Diana (16 page)

“Good night,” said Lew, getting up abruptly and looking at me with disdain.

“No. Don't leave yet. Don't you know that you and I are living here in a monastery with Diana, you the father superior, I the novice? Or could it be some kind of artistic utopia, you the minstrel, I the scribe, Azucena the sluttish maid. But no one fornicates here—not a chance. Who ever heard of that? People come here to take refuge, they don't take refuge here to come. Filthy convent, crummy utopia…”

“I'd rather listen to rock and roll, which I loathe, than to this stupid litany. Good night, Diana.”

“Good night, Lew,” she said, her eyes anxious but resigned.

I parodied her in falsetto. “Oh dear, oh dear! Why did I ever invite these people to share my house?”

“Come to bed, sweetheart. You've had a lot to drink today.”

XXIV

She was right, and it was hard for me to fall asleep. I understood everything. That night she got up. Ostentatiously she did not turn to see if I was asleep. She left the bedroom. The curtains were open. The moonlight fell freely on the old black telephone. I heard a light click. I got up, walked to the lunar pool. I held out my hand to take the telephone. I stopped out of fear. Would she realize I knew? Was she talking at that very moment from another part of the house? Did I have the right to listen in on a private conversation? I'd already pawed through bags, drawers, lingerie … What would one more indignity matter?

I picked up the telephone and heard the two voices talking on the extension. Hers was the unknown voice I'd learned to recognize at night, in secret. A voice that came from a different geography, another age, to take control of hers … that was my fantasy. Actually, it was just the voice of the actress Diana Soren acting a part she'd never be given in a film. The voice of a black woman. She was talking with a black man. That was clear. Even if it was a white man imitating a black, just as she was imitating a black woman, it was a black man's voice. I mean it was the voice of someone who wanted to be black, only black. That impressed me, blowing away the alcoholic mist of my growing bitterness (as the tango—or is it the bolero?—goes …). Now I understood what I had heard in the bedroom, the previous nights, when she said things like “Make me see myself as another woman” or “How? I'm white.”

“Make yourself black.”

“How? I'm white.”

“You'll figure out how.”

“I'm trying hard.”

“No, Aretha. Don't be stupid. I'm not asking you to change the color of your skin. You understand what I mean.”

“I want to be with you,” said Diana, transformed into Aretha. “I'd give anything to be with you, in your bed…”

“You can't, baby, you're in your cage. I already got out of mine…”

“I'm not talking about a cage, I'm talking about a bed, with both of us in it…”

“Set us free, Aretha. Free the black man who doesn't want a white woman, because he'd be betraying his mother. Free the white man who doesn't want a black woman, because he'd be betraying his prejudices. Free the black man who wants a white woman to avenge his father. Free the white man who wants a black woman to humiliate, abandon, make a slave even in pleasure. Do all that, baby, and then I'll be yours…”

“I'll try to change my soul, if that's what you want, darling.”

“You can't.”

“Why? Don't—”

The black man hung up but Diana sat there listening to the telephone static. I quickly hung up and went back to bed, feeling horribly guilty. But the next night I couldn't resist the temptation to go on listening to the interrupted but eternal conversation, night after night …

She told him she'd try to change her soul, and he said, You can't. She begged him not to condemn her that way, not to be unjust, but he insisted, You can't. At heart you think we want to be white—that's why you'll never be able to be black. Diana Soren said she wanted justice for all. She reminded the black man she was against racism, she'd marched, she'd demonstrated; he knew it. Why didn't he accept her as an equal? His burst of laughter must have wakened all the sleeping birds between Los Angeles and Santiago. You want them to let us into country clubs, he said to Diana, into luxury hotels, into McDonald's, but we don't want to get in. We want them to keep us out, we want them to do us the favor of telling us, Don't come in, you're different, we hate you, you smell bad, you're ugly, you look like monkeys, you're stupid, you're not like us. He was gasping for breath and said that every time a liberal, philanthropic white spoke against racism he felt like castrating him and making him eat his own balls.

