“That’s what you tell the people who work here?”
He said he did. “Someone’s got to inform them. Someone’s got to make them aware of things. Maybe you yourself, now that you’re here…”
“I’m writing a book. Besides, I don’t want to compromise my North American friends. They’re working and can’t get involved in politics. It would be a real pain if they did. I’m their guest. I have to respect them.”
“Okay. Maybe another time.”
I shook hands with him and asked him not to take offense. We could get together sometime for coffee. He smiled. His teeth were terrible. And yet he was tall, graceful, with languid eyes, and a sagging Zapata mustache—thin, like his unfinished, patchy, almost pubic beard.
“My name is Carlos Ortiz.”
“Well, well, we’re namesakes.”
That he liked. He thanked me for saying it and even smiled.
At night, Diana and I went on building our passion. I didn’t dare ask her anything about her past loves, and she didn’t ask me about mine. I’d ventured two ideas: the company of death and the natural tendency of couples to form triangles. In reality, what both of us wanted at that stage was to feel ourselves unique, without precedents, one of a kind. The first nights were a matter of words and acts, acts and words, sometimes the one first, other times the other, rarely both at once, because the words of sex are unrepeatable, infantile, often filthy, with no interest or excitement except for the lovers themselves.
On the other hand, the words before or after the act always tended, during those early days in Santiago, to proclaim the joy and singularity of what was happening to us. With Diana Soren in my arms, I came to feel that I had written nothing before I met her. Love meant starting over. She fed and strengthened that idea: she actually told me that we were getting to know each other at the creation, before the past, before Iowa and the little skirt and the moon—she actually said that. Ultimately, she transmuted everything (and I thanked her for it) into a fantastic vision of joy as simultaneity. Sometimes during orgasm she would shout, “Why doesn’t everything happen at the same time?” It wasn’t a question; it was a desire. A fervent desire in which I joined. Welded to her flesh and her words. Yes, please, let everything happen at the same time …
We were unique. Everything began with us. Then literature butted in. I remembered Proust: “To know Gilberte again, as in the time of the creation, as if the past did not yet exist.” And from there it was only a step to the Lucho Gatica bolero that sometimes floated through the window from the servants’ rooms: “Don’t ask me anything more, / let me imagine / that the past doesn’t exist / and that we were born / at the very moment when we met…”
It’s true she hadn’t read the sentence in a novel by her husband, Ivan Gravet, where he says, more or less, that a couple exists while it can invent itself or because shit’s better than solitude. A couple’s problems begin when the two of them stop inventing themselves.
I preferred to think I was captured inside the body of this woman like a fetus that grows and fears, when it’s thrown into the world, that it loses its nourishing mother, Diana, Artemis, Cybele, Astarte, first goddess …
“I love your cloudy brow,” Diana would say when I thought these things.
“But you always have a clear brow.”
“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if one day you see me suffer, you’ll pay for it.”
IX
No sooner did I move into Diana’s house than I claimed, like some sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, a territory of my own. There I arranged my portable typewriter, my paper, and my books. Diana looked at me with smiling surprise.
“Won’t you be coming to the set with me?”
“You know I can’t. I write from eight in the morning until one—it’s the way I work.”
“I want to show you off on the set. I want to be seen with you.”
“I’m sorry. We’ll see each other every afternoon, when the day’s shooting is done.”
“My men always accompany me on the set,” she said, accentuating the smile.
“I can’t, Diana. Our whole relationship would fall apart in twenty-four hours. I love you at night. Let me write during the day. If you don’t, we’ll never get along. I swear.”
The truth is, I was going through a creative crisis whose full dimensions I had yet to measure. My first novels had been successful because a new readership in Mexico identified itself (or, rather, misidentified itself) in them, saying we are or we aren’t like that but, either way, giving an engaged, occasionally impassioned response to three or four of my books, which were seen as a bridge between a convulsed, dejected, rural, self-enclosed country and a new urban society that was open but perhaps too apathetic, too comfortable and thoughtless. One phantom of Mexican reality was disappearing, only so another could take its place. Which was better? What were we sacrificing in either case? “I’ll always be grateful to you,” said a woman who worked with me in the Foreign Office when I had published my first novel but still needed a bureaucratic salary, “for having mentioned the street where I live. I’d never seen it in print before in a novel. Thank you!”
The truth is, the social dimension of those books would have no real value for me unless it went along with a formal renovation of the novel as a literary form. The way I said things was as important as, or even more important than, what I was saying. But every writer has a primary relationship with the themes that arise from the world around him, and a much more complex relationship with the forms he invents, inherits, copies, or parodies—every novel contains those elements, feeds on those sources. The novel as a genre and impurity as an idea are sisters; the concept of the novel and the concept of originality are like a pair of mothers-in-law. I did not want to repeat the success of my first novels. Perhaps I made a mistake seeking out my new partnership exclusively in the idea of form and divorcing myself from subject matter. The fact is that one day I reached the palpable point of exhaustion between vital content and literary expression.
