I could never forget that on this location, only she and I knew who Quevedo was. “Yesterday’s gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived…” But I was curious about the real shape of her eyebrows. The artificial shape was interrogative, not a neutral declaration like her hair but a questioning challenge, arched brows from which surprise was excluded and in which, always, only the question remained.
She was Spanish, so it was easy for us to communicate. Not only because of language but because of a quality I first intuited in her and then verified. Seeing her move—agile and sinewy, always in a skirt, blouse, and cardigan, the professional city uniform of that period, but with two Spanish legs, muscular and strong, with thick ankles—I guessed there were many generations of peasants behind Azucena’s leathery figure. Above all, though, there was a tradition of work, not only honorable work but pride in work. In everything the woman did, the woman took pride. One day, she told me that her grandparents were peasants from the Lower Ebro, that they’d lived in Poblet for centuries. Her parents had gone to Barcelona and set up a small grocery store; they’d sent her to study shorthand, but times in Spain turned bad and young people had to work to support their parents and siblings. She became a waitress, was hired when the Americans began to shoot movies in Spain; she met the mistress’s husband—here she was …
She had, as I say, that dignity in her work which we associate, however much we hate the idea, with the closed European class system. It might also be the result of the ancient medieval dignity ascribed to function, to trades. When we know, centuries before and centuries after, that we were and shall be carters, bricklayers, silversmiths, innkeepers, we lend spontaneous dignity to our place, our work. This certainty—this fatality? this pride?—contrasted with the modern cult of social mobility, the upward mobility that makes us eternally unsatisfied with the place we occupy, eternally envious of those who’ve reached a place superior to our own, who probably did so, of course, by usurping the place that was rightfully ours …
Azucena didn’t talk about it, but there could be no doubt she’d passed through war and dictatorship, she’d seen prison and death, she knew about the hangman’s knot, and the Guardia Civil filled her with dread. But her work went on: sow, plow, sell lettuce, or wait tables. If she didn’t confer dignity on her work, no one else would. The perspective of that work was continuity, permanence. She was where she was to suit herself and no one else, and that’s where I saw the contrast, when I visited the set from time to time in the afternoon to meet with Diana, the hairdresser, and the stuntman. They and the other actors, the technicians, the producers, the director were all immensely anguished, hiding their anguish behind a jolly mask.
The joke, perpetual joking, is another atrocious trait of North Americans. The wisecrack, the snappy retort, the ironic or witty answer—they’re all an extensive but thin mask covering the vast territory of the United States and disguising the anguish of its inhabitants, the anguish of moving around, of not being still in a single place, of arriving at another place, doing, getting things done, making it. North Americans detest what they’re doing because all of them, without exception, would like to do something else so as to be something more. The United States had no Middle Ages. That’s the big difference between it and Europe, of course, but it’s also the biggest difference between them and us. We Mexicans descend from the Aztecs but also from the Mediterranean—the Phoenicians, the Greeks and Romans, from the Jews and Arabs, and along with all of them, medieval Spain. To get to Mexico you must travel the route to Santiago—not the movie set in Mexico but Santiago de Compostela in Spain—as did pilgrims. Later, when my Harvard students would complain about the remote traditions I dragged out to explain contemporary Latin America, I ask them: “And for you, when does history begin?”
They always answered: “In 1776, when our nation was born.”
The U.S.A., sprung like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter, armed, whole, enlightened, free, envied … and blessed with social mobility, always higher, to be always something more, someone more, more than the person next door. The country without limits. That was its grandeur. Also its servitude.
Azucena was the lady’s maid, the invisible, worthy, serenely satisfied servant. At times it was impossible to know if she was there or not. She walked through the Santiago house like a cat. One morning, she came in with the breakfast tray to wake Diana and found us screwing—well, ostensibly we were screwing: a sumptuous sixty-nine that we could not disguise. She dropped the tray. In the huge clatter, Diana and I awkwardly disconnected ourselves. By chance, because of my position or the light, my eyes caught Azucena’s. In her eyes, I saw the vertigo of her imagining herself loved.
XIII
In very tender, very vulnerable moments that I thought I was sharing with Diana, investing her with qualities, if that’s what they were, or lacks of defense, which is what they turned out to be, I invited her to give it all up, to come with me to one of those North American university positions I was offered from time to time. I’d never taught in a gringo university. What I imagined was a bucolic haven surrounded by lakes, with ivy-covered libraries—and good stationers, the supreme attraction the Anglo-Saxon world holds for me.
