A mulatto was only acceptable, imaginable, as the son of a white man and a black woman, the result of the whim or despair of the plantation owner, the white master too respectful of his white wife, the white master with the feudal right to spend the first night of marriage with the black bride, the white master enervated by his white wife’s long pregnancy, the father of the mulattoes: a white patriarch …
But that a white woman might be the matriarch of the light-brown world, might populate the forests of the New World, the American utopia, with degraded mestizo bastards—no, that repelled even the most liberal conscience, that went to the very center of the Yankee heart, stirred up the guts and balls of Yankee decency. The child had to be black, the offspring of a black revolutionary and a frivolous, crazed white actress. If not, it would mean total horror. The white woman was the slave of the black.
The FBI is patient. It waited until Diana’s pregnancy was obvious. Approval of the defamation plan went along these lines: Diana Soren has provided financial support to the Black Panther Party and must be neutralized. Her current pregnancy by [name blacked out] gives us the opportunity to do so.
The Bureau proceeded in the following manner. Agents planted a rumor with Hollywood’s gossip columnists. They circulated a letter signed by a fictitious person: “I’ve been thinking about you, and I remembered that I owe you a favor. Imagine, I was in Paris last week and by accident I ran into Diana Soren, so pregnant she’s as big as a house … At first I thought she’d gotten back together with Ivan, but she told me that the father is [name blacked out] of the Black Panthers. That girl sure gets around, as you can see. In any case, I wanted to give you first shot at this one…”
Hollywood gossip columns began to repeat the rumor: “The top item in today’s news is that Miss D., the famous actress, is expecting. The proud papa is supposed to be a prominent Black Panther.” The news spread, scaled the heights of credulity, won more converts than the Bible, and was consecrated in an American news weekly with a worldwide circulation—in fact, it is so well distributed that it was one of the two magazines you could get at the drugstore in the Santiago town square, the place where I’d gone to buy toothpaste and where a young student approached me with an invitation to speak to his group …
“Excuse me,” I said then (I laugh at myself today), “but I don’t want to compromise my North American friends. I’m their guest.”
The magazine was the first to mention Diana’s name. She and Ivan sued them for libel and won something like ten thousand dollars.
The next thing I learned was that Diana had given birth prematurely by cesarean section and that the baby had died after three days.
The next week she flew from Paris to Jeffersontown to bury it. She displayed the body in a funeral parlor. The entire town marched around the coffin, eager to verify the color of the baby’s skin.
“It isn’t white.”
“It’s not black, either. The features aren’t black.”
“You can never tell with a mulatto. They’re tricky.”
“How can you know if this is really Diana’s baby? A black fetus is the easiest thing to throw in the garbage.”
“Do you mean she bought the body of a white baby just to bring it here for us to see?”
“How much would that cost?”
“Is it legal?”
“You look at that baby carefully. It’s white.”
“But with a touch of the tar brush. Don’t kid yourself.”
“So who’s the father?”
“Her husband says he is…”
That sent the line of curious spectators into waves of laughter.
Diana Soren paid no attention. She was too busy taking photos of the tiny body in the white coffin. She took 180 photographs of the dead child.
XXXII
At the end of the 1970s, I met Ivan Gravet in Holland. We’d both been invited to spend a long weekend in the country at the castle of our mutual friend Gabriella van Zuylen. Gabriella is a charming, very beautiful woman, a lover of gardens and a friend of Russell Page, the magnificent British park designer, about whom she wrote a monograph.
The castle is an impressive pile, especially because in Holland’s flat landscape it stands out like a mountain. Gabriella has dedicated herself to extending, completing, and beautifying the tranquil, bovine Dutch landscape with the mystery of nature as conceived by the baroque imagination—contrived, varied, circular.
Among the curiosities of her garden was a labyrinth of very high hedges whose perfectly geometrical form, as regular as a botanical spiral, could only be appreciated fully from the roof of the castle. But if you were inside the maze, you quickly lost any sense of its form, and lost your way as well. Sooner or later, Gabriella’s thirty guests all explored the maze and all got lost until she came to our rescue, laughing.
My wife, who’s afraid of spaces without exits, refused to go in the maze and went off with Gabriella to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. I ventured in, willfully desiring to get lost. First of all, I wanted to play along with the maze’s intention. Secondly, I was convinced that to enter the maze with the goal of getting out was obviously how you’d become the prisoner of the mythic bull who inhabits it. But if you got lost, losing the will to survive, it would please the Minotaur, make him your ally, allay his suspicions. That’s how Theseus should have proceeded.
