especially hunger, because she refused to eat more than the rations given her Jewish brothers and sisters in the Nazi camps. But she did it as a Christian, in the name of Jesus.”
Jorge Maura stopped for a moment before the black and furrowed earth within sight of Timanfaya. The mountain was a blazing red, like a gospel of fire.
5.
I pardoned all the crimes of history because they were venial sins next to this crime: doing the impossible evil. That’s what the Nazis did. They showed that the unimaginable evil was not only imaginable but possible. With them around, all the centuries of crimes of political power, of churches, armies, and princes fled my memory. What they had done could be imagined. What the Nazis did could not. Until then I thought evil existed but wouldn’t let itself be seen and tried to hide, or presented itself as a necessary means for attaining a good end. You remember that was how Domingo Vidal thought of Stalin’s crimes, as the means to a good end, and besides, they were based on a theory of collective good, Marxism. And Basilio Baltazar sought only the freedom of human beings by any means, by abolishing power, bosses, hierarchies.
Nazism, however, was evil proclaimed out loud, announcing proudly, “I am Evil. I am perfect Evil. I am visible Evil. I am Evil and proud of it. I justify nothing but extermination in the name of Evil. The death of Evil by the hand of Evil. Death as violence and only violence and nothing more than violence, without any redemption and without the weakness of a justification.”
I want to see that woman, I said to the commandant of Buchenwald.
No, you’re mistaken, the woman you named is not here, never has been.
Raquel Mendes-Aleman. That’s her name. I just saw her on the other side of the barbed wire.
No, that woman doesn’t exist.
You have killed her already?
Be careful. Don’t go too far.
She let herself be seen by me and for that you killed her? Because she saw me and recognized me?
No. She doesn’t exist. There’s no record of her. Don’t complicate things. After all, you’re here only because of a gracious concession by the Reich. So you can see how well treated our prisoners are. It isn’t the Hotel Adlon, to be sure, but if you’d come on a Sunday, you’d have seen the prisoners’ orchestra. They played the overture to
I demand to see the registry of prisoners.
The registry?
Don’t play dumb. You people are very orderly. I want to see the registry.
A page in the M’s had been hastily torn out, Laura. They’re so precise, so well organized, they’d allowed the torn binding to show where the page was missing, with the edges rough and jagged like the cliffs on Lanzarote’s mountains.
I never learned anything more about Raquel Mendes-Aleman.
When the war was over, I went back to Buchenwald, but the corpses in the common graves were no longer what they had been, and the cremated bodies became powder for the wigs of Goethe and Schiller, shaking hands in Weirmar, Athens of the North, where Cranach and Bach and Franz Lizst worked. None of those men would ever have invented the motto the Nazis placed over the entrance to the concentration camp. Not the well-known
No, she looked at me with her eyes deep as a night of omens, why should I be the exception, the privileged individual?
Her words sufficed, for me, to sum up my whole experience in this half century, which was going to be the paradise of progress and instead was the hell of degradation. Not only the age of fascist and Stalinist horror but of the horror that those who fought against evil could not save themselves from, no one was exempted, Laura! not the English who hid rice from the Bengalis so they wouldn’t have the will to revolt and join Japan during the war, not the Islamic merchants who collaborated with them, not the English who broke the legs of rebels who wanted national independence and refused medical care, not the French who collaborated in Nazi genocide or who cried out against the German occupation but considered the French occupation of Algeria, of Indochina, of Senegal a divine right, not the Americans who kept all the Caribbean and Central American dictators in power with their jails overflowing and their beggars in the streets as long as they supported the United States. Who was saved? Those who lynched blacks, or the blacks who were executed, jailed, forbidden to drink or urinate next to a white in Mississippi, land of Faulkner?
“Starting with us, evil ceased to be a possibility and became an obligation.”
“I don’t want to be pitied, Jorge. I’d rather be persecuted.”
Those were the last words of Raquel that I heard. I don’t know if I suffer because I didn’t save her or because of her suffering. But the way she looked at her executioner in the camp, more than the way she looked at me, told me that right until the last minute Raquel affirmed her humanity and left me a question I’d always live with: what is the virtue of your virtue, my love, the love of my love, the justice of my justice, the compassion of my compassion?
“I want to share your suffering, the way you share the suffering of your people. That is the love of my love.”
6.
Laura left Jorge on the island. She boarded the little ship knowing she would never return. Jorge Maura would never again be a clearly delineated figure for her, only a haze rising from a past that was always present, whose identification would be final proof that he was there even if he no longer existed.
Go on, she said, be a saint, be a hermit, climb up and sit alone on top of your column in the desert, be a comfortable martyr without martyrdom.
He said she was very hard on him.
She answered, because I love you. “Why are you hiding on an island? It would have been better if you’d stayed in Mexico. There’s no hiding place better than Mexico City.”
“I don’t have the strength anymore. Forgive me.”
“Well, you’re a Spaniard. You can be sure that death will be late in reaching you.”
Was the meeting so painful for her?
“No, it’s that I’ve learned to fear those who deform me with their love, not those who hate me. When you went to Cuba, I asked myself a thousand times, can I live without him, can I live without his support? I badly needed your support to create a world of my own that I wouldn’t have to sacrifice to anyone I loved. You gave it to me, you know, you supported me so that I could return to my home and tell the truth to my family, whatever happened. Without your love supporting me, I never would have dared. Without your memory, I would have been just one more adulteress. With you, no one dared cast the first stone against me. I feel free because you are with me.”
“Laura, the worst is over. Calm down. Understand that I stay here alone of my own free will.”
“Alone? That word I don’t understand. How are you going to be religious without the world, how are you going to reach God without leaving yourself? You see how you live halfway between the monastery and the world. Do you think the cloistered monks who forbid the presence of women have already found God, you think they can find Him without the world? How pretentious you are, pretentious bastard! Are you going to purge the sins of the twentieth century hiding away on this stone island? You are the very pride you detest. You are your own Lucifer. How are you going to have your pride pardoned, Jorge, you bastard?”
“By imagining that God says to me: I hate in you the same thing you’ve hated in others.”
