Diana (2 page)

Diana the goddess who hunts alone. This narrative, weighed down by the passions of time, defeats itself because it never reaches the ideal perfection of what can be imagined. Nor does it desire that perfection, since if language and reality were identical, the world would come to an end, the universe would no longer be perfectible, simply because it would be perfect. Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things. All our blood can flow out of that hole.

Alone at the end as we're alone at the beginning, we remember the happy moments we save from the deep latency of the world, we demand the slavery of happiness, and we only listen to the voice of the masked mystery, the invisible throb that in the end manifests itself to demand the most terrible truth, the sentence that brooks no appeal, of time on earth:

You did not know how to love. You were incapable of loving.

Now I'll tell this story to admit just how right the horrible oracle of truth was. I didn't know how to love. I was incapable of loving.

II

I met Diana Soren at a New Year's Eve party. Actually, it was a double celebration the architect Eduardo Terrazas staged at his house: the New Year and a reconciliation between me and my wife, Luisa Guzmán. Eduardo and I had shared a little house in Cuernavaca during 1969. I would write from Monday to Friday, then he and his girlfriend would come down from Mexico City for a weekend devoted to friends, food, and alcohol. Lots of women passed through. I had turned forty in 1968 and gone into a midlife crisis that lasted the whole year and culminated in a party I gave for my friend the American novelist William Styron in the Opera Bar on Avenida Cinco de Mayo, a tarnished but flashy leftover from Mexico's
belle époque
(supposing there really was such a thing). The Opera was down at the heels—too many domino matches and near-misses at the spittoon.

I invited all my friends to honor Styron, who had recently published
The Confessions of Nat Turner,
a very successful and very provocative book. The parties most provoked were members of black organizations who said that Styron had no right to speak in the voice of a black man, Nat Turner, who in 1831 led an uprising of sixty fellow slaves, burning buildings and killing in the name of freedom until he himself was killed in a woods where he'd survived on his own for two months. Because of his insurrection, the slave laws were tightened. But because they were so tight they kindled even greater revolts. Styron recounted one—but only one—of the stations in the calvary of the United States, which is racism.

When Bill feels he's being hounded in his country, he calls me and visits Mexico, and I do the same when Mexico starts getting on my nerves, knowing I can always take refuge on Martha's Vineyard, Bill's island on the edge of the North Atlantic. Now the two of us were living in a little house I rented when I separated from Luisa Guzmán. Located in the cobblestoned neighborhood of San Angel, a separate city until recently, where families from the capital would vacation in the last century and that now survives disguised in monastic robes amid the noise and smoke of the Periférico, the beltway around the capital, and Avenida Revolución.

My neo-bachelor residence was constructed out of debris salvaged from torn-down buildings. It was designed by another Mexican architect, Caco Parra, who specializes in combining huge hacienda doors, pilasters from nationalized churches, ancient beams from the long-disappeared age of the viceroys, sacrilegious columns, and profaned altars: a complete history of how the privileged havens of the past were transformed into the civil, transitory sanctuaries of the present. Using all these elements, Parra built strange, attractive houses, so mysterious that their inhabitants could wander into their labyrinths and never be seen again.

Martha's Vineyard, on the other hand, is open to the four winds, incinerated by the sun for three months of the year and then battered by the frozen blasts of that great white whale the North Atlantic. Whenever I think of Styron holed up on his island, I imagine that Melville's Captain Ahab sailed out to kill not the whale but the ocean, Neptune himself, just as the Belgian imperialists in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
fire their cannon not at a black enemy but at an entire continent: Africa. On Styron's island, even during the hottest months, the fog rolls in every night from the sea, as if to remind the summer that it's only a transient veil that will be torn open by the great gray cloak of a long winter. The fog comes in from the sea, over the beaches, the cliffs at Gay Head, the docks at Vineyard Haven, the lawns and the houses, until it reaches the umbilicus of the island, the melancholy inland ponds where the sea recognizes itself and dies, drowned.

