“You haven’t? Well, I’ve seen it.”
3.
Do you know why I resist believing in God? Because I fear seeing Him one day. I fear that if I could see God, I’d be struck blind. I can approach God only to the degree that He distances Himself from me. God needs to be invisible so I can labor over a plausible faith, but at the same time I fear God’s visibility because at that precise moment I’d no longer have faith but proof. Here, read St. John of the Cross’s
I saw the beloved fleetingly, for less than ten seconds, when our Swedish Red Cross truck passed by the barbed wire at Buchenwald, and in that instant I saw Raquel lost amid a multitude of prisoners.
It was very difficult to identify anyone in that mass of emaciated, hungry beings in their striped uniforms with the Star of David pinned to their breasts, huddled under blankets ripped by the February cold, clinging one to another. Except her.
If that was what they allowed us to see, what was there behind the visible, what were they hiding from us, didn’t they realize that in showing us this they forced us to imagine the real face, the hidden face? But in offering us this terrible face, weren’t they saying that the worst didn’t exist-no longer existed-that it was the face of death?
I saw Raquel.
A man in uniform was holding her up, a Nazi guard was supporting her, I don’t know if it was because he was ordered to show the compassion of someone helping a person in need; or so that Raquel wouldn’t collapse like a pile of rags; or because between the two, Raquel and the guard, there was a relationship of reciprocal yielding, of tiny favors that to her must have seemed enormous-some extra food, a night in the enemy’s bed, perhaps a simple, human portion of pity; or perhaps because it was just theater, a pantomime of humanity to impress the visitors; for perhaps a new, unforeseeable love between victim and executioner, one as hurt as the other, and both able to withstand the hurt only in the other’s unexpected company, the executioner identified by the pain of his obedience and the victim by the pain of hers-two obedient beings, each one at the orders of someone stronger, Hitler had said it, Raquel repeated it to me, there are only two peoples confronting each other: Germans and Jews.
Perhaps she was saying to me: Do you see why I didn’t leave the ship with you in Havana? I wanted to have happen what is now happening to me. I didn’t want to avoid my destiny.
Then Raquel freed herself from the grasp of the Nazi guard and clasped the barbed wire with her bare hands; between her executioner or lover or protector or shadow and me, Jorge Maura, her university lover, with whom she had one day gone to the Freiburg cathedral and kneeled down side by side with no fear of being ridiculous and prayed out loud:
those words we said then with profound intellectual emotion-they came back now, Laura, as a crushing reality, an intolerable fact, not because they came true but precisely because they weren’t possible, the horror of the age had eliminated them yet in a mysterious and marvelous way made them possible, they were the final truth of my swift and terrible encounter with the woman I loved and who loved me…
Raquel stabbed her hands with the wire and then pulled them up from the steel barbs and showed them to me, bleeding like… I don’t know like what, because I don’t know and don’t want to know how to compare Raquel Mendes-Aleman’s beautiful hands with anything, those hands made to touch my body the way she touched the pages of a book or played a Schubert impromptu or touched my arm to warm herself when we walked together during the winter along the Freiburg streets: now her hands were bleeding like Christ’s wounds, and that was what she was showing me, don’t look at my face, look at my hands, don’t feel sorrow for my body, feel compassion for my hands, George, have pity, friend… Thanks for my destiny. Thanks for Havana.
The Nazi commandant who was with us, hiding with a smile the alarm and annoyance Raquel’s act had made him feel, said, fatuously: “See? That story about Buchenwald’s fences being electrified is false.”
“Take care of her hands. Look how they’re bleeding, Herr Kommandant.”
“She touched the barbed wire because she wanted to.”
“Because she’s free?”
“That’s right. That’s right. You said the right thing.”
4.
“I’m weak. You’re all I have left. That’s why I came to Lanzarote.”
“I’m weak.”
They made their way back to the monastery at nightfall. On this night, above all others, Jorge wanted to return to the religious community and confess his carnal weakness. Laura, in her reencounter with Jorge’s body, felt the man’s newness, as if their bodies had never been joined before, as if this time Laura had become flesh as an exception, only to look like herself, and he only to show himself naked to her.
“What are you thinking about?”
“About God advising us to do what He will not allow. To imitate Christ!”
“It isn’t that He doesn’t allow it. It’s that He makes it difficult.”
“I imagine God saying to me all the time, ‘I hate in you the same thing that you’ve hated in others.’”
“Which is?”
He was living here, half protected, indecisive, not knowing if he wanted complete, certain physical and spiritual salvation or risk that would give value to the security. This is why he walked every morning from the monastery to the cabin and back every afternoon, from exposure to refuge, glaring, without so much as blinking, at the Guardia Civil, who had gotten used to him, greeted him, he worked with the brothers, a servant, a minor figure of no importance.
He went from one stone house to the other in the landscape of stone. He imagined a sky of stone and a stone sea, in Lanzarote.
“All day long you’ve been asking me if I believe in God or not, if I’ve recovered the faith of my Catholic culture, my childhood faith-”
“And you haven’t answered me.”
“Why did I become Republican and anticlerical? Because of the hypocrisy and crimes of the Catholic Church, its support for the rich and powerful, its alliance with the pharisees and against Jesus, its disdain for the humble and defenseless, even though it preached exactly the opposite. Did you see the books I have in the cabin?”
“St. John of the Cross and that copy of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz we bought together on Tacuba Street… they’re like brother and sister, because he’s a saint and she isn’t. She was humiliated, silenced, her books and poems were taken away, even her paper, ink, and pen.”
“You should take a look at a volume that’s just come out in France. One of the brothers gave it to me.
