Diana (19 page)

I was making a fool of myself. I'd lost control. I was falling into everything I hated. I deserved Diana's response.

“I know who I am.”

“No, you don't!” I shouted. “That's your problem. I heard you talking with that black man on the telephone. You want to be someone else, you want to absorb the suffering of others so you can be another person. You think no one suffers more than a black person. When are you going to learn, you fool, that suffering is universal, even white?”

“Carlos is teaching me all about it.”

“Carlos?” I said it like an echo not only of my own voice but of my own soul, incapable of telling Diana that I'd just seen him, injured, in a demonstration in Santiago.

“It's in your books,” Diana said coldly.

“Did he tell you that?”

“No, I read them. I thought you were a real revolutionary. Someone who puts his actions where he puts his words. It's not true. You write, but you do nothing. You're like an American liberal.”

“You're crazy. You don't understand anything. Creation is an action, the only action. You don't have to die in order to imagine death. You don't have to be imprisoned in order to describe what a prison's like. And if you get shot or murdered, you're useless. You don't write any more books.”

“Che went out to be killed.”

“He was a martyr, a hero. A writer is something much more modest, Diana.” I kept on talking to her, exasperated but now, possibly, in control of my arguments.

“Carlos would climb a mountain to fight. You wouldn't.”

“So what's that got to do with you? You're going to follow him? Going to be the warrior's woman?”

“No. His base is here. He fights here. He'd never follow me.”

“That makes things work out fine for you, right? Knowing that poor kid won't follow you. Unless he gives up the guerrilla business and becomes a gigolo. Poor Diana. You want to be someone else? Do you want to be the midwife of universal revolution? Do you want the role of Joan of Arc married to Malcolm X? Let me tell you something. Try to be a good actress. That's your problem, sweetheart. You're a mediocre, bland actress, and you want to compensate for your mediocrity with all the furies of your real-life person. Why don't you really work at the roles you get in movies? Why do you reject them and take on characters you've only heard talked about?”

“You don't understand a thing. I've already had you.”

“One month three weeks and four days.”

“No, I know you through and through. I know who you are. I should have known from the first instant, but I let myself be dragged along by the fantasy that you were different—action and thought, like Malraux…”

“For God's sake, spare me these revolting comparisons…”

“Naïve. All you can offer me is decency. Naïve. Decent. And cultured!”

“All defects of the worst kind…”

“No, I admire your culture. Really. A solid base, no doubt about it. Very solid. Classic, man, classic.”

“Thank you.”

“On the other hand, the boy…” She spoke with a ferocity I'd never seen in her, a hallucinatory savagery, as if finally she was showing me the dark side of the moon. “Everything about him is wrong. He smells bad, he's got rotten teeth, he needs to see a dentist, his manners are awful, he's got no refinement at all, he's rough, I'm afraid he's going to beat me up—and because of all that I like him, because of all that I find him irresistible. Now I need a man I don't like, a man who'll bring me back to the gutter, the sewer, who'll make me feel I'm nobody, who'll make me fight again, work my way up, feel I don't have anything, that I have to earn everything, who'll make my adrenaline flow…”

I ran to embrace her. I couldn't hold back anymore. She was crying and she clung tightly to me, but she didn't stop talking between sobs. “You're crazy. I'm not looking for a black or a guerrilla, I'm looking for someone who's not like you. I hate people like you, decent and cultured. I don't want a famous author, decent, refined, Western no matter how Mexican he thinks he is, European like my husband. You're my husband all over again, a repetition of Ivan Gravet, the same thing all over again. It bores me, it bores me, it bores me. At least my husband fought in a war, ran away from Russia, persecuted for being a Jew, for being a boy, for being poor. You, what have you ever run away from? What's ever threatened you? Your table's always been set, and you've always been chasing after me, trying to catch me, to catch my imagination … You're my husband all over again, except that Ivan Gravet is more famous, more European, more cultured, more refined, and a better writer than you!”

She stopped for air, swallowing her tears. “I can't stand men like you.”

