Everyone turned to see who’d asked that. But the questions seemed to come from nowhere. They seemed to have been said by a ghost. It was the voice of absence. Only Laura, sitting opposite Harry, realized that the Spanish Civil War veteran had thought and perhaps said them, but no one else noticed, because the lady of the house, Ruth, had already changed the tone of the conversation as she served her endless bowl of pasta and sang under her breath:
You’re going to get me into trouble
If you keep looking at me like that.
Harry had said that radio was invisible theater, a call to imagination… and actual theater, what was that?
“Something that disappears with the applause.”
“And movies?”
“The ghost that outlives us all, the speaking, moving portrait we leave behind so we can go on living.”
“Is that why you went to Hollywood, to write movies?”
He nodded without looking at her, it was hard for him to look at anyone and everyone avoided looking at him. Little by little Laura realized this fact-so flagrant as to be a mystery, invisible, like a radio program.
Laura felt she could be the object in Harry’s line of sight because she was new, different, innocent, because she didn’t know the things the others did. But the courtesy all the exiles showed to Harry was impeccable. He turned up every weekend at the Bells’ house. He sat down to dinner with them every Sunday. Only no one looked at him. And when he spoke it was in silence, Laura realized with alarm, no one listened to him, that was why he gave the impression that he never spoke, because no one listened to him but her, only her only I, Laura Díaz, I pay attention to him, and that’s why only she listened to what the solitary man said without his having to open his mouth.
Before, whom would he talk to? Nature in Cuernavaca was so prodigal, though so different, rather like the Veracruz of Laura Díaz’s childhood.
It was a perturbed nature, redolent of bougainvillea and verbena, of freshly cut pine and bleeding watermelon, scents of saffron but also of shit and garbage piled in the deep gullies around every orchard, every neighborhood, every house… Would Harry Jaffe speak to that nature-the little New York Jew who’d made his pilgrimage from Manhattan to Spain and from Spain to Hollywood and from Hollywood to Mexico?
This time Laura was the foreigner in her own homeland, the other to whom this strangely taciturn and solitary man might perhaps speak, not aloud but in the whisper she learned to read on his lips as they became friends and drifted away from the Bells’ red stronghold into the silence of the Borda gardens or the buzz of Cuernavaca’s main square, or the light and careless inebriation at the Hotel Marik’s open-air café, or the cathedral’s peaceful solitude.
There, Harry pointed out to her that the nineteenth-century murals, in their pious St. Sulpice style, were hiding another fresco that had been painted over, bad taste and clerical hypocrisy having deemed it primitive, cruel, and not especially devout.
“You know what it is, do you?” asked Laura, not hiding her curiosity and surprise.
“I do. An angry-very angry-priest told me. What do you see here?”
“The Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, the Wise Men,” said Laura-though she was thinking about Father Elzevir Almonte and the jewels of the Holy Child of Zongolica.
“You really don’t know what’s underneath?”
“No.”
“The missionary expedition of Mexico’s only saint, St. Felipe de Jesus. Felipe went to convert the Japanese in the seventeenth century. Painted here, but painted over now, are the scenes of danger and terror-rough seas, shipwrecks. The saint’s heroic and solitary sermons. Finally, his crucifixion by the infidels. His slow death agony. A great movie.”
“His nursemaid said, The day the fig tree blooms, our little Felipe will be a saint. A servant we once had, a man I loved a lot, Zampaya, told me that story.”
“All that was covered up. By piety. By lies.”
“A pentimento, Harry?”
“No, not a repentant painting, but one that pride superimposed on truth. A triumph of simulation. I’m telling you, it’s a movie.”
He invited her, for the first time, to the little house he was renting, surrounded by mangroves. It wasn’t far from the square, but in Cuernavaca one had only to walk a few yards beyond the main streets to find houses almost like lairs, hidden behind high walls painted indigo blue, genuine silent oases-with green lawns, red roof tiles, ocher facades, and thickets running toward black gullies one after the other. It smelled of moisture and decaying trees. Harry’s house had a garden, a brick terrace that was hot all day and freezing at night, a roof of broken tiles, a kitchen where a silent old woman sat immobile with a palm fan in her hands, and a bed-sitting room with its spaces divided by curtains, which transformed the carefully made bed-as if someone would punish Harry if he left his bed unmade-into a secret.
Three open suitcases, full of clothes, papers, and books, clashed with the scrupulous order of the bed.
“Why haven’t you unpacked?”
He hesitated before answering.
“Why?”
“I might leave any time.”
“Where would you go?”
“Home.”
“Home? But you don’t have a home anymore, Harry. This is your home, haven’t you figured that out yet? You’ve lost everything else!” Laura was suspicious and exasperated.
“No, Laura, no, you don’t know when-”
“Why don’t you sit down and get to work?”
“I don’t know what to do, Laura. I’m waiting.”
“Work,” she said, meaning “stay.”
“I’m waiting. In a while. Any time now.”
Laura gave herself to Harry for many reasons: because of his age, because she hadn’t made love since the night Basilio said goodbye before returning to Vassar and she hadn’t had to ask, nor did Basilio, because it was an act of humility and memory, homage to Jorge Maura and Pilar Méndez, only she and he, Laura and Basilio together, could represent their absent lovers tenderly and respectfully, but that act of love between them for love of others had aroused in Laura Díaz an appetite that began to grow, an erotic desire she’d believed was, if not lost, then certainly overshadowed by age, modesty, memory of the dead, a superstitious sense she had of being watched from some dark land by the two Santiagos, by Jorge Maura, by Juan Francisco-the dead or disappeared who lived in a territory where the only business was to spy on her, still in this world, Laura Díaz.
“I don’t want to do anything that would violate my respect for myself.”
“Self-respect, Laura?”
“Self-respect, Harry.”
Now the nearness of Harry in Cuernavaca aroused a new tenderness in her which at first she could not identify. Perhaps it was born from the play of glances in the weekend parties: no one looked at him, he looked at no one, until Laura came, and they looked at each other. Hadn’t her love for Jorge Maura begun that way, with exchanged glances during a party at the house of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo? How different the power of her Spanish lover’s glance from the weakness, not only in the glance but in the entire body of this sad American, disoriented, wounded, humiliated, and in need of affection.
First, Laura embraced him, the two of them sitting on the bed in the little house in the gully. She hugged him as if he were a child, put ting her arms around him, holding his hand, almost cuddling him, asking him to raise his head, to look at her, she wanted to see Harry Jaffe’s true face, not the mask of exile, defeat, and self pity.
“Let me put your things away for you.”
“Don’t mother me! Fuck you!”
He was right. She was treating him as if he were a weak cowardly child. She had to make him feel, You’re a man, I want to stir up the fire still within you, Harry, even though you no longer feel any passion for success, work, politics, or the rest of humanity-waiting, perhaps, crouched, mocking, like a genie, your sex unable always to say no, the only part of your life, Harry, that maybe goes on saying yes, out of pure animal spirit perhaps, or perhaps because your soul, my soul, has only the stronghold of sex but doesn’t know it.