She embraced him, sank to her knees and embraced his legs, leaning her head against his knees, flushing with shame for the moisture in his cheap gray slacks—they seemed worn out by washing, as if there hadn’t been time for them to dry and they still smelled of urine, and the shirt too, washed quickly and put right back on because it was the only one he had, and the bad odors hadn’t gone away, the smell of an earthly body, an animal body, tired of expelling humors, shit, semen. Jorge my love, my Jorge, I don’t know how to kiss you.
“I just don’t have the strength to go on scratching at my roots. The Spanish and Spanish American malady. Who are we?”
She begged his pardon for having provoked him.
“No, it’s all right. Get up. Let me get a good look at you. You look so clean, so clean …”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
By now Laura can’t remember how her lover is standing, with his moist freshly washed old clothes, with a smell of defeat no soap can purge. By now she can’t remember if he is standing or sitting on the cot, if he is looking down or staring out the door. At the ceiling. Or into her eyes.
“What am I trying to tell you? What do you know?”
“I know your biography. From the aristocracy to the Republic to defeat to exile and from there to pride. The pride of Lanzarote.”
“The pride of Lucifer.” Jorge laughed. “You leave a lot of openings, you know?”
“I know. The pride of Lanzarote? That isn’t an opening. It’s right here. It’s today.”
“I clean the monks’ latrines and see impossible drawings on the walls. As if a repentant painter had begun something he never finished and, because he knew it, chose the humblest and most humiliating place in the monastery to begin an enigma. Because what I see or imagine is a mystery, and the place of the mystery is the very spot where the good brothers, whether they want to or not, shit and piss. They are body, and their bodies remind them they can never be wholly spirit, as they’d like. Wholly.”
“Do you think they know? Are they that naive?”
“They have faith.”
God became flesh, said Maura in a kind of controlled exaltation, God stripped Himself of His holy impunity by making Himself man in Christ. That made God as fragile as the human beings who could recognize themselves in Him.
“Is that why we killed Him?”
“Christ became a man so we would recognize ourselves in Him.”
But to be worthy of Christ, we had to sink lower so we wouldn’t be more than what He is.
“A monk should think that when he’s shitting. Jesus did the same, but I do it with more shame. That’s faith. God’s in the pots and pans, St. Teresa said.”
“Was He looking for it?” asked Laura. “Looking for faith?”
“Christ had to abandon an invisible holiness in order to become flesh. Why ask me to become a saint—so I can incarnate a bit of Jesus’ holiness?”
“Do you know what I thought when my son Santiago died? Is this the greatest sorrow in my life?”
“Did you think it was? Or did you wonder if it was? … I’m sorry, Laura.”
“No. I thought that if God takes something from us, it’s because He gave up everything.”
“His own son, Jesus?”
“Yes. can’t help thinking this ever since I lost Santiago. He was the second, did you know? My brother and my son. Both. Santiago the Elder and Santiago the Younger. Both. You’re sorry? Imagine how I feel!”
“Look a bit further. God renounced everything. He had to renounce His own creation, the world, to let us be free.”
God became absent in the name of our freedom, said Jorge, and since we use that freedom for evil and not only for good, God had to become flesh in Christ in order to show us that God could be a man and nonetheless avoid evil.
“That’s our conflict,” Maura went on. “Being free to do evil or good and to know that if I do evil I offend the freedom God gave me, but if I do good, I also offend God because I’m daring to imitate Him, to be like Him, to sin through pride like Lucifer; you yourself said so.”
It was horrible to hear that: Laura took Jorge’s hand.
“What am I saying that is so terrible? Tell me.”
“That God asks us to do something He doesn’t allow. I’ve never heard anything crueler.”
“You haven’t? Well, I’ve seen it.”
3.
Do you know why I resist believing in God? Because I fear seeing Him one day. I fear that if I could see God, I’d be struck blind. I can approach God only to the degree that He distances Himself from me. God needs to be invisible so I can labor over a plausible faith, but at the same time I fear God’s visibility because at that precise moment I’d no longer have faith but proof. Here, read St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel, come with me, Laura, into the darkest night of time, the night when I went out in disguise to seek the beloved so we could be transformed, she into me, my senses suspended, and my neck wounded by a serene hand that says: Look and don’t forget … Who separated me from the beloved, God or the devil?
I saw the beloved fleetingly, for less than ten seconds, when our Swedish Red Cross truck passed by the barbed wire at Buchenwald, and in that instant I saw Raquel lost amid a multitude of prisoners.
It was very difficult to identify anyone in that mass of emaciated, hungry beings in their striped uniforms with the Star of David pinned to their breasts, huddled under blankets ripped by the February cold, clinging one to another. Except her.
