The Don Juan temptation is erotic but it’s also literary. Don Juan endures because nothing can satisfy him (or, as the best contemporary incarnation of Don Juan grafted onto Lucifer would sing it, I can’t get no satisfaction). It’s a fact that the insatiability of the rake from Seville opens the doors of perpetual metamorphosis to him. Always desirous, always avid, he never ends, never dies: He continually transforms. He’s born young, and after just a few love affairs (two or three in Tirso de Molina), he becomes old in an instant, sated but unsatisfied, an evil and cruel gentleman (in Molière). Tirso’s perverse and juvenile cherub becomes the actor Louis Jouvet’s mortal mask, a rationalist Gallic gargoyle who no longer believes that adolescence will last forever (he repeats, whenever reminded of death, “Let’s hope it’s a long way off”) but who wears his own death mask. Byron, to avoid competition, tames Don Juan and sits him down to have tea with his family during one of those English winters “ending in July, to recommence in August.” But he gives a perverse, quasi-Argentine twist to this domestic metamorphosis. Don Juan discovers he’s in love not with love but with himself, like Argentines who are bored in elevators without mirrors. Don Juan’s love for Don Juan is a despotic trap—nothing less than that of love itself.
To be all that—what a dream, what an elixir—Gautier’s Don Juan, Adam expelled from paradise but remembering Eve, the imprisoned memory that ties him to the perpetual quest for the lost lover and mother; Musset’s Don Juan, sunk in a world of dives and whorehouses where he hopes to find the “unknown woman.” He deludes himself; he’s only looking for Don Juan, and even if all women look like him, none of them is him. But perhaps the real Don Juan, the most public because the most secretive, is Lenau’s, who admits he wants to possess all women simultaneously. That is Don Juan’s ultimate triumph, his most certain pleasure. To have all of them at the same time.
“Tonight I’m going to have them all. All of them.”
Don Juan’s pleasure depends more on disguise and movement than on ubiquity. He’s like a shark: he’s got to keep moving all the time so he won’t sink to the bottom of the sea and drown. He moves, he moves around masked, his mask covering his larval, mutating, metamorphosing condition. He moves and changes so rapidly that his own images can’t catch up with him. Neither Achilles nor the Tortoise, Don Juan is the parable of the disguised man whose disguises are always running after him. He’s naked. He takes his pleasure naked. But to move, he has to dress up, disguise himself and leave behind his most recent disguise, already known, already penetrated, before he puts on the next. In his momentary helplessness, in his Duchampian nakedness scaling balconies and descending ladders, Don Juan is Don Juan only so he can leave his own image behind. He runs, uncatchable by any image that might want to capture him, experiencing the velocity of pleasure in the velocity of change, conquering all frontiers. Don Juan is the founder of the European Common Market: he has lovers in Italy, Germany, France, and Turkey, and in Spain—Mozart tells us—a thousand and three. The Machiavelli of sex, a figure disguised in order to escape the vengeance of fathers and husbands but, above all, to escape tedium … That is how I, secretly, ridiculously, painfully, wanted to be …
Minimal forty-year-old Don Juan of the Mexican night, I aspired as a man to that power of metamorphosis and movement. But most of all, I wanted it as a writer. Loving or writing, nothing is more exciting or more beautiful than recognizing the struggle between the power we exercise over another person and the power the other—man or woman—exercises over us. Everything else vanishes in that ungraspable tempest of mutual attraction, of resistance that, out of lust for power or a mere instinct of survival or perhaps perversity, we put up to the attraction of another. The charm of such a struggle, obviously, is to yield to it. How? With whom? When? For how long? This is the common ground shared by sex and literature. An ashen-winged angel flies over. That dark angel, that tarnished Eros, is Don Juan, Cupid in flames, his own androgynous putto, who deposits on the eyelids, in the nostrils, the ears, the mouth, the anus of the loved one, on the back of the head, if necessary, the seeds of a smile, of a voice, of a glance. Of a desire. Beltenebros the melancholy whispers softly in my ear and tells me, “There can be nothing sadder than the taste of the women you will never possess, the men you lost out of fear, out of conventionality, out of dread of taking the forbidden step, out of lack of imagination, out of inability to become, as Don Juan does, someone else.”
