X
The tedium of Santiago became the most tedious theme of our conversations. It seemed we’d reached an unbreachable consensus, in which all of us—Diana and I, her secretary, and the other members of the cast—concurred that Santiago was the most boring place in the world.
Instead of the well-wishing telegrams we usually send to friends on New Year’s Day, this year Diana sent two or three desolate cables. They all said the same thing, just one word: HELP!
Various circles formed. The leading man, famous as the hero of a television series, lived in a large, elegant house on the outskirts of Santiago with his girlfriend and the director, a saturnine but promising man who’d also made a name for himself in television. The melancholy hotel in the center of town was home to the cinematographer—an Englishman who explicitly worshipped at the altar of Onan—and an actor who’d been famous in the workers’ theater movement of the 1930s. But the sun around which the entire production revolved was the leading man, his girlfriend, and the director.
“They’re very nice, and I get along well with them,” said Diana. “But the deal is that we live apart and see one another very little. They like to spend their evenings drinking beer and playing poker.”
Something we would never do. But I did wonder what, aside from loving each other a great deal, we would do to pass the nights. Diana told me she’d invited the character actor of the film, an American named Lew Cooper, to live with us. “Don’t worry. He’s sixty and very intelligent. You’ll like him.”
I knew very well who he was. First, because he was the greatest actor in Clifford Odets’s plays during the 1930s and in Arthur Miller’s in the 1940s. Second, because he was one of the victims of Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt in the 1950s. I was disgusted by all those who’d squealed on their colleagues, condemning the victims to hunger and, sometimes, to suicide. On the other hand, all those who, like Lillian Hellman, had refused to accommodate conscience to the political fashions of the day were my heroes. Cooper strangely fell between the two categories. Some said he was a totally apolitical man and that his statements to the House Un-American Activities Committee had been innocuous: he’d named those who’d already been named or who’d come forward and declared themselves Communists. He never added an unpublished name, so to speak, to the inquisitor’s list. But even if he’d actually informed on no one, the moral fact is that he did give names, or at least repeat them.
How do you judge that kind of action? Cooper went on working. Others, who refused to talk, never again set foot on a movie set. Not part of the U.S. political world but from a moral world that transcended it, I was caught between my leftist convictions and my personal ethics, which rejected facile Manichaeanism and, above all, the slightest hint of Pharisaism. Was the case difficult to judge precisely because it stood between bloodthirsty, vengeful, envious, opportunistic squealing and the weaknesses and failures to which, perhaps, all of us are susceptible? Cooper’s moral ambiguity made him more interesting than blameworthy. One among so many people had to be my own double. Who could reassure me that under certain circumstances I myself wouldn’t have done what he did? My entire intellectual and moral self rebelled against the idea. But my sentimental side, human, affectionate, or whatever you’d like to call it, tended to forgive Cooper, just as one day someone else would have to forgive me something. There are people who replicate our weakness because we instantly recognize ourselves in them. Cooper deserved not my censure but my compassion.
Anyway, I was curious about all the people involved in the film, but Diana lost patience with my questions. “Hollywood adores capsule biographies. They save time and, best of all, excuse us from thinking. They let us put on airs of being objective, but actually we’re just swallowing gossip consommé. Marilyn Monroe: a sad, lonely little girl. Irresponsible father. Insane mother. Bounced from orphanage to orphanage. She never should have stopped being Norma Jean Baker. She couldn’t stand the burden of being Marilyn Monroe—pills, alcohol, death. Rock Hudson: an extremely handsome truck driver from Texas. Used to driving the highways by night, he would pick up boys and make love to them. He’s discovered. He becomes a star. He’s got to hide his homosexuality. He’s locked in a closet filled with spotlights and cameras. Everyone knows he’s a queen. The world has to believe he’s the most virile of leading men. Who disillusioned them? Death, death…”
She laughed and poured herself a whiskey without bothering to ask me to do it for her. “Sweetheart, don’t believe my biography. Don’t believe it when they say: Diana Soren. Small-town girl. The girl next door. Wins a competition for the part of Shaw’s Saint Joan. Wins out of eighteen thousand contestants. From anonymity to glory in a flash. A genuine sadist directs the film. He humiliates her, tries to get great acting out of her with his cruelty, but only manages to convince her she will never be a great actress. And that’s a fact. Diana Soren will take any shitty part the studios offer her so she can disguise herself, so the world will believe Diana Soren is just that: only a mediocre actress. Then Diana can dedicate herself to being what she wants to be and no one can impose limits on her…”
I toasted her. “What do you want to be?”
