I knew it sure wasn’t me. She wasn’t asking me to take care of her. But she was asking someone else, maybe more than one someone else. A lover, her parents, her husband, with whom she maintained a close and affectionate relationship (three in the morning in Mexico, midday in Paris)? But I knew that the woman talking wasn’t Diana. She said it clearly. One night she was saying, I’m Tina; another, I’m Aretha; another I’m Billie … I understood the allusions, in retrospect. Billie Holiday was the Our Lady of Sorrows of jazz singers, our voice of every grief, the voice which we dare not listen to in ourselves but which she takes on in our name, like a black, feminine Christ, a crucified Christ to bear all our sins:
Got the moon above me
But no one to love me
Lover man, where can you be?
Aretha Franklin was the joyful voice of the soul, the grand, collective ceremony of redemption, a renewed, purifying baptism that peels off our used-up, worn-out names and gives us new ones, clean and shining.
A woman’s only human, you’ve got to understand.
And Tina Turner was the woman abused, wounded, victimized by society, prejudice, machismo; the young woman who, no matter what, felt in her subjugation the promise of a free, clear maturity that would fill the world with joy because she’d known great sorrows.
You might as well face it:
You’re addicted to love.
Between the songs, I listened to phrases that had no meaning for me—they weren’t part of a well-known song, recorded and repeated by everyone—garbled chunks of a dialogue that for me was Diana’s monologue in the moonlight.
“How? I’m white.”
What was being said to her? What was she answering, what was being asked? What did Diana mean when she said into the phone, “Make me see myself as another woman”? These questions began to torture me because of their intrinsic mystery, because of the distance the mystery created between my lover and me, because my obsession with knowing what was going on, whom Diana was speaking with, interrupted my mornings, kept me from working, plunged me into a literary depression. Reluctantly I revised my pages and found them lifeless, mechanical, devoid of the passion and enigma of my possible daily life: Diana was my enigma, but I myself was becoming an enigma to myself. Both of us were only possibilities.
I would wait impatiently for night and the mystery.
I didn’t dare, from the bed, interrupt Diana’s secret dialogue. It would only cause a scene, perhaps a complete break. Once again, I confessed to myself that I was a coward when faced with the idea of losing my adored lover. I’d gain nothing by getting out of bed, going over to her, grabbing the telephone from her hand, and demanding, like some husband in a melodrama, Who are you talking to, who are you cheating on me with?
I humiliated myself by searching through Diana’s things to see if I could find a name written down by chance, a telephone number, a letter, any clue about her mysterious nocturnal interlocutor. I felt dirty, small, despicable, opening drawers, handbags, suitcases, zippers, slipping my fingers like dark worms through panties, stockings, brassieres, all the indescribable lingerie that once had dazzled me and that now I was handling as if it were old rags, Kleenex to be thrown out, soiled Kotex …
She had to give me the chance I needed. One night, she did. She invited me, I’m sure of it, to share her mystery.
XXIII
The old actor was depressed that night, conjuring up memories and longing, paradoxically, for a past time that had abandoned him. He felt betrayed by his time. He also felt he’d betrayed something—the promise, the optimism of the New Deal years. In his evocation of names, literary works, and organizations of the 1930s, there was both nostalgia and disdain, yes, a disdainful nostalgia. He said to himself and to us; There were so many promises that were not carried out. To himself and to us he said, We didn’t deserve to see them carried out.
That night he would have wanted to channel that feeling into one of the parlor games with which we blocked out the tedium of Santiago. Since he got no answer from Diana or me (both of us tightly sealed—she certainly knew I was, and I knew she was—in the enigma of those nocturnal telephone calls, always furtive, never mentioned by light of day), Lew Cooper launched into an unsolicited explanation of why he had named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was precise and forcefully persuasive.
“No one deserved respect. Neither the members of the committee nor the members of the Communist Party. Both seemed despicable to me. Both trafficked in lies. Why should I sacrifice myself for either side? To save my honor? By dying of hunger? I wasn’t a cynic—don’t even think that. I simply behaved the way all of them behaved, the fascists on the right who interrogated me or the fascists on the left who never lifted a finger for me. I was selective, that’s true. I never gave them the name of anyone who was weak, anyone who could be hurt. I was selective. I only gave the names of those who would have treated me in Moscow exactly the way these people were treating me in Washington. They deserved one another. Why should I be the sacrificial lamb in their mutual dirty tricks?”
“Can you measure the damage you might have done to those you didn’t want to hurt?” I asked.
“I didn’t mention them. Other people did. Lives were destroyed, but I didn’t destroy them. The only thing I did was not destroy myself. I admit it.”
“The bad thing about the United States is that if you’re denounced as anti-patriotic everyone believes it. In the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, no one would believe it. Vyshinsky had no credibility; McCarthy did.”
I said that, but Diana quickly added, “My husband always says that the dilemma of liberals in America is that they have an enormous sense of injustice but no sense of justice. They denounce, but they do nothing.”
“I read that,” I said. “He goes on to say that they refuse to face the consequences of their acts.”