I want to be very frank in this story and keep nothing to myself. I can wound myself whenever I like. But I don’t have the right to wound anyone who isn’t me, unless, of course, I amorously sink into myself the dagger I end up sharing with someone else. Right here at the outset, I list the terrors that assail me. I try to justify sex with literature and literature with sex. But the writer—lover or author—ultimately disappears. If he shouts, he disintegrates. If he sighs, he’s done for. You’ve got to be conscious of this before affirming, above all things, that life is never generous twice.
That night at the Opera Bar, in a Viscontian, which is to say operatic, setting, I felt I’d sunk the dagger too frequently, wounding myself more than I’d wounded the women whom I’d tried to manipulate but who, I knew only too well, could repay me in the same coin. I chose one, I earned the hatred of the rest, and Styron, Terrazas, and I left the next day for Guadalajara and the Pacific coast, where the Hotel Camino Real in Puerta Vallarta, designed by my friend, was celebrating its grand opening.
It was there I received the foreseeable lesson. One afternoon, the girl I was traveling with casually left a letter on the bed in our hotel room. She was writing to another of her boyfriends, arranging a date for New Year’s Eve, which, of course, she refused to spend with me. “Writers only for a little while, because they give me brain food so I can make better love with you, darling. Besides, the oldtimers have their own kind of kicks … like drinking champagne all day. It just gives me heartburn. Put some sodas on ice for me, baby. Remember, if there’s no Coke, I just don’t celebrate…”
I pretended not to notice, but when I got back to Mexico City, I went to see my wife and asked her to spend New Year’s Eve with me and to end a separation that had lasted almost a year. Once again, she would be my total victory over transitory loves.
III
Luisa Guzmán had been—still was—a woman of exceptional beauty. Dark-haired, with pale, crepuscular, luminous skin that glowed brightly instead of darkening in the light of her huge black eyes, which were slanted, almost Oriental, resting above the twin continents of her high, Asiatic, tremulous cheekbones. There was a reverie in her eyes, a languor, as if while searching for herself she had been stricken with a resigned, culpable sadness. She was an actress who wanted more than the Mexican movie industry could give her. She had made her debut at the age of fifteen, an aspirant to the pantheon of Mexican film goddesses, all dark-haired like her, all tall, with sleepy eyes and the cheekbones of an immortal skull.
She never got the parts, the stories, or the directors that could have brought about the tiny miracle called stardom. She avidly searched for the best, both in film and on stage; she loved her profession so much that, paradoxically, it destroyed her. Just like Diana Soren, she made only two or three good films. Later, just to keep working, she would take any part that came along. Time and wear took away her voice, denied her starring roles, made her prematurely old; she looked for character-actor parts, opportunities to shine that no one understood because they were so eccentric.
When we met, Luisa was married and I was emerging from a failed attempt at “decent” marriage. One after another, the proper young ladies my family’s status brought me into contact with would end up abandoning me, obeying their parents’ ironclad rules: I wasn’t rich, and even though I came from a good family, I didn’t belong to a grand political or financial clan. Besides, my talent was yet to be proven. In the best of cases, writing is a risky profession, especially in Latin America: in our countries, who lives off his books?
From my amat
ory youth, all I had left was the taste of many young and fresh lips and, over the years, questions: What have they said? When did they lose their freshness? When will they be cracks instead of lips? I loved none of them so much as I loved a dead girlfriend burned to cinders in an air crash; there was no girl in my life with fresher lips. But her ashes were also those of the lips of another woman I was on the verge of marrying. She rejected me because I wasn’t Catholic enough; I was, her parents said, an atheist and a Communist. She married a gringo with enormous feet, a belly swollen from too many beers, and a string of Texaco stations in the Midwest.
