Diana
“That’s a problem? What brand do you like?” Diana asked.
Half seriously, half jokingly I told her I liked Capitano, a toothpaste I used in Venice that reminded me of toothpaste my grandmother made at home in Jalapa. My grandmother distrusted products made who knows where, who knows by whom that you were going to end up putting in your mouth. She tried to do everything at home—cooking, carpentry, sewing … Capitano toothpaste also reminded me of my grandmother because it was pink inside and white outside. On the tube was a picture of an illustrious turn-of-the-century gentleman with a huge mustache, presumably the Capitano himself, guaranteeing the product’s tradition and dependability. My grandfather, I told myself, must have looked like this nineteenth-century Capitano. My granny would have fallen in love with a man like that, with his mustache, his high, stiff collar, and his huge cravat.
“Capitano toothpaste.” I laughed.
Three days later, Diana handed me a package with ten tubes of the famous toothpaste. She’d had them sent from Italy. Just like that, by snapping her fingers, from Rome to Los Angeles to Mexico City, to the provincial city of Santiago. In three days, my lover satisfied a disproportionate, sudden whim. At the same time, something that seemed to me a mere boutade on my part, not even a passion, took up its habitual place in our bathroom. I no longer had to desire my Italian toothpaste. Here it was, as if Saint Apollonia, patron saint of dentists and toothaches, had sent it down to me from heaven.
I looked at the sleeping Diana. She lived in the world of instantaneous gratification. I knew that world existed. The young people of Paris, in May 1968, had rebelled against what they vaguely called the tyranny of consumption, a society that exchanged being for seeming and took acquisition as a proof of existence. A Mexican, no matter how much he travels the world, is always anchored in a society of need; we return to the need that surrounds us on all sides in Mexico, and if we have even the slightest spark of conscience, it’s hard for us to imagine a world where you can get everything you might want immediately, even pink toothpaste. I’ve always told myself that the vigor of Latin American art derives from the enormous risk of throwing yourself into the abyss of need, hoping to land on your feet on the other side, the side of satisfaction. It’s very hard for us—if not for us personally, then in the name of all those around us.
Toothpaste from Italy in three days. A habit, no longer a desire, not even a caprice. I shook my head, as if either to exit or to enter Diana’s dreams. Everything turns into habit. Diana sleeps on the right side of the bed, near the telephone and the photo of her child. I sleep on the left side, next to a couple of books, a notebook, and two ballpoint pens. But tonight, as I get into bed, reaching out to pick up a book, I raise my eyes and find those of Clint Eastwood. I drop the book in shock. Habit was broken. Diana had put a photograph of Clint Eastwood on my side of the bed, a photograph dedicated, with love, to Diana.
Those unmistakable laconic eyes, blue and icy, as intense as a bullet. His slow, spare way of speaking, as if parsimony in dialogue were a lubricant for the speed of the shot. A thin unlit cigar between tightly shut lips. It was the photo of a warrior who’d been at Troy, an Achilles of leather and stone, now transplanted far from Homer’s wine-dark sea to an epic without water, coastlines, or sails, an epic of thirst, the desert, and an absence of poets to sing the deeds of the hero. That was his sadness: no one sang of him. Clint Eastwood. From under sandy eyebrows, a bitter hero stared at me between blond eyelashes. The established habit had been broken. I should have foreseen it. I always should have known that no habit would last very long around Diana. Her tears that night were only the memory of the times she should have cried and didn’t.
I wanted to ask her about it someday: “Listen, do you only cry in the name of the times you didn’t when you should have?”
Clint Eastwood’s eyes kept me from waking her up right then and there to ask her the question whose answer I already knew. She was crying today because she didn’t cry when she should have before. She had just made a movie in Oregon with Clint Eastwood. It was a long shoot. Lasted months. They were lovers. But it wasn’t my place to ask anything, find out anything. It wasn’t hers either. That was really an unwritten law, a tacit agreement between lovers. Modern lovers, which is to say liberated ones. Not to go around investigating what happened before, with whom, when, for how long. The civilized rule was not to ask. If she wanted to tell me something, fine. I wasn’t going to show curiosity, jealousy, even good humor. I was going to maintain an absolute serenity staring day and night at the eyes of the warrior of the West as if he’d been the Sacred Heart of Jesus, placed next to me on a night table to bless and protect us.
