“No, I admire your culture. Really. A solid base, no doubt about it. Very solid. Classic, man, classic.”
“Thank you.”
“On the other hand, the boy…” She spoke with a ferocity I’d never seen in her, a hallucinatory savagery, as if finally she was showing me the dark side of the moon. “Everything about him is wrong. He smells bad, he’s got rotten teeth, he needs to see a dentist, his manners are awful, he’s got no refinement at all, he’s rough, I’m afraid he’s going to beat me up—and because of all that I like him, because of all that I find him irresistible. Now I need a man I don’t like, a man who’ll bring me back to the gutter, the sewer, who’ll make me feel I’m nobody, who’ll make me fight again, work my way up, feel I don’t have anything, that I have to earn everything, who’ll make my adrenaline flow…”
I ran to embrace her. I couldn’t hold back anymore. She was crying and she clung tightly to me, but she didn’t stop talking between sobs. “You’re crazy. I’m not looking for a black or a guerrilla, I’m looking for someone who’s not like you. I hate people like you, decent and cultured. I don’t want a famous author, decent, refined, Western no matter how Mexican he thinks he is, European like my husband. You’re my husband all over again, a repetition of Ivan Gravet, the same thing all over again. It bores me, it bores me, it bores me. At least my husband fought in a war, ran away from Russia, persecuted for being a Jew, for being a boy, for being poor. You, what have you ever run away from? What’s ever threatened you? Your table’s always been set, and you’ve always been chasing after me, trying to catch me, to catch my imagination … You’re my husband all over again, except that Ivan Gravet is more famous, more European, more cultured, more refined, and a better writer than you!”
She stopped for air, swallowing her tears. “I can’t stand men like you.”
She twisted out of my arms. She turned her back to me and walked to the liquor cabinet. I followed. She mixed a drink with trembling hands. She spoke to me with her back turned.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Have a drink, it’ll make you feel better. Don’t worry,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. A mistake.
“No. Don’t touch me.”
“I’m going to miss you. I’m going to cry over you.”
“I won’t cry over you.” She gave me a final look, the synthesis of all her looks—happy eyes, tired eyes, bedazzled eyes, lonely eyes, fugitive eyes, orphan eyes, remembering eyes, altruistic eyes, convent eyes, whorehouse eyes, fortunate eyes, unfortunate eyes, dead eyes.
She blinked several times in a strange, dreamlike, almost insane way, and said this: “Don’t cry over me. Ten years from now your gamine will be an old lady over forty. What are you going to do with a lark with a fat ass and short legs? Thank God you’re getting out in time. Count your blessings and cut your losses. Good-bye. Désolé.”
“Désolé.”
Azucena helped me pack my things. She took my clothes out of the bedroom. I asked her with a look if the student was there. We understood each other without having to speak. She shook her head. She didn’t have to help me—she did it out of pure goodwill, so I wouldn’t feel alone, cuckolded, thrown out, or, in the last instance, badly thought of by her. She also knew I didn’t need her help; I made her understand how thankful I was for it. We exchanged few words while we packed my books, papers, and pens into my two briefcases. Then I carefully covered my typewriter.
“She was a beginner, too. She likes to help people just starting out.”
I laughed. “The midwife of the revolution, that’s what I told her.”
“She’s a very unhappy person. Seriously. She feels persecuted.”
“I think she’s right. Sometimes I thought it was nothing but paranoia. I’m beginning to think she’s right. The boy’s only going to complicate her life.”
“Diana likes risks. You didn’t give her that.”
“So she told me. Tell her to watch out. I couldn’t do anything for her in Mexico City. I hope she gets a lot out of her new love.”
Azucena sighed. “A beautiful woman doesn’t look for beauty in her partner.”
It seemed a cruel remark coming from her. I imagined the roles reversed. Azucena and a handsome man. The equation was unfair. Once again, the man was the winner. Never the woman.
In the hall, I ran into Lew Cooper. He didn’t say anything to me. He just grunted.
Azucena ran out into the street after me and handed me something.
“You forgot this.”
It was a marmalade jar full of hairs.