“I don't want to be like you whites. I don't want to be like you!”

The next night, she told him she only wanted to see herself as another woman so she could see herself as she really was. Everyone had his objective—he had his, and she had hers …

“Respect me. After all, I'm an actress, not a politician…”

The man burst into laughter again.

“Then dedicate yourself to your thing and don't play with fire, asshole. But let's get something straight. Nobody can see himself as he is unless he sees himself separated, divorced from the human race, radically separated, a leper, alone, with his own kind…”

Almost crying, she told him she couldn't, that what he wanted was impossible, and he insulted her—You cunt, you fucking white cunt—and she gave something like a sigh of joy …

“You'd have to be pure black, a black from Africa before he was brought here, before mixing, and not even then could you live separated…”

“Shut up, Aretha. Shut up, whore…”

Triumphantly, Diana told him there were no pure blacks in America; they were all descended from whites as well … “I'm not saying that to offend you. I'm saying it so you'll think you share something with me…”

“Shut up, whore. You don't have a drop of black blood, you don't have a mulatto child…”

She said she'd like to give in to that temptation, but of her own free will, not to prove a point. “I don't want to use my sex to win arguments.”

“Whore, white cunt…”

He called her the next night to ask forgiveness. He tried to explain himself with a humility that seemed suspicious to me. He told her that she wanted to change the system. Then he added, in humble scorn, in the voice of Little Black Sambo, How good you are, how compassionate, and how hypocritical. She had to understand that the system doesn't change, he said, slowly but surely recovering his normal aggressive tone; the system has to be smashed. She was silent, didn't get the joke, then said, honestly and with sincere emotion, that she wanted to help them. “But I don't think I know how…”

“You can begin by not reminding me I'm a mulatto.”

“But you are. I like you like that. I love you like that. Doesn't that matter to you?”

She should tell him that he, too, was going to give in to temptation, like his ancestors, that he, too, was going to fall for a white slut, that he, too, was going to have a mulatto child with her. What did she think of that? Would she honestly accept it? Wouldn't she run around screaming, not her, she wasn't promiscuous, it was a lie, she would never have children that weren't Aryan, white, Nordic…?

“Me, I'm going to insult all the blacks.” Now the absent mulatto was speaking with a voice like a sea in chains. “All the blacks that should have stayed African and who betrayed their race giving in to temptation and screwing a white woman and having café-au-lait children. Say that, whore. Think that, give me that slap. No matter how far away you are, Aretha, I swear I'm going to feel your slap. It'll hurt even more because you're far away, screwing a white man. I can see you from here. There's not enough distance between California and Mexico for me not to see you or smell your blond cunt and spit on it…”

“Don't mention names, don't say names…”

“Don't be a jerk. They know everything. They tape everything. Are you out of your head?”

“I'm Aretha. My name is Aretha.”

“Make yourself black.”

“How? I'm white.”

“You'll figure out how to do it. I can't accept you if you don't.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Fuck off, bitch.”

The next night was the last call. He spoke very calmly and said that Diana's error was to think everyone was guilty, including her, including the oppressors. If that were so, they'd all be innocent. No, only the kids who didn't leave the ghetto were oppressed, the drug-addict mothers, the fathers forced to steal, the men castrated by the Klan—those were the oppressed, not the poor oppressors.

“Know how you can make yourself black, Aretha? Have you figured out that in this country the only crimes people get convicted for committing are crimes committed by blacks? Have you realized that black victims never arouse compassion, only white ones? That's what I'm asking you to do, Aretha: make yourself into a black victim and you'll see how they throw you into the street like a dog so the trucks roll over you and turn you into a bloody, rotten chunk of meat. Commit a crime as a black and pay for it as a black. Be a victim as a black so nobody feels sorry for you.”

