Germany, Hitler was a danger invented by perfidious Albion to draw the Yankees into another fatal European war, Roosevelt was a scoundrel capitalizing on the international crisis to make himself indispensable and win another election and then another. Let Europe commit suicide on her own. Saving Jews was not a popular idea in a country where Jews were not allowed in country clubs, expensive hotels, public swimming pools, as if they were bearers of the plague of Calvary. Roosevelt, was a pragmatic President. He had no support for increasing the number of immigrants approved by Congress. He gave in. Fuck you.

I could lie to you. I reached Cuba that week when I abandoned you and got permission to board the ship. I had a Spanish diplomatic passport and the captain was a decent man, a sailor of the old school annoyed by the presence on his ship of Gestapo agents. They raised their arms in the fascist salute when they heard I was from Spain. They took it for granted the war was won. I returned their salute. What do symbols matter to me? I wanted to save Raquel.

My attention was drawn to the extreme youthful beauty of one of the agents, a Siegfried who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, blond and forthright-there was no line on his face between his closely shaven jaw and his cheeks covered with blond down-while his partner, a small man perhaps sixty years old, without his black uniform, boots, and Nazi armband could have been a bank accountant or trolley conductor or marmalade salesman. He used a pince-nez, had a tiny mustache sprouting like two fly wings on either side of the division in his lips which according to Jewish tradition the sword of the God of Israel had opened with one stroke above the mouth of the newborn so they’d forget their immense racial, prenatal memory. The little man’s eyes were lost like two dead herrings in the bottom of the pot that was his shaven head. He wasn’t a policeman at all; he was an executioner.

They greeted me with raised arms, the little man shouted Long live Franco! I returned the salute.

I found her crouching on the prow, next to the mast where the red banner emblazoned with the swastika was flying. She wasn’t looking toward Morro Castle or the city. She was staring at the sea, returned to the sea, as if her gaze could reach all the way back to Freiburg, to our university and our youth.

I softly touched her shoulder and she had no need to see me, with her eyes closed she clasped my legs, pressing her face against my knees, and wailed with a penitent’s sob, almost a shout, no longer hers, echoing in the Havana sky like a chorus not of Raquel’s voices but as if she were the receptor of a hymn that flew from Europe to lodge in the voice of the woman I’d come to save.

For the price of my love for you for…

Our love our…

“Why won’t anyone help us?” she asked, sobbing. “Why won’t the Americans let us in, why won’t the Cubans give us asylum, why won’t the Pope answer the supplication of his people and mine, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani! why have you abandoned us, am I not one of the four hundred million faithful the Holy Father can mobilize to save me, just me, a Jewish convert to Catholicism?”

I told her as I caressed her hair that I’d come to save her. Her hair, tousled by the cold tempestuous wind of that February morning in Cuba. I saw Raquel’s windblown hair, the force of the wind, and nevertheless, the flag of the Reich on the prow was hanging, immobile, not waving, as if heavy with lead.

“You?”

Raquel raised her dark eyes, her black, unbroken eyebrows, her dark Sephardic skin, her lips half open in prayer and weeping-the similarity to fruit, her long, tremulous nose-and I could see her eyes again.

I told her I was there to take her off the ship, I’d come to marry her, it was the only way she could stay in the