The Years with Laura Diaz

future was glorious, but Harry Jaffe in Spain was small, nervous, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive-Maura had thought-because he didn’t know just how weak an uncritical political conviction really is.

“I want to save my soul,” Harry would say at the front.

“I want to know fear,” his inseparable friend Jim would say. Jim, the tall, gawky New Yorker, with Harry-Maura would smile-the classic twosome of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Mutt and Jeff, Basilio said now, adding his smile to that of his absent friend.

“So long to neckties,” said Jim and Harry in one voice when Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway went off to report on the war, arguing about which of the two would have the honor of writing the other’s obituary.

The little Jew in jacket and tie.

If the description of the Harry Jaffe of fifteen years earlier was accurate, then that decade and a half had been a century and a half for this man who could not hide his sadness, who perhaps wanted to hide it; but the sadness managed to show itself in his infinitely distant gaze, his tremulously sad mouth, his nervous chin and supernaturally inert hands, controlled with great effort to reveal no genuine enthusiasm or interest. He would sit on his hands. He would clench his fists. He would clasp them desperately under his jaw. Harry’s hands were witness, offended and humiliated, to the vicious cruelty of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy had paralyzed Harry Jaffe’s hands.

“We never win, it’s just not true that at any given moment we triumphed,” said Harry, in a voice as neutral as dust. “There was excitement, oh yes. Plenty of excitement. We Americans like to believe in what we’re doing, and we get excited doing it. How could a moment like the first night of The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s musical drama, not be one of pleasure, faith, excitement? With its daring, direct reference to events of the day-the automobile strike, riots, police brutality, workers shot in the back and killed? How could we not be excited-indignant! about our production causing a cutoff in the official subsidy for the workers’ theater? They confiscated the sets. The stagehands were fired. And then? We had no theater. So we had the brilliant idea of bringing the play to the scene of the action, to the steel factory. We’d put on a workers’ theater in the workers’ factory.”

How hard for me that look of defeat is turning out to be whenever he opens his eyes, that look of reproach whenever he closes them, thought Laura as she watched him intently, as she always did, the little needy man sitting on a leather armchair in the garden with its view of Cuernavaca, city of refuge, where Hernan Cortes had commanded a stone palace be built, protected by watchtowers and artillery, to escape the heights of the conquered Aztec city, which he destroyed and rebuilt as a Renaissance city laid out on a right-angled grid.

“What do you think Cortes would feel if he came back to his palace and found himself in Rivera’s murals painted as a merciless conquistador with reptilian eyes?” Harry asked Laura.

“Diego makes up for it by painting heroic white horses that shine like armor. He can’t help feeling a certain admiration for the epic. It’s true for all Mexicans,” said Laura, bringing her fingers close to Harry’s.

“I got a little scholarship after the war. Went to Italy. That’s how Ucello painted medieval battles. Where will you take me tomorrow so I can learn more about Cuernavaca?”

Together they went to the Borda gardens, where Maximilian of Austria came to take refuge with his pleasures in the hidden, moist, lecherous gardens, far from the imperial court at Chapultepec and the insomniac ambition of his wife, Carlota.

“Whom he wouldn’t touch because he didn’t want to give her syphilis,” they both said, laughing, at the same time, wiping the beer foam from their lips in Cuernavaca’s main square, Cuauhnahuac, the place by the trees where Laura Diaz listened to Harry Jaffe and tried to penetrate the mystery hidden in the depths of his story, lightened occasionally with irony.

“The culture of my youth was a radio culture, blind theater, which is how Orson Welles managed to scare everyone into thinking that a simple adaptation of a work by the other Wells, H. G., was really happening in New Jersey.”

Laura laughed a lot and asked Harry to listen to the latest chachacha on the tavern’s jukebox:

The Martians have landed, ha-ha-ha!

They came down dancing the chachacha!

“You know?”

So they took Blitzstein’s drama to the scene of the crime, the steel factory. Which is why the plant managers decided to give the workers a picnic that day, and the workers chose a day in the country over a session of political theater.

“You know? When they finally put on the play again, the director scattered the actors in the audience. The spotlights would focus on us, and we’d suddenly be revealed. The spot came on me, the light hit me in the face, blinding me, but then I had to speak: ‘Justice. We want justice.’ That was my only line, from the audience. Then the lights went down, and we went home to hear the invisible truth of radio. Hitler used the radio. So did Roosevelt and Churchill. How could I refuse to speak on the radio, when the very government of the United States, the American army, asked me: This is the Voice of America, we have to defeat fascism, Russia is our ally, we have to praise the Soviet Union? What was I going to do? Anti-Soviet propaganda? Just imagine, Laura, me doing anti-Communist propaganda in the middle of a war. They would have shot me as a traitor. But today, the fact that I did it condemns me as an anti-American subversive. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

He didn’t laugh when he said that. Later, at dinner, the group, about a dozen guests, listened carefully to the old producer Theodore tell the story of Jewish migration to Hollywood, the Jewish creation of Hollywood. But a younger screenwriter, who never took off his bow tie, rudely told him to shut up, every generation has its problems and suffers them in its way, he wasn’t going to feel nostalgia for the Depression, unemployment, lines of freezing men waiting for a cup of watery hot soup, there was no security, no hope, there was only Communism, the Communist Party, why not join the Party?, how could he ever renounce his Communism, when the Party gave him the only security, the only hope of his youth?

“To deny I was a Communist would be to deny I was young.”

“Too bad we denied ourselves,” said another guest, a man with distinguished features (he looked like the Arrow shirt man, Harry noted slyly).

“What do you mean?” asked Theodore.

“That we weren’t made for success.”

“Well, we were,” grumbled the old man and his wife in unison. “Elsa and I were. We certainly were.”

“We weren’t,” retorted the good-looking man, wearing his gray hair well, proud of it. “The Communists weren’t. Being successful was a sin, a kind of sin anyway. And sin demands retribution.”

“You did all right.” The old man laughed.

“That was the problem. The retribution. First there was commercial work, done halfheartedly. Scripts for whores and trained dogs. Then compensatory dissipation-whores in bed, whiskey not as well trained as Rin Tin Tin. Finally came panic, Theodore. The realization that we weren’t made for Communism. We were made for pleasure and dissipation. That was the punishment in the end, of course. Denounced and out of work for having been Communists, Theodore. McCarthy as our exterminating angel-it was inevitable. We deserved it, fuck the dirty weasel.”

“And what about the people who weren’t Communists, who were wrongly accused, smeared?”

Everyone turned to see who’d asked that. But the questions seemed to come from nowhere. They seemed to have been said by a ghost. It was the voice of absence. Only Laura, sitting opposite Harry, realized that the Spanish Civil War veteran had thought and perhaps said them, but no one else noticed, because the lady of the house, Ruth, had already changed the tone of the conversation as she served her endless bowl of pasta and sang under her breath:

You’re going to get me into trouble

If you keep looking at me like that.

Harry had said that radio was invisible theater, a call to imagination… and actual theater, what was that?

“Something that disappears with the applause.”