“We’ll be on location for two months.” Her gray (or were they blue?) eyes disappear behind a veil of amber glass. “You can tell me yourself when the time’s up.”
XI
We had dinner with the leading man, the girlfriend, and the director only a few times. Diana loathed that species of utopian colony which tried to reproduce Hollywood life far from Hollywood—a sublimated version, more disdainful, obvious, relaxed, and weary of what North Americans usually look for when they leave the United States. I mean home away from home, Holiday Inns identical to one another, the same towels, the same soap in the same places, the same information, magazines, filters for mental security … The difference between ordinary tourists and Hollywood people is that tourists, despite being afraid, live with the word wonderful on their lips; the world seems fascinating to them, incredible, exotic … but only if they can go back to their home away from home, the Holiday Inn, the same menu, every night. Movie stars, on the other hand, have seen everything, are tired, impressed by nothing. Being on location is a necessary evil—may it pass quickly; let’s kill our tedium with sex, alcohol, gossip, immortality. The combination didn’t surprise me. Sex told us we were alive even if the place was dead. The alcohol replaced the exceptional (because powerful and physical) nature of sex with a vaguely dreamlike, floating state that, as the leading man said, brought everything into present time: Do you realize that? All you need is a couple of martinis for everything that ever happened to you to be happening now …
“What do you mean, sugar? I don’t get you,” said his girlfriend.
“Would you like to be happy all the time?” he asked her, putting a finger under her chin and staring straight into her eyes.
“Well, who wouldn’t?”
“But you’re not, right?”
“So who is?”
“But when you’re drinking, you’re happy…”
“Sure, but I pay for it the next morning…” She laughed like a jackass.
“That’s not the point. You drink and you’re not only happy.”
“No?”
“No. You’re combining all your moments of happiness, as if you were living them all together at the same time, here and now. See?”
“Yeah, I see. Know why I love you so much? Nobody else makes me understand things…”
The actor laughed gutturally and hugged his girlfriend’s reddish head against his hairy chest, which overflowed out of his shirt, red as a bullfighter’s cape. But she shrieked because of the chain that also glittered on the actor’s chest: Ow, it’s hurting me, it’s scraping my eyebrows …
He had taxidermic eyes, and when he looked at her she swooned, saying, I’ve only seen eyes like that in deer trophies hanging in country clubs …
Sex, alcohol, and gossip. If alcohol made us happy, it also loosened our tongues: who
was sleeping with whom, for how long, why, what part did they give Lilly, who’d she steal it from, who’s on the way out, who’s rising like the head on beer? Immortality.
“Think Lilly’s going to last?”
“Don’t know. Everything’s relative. Last longer than what?”
“All right, less than the faces on Mount Rushmore, of course.”
“Or more than who, then?”
“Garbo lasted a long time and retired at the right moment. Anna Sten lasted a minute, and they retired her at the right moment. Lupe Vélez lasted a long time but didn’t know how to retire at the right moment. Death retired Valentino when he was thirty…”
“Look, the important thing is not what your place is but how big it is. It’s the space that counts, not the time. A short time but a lot of space—you’ve got it made. A small space for a long time, you’re a poor jerk.”
“Depends on publicity. And talent, of course.”
