The Years with Laura Diaz

five-year-old lady whose hair, getting grayer and grayer, she arranged simply, in a bun at the nape of her neck, emphasizing her clear forehead and her angular features, her fine, large nose mounted on an easel, her lips as thin as those of a Gothic statue. And all saved by the intelligence and fire of her amber eyes glittering in their shadowy depths.

He also watched her doing the household chores, taking care of the kitchen, making the bed, washing the dishes, preparing the meals, taking long showers, sitting on the toilet, discontinuing the use of sanitary napkins, suffering hot flashes, cuddling up to sleep in a fetal position, while he, Harry, rested straight as a board, until one day they simply exchanged positions, and he slept like a fetus and she stretched out, rigid, like a governess and a child…

He told himself he thought what she thought when she looked at herself in the mirror, when she separated from their tender, nocturnal lovers’ embrace: it’s one thing to be a body, another to be beautiful… How warm and tender it was to embrace and love each other, but above all how healthful, the salvation of love meant forgetting one’s own body and fusing with the body of the other and letting the other absorb my body so as not to think about beauty, not to contemplate oneself apart from the other but blind, united, pure touch, pure pleasure, with no sanctions of ugliness or beauty, which no longer matter in the dark, in the intimate embrace, when each body fuses with the other and they cease contemplating each other outside each other, cease judging themselves outside the couple that couples until it makes one from two and loses all notions of ugliness or beauty, youth or age… Harry said this to himself thinking that Laura was saying it to him, I only contemplate internal beauty in you.

It was easy in his case: more and more emaciated, white as a fish belly, said Laura, he wasn’t even a distinguished bald man but a sparsely hairy man with abrupt little tufts that resisted dignified, complete baldness, hair like outcroppings of dry grass on the crown of his head, above his ears, on the back of his scruffy neck. It was more difficult in her case: Laura Diaz’s beauty was intelligible, Harry tried to tell her, it resembled classical beauty which was nothing more than the idea of beauty imposed since the time of the Greeks but which could have been another norm of beauty, that of an Aztec goddess, for example, Coatlicue instead of the Venus de Milo.

“Socrates was an ugly man, Laura. He prayed every night to see his own internal beauty. It was the gift of the gods. Thought, imagination. That was Socrates’ beauty.”

“Didn’t he want others to see it as well?”

“I think his way of speaking was that of a vain man. So vain that he preferred to drink the hemlock rather than admit he was wrong. He wasn’t. He held his ground.”

They always ended up talking about the same thing but they couldn’t get to the bottom of what “the same thing” was. Like the victims of McCarthyism. The opposite of McCarthy’s informers. And now Harry was looking at her looking at herself in the mirror, and he wondered if she saw the same thing he saw, an external body in the process of losing its beauty, or an internal body that was becoming more beautiful. Only making love, only in sexual union did the question cease to have meaning. The body disappeared in order to be only pleasure, and pleasure overwhelmed any possible beauty.

She, on the other hand, did not seem to judge him. She accepted him just as he was, and he felt tempted to be disagreeable, to ask her, Why don’t you color your hair, why don’t you do your hair more stylishly, why has she abandoned all coquetry; he’s looking at me as if I were his nurse or his nanny, he’d like me to turn into a siren, but my poor Odysseus is scuttled, immobile, dissolving in a sea of ashes, drowned by smoke, disappearing little by little in the mist of his four packs of Camels a day whenever Fredric Bell gives him a carton or his five packs of unfiltered Raleighs which taste like soap, he says, whenever he had to put up with the best the corner tobacco stand had to offer.

“The best is sometimes all there is. Here all there is is almost always the worst.”

