In any case, sitting there watching her watch me, with all the burden of memory on our shoulders, I realized that each time she had been one step ahead of me. She could not conceive a fidelity that could withstand the success of my first book. At the age of twenty-nine, I attained a celebrity I myself didn’t celebrate very much. If there’s one thing I’ve always known, it’s that literature is a long apprenticeship that is always open to imperfection when things go well, to perfection when things go badly, and to risk at all times—if we want to deserve what we write. I didn’t believe the praise heaped on me, because I knew I was far from achieving the goals I imagined; I didn’t believe the attacks either. I listened to the voices of my friends, and they encouraged me. I listened to my own voice, and all I heard was this: “Don’t accept success. Don’t repeat it superficially. Set yourself impossible challenges. It’s better to fail by taking the high road than to triumph on the low road. Avoid security. Take chances.”
I don’t know when exactly in our relationship Luisa felt I needed more, needed something more but needed her as well—something that would be the erotic equivalent of literary risk. Or ambition. We laughed a lot when, a week after we fell in love, a very famous Mexican writer visited and berated her for preferring me to him. “I’m handsomer, more famous, and a better writer than your boyfriend.”
Our astonishment was due, more than to anything else, to the great author’s continuing his friendship with her and with me, undeterred. His delirious plea for her hand (or a change of hands) had failed, but his amiable smile never did. Nor did, and this we knew from the start, his limitless ambition—so genial, so well founded, even though he took a dim view of it—to achieve power and glory through writing. Luisa showed me (or confirmed me in the certainty) that it’s better to be a human being than a glorious author. But at times being a person involves greater cruelty than the naïve promise of literary fame.
Now, as we sat opposite each other, there was no need to tell her I couldn’t do without Diana Soren; hugging her stuffed panda, a glass of whiskey in her hand, she reproached me, without saying a word, for all the accumulated cruelty in our relationship and threw in my face the ease with which I used the mask of literary creation to disguise it. Her eyes told me: You’re ceasing to be a person. As long as you were, I respected your love affairs. But I’ve just now realized you don’t respect yourself. You don’t respect the women you sleep with. You use them as a literary pretext. I refuse to go on being one.
“It’s your fault. You should have drawn the line the first time I was with another woman.”
“Tender and evil. How do you expect…?”
“For years you’ve put up with my infidelities…”
“Excuse me. I can’t compete anymore with all these imaginative efforts and the fantasy of all the women in the world…”
“By maintaining our love, we ended up killing it—you’re right…”
She hurled the glass, heavy as an ashtray, at me, hitting my lower lip. I gave the melancholy panda a melancholy look, stood up, rubbing my painful lip, and left forever.
XXVIII
I didn’t find Mario Moya. He was at a conference on population growth in Bucharest and wouldn’t be back for two weeks. I shrugged and hoped the matter could wait. That was more or less the amount of time it would take to finish filming in Santiago. Then all of us would go back to … Where would Diana go? Where would I go? Would we stay together? I doubted it. Her husband was waiting for her in Paris. In Los Angeles, a Black Panther whom she talked to on the telephone at three in the morning. In Jeffersontown, Iowa, an idealized lost boyfriend, a midwestern Tristan who by now, perhaps, was a potbellied pharmacist, swollen with Miller beer, a fanatical Chicago Cubs fan.
I had no illusions. She wouldn’t go along with me to some idyllic ivy-covered American campus. What I didn’t want was for anything to interrupt present time, our time together in Santiago and later, with a little luck, a few days in Mexico City, a rendezvous in Paris … I did have illusions of our spending a summer together on Mallorca, an island we both adored, where I had recently spent time exploring with a marvelous friend, the writer Hélène Cixous, and where Diana and Ivan had a house …
Anything, I told myself on the flight back to Durango, anything but losing her for these last two weeks. One possibility came to my mind incessantly, excluding all others. I was her lover because they would not allow her real lover, the leader of the Black Panthers, to enter Mexico. Should I anticipate her rebuff, the break between us? Should I be the one to take the initiative and break with her before she, going even further, abandoned me, left, and forgot everything we were?
I had called her a few times from the capital. I have a hard time communicating by telephone. The invisibility of the person I’m talking to fills me with impatience and anguish. I can’t match the words with the facial expression. I can’t know if the person talking to me is alone or with someone, dressed or naked, made-up or clean-faced. The more technology advances, the more we compensate for our moral or imaginative deficiency with the only weapon available: lies. I’ve just stepped out of the shower. I’m naked. I’m just walking out the door. I’m sorry. I’m alone. I’m alone. I’m alone.
“I love you, Diana.”
“Words are very pretty and don’t cost much.”
“I miss you.”
“And yet you aren’t here. Well, well.”
“I’ll be back on Friday. We’ll spend the weekend together.”
“I’m dying of impatience. ’Bye.”
I didn’t have time to tell her that I was afraid for her, that she should watch out, that it was for that reason I’d gone to the capital, to try to find something out and protect her. But my relations with the Díaz Ordaz government were terrible. I had only one friend in it, my schoolmate Mario Moya, Undersecretary of Internal Affairs, and he was away.