In winter, the sea howls around the island but not as loudly as my guests at the Opera. I was imprudent enough to invite, willy-nilly, all my current girlfriends, making each one think she was my favorite. I loved to create situations like that: dissimulated passion, rage on the verge of augmenting passion, jealousy about to overflow like a wound to stain our blouses, our shirts, as if we were bleeding from our nipples—all this enabled me to see clearly the fragility of sex and to celebrate instead the vigor of literature.

So I invited not only my lovers to the party at the Opera but new writers like José Agustín, Parménides García Saldaña, and Gustavo Sáinz, who were fifteen years younger than I and who deserved the laurels already wilted on much older heads—mine, for instance. Totally free, uninhibited, funny, mortal enemies of solemnity, these members of the Onda movement wrote to a rock beat and were the natural stars of a party that also wanted to say to the authoritarian, murderous government of October 2, 1968: You last six years. We'll last a whole lifetime. Your saturnalia is bloody and oppressive. Ours is sensual and liberating.

Such justifications did not absolve me of the frivolity—to say nothing of the cruelty—of my erotic games. At the time I believed, despite everything, that literature, my gospel, excused everything. Others surrendered in the name of literature to drugs, alcohol, politics, even to polemics as a literary sport. I—and I wasn't alone—succumbed to love, but I retained my right to keep my distance, to manipulate, to be cruel. I was only too happy to wear the costume of Beltenebros, the Lucifer who inhabits the shining moral armor of the chivalric hero Amadis of Gaul. No sooner does Amadis lose his heroism and yield to passion than he becomes his enemy brother, Le Beau Ténébreux: Don Juan.

The Don Juan temptation is erotic but it's also literary. Don Juan endures because nothing can satisfy him (or, as the best contemporary incarnation of Don Juan grafted onto Lucifer would sing it,
I can't get no satisfaction
). It's a fact that the insatiability of the rake from Seville opens the doors of perpetual metamorphosis to him. Always desirous, always avid, he never ends, never dies: He continually transforms. He's born young, and after just a few love affairs (two or three in Tirso de Molina), he becomes old in an instant, sated but unsatisfied, an evil and cruel gentleman (in Molière). Tirso's perverse and juvenile cherub becomes the actor Louis Jouvet's mortal mask, a rationalist Gallic gargoyle who no longer believes that adolescence will last forever (he repeats, whenever reminded of death, “Let's hope it's a long way off”) but who wears his own death mask. Byron, to avoid competition, tames Don Juan and sits him down to have tea with his family during one of those English winters “ending in July, to recommence in August.” But he gives a perverse, quasi-Argentine twist to this domestic metamorphosis. Don Juan discovers he's in love not with love but with himself, like Argentines who are bored in elevators without mirrors. Don Juan's love for Don Juan is a despotic trap—nothing less than that of love itself.

To be all that—what a dream, what an elixir—Gautier's Don Juan, Adam expelled from paradise but remembering Eve, the imprisoned memory that ties him to the perpetual quest for the lost lover and mother; Musset's Don Juan, sunk in a world of dives and whorehouses where he hopes to find the “unknown woman.” He deludes himself; he's only looking for Don Juan, and even if all women look like him, none of them is
him.
But perhaps the real Don Juan, the most public because the most secretive, is Lenau's, who admits he wants to possess all women simultaneously. That is Don Juan's ultimate triumph, his most certain pleasure. To have all of them at the same time.

“Tonight I'm going to have them all. All of them.”

Don Juan's pleasure depends more on disguise and movement than on ubiquity. He's like a shark: he's got to keep moving all the time so he won't sink to the bottom of the sea and drown. He moves, he moves around masked, his mask covering his larval, mutating, metamorphosing condition. He moves and changes so rapidly that his own images can't catch up with him. Neither Achilles nor the Tortoise, Don Juan is the parable of the disguised man whose disguises are always running after him. He's naked. He takes his pleasure naked. But to move, he has to dress up, disguise himself and leave behind his most recent disguise, already known, already penetrated, before he puts on the next. In his momentary helplessness, in his Duchampian nakedness scaling balconies and descending ladders, Don Juan is Don Juan only so he can leave his own image behind. He runs, uncatchable by any image that might want to capture him, experiencing the velocity of pleasure in the velocity of change, conquering all frontiers. Don Juan is the founder of the European Common Market: he has lovers in Italy, Germany, France, and Turkey, and in Spain—Mozart tells us—a thousand and three. The Machiavelli of sex, a figure disguised in order to escape the vengeance of fathers and husbands but, above all, to escape tedium … That is how I, secretly, ridiculously, painfully, wanted to be …