XXX
Jealousy kills love, but it leaves desire intact. That’s the real punishment for betrayed passion. You hate the woman who broke the love pact, but you still desire her because her betrayal was the proof of her passion. That was the case with Diana. We didn’t end in indifference. She had the intelligence to insult me, to humiliate me, to attack me savagely so I wouldn’t resign myself to forgetting her, so I would go on desiring her with what we call jealousy, that perverse term for erotic will.
I saw the Santiago house for the last time in the growing darkness of a February afternoon. Now it was an impregnable fortress. That house I walked in and out of as if I owned it, where I wrote every day, was now alien and repugnant to me. I wanted to besiege it the way the Romans besieged Numantia in Spain, to burn it and destroy it the way the legions burned and destroyed the Jews’ Masada. It was with that desire that I gave it a farewell glance, that I circled it one last time, as if instead of penetrating Diana I could penetrate the house we shared.
Fate had given me that woman. No man could take her away from me. Least of all someone I considered a coreligionist, a left-wing student, a traitor … The fetid smell of tear gas drifted in from the center of town, and at that moment I wished that the army had captured my rival, that General Cedillo personally had cut off his balls, and that if he escaped I might one day find him and have the courage to kill him myself. As I thought about it, though, I was gripped by an amusing irony: “Don’t deprive the government of that pleasure.”
Norman Mailer says jealousy is a portrait gallery of which the jealous man is the curator. I summoned up the images of each and every one of my moments with Diana, but now with the young student in my place, in my positions, enjoying what had been mine, filling his mouth with the taste of peaches, enjoying the limitless wisdom of Diana’s caresses, transformed into the sole spectator of the lake in which the Huntress is reflected …
Jealousy is like a life within our lives. We can catch a plane, go back to the capital, call up friends, begin writing again, but all the time we’re living another life, apart although within ourselves, with its own laws. That life inside our lives manifests itself physically. There’s a battle in our guts. We wake up, and it’s Omaha Beach at Normandy in our stomachs. True. A savage, bitter, bilious tide swirls, rises, and falls from our heart to our guts and from our guts to our worn-out, useless sex, a war casualty. It makes you feel like pinning a Purple Heart on your dick. And then a funeral wreath. But the tide doesn’t celebrate anything and doesn’t stay in one part of the body for very long. It runs through it like a poisonous liquid, and its objective is not to destroy your body but to besiege it and squeeze it so its worst juices rise to your head, stick like hard green serpent scales on your tongue, on your breath, in your eyes …
For a moment, the break made me feel expelled from life. The way you feel when someone you love dies. But we can show that pain. The dark, poisoned pain of jealousy must be hidden, to avoid both compassion and ridicule. Exposed jealousy exposes us to the laughter of others. It’s like returning to adolescence, that unfortunate age in which everything we do in public—walk, talk, look—may be the object of someone else’s laughter. Adolescence and jealousy separate us from life, keep us from living it.
The curious thing about this experience of mine was that I felt separated from life, not out of adolescent fear of the ridiculous but because of the fatal sad
ness of age. Diana made me feel old for the first time. I was forty-one. My rival couldn’t be more than twenty-four. Diana was thirty-two. I laughed. Once in Italy I tried to get into a discotheque with an eighteen-year-old American girl. The man at the door stopped me, saying, “It’s only for young people.” To which I replied, with a straight face, “I’m her daddy.”
I was thirty-five then. How many doors would be closing on me now, one after another? She said that she was doing it for my own good. In ten years, she’d be barrel-assed and flabby. I was sorry I hadn’t said no, that she could be someone else—she wanted that anyway—if she gave herself over to her profession, if she stopped looking for roles that would give meaning to her life outside the movies … Thinking that over, I tried to convince myself of my superiority. All I had to do was to work seriously on my own stuff: I wouldn’t get old in ten or even a hundred years. That was the power of literature. But on the condition that we share that power with others. And I, as I said, felt I’d fallen from my initial power, and in that I was like Diana. My literary anointment, like her Saint Joan, was long past. The aura of the beginning was fading, dying. How do you rekindle the flame?