If that was what they allowed us to see, what was there behind the visible, what were they hiding from us, didn’t they realize that in showing us this they forced us to imagine the real face, the hidden face? But in offering us this terrible face, weren’t they saying that the worst didn’t exist—no longer existed—that it was the face of death?
I saw Raquel.
A man in uniform was holding her up, a Nazi guard was supporting her, I don’t know if it was because he was ordered to show the compassion of someone helping a person in need; or so that Raquel wouldn’t collapse like a pile of rags; or because between the two, Raquel and the guard, there was a relationship of reciprocal yielding, of tiny favors that to her must have seemed enormous—some extra food, a night in the enemy’s bed, perhaps a simple, human portion of pity; or perhaps because it was just theater, a pantomime of humanity to impress the visitors; for perhaps a new, unforeseeable love between victim and executioner, one as hurt as the other, and both able to withstand the hurt only in the other’s unexpected company, the executioner identified by the pain of his obedience and the victim by the pain of hers—two obedient beings, each one at the orders of someone stronger, Hitler had said it, Raquel repeated it to me, there are only two peoples confronting each other: Germans and Jews.
Perhaps she was saying to me: Do you see why I didn’t leave the ship with you in Havana? I wanted to have happen what is now happening to me. I didn’t want to avoid my destiny.
Then Raquel freed herself from the grasp of the Nazi guard and clasped the barbed wire with her bare hands; between her executioner or lover or protector or shadow and me, Jorge Maura, her university lover, with whom she had one day gone to the Freiburg cathedral and kneeled down side by side with no fear of being ridiculous and prayed out loud:
we shall return to ourselves
we shall think as if we’d founded the world
we shall be the living subjects of history
we shall live the world of life
those words we said then with profound intellectual emotion—they came back now, Laura, as a crushing reality, an intolerable fact, not because they came true but precisely because they weren’t possible, the horror of the age had eliminated them yet in a mysterious and marvelous way made them possible, they were the final truth of my swift and terrible encounter with the woman I loved and who loved me …
Raquel stabbed her hands with the wire and then pulled them up from the steel barbs and showed them to me, bleeding like … I d
on’t know like what, because I don’t know and don’t want to know how to compare Raquel Mendes-Alemán’s beautiful hands with anything, those hands made to touch my body the way she touched the pages of a book or played a Schubert impromptu or touched my arm to warm herself when we walked together during the winter along the Freiburg streets: now her hands were bleeding like Christ’s wounds, and that was what she was showing me, don’t look at my face, look at my hands, don’t feel sorrow for my body, feel compassion for my hands, George, have pity, friend … Thanks for my destiny. Thanks for Havana.
The Nazi commandant who was with us, hiding with a smile the alarm and annoyance Raquel’s act had made him feel, said, fatuously: “See? That story about Buchenwald’s fences being electrified is false.”
“Take care of her hands. Look how they’re bleeding, Herr Kommandant.”
“She touched the barbed wire because she wanted to.”
“Because she’s free?”
“That’s right. That’s right. You said the right thing.”
4.
“I’m weak. You’re all I have left. That’s why I came to Lanzarote.”
“I’m weak.”
They made their way back to the monastery at nightfall. On this night, above all others, Jorge wanted to return to the religious community and confess his carnal weakness. Laura, in her reencounter with Jorge’s body, felt the man’s newness, as if their bodies had never been joined before, as if this time Laura had become flesh as an exception, only to look like herself, and he only to show himself naked to her.
“What are you thinking about?”
“About God advising us to do what He will not allow. To imitate Christ!”
“It isn’t that He doesn’t allow it. It’s that He makes it difficult.”
“I imagine God saying to me all the time, ‘I hate in you the same thing that you’ve hated in others.’”
“Which is?”
He was living here, half protected, indecisive, not knowing if he wanted complete, certain physical and spiritual salvation or risk that would give value to the security. This is why he walked every morning from the monastery to the cabin and back every afternoon, from exposure to refuge, glaring, without so much as blinking, at the Guardia Civil, who had gotten used to him, greeted him, he worked with the brothers, a servant, a minor figure of no importance.
He went from one stone house to the other in the landscape of stone. He imagined a sky of stone and a stone sea, in Lanzarote.
“All day long you’ve been asking me if I believe in God or not, if I’ve recovered the faith of my Catholic culture, my childhood faith—”
“And you haven’t answered me.”
“Why did I become Republican and anticlerical? Because of the hypocrisy and crimes of the Catholic Church, its support for the rich and powerful, its alliance with the pharisees and against Jesus, its disdain for the humble and defenseless, even though it preached exactly the opposite. Did you see the books I have in the cabin?”
