XXXVII
Diana Soren is dead. She was found putrefying inside a Renault parked in a Paris alley. She’d been there for two weeks. She was wrapped in a Saltillo serape. Could it have been the one she bought with me in Santiago? The news article says that with her body there was an empty bottle of mineral water and a suicide note. The Paris police had to call the sanitation squad to decontaminate the dead end where they found her body locked up with death for two weeks. What was left of her was covered with cigarette burns. Even so, I wondered if finally, in death, she’d been comfortable in her own skin.
XXXVIII
The FBI rendered Diana a posthumous homage. The Bureau admitted it had slandered her in 1970 as part of a counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. The director of the agency at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, approved the plan: Diana Soren was destroyed because she was destructible. In 1980, Acting Director William H. Webster declared that the days when the FBI used derogatory information to fight supporters of “unpopular causes” were gone forever. Calumny, he said, is no longer our business. Our only concern is criminal conduct.
BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES
Aura
Distant Relations
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
Terra Nostra
The Campaign
The Old Gringo
Where the Air is Clear
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Good Conscience
Burnt Water
The Hydra Head
A Change of Skin
Christopher Unborn
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
The Orange Tree
Myself with Others
Translation copyright © 1995 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish under the title Diana, o, La cazadora solitaria by Alfaguara Hispánica © 1994 by Carlos Fuentes
Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fuentes, Carlos.
[Diana, o, La cazadora solitaria. English]
Diana, the goddess who hunts alone / by Carlos Fuentes ; translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam.
p. cm.
I. Mac Adam, Alfred J. II. Title.
PQ7297.F793D4813 1995 863—dc20 95–10846 CIP
eISBN 9781466839953
First eBook edition: February 2013
Carlos Fuentes, Diana
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