But with the word talent everyone’s eyes became glassy; they all looked at one another as if they weren’t there or as if they were all glass, like Cervantes’s character, the university graduate who wakes up imagining he’s made of glass. Then it was time to think about sex again, alcohol, gossip, immortality, who’s going to survive, who’s going to last, let’s screw, let’s have a drink, let’s gossip, are we going to last?
I whispered to Diana that all this reminded me of one of the most repulsive institutions in the world, the gringo cocktail party, where no one deigns to concede more than two or three minutes to anyone, not the most fascinating stranger, not even one’s oldest and dearest friend. Yes, you’re made of glass, they look right through you to see who the next favored person is to whom they will surrender a few minutes before offering him a frozen, disdainful face, since of course waiting his turn is the next, et cetera. All of this while balancing a drink in one hand and in the other a Vienna sausage wrapped in greasy bacon, which means one shakes hands with only two fingers and with one’s mouth more puffed out than the cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie playing his trumpet.
“What was it like when you went to Hollywood?” I interrupted myself.
That night, Diana did not smell of perfumed ointments. She smelled of soap and wore overalls over a white T-shirt. Only I knew the exciting delights hidden under that simplicity.
She told me many things I already knew and others I didn’t.
She was chosen for the role of Saint Joan out of eighteen thousand applicants. Stardom by elimination—everything in the U.S. is like a relay race: one after another the girls were rejected because they didn’t conform to the model. This one’s nose was too long or short, for others it was a neck that was too long or too short; others looked too big on screen.
“The screen makes you look bigger. Ideally you have to be small and thin, or if you are big, you should be svelte and graceful in your movements like Ava Gardner, or mysterious like Garbo, or believable like Ingrid Bergman. Other girls had the most beautiful eyes in the world, but God gave them cortisone necks. Others had bodies like Venus, but moon faces.”
“You’re Diana, the goddess who hunts by moonlight.”
She laughed. “I heard it right from the first day on the set. A very little girl for a very big part, they whispered. A great English actor took pity on me. He told me, You’re going to be a star before being an actress. What horrified me were his good intentions, his pity, not the tyrannical demands of the director. He actually thought he had a clear idea of what Shaw wanted. All he asked of me was to be at the same level as the author, to be Saint Joan, and he didn’t care if I was an actress or a star or if I was too small or too big for the part. Remember what Shaw says about his saint?”
I said I did, that it was a play I liked a lot. “Shaw sees the Middle Ages as a pool filled with eccentrics and Saint Joan as one of its strangest fish. Annoying everyone. A woman dressed as a man: she irritated feudal machismo. By saying she was an emissary from God, she irritated the bishops, to whom she felt superior. She gave orders to the King of France and tried to humiliate England. She told generals to go to hell and showed she was a better strategist than they were. How could they not burn a woman like that?”
Diana hung her head. “The director told me, If she’d dealt diplomatically with all of them—the kings, the generals, the bishops, and the feudal lords—she would have lived a long time. She was a woman who couldn’t give an inch. She didn’t know how to compromise. She was a masochist. She wanted to suffer so she could go to heaven.”
She threw her arms around my neck, deeply moved, almost sobbing: What should we do, give in, stand fast, live a long life or die young, burned at the stake, what? Tell me, love.
I tried to be good-humored because my emotions were taking control of me as well. But nothing came out; the Holy Spirit did not visit me that night. I made a sign of discretion with my finger so everyone would understand. They stared at us, shocked. I led her out to the wooden balcony that hung over a ravine. The cold night air of the desert revived us. “If only you’d directed me.” Diana presented me with her dimpled smile.
“Shaw says Joan was like Socrates and Christ. She was killed and no one lifted a finger to defend her.”
“I asked to see Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc. They—the studio—didn’t want me to. They thought it would influence me. That the comparison would devastate me. Falconetti was such an infinitely sad Joan, sweetheart—I didn’t have that sadness, there was no place inside from which I could extract it…”
“So you decided to be Saint Joan in life.”
She looked at me inquisitively. “No. I decided Joan was crazy and deserved to die in the flames.”
Surprised, I pressed her to go on.
