us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if you do have a secret and they respect it, it’s because you don’t seem important to them.”
“You whore, you bitch, you think you can get me to talk with your traps.”
“Men tell whores their problems. Let me be your whore, Harry, talk.”
Harry laughed sarcastically. “Old bitch, old whore.”
She no longer had the capacity for being insulted. She herself had begged him, let me be your bitch.
“Okay, bitch, imagine I talked in secret testimony. But imagine I mentioned only innocent people-Mady, Julie. You follow my logic? I imagined that because they were innocent, the committee wouldn’t touch them. They did touch them. They killed them. I imagined they’d only go after Communists, and for that reason I didn’t name Communists. They swore they’d only go after reds. They didn’t keep their promise. They didn’t imagine the same way I did. That’s why I went from executive session to public session and attacked McCarthy.”
(Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
(You’re the Communist, Senator, you’re the red agent, Moscow pays you, Senator McCarthy, you’re the best propaganda for Communism, Senator.
(Point of order! Contempt! The witness is guilty of contempt of Congress.)
“Is that why I spent a year in jail? Is that why they have no choice but to respect me and accept me as one of their own? Is that why I’m a hero? But am I also an informer? Do they imagine I informed because I believed no one could prove the unprovable, that Mady Christians or John Garfield was a Communist? Do they think I didn’t understand the logic of the persecution, which was to turn the innocent into victims? Do they imagine I named only innocents because I myself was guilty of innocence? Was it easier to terrorize the innocent rather than the culpable? Could someone say, I was or am a Communist and take the consequences honorably? Is that the logic of terror? Yes, terror is like an invisible vise that crushes you the way emphysema is suffocating me. You can’t do anything, and you end up exhausted, dead, sick, or a suicide. Terror kills the innocent with fear. It’s the inquisitor’s most powerful weapon. Tell me I was an idiot, that I wasn’t able to foresee that.”
“Why didn’t the inquisitors denounce you, why didn’t they reveal that you’d talked in secret session?”
“Because if they revealed my double game, they would also reveal their own. They would have lost an ace from their deck. They kept their mouths shut about my betrayal, they ultimately made martyrs of the people I named, which was no problem for them, because they had their list of victims prepared beforehand. An informer only confirmed publicly what they wanted to hear. Many more witnesses denounced Mady Christians and John Garfield, publicly. That’s why they said nothing about my informing. They jailed me for rebelliousness, sent me to jail, and when I got out, I had to go into exile. Either way, they defeated me, made me impossible for myself.”
“Do your friends in Cuernavaca know all that?”
“I don’t know, Laura. But I suppose they do. They’re divided. For them it’s good to have me among them as a martyr, better than expelling me as an informer. But they don’t talk to me or look me in the eye.”
She begged him to leave Cuernavaca with her; both of them, alone, elsewhere, could give each other what two solitary beings can give each other, two losers, together we can be what we are what we aren’t. Let’s go before an immense void swallows us up, my love, let’s die in secret, with all our secrets, let’s go, my love.
“I swear I’ll keep my mouth shut forever.”
21.
Colonia Roma: 1957
1.
WHEN AN EARTHQUAKE SHOOK Mexico City in July 1957, Laura Diaz was staring out at the night from the roof ter race of her old house on Avenida Sonora. Breaking her own rule, she was smoking a cigarette. In honor of Harry. He’d died three years before, but her devout love had left her full of unanswered questions, had burdened her with blocked mental horizons. Her heart was still alive, but she had no man and had lost the one she loved. Also, she’d just turned fifty-nine.
The memory filled her days and sometimes, as now, her nights. Ever since Harry’s death and her return to Mexico City, she was sleeping less than she once had. The fate of her American lover obsessed her. She did not want to classify Harry Jaffe as a failure, because she didn’t want to blame his failure either on McCarthyite persecution or on his own internal collapse. She didn’t want to admit that persecution or no persecution Harry had stopped writing because he had had nothing to say. He’d taken refuge in the witch-hunt.
Her doubts persisted. Did the persecution begin just when Harry’s abilities failed him, or had he already lost them? Then was the persecution a mere pretext to turn sterility into heroism? It wasn’t his fault. He wanted to die in Spain, at the Jarama with his buddy Jim, when ideas and life were identical for him, when nothing separated them, when, Laura, I didn’t suffer this damned alienation…
From the terrace, as she thought about her poor Harry, Laura Diaz could contemplate, on her left, the dark tide of the sleeping forest, its treetops undulating like the breathing in and out of an ancient sleeping monarch on his throne of trees and crowned by his stone castle.
To the right, far away, the gilded Angel of Independence added to its own painted gleam the glow of spotlights outlining its air-borne silhouette, golden damsel of the Porfirio Diaz era disguised as a Greek goddess but representing, like a celestial transvestite, the virile angel of a feminine saga, Independence… The he/she Angel held up a laurel branch in his/her right hand, stretched his/her wings, and began a flight-but not the one intended, a flight that instead was catastrophic, brutal, and abrupt, from the top of the airy column into the very air, then crashing into shattered pieces at the base of its own pedestal, a fall like Lucifer’s, the ruined he/she Angel vanquished by the shaking earth.
Laura Diaz saw the Angel fall and-who knows why?-thought that it wasn’t the Angel but Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who had posed mythically for the sculptor Enrique Alciati, never imagining that one day her beautiful effigy, her entire body, would fall to pieces at the foot of the slender commemorative column. She watched the treetops ebb and flow and she watched the Angel fall but, more than anything else, she felt her own house creaking, snapping apart like the Angel’s wings, breaking into pieces like a fried tortilla between the teeth of the monstrous city-where she’d toured with Orlando Ximenez one night to see the face of its true misery, the invisible misery, the most horrible of all, the misery that didn’t dare show itself because it could beg for nothing, and because no one would give it anything anyway.
She waited for the earthquake to wear itself out.
The best thing to do was to stay where she was. There was no other way to fight that underground force, one had to resign oneself to it and then overcome it with its mirror opposite: immobility.
She’d only once before experienced a serious tremor, in 1943, when the city quavered because of an extraordinary event: as a peasant in Michoacan was plowing his field, smoke began to pour out of a hole, and out of the hole emerged, in just a few hours, as if the earth had really borne it, a baby volcano, Paricutin, vomiting stone, lava, sparks. Every night its glow was visible from farther and farther away. The Paricutin phenomenon was amusing, astonishing, but comprehensible precisely because so bizarre (the name of the place was unpronounceably Tarascan: Paranguaritecuaro, abbreviated to Paricutin). A country where a volcano can appear overnight, out of nowhere, is a country where anything can happen…
The 1957 earthquake was crueler, faster, dry, and it slashed the sleeping body of Mexico City like a machete. When calm returned, Laura carefully walked down the cast-iron circular stairs to the bedroom floor and found things scattered every which way: armoires and drawers, toothbrushes, glasses and soaps, pumice stones and sponges, and on the ground floor pictures hung at crazy angles, not a single light burning, plates broken, parsley knocked over, bottles of Electropura water smashed in pieces.