I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking about anything. If she wanted to say something about Clint Eastwood and his picture, which had suddenly appeared like a votive offering of gratitude by the headboard of our erotic bed, it was her problem. Passion and jealousy were telling me, Raise the roof, make a scene, tell this gringo whore to go to hell. My intelligence told me, Don’t give her the satisfaction. She’d be delighted. Then what? Then she’d get mad at me and break up with me, I’d leave, and then? Then everything.
That was the problem: that real passion, what I was feeling for her then, kept me from doing anything to endanger my being next to her, that’s all. I wasn’t fooling myself. There was plenty of indignity, of an almost bitchy kind, in that. She was sticking the photo of her previous flame right down my throat and I was putting up with it. I was putting up with it because I didn’t want to break up with her. I didn’t want anything to break the charm of our love. But she did. That photo was a provocation. Or was it her way of telling me that both of us would have other loves after ours? I didn’t want to anticipate a breakup in all that. I couldn’t admit it. It would negate the intensity of my own passion, which was to be with her, screw with her, always, always …
Between jealousy and separation lay the road of serenity, sophistication, the civilized reaction. Pay no attention. Take it all sans façon. Did she want to hang photos of Clint Eastwood all over the house? Fine. I would see her as a kind of provocative sixteen-year-old, a tease, alienated, whose measles would be cured by my patient, civilized maturity. I was ten years older. Did Diana want to stick her tongue out at me? I would suck it.
But the fact is, I didn’t sleep well. I wasn’t convinced by my own explanation. It was all too simple. There had to be something more, and that morning, when she woke up at five and rolled over, giving and offering her daily love, my answer was almost mechanical, and afterward, getting out of bed wrapped in a towel, as if the staring eyes of Clint Eastwood and your humble servant were, taken together, a bit too much, she said this to me: “Mister, you’ve had two weeks of pleasure. When are you planning to give me some?”
XV
It goes without saying that I didn’t write a single line that morning. How was I going to take up the love of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche when my own had become so mysteriously complicated? What did a rough soldier from Extremadura and a captive princess, from Tabasco no less, give each other, what could they give each other? Something more than a political alliance mediated by sex? Something more than the verbal, carnal union of two languages—two tongues? By the same token, Diana went off to film a ridiculous Western in the Sierra Madre, and there I was, pondering the pleasure that apparently I hadn’t given her, taking it only for myself.
For a moment, I almost convinced myself that I was like all other men, especially Latin American men, who go after their own immediate satisfaction and don’t give a shit about the woman’s. I was my own best lawyer: I quickly convinced myself that this didn’t apply in my case. I’d showered Diana Soren with warmth and attention; neither my patience nor my passion was in doubt. She was as voracious as I was desirous of satisfying her. If the masculine pleasure to which she referred that morning was the simple, direct pleasure of mounting her and coming, I never did it without all the preambles, the foreplay, that sexual urbanity requir
es in order to satisfy the woman and bring her to the point just before the culmination that leads, with luck, to shared orgasm, profound lovemaking, composed equally of flesh and spirit: coming together, soaring to heaven …
Did I fail in some other area? I reviewed them all. I asked her for a blowjob when I sensed she wanted to give me one, when taking her by the nape of the neck and bringing her close to my erect penis as if she were a docile slave was the pleasure we both wanted. But I also understood when what Diana wanted was slow, dazzling cunnilingus in which my tongue explored her invisible sex, when I was ashamed of the brutal obstruction of my mere masculine form, awkward, as obvious as a hose abandoned in a garden of blond grass. In her, in Diana, sex was a hidden luxury, behind the hair, between the folds that my tongue explored until it reached the tiny, nervous, quivering, dithering thrill of pure quicksilver clitoris.
