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 Tepoztlán (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 together, both of them knew that, sense mixed with nonsense, hope with despair, justification with criticism, compassion with disdain.
“If I could only go back to my time in Spain and stay there,” Harry would sometimes say. And, feverishly, turning brutally to Laura, he would go on in a softer and softer but also hoarser voice: “Why don’t you leave me, why are you staying with me?”
It was the moment of temptation. The moment when she experienced doubt. She could pack up and leave. It was possible. She could stay and put up with everything. That too was possible. But she could do neither: neither walk out just like that nor stay passively. She listened to Harry and again and again made the same decision: I’ll stay, but I’ll do something, I won’t just take care of him, I won’t just try to encourage him, I’ll try to understand him, to find out what happened to him, why he knows all the stories of that infamous time and yet doesn’t know his own story, why he won’t tell me, the one who loves him, his story, why…
It was as if he read her mind. It happens with couples linked more by passion than by custom, we read each other’s mind, Harry, a look is enough, a wave of a hand, a feigned distraction, a dream penetrated the same way a body is penetrated sexually, to know what the other is thinking, you’re thinking about Spain, about Jim, about how he saved himself by dying young, how he didn’t have time to become a victim of history, he was a victim of the war, that’s noble, that’s heroic; but being a victim of history, not foreseeing, not dodging history’s blow in time, or not taking its full force when it does hit us, that’s sad, Harry, that’s terrible.
“It’s all been a farce, an error.”
“I love you, Harry, that’s neither a farce nor an error.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I’m not tricking you.”
“Everybody’s tricked me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Everybody.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Why don’t you find out on your own?”
“No, I’d never do anything behind your back.”
“Don’t be a fool. I’m giving you permission. Go ahead, go back to Cuernavaca, ask them about me, tell them I gave you permission, they should tell you the truth.”
“The truth, Harry?”
(The truth is that I love you, Harry, I love you in a different way from the way I once loved my husband, different from the way I loved Orlando Ximénez or even Jorge Maura, I love you the way I loved them, as a woman who lives and sleeps with a man, but with you it’s different, Harry, besides loving you as I loved those men, I love you as I loved my brother Santiago the First and my son Santiago the Second, I love you as if I’d already seen you die, Harry, as I saw my brother, dead and buried with his unfulfilled promise, my son, resigned and handsome, that’s how I love you, Harry, as a son, a brother, and a lover, but with one difference, my love: I loved them as a woman, as a mother, as a lover, and I love you as a bitch, I know neither you nor anyone else will understand me, but I love you as a bitch, I wish I could give birth to you and then bleed to death, that’s the image that makes you different from my husband, my lover, or my sons, my love for you is the love of an animal that would love to put itself in your place and die instead of you, but only at the price of becoming your bitch, I’ve never felt this before and I’d like to explain it to myself and can’t, but that’s how it is and that’s the way it is, Harry, because only now, at your side, I ask myself questions I never asked before, I ask myself if we deserve this love, I ask myself if it’s love that exists, not you and I, and for that reason I’d like to be your animal, your bleeding, dying bitch, to say that love does exist the way a dog and a bitch exist, I want to take your love and mine away from any romantic idealism, Harry, I want to give your body and mine a last chance by rooting them in the lowest ground but also the most concrete and certain ground, where a dog and a bitch sniff, eat, entangle sexually, separate, forget each other, because I’m going to have to live with your memory when you die, Harry, and my memory of you will never be complete because I don’t know what you did during the terror, you won’t tell me, maybe you were a hero and your humility disguises itself in pugnacious honor, like John Garfield, so you won’t tell me your exploits and make your heart sentimental, you who weep when Libertad Lamarque sings in those movies of hers, but maybe you were a traitor, Harry, a squealer, and that shames you and that’s why you’d like to go back to Spain, be young, die at the side of your young friend Jim in the war and have war and death instead of history and dishonor: which is the truth? I think it’s the first, because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have been accepted in that circle of victims over in Cuernavaca, but it may be the second because they never look at you, never address you, they invite you over and let you sit there, not talking to you but not attacking you, until your chair is like the dock where the accused sits, and you know me and you’re not alone anymore and we should leave Cuernavaca, leave your comrades behind, not hear those arguments repeated ad nauseam anymore.)