Contradictions: Harry was dying of emphysema hut didn’t stop smoking four packs of cigarettes a day because he said he needed them to write, it was a habit he couldn’t break. The problem was, he didn’t write anything but went on smoking. He was watching, with a kind of resigned passion, the great sunsets in the Valley of Morelos when the perfume of laurels overwhelmed his dying breaths.
He breathed with difficulty, and the valley air invaded his lungs and destroyed them: there was no room for oxygen in his blood. One day his own breath, the breath of a man named Harry Jaffe, escaped from his lungs as water pours from a broken water main, and it invaded his throat until it suffocated him with the very thing his body needed: air.
“If you listen carefully”-the ghost of a grin appeared on the sick man’s face-“you can hear the sound of my lungs, like the snap, crackle, and pop in that cereal. Right, I’m a bowl of Rice Krispies.” He laughed with difficulty. “But I should be Wheaties, breakfast of champions.”
Contradictions: Does he think they don’t know and they do know but don’t say so? Does he know they know and they think he doesn’t know that?
“How would you write about yourself, Harry?”
“I’d have to write history, words I detest.”
“History, or your history?”
“Personal histories have to be forgotten for real history to emerge.”
“But isn’t real history a totality of personal histories?”
“I can’t answer you. Ask me again some other day.”
She thought about the totality of her carnal loves, Orlando, Juan Francisco, Jorge, and Harry; about her family loves, her father Fernando and her Mutti Leticia, her Aunts María de la O, Virginia, and Hilda; her spiritual passions, the two Santiagos. She stopped, upset and cold at the same time. Her other son, Danton, did not appear on any of those personal altars.
Other times she would say to Harry, I don’t know who your victims were, or if there were victims, Harry, maybe you had no victims, but if you did, let me be one more.
He looked at her incredulously and forced her to see herself in the same way. Laura Díaz had never sacrificed herself for anyone. Laura Díaz was no one’s victim. Which is why she could he Harry’s victim, cleanly, gratuitously.
“Why don’t you write?”
“Maybe it would be better if you’d ask me what it means to write.”
“All right, what does it mean?”
“It means descending into yourself, as if you were a mine, so you can emerge again, Laura, emerge into pure air, with my hands full of myself.”
“What do you bring out of the mine-gold, silver, lead?”
“Memory? The mud of memory?”
“Our daily memory.”
“Give us this day our daily memory. It’s pure shit.”
He would have wanted to die in Spain.
“Why?”
“For symmetry. My life and history would have coincided.”
“I know lots of people who think as you do. History should have stopped in Spain when you were all young and all heroes.”
“Spain was salvation. I don’t want to he saved anymore. I told you that already.”
“Then you should get a grip on what followed Spain. Did the guilt continue then?”
“There were lots of innocents, there and here. I can’t save the martyrs. My friend Jim died at the Jarama. I would have died for him. He was innocent. No one was innocent after that.”
“Why, Harry?”
“Because I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t let anyone else be innocent again.”
“Don’t you want to save yourself?”
“Yes.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
But Harry was destroyed; he didn’t save himself, and wasn’t going to die again on the Jarama front. He was going to die of emphysema, not from a Falangist or Nazi bullet, a bullet with a political purpose, he was going to die of an implosion from the physical or moral bullet he carried within himself. Laura wanted to give a name to the destruction that in the last analysis linked her inexorably to a man who no longer had any other company-even to go on destroying himself, with a cigarette or with repentance-but Laura Díaz.
They had left Cuernavaca because the facts remained, and Harry said he hated things that remained. Why do they accept me at the same time they reject me? asked Laura in Harry’s voice. Because they don’t want to accord me the discriminatory treatment they themselves suffered? Because if I informed secretly they won’t accuse me publicly? Because if I acted in secret, they can’t treat me as an enemy, yet I can’t tell the truth.
“And live in peace?”
“I don’t know who your victims were, Harry. Let me be one.”
If he took refuge in Mexico was it because they went on persecuting him in the United States? Because he went on accusing-if that were the case-the witch-hunters? Because he informed on no one? Or-that’s it-because he did inform? But what kind of squealing did he do, which lets me live among my victims? Should he have denounced himself to the others as an informer? What would he gain by doing that? What? Penitence and credibility? He’d be penitent and then they’d believe in him, look at him, speak to him? Had they all made a mistake, he and they?
(Laura, the informer is impregnable; to attack the credibility of the informer is to undermine the very foundations of the system of informing.
(Did you inform?
(Suppose I did. But also suppose no one knows I did, people think I’m a hero. Isn’t that better for the cause?)
“I assure all of you. He could return, and no one would bother him.”
“No. Inquisitors always find new reasons to persecute.”
“Jews, converted Jews, Muslims, fags, impure races, lack of faith, heresy,” Basilio reminded her during one of his sporadic visits. “The inquisitor never lacks motives. And if one motive fails or grows old, Torquemada pulls a new, unexpected one out of his sleeve. It’s a story with no ending.”
In an embrace at night, making love with the lights out, Harry stifling his cough, Laura in a nightgown to hide a body she no longer liked, they could say things to each other, they could speak with caresses, he could tell her this is the last chance for love, and she could say to him what’s happening now has already been announced, and he, what already happened, what is happening, you and me is what already happened between you and me, Laura Díaz, Harry Jaffe, she had to suppose, she had to imagine. At breakfast, at the crepuscular cocktail hour, when only a diaphanous martini defended her from the night, and during the night itself, at the time of love, she could imagine answers to his questions.
“But you didn’t talk, did you?”
“No, but they treat me as if I did.”
“True. They insult you. They treat you as if you didn’t matter. Let’s go away from here, just the two of 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.”