I feel a professional distress in Latin countries: the low quality of the paper, my work material, is a negative comparable to a painter’s being deprived of paint or given brushes but no canvases. The ink bleeds through notebooks made in Mexico; Spanish paper comes right out of the ancient mercantile or accounting world Pérez Galdós describes in his novels—it’s first cousin to the abacus and brother to parchment—and in France a sourpuss salesgirl blocks the way to any writer curious to smell, touch, or feel the nearness of paper.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, the paper is as smooth as silk, the selection brilliant, extensive, well-ordered. To enter a stationery store in London or New York is to penetrate a paradise of writerly fruits, pens that fly like hawks, pads that are as pliant and responsive as a loving hand, paper clips that are silver brooches, portfolios as grand as protocols, labels that are credentials, notebooks that are deuteronomies … For years, I would go back to Mexico loaded with satin-paper notebooks for my friend Fernando Benítez so that he could write his great books about the survival of indigenous cultures in Mexico comfortably and sensually. The ideological exclusion laws of McCarthyism kept him from entering the States—he couldn’t even buy good workbooks. But that’s another story. The Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco says that the first thing he does before buying a book is to open it at random and stick his nose between its pages. That magnificent scent, comparable to aromas that might be found between a woman’s breasts or legs, is multiplied a thousandfold in the stacks of the great university libraries in the United States. Now I was inviting Diana, not too seriously, I admit, and with a kind of defenseless enthusiasm, I repeat. If you want, I said, we can live together in a university, you could go out and make your films …
She interrupted me. “It would be better than Santiago.”
I was thankful for the little notes she sent me every day from location up in the mountains while I went on writing my oratorio. The best one (which I’ll keep forever): “My love—If we manage somehow to survive this place, we will be invincible. What can separate us? I love you.” But now she said that yes, living on an American university campus would be nice. Every year, she would go back to her hometown in Iowa to celebrate the Thanksgiving that only gringos celebrate. It reminds them of their innocence, which is what they’re really celebrating. They evoke the completion of the first year spent in New England by the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony when they reached Plymouth Rock in 1620, fleeing from religious intolerance in England.
To amuse my friends, I refer to the Puritans as the first wetbacks in the United States. Where were their visas, their green cards? The Puritans were immigrant laborers, just like the Mexicans who cross the southern frontier of the U.S. today looking for work, finding instead, sometimes, billy clubs and bullets. Why? B
ecause they’re invading—with their language, their food, their religion, their hands, and their sex—a space reserved for white civilization. They’re the savages returning. The Puritans, on the other hand, enjoy the easy conscience of the civilizer. They steal land, murder Indians, decree the separation of the sexes, impede the mixing of the races, impose an intolerance worse than what they left behind, hunt down imaginary witches, and yet are the symbols of innocence and abundance. Each November, a huge turkey stuffed with apples, nuts, and spices and dripping with rich gravy confirms the United States in the certitude of its double destiny: Innocence and Abundance.
“You go back to that every year?”
She said that was actually her best role. To pretend that she was still a simple country girl. It wasn’t hard for her to act out middle-class values. They were mother’s milk to her; she grew up with them. “It’s the role my parents expect of me. It’s not hard. I tell you, it’s my best part. I should get an Oscar for how well I carry it off. I become the girl next door again. The neighbor. You’re right.”
Her eyes veiled over with nostalgia. “Wherever I am, the last week in November I go back home and celebrate Thanksgiving.”
“How do they react? Your parents, I mean.”
“They serve wine. It’s the only time they do. They think that if they serve wine I’ll be happy, that I won’t miss Paris. They see me as a strange, sophisticated girl. I make them think I’m still the same small-town girl I always was. They serve French wines. It’s their way of telling me they know I’m different and they are always the same.”
“Do they believe you? Do you think they believe you?”
“Let’s play Scrabble. It’s not even eight.”
We invented different parlor games to pass the evenings. The most durable proved to be truth or consequences. The punishment for lying was a pleasure: to give the liar a kiss. Of course, it was better to say only true things and save the kisses for bed. But even though Cooper, the old actor, was alone, he wanted neither to kiss nor to be kissed.
The question that evening was one I proposed: Why do we restrain our great passions?
What do you mean? asked the actor. If we didn’t restrain them, we’d go straight back to the law of the jungle. We already knew that, he said with the disdainful snort and sneering lips that characterized all his film roles.
No, I explained, I’m asking you to declare personally why, in most cases, when the opportunity to live a great personal passion presents itself, we let it pass, we become stupid, sometimes blind, even though it’s our best chance to involve ourselves in something that would give us a superior satisfaction, a—
“Or leave us profoundly unsatisfied,” said Diana.
“That’s possible, too,” I said. “But let’s go one at a time. Lew.”
“Okay, I won’t say that all great passions turn us back into animals and shatter the laws of civilization. But it does happen every once in a while, from having sex with your wife to politics. Perhaps the most secret fear is that a blind, unthinking passion might rip us away from the group we belong to, make us guilty of betrayal…”
It was painful for the old man to go on. I interrupted him, not realizing I was breaking my own ground rule. I wouldn’t let him give himself over to his passion, because I felt he was personalizing it, identifying too much with his own experience …
Diana shot me a curious glance, pondering my good manners, my tendency to avoid conflict … “You mean sex, sexual passion?”
No, said Cooper’s eyes to me. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. Passion takes us away from the family. It can violate endogamy. Endogamy and exogamy. Those are the two fundamental laws of life. Life with the group or outside it. Sex within or outside. Deciding that, knowing whether our blood stays home or is out there wandering around aimlessly, that’s what keeps us from following great passions. Otherwise, we dive right into the abyss of the unknown. We need rules. It doesn’t matter if they’re implicit. They have to be fixed, clear in our mind. You marry within the clan. Or you marry outside it. Your children will either be of our family or outsiders. You either stay near the home of your grandparents. Or you go out into the world.”
