I was sorry for another reason. By comparing the army to cops and hired assassins, I had insulted it unnecessarily, I thought to myself, just because I was playing around, just because I, too, was a provocateur. But as always happens with me, the more I swore I wouldn’t get involved in politics, the more politics got involved with me.
“You were very critical of what happened in ’68, I know,” he said, wiping the pork-rump sauce off his lips.
“I didn’t say even half of what I wanted to,” I answered, now out of control, all but foaming at the mouth.
“Tell your girlfriend to be careful,” said the Mexican samurai, suddenly transformed into a genuine warlord, owner of the lives gathered that evening around his will, his whim, his mystery.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Tell your girlfriend to be careful? Is that what the general said? As if to remove any doubts, Cedillo then did what I feared he’d do: he looked at Diana. He stared directly at her, with no disguise, no reticence, a savage glint in his eyes, where I discerned, along with terror, lust, and death, an instinct tamed for centuries the more easily to leap on its prey, a prey already overwhelmed in that “right moment” the general had mentioned when we talked about 1968. He wanted her, he was threatening her, he hated me—he hated both of us, Diana and me. The commander’s eyes communicated to us in that moment an intense social hatred, an implacable class opposition, a resentment I felt in waves, and the intensity of that soldier’s stare (usually veiled) communicated it to the others at the table—the mayor, the governor, the local bigwigs, the bodyguards. Those brutes watched Cedillo like people receiving the Host at Communion who feel their bodies and souls full of the Lord. They stirred, moved around, regrouped, advanced slightly, raised their hands to the secret guns in their armpits—until the general’s eyelids lowered and the order to stand at ease was conveyed to them by those eyes so accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed without hesitation, from afar, blindly, if it came to that.
It was like being caught in a sudden undertow; the tide went out, the instant of tension went no further, the bodyguards went back to smoking and standing around in Masonic circles, the governor, the idiot, played the fool, the mayor ordered the coffee served. But within me the alarm the general aroused continued. His threat hadn’t dissipated; I knew it would be with me, much to my regret, for the rest of my time in Santiago, screwing up my love, my work, my tranquillity …
“Don’t get involved in anything in Mexico,” I told Diana after I had used her as an excuse to say good-bye. She had a 5:00 a.m. call, so we rose and slowly left the patio. “You get involved, and you’ll never get out of it.”
She gave me a determined look, as if I’d insulted her by recommending caution.
I was pleased to see the group of students in a corner of the patio and to realize I could easily tell them apart from the bodyguards. There was no way to confuse the two. Carlos Ortiz was very different from the general and his bodyguards. Knowing the students were different and new saved the evening for me—perhaps they themselves were saved … Even so, my anxiety about Diana because of what the general said prevailed over any desire for satisfaction. What did he mean? How could a Hollywood actress bother, interfere with, provoke a general in the Mexican Army?
“Did you sense how heavy the atmosphere was?” I said to Diana.
“Yes. But I didn’t understand the reason for it. Did you?”
“No. Me neither.”
“We made them jealous because we love each other.” Then the woman laughed a beautiful laugh.
“That’s it. Yes. No doubt about it.”
The words of General Agustín Cedillo reverberated in my head. “Tell your girlfriend to be careful. Whenever you like, come by at two and have lunch with me at the club. Right here in Central Square.”
XX
To respond properly to the gift of the Italian toothpaste and to excuse myself for my attitude toward the shepherd boy, I went out one boring, blazing afternoon to find a present for Diana. The streets of Santiago were abysmally solitary during the afternoon; a leaden sun slammed against the benches, and there were few trees or awnings to provide shade. I felt tired and dizzy after walking ten blocks. I leaned against an ocote-pine-paneled door, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of a cave filled with treasure. It was an antique shop that, for provincial reasons I could not discern, had no sign.
