Remember, with a drop of tenderness,
ELZEVIR ALMONTE
That weekend, Basilio Baltazar rented a car, and the two of them drove to Cuernavaca, Laura and her old friend the Spanish anarchist.
19.
Cuernavaca: 1952
LAURA DOVE into the pool, framed in bougainvillea, and didn’t surface until she reached the far end. On the side, a large group of foreign men and women were chatting, the majority Americans, a few in bathing suits but most of them dressed, the women in full skirts and “Mexican-style” short-sleeved blouses with flower-embroidered bodices, the men in short-sleeved shirts and summer slacks, most of them getting their feet used to huaraches, all of them, every single one of them, holding a drink, all of them guests of the splendid English Communist Fredric Bell, whose house in Cuernavaca had become a sanctuary for the victims of McCarthyite persecution in the United States.
Bell’s wife, Ruth, was an American who balanced the high, dry irony of her British husband with an earthy coarseness, close to the soil, as if she were dragging along her roots in the Chicago slums where she was born. She was a woman from the Great Lakes and immense prairies who by chance had been born on the asphalt of the “big-shouldered city,” in Carl Sandburg’s words. Ruth’s shoulders easily carried her husband, Fredric, and her husband’s friends, she was Sancho Panza to Fredric, the tall, slim Englishman with blue eyes, clear brow, and thin, completely white hair surrounding his freckled skull.
“A Quixote of lost causes,” Basilio Baltazar told Laura.
Ruth had the strength of a steel die, from the tips of her bare toes on the grass to her curly, short gray hair.
“Almost all of them are directors and screenwriters,” Basilio went on as he drove along the recently opened highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, which reduced the trip to only forty-five minutes, “a few professors, but mostly movie people.”
“You’re safe, then, you’re in the minority.” Laura smiled. She had a kerchief tied over her head against the wind blowing over the MG convertible that García Ascot, a Republican poet exiled in Mexico, had lent to his friend Basilio.
“Can you see me as a professor, teaching Spanish literature to proper young ladies at Vassar?” asked Basilio maliciously, as he steered smoothly around the highway curves.
“Is that where you met this gang of reds?”
“No. On the side, I moonlight on weekends—extra, unpaid work at the New School for Social Research in New York. The students there are workers, older people who had no time to get an education. That’s where I met a lot of the people you’re going to meet today.”
She wanted to ask a favor of Basilio, that he not treat her with pity, that he simply relegate the past that both knew to a tranquil, silent memory, the past whose pains and joys leave their marks on our bodies.
“You’re still a beautiful woman.”
“I’m over fifty. A bit.”
“Well, there are women twenty years younger than you who wouldn’t be seen in a one piece bathing suit.”
“I love swimming. I was born next to a lake and grew up on the seacoast.”
Good manners did not let the group take overt notice of her when she dove into the pool, but when she came out, Laura noticed the curious, approving, smiling glances of the gringos gathered for dinner that Saturday in Cuernavaca at the house of the Communist Fredric Bell, and she also saw, as if in a Diego Rivera mural or a King Vidor film, the “crowd,” the simultaneously collective and singular combination of people, appreciated it, knowing that this group of people was united by one thing, persecution, but that each had managed to save his or her individuality. They weren’t a “mass,” no matter how much they believed in such a thing; there was pride in their eyes, in the way they stood, held a glass, or raised their chins, a way of being themselves, which impressed Laura, the visible awareness of wounded dignity and the time needed to regain it. This was an asylum for political convalescents.
She knew something about their stories. Basilio had told her more on the trip, that they had to believe in their own individuality because to transform them into enemies the persecutors had tried first to turn them into a herd, a red flock, lambs of Communism, and then to strip away their singularity.
“Did you go to the tribute to Dimitri Shostakovich at the Waldorf-Astoria?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know that he is a prominent figure in Soviet propaganda?”
“All I know is that he’s a great composer.”
“We’re not talking about music here but about subversion.”
“Senator, are you saying that Shostakovich’s music turns the people who listen to it into Communists?”
“Exactly. That’s my conviction as an American patriot. It’s obvious to this committee that you don’t share this conviction.”
“I’m as American as you are.”
“But your heart’s in Moscow.”
(We’re very sorry. You cannot work for us anymore. Our company cannot get involved in controversies.)
“Is it true that you scheduled a festival of Charlie Chaplin movies on your television station?”
“Certainly. Chaplin is a great comic artist.”
“A poor, tragic artist, you mean. He’s a Communist.”
“Possibly. But that has nothing to do with his films.”
“Don’t play dumb with us. The red message gets through without anyone’s realizing it.”
“But, Senator, Chaplin made those silent films before 1917.”
“What happened in 1917?”
“The Soviet Revolution.”
“Well, Charlie Chaplin isn’t only a Communist, he paved the way for the Russian Revolution, that’s what you want to show, a manual for insurrection disguised as comedy …”
(We’re very sorry. The company cannot approve your programming. Our sponsors have threatened to withdraw their support if you go on showing subversive films.)
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
“Yes. So are or have been the fourteen veterans who are with me here before this committee. They were all maimed in the war.”
“The red brigade, ha-ha.”
“We fought in the Pacific for the United States.”
“You fought for the Russians.”