But the girlfriends were also part of an unknown sign, part of that horror I evoked at the start of my story, which consists in trying to penetrate the powerful mystery of what has yet to show itself. There is no greater melancholy than this: not knowing all the beings we might have loved, to die before we know them. My girlfriends—kissed, touched, desired, only occasionally possessed—all belonged, ultimately, to that magma of the unknown or unsaid. They all returned to the vast field of my possibility, my ignorance.
I met Luisa Guzmán before the success of my first novel. I think she loved me for myself, and I loved her for her beauty, which was obvious, and for her simplicity, which was disguised by a whirl of furs, rumors, images. More often than in her films, I had seen her in newspapers, ascending or descending airplane gangways clutching a huge plush panda. It was her trademark. An infantile image but closer to the truth than any publicity story could be.
Luisa’s childhood was miserable: a father who was absent or, rather, exiled by her mother’s aristocratic pride. The mother, a rebellious writer from a “good” Puebla family, always put her sexual or literary egoism before any family obligation. One day, Luisa’s father, tall, Indian, coarse, found the door of his wife and daughter’s home locked and he disappeared forever in the high mist and piquant scent of our mountains. Luisa, a child then, was sent to an orphanage and reemerged, an adolescent, only when her beauty and her mother’s profession came into a favorable conjunction in her mother’s little brain.
Damaged, Luisa came to me like a wounded bird, flying from a theater set on Sullivan Street into my waiting arms, which yearned for her, to fill a solitude that was creative but also stupid. The months of discipline and dissipation during which I had distanced myself forever from my family’s social world and struggled to finish my book had left me with empty arms. She came to fill them with her passion and tenderness but also with a sadness in her captive eyes. That sadness was an early disquiet for my own joy. I finished a book; I love a woman.
It took me a long time to understand that the melancholy in Luisa’s eyes was not temporary but consubstantial with them. It came, who knows, from her father’s misty, spicy mountains, from the faded sadness of those Puebla houses and their inhabitants, often querulous and hypocritical, as is appropriate to that region—a hotbed of warlords and nuns, of cruelly ambitious men and cruelly devout women. But more than anything, in my wife’s mestizo beauty I recognized her father’s foggy, piquant mountains, where patience and goodness accumulate along with rancor and revenge.
IV
Now Luisa and I were together again at the New Year’s Eve party Eduardo Terrazas was throwing, and Luisa was more beautiful than ever—dark, tall, showing lots of cleavage in a black dress that reflected the brilliance of her teased hair, of her eyebrows and lashes, almost of her dark skin that shone like some Aztec moon, sculpted, fighting to make visible its secret interior light devoid of color; or perhaps she offered her color in a spectrum of emotions, situations, and accidents that reconciled the profound solidity and the tremendous insecurity of this woman: between those two poles, her destiny took on its own form.
She felt she was permanent, and she was. She forgave me everything; I’d always come back to her. She was the safe haven, the peaceful lagoon where I could write. She knew my truth. Literature is my real lover, and everything else—sex, politics, religion (if I had one), death (when it comes)—passes through literary experience, which is the filter of all the other experiences of my life. She knew it. She prepared and maintained the home of my writing like a perpetual flame, always waiting for me, come what may. My friends knew it, and the most generous among them, if they were friends of my lovers, would warn them: “He’ll never leave Luisa. You have to understand that. On the other hand, you’ll always have a friend in me.”
Which is to say, the hard and fast rule for the Don Juans of all times is summed up in this Mexican adage: “Let’s see if she’s like chewing gum and sticks.” I was no exception. They all brought their chewing gum and tried to stick, sometimes successfully, other times not. Some wives would never stand for that; others would simply pretend not to see. Luisa and I had an express pact. Even if my chewing gum stuck, I’d come back. I would always come back. That was the worst blackmail. I was always in danger of having her pay me back in the same coin. Maybe she did. Women—the best women—know how to keep secrets, unlike stereotypical gossips. The most interesting women I know never tell anyone about their sexual lives. Not even their best friends. And nothing intrigues and excites a man more than a woman who keeps secrets better than he does. But Don Juan, by definition, proclaims his triumphs, wants to have them known, wants to be envied. Luisa was secret. I—a contemptible clown, a sexual tourist—didn’t deserve the loyalty, solidity, and constantly renewed faith of a woman like Luisa. That was her strength. That’s why she put up with everything. That’s why I was with her once again that night. She was stronger than I was.