“I came here for your sake, Diana. I’m here because of you,” I would have wanted to shout to her, but I was uncertain about things. There was no hurry, I told myself. I was much more concerned now with knowing what her expression had been when she spoke so abruptly to me. Would that be the next technological advance—a telephone with a screen so we can see the face of the person speaking to us? What an atrocious violation of our privacy, I told myself, what infinite complications: always being ready, hair combed, makeup fresh, dressed (or undressed, depending). Or quickly messing up one’s hair to justify one’s drowsiness: “You woke me up, darling. I was sleeping—alone.” And a paunchy, bearded guy in a T-shirt next to her, watching football on television and chugging a mug of beer.
I began to be haunted by the idea that Diana was a work of art that had to be destroyed to be possessed. In sex, as in art, interrupted pleasure is a poison, but it also stimulates an ambiguity that is the amniotic fluid of both passion and art. Could I come out of this ecstasy at the cost of destroying Diana, the object that caused it? Should I, in other words, anticipate her? Should I ensure the possibility of continued pleasure in its unique atmosphere of ambiguity, of might-have-been or might-have-not-been, nothing resolved, everything in the marvelous realm of the possible, where alternatives, for a story or for a passion, multiply and open like a fan that compromises but enriches our freedom?
I landed in Santiago at five in the afternoon, still unable to answer my own questions.
The ride from the airport to Diana’s house seemed especially long this time. The tedium of the town, its stores closing and their metal gates crashing down like deafening waterfalls of steel, was broken only by the swish of the trees and the growing shadow of the mountain, which dominated the city. I saw nervous turkeys and scarred cactus fences covered with the markings of lovers—names (Agapito loves Cordelia), linked hearts—mortal wounds that left dark scars on the green flesh.
“What’s going on?” I asked the cabdriver. “Why are we going so slowly?”
“It’s a demonstration. Another student protest. Why don’t they spend their time studying? Bunch of lazy ba
stards.”
The town square smelled of mustard. A vague, depressing cloud covered it. People ran for the side streets, coughing, covering their noses with handkerchiefs, sweaters, newspapers. I imagined the governor barking behind a window. I saw the young leader Carlos Ortiz run by, blood pouring down his face.
“Close your window, señor, and hold on.”
He made a U-turn and escaped toward the neighborhood where my temporary home, my papers, and my books were. I felt the landscape of Santiago falling to pieces, its inhabitants rapidly losing their features …
XXIX
The expression on Azucena’s face told me something was up. She never showed anything, and I knew nothing of her emotions. Sometimes we chatted, very cordially, as I’ve said. We were linked by language—lines of poetry we all learned in Spanish-language schools: “Yesterday’s gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived.”
I respected her, as I’ve also said, for her dignity, her pride in doing well what it had fallen to her to do well in this world. In the little world of Hollywood transplanted to Santiago, she was the only one, in the end, who was neither sorry for herself nor devoured by a desire to rise in the world. She was superior to her mistress. She didn’t want to be someone else. She was someone else. She was herself.
Now she received me in a dimly lit, strangely silent house. She had an unaccustomed grimace on her face, and it took me a while to find in it any sympathy, any affection, any solidarity with the other Hispanic person present. For a moment I felt perfectly melodramatic, like the poet Rodolfo asking his Bohemian companions why they’re walking around so silent, why they’re weeping. Mimí is dead. Azucena was holding back, unintentionally of course, something like a death announcement.
“Diana?” I asked, as I might have asked out loud, except that now I said her name almost in a whisper, as if I were afraid of interrupting a novena to the Virgin.
“Wait here. She’s on her way,” said Azucena, inviting me to stay in the living room.
Night was falling. Lew Cooper wasn’t there as he usually was, standing at the liquor cabinet mixing a cocktail justified by the hard work involved in exterior shots. The bedroom door was closed. But my clothes were there and, in the bathroom, my Italian toothpaste. Impatiently, angry, I walked to the corner where my typewriter, my papers, and my books were laid out. Someone had imposed order on everything. Everything was arranged in perfectly symmetrical piles.
I went back to find Azucena, to protest this violation of my creativity. Instead, I found Diana, divided by the light of the gallery at nightfall, half light, half shadow, perfectly cut in two, like one of Ingres’s female portraits, my beloved Diana Soren. She walked toward me, separated from herself by the light, yielding not an inch of her luminous person to her dark person, or vice versa. The contrast was such that even her short blond hair seemed white on the side of the gallery window and black on the wall side. The charm was broken by her outfit. In a pink quilted robe buttoned to her throat, totally domestic, and a pair of fluffy slippers, Diana Soren looked like an upside-down mushroom, a walking thumbtack …
It wasn’t that—not the magic of her appearing between light and shadow, not how absurd I instinctively judged her appearance to be—which kept me from walking over to her, embracing her, and kissing her as I’d always done. She never reached me. She stopped and sat down in a rattan chair, the most imperial object in this house devoid of pretensions, and she stared at me intently. I sat down in the thatch-backed chair opposite my desk and crossed my arms over my chest. Perhaps Diana had read my mind. Perhaps she imagined, as I did, how our love would end and what would follow it. It occurred to me to tell her, before saying anything else, how useless my trip to Mexico City had been. I found out nothing about the FBI threat General Cedillo had hinted at. I was going to tell her, but she spoke first, quickly, brutally.