She twisted out of my arms. She turned her back to me and walked to the liquor cabinet. I followed. She mixed a drink with trembling hands. She spoke to me with her back turned.

“I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt you.”

“Have a drink, it'll make you feel better. Don't worry,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. A mistake.

“No. Don't touch me.”

“I'm going to miss you. I'm going to cry over you.”

“I won't cry over you.” She gave me a final look, the synthesis of all her looks—happy eyes, tired eyes, bedazzled eyes, lonely eyes, fugitive eyes, orphan eyes, remembering eyes, altruistic eyes, convent eyes, whorehouse eyes, fortunate eyes, unfortunate eyes, dead eyes.

She blinked several times in a strange, dreamlike, almost insane way, and said this: “Don't cry over me. Ten years from now your
gamine
will be an old lady over forty. What are you going to do with a lark with a fat ass and short legs? Thank God you're getting out in time. Count your blessings and cut your losses. Good-bye.
Désolé.
”

“Désolé.”

Azucena helped me pack my things. She took my clothes out of the bedroom. I asked her with a look if the student was there. We understood each other without having to speak. She shook her head. She didn't have to help me—she did it out of pure goodwill, so I wouldn't feel alone, cuckolded, thrown out, or, in the last instance, badly thought of by her. She also knew I didn't need her help; I made her understand how thankful I was for it. We exchanged few words while we packed my books, papers, and pens into my two briefcases. Then I carefully covered my typewriter.

“She was a beginner, too. She likes to help people just starting out.”

I laughed. “The midwife of the revolution, that's what I told her.”

“She's a very unhappy person. Seriously. She feels persecuted.”

“I think she's right. Sometimes I thought it was nothing but paranoia. I'm beginning to think she's right. The boy's only going to complicate her life.”

“Diana likes risks. You didn't give her that.”

“So she told me. Tell her to watch out. I couldn't do anything for her in Mexico City. I hope she gets a lot out of her new love.”

Azucena sighed. “A beautiful woman doesn't look for beauty in her partner.”

It seemed a cruel remark coming from her. I imagined the roles reversed. Azucena and a handsome man. The equation was unfair. Once again, the man was the winner. Never the woman.

In the hall, I ran into Lew Cooper. He didn't say anything to me. He just grunted.

Azucena ran out into the street after me and handed me something.

“You forgot this.”

It was a marmalade jar full of hairs.

XXX

Jealousy kills love, but it leaves desire intact. That's the real punishment for betrayed passion. You hate the woman who broke the love pact, but you still desire her because her betrayal was the proof of her passion. That was the case with Diana. We didn't end in indifference. She had the intelligence to insult me, to humiliate me, to attack me savagely so I wouldn't resign myself to forgetting her, so I would go on desiring her with what we call jealousy, that perverse term for erotic will.

I saw the Santiago house for the last time in the growing darkness of a February afternoon. Now it was an impregnable fortress. That house I walked in and out of as if I owned it, where I wrote every day, was now alien and repugnant to me. I wanted to besiege it the way the Romans besieged Numantia in Spain, to burn it and destroy it the way the legions burned and destroyed the Jews' Masada. It was with that desire that I gave it a farewell glance, that I circled it one last time, as if instead of penetrating Diana I could penetrate the house we shared.

Fate had given me that woman. No man could take her away from me. Least of all someone I considered a coreligionist, a left-wing student, a traitor … The fetid smell of tear gas drifted in from the center of town, and at that moment I wished that the army had captured my rival, that General Cedillo personally had cut off his balls, and that if he escaped I might one day find him and have the courage to kill him myself. As I thought about it, though, I was gripped by an amusing irony: “Don't deprive the government of that pleasure.”