Lots of friends were at Eduardo Terrazas’s house that Feast of Saint Sylvester, December 31, 1969. José Luis Cuevas, the extraordinary artist whose painful embrace includes all the marginal, excluded visions of desire, along with his wife, Berta. Fernando Benítez, my good and old friend, the great promoter of culture in the Mexican press, the novelist, the explorer of the invisible Indian Mexico, and his wife, Georgina. At the age of thirty-five, Cuevas was a wildcat whose pretense to urbane manners barely camouflaged his savage, nervous nature, for he was always on the point of pouncing on some prey as hot-blooded as he to tear it to pieces, devour it, all so he’d be left with the sensuality of being able to imagine doing it again. Was there a murderer in him sublimated by art? I always thought so, just as in Benítez—a sensualist if ever there was one, a sexist, a man who adored women but was a misogynist and hermit—there was a Franciscan monk, a Bartolomé de las Casas, redeemer of the Indians, one of those monks who came to the New World to save souls and protect bodies as soon as the conquest of Mexico was finished. It was possible to imagine him driving a BMW convertible at top speed toward Acapulco and an orgiastic weekend, but it was equally possible to see him riding a burro up some inhospitable mountain where there awaited him not lost tribes but the bacteria that was destroying his stomach, his pancreas, his intestines …
New Year’s Eve. This passage from 1969 to 1970 was worthy of celebration because it marked the end of one decade and the beginning of a new one. But no one agrees about what that final zero means at the end of a year. Were the 1960s coming to an end and the 1970s beginning, or were the 1960s demanding one more year, a final agony of partying and crime, revolt and death, for that decade replete with major events, tangible and intangible, guts and dreams, cobblestones and memories, blood and desire: the decade of Vietnam and Martin Luther King, the Kennedy assassinations and May 1968 in Paris, the Democratic convention in Chicago and the massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza, the death of Marilyn? A decade that seemed to be programmed for television, to fill the sterile scheduling wastelands of blank screens but leave them breathless, making miracles banal, transforming the little electronic postage stamp into our daily bread, the expected into the unexpected, the facsimile of reality that culminated, even before the 1970s had begun, in mankind’s first step on the moon. Our immediate suspicion: was the flight to the moon filmed in a TV studio? Our instantaneous disenchantment: can the moon go on being our romantic Diana after a gringo leaves his shit up t
here?
More guests arrived. China Mendoza, journalist and writer, who had a spectacular sense of self-affirmation during the 1960s. In that decade of outrageous styles, she wore clothing she seemed to have invented on her own, not copied from a fashion magazine. That night I remember her decked out in silver glasses shaped like butterflies and a miniskirt that was actually pajamas, a pink ruffled babydoll that revealed matching panties.
Rosa, the incredibly beautiful widow of the artist Miguel Covarrubias, came with a New York art dealer who looked exactly like the actor Sydney Greenstreet—that is, he was immensely fat and old, bald, with tufts of white hair here and there, eyebrows thick as caterpillars, and liver lips. Rosa was wearing one of her golden Fortuny dresses that rolled up like a towel and unfolded like a flag proclaiming My country is my body. On the verge of death, Rosa Covarrubias belied her age. She, too, belonged to that pantheon of Mexican beauties, those “immortal skulls,” as Diego Rivera called them when he painted Dolores del Río. How right he was. The bones of the face never grow old; they’re the paradox of a death that by definition has no age, borne like the secret insignia of beauty and its price. Luisa Guzmán—I saw her walk off and go up the stairs—belonged to that race. The closer the bone was to the skin, the more beautiful the face. But the more visible was death as well. Beauty lived off its imminent dying.