And Harry put the knife in his mouth, and Laura screamed and stopped him, snatched the knife out of his hand and embraced him sobbing.
“And they’re sentenced to exile and death,” murmured Harry, almost inaudible, into Laura’s ear.
Early on, Laura had learned to read Harry’s thoughts just as he’d learned to read hers. They were helped by the punctual round of tropical sounds. She’d known it since she was a girl in Veracruz, but had forgotten it when she lived in Mexico City, where noises are accidental, unforeseen, intrusive, shrieking like evil fingernails scratching a school blackboard. But in the tropics the chirping of birds announces the dawn and their symmetrical flight the dusk, nature fraternizes with the church bells ringing matins and vespers, vanilla trees perfume the ambient air when we give it our intermittent attention, and the clusters of harvested beans give an air at once newborn and refined to the cupboards where they’re stored. When Harry sprinkled pepper on his huevos rancheros at breakfast, Laura would glance at the flowering peppers in the garden, yellow jewels set in a fragile airy crown the color of afternoon. There were no delays in the tropics. They went from the garden to the table killing scorpions, first in the house, then hunting preventively in the garden, later under stones. They were white, and Harry laughed as he stepped on them.
“My wife used to tell me to take some sun once in a while. Your stomach is as white as a fish fillet before it’s fried. That’s how these scorpions are.”
“Fish belly,” Laura said, laughing.
“Get out of this fix, she’d tell me, you’re not part of it, you don’t believe in it, your friends aren’t worth all that. And then she’d go back to her usual theme. Your problem isn’t that you’re a Communist, Harry, it’s that you’ve lost your talent.”
And despite everything, he finally did sit down to write, for when all was said and done, he needed to write, and in Tepoztlán he began to do so more regularly, beginning with his mini-biographies of victims like Garfield and Bromberg, who’d been his friends. Why didn’t he write about his enemies, the inquisitors? Why did he write only about the wounded and destroyed people like Garfield and Bromberg, but not about the solid individuals who overcame the drama, didn’t cry, fought, resisted, and, above all, made fun of the monstrous stupidity of the whole trial? Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman… those who came to Mexico, passed through Cuernavaca or stayed there. Why was it that Harry Jaffe said almost nothing about them? Why didn’t he include them in the biographies he was writing in Tepoztlán? Above all, why did he never mention the worst of the lot, the ones who did squeal, who did name names-Edward Dmytryk, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, Larry Parks?
Harry used his shoe to smash a scorpion.
“Evil insects make their nests in the most hostile places and live where there seems to be no life. That’s how Tom Paine described prejudice.”
Laura tried to imagine what Harry was thinking, all the things he didn’t say to her that were passing through his feverish eyes. She didn’t know that Harry was doing the same thing, thinking he could read Laura’s thoughts. He’d watch her from the bed as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror every morning. He could compare the still-young woman he’d met two years before, emerging from the swimming pool framed in bougainvillea, with the fifty-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 Díaz’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.