Was that the moment to ask her, calmly, if the person she’d been speaking to at night was her husband? What if it wasn’t? Would I be opening a can of worms? Once again, I remained silent. The old actor was going on about the extraordinary excitement of the stage experiments of the Group Theatre in New York, the communion between the audience and the actors during the 1930s, the time and the scene of my own youth …
The barrier between stage and audience disappeared. The people in the audience were also actors and were totally enraptured by those extraordinary performances, never realizing the terrible illusion they were sharing with the actors on stage. The tragedies represented by the actors would sadly and painfully become the tragedies lived by the audience. And the actors, part of society, after all, wouldn’t escape the destiny they first acted out. Frances Farmer, blond as a wheat field, ended up tainted by alcohol, prostitution, madness, and fire. John Garfield, master of all the urban rage there ever was, died making love.
“Don’t you envy him?” Diana interrupted.
“J. Edward Bromberg, Clifford Odets, Gale Sondergaard—all persecuted, mutilated, burned by witch-hunters…”
“Odets was married to a woman of sublime beauty, Luise Rainer,” I recalled. “A Viennese advertised as the Eleonora Duse of our time. Why Duse? Why not just herself—Luise Rainer, the incomparable, fragile, fainting, passionate Luise Rainer, wounded by the world because she wanted to be…?”
“Someone else,” said Diana. “Don’t you get it? She wanted to be someone else—Duse, Bernhardt, anyone but herself…”
“You’re speaking for yourself,” I dared to blurt out.
“For every actress,” said Diana, vehement and exasperated.
“Naturally, every actress wants to be someone else, otherwise she wouldn’t be an actress,” said Lew avuncularly.
“No,” said Diana, her eyes wide with fright, “more than that. To refuse to take on the parts they assign you, to take on instead characters you’ve only heard talked about…”
Right then and there I repeated her words, personalizing them, rooting them in her, taking away the disguise of the inf
initive (“to be or not to be”) and that impersonal “you” Americans use. You refuse to take on the parts they give you. You interpret characters that you’ve only heard talked about …
I said all that to avoid saying what I really wanted to: Whom were you talking to on the telephone at three in the morning? My rage simply took twisted paths. The actor felt the tension between us rising above his own, so he went on with his evocation.
“I heard Luise Rainer say something very beautiful to Clifford Odets. She said she was born prematurely, so she was always searching for the two months she missed. Then she said, I found them with you. But he was a left-wing radical and rewrote her words: The general strike gave me the two months I was missing. Not love but the strike. The truth is, we’re all looking for the months we’re missing. Two. Or nine. It’s all the same. We want more. We want to be someone else. Diana’s right … Odets sacrificed his wife to coin a political slogan.”
“Diana wants to disguise herself and to disguise us.” I laughed sarcastically, offensively. “She invited you to live here to disguise our little affair. Even if it’s a fact and everyone knows it, she must disguise it, you see, so as to act, to be someone else, to be a good actress in life because she can’t be a good one on screen … I hate whores who want to be seen as bourgeois housewives.”
“Good night,” said Lew, getting up abruptly and looking at me with disdain.
“No. Don’t leave yet. Don’t you know that you and I are living here in a monastery with Diana, you the father superior, I the novice? Or could it be some kind of artistic utopia, you the minstrel, I the scribe, Azucena the sluttish maid. But no one fornicates here—not a chance. Who ever heard of that? People come here to take refuge, they don’t take refuge here to come. Filthy convent, crummy utopia…”
“I’d rather listen to rock and roll, which I loathe, than to this stupid litany. Good night, Diana.”
“Good night, Lew,” she said, her eyes anxious but resigned.
I parodied her in falsetto. “Oh dear, oh dear! Why did I ever invite these people to share my house?”
“Come to bed, sweetheart. You’ve had a lot to drink today.”
XXIV
She was right, and it was hard for me to fall asleep. I understood everything. That night she got up. Ostentatiously she did not turn to see if I was asleep. She left the bedroom. The curtains were open. The moonlight fell freely on the old black telephone. I heard a light click. I got up, walked to the lunar pool. I held out my hand to take the telephone. I stopped out of fear. Would she realize I knew? Was she talking at that very moment from another part of the house? Did I have the right to listen in on a private conversation? I’d already pawed through bags, drawers, lingerie … What would one more indignity matter?
I picked up the telephone and heard the two voices talking on the extension. Hers was the unknown voice I’d learned to recognize at night, in secret. A voice that came from a different geography, another age, to take control of hers … that was my fantasy. Actually, it was just the voice of the actress Diana Soren acting a part she’d never be given in a film. The voice of a black woman. She was talking with a black man. That was clear. Even if it was a white man imitating a black, just as she was imitating a black woman, it was a black man’s voice. I mean it was the voice of someone who wanted to be black, only black. That impressed me, blowing away the alcoholic mist of my growing bitterness (as the tango—or is it the bolero?—goes …). Now I understood what I had heard in the bedroom, the previous nights, when she said things like “Make me see myself as another woman” or “How? I’m white.”
“Make yourself black.”
“How? I’m white.”
“You’ll figure out how.”
“I’m trying hard.”
“No, Aretha. Don’t be stupid. I’m not asking you to change the color of your skin. You understand what I mean.”