There are restaurants like that in Oaxaca, bookstores in Guadalajara, bars in Guanajuato that don’t tell what they are. They believe, I imagine, that advertising isn’t needed to lure their clientele. These secret places in Mexico feel that the crowds brought in by publicity would only cheapen the quality of what they offer, and then they would have to satisfy the taste of the least common denominator. The truth is that there is a secret country within Mexico that does not advertise itself, that only tradition knows and recognizes. There, cuisines, legends, memories, conversations—everything that disappears, evaporated, the moment neon light blares it—gestate and continue.
There was lots of turn-of-the-century furniture. Families, when they modernized, when they emigrated from the province to the capital, abandoned these fin de siècle marvels: wicker armchairs, pier glasses, marble-topped dressers, wash-stands, genre paintings—hunting scenes, still lifes … The owner of the shop came over to me. He was a mestizo with slanty eyes, wearing a striped shirt with no collar or tie, although his vest was crossed by a valuable gold watch chain. I smiled and asked if business was going well. “I keep things,” he said. “I keep things from turning into dust.”
“May I look around?”
“Make yourself at home.”
I found an easel piled with posters and badly neglected engravings. I have no idea how posters for the Normandie, with its marvelous Art Deco lines, ended up there, even if I could imagine how the ones for the M-G-M films I had seen as a boy in the Iris theater in Mexico City—Mutiny on the Bounty, The Good Earth, Marie Antoinette—might have …
My fingers touched a sturdy wrinkled paper that had suffered much less than the posters. I smelled or sensed something in that touch and very carefully extracted it from the nest of forgotten colors. It was a Posada. An etching by José Guadalupe Posada, lost in that shop, well preserved, with the printer’s address: Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, No. 1 Santa Teresa Street, 1906. I extracted it as if I were in the Albertina in Vienna touching a Lucas Cranach etching. I’m not mistaken in my comparison. There is a relation, distant but certain, between the German painter of the sixteenth century and this artist of the Mexican provinces who died in 1913. They’re linked by a long dance of death, a galliard that goes its implacable way, weaving bodies together, day after day adding treasures to humanity’s most abundant wealth, death.
Clean, direct, savage, refined, Posada brought a message. A lady dressed in black with a train to her skirt, revolver in hand, had just murdered another lady, also dressed in black with a train to her skirt and also with a pistol in her hand. Obviously, the first lady had gotten the drop on the second. But the murderess had turned her back on an open balcony and to the light of the sun, as if the promise of her crime were, despite everything, life. The murdered woman, on the other hand, was imprisoned by a serpent whose coils were suffocating her, making the viewer doubt whether in fact she’d been murdered by her presumptive rival or whether Posada was depicting—as he did in other pictures, with a serpent wrapped tightly around a woman’s body, braiding her—an epileptic.
In any case, behind her opened the jaws of a devouring toothy monster that in fact was the entrance to a circus. Flying out of that open mouth were bats and demons, souls in torment, succubi and incubi: a whole carnival of malignant dreams, a nightmare that transformed the murder of an elegant woman dressed in black into one that would be its double, a Mardi Gras of sickness, death, laughter, gambling, news, all mixed together …
The little man with the golden chain asked so little money that I was about to give him twice as much, as a gift. I didn’t, because he would have taken offe
nse. I waited until after dinner to give my present to Diana. But she was tired that night and fell asleep early. I read for a while and then followed her. Tomorrow I’d give her the present. Then I woke up with a shock, and she was sitting next to me, trembling.
“Diana, what’s the matter?”
“I was dreaming.”
I looked at her in silence. She told me this: A woman dressed in black shot her to death. Diana, also dressed in black, was falling, mortally wounded, though the instantaneous death was accompanied by convulsions.
“What else?”
“That’s all.”
“Wasn’t there a snake wrapped around you?”
“What are you talking about? The most important thing, I want you to know, was the sky, a little piece of sky that you could see through the window.”
“The murderess had her back to the open balcony.”
“How do you know?”