I returned from Santiago with a handful of useless pages. All I had to do was read them coldly, as a counterpoint to my burning internal convulsion, to realize they were no good. I would publish them anyway. They had a political purpose. But if no one read them, what political purpose would they serve? I was willfully fooling myself. I needed to lie to myself as a creator in order to survive as a man. But at the center of my unquiet desire, one conviction shone with a brilliance that grew day by day. The writer’s other is not there, big as life, waiting for what he hopes he’ll be given. The reader must be invented by the author, imagined, so that he reads what the author must write, not what it is expected he will write. Where is that reader? Hidden? Let’s find him. Unborn? We must wait patiently for him to be born. Writer, toss your bottle into the sea, be confident, don’t break your word—your words—of honor even if today no one reads them. Wait, desire, desire, even if no one loves you …
I could never have said this to Diana Soren. Something melodramatic and pointless would have come out, like “There are great roles for mature actresses.” It would have been pointless because at that moment in her life Diana Soren wouldn’t have known what to do with her own success.
I realized that and loved her more than ever. I loved her all over again. Thinking that saved me from my ardor, from my interrupted way of living, from my break and expulsion from life, from my life within my life but separated from my life. That is, it saved me from my jealousy. I saw her, with the little distance I’d managed to win, as a woman who really did know who she was. A foreigner wherever she was, condemned to solitude and exile. A political activist, condemned this time to despair, irrelevance, and finally, again, solitude. A mature actress condemned to decadence, oblivion, and forever, again, solitude. The story of Diana Soren is the story of her solitudes. Diana was the goddess who hunts alone.
Did she and I share that? I could formulate only one answer. I would have given everything for her, only because she wouldn’t have given anything for me.
Accepting that truth was how I distanced myself once and for all from Diana, renouncing all my romantic illusions of getting back together with her or spending time together … Perhaps only one link remained between us. We could tell a story to all those who’ve wanted to free themselves from a love relationship without hurting anybody. It’s impossible.
I thought about Luisa. My jealousy of Diana consumed me even as my love for Diana was dying. I wanted to give that love to Luisa. With her I felt no jealousy at all—she could be the receiver of a love I no longer wanted to waste on my game of mirrors, on the anxiety of all these combinations … I was fooling myself yet again.
It’s true that once more she accepted the rules of our pact. There was no weakness or submission in it, just active strength. Our pact survived all minor accidents. We had a house, a daughter, a group of friends, everything that makes possible the daily life which with Diana was impossible.
I said I was fooling myself. Other irresistible temptations would come. Foreign actresses get bored when they’re on location. They want company without risk. They pass names around among themselves: in India, Tom; in Japan, Dick; in Mexico, Harry. Gentlemen who will take you out, who are well mannered, handsome, intelligent, good to be seen with, good lovers, discreet … How could anyone resist the parade of beauties who formed this information circuit to which, to my eternal joy, I belonged at the age of forty-one? How could I deny myself the game of mirrors in which were reflected image within image within image, passion and jealousy, desire and love, youth and old age, the pact of love and the pact with the devil: Push back my Judgment Day, let me enjoy my youth, my sex, my jealousy, my desires for one more day … but also let me enjoy my pact with Luisa. Why not hope that death, or separation, is a long way off?
She didn’t fool herself. “He’ll always come back to me,” she would tell our friends. She knew that beneath that incessant tide a sediment of necessary stability was amassed, in which love and desire united without violence, discarding the need for jealousy to increase desire, or the need for guilt as thanks for love. Luisa waited patiently behind her incredibly beautiful mestizo mask for the inevitable day when one woman would give me everything I needed. Just one. She wasn’t that woman.
Diana went away. She went when the rainy season began in Mexico and the air once again turned to crystal and gold for a single day.
XXXI
I read about one part of Diana Soren’s final drama in the newspapers.
When Diana left Mexico, she was pregnant. I didn’t know it, but the FBI did. With that information, they decided to destroy her. Why? Because she was an emblematic figure of Hollywood radical chic, the celebrity who lends her fame and gives her money to radical causes. When I met her, Diana supported the Black Panthers. I’ve already mentioned the relationship I found out about at night and by telephone. I knew every shade of her support. The FBI doesn’t deal in subtleties.
