Along with Rosa and Greenstreet came three English marchands de tableaux who stared in shock and disgust at the Mexican men embracing, slapping one another on the back, and grabbing one another by the waist. Englishmen find touching repugnant and recoil in horror at the merest brush with someone else’s skin. Their ideas about climate and temperature are also singular, and one of them, the spitting image of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, recited the very lines from Byron I had just remembered: “The English winter—ending in July, / To recommence in August.” He added that it was very hot and opened a window.
Terrazas had decorated his house with myriad balloons strung from the ceiling in expectation of the moment of passage from one year to another. The balloons were stamped with the logo of the 1968 Olympiad, which Terrazas himself had designed. Just as the clock was striking twelve, Berta Cuevas, to announce the new year, touched her burning cigarette to the cluster of balloons that Terrazas had bunched together to imitate the traditional twelve grapes of the celebration. She didn’t know the balloons had been inflated with gas. The explosion went off like a muted earthquake and threw all of us to the floor or against the walls, swept the tables clean, turned over chairs, and knocked pictures cockeyed.
A seventeenth-century carving fell right on Greenstreet’s head, and all the rest of us—Rosa, Georgina and Fernando Benítez, Cuevas and Berta, China, and I—were blind to one another, aware only of our individual selves, of our brush with death, of the instantaneous surprise of the accident, of the cancellation of all questions but one—Am I alive? Then came moans, anger, pain. We were all completely flabbergasted. We stood there with our mouths hanging open and then began to laugh as the three Englishmen, no longer so nonchalant, peered into the mirror to make certain of their existence and found their faces dotted with pieces of balloon bearing the logo of the Mexican Olympiad of 1968. They looked like three explorers suddenly transformed by the sorcery of a tribal sacrifice into priests tattooed by the very rites they’d come to exorcise. One of them—I’d recovered my senses—saved our lives by opening a window to let in a breeze that came, no doubt about it, straight from the Scottish Highlands.
Luisa saved herself and her impeccable appearance: she’d gone up to the powder room and now came back down in alarm. Just at that moment, the front door opened, and Eduardo Terrazas walked in with Diana Soren, whom he’d gone to fetch from another party.
“Are we too late?” asked our host, watching us, dazed, get up from the floor.
V
Can you extricate yourself from one romance and get into another without hurting someone? This is just one simple example of the myriad questions you ask yourself when you suddenly realize something’s going to begin at the expense of something that’s going to end. She was small, blond, with boyishly cut hair, fair, pale, with blue or perhaps gray eyes, very jolly eyes, that nicely matched her dimpled cheeks. Her dress wasn’t very attractive: a long Greco-Californian evening gown, which didn’t suit her because it made her seem shorter than she was, like a thumbtack.
I—who else?—remembered her from her two major films. In both, Diana Soren used her adolescent physique to full advantage by dressing as a man. First she was Joan of Arc, and the armor allowed her to move with energy and fluidity, comfortable in war as she never would have been in a court of hoop skirts and white wigs, armed to fight like a soldier, dressed as a soldier. In the bonfire, she would pay dearly for the privilege, accused of witchcraft but also perhaps, silently, of lesbianism and androgyny. In the only good movie she made after that, in France, she was a girl in a T-shirt and jeans running back and forth on the Champs Elysées waving her copy of the Herald Tribune … Loose, free, the warrior maiden of Orléans or the vestal virgin of the Latin Quarter, adorably feminine because to get to her you had to negotiate the twists and turns of androgyny and homoeroticism. On the screen, I’d always seen Diana Soren with an unwritten subtitle: There is the love that dares not speak its name, but there is something worse, which is the love without a name. What name can I give the possible love with this pure possibility which entered the 1970 New Year’s Eve party after a gas explosion and which was called Diana Soren?
I looked at her. She looked at me. Luisa looked at us looking at each other. My wife walked over to me and said point-blank, “I think we should be on our way.”
“But the party hasn’t even started,” I protested.
“For me it’s over.”
“Because of the explosion? I’m fine. Look.” I showed her my steady hands.