“St. John of the Cross and that copy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz we bought together on Tacuba Street … they’re like brother and sister, because he’s a saint and she isn’t. She was humiliated, silenced, her books and poems were taken away, even her paper, ink, and pen.”
“You should take a look at a volume that’s just come out in France. One of the brothers gave it to me. Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil, a Jew converted to Christianity. Read it. She’s an extraordinary philosopher who can actually tell us we should never think about someone we love and from whom we’re separated without imagining that person dead … She does an incredible reading of Homer. She says the Iliad teaches three lessons: never admire power, never disdain those who suffer, and never hate your enemies. Nothing is exempt from fate. She died during the war. Of tuberculosis and hunger, especially hunger, because she refused to eat more than the rations given her Jewish brothers and sisters in the Nazi camps. But she did it as a Christian, in the name of Jesus.”
Jorge Maura stopped for a moment before the black and furrowed earth within sight of Timanfaya. The mountain was a blazing red, like a gospel of fire.
5.
I pardoned all the crimes of history because they were venial sins next to this crime: doing the impossible evil. That’s what the Nazis did. They showed that the unimaginable evil was not only imaginable but possible. With them around, all the centuries of crimes of political power, of churches, armies, and princes fled my memory. What they had done could be imagined. What the Nazis did could not. Until then I thought evil existed but wouldn’t let itself be seen and tried to hide, or presented itself as a necessary means for attaining a good end. You remember that was how Domingo Vidal thought of Stalin’s crimes, as the means to a good end, and besides, they were based on a theory of collective good, Marxism. And Basilio Baltazar sought only the freedom of human beings by any means, by abolishing power, bosses, hierarchies.
Nazism, however, was evil proclaimed out loud, announcing proudly, “I am Evil. I am perfect Evil. I am visible Evil. I am Evil and proud of it. I justify nothing but extermination in the name of Evil. The death of Evil by the hand of Evil. Death as violence and only violence and nothing more than violence, without any redemption and without the weakness of a justification.”
I want to see that woman, I said to the commandant of Buchenwald.
No, you’re mistaken, the woman you named is not here, never has been.
Raquel Mendes-Alemán. That’s her name. I just saw her on the other side of the barbed wire.
No, that woman doesn’t exist.
You have killed her already?
Be careful. Don’t go too far.
She let herself be seen by me and for that you killed her? Because she saw me and recognized me?
No. She doesn’t exist. There’s no record of her. Don’t complicate things. After all, you’re here only because of a gracious concession by the Reich. So you can see how well treated our prisoners are. It isn’t the Hotel Adlon, to be sure, but if you’d come on a Sunday, you’d have seen the prisoners’ orchestra. They played the overture to Parsifal. A Christian opera, did you know that?
I demand to see the registry of prisoners.
The registry?
Don’t play dumb. You people are very orderly. I want to see the registry.
A page in the M’s had been hastily torn out, Laura. They’re so precise, so well organized, they’d allowed the torn binding to show where the page was missing, with the edges rough and jagged like the cliffs on Lanzarote’s mountains.
I never learned anything more about Raquel Mendes-Alemán.
When the war was over, I went back to Buchenwald, but the corpses in the common graves were no longer what they had been, and the cremated bodies became powder for the wigs of Goethe and Schiller, shaking hands in Weirmar, Athens of the North, where Cranach and Bach and Franz Lizst worked. None of those men would ever have invented the motto the Nazis placed over the entrance to the concentration camp. Not the well-known Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You Free, but something infinitely worse: Jedem das Seine, You Get What You Deserve. Raquel. I want to remember her on the prow of the Prinz Eugen anchored in Havana harbor, when I offered to marry her to save her from the holocaust. I want to remember Raquel.
No, she looked at me with her eyes deep as a night of omens, why should I be the exception, the privileged individual?
Her words sufficed, for me, to sum up my whole experience in this half century, which was going to be the paradise of progress and instead was the hell of degradation. Not only the age of fascist and Stalinist horror but of the horror that those who fought against evil could not save themselves from, no one was exempted, Laura! not the English who hid rice from the Bengalis so they wouldn’t have the will to revolt and join Japan during the war, not the Islamic merchants who collaborated with them, not the English who broke the legs of rebels who wanted national independence and refused medical care, not the French who collaborated in Nazi genocide or who cried out
against the German occupation but considered the French occupation of Algeria, of Indochina, of Senegal a divine right, not the Americans who kept all the Caribbean and Central American dictators in power with their jails overflowing and their beggars in the streets as long as they supported the United States. Who was saved? Those who lynched blacks, or the blacks who were executed, jailed, forbidden to drink or urinate next to a white in Mississippi, land of Faulkner?
“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.