Minimal forty-year-old Don Juan of the Mexican night, I aspired as a man to that power of metamorphosis and movement. But most of all, I wanted it as a writer. Loving or writing, nothing is more exciting or more beautiful than recognizing the struggle between the power we exercise over another person and the power the other—man or woman—exercises over us. Everything else vanishes in that ungraspable tempest of mutual attraction, of resistance that, out of lust for power or a mere instinct of survival or perhaps perversity, we put up to the attraction of another. The charm of such a struggle, obviously, is to yield to it. How? With whom? When? For how long? This is the common ground shared by sex and literature. An ashen-winged angel flies over. That dark angel, that tarnished Eros, is Don Juan, Cupid in flames, his own androgynous
putto,
who deposits on the eyelids, in the nostrils, the ears, the mouth, the anus of the loved one, on the back of the head, if necessary, the seeds of a smile, of a voice, of a glance. Of a desire. Beltenebros the melancholy whispers softly in my ear and tells me, “There can be nothing sadder than the taste of the women you will never possess, the men you lost out of fear, out of conventionality, out of dread of taking the forbidden step, out of lack of imagination, out of inability to become, as Don Juan does, someone else.”

I want to be very frank in this story and keep nothing to myself. I can wound myself whenever I like. But I don't have the right to wound anyone who isn't me, unless, of course, I amorously sink into myself the dagger I end up sharing with someone else. Right here at the outset, I list the terrors that assail me. I try to justify sex with literature and literature with sex. But the writer—lover or author—ultimately disappears. If he shouts, he disintegrates. If he sighs, he's done for. You've got to be conscious of this before affirming, above all things, that life is never generous twice.

That night at the Opera Bar, in a Viscontian, which is to say
operatic,
setting, I felt I'd sunk the dagger too frequently, wounding myself more than I'd wounded the women whom I'd tried to manipulate but who, I knew only too well, could repay me in the same coin. I chose one, I earned the hatred of the rest, and Styron, Terrazas, and I left the next day for Guadalajara and the Pacific coast, where the Hotel Camino Real in Puerta Vallarta, designed by my friend, was celebrating its grand opening.

It was there I received the foreseeable lesson. One afternoon, the girl I was traveling with casually left a letter on the bed in our hotel room. She was writing to another of her boyfriends, arranging a date for New Year's Eve, which, of course, she refused to spend with me. “Writers only for a little while, because they give me brain food so I can make better love with you, darling. Besides, the oldtimers have their own kind of kicks … like drinking champagne all day. It just gives me heartburn. Put some sodas on ice for me, baby. Remember, if there's no Coke, I just don't celebrate…”

I pretended not to notice, but when I got back to Mexico City, I went to see my wife and asked her to spend New Year's Eve with me and to end a separation that had lasted almost a year. Once again, she would be my total victory over transitory loves.

III

Luisa Guzmán had been—still was—a woman of exceptional beauty. Dark-haired, with pale, crepuscular, luminous skin that glowed brightly instead of darkening in the light of her huge black eyes, which were slanted, almost Oriental, resting above the twin continents of her high, Asiatic, tremulous cheekbones. There was a reverie in her eyes, a languor, as if while searching for herself she had been stricken with a resigned, culpable sadness. She was an actress who wanted more than the Mexican movie industry could give her. She had made her debut at the age of fifteen, an aspirant to the pantheon of Mexican film goddesses, all dark-haired like her, all tall, with sleepy eyes and the cheekbones of an immortal skull.

She never got the parts, the stories, or the directors that could have brought about the tiny miracle called stardom. She avidly searched for the best, both in film and on stage; she loved her profession so much that, paradoxically, it destroyed her. Just like Diana Soren, she made only two or three good films. Later, just to keep working, she would take any part that came along. Time and wear took away her voice, denied her starring roles, made her prematurely old; she looked for character-actor parts, opportunities to shine that no one understood because they were so eccentric.