“You promised tonight to me.”
“Don’t be so self-centered. Look who’s just walked in. We’re both fans of hers.”
“Forget the plural, please.”
“I just want to chat with her for a while.”
“Don’t come home too late.” She raised her eyebrow, an almost inevitable, Pavlovian, instinctive reflex in a Mexican actress.
I never went home. Seated next to Diana Soren, talking about movies, about life in Paris, discovering mutual friends, I felt I was being unfaithful and, as always, told myself that, if I wasn’t being unfaithful to literature, I wasn’t being unfaithful to myself; nothing else mattered. But when I caressed Diana Soren’s hand with the tips of my fingers, I had the sensation that the infidelity, if there was any, had to be double.
After all, Diana was married to Ivan Gravet, a very popular, prizewinning French writer who’d written two beautiful books about his youth, the first about his escape from Eastern Europe, the second about when he’d fought in the war. His latest novels seemed written for the movies and were produced in Hollywood, but in everything he wrote there was always both intelligence and a growing disenchantment. I could imagine him capable of a final joke, excessive but devoid of illusion. He was a fellow writer. Could I betray him? He himself, if he was like me, would say books are more valuable than women … I began to desire Diana.
Encounters between a man and a woman take place on two levels. One is external—filmable, if you like—the level of gesture, attitude, eyes, movement. More interesting is the internal level, where sensations, questions, doubts, games you play with yourself, fantasies begin to materialize and crowd in. She herself: what could she be thinking, what’s she like, what can she be thinking about me? Facing the charm of that blond head, sculpted like a helmet for medieval warfare or for the street fighting of the 1960s (fading into the distance that night, suddenly as far off as the Hundred Years’ War), I imagined an overwhelming carnal invitation, Diana Soren’s head saying to me, Imagine my body, I command you. Each detail of my head, my face, has its equivalent in my body. Search my body for the smile of my visible mouth, search my body for the dimples in my cheeks, search my body for the breathing of my turned-up little nose, search for the tactile and excitable counterpart of my eyes, search for the twin companion of my smooth blond hair, freshly washed, short, sometimes combed, otherwise free as the wind, but near, ever so near to its most intimate, invisible, insecure model: my flesh.
That was one level of my incipient desire as we chatted amiably on the sofa in Eduardo Terrazas’s house. I must not reveal it: another clause in the constitution of encounters orders us never to give a woman the ammunition she can store up to fire at you when she needs to attack you (which, one day, she will). It’s something inherent in women: to store away our sins and dump them on us when they need to and when we least expect it. Self-defense? No. Women are great at the art of making us feel guilty. To disguise my own immediate desire, I resorted to the anti-aphrodisiac idea of woman as producer of guilt, woman as the true Federal Reserve or Fort Knox of Guilt. They stockpile guilt to avoid inflation and then release those ingots of reproach little by little, distilled, wounding, poisoned, ultimately victorious, because we men, marvelous paradigms of generosity, would never do that … I thought about the unfaithfulness that in my case had already been consummated even if nothing had taken place with Diana Soren. I thought about Luisa, alone back in the San Angel house, and the unfaithfulness she might
perpetrate if I went ahead with my own that night. More than ever, I decided it must be a double infidelity, shared, that would link us and excite us …
Luisa and Ivan—our absent witnesses—suspended like two exterminating angels over our bodies but respecting our unfaithful integrity because, after all, they loved us, remembered us with pleasure, and never lost the hope of being with us. And did we have the hope of being with them?
We talked of other places, other friends scattered around the world, and we felt that what was beginning to link us was not only that cosmopolitan, footloose fraternity but also the price of membership in it. To be from everywhere, we said, was to be from nowhere … Where would she feel comfortable? In Paris, in Mallorca, she said. Los Angeles? She laughed. A place that looked horrible externally, physically, and was horrible inside as well, hopeless.
“There’s a word in English that’s perfect for Hollywood: smug. How do you say that in Spanish?”
“Pagado de sí, satisfecho de sí mismo: both mean smug.”