Diana’s dream upset me so much that I made the mistake of going too far, of asking her if there was also, behind her, a horrible mouth filled with vampires.
“No. Not even that snake around me. You can skip the Freud for Beginners, okay? I told you I don’t want a biographical chicken with Freudian dressing. I told you that before. When you hear someone say ‘poor country girl devoured by instant success,’ don’t believe it. Don’t believe the story of the innocent girl abused by the tyrannical Teutonic director. Only believe in the images of me that you take away from our relationship.”
“You yourself give me so many, I don’t have to invent anything.”
“Then don’t believe anything about me.”
XXI
I decided not to play along with her irrational manias—the bathroom door always closed, the window curtains always open in expectation of moonlight pouring in on a snowy landscape. Her accusation annoyed me: “You have no imagination.” Actually, what I wanted was for us to share the imagination of the future instead of that morbid imagination of a past in which I didn’t figure. There was pride in that, but also fear, fear that Diana’s memory would enslave me and that we would both lose in a morbid reconstruction of irrecoverable moments.
It seemed strange to me to be in such a position, a Mexican supposedly loaded down with too much past, she a mid-western gringa supposedly devoid of memory. Was that why she wanted to invent for herself a treasure chest of memories, a true mnemonic treasure, inviting me to re-create it with her? No doubt about it. But at that moment I was living through a crisis of power with regard to women, a crisis precipitated by vanity and caprice. It excluded the vanity and caprice of women, eliminated them and occasionally eliminated the women, too, if they didn’t obey my desire for them to eliminate their own caprices.
Once I went to Taxco with a rich Mexican girl who complained about the hotel room. It seemed too low-class to her. I told her she was an intolerable rich brat, incapable of adapting to circumstances and devoid of fantasy or the spirit of adventure, but what I was really saying was: Just count yourself lucky that I actually brought you along for the weekend. I decided no Mexican woman was going to gain power over me through whim, vanity, pride. I’d always be one step ahead of them; I’d give them a dose of their own medicine. They’d hurt me too much when I was young. They were weak, vain, easy to convince when their parents crossed me off the eligible-bachelor list just because I had no money and my rivals did. Now that they were after me, I paid them back in kind, knowing all along that I was hurting myself more than I was hurting them. By denying Diana that share of her imagination which she demanded, I was letting myself be swept along by the inertia of my previous loves. She was no spoiled Mexican brat, and I was committing a serious error with an exceptional woman.
I quickly tried to make up for it, letting her know that I would bow to her desire to close the bathroom door and to imagine a snowy moonlit night. She was puzzled by my attitude, annoyed sometimes. She begged me to close the door. But she berated me scornfully for not helping her recover her lost imagination. That confirmed for me a basic Hispano-Arab conviction: in the harem it is not the eunuch who rules but the sultan. Diana would become terribly weak and sweet when she begged me please to leave the bathroom door closed, and I would feel guilty for not acceding to her wish. Perhaps I saw in her pleas something that always annoyed the hell out of me: someone giving me orders, especially orders about order.
I always had a good relationship with my father, a very good relationship, except on that one point. I loved to infuriate him with my disorder. He was the son of a German woman and was proud of his punctuality, his refined devotion to order. His closets, his papers, and his schedule were all examples of a well-ordered life. I piled papers on my desk, left my dirty shirts on the floor, and one day, right before his eyes, I put on my shoes and then tugged and pulled my trousers over them. The spectacle horrified and disgusted him. But it also aroused a tenderness in him I would never have expected. He saw my weakness. He accepted it. He forgave me. He never again gave me an order, and I never again took one from anybody. I organized my life around my work so as to be independent or, in any case, to choose my dependencies with a certain freedom. And my physical disorder became a motive for mental order. In the chaos of my work papers, books, and letters, I always know—and only I know—where things are. As if I had radar in my head, my hand shoots directly to the Leaning Tower of Paper and instantly finds exactly what it seeks. Sometimes the tower collapses, but the object is never lost.