Norman Mailer says jealousy is a portrait gallery of which the jealous man is the curator. I summoned up the images of each and every one of my moments with Diana, but now with the young student in my place, in my positions, enjoying what had been mine, filling his mouth with the taste of peaches, enjoying the limitless wisdom of Diana's caresses, transformed into the sole spectator of the lake in which the Huntress is reflected …

Jealousy is like a life within our lives. We can catch a plane, go back to the capital, call up friends, begin writing again, but all the time we're living another life, apart although within ourselves, with its own laws. That life inside our lives manifests itself physically. There's a battle in our guts. We wake up, and it's Omaha Beach at Normandy in our stomachs. True. A savage, bitter, bilious tide swirls, rises, and falls from our heart to our guts and from our guts to our worn-out, useless sex, a war casualty. It makes you feel like pinning a Purple Heart on your dick. And then a funeral wreath. But the tide doesn't celebrate anything and doesn't stay in one part of the body for very long. It runs through it like a poisonous liquid, and its objective is not to destroy your body but to besiege it and squeeze it so its worst juices rise to your head, stick like hard green serpent scales on your tongue, on your breath, in your eyes …

For a moment, the break made me feel expelled from life. The way you feel when someone you love dies. But we can show that pain. The dark, poisoned pain of jealousy must be hidden, to avoid both compassion and ridicule. Exposed jealousy exposes us to the laughter of others. It's like returning to adolescence, that unfortunate age in which everything we do in public—walk, talk, look—may be the object of someone else's laughter. Adolescence and jealousy separate us from life, keep us from living it.

The curious thing about this experience of mine was that I felt separated from life, not out of adolescent fear of the ridiculous but because of the fatal sadness of age. Diana made me feel old for the first time. I was forty-one. My rival couldn't be more than twenty-four. Diana was thirty-two. I laughed. Once in Italy I tried to get into a discotheque with an eighteen-year-old American girl. The man at the door stopped me, saying, “It's only for young people.” To which I replied, with a straight face, “I'm her daddy.”

I was thirty-five then. How many doors would be closing on me now, one after another? She said that she was doing it for my own good. In ten years, she'd be barrel-assed and flabby. I was sorry I hadn't said no, that she could be someone else—she wanted that anyway—if she gave herself over to her profession, if she stopped looking for roles that would give meaning to her life outside the movies … Thinking that over, I tried to convince myself of my superiority. All I had to do was to work seriously on my own stuff: I wouldn't get old in ten or even a hundred years. That was the power of literature. But on the condition that we share that power with others. And I, as I said, felt I'd fallen from my initial power, and in that I was like Diana. My literary anointment, like her Saint Joan, was long past. The aura of the beginning was fading, dying. How do you rekindle the flame?

I returned from Santiago with a handful of useless pages. All I had to do was read them coldly, as a counterpoint to my burning internal convulsion, to realize they were no good. I would publish them anyway. They had a political purpose. But if no one read them, what political purpose would they serve? I was willfully fooling myself. I needed to lie to myself as a creator in order to survive as a man. But at the center of my unquiet desire, one conviction shone with a brilliance that grew day by day. The writer's
other
is not there, big as life, waiting for what he hopes he'll be given. The
reader
must be invented by the
author, imagined,
so that he reads what the author
must
write, not what it is expected he will write. Where is that reader? Hidden? Let's find him. Unborn? We must wait patiently for him to be born. Writer, toss your bottle into the sea, be confident, don't break your word—your words—of honor even if today no one reads them. Wait, desire, desire, even if no one loves you …

I could never have said this to Diana Soren. Something melodramatic and pointless would have come out, like “There are great roles for mature actresses.” It would have been pointless because at that moment in her life Diana Soren wouldn't have known what to do with her own success.

I realized that and loved her more than ever. I loved her all over again. Thinking that saved me from my ardor, from my interrupted way of living, from my break and expulsion from life, from my life within my life but separated from my life. That is, it saved me from my jealousy. I saw her, with the little distance I'd managed to win, as a woman who really did know who she was. A foreigner wherever she was, condemned to solitude and exile. A political activist, condemned this time to despair, irrelevance, and finally, again, solitude. A mature actress condemned to decadence, oblivion, and forever, again, solitude. The story of Diana Soren is the story of her solitudes. Diana was the goddess who hunts alone.