I did not have Ariadne’s thread. But when I suddenly found myself face-to-face with Ivan Gravet inside the maze, I decided that Diana Soren was the thread on which, in a certain way, both of us were relying at that moment—only at that moment. I’d seen him, of course, since Friday, at Gabriella’s magnificent dinners and lunches. At night, we were supposed to wear evening clothes, and Ivan was the sole exception, wearing a jacket I can only compare to those I saw in photos of Stalin or Mao: a gray tunic with very long sleeves, buttoned to the neck and worn without a tie. It wasn’t what was then called—during an attack of Third World fashion—a Mao or Nehru jacket. Ivan Gravet’s tunic looked as if it had either been bought in the GUM store in Red Square or been handed on from some member of the Politburo. The last time I’d seen one like it was in a photograph of the justly forgotten Malenkov. Khrushchev wore only suits and ties. In Ivan Gravet’s outfit—which he didn’t change the whole three nights we spent at the castle—there was nostalgia for a lost Russian world; there was humor, but there was also mourning …
We laughed when we met. We couldn’t have spoken any other way, said Ivan. Why? I asked; I’ve never said anything, no one would connect us. We’re in another country, I added brutally, and besides, the wench is dead. I was curious to know more, but I also wanted to force Ivan to react within the brief time we had in the maze. How strange: I felt that both of us ascribed less importance and devoted less time to this labyrinth, created to capture forever those who venture into it, than we did to going through customs at an airport.
“It’s that you didn’t know the difficulty of loving a woman you can’t help, change, or leave,” he said.
I agreed. Diana was part of a past that no longer concerned me. For eight years, I’d been living with my new wife, a healthy, modern, active, beautiful, and independent woman. We had two children and a loving sex life in which we treated each other with respect without submitting to each other, aware that the continuity of our relationship depended on our never taking it as something certain, customary, given, with no effort on our part.
Far from Diana, far from my past, I still felt close to the literary joy I’d recovered. I did not burn the pages I’d written in Santiago with Diana at my side, but I had leapt from them, with more strength and conviction than ever, to the work that was waiting for me, that summoned me, and that gave me the greatest happiness in my life. I hadn’t wanted to finish writing it. No novel gave me so many intelligent readers, readers who were close to me, who were permanent, who mattered to me … With that novel, I found my real readers, those whom I wanted to create, discover, keep. Those who, like me, wanted to discover
the figure of greatest essential insecurity—not worn-out psychologies but helpless figures developing at another level of communication and discourse: language, history, epochs, absences, nonexistences as characters, and the novel as the meeting place of times and beings that would never otherwise encounter one another.
Ivan Gravet answered me affectionately. He was not offended by my little quotation from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. We were writers and men of the world. I had to understand two things about Diana’s fate. Diana and he had never protested the FBI’s lies, never succumbed to a surge of the racism in their Caucasian genes. There had been no doubt that the FBI had played that card. To protest the libel could have been taken as disgust for or rejection of a black baby. They, Diana and Ivan, saw the trap. But Diana’s anger was directed against the political manipulation of her sex. The FBI had reduced her to a sex object. It had presented her as a white woman hungry for a black man. Besides, finally, it was untrue. The father wasn’t black—as he and I know well. Nor was the baby.
“Did she have to exhibit it in Jeffersontown? I didn’t think public opinion there mattered to her.”
“It did. She never wanted to be judged as a schizoid personality—the small-town girl split between home, family, spiritual peace, middle-class stability, Christmas and Thanksgiving, and all the rest…”
“Did she have to photograph the child’s body? It seems to me a—”
“She had to be the witness to her own death. That’s all. She wanted to see how she would be seen if she came back to her town dead. She wanted to see the faces, hear the comments while she still could. That baby was a substitute Diana. See? The wench died in her own country. And she dies all the time.”
“Forgive me. Je suis désolé,” I said and remembered Diana.
He squeezed my arm. “She wanted to respond to oppression with something more than politics, which she didn’t understand. She thought sexuality and the romantic life would be her contribution to a world filled with both. She didn’t realize that one thing leads to another. You know? Rebellion leads to sexual excess, which leads to alcohol, alcohol to drugs, drugs to terror, to violence, to madness…”
“Then she will have to be judged just as she didn’t want to be judged—as the small-town girl who couldn’t resist the evil of a world she was unprepared for…”
“No. I loved her. Excuse me: I still love her.”
“I don’t anymore.”
“She was politically naïve. I warned her many times that democratic governments know that the best way to control a revolutionary movement is to create it. Instead of embodying it, the way totalitarian regimes do, they invent and control it and thus have an enemy they can count on. She never understood that. Again and again, she fell into the trap. The FBI decided to finish her off with a huge laugh.”
“I thought you were going to defend her.”
“Of course. Dear friend, Diana Soren was an ideal being. She epitomized the idealism of her generation, but she was incapable of overcoming a corrupt society and an immoral government. That’s all. Think of her that way.”
We heard the happy voice of Gabriella calling for us in the maze, summoning us in to lunch …
XXXIII
It was Azucena who told me the most terrible version of Diana’s end. I ran into her quite by chance on the Ramblas in Barcelona sometime in the mid-1980s. I was visiting my friend and literary agent Carmen Balcells on a mission of mercy. I wanted to ask her to support the Ecuadoran novelist Marcelo Chiriboga, unjustly overlooked by everyone but José Donoso and me. He had a minor post in the Foreign Ministry in Quito, where the altitude was suffocating him and the work left him no time to write. What could we do for him?
