A little old man with trembling hands and jolly eyes explained it to Laura: We were tailors, peddlers, shopkeepers, discriminated against because we were Jews; we emigrated to America, but in New York we were still foreigners, excluded, so we went to California, where there was nothing but sun, sea, and desert, California, where the continent ends, Miss Laura, we all went to that city with the angelic name, many angels, the union with wings that seemed to be waiting for us, Jews from Central Europe, to make our fortunes, Los Angeles, where, as our hostess Ruth tells, a winged being descends from heaven and uses his memory sword to take away what we were and no longer wanted to be. It’s true, we Jews not only invented Hollywood but invented the United States as we wished it to be, dreamed the American Dream better than anyone, Miss Laura, and stocked it with immediately identifiable good guys and bad guys. We always had the good guy win; we linked being good with innocence, gave the hero an innocent girlfriend, created a nonexistent America, rural, small-town, free, where justice always triumphs; and it turns out that’s what Americans wanted to see, or it was how they wanted to see themselves, in a mirror of innocence and goodness where love and justice always triumph, that’s what we gave the Americans, we persecuted Jews of Mitteleuropa. So why are they persecuting us now? Are we Communists? We the idealists?
“Out of order,” McCarthy shouted back.
“You, Senator, you’re the red,” said the small, bald man.
“The witness is about to be in contempt of Congress.”
“You, Senator, are paid by Moscow.”
“Take this witness away.”
“You’re the best propaganda the Kremlin ever invented, Senator McCarthy.”
“Get him out of here! Take him away!”
“Do you think that by acting like Stalin you’re defending American democracy? Do you think you can defend democracy by imitating your enemy?” shouted Harry Jaffe. That was the name Basilio Baltazar mentioned. The two of them had been comrades on the Jarama front, along with Vidal, Maura, and Jim. Comrades.
“Order, order. The witness is in contempt,” shouted McCarthy with his whining kidnapper’s voice, his mouth twisted into an eternal smile of disdain, his beard showing dark only hours after he shaved, his eyes those of an animal chased by itself: Joe McCarthy was like an animal aware of being a man and nostalgic for his earlier freedom as a beast in the jungle.
Another old man interrupted. The people to blame for the whole thing are the Warner Brothers, who started putting politics into movies, social themes, delinquency, unemployment, abandoned children who slide into a life of crime, the cruelty of prisons, movies that said to America, you’re not innocent anymore, you’re not rural anymore, you live in cities plagued by poverty, exploitation, organized crime, and criminals of all kinds from gangsters to bankers.
“Just as Brecht said: which is worse, robbing a bank or founding a bank?”
“I’ll tell you what’s what,” answered the first old man, Laura’s confidant. “A movie is a collective effort. No matter how clever he is, a writer can’t pull the wool over the eyes of Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner and make him see white by putting red in front of him. The man has yet to be born who could trick Mayer by saying to him, Look, this film about noble Russian peasants is really camouflaged praise of Communism. Mayer won’t be conned, because he’s the greatest con man of all. That’s why he was the first to denounce his own workers. The wolf was tricked by the lambs. The wolf got a pardon because he turned over the lambs to the slaughterhouse so he’d be spared the knife. Mayer must have been furious about McCarthy drinking the blood of all the actors and writers he’d hired instead of letting him do it!”
“Vengeance is sweet, Theodore…”
“On the contrary. It’s a skimpy diet if you’re not the one drinking the blood of the person who got crucified because you squealed. It’s bitter for the squealer to have to keep his mouth shut, to not be able to brag in private, to have to live with shame.”
Harry Jaffe got up, lit a cigarette, and walked through the garden. Laura Díaz followed the trail of his firefly, a Camel burning in a dark garden.
“We’re all responsible for a picture,” the old producer named Theodore continued. “Paul Muni isn’t responsible for Al Capone because he starred in Scarface, or Edward Arnold for plutocratic fascism because he personified it in Meet John Doe. From the producer to the distributor, we’re all responsible for our pictures.”
“Fuenteovejuna, one for all, all for one,” said Basilio Baltazar. He didn’t care that none of the gringos would recognize this great line from Lope de Vega’s play about a town that stands up and acknowledges its cellective guilt.
Elsa, the old producer’s wife, said innocently, “Well, who knows if they aren’t right when they say it was one thing to go into social themes during the New Deal and another to exalt Russia during the war.”
“They were our allies!” Bell exclaimed. “We were supposed to be nice to the Russians!”
“We were told to promote pro-Soviet sentiment,” Ruth interrupted. “Roosevelt and Churchill asked us to.”
“And one fine day, someone knocks at your door and you get a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee because you portrayed Stalin as good old Uncle Joe with his pipe and peasant wisdom defending us against Hitler,” said the tall man who looked like an owl because of his heavy tortoiseshell glasses.
“And wasn’t that the truth?” answered a small man with frizzy, tangled hair that rose to a high, natural topknot. “Didn’t the Russians save us from the Nazis? Remember Stalingrad? Have we already forgotten Stalingrad?”
“Albert,” countered the tall, myopic man, “I’ll never argue with you. I’ll always agree with a man who walked with me, next to me, both of us in handcuffs because we refused to denounce our comrades to the McCarthy committee. You and I.”
There was more, Harry told Laura one night when the cicadas were raising a racket in the Bells’ garden. It was an entire era: It was the misery of an era, but also its glory.
“Before I went to Spain, I was active in the Black Theater Project with Roosevelt’s WPA, which set off riots in Harlem in 1935. Then Orson Welles put on a black Macbeth that caused a furor and was savagely attacked by the theater critic of The New York Times. The guy died of pneumonia a week after the review appeared. It was voodoo, Laura.” Harry laughed and asked her if it was all right to call her by her first name.
“Of course. Laura,” she said.
“Harry. Harry Jaffe.”
“Yes, Basilio told me about… you.”
“About Jim. About Jorge.”
“Jorge Maura told me the story.”
“No one ever gets the whole story, you know,” said Harry. His tone expressed challenge, sadness, and shame all at once, Laura thought.
“Do you have the whole story, Harry?”
“No, of course not.” The man tried to recover his normal expression. “A writer should never know the whole story. He imagines one part and asks the reader to finish it. A book should never close. The reader should continue it.”
“Not finish it, just continue it?”
Harry agreed, with his balding head and immobile but expressive hands. Jorge had described him on the Jarama front in 1937, compensating for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry said at that time. His faith in Communism expiated his inferiority complexes. He argued a lot, Jorge Maura had recalled, he’d read all the Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” Stalin’s mistakes were mere misdirections. The future was glorious, but Harry Jaffe in Spain was small, nervous, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive-Maura had thought-because he didn’t know just how weak an uncritical political conviction really is.