“They were our allies, Senator. But we only killed Japanese.”
“Well, the war’s over. You can go live in Moscow and be happy.”
“We’re loyal Americans, Senator.”
“Prove it. Give the committee the names of other Communists.”
( … in the armed forces, in the State Department, but especially in the movies, in radio, in the new medium of television: the congressional inquisitors loved above all else to investigate movie people, rub elbows with them, appear in photos with Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, who all named names, or with Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, who had the courage to denounce the inquisitors … )
“That was the tactic: strip away our individuality and turn us into either enemies or collaborators, scapegoats or squealers. That was the crime of McCarthyism.”
Laura’s head emerged from the water, and she saw the group around the pool and thought her own thoughts, and for that reason was surprised that she noticed a small man with narrow shoulders, a sad expression, thin hair, and a face so carefully shaven that it looked erased, as if every morning the blade took away his features, which would spend the rest of the day struggling to be reborn and recognized. A loose-fitting, sleeveless khaki shirt and loose trousers of the same color held up by a snakeskin belt of the kind sold in tropical markets where everything is put to use. He was barefoot. His naked feet caressed the grass.
She got out of the pool without taking her eyes off him, although he wasn’t looking at her—or anyone else … Now Laura was out of the water. No one paid attention to her matronly nakedness, more than fifty years old but still attractive.
Tall and right-angled, Laura since childhood had had that impulsive and defiant profile, not a little rosebud nose; from childhood had had those almost golden eyes submerged in a veil of shadows, as if age itself were a veil some people are born with, though it’s almost always acquired; had had the thin lips of a Memling madonna, as if she’d never been visited by the angel with the sword that divides the upper lip and banishes oblivion at birth.
“That’s an old Jewish legend,” said Ruth, mixing a new pitcher of martinis. “When we’re born, an angel comes down from heaven with his sword, strikes us between the tips of our noses and our upper lips, and makes this split, which is otherwise inexplicable.” Here Ruth scratched an imaginary mustache, like that of the proto-Communist Chaplin, with an unpolished fingernail. “But according to the legend, he also makes us forget everything we knew before we were born, all the deep memory within the womb, including our parents’ secrets and our grandparents’ triumphs.” “Salud!” said the matriarch of the Cuernavaca tribe in Spanish—a title Laura bestowed on her then and there, as she laughingly told Basilio. Basilio agreed completely. Ruth couldn’t not be like that, and the others wouldn’t admit they needed her. But who doesn’t need a mama? Basilio smiled. Especially if every weekend she prepares a bottomless bowl of spaghetti.
“The witch-hunters publish a rag called Red Channels. They justify themselves by invoking their equally vigilant patriotism and anti-Communism. But neither they nor their publication would prosper if there weren’t denunciations. They began a feverish search for people who could be implicated, sometimes for reasons as far-fetched as listening to Shostakovich or seeing a Chaplin film. Being denounced by Red Channels was the beginning, and the persecution would continue with letters to the suspect’s employers, threatening publicity against the guilty company, intimidating telephone calls to the victim—all culminating in a summons to appear before Congress from the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
“You were going to say something about a mother, Basilio.”
“Ask anyone here about Mady Christians.”
“Mady Christians was an Austrian actress who had the lead in a very famous play, I Remember Mama,” said a man with heavy tortoiseshell glasses. “She taught drama at New York University, but her obsession was protecting political refugees and people displaced by the war.”
“She offered to protect us Spanish exiles,” recalled Basilio. “That’s how I met her. A very beautiful woman, about forty, very blond, with the profile of a Nordic goddess and a look in her eye that said, I won’t give up.”
“She also protected us German writers expelled by the Nazis,” added a man with a square jaw and lifeless eyes. “She created a Committee for the Protection of Those Born Abroad. These were crimes that justified Red Channels’ denouncing her as a Soviet agent.”
“Mady Christians.” Basilio Baltazar smiled fondly. “I saw her before she died. She would be visited by detectives who wouldn’t identify themselves. She got anonymous calls. Hardly anyone offered her parts. One television company did telephone her, but the investigators did their work, and the company withdrew their offer, though they did agree to pay her a fee. How can anyone live with that fear, that uncertainty? So the defender of exiles became an internal exile. ‘This is incredible,’ she managed to say before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty. The playwright Elmer Rice said at her funeral that she represented America’s generosity, that in return she received calumny, persecution, unemployment, and illness. ‘It’s no use appealing to the McCarthyites’ conscience, because they have none.’”
Many pasts were reunited in Fredric Bell’s house, and as she made visit after visit, at first with Basilio but later alone when the anarchist professor had gone back to the virginal order of Vassar College, Laura began to sort out the stories she heard, trying to separate real experience from the wounded justifications, unnecessary or urgent. All of that.
To say there were many different pasts was also to say there were many different personal origins, and among the weekend guests, many of whom were living in Cuernavaca, the Central European Jews were notable—they were the oldest, and they’d gather in circles, husbands and wives together, to tell each other stories about a past that seemed historical but that was barely more than a half century of life. (That’s how quickly U.S. history goes, said Basilio.) They would laugh sometimes as they noted they’d been born in neighboring villages in Poland or just a few miles from the border between Hungary and Bessarabia.
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?