I want to imagine that the the “general public” in the United States did differentiate between, say, the integrationist policy of a Martin Luther King and the separatist policy of Malcolm X. I think that during the years I’m talking about many white Americans (many friends of mine) supported King’s nonviolent civil protest as a progressive ideal: the gradual integration of black people into the society of white America, the conquest by blacks of the privileges of whites. Malcolm X, however, advocated a separate, black nation opposed to the white world because it only knew and accepted injustice. If the white world was unjust with itself, how could it not be unjust with the black world? Both, in any case, would live in ghettos separated by color but united in pain, violence, drugs, and misery.
Those irreconcilable options needed a bridge. In Paris, Diana met James Baldwin, who shared at least two things with her: exile as solitude and the search for another, fraternal American. Baldwin, who stood between the two extremes, was a source of perpetual doubt; he deliberately muddied the waters so that no one would believe in easy justice or the inevitability of racial injustice, two faces of the same coin. Baldwin did not want humiliating, charitable integration. Nor did he want the union of black with black to be the chain of hatred toward whites. What Baldwin asked of whites and blacks, Southerners and Northerners, was the simplest and most difficult thing: Treat us like human beings. That’s all.
“Look at me,” Baldwin told Diana. “Look at me and ask yourself about the life, hopes, and universal humanity hidden behind my dark skin…”
Judging by Diana’s nocturnal conversations, I imagined she thought the same. She wanted to be uncompromising about racism and white hypocrisy, but she wanted to be equally uncompromising in her opposition to a black world radically separate from the white world. The explanation seems to me, having known her, quite clear. Diana Soren wanted to see herself as someone else in order to see herself a
s she was. She took the risk of seeing blacks only as she wanted to see them, and she paid dearly for it.
The FBI, like the KGB, the CIA, the Gestapo, or Pinochet’s DINA, needs to simplify the world so as to designate the enemy clearly and annihilate him without a second thought. Political police agencies, the guardians of the modern world and its well-being, always need a reliable enemy to justify their jobs, their budgets, their children’s daily bread.
In Washington, it was decided that Diana Soren was the ideal candidate for that role. Famous, beautiful, white, the Saint Joan of radical causes (I called her the midwife of revolutionaries without imagining that my metaphor would be a reality in the cruelest way), Diana was placed under surveillance and invisibly, silently harassed by the FBI. The Bureau was waiting for the right moment to destroy her. It was merely a matter of opportunity. Diana Soren was destructible. More than anyone. She believed that injustice was fought not only with politics but with sex, with love, and from the romantic depths which made her ideally vulnerable. When the Bureau learned of Diana’s pregnancy—while she was still in Mexico or soon thereafter—they realized it was time to move against her, to take advantage of her weakness.
It was then I understood General Agustín Cedillo’s warnings and cursed myself for not having found Mario Moya in Mexico, for not believing Diana, for treating her with contempt (“You’re paranoid”) and locking myself in the prison of my jealousy. But really, what could I have done? It was already much too late when I found out what was going on. Was I the father? I don’t think so—we’d taken precautions. Was the father young Carlos Ortiz, my successor in Diana’s favors? That was more likely. She saw him as a revolutionary hero, while I was a tedious repetition of her own husband.
Still, a Mexican revolutionary does not have enough symbolic force to provoke the puritanical democratic white general public of the U.S.A. It would have been like having a baby with Marlon Brando—Viva Zapata!—an exotic experience, yet one that could readily be assimilated. But that the fair, blond star with blue (or were they gray?) eyes, descendant of Swedish immigrants, born in a small Midwestern town, brought up with soda fountains and Mickey Rooney movies, a Lutheran, a graduate of the local high school, the sweetheart of the football team and, one time, of a strong, healthy boy, a girl favored of the gods, chosen from among eighteen thousand hopefuls to play a saint; a rich, free woman married to a famous man, darling of the jet set—that this favorite of the white God would descend to the depths of miscegenation, to the murky, dark surrender of her Caucasian femininity to a brutal black penis, disturbed the night of the American soul, revived the bloody phantoms of castration, of blacks hung with their testicles in their mouths, of burning crosses, of the Klan galloping on …