The black started laughing and crying at the same time. My hand was shaking, but I hung up carefully and returned to bed before she did, as I had all the other nights. I pretended to be asleep. Diana counted on my deep sleep and the stupor of the hangover I'd have in the morning. She came back in and got into bed silently. I could sense that she fell asleep immediately, content, relieved, as if nothing satisfied her more than this nightly exchange of insults, passions, and guilt.

Eyes open, prisoner of the ceiling of this suddenly frozen bedroom, a faded battleground, I repeated to myself over and over, like someone counting sheep, that my passion was nothing compared with those I'd just heard, that having listened to the passion of Diana and her black I should accept that my own was a passing fancy, and that perhaps the honorable thing to do was to give up this arrangement, turn my back on Diana, and go back to my life in Mexico City.

But in the course of that night's insomnia, which diminished my own passion considerably, another certainty asserted itself little by little, involuntarily, an idea that was part of me though I hadn't formulated it clearly. I was sorry, I said to myself. Both within myself and in the outside world, I saw manifested the idea that civilized life respects laws while savage life disdains them. I didn't want to say it or even think it, because it contradicted or, in its own way, disparaged the sorrow I could feel in the rage of Diana's black lover. Yet despite that, I was as repelled by the idea of black supremacy as of white supremacy. I couldn't put myself in the shoes of that unknown interlocutor. I didn't need to tell Diana I couldn't jive, didn't swing to black street rhythms …

I wanted to be sincere and to imagine myself, on the other hand, in the sandals of that boy who'd played the part of Juárez. Would I have helped the boy Juárez? Would I have helped him become what he became—a white Indian, a Zapotec with the Napoleonic Code for his pillow, a Cartesian lawyer, a Republican shyster instead of a shaman, a paper pusher instead of a sorcerer in contact with nature and death, animator of the inanimate, owner of things that cannot be possessed, millionaire of misery? What would I have done for the boy Juárez?

Nothing. Diana's black—her Panther, I decided to call him—knew me better than I knew him and maybe even better than I knew myself. He knew that I could take everything away from him whenever I wanted. Everything. The castrated, hanged, lynched blacks, like milestones in American history—they are also a book of martyrs for innocent blacks. The Panther decided he would no longer be the victim. God never stopped the homicidal hand of the white Abraham when he sank his dagger into the heart of his son, the black Isaac.

XXV

I had a bad morning, but at lunchtime I decided to visit the club and see if General Agustín Cedillo was there, as he was every day. In the old-fashioned way, he was drinking a cognac before lunch and invited me to sit with him. I had a beer instead of a cognac because no beer in the world is better than ours. It made me feel rather chauvinist, but I was thankful for that feeling. I remembered what Diana had told me James Baldwin said—that a black and a white, because they're both Americans, know more about themselves and one another than any European knows about either of them. The same thing is true of Mexicans.

The other night I had felt class hatred flare up between the general and me. This afternoon the beer raised my spirits and made me recognize myself in him. In one voice we both ordered “two Tehuacans,” knowing well that in no other part of the world would anyone understand what that mineral water was. Then he invited me to join him. The ritual of dining—from ordering
quesadillas
with
huitlacoche
(only we Mexicans understand and enjoy eating the black cancer of corn) to being handed a basket of hot tortillas and delicately picking one out, spreading guacamole on it, adding a dash of chile, and rolling it all up; from the diminutive and possessive references to all edibles (your little beans, your little chiles, your little tortillas) to the guarded, familiar, tender allusions to health, weather, age (he's not well, the rain's letting up, he's getting so elderly)—created a favorable climate for bringing up the theme that concerned me. It also allowed me to free myself, in an involvement the general knew nothing of, from the extreme alienation, still buzzing in my ears, of that pair Diana Soren and her Panther. They were other. But everything at the table was Mexican, right down to my possessive when I addressed General Cedillo: My general, my general, dear, oh dear. That was it: he was mine.

“You said the other night that my girlfriend should be careful. Why?”