Seeing Azucena reminded me of the days we’d spent in Mexico and the pleasant experience of her always dignified presence. As we walked toward Paseo de Gracia, where I was staying, she spoke with her head lowered, giving a grim, objective account of the events, which, out of respect for Diana and herself, she did not want to cheapen with sentimentalism.
Azucena went to the United States with Diana for the baby’s funeral in Jeffersontown. On the flight from Paris to New York and then on to Iowa, Diana was calm, with a distant, almost beatific smile on her face, imagining the body in the white coffin that was with her on this trip, a trip she’d made dozens of times before. But on the return flight, from JFK to De Gaulle, something horrible happened. Diana excused herself to go to the lavatory. Three minutes later, she came screaming and running down the aisle, naked. No one dared to touch or stop her until a powerful black man intervened. He wrapped her in a blanket and returned her, suddenly calm but staring intently at the man’s eyes, to her seat next to Azucena in first class. Azucena gave her some sleeping pills and assured the stewardesses that Diana would sleep for the rest of the flight.
She stayed quietly in Paris for some time, sharing the apartment on Boulevard Raspail with Ivan, whom she no longer had relations with. She preferred to pick up boys in bars and hotels, especially hippies with a spiritual air and a dedication to drugs, which she then began, of course, to use seriously, as if they were the next step in her spiritual maturation and her rebellion. But she also belonged to an alcohol culture, and Diana was not a woman who would abandon an earlier phase in her life when she was diving into a new one.
From what Azucena told me, I came to understand an important truth about my old, momentary lover. She loved everything, but not greedily or egoistically. On the contrary, she loved things as a form of generosity toward herself but also toward the world or worlds she was living in. The provincial world of the Midwest and Hollywood, the intellectual world her husband offered her in Paris, the rebellion of the 1960s, liberal causes, the Black Panthers, the Mexican revolutionary—she collected all these worlds so they would go on being hers, but, most of all, so that none would consider her an ingrate, unable to take responsibility for her past. The past was an unfulfilled obligation that she had to bear, even if she failed.
“Is that why she wouldn’t sacrifice anything? Is that why she went back to Iowa with the dead baby?”
“I don’t know,” Azucena said simply. “The truth is that Diana suffered greatly. She would get in trouble and never get out except by getting in more trouble.”
She wanted to stay thin so she could go back to movies. Quick diets made her weak and strained her nerves. To quiet her fears, she would drink more. The alcohol would make her fat. So she’d use more drugs to get thin and stop drinking. She was in and out of one clinic after another. In one, she would dedicate herself to repeating again and again the simplest gestures and tasks. Azucena would visit her every day and see her get up, go to the bathroom, urinate, defecate, eat her breakfast, wash her clothing in the sink, straighten her bed, and climb back in it. But each of those acts, each one, would take two to three hours and wear her out. After sweeping the room, she would sleep till the next morning, when she’d get up, go to the bathroom, and begin the round all over again.
She would stare at Azucena during these times, with a mixture of attitudes and emotions. She would watch her out of the corner of her eye to make sure that Azucena was looking at her, that she was aware of what she was doing, and, most important, that she was approving, applauding her effort and the importance of each one of her actions …
For a long time she stayed in a sanatorium near Paris, overlooking the river. All one could see from her window was factory chimneys. There, Diana set about rediscovering her face, tracing it with her hand in the mirror, as if she were trying to remember herself. That act became a daily ritual. The permanence of her features seemed to depend on it. Without that ritual, Diana would have lost her own face.
One day, though, Azucena noticed that Diana’s fingers no longer followed the shape of her face. Instead—Azucena saw it by coming closer—they drew something else over it. She didn’t want to alarm her. Curious, she observed her for several days, concerned, trying to figure it out. With her finger, the woman was drawing over her face the exterio
r landscape of the chimneys. She wanted the world. She wanted to create it. She could reproduce it only as an invisible tattoo on her face in a misted-over mirror.
Inside, she was dead. Her interior death preceded her exterior death. The men she was with were, at best, her guards, her jailers. They also used drugs. She saw them as friends one day, enemies the next. She’d run away from them to pick up total strangers outside the hotels near the big train stations—the Gare de Lyon, Austerlitz, the Gare du Nord. The stations for anonymous businessmen, traveling light. Who were they? That was the point: no one. Sex without baggage, nothing that would truly enter her life, because she let nothing go and excess baggage was very heavy and very expensive …
“She simplified her life so much that at the end she was only eating dog food.”
No one would give her work. She imagined a strange movie—Azucena told me that afternoon in Barcelona, sitting in a café on the Ramblas—in which nothing happened but in which everything happened at the same time. There were four simultaneous scenes, with no people, just places, colors, sensations. One place was a desert. That was Mexico. Another place was pure stone. That was Paris. Another place was lights—many, many lights. That was Los Angeles. Another place was snow and night. That was Iowa. She wanted to bring them together in a film, and only then, when all of them were joined, would she enter the picture.