“Your people have gone out into the world,” I said to the two North Americans. “We Mexicans have stayed inside. We even gave you half our country because we didn’t populate it in time.”
“Don’t worry.” Diana laughed. “Pretty soon California will belong to you again. Everybody there speaks Spanish.”
“No,” I said. “Answer the question from the game.”
“You first. Ladies last.” She curled up around herself like an Angora cat. Her dimples were never so deep or so promising.
“I have to admit I’m afraid of a passion that would take away the time I need to write. I’ve let lots of chances for pleasure pass because I could foresee the negative consequences for my writing.”
“Tell us what they are.” More dimples than ever, almost wanton dimples.
“Jealousy. Doubt. Time. Going around and around. Trysts. Confusions. Misunderstandings. Lies.”
“Everything that takes passion away from passion,” Diana said with a comic toss of her blond head.
“There is no woman you can’t conquer if you dedicate time and flattery to her. Those are more important than money or beauty. Time, time, a woman devours a man’s time—that’s it. Dedicate a lot of time to them.”
“We didn’t waste any time. We saw each other and that was that,” said Diana, as if she were drinking an invisible highball. “You and I.”
I went on. “I’m terrified of being left with no time to write. Writing is my passion. Every writer is born with a limited amount of time. From the moment you sit down to write, you begin a battle against death. Every day, death whispers into my ear, One day less. You won’t have time.”
“There’s something worse,” said Cooper. “A friend of mine who’s a scientist at UCLA told me that the day will come when they’ll be able to tell when you’re born, first, what you’re going to die of, and second, when you’re going to die. Is it worth it to live like that?”
“That’s another game, Lew. We’ll deal with that question tomorrow.” I laughed. “We’ve got lots of long Santiago nights left with no movies, no TV, no decent restaurants…”
I looked at Diana’s eyes, but my gaze, imploring, not affirming, many nights ahead of us, did not dissolve the disillusion in hers. I spoke the truth. Would I deserve a kiss that night? Would Diana kiss me just to say “Did you lie? You prefer me. You’ll leave everything for me. Your mornings as a writer are a farce. You live to love me at night. I know it. I feel it. Everything you write here will be shit because your passion isn’t in it. Your passion is between my sheets, not between your pages.”
“We should have done it,” said Diana.
Lew and I looked at her, not understanding. She understood.
“Nothing should keep us from a passion. Absolutely nothing. Get me something to drink, love.”
I did, while she went on to say that life is never generous twice. There are forces that present themselves once and never again. Forces, she repeated, sleepily nodding several times, staring at the polished nails of her bare feet, her chin perched on her knees. Forces, not opportunities. Forces for love, politics, artistic creation, sports, who knows what else. They come by only once. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone, mad at us because we paid them no mind. We didn’t want passion. Then passion didn’t want us either.
She burst into tears, so I picked her up in my arms and carried her to bed. She was the size of a little girl.
XIV
I put her to bed: she was soft, worn out, and crying. I was getting used to the care which she seemed to require and which it gave me immense pleasure to give her. She looked like a little girl, turned on her side, crying softly, shuddering slightly in her physical smallness, begging protection and tenderness. I wanted to give it to her. I settled her on the bed, pulled up the covers to keep
out the desert cold, and caressed the head I had grown so accustomed to, the Saint Joan hair, always ready for either war or fire. Unlike other women, she never left stray hairs on the pillow. In truth, she never left a trace of any kind, as if she were pure spirit, immaterial, in her Swedish, Lutheran cleanliness, as fresh as a forest, as blue as a fjord, clinging desperately to the long hours of summer, as if the winter without light were the dark mirror of death.
I saw and felt all this as I tucked her in that night while she wept and thought (I imagined) about lost opportunities for passion, the moments that passed, that called us, that we disregard, and that went away forever. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone forever. They never turned into habit.
But, I told myself as I caressed her head and she sank into invisible dreams, everything we accept turns into habit, even passion. I smiled, caressing her blond head of very short hair; the role of Saint Joan had become a habit for Diana. She would always be a petite woman, the sparrow, the pucelle, the virgin, the Maid of Orléans, the battling saint, small, blond, hair cut in military style so that no one would doubt her warrior’s will, so her helmet would fit properly: her hair cut very short so there would be less to burn in the bonfire. I told her silently that God would give her a halo. A head of long hair burning in the night, dragged across the night, would be seen as the trail of the devil.
Saint Joan … Even sainthood becomes habit, as do passion, death, love, everything. In the few weeks we’d spent together in Santiago, this bedroom had become a familiar, habitual place. We knew where to find everything. My clothes here. Hers there. The little bathroom divided equitably—which meant eighty percent for her, since she traveled with a luxurious and disconcerting variety of creams, pencils, nail polish, unguents, lotions, perfumes, lacquers … All I needed was space for my razor, shaving cream, my comb, and my toothbrush. I complained about the Colgate toothpaste I had to buy in Mexico, where high tariffs left us without much of a selection.