“I like them both.” She laughed. “You know—the presumption of being universal. The navel of the world. Whatever happens there is the most important thing in the universe. The rest of us are just hicks…”
“Payos in Spanish.”
“Only Hollywood is international, cosmopolitan. And boy, when you prove to them they aren’t cosmopolitan, they hate your guts. They make you pay for it. They hate your guts.”
“How can you tell? They’re all hiding behind those tan masks they call faces.”
“So are you!” She laughed, opening her eyes wide in mock astonishment, staring at the tan I’d brought back from Puerto Vallarta. She made me remember I’d gotten a good burn down there, in more ways than one.
That smile enchanted me. She could repeat it, I told myself, as many times as she wanted, for centuries, without ever boring me. Diana Soren’s smile and musical laugh, so light-hearted, so alive that New Year’s Eve in Mexico. How could I not adore her right then and there? I bit my lip. I was adoring an image I’d seen, pursued, and pitied for fifteen years … My vanity spurred me on. I wanted to go to bed with a woman desired by thousands of men. I wanted to feel her under me and feel the green breath of a hundred thousand green men on the back of my neck, all wanting to be me, to be where I was. I stopped short. How would she ever be able to share that pride and that vanity with me?
All that night, I underestimated the feminine capacity for conquest, the Don Juanism of the opposite sex. We don’t like to admire in a woman the perseverance or luck we admire in ourselves. Our vanity (or our blindness) is huge. Or, perhaps, they reveal a secret modesty that can be a person’s greatest attraction, his secret, irresistible weakness appealing unconsciously to the embrace of the mother-lover-protector who discovers the enigma of our vulnerability, which we’ve so carefully disguised, hidden, repressed …
Diana returned repeatedly to the theme of home and exile. She asked me if I knew James Baldwin, the black writer exiled in France. No. He was a good friend of my pal Bill Styron, but I didn’t know him. I’d only read his books.
“He says something.” Diana’s eyes focused on the colonial chandelier from which the sagging New Year’s Eve balloons hung like sad, dead planets. “A black and a white, because they’re both Americans, know more about themselves and about each other than any European knows about any American, black or white.”
“Do you think you can go home again?” I asked.
She shook her head again and again, drawing up her legs and bringing them together so she could rest her forehead on her knees.
“No. You can’t.”
“Do you ever go back to your hometown?”
“Sure. That’s why I know you can’t go back.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a farce. I have to pretend I love them.”
She lifted her head. She looked at my inquisitive face and quickly said, as if to rid herself of it for good, “My parents. My friends from school. My boyfriends. I hate their guts.”
“Because they stayed there, in the rut?”
“Yes. But also because they saved themselves there. They didn’t have to act out roles the way I do. Maybe I hate them because I’m jealous of them.”
“You’re an actress. What’s so strange…”
“Iowa, Iowa.” She laughed with a touch of desperation. “I don’t know if we Americans should all go into exile as Baldwin and I did or stay at home as my parents and boyfriends did. Maybe our mistake, the mistake of the United States, is to go out into the world. We never understand anything going on outside the front door. We’re a bunch of payos, as you say, hicks. Hollywood! Just imagine: if you don’t know the most recent gossip, who’s sleeping with who, what everyone’s salary is, they think you’re a moron, an illiterate. All their jokes are about provincial, local subjects. Inside jokes, you know? They don’t understand someone like me, who never gives them the pleasure of repeating gossip or even of telling them about my love life.”
“Baldwin also says that Europe has what you Americans need—a sense of tragedy, of limits. On the other hand, you do have what the Europeans lack—a sense of life’s unlimited possibilities … An energy that…”
“I like it. I like that. What you just said.”
Diana’s burning hand in mine when the party ended and only she, Terrazas, and I were left. Diana invited us to have a nightcap in her hotel suite, and Eduardo said he’d drop us off while he went to pick up a girlfriend at Anderson’s on Paseo de la Reforma. He’d catch up with us at the Hilton, which wasn’t far away.