Emotions, unlike papers, refuse to be catalogued in order or disorder. They challenge us to find their form—only to disappear like the perfume of certain flowers that seems to be the most fixed, the most real thing in the world and yet has no more form than the rose or iris from which it emanates. We know, of course, that the form of the rose is not its scent, but in effect, its scent is a phantom similar to emotions, which are the realest but least apprehensible things in the world. I punished myself mentally for my mistakes in dealing with a woman like Diana Soren, allowing myself to slide on the little sled of my domestic loves. I convinced myself that she was giving me passion and tenderness, and I was too lucky not to realize the privilege it was to love her, even if that meant giving in, if necessary, to her whims and imaginings.
Another night, she woke up agitated. She told me she’d imagined herself entering a salon she expected to find full of people. From far off, she could hear the conversations, the laughter, the music, even the tinkle of glasses. But when she walked in, no one was there. She heard only the rustle of a long skirt, as of taffeta. She began to shout so she’d be heard outside. She woke; I thought about the Posada I’d given her.
XXII
Diana’s whims and nocturnal frights lulled me into inattention. If I heard her stirring at night, I ignored it. If she got out of bed, still half asleep I would imagine her opening curtains and closing doors. When she appeared in my dreams, she was wearing black, standing opposite a balcony while another woman, identically dressed, shot her.
But there was no music in this catalog of grotesque images. Everything occurred during long silences punctuated by the shots. One night Diana’s voice, far off and odd, was chanting something in a voice that wasn’t her own, as if another, far-off, maybe even dead voice had come back to possess hers, taking advantage of the night to recover a presence lost in oblivion, death, the usury of time.
The sensation was so strange, so alarming that I focused all my attention on it, clearing the cobwebs from my head to hear and see her clearly. That night the full moon was indeed pouring in through the open window like a huge white embrace: Diana was sitting next to it wearing her white baby-dolls, whispering a song I soon identified. It was one of Tina Turner’s early hits, a song called “Remake Me” or “Make Me Over.”
Diana had something in her hands; she was singing to an object. Of course—the telephone, I admitted with pain and instant jealousy, banishing the image of a woman perturbed by the full moon, a forlorn she-wolf howling to the goddess of the night: Artemis, her nemesis; Di
ana, her namesake.
If the flash of pain told me first that she was insane, the stab of jealousy quickly put me on notice: she was singing to someone … Should I break up this melodrama with a scene of my own, a jealous, furious scene? Caution overcame honor, and curiosity prevailed over both. Neither Hamlet nor Othello, that night I was just Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, interested more in knowing what was happening than in stopping or ignoring it. If I didn’t proceed carefully, I’d never know what was going on … I opened Pandora’s box.
I pretended to be asleep. I stopped listening to her. After a while, I felt her warm body next to mine, but it was strangely distant and she didn’t feel around with her feet for mine that night, as she did on others …
How long could I control my desire to know to whom Diana was talking at three in the morning, to whom she was singing Tina Turner songs over the telephone? Because, beginning that night, she talked every night, sitting in a pool of light shed by the waning moon, in a distant and at first incomprehensible voice (another voice, imitated or possessive; Diana, owner of a mimic’s voice, or the mimic’s voice possessing Diana, I don’t know which) that became louder as the moon died, more audible, passing from the lyrics of “Remake Me” to sentences not sung but spoken in that same deep, velvety voice, which wasn’t Diana’s. Her normal voice came from above, from her clear eyes, or maybe even from her lovely soft white breasts; this nocturnal voice came from her guts, her ovaries, maybe even from her solar plexus. She was saying things I couldn’t understand without knowing the question or answer to which they were directed on the other end of the line, wherever that might be …
I remembered the Capitano toothpaste sent from Italy and imagined long-distance communication with who knows what place on the globe. Impossible to guess; all I heard, with ever-increasing unease, was Diana’s different voice and the inexplicable words “Who takes care of me?”