Living for several years in Paris, London, and Venice, I searched for the new alliance in my own vocation. I found it, just maybe and just fleetingly, in a funeral chant to the modernity that was wearing all of us out, Europeans and New World Americans alike. We were going to suffer a change of skin, like it or not. The upheavals all over the world in the 1960s did not help me; they only made it obvious that youth was elsewhere, not in a Mexican author who in the crucial year 1968 had turned forty.
But that was also the year of the massacre in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City and of the Tlatelolco killings. The unpunished murder of hundreds of young students by the armed forces and government agents brought all Mexicans together, despite our biological or generational differences. It united us, I mean, in terms not only of political parties but of grief. At the same time, it divided us according to whether we supported or opposed the government’s behavior. The writer José Revueltas went to jail because of his participation in the movement for reform. At a Freedom of the Press Day dinner, Martín Luis Guzmán, the novelist of the Mexican Revolution, praised President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who was responsible for the slaughter. Octavio Paz resigned his ambassadorship in India. The poet Salvador Novo intoned an aria of thankfulness to Díaz Ordaz and our national institutions. In Paris, I circulated petitions demanding amnesty for Revueltas and condemnations of the violence with which the government, lacking political answers, had so bloodily responded to the students’ challenge.
The students were no more or less than the children of the Mexican Revolution that I had explored in my first books. They were the youth educated by the revolution, which taught them to believe in democracy, justice, and liberty. Now they were asking only for that, and the government, which had supposedly emanated from the revolution, answered them with death. The official argument until that moment had been: We’re going to pacify and stabilize a country ravaged by twenty years of armed conflict and a century of anarchy and dictatorship. We’re going
to provide education, communication, health, and economic prosperity. For your part, you citizens are going to allow us, in order to attain all that, to postpone democracy. Progress today, democracy tomorrow. We promise. That was the pact.
The kids of 1968 asked for democracy today, and that demand cost them their lives, but it gave life back to Mexico.
I expected the new writers to translate all this into literature, but I did not exempt myself from a hard look: I accused myself of a complicity and blindness that kept me from participating in a better way, more directly, in that parting of the waters in modern Mexican life that was 1968. My recurring nightmare was a hospital where the authorities banned the students’ parents and relatives, where no one bothered to tie a tag to the naked toe of a single corpse …
“We’re not going to have five hundred funeral processions here tomorrow,” said a Mexican general. “If we allow that, the government collapses…”
There were no processions. There was a common grave. My wife, Luisa Guzmán, sent me tranquil but secretly anguished letters: “I was rehearsing in the Comonfort theater in the Bellas Artes complex, just opposite Tlatelolco, when I began to hear a lot of shooting. I saw the government helicopters mowing down students and ordinary people indiscriminately. It went on for more than an hour, and when I left the theater the students threw themselves at me and the other actors, shouting, ‘They’re killing your children!’ I’ve never heard such screams of horror and desperation. It was the worst night in many lives. The next day, the newspapers made no mention of the helicopters and said thirty people had lost their lives. No one knows how the shooting began. The kids said some agents mixed in with the demonstrators probably fired the first shots. Then someone saw them receiving arms and orders from the soldiers. Everyone has a different version of what happened. Everyone is also more and more afraid every day, not only of the violence but of what’s behind the violence, and so as not to serve secret interests they prefer to serve no one…”
I answered that I wanted to come home to Mexico and get more involved. I’d just visited Prague. The world was changing its skin; something had to be done.
“Mexico is not Prague,” Luisa Guzmán wrote back, “as you well know. The middle class is scared and is siding with the authorities, with law and order. I’ve talked to taxi drivers and poor people. Their ignorance and indifference are still unshakable. They swallow all the lies they hear on television or read in the papers, and they go on believing in the red-menace bogeyman. I know, I know, in spite of all that or because of it, we have to continue fighting, and if someone gets caught in the crossfire, well, it’s just bad luck. But to come and put your head in the wolf’s mouth only to find out it was a trap set to catch idealists seems to me absurd, sad, and even ridiculous. Student leaders disappear mysteriously, without a trace. Others have been all but killed by torture. Your only chance to take part would be from underground. Betrayal and corruption are too deeply rooted here. Perhaps there are half a dozen young people who could actually withstand the bombardment of half a million pesos, but most would end up giving in. Pardon my pessimism—I don’t want to avoid responsibility, but I do want to calm down that enthusiasm you picked up in Czechoslovakia. Not a day goes by here without someone calling you, in writing or out loud, a traitor to your country. You shouldn’t come back. It’s all the same to me whether you’re a hero or a traitor, and I refuse to talk to anyone. I’m tired of hearing superficial judgments…”
I did return in February 1969. One morning, angry and tearful, Luisa Guzmán and I walked hand in hand around Tlatelolco Plaza. My literary imagination would allow me only to write a theatrical oratorio on the Conquest of Mexico, another of those savage wounds driven in the body of what we call, with no clear definitions, the state, the country, the nation … Mexico was always sewn together with stabs, always invented by means of survival. Elena Poniatowska and Luis González de Alba wrote the great books on the Tlatelolco tragedy, and I had to content myself with admiring them, feeling they spoke in my name.