He never showed up. Diana and I had fun writing joint telegrams to all our friends in Paris. We went on talking about Hollywood (she), Mexico (I), drinking champagne and beginning to play with each other, while I swore that I’d never love her, that love’s space was too vast for me to sacrifice it to love, that on that very night I could have substituted other women for her, lots of other women, that loving her, nevertheless, was an exciting temptation, and that I never wanted to wonder later if I could deprive myself of her … That night, yes, I could have left her, invented any damn pretext and walked out of that suite, which looked like an M-G-M set in a hotel destined to collapse in the next earthquake.
While she undressed, I looked out the bedroom window at the statue of the Aztec king Cuauhtémoc holding his spear on high, standing guard over the pleasures of the city he’d lost.
VI
That long, marvelous first day of January 1970 in the Hilton suite, we didn’t bother to get dressed, just wrapped ourselves in towels whenever the room-service people came. We discovered a thousand details that linked us: we were both born in November—Scorpios can sense each other. At first, I called her a gamine, but she didn’t like it, so I stopped. But we both liked another French word, désolé, desolate, I’m so sorry, and we said it all the time, désolé about this, désolé about that, especially when we asked each other for physical love: we pronounced ourselves désolés, I’m so sorry, but I would like to kiss you, I’m sorrier, but you could come closer … desolate, the two of us.
Close to her. Whenever I was, everything else faded into the background, vanished like the night itself as the first light of the new year broke over the intersection of Reforma and Insurgentes. My lovely, sinister city, center of all beauty and all horror, México, D.F. All too frequently, the only thing that would bring people together in my city was solitude, a craving for company, a group, the need to belong. Even sex in Mexico City, once you’re above a certain income bracket (everything here is determined by brutal class differences), is like going down a slide, riding a toboggan of pleasures—uncertain, partial, immediate—that are never postponed and end only with death. Then, when we die, we realize we were always dead.
Not Diana. She infuriated Beverly Hills gossips because they never knew whom she was sleeping with—in a city where every woman announced such things publicly. What she was doing now, it was clear to me, was an act of total commitment, one she
desired, not an accident but at the same time, I sensed without knowing why, dangerous. I told myself, as afternoon came on and I remembered the pleasure of making love with Diana, that we had no illusions about each other, neither of us. Our relationship was a passing one. She was here to make a film, I was the lucky boy at a New Year’s Eve party. Transitory but not gratuitous, not a pis aller, not a better-than-nothing or, as we say expressively in Mexico, a peoresnada—“worse would be nothing.” Worse would be nothing, no one, Mr. Nothing, wiseguy. Mexicans and Spaniards delight in denying or diminishing other people’s existence. Gringos, Anglo-Saxons in general, are better than we are, at least in this respect. They have more concern for their fellowman, more than we do. Maybe that’s why they’re better philanthropists. Our cruel aristocratic spirit, the hidalgo dressed in black, hand on chest, is more aesthetic but more sterile.
I was intrigued with the idea of discovering precisely what Diana’s internal quality of cruelty, of destruction was, even if—as we all knew—she fervently supported, and was committed to, liberal, noble, sympathetic causes. Her name was on every petition against racism, in favor of civil rights, against the OAS and the fascist generals in Algeria, in favor of animal rights … She even had a sweatshirt imprinted with the image of the supreme 1960s icon, Che Guevara, transformed after his brutal death in 1967 into Chic Guevara, savior of all the good consciences of so-called radical chic in Europe and North America, that capacity of the West to find revolutionary paradises in the Third World and, in their lustrous waters, wash away its petit-bourgeois egoism … Was there any doubt about it?
Ernesto Guevara, dead, laid out like Mantegna’s Christ, was our era’s most beautiful cadaver. Che Guevara was the Saint Thomas More of the Second (or Millionth) European Discovery of the New World. Ever since the sixteenth century, we’ve been the utopia where Europe can cleanse itself of its sins of blood, avarice, and death. And Hollywood has been the U.S. Sodom that waves revolutionary flags to disguise its vices, its hypocrisy, its love of money pure and simple. Was Diana different, or was she just one more in that legion of Californian utopians, now purified, thanks to her husband, by French revolutionary sentimentalism?