There was no dearth of sixty-nines, and she possessed the infinite wisdom of true lovers who know where the roots of a man’s sex are, the knot of nerves between his legs, equidistant between testicles and anus, where all virile tremors meet when a woman’s hand caresses us there, threatening, promising, insinuating one of the two paths, the heterosexual at the testicles or the homosexual at the asshole. That hand holds us suspended between our open or secret inclinations, our amorous potentialities with the opposite or the same sex. A true lover knows how to give us the two pleasures and give them, besides, as a promise, that is, with the maximum intensity of what is only desired, of what is incomplete. Total love is always androgynous.
Didn’t she herself want me to sodomize her? I did it two ways, turning her over on her stomach to enter her vagina from the rear, or lubricating her anus to enter, to tear open, her most intimate bud. I covered her with oils, and one night I showered her with champagne, both of us spraying each other in a torrent of laughter; I’ve already spoken of her splendid vaginal aromas of ripe fruits; I sprayed my cologne in her armpits and between her legs; she hid her own perfume behind my ear, so it would stay there, she said, forever; I tricked her out like a domestic Venus, not in sea foam but in the foam of my shaving cream (Noxema), and one boring Sunday afternoon I shaved her armpits and her pubis, keeping everything in a leftover marmalade jar until it either flowered or rotted horribly, whichever.
I finally laughed out loud at all that nonsense, remembering in the end (I believed at the time) the marvelous words of Ben Jonson’s lascivious millionaire Volpone, who speaks of desiring “women and men of every sex and age…”
Was that what was missing: sharing sex with others? Was that the pleasure Diana was talking about? What did she want? A ménage à trois? With whom? The stuntman I’d neutralized? But then why make him our third? She’d end up alone with him; I wasn’t going to forgo that turn of the screw—I’d leave her alone with the man I was instrumental in getting rid of, she’d be alone with him and without the ménage à trois … The partouze, the French orgy, didn’t seem terribly interesting to me or, for that matter, practicable with an old actor, a hairdresser who chewed gum, an austere Spanish lady’s maid, a short, obese, bearded director, and a cameraman who proclaimed his devotion to the cult of Onan as a saving and certain pleasure during long location shoots.
With animals?
Fetishism?
The mirror. Perhaps we hadn’t played with mirrors enough.
I couldn’t develop that fantasy because when I looked in the mirror on one of the closet doors I saw the eyes of the Metaphysical Cowboy Clint Eastwood, and right then and there I figured it all out. I knew what Diana wanted.
Naked in bed that night I could sense her frigidity and asked her if she wanted to make love.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you asked me if I like making love with you?” she said, curling up between the sheets.
“Okay. I’m asking you.”
“What?”
“Do you like making love with me?”
“Jerk,” she said with her most dazzling, most dimpled smile.
“I’d like to make love to you in the name of all the men who’ve made love with you,” I told her, thrusting my mouth next to her ear.
“Don’t say that.” She trembled slightly.
I grasped her around the waist. “I don’t know if I should say it.”
“We’re free. We don’t hold anything back, you and I.”
“There’s something I like about you. You always pretend we’re alone when we screw.”
“Aren’t we?”
“No. When we go to bed I see a horde of men pass over your skin, from your first lover up to the ones who aren’t here but who are still on the active list…”
I glanced at the photo of the star of A Fistful of Dollars and felt a chill.
“Go on, go on.”
I no longer knew what I was doing with my hands. I only knew my words.
“Can there be sex between only two people?”
“No, no.”
“Do you like to know that when I’m screwing you I think about all the men who’ve enjoyed you?”
“You have a nerve, telling me that.”
“Didn’t you know that, Diana? Don’t you like it, too?”
“Don’t say that to me, please.”
“Do I disillusion you when I say that?”
“No,” she almost shouted. “No, I like it…”
“To think that along with me all the men who’ve ever screwed you in your life are with me?”