“Yes. Anyone who fights for justice is crazy. Christianity is madness; freedom, socialism, the end of racism and poverty, they’re all crazy. If you defend all those crazy things, you’re a witch and you’ll end up in the fire…”
Never did she look at me with greater melancholy, as if through her nocturnal eyes, so clear, were passing Dreyer’s chiaroscuro images—Falconetti with her hair shaved off and her eyes bloodshot like grapes, the white walls, the bishops’ black robes, Antonin Artaud’s bloodless lips promising other paradises …
“There’s a very old philosopher from Andalusia, María Zambrano, who says the following: Revolution is an annunciation. And the vigor of the revolution may be measured by the eclipses and falls that it survives. Joan was a revolutionary. She was a Christian.”
“The bad thing”—she spoke with sudden bitterness—“is that the director didn’t understand that … The idiot thought Joan was a saint because she suffered, not because she enjoyed being intolerable for everyone.”
“She had to be burned,” I said in conclusion, rather thoughtlessly.
“Literally, literally. The director tied me to the stake, he ordered the fire lit, and he didn’t even film the scene. He watched how the flames came closer and closer to me. He wanted to see me terrified so he could make me into his Saint Joan. He should have let me be burned up then and there, the son of a bitch. The crew saved me when the flames were touching my robe. The director was happy. I had suffered: I was a saint. He didn’t let me be a rebel. We both failed.”
This statement restored Diana’s serenity.
“To escape the director’s tyranny, I married a famous writer who could dominate the director and every studio in Hollywood.”
“Did he also satisfy you?”
“Never say anything bad about Ivan.”
She glared at me as if I were someone else, a man made of glass, another glass graduate.
“I admire him greatly,” I said with a cordial smile.
“Never laugh when you talk about him, either.”
She turned on her heel and walked back into the living room. I followed her. The actor, by now very drunk, hopelessly lost in the geography of Mexico, repeated incessantly, “I’m very cross in Vera Cruz, I’m very cross in Vera Cruz”; his girlfriend w
ondered if Lilly, the rising star, would last or not; and the cinematographer said he had a portable solution to all problems of sexual solitude while on distant locations: he pulled down his zipper and showed us his sex (which looked like a huge bruised pear), shouting: Long live self-love! And the actor declaimed, Very cross in Veracruz, and his girlfriend begged him, Don’t be a has-been. I’d leave you. I swear I’d leave you for another man. Success is my aphrodisiac …
“See?” whispered Diana, as the station wagon brought us to the center of Santiago. “Hollywood is a series of capsule biographies, vitamins or poison you can buy in the drugstore.”
XII
Azucena needed no capsule biography. Everything about her seemed uncertain to me at first. Her age, of course. She was short, very thin, with almost masculine sinews, which no doubt derived from a life (maybe more than one) of hard work. The nature of this job with Diana Soren was not uncertain. Azucena was invisibly involved in everything. She packed the bags for trips, unpacked them on arrival, put everything in its proper place. She made sure the clothes were always clean and pressed. She was the one who woke Diana up, brought her breakfast, and organized meals for all of us. She made the indispensable phone calls, got the plane tickets, made hotel reservations, answered telegrams, sent presigned photos of the star (how many requests, on average, came each month?), screened telephone calls, pertinent and impertinent requests. Secretary, lady’s maid, deluxe servant, accomplice, bodyguard? What to call her?
Azucena. She wasn’t pretty. She had one of those Catalan faces that seem hacked out with an ax or born out of a mountain: hard, rocky, angular. Long, thin lips, long nose whose tip trembled, her stare veiled by her eyelids and thick bags, her eyes mere slits that nevertheless revealed an intelligent gleam. Everything depended on the eyebrows and the hairdo. The arc, the thickness of the eyebrow. The form, the color of the hair. Azucena had chosen a neutral hairstyle and a mahogany shade that proclaimed her message: I’ll grow old with this color and this hairdo. I’ll grow old and no one will notice, until everyone thinks I was always the age I was when I died.