No, Harry said to Laura, the origin wasn’t freedom, the origin was terror, a struggle against beasts, distrust among brothers, fighting for wife, mother, the patriarchy, keeping the fire going, don’t let it go out, sacrificing the child to keep death away, plague, hurricanes, that was the origin. There never was a Golden Age. There never will be. The thing is you can’t be a good revolutionary if you don’t believe that.
“And what about McCarthy? And Beria?”
“They were cynics. They never believed in anything.”
“I respect your drama, Harry. I swear I respect you a great deal.”
“Don’t waste your time, Laura. Come here and give me a kiss.”
When Harry died, Laura Díaz went back to Cuernavaca to tell the exiles. They were all together, as they were every Saturday night, and Ruth was dishing out huge servings of pasta. Laura saw that while the cast had changed, the parts were the same, and the absences were made up for with new recruits. McCarthy never tired of looking for victims, the stain of persecution was spreading like an oil spill on the sea, like pus from a penis. The old producer Theodore died, and his wife, Elsa, wouldn’t last long without him; the tall, nearsighted man with tortoiseshell glasses had a chance to make a movie in France, and the small man with the curly hair and pompadour could write Hollywood screenplays under a pseudonym, using a “front.”
Others went on living in Mexico, keeping company with Fredric Bell, protected by people on the Mexican left like the Riveras or the photographer Gabriel Figueroa, and always faithful to the arguments that would let them live, remember, argue, deaden the pain of the growing list of those who were persecuted, excluded, jailed, exiled, those who committed suicide, those who disappeared. They became deaf to the footfalls of old age, pretended to be blind to the certain if minute changes in the mirror. Now Laura Díaz was a mirror for the Cuernavaca exiles. She told them, Harry is dead, and they all suddenly became older. Yet at the same time Laura felt with visible emotion that each and every one of them shone like sparks from the same fire. For a second, when she gave them the simple message, Harry is dead, the fear that pursued them all, even the bravest-the fear that was Joe McCarthy’s best-trained bloodhound nipping at the heels of the “reds”-dissipated in a kind of sigh of final relief. Without a word, they were all telling Laura that Harry would not be tormenting himself anymore. Nor would he torment them.
The looks of the American refugees in Cuernavaca were enough to precipitate in her heart an intolerable memory of everything Harry Jaffe had been-his tenderness and his anger, his bravery and his cowardice, his political pain translated into physical pain. His affliction, Harry her lover as an afflicted being, nothing more.
The English Bell remarked that those who were summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee could do one of four things.
They could invoke the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression and association. The risk in this was of being charged with contempt of Congress and going to jail. Which is what happened to the Hollywood Ten.
The second option was to invoke the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which allows all citizens the right of not incriminating themselves. Those who opted to “take the Fifth” risked losing their jobs and appearing on blacklists. Which is what had happened to most of the Cuernavaca exiles.
The third possibility was to inform, to name names and hope the studios would give you work.
Then something extraordinary happened. All of the seventeen guests, along with Bell, his wife, and Laura, went down the highway to the little Tepoztlán cemetery where Harry Jaffe was buried. There was moonlight, and the modest graves decorated with flowers stretched out at the foot of Tepozteco’s impressive height; its three-story pyramid descended to the blue, rose, white, and green crosses as if they weren’t graves but just another kind of flower in the Mexican tropics. An always premature cold fell over Tepoztlán in the evening, and the gringos had brought jackets, shawls, and even parkas.
They were right to do so. Despite the bright moonlight, the mountains cast an immense shadow over the valley, and they themselves, these persecuted exiles, moved as if they were reflections, like the dark wings of a distant eagle, a bird that one day looks at itself in the mirror and no longer recognizes what it sees, because it imagined itself one way and the mirror shows it wasn’t that at all.
Then, in the Tepoztec night, under the light of the moon, as if in a final Group Theatre presentation (the last curtain before closing on an empty house), each one of the exiles said something over the grave of Harry Jaffe, the man admitted to the group but whom no one had looked at except Laura Díaz, who arrived one day, dove into the bougainvillea-framed pool, and surfaced opposite her poor, disgraced, sick love.
“You only named those who’d already been named.”
“Everyone you named was already on the blacklist.”
“Between betraying your friends and betraying your country, you chose your country.”
“You said to yourself that if you stayed in the Party, the fountains of your inspiration would dry up.”
“The Party told you how to write, how to think, and you rebelled.”
“First you rebelled against the Party.”
“It horrified you to think that Stalinism could govern in the U.S.A. as it governed in the U.S.S.R.”
“You went to speak before the committee, and you trembled with fear. Here in America, now, was the very thing you feared. Stalinism was interrogating you, but here it was called McCarthyism.”
“You gave not one name.”
“You faced up to McCarthy.”
“Why did you do it when you knew they already knew? To inform on the informers, Harry, to cast infamy on the infamous, Harry.”
“To go back to work, Harry. Until you realized that there was no difference between squealing and not squealing. The studios didn’t give work to reds, but they also didn’t give work to people who admitted being reds and informed on their comrades.”
“It didn’t work, Harry.”
“You knew that anti-Communism had become the refuge of the scum of America.”
“You didn’t name the living. But you also didn’t name the dead.”
“You didn’t name those who’d never been named. You also didn’t name only those who’d already been named.”
“You didn’t even name those who named you, Harry.”
“The Party demanded obedience of you. You said that even though you detested the Party, you weren’t going to submit to the committee. The Party in its best moment was always better than the committee at any moment.”
“My worst moment was not being able to tell my wife what was going on. Suspicion ruined our marriage.”
“My worst moment was living in hiding, in a house where we never turned on the lights so we wouldn’t be summoned by the agents of the committee.”
“My worst moment was knowing that my children were ostracized in school.”
“My worst moment was not telling my children what was happening, even though they already knew it all.”
“My worst moment was having to decide between my socialist ideal and Soviet reality.”
“My worst moment was having to choose between the literary quality of my writing and the dogmatic demands of the Party.”
“My worst moment was choosing between writing well and writing commercially, as the studio wanted.”
“My worst moment was looking into McCarthy’s face and knowing that American democracy was lost.”
“My worst moment was when Congressman John Rankin said to me, Your name isn’t Melvin Ross. Your real name is Emmanuel Rosenberg, and that proves that you’re a fake, a liar, a traitor, a shameful Jew.”