Laura Díaz told Jorge she wanted to be everything with him, share everything, know everything, that she was in love with him, madly in love.
Jorge Maura’s expression did not change when he heard her declaration, and Laura did not understand if it was part of his seriousness to listen to her without a word or if the hidalgo was only pausing before beginning his story. Perhaps a bit of both. He wanted her to listen before making any decisions.
“I swear I’ll die if I don’t know everything about you,” she ventured in turn.
Thinking about Spain locked him within himself. He said that Spain for the Spaniards is like Mexico for Mexicans, a painful obsession. Not a hymn of optimism, as their country is for Americans, not a phlegmatic joke as it is for the English, not a sentimental madness (Russians), not a reasonable irony (French), not an aggressive command, as Germans see theirs, but a conflict of halves, of opposed parts, of tugs at the soul-Spain and Mexico, countries of light and shadow.
He began by telling stories, with no commentary, while the two of them strolled among the hedges and pines of the Parque de la Lama. The first thing he told her was how shocked he was at the resemblance between Mexico and Castile. Why had the Spaniards chosen a plateau so like Castile as the site of their first and principal viceroyalty in the New World?
He was looking at the dry land, the gray brown mountains, the snowy peaks, the cold transparent air, the desolation of the roads, the burros and bare feet, the women dressed in black and covered with shawls, the dignity of the beggars, the beauty of the children, the floral compensation and culinary abundance of two countries dying of hunger. He visited the oases, like this one, of refreshing vegetation, and he felt that he hadn’t changed places, or that he was ubiquitous, and not only physically but. historically because being born Spanish or Mexican transforms experience into destiny.
He loved her and wanted her to know everything about him. Everything about the war and how he lived it. He was a soldier. He obeyed orders. But he rebelled first, the better to obey later on. Because of his social origin, the government first thought to use him on diplomatic missions. He was a descendant of the first reform minister at the turn of the century, Antonio Maura y Montaner; he’d been a disciple of Ortega y Gasset; he’d graduated from the University of Freiburg in Germany: he wanted first to live the war in order to know the truth and then to defend it and negotiate for it if necessary, but first to know it. The truth of experience first. The truth of conclusions later. Experience and conclusion, he told Laura, those are perhaps the complete truth, until the conclusion itself is negated by other experiences.
“I don’t know. I have an immense faith and an immense doubt at the same time. I think certitude is the goal of thought. And I always fear that any system we help to build will end up destroying us. It isn’t easy.”
He fought in the battles at the Jarama River during the winter of 1937. What did he recall of those days? Physical sensations above all. The mist that came out of your mouth. The frozen wind that emptied your eyes. Where are we? That’s the most disconcerting thing in war. You don’t know exactly where you are. A soldier doesn’t carry a map in his head. I didn’t know where I was. We were ordered to execute flanking movements, advances into nothingness, then to scatter so the bombs wouldn’t kill us. That was the biggest confusion in battle. Cold and hunger were constant. The people were always different. It was hard to fix a face or a phrase beyond the day you saw or heard it. Which is why I decided to concentrate on a single person, so the war would have a face, but above all to have company. In order not to be alone in the war. So alone.
I remember I saw a pretty girl one day wearing blue overalls. She had the face of a nun, but she shouted the worst obscenities I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ll always remember her because I never saw her again. Her hair was so black it seemed as blue as midnight. Her thick eyebrows met in a frown of rage. She had a bandage on her nose, and not even that would hide her profile-like that of a wild eagle. But her constant litany of insults camouflaged the prayer she recited silently. Of that I was so convinced that I communicated it to her with my eyes. She understood, got upset, spouted a couple of curses at me, and I answered “Amen.” She was as white as a nun who’s never seen the sun and had whiskers like the women of Galicia. She was pretty for all that, because of all that. Her language was a challenge, not only to the fascists but to death itself. Franco and death were a couple, two big sons of bitches. Sometimes the image of the beautiful woman with the pale blue overalls and the night-blue hair threatens to fade. He laughed. I needed someone as different from her as you are to remember her today. No, both of you were or are tall women.
But she was on her way to the Guadarramas, and I was entrenched at the Jarama. I remember the boys along the highways holding up their fists, serious and squinting into the sun, all with the face of memory. (Do you know that the orphans sent from Guernica to French and English homes scream and cry every time they hear a plane fly over?) Afterward I only remember sad, abandoned places that people passed through very quickly.
Next to a swift, yellow river.
Inside a moist cave full of stalagmites and labyrinths.
Hugging cold and hunger.
The Luftwaffe bombings began.
We knew the Germans didn’t bomb military objectives.
They wanted to keep them intact for Franco.
The Stukas attacked cities and civilians, which caused more destruction and discouragement than blowing up a bridge.
That’s why it was safer to rest on a bridge.
The objective was Guernica.
To teach a lesson.
Making war on the general populace.
Where are we?
Who won?
It doesn’t matter: who survived?
Jorge Maura clasped Laura D az. “Laura, we were mistaken in our historical moment. I don’t want to admit anything that would break our faith…”
The International Brigades began to arrive. General Mola was besieging Madrid with four columns outside the city and his “fifth column” of spies and traitors inside. What invigorated the resistance was the influx of refugees fleeing Franco. The capital was full of them. That was when people starting singing “Madrid, how well you resist” and “The women of Madrid use fascist bombs for curlers.” It wasn’t absolutely true. There were lots of Franco supporters in the city. Half of Madrid had voted against the Popular Front in 1936. And the “tours” made by Republican thugs who went around murdering fascists, priests, and nuns had reduced sympathy for the Republic. I think the arrival of refugees was the greatest defense of Madrid. And if it wasn’t the ladies’ hair curlers, it was a certain suicidal but elegant challenge that set the tone. Writers had taken refuge in a theater, and Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León organized dances in the darkness every night to help dissipate the fear sown by the Luftwaffe. I was one of them, and besides the Spaniards there were many Spanish Americans there: Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and the Mexican painter Siqueiros, who’d given himself the rank of “super-colonel” and who had himself followed around by a shoeshine boy so his cavalry boots could be kept polished. Neruda was slow and sleepy, like an ocean; Vallejo carried hollow-eyed death shrouded under his eyelids. Paz had eyes bluer than the sky, and Siqueiros was a military parade all by himself. We all dressed up in theater costumes from classic Spanish plays like Don Juan, The Leandras, The Vengeance of Don Mendo, and The Mayor of Zalamea. A little bit of everything, all of us dancing on a Madrid rooftop under the bombs, unintentionally illuminated by the German Stukas, drinking champagne. What madness, what joy, what kind of party was that, Laura? Is it risible, reprehensible, or magnificent that a group of poets and painters celebrate life in the midst of death, tell the solemn cloistered enemy attacking us from above to go to hell with his infinite fascist reactionary gloom and his eternal list of prohibitions: purity of blood, purity of religion, sexual purity?