“Forgive me. I have another lover.”
I controlled my confusion, my rage, my curiosity …
“In the U.S.?” I asked without daring to mention my telephone indiscretions.
“Another man is living here.”
“Who?” I asked, not daring now to think about The Return of Clint Eastwood and telling myself that at least they wouldn’t allow a Black Panther to cross the border. The stuntman? I laughed at myself for even thinking it. I laughed even more at the ludicrous possibility of old Lew Cooper’s sleeping in my bed, next to Diana.
“Carlos Ortiz.”
“Carlos Ortiz?”
“The student. You saw him here in Santiago. He says that he knows you and admires you and that he’s spoken with you.”
“Suppose he hated me and refused to speak with me.” I tried to smile.
“Excuse me?”
“This isn’t about excuses. It’s about talking things over.”
“I don’t like explaining myself.”
I stood up, enraged. “I just mean talking.”
“We can talk if you like.”
“Why, Diana? I thought we were very happy.”
“We also knew it would end.”
“But not like this, suddenly, prematurely, before the filming was over, and with a boy—”
“Younger than I am?”
“No, that doesn’t matter.”
“Well, what does? The fact that I hurt you, humiliated you—do you think I like doing that?”
“Not having carried our love to its end, not having used it up completely, that—”
“I don’t think there’s anything left.”
“Diana, I offered you everything I could—to go on being together if that’s what you wanted, to go together to some university,” I said stupidly, confused by a sudden vague feeling of sentimental blindness.
She was right to answer me like this, brutally, without sentiment. “Don’t be naïve. Do you really think I’d waste my life in some shitty hick town covered with ivy but made of nothing? You must be crazy.”
“Why crazy? You’ve been running away from another hick town, and you never want to give yourself the opportunity, the chance to go home and then leave again, be renewed.”
“Darling, you’re delirious. I felt suffocated in that town. I would have left there no matter what.”
Gently I asked her to explain. I think she sensed how I felt, because she added something I liked. She said I shouldn’t misunderstand her, that in Jeffersontown she felt suffocated not only by its smallness but by the immensity of the nature surrounding it. It was a world she couldn’t grasp.
And in the world you did choose, I asked her, do you feel protected? Will you ever know who you are, Diana? You have to be protected by other people, by the sect, by the beautiful people, the jet set, the Black Panthers, the revolutionaries—anyone, as long as there’s noise, weeping, joy, commotion, belonging. That’s what you want, that’s what I don’t give you, because I’m stuck in a corner writing for hours at a time?
I was making a fool of myself. I’d lost control. I was falling into everything I hated. I deserved Diana’s response.
“I know who I am.”
“No, you don’t!” I shouted. “That’s your problem. I heard you talking with that black man on the telephone. You want to be someone else, you want to absorb the suffering of others so you can be another person. You think no one suffers more than a black person. When are you going to learn, you fool, that suffering is universal, even white?”
“Carlos is teaching me all about it.”
“Carlos?” I said it like an echo not only of my own voice but of my own soul, incapable of telling Diana that I’d just seen him, injured, in a demonstration in Santiago.
“It’s in your books,” Diana said coldly.
“Did he tell you that?”
“No, I read them. I thought you were a real revolutionary. Someone who puts his actions where he puts his words. It’s not true. You write, but you do nothing. You’re like an American liberal.”
“You’re crazy. You don’t understand anything. Creation is an action, the only action. Y
ou don’t have to die in order to imagine death. You don’t have to be imprisoned in order to describe what a prison’s like. And if you get shot or murdered, you’re useless. You don’t write any more books.”
“Che went out to be killed.”
“He was a martyr, a hero. A writer is something much more modest, Diana.” I kept on talking to her, exasperated but now, possibly, in control of my arguments.
“Carlos would climb a mountain to fight. You wouldn’t.”
“So what’s that got to do with you? You’re going to follow him? Going to be the warrior’s woman?”
“No. His base is here. He fights here. He’d never follow me.”
“That makes things work out fine for you, right? Knowing that poor kid won’t follow you. Unless he gives up the guerrilla business and becomes a gigolo. Poor Diana. You want to be someone else? Do you want to be the midwife of universal revolution? Do you want the role of Joan of Arc married to Malcolm X? Let me tell you something. Try to be a good actress. That’s your problem, sweetheart. You’re a mediocre, bland actress, and you want to compensate for your mediocrity with all the furies of your real-life person. Why don’t you really work at the roles you get in movies? Why do you reject them and take on characters you’ve only heard talked about?”
“You don’t understand a thing. I’ve already had you.”
“One month three weeks and four days.”
“No, I know you through and through. I know who you are. I should have known from the first instant, but I let myself be dragged along by the fantasy that you were different—action and thought, like Malraux…”
“For God’s sake, spare me these revolting comparisons…”
“Naïve. All you can offer me is decency. Naïve. Decent. And cultured!”
“All defects of the worst kind…”