They went to the Saturday market, and he decided to buy a tree of life. She had no reason to oppose the purchase, but she did. I don’t know why I objected, she thought later on, when they’d stopped speaking to each other for an entire week, in reality those candelabras painted a thousand different colors aren’t ugly and don’t offend anyone even if they aren’t the marvels of folkloric audacity and sensibility he says they are, I don’t know why I told him they’re vulgar kitschy things that only foreigners buy, why don’t you buy some puppets with pink socks or a multicolor mat, or, why not?, a serape for you and a shawl for me? We’ll sit down in the afternoon protected from the sudden cold that rolls down the mountain, wrapped in Mexican folklore, do you want to lower me to that? Isn’t it enough you watch me so insistently while I fix myself up in front of the mirror, letting me think what he thinks, she’s getting old, doesn’t take care of herself, is going on fifty-six, no longer needs Kotex? On top of that, you want to fill up the house with tourist crap, trees of life, mats, market marionettes? Why don’t you just buy a machete, Harry, the ones with cute inscriptions on the handle, like “I’m like a green chile, hot but tasty,” so the next time you try to cut off your fingers and cut out your tongue you succeed, succeed in feeling sorry for yourself, for what you were and for what you weren’t, for what you are and for what you could have been.

Harry was too weak to slap her. It was she who felt compassion for him when he raised his hand and she smashed the tree of life on the brick floor and the next day swept up the scattered pieces and threw them into the garbage. Only a week later, she returned alone from the market and put the new tree of life on the shelf opposite the table and chairs where they ate.

Then she tried to make up for her inexplicable hatred for the multicolored structure of angels, fruits, leaves, and tree by deeply inhaling the scent of the plants in the garden, the shine of the rain on the leaves of the banana tree, and, beyond, in her memory, the trees that shaded the coffee bushes, the symmetrical lemon and orange orchards, the fig trees, the red lily, the round crown of the mango tree, the trueno with its tiny yellow flowers that could withstand both hurricane and drought-all the flora of Catemaco. And, at the end of the forest, the ceiba. Covered with spikes. The pointy spines the ceiba produces to protect itself. A trunk covered with swords defending itself so no one gets too close. The ceiba at the end of the road. The ceiba covered with fingers cut off in a single machete stroke by a bandit on the Veracruz, highway.

At dusk, they always sat side by side in the garden. They would talk about everyday things, the price of food in the market, what they’d eat the next day, how long it took for American magazines to reach Tepoztlan (if they ever got there), how kind it was of the Cuernavaca group to send them articles, always articles, never whole newspapers or magazines, what a blessing shortwave radio was, should they go to Cuernavaca to the Ocampo Cinema to see such and such a cowboy movie or the Mexican melodramas that made Laura laugh and Harry cry-but they never visited the Bells’ house, Aristotle’s Academy as Harry called it, he was bored by the eternal discussion, always the same discussion, a three-act tragicomedy.

“The first act is reason. The conviction that brought us to Communism, to sympathize with the left, the cause of the workers, faith in Marx’s arguments and in the Soviet Union as the first workers’ revolutionary state. With that faith, we answered the reality of the Depression, unemployment, the ruin of American capitalism.”

There were fireflies in the garden, but not as many as the intermittent lights given off by the cigarettes Harry chain-smoked, lighting the next with the butt of the last.

“The second act is heroism. First the fight against the economic depression in America, then the war against fascism.”

A brutal fit of coughing interrupted him, a cough so deep and strong that it seemed alien to his body, which was growing thinner and paler by the day. That body could not contain such a deep hurricane in I Harry’s chest.

“The third act is the victimization of men and women of good faith, Communists or simply humanitarians. McCarthy is the same human type as Beria, Stalin’s policeman, or Himmler, Hitler’s policeman. He’s driven by political ambition, because the easy way to get ahead is by joining the anti-Communist chorus that materialized when the hot war ended and the Cold War began. A cold calculation that one could gain power on the basis of ruined reputations. Squealing, anguish, death… and the epilogue…” Harry spread his hands, showing his open palms, his yellow fingers, then shrugged his shoulders and coughed lightly.

It was she who said to him, said to herself, without knowing in what order or how it would be best to communicate it to Harry: the epilogue has to he reflection, the effort of intelligence to understand what happened, why it happened.

“Why do we in America behave the same way they behave in Russia? Why did we become the same thing we said we were fighting? Why are there Berias and McCarthys, all those modern Torquemadas?”

Laura listened, she wanted to tell Harry that the three acts and epilogue in political dramas never appear that way, well ordered and Aristotelian, as Harry would say, mocking the “Academy” in Cuernavaca. They come tangled