“I want to be with you,” said Diana, transformed into Aretha. “I’d give anything to be with you, in your bed…”
“You can’t, baby, you’re in your cage. I already got out of mine…”
“I’m not talking about a cage, I’m talking about a bed, with both of us in it…”
“Set us free, Aretha. Free the black man who doesn’t want a white woman, because he’d be betraying his mother. Free the white man who doesn’t want a black woman, because he’d be betraying his prejudices. Free the black man who wants a white woman to avenge his father. Free the white man who wants a black woman to humiliate, abandon, make a slave even in pleasure. Do all that, baby, and then I’ll be yours…”
“I’ll try to change my soul, if that’s what you want, darling.”
“You can’t.”
“Why? Don’t—”
The black man hung up but Diana sat there listening to the telephone static. I quickly hung up and went back to bed, feeling horribly guilty. But the next night I couldn’t resist the temptation to go on listening to the interrupted but eternal conversation, night after night …
She told him she’d try to change her soul, and he said, You can’t. She begged him not to condemn her that way, not to be unjust, but he insisted, You can’t. At heart you think we want to be white—that’s why you’ll never be able to be black. Diana Soren said she wanted justice for all. She reminded the black man she was against racism, she’d marched, she’d demonstrated; he knew it. Why didn’t he accept her as an equal? His burst of laughter must have wakened all the sleeping birds between Los Angeles and Santiago. You want them to let us into country clubs, he said to Diana, into luxury hotels, into McDonald’s, but we don’t want to get in. We want them to keep us out, we want them to do us the favor of telling us, Don’t come in, you’re different, we hate you, you smell bad, you’re ugly, you look like monkeys, you’re stupid, you’re not like us. He was gasping for breath and said that every time a liberal, philanthropic white spoke against racism he felt like castrating him and making him eat his own balls.
“I don’t want to be like you whites. I don’t want to be like you!”
The next night, she told him she only wanted to see herself as another woman so she could see herself as she really was. Everyone had his objective—he had his, and she had hers …
“Respect me. After all, I’m an actress, not a politician…”
The man burst into laughter again.
“Then dedicate yourself to your thing and don’t play with fire, asshole. But let’s get something straight. Nobody can see himself as he is unless he sees himself separated, divorced from the human race, radically separated, a leper, alone, with his own kind…”
Almost crying, she told him she couldn’t, that what he wanted was impossible, and he insulted her—You cunt, you fucking white cunt—and she gave something like a sigh of joy …
“You’d have to be pure black, a black from Africa before he was brought here, before mixing, and not even then could you live separated…”
“Shut up, Aretha. Shut up, whore…”
Triumphantly, Diana told him there were no pure blacks in America; they were all descended from whites as well … “I’m not saying that to offend you. I’m saying it so you’ll think you share something with me…”
“Shut up, whore. You don’t have a drop of black blood, you don’t have a mulatto child…”
She said she’d like to give in to that temptation, but of her own free will, not to prove a point. “I don’t want to use my sex to win arguments.”
“Whore, white cunt…”
He called her the next night to ask forgiveness. He tried to explain himself with a humility that seemed suspicious to me. He told her that she wanted to change the system. Then he added, in humble scorn, in the voice of Little Black Sambo, How good you are, how compassionate, and how hypocritical. She had to understand that the system doesn’t change, he said, slowly but surely recovering his normal aggressive tone; the system has to be smashed. She was silent, didn’t get the joke, then said, honestly and with sincere emotion, that she wan
ted to help them. “But I don’t think I know how…”
“You can begin by not reminding me I’m a mulatto.”
“But you are. I like you like that. I love you like that. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
She should tell him that he, too, was going to give in to temptation, like his ancestors, that he, too, was going to fall for a white slut, that he, too, was going to have a mulatto child with her. What did she think of that? Would she honestly accept it? Wouldn’t she run around screaming, not her, she wasn’t promiscuous, it was a lie, she would never have children that weren’t Aryan, white, Nordic…?
“Me, I’m going to insult all the blacks.” Now the absent mulatto was speaking with a voice like a sea in chains. “All the blacks that should have stayed African and who betrayed their race giving in to temptation and screwing a white woman and having café-au-lait children. Say that, whore. Think that, give me that slap. No matter how far away you are, Aretha, I swear I’m going to feel your slap. It’ll hurt even more because you’re far away, screwing a white man. I can see you from here. There’s not enough distance between California and Mexico for me not to see you or smell your blond cunt and spit on it…”
“Don’t mention names, don’t say names…”
“Don’t be a jerk. They know everything. They tape everything. Are you out of your head?”
“I’m Aretha. My name is Aretha.”
“Make yourself black.”
“How? I’m white.”
“You’ll figure out how to do it. I can’t accept you if you don’t.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Fuck off, bitch.”
The next night was the last call. He spoke very calmly and said that Diana’s error was to think everyone was guilty, including her, including the oppressors. If that were so, they’d all be innocent. No, only the kids who didn’t leave the ghetto were oppressed, the drug-addict mothers, the fathers forced to steal, the men castrated by the Klan—those were the oppressed, not the poor oppressors.