Now this accidental meeting with the student Carlos Ortiz in the Santiago plaza awakened all those feelings in me again. Not everyone had given in, as Luisa Guzmán had predicted they would. But the one who had been hiding was me; the traitor was me. I couldn’t respond with the courage I owed to the loyalty and patience of my wife. I had returned to Mexico and tried to compensate for my double burden of political horror and writing block with the plaything of love, refusing—perhaps forever—to enter further into Luisa’s love, to make it exclusive, to penetrate more deeply into the life of the woman who in those moments would have enabled me to venture more deeply into politics and literature. I broke Ariadne’s thread. My frivolity is unforgivable. I was to pay for my abandonment of Luisa many times, again and again, in the years left to me. I just couldn’t start over with her. Perhaps I should have reconstructed our love. Was it reconstructible, or was it already a great void, a lie, a repetition? Hand in hand with her, I walked Tlatelolco Plaza. Tenderness and horror mixed in my heart: was my rejection of this ceremony of death only a pretext to affirm a capacity for abstract, general love without specific content? Was I incapable of truly loving someone? Was I able to bedazzle myself by multiplying adventures only in order to convince myself, falsely, that I really could love? Why didn’t I see that the love she was offering me then, at my side, was known, maybe even routine, but certain?
Tlatelolco for me was a terrible sign—my own wound as a writer and a lover—of the separation between the vital content of things and their literary expression in my work. Now, in Santiago, I was going to sit down and prove to myself that I could climb out of my hole. Anguished, I was also happy. This mad love with Diana could be my new point of departure. If the original vein of my literature had run out, what would the new one be? Would love tell me? The answer would depend on the intensity of that tenderness. That’s why I had abandoned my house, betrayed my wife, exposed myself to yet another cruel fall into disillusion. How could Diana ask me to spend the day watching her get made up and have her hair done on the set? There’s nothing so tedious as making a movie. I was not going to waste my time. In my name or in hers.
“You and I share something,” I told Diana one cold, boring night. “We have forever lost the moment of beginning, the glory of our debut. You can lose it in movies, in literature, and in love, you know…”
“You’re talking to a woman who stopped existing at age twenty,” replied Diana. “I was a has-been at twenty.”
I told her how I’d always been fascinated by that expression, the “has-been” implying a closed, finished destiny. I was too optimistic to think that way; I believe we’re incomplete, unfinished individuals. I read and reread three great lines by my favorite poet, Quevedo. (Diana’s never heard of him, but her secretary, Azucena, has and asks me to repeat them. Then I translate them, the three of us at the dining-room table, surrounded by tasteless white figurines in the rented house in Santiago.)
Yesterday’s gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived,
today’s going by without stopping an instant;
I am a Was, a Will Be, and an Is grown tired …
Perhaps what the gringos lack, I said in a joking way, is a serious sense of death instead of a tragic sense of fame. No country gives so much value to fame as the United States. It’s the culmination of the great modern fanfare, that blast of trumpets which for half a millennium has been saying that “we” is not enough, that not even “I” is enough, that we need to be known, we need renown, fame. By then, Andy Warhol had already declared we’d all be famous for fifteen minutes. I asked Diana if she really believed her fame had ended when she was twenty. She rested her blond, chiseled head on my shoulder and put her hand on my heart.
“As an actress, yes…”
“You’re wrong,” I consoled her. “Should I tell you what I’m going through now as a writer? I promise you we’re not so different.”
“Can we begin again if we love each other a lot?”
 
; “I think we can, Diana,” I said. I was deeply moved.
Moments like that don’t last. The will for passion can, and I exercised it with Diana against Diana, toward Diana, with all my strength. I was convinced that she felt the same toward me, in her way. For both of us, love was always the opportunity to start over, although, for her, living was living what had yet to be lived, while for me it was knowing again how to live what had already been lived. For better or worse, I don’t want to abandon my own past to a wandering orphanhood.
For Diana, her early triumph in movies and then the mediocrity of her most recent films closed the door of her profession as actress. But that was the profession she got out of bed every morning to practice. From bed I watched her reacting to the alarm clock, drinking the coffee Azucena brought her on a nicely prepared tray (Azucena is a Spanish working woman; she likes her work; what she does makes her proud, so she does it well), slipping on a T-shirt and jeans—much like her most famous character, the maid of Orléans, who discovered the most comfortable style for a warrior woman: to dress like a man—then tying a kerchief over her head, and leaving, throwing me a dry kiss as I’d steal another hour’s sleep. Later I’d wake, remembering night with Diana with intense pleasure. I’d take a shower and shave thinking about what I was going to write (the shower and the razor are my best springboards for creation: water and steel; I must really be Arab, really Castilian). I watched my lover sacrifice and discipline herself for a profession in which she didn’t believe, in which she didn’t see her self, in which she could not even glimpse her future, while I settled down for the rest of the day in this enigma, huge and tiny at the same time: what does Diana Soren really want if what she does is not what she wants to do?