“I like it, I like it…”
“I thought you weren’t going to like it.”
“Don’t say anything. Feel what I’m feeling…”
“Why don’t we dare to feel that pleasure if we like it so much?”
“Which pleasure? What are you saying?”
“This pleasure. The one I give to you thinking I’m someone else, the one you feel imagining that I, too, am someone else—admit it…”
“Yes, I like it, it drives me crazy, don’t stop…”
“I wish that all of them were here, seeing us screw, you and I…”
“So do I, don’t stop, go on…”
“Don’t come yet…”
“But you’re giving me lots of dicks today…”
“Wait, Diana, they’re all watching us, from that mirror, they’re watching us and they’re jealous…”
“Tell me you like it, too, that they’re looking at us…”
“I like that you pretend we do it alone. I like to know you like it…”
“I like it I like it I like it…”
When we finished, she turned toward me, half closed her gray (blue?) eyes that were like a forgotten mist, and said, “You have no imagination.”
XVI
Reasonably or not, I’ve lived to write. Literature, almost since I was a child, has been the filter of experience for me, from fear of being punished by my father to my most recent night of love. Sex, politics, soul—it all passes through my literary experience. The expectations of the book refine and strengthen the facts of lived life. Perhaps nothing of this is true, or perhaps in reality it’s the other way around: it’s literary imagination that determines, provokes the “real” situations in my life.
But if that’s the way it is, I’m not aware of it. Yes, I would like to be aware that for me reality is not a simple fact or that it’s defined by only one of its dimensions. There are people for whom reality is only the objective, concrete world—the chair is the chair, the mountain has always been there, the cloud passes over but obeys the laws of physics—all that is real. For other people, the only reality is internal, subjective reality. The mind is a vast unfurnished room that slowly but surely fills us up as we live with the furniture of perceptions. The objective world exists, but it has no meaning unless it passes through the sieve of my mind. Subjectivity gives reality to a world of mute, inanimate objects.
But there is a third dimension, which is where my individuality comes into contact with others, with my society, my culture. That is, something exists that is neither paradox nor i
mpossibility, something called collective individuality. Within it, I feel myself to be most complete, in greatest consonance with the world. It’s in that shared individuality where I find family, women and sex, friends … So reality for me is a three-pointed star: matter, psyche, and culture. Material reality, subjective reality, and the reality of the contact between my ego and the world. I don’t like sacrificing any of them. Only when the three are present can I say I’m happy.
Our evening parlor games continued and one of them was Scrabble. Now, the alphabetic combinations change according to which language you play in: Spanish abounds in vowels, while English is rich in consonants. The English w, the sh, the double tt, mm, or ss make for inconceivable conjunctions in Spanish. On the other hand, we do have that clitoris of language, the ñ, which drives foreigners insane because they think of it as a Hispanic, medieval extravagance comparable to the Holy Inquisition, when it’s actually a futurist letter that embraces and suppresses the laborious gn of French, the nh of Portuguese, and the unpronounceable English ny.
The three of us—Diana, Lew, and I—played like a bored, well-established family, using an English alphabet. While I know English well, it isn’t mine nor I its. I’ve never dreamed in English. I speak it, but I’m mentally translating very fast from Spanish. It’s easy to see because my English abounds in Spanish cognates, in locutions derived from Latin or Arabic rather than Saxon or German. My error that night came when I had before my eyes the word wheel, perfectly formed, and with six spaces after it that I could fill in to pick up some great points. All that I could think of was wheelbarrow, because sometimes I’d hum a pretty Irish song about “Sweet Molly Malone,” who “wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets long and narrow,” but though barrow was six letters, I didn’t have the right ones. I had to pass, and Lew filled the space I coveted with his six letters, wright—the old Saxon word wheelwright. I said I didn’t know that word. Diana gave me a mocking look. Then she brusquely turned my letters around and showed that I could have filled at least five of the spaces with chair and gotten wheelchair.