My attention was drawn to the extreme youthful beauty of one of the agents, a Siegfried who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, blond and forthright-there was no line on his face between his closely shaven jaw and his cheeks covered with blond down-while his partner, a small man perhaps sixty years old, without his black uniform, boots, and Nazi armband could have been a bank accountant or trolley conductor or marmalade salesman. He used a pince-nez, had a tiny mustache sprouting like two fly wings on either side of the division in his lips which according to Jewish tradition the sword of the God of Israel had opened with one stroke above the mouth of the newborn so they’d forget their immense racial, prenatal memory. The little man’s eyes were lost like two dead herrings in the bottom of the pot that was his shaven head. He wasn’t a policeman at all; he was an executioner.
They greeted me with raised arms, the little man shouted Long live Franco! I returned the salute.
I found her crouching on the prow, next to the mast where the red banner emblazoned with the swastika was flying. She wasn’t looking toward Morro Castle or the city. She was staring at the sea, returned to the sea, as if her gaze could reach all the way back to Freiburg, to our university and our youth.
I softly touched her shoulder and she had no need to see me, with her eyes closed she clasped my legs, pressing her face against my knees, and wailed with a penitent’s sob, almost a shout, no longer hers, echoing in the Havana sky like a chorus not of Raquel’s voices but as if she were the receptor of a hymn that flew from Europe to lodge in the voice of the woman I’d come to save.
For the price of my love for you for…
Our love our…
“Why won’t anyone help us?” she asked, sobbing. “Why won’t the Americans let us in, why won’t the Cubans give us asylum, why won’t the Pope answer the supplication of his people and mine, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani! why have you abandoned us, am I not one of the four hundred million faithful the Holy Father can mobilize to save me, just me, a Jewish convert to Catholicism?”
I told her as I caressed her hair that I’d come to save her. Her hair, tousled by the cold tempestuous wind of that February morning in Cuba. I saw Raquel’s windblown hair, the force of the wind, and nevertheless, the flag of the Reich on the prow was hanging, immobile, not waving, as if heavy with lead.
“You?”
Raquel raised her dark eyes, her black, unbroken eyebrows, her dark Sephardic skin, her lips half open in prayer and weeping-the similarity to fruit, her long, tremulous nose-and I could see her eyes again.
I told her I was there to take her off the ship, I’d come to marry her, it was the only way she could stay in the New World, married to me she’d be a Spanish citizen, they wouldn’t be able to touch her, the Cuban authorities agreed, a Cuban judge would come on board to officiate.
“And what about the captain? Can’t the captain marry us?”
“No, we’re in Cuban waters.”
“You’re lying to me. He does have the right to. But he’s afraid. We’re all afraid. These animals have managed to frighten the whole world.”
I took her in my arms; the ship would sail in a few hours, and no one will ever see again the Jews who were returned to the Reich, no one, Raquel, especially you and the passengers on this ship, you’re guilty of having left and of not having found refuge, listen to the Führer laughing, if no one else wants them, why would I?
“Why is it that St. Peter’s successor, St. Peter who was a Jewish fisherman, doesn’t speak against those who persecute his descendants, the Jews?”
I wanted her not to think about that, she was going to be my wife, and then we’d fight together against this evil, because we have finally come to know the face of evil in all the suffering of that time, I said, at least we’ve learned that, now you know what Satan’s face is like, Hitler betrayed Satan by giving him the face God took away from him when He hurled Satan into the abyss: between heaven and hell, a hurricane like this one advancing on Cuba erased Lucifer’s face, left him with a face as blank as a sheet and the sheet fell in the center of the crater of hell covering the devil’s body, awaiting the day of his reappearance just as St. John announced it: And I saw a Beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads… Men worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the Beast, saying, “Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?” And the Beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and that was the Beast imagined by St. John. Now we know who that Beast is. We’re going to fight it. It’s a shit stain on the flag of God.
“My love.”
“I shall pray as a Catholic for the Jewish people, who were the bearers of the revelation until the advent of Christ.”
“Christ too had a face.”
“You mean Christ certainly had a face. He chose to leave the only proof of His appearance.”
“Then you know the face of good but also the face of evil, the face of Jesus and the face of Hitler-”
“I don’t want to know the face of good. If I could see God, I would be struck blind. God must never be seen. Faith would die. God doesn’t allow Himself to be seen-so that we may believe in Him.”
2.
He had to receive her outside the monastery because the monks did not allow the presence of women, and though they gave him a bare cell, they also arranged for him to have a hut near the town of San Bartolomé. There a hot wind blew which carried dust from the African desert and made it necessary for the peasants to protect their meager plantings with hedges.
“The whole island is fenced with stone walls to save the harvests, and they even cover the soil with moss to hold in the nighttime moisture for the vines.”
She looked around the stone hut. There was only a cot, a table with a single chair, some flimsy shelves holding two plates, enough tinware for one person, and half a dozen books.
They gave him the cabin because he was not to feel himself an integral part of the monastery, but also they could say to the authorities, if asked, that he did not live there, that he was an employee, a gardener… When they received him, they made an exception to their rules, but on condition that he take the risk in going and coming, the risk of not feeling completely safe.
Jorge Maura understood the monks’ offer. If a problem arose, they could always say he didn’t live with them, he fulfilled his devotions in the chapel and did domestic work or gardening for them, yes, invisible gardening, sculpting rock, sowing volcanic rock-but he wasn’t under the order’s protection. The proof was that he lived outside the monastery in the town of San Bartolomé, exposed to breathing in the wandering sands from Africa, which seemed to be searching for their water clock, their hourglass for measuring a time that, with no receptacle, would become lost like the sand itself: the desert’s diaspora.
They didn’t put it to him like that, crudely, but they were insistent, fearful. They owed a debt to Maura’s family, whose donations had made possible the construction of the monastery on Lanzarote. It was quite enough that they offered him protection: during the war he had worked with the relief agencies that brought blankets, medicines, and food to the neediest, air-raid victims, prisoners of war, internees in concentration camps, among them many Catholics opposed to Nazism. Hitler had laughed at the Catholic devotion of Franco’s supporters, since for him Catholics were enemies to the same degree that Communists, Jews, and garbage were, and besides, Pope Pius XII never said a word in defense of Catholics or Jews… The Holy Father was a contemptible coward.