“Starting with us, evil ceased to be a possibility and became an obligation.”
“I don’t want to be pitied, Jorge. I’d rather be persecuted.”
Those were the last words of Raquel that I heard. I don’t know if I suffer because I didn’t save her or because of her suffering. But the way she looked at her executioner in the camp, more than the way she looked at me, told me that right until the last minute Raquel affirmed her humanity and left me a question I’d always live with: what is the virtue of your virtue, my love, the love of my love, the justice of my justice, the compassion of my compassion?
“I want to share your suffering, the way you share the suffering of your people. That is the love of my love.”
6.
Laura left Jorge on the island. She boarded the little ship knowing she would never return. Jorge Maura would never again be a clearly delineated figure for her, only a haze rising from a past that was always present, whose identification would be final proof that he was there even if he no longer existed.
Go on, she said, be a saint, be a hermit, climb up and sit alone on top of your column in the desert, be a comfortable martyr without martyrdom.
He said she was very hard on him.
She answered, because I love you. “Why are you hiding on an island? It would have been better if you’d stayed in Mexico. There’s no hiding place better than Mexico City.”
“I don’t have the strength anymore. Forgive me.”
“Well, you’re a Spaniard. You can be sure that death will be late in reaching you.”
Was the meeting so painful for her?
“No, it’s that I’ve learned to fear those who deform me with their love, not those who hate me. When you went to Cuba, I asked myself a thousand times, can I live without him, can I live without his support? I badly needed your support to create a world of my own that I wouldn’t have to sacrifice to anyone I loved. You gave it to me, you know, you supported me so that I could return to my home and tell the truth to my family, whatever happened. Without your love supporting me, I never would have dared. Without your memory, I would have been just one more adulteress. With you, no one dared cast the first stone against me. I feel free because you are with me.”
“Laura, the worst is over. Calm down. Understand that I stay here alone of my own free will.”
“Alone? That word I don’t understand. How are you going to be religious without the world, how are you going to reach God without leaving yourself? You see how you live halfway between the monastery and the world. Do you think the cloistered monks who forbid the presence of women have already found God, you think they can find Him without the world? How pretentious you are, pretentious bastard! Are you going to purge the sins of the twentieth century hiding away on this stone island? You are the very pride you detest. You are your own Lucifer. How are you going to have your pride pardoned, Jorge, you bastard?”
“By imagining that God says to me: I hate in you the same thing you’ve hated in others.”
“Imagining? Only that?”
“Listening, Laura.”
“Do you know something? I leave here admiring your indifference and your serene wisdom. Which I don’t have.”
“Raquel is buried in an unmarked grave, mixed with hundreds of other naked bodies. Can we be more than she? I’m not better. I’m different. Just like you.”
“Why do you think you’re liberated?” she asked incredulously.
“Because you came to see me filled with incredulity. You’re the truly incredulous person here. As I was before. I’m finding health seeing a human being with less faith than I. What insignificant things we are, Laura.”
She asked him to answer the question she’d been asking since she reached Lanzarote. (You shouldn’t have come here. This island doesn’t exist. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there.) Do you believe or don’t you?
“Which is like asking, is Christianity true or false? And I answer that your question has no importance. What I want to find out here on Lanzarote, halfway between monastic life and life as you understand it, between security and danger, is whether faith can give meaning to the madness of being here on earth.”
What had he discovered?
“That the life of Christ is always possible for a Christian, but no one dares imitate it.”
“No one dares, or no one can?”
“It’s that they think that being like Christ is acting as Christ acted-raising the dead, multiplying loaves… they transform Christ into an active ideology. Laura, Christ only seeks us if we don’t believe in Him. Christ finds us if we don’t look for Him. It’s Pascal’s truth: you found me because you didn’t seek me. That is my truth today. Go away, Laura. Realize I have no joy. Every afternoon on this island is very sad.”
I came because your place was empty, Laura said to herself as she left the nocturnal coast of Lanzarote, sailing for Tenerife, as the night became black and the island red. I couldn’t bear it anymore. It’s dangerous, living in a vacant space, nostalgic for the life my son didn’t have and the love you took away from me. But I lost my son, and you lost Raquel. We both gave up something precious. Perhaps God, if He exists, recognizes that loss and takes note of our sorrows, each of them. Now I no longer want to think about you. To think about you consoles me too much and keeps my imagination going. I want to renounce you completely. I never met you.
When they had separated at the monastery entrance, Laura had waited for a moment, confused. Why wouldn’t they let a woman in? She saw that nothing was keeping her from entering, from looking for Jorge just once more, from feeling his hot lips for the last time, from repeating the words that would now be unspoken for all time.
I love you.
He was on all fours in the solitary refectory, licking the floor with his tongue, tenacious, disciplined, tile after tile.
18.
Avenida Sonora: 1950
THERE COMES A MOMENT in life when nothing but loving the dead has any importance. We have to do everything we can for the dead. You and I together, we can suffer because the dead person is absent. Their presence is not absolute. Their absence is the only absolute. But the desire we have for the dead person is neither presence nor absence. There is no one left in my house, Jorge. If you want to believe my solitude is what returned me to you, I give you permission to do so.
My husband, Juan Francisco, died.
My auntie, María de la O, died.
But the death of my adored son Santiago is the only real death for me, it comprises all the others, gives them meaning.
My auntie’s death actually gives me joy. She died as she wished, in her beloved Veracruz, dancing danzones with a tiny man named Matias Matadamas, who dressed all in powder blue to take her out in the public square twice a week dancing the danzón on the space of a single brick.
The real death of Juan Francisco had occurred long before. His inanimate body merely confirmed it. He approached death dragging his feet, saying to me, “I can’t think of anything,” asking me, “Should we have married, you and I?” Because the day he died I asked him if we could finally stop hurting each other.