Diana (20 page)

Did she and I share that? I could formulate only one answer. I would have given everything for her, only because she wouldn't have given anything for me.

Accepting that truth was how I distanced myself once and for all from Diana, renouncing all my romantic illusions of getting back together with her or spending time together … Perhaps only one link remained between us. We could tell a story to all those who've wanted to free themselves from a love relationship without hurting anybody. It's impossible.

I thought about Luisa. My jealousy of Diana consumed me even as my love for Diana was dying. I wanted to give that love to Luisa. With her I felt no jealousy at all—she could be the receiver of a love I no longer wanted to waste on my game of mirrors, on the anxiety of all these combinations … I was fooling myself yet again.

It's true that once more she accepted the rules of our pact. There was no weakness or submission in it, just active strength. Our pact survived all minor accidents. We had a house, a daughter, a group of friends, everything that makes possible the daily life which with Diana was impossible.

I said I was fooling myself. Other irresistible temptations would come. Foreign actresses get bored when they're on location. They want company without risk. They pass names around among themselves: in India, Tom; in Japan, Dick; in Mexico, Harry. Gentlemen who will take you out, who are well mannered, handsome, intelligent, good to be seen with, good lovers, discreet … How could anyone resist the parade of beauties who formed this information circuit to which, to my eternal joy, I belonged at the age of forty-one? How could I deny myself the game of mirrors in which were reflected image within image within image, passion and jealousy, desire and love, youth and old age, the pact of love and the pact with the devil: Push back my Judgment Day, let me enjoy my youth, my sex, my jealousy, my desires for one more day … but also let me enjoy my pact with Luisa. Why not hope that death, or separation, is a long way off?

She didn't fool herself. “He'll always come back to me,” she would tell our friends. She knew that beneath that incessant tide a sediment of necessary stability was amassed, in which love and desire united without violence, discarding the need for jealousy to increase desire, or the need for guilt as thanks for love. Luisa waited patiently behind her incredibly beautiful mestizo mask for the inevitable day when one woman would give me everything I needed. Just one. She wasn't that woman.

Diana went away. She went when the rainy season began in Mexico and the air once again turned to crystal and gold for a single day.

XXXI

I read about one part of Diana Soren's final drama in the newspapers.

When Diana left Mexico, she was pregnant. I didn't know it, but the FBI did. With that information, they decided to destroy her. Why? Because she was an emblematic figure of Hollywood radical chic, the celebrity who lends her fame and gives her money to radical causes. When I met her, Diana supported the Black Panthers. I've already mentioned the relationship I found out about at night and by telephone. I knew every shade of her support. The FBI doesn't deal in subtleties.

I want to imagine that the the “general public” in the United States did differentiate between, say, the integrationist policy of a Martin Luther King and the separatist policy of Malcolm X. I think that during the years I'm talking about many white Americans (many friends of mine) supported King's nonviolent civil protest as a progressive ideal: the gradual integration of black people into the society of white America, the conquest by blacks of the privileges of whites. Malcolm X, however, advocated a separate, black nation opposed to the white world because it only knew and accepted injustice. If the white world was unjust with itself, how could it not be unjust with the black world? Both, in any case, would live in ghettos separated by color but united in pain, violence, drugs, and misery.

Those irreconcilable options needed a bridge. In Paris, Diana met James Baldwin, who shared at least two things with her: exile as solitude and the search for another, fraternal American. Baldwin, who stood between the two extremes, was a source of perpetual doubt; he deliberately muddied the waters so that no one would believe in easy justice or the inevitability of racial injustice, two faces of the same coin. Baldwin did not want humiliating, charitable integration. Nor did he want the union of black with black to be the chain of hatred toward whites. What Baldwin asked of whites and blacks, Southerners and Northerners, was the simplest and most difficult thing: Treat us like human beings. That's all.

“Look at me,” Baldwin told Diana. “Look at me and ask yourself about the life, hopes, and universal humanity hidden behind my dark skin…”

Judging by Diana's nocturnal conversations, I imagined she thought the same. She wanted to be uncompromising about racism and white hypocrisy, but she wanted to be equally uncompromising in her opposition to a black world radically separate from the white world. The explanation seems to me, having known her, quite clear. Diana Soren wanted to see herself as someone else in order to see herself as she was. She took the risk of seeing blacks only as she wanted to see them, and she paid dearly for it.

The FBI, like the KGB, the CIA, the Gestapo, or Pinochet's DINA, needs to simplify the world so as to designate the enemy clearly and annihilate him without a second thought. Political police agencies, the guardians of the modern world and its well-being, always need a reliable enemy to justify their jobs, their budgets, their children's daily bread.

In Washington, it was decided that Diana Soren was the ideal candidate for that role. Famous, beautiful, white, the Saint Joan of radical causes (I called her the midwife of revolutionaries without imagining that my metaphor would be a reality in the cruelest way), Diana was placed under surveillance and invisibly, silently harassed by the FBI. The Bureau was waiting for the right moment to destroy her. It was merely a matter of opportunity. Diana Soren was destructible. More than anyone. She believed that injustice was fought not only with politics but with sex, with love, and from the romantic depths which made her ideally vulnerable. When the Bureau learned of Diana's pregnancy—while she was still in Mexico or soon thereafter—they realized it was time to move against her, to take advantage of her weakness.

It was then I understood General Agustín Cedillo's warnings and cursed myself for not having found Mario Moya in Mexico, for not believing Diana, for treating her with contempt (“You're paranoid”) and locking myself in the prison of my jealousy. But really, what could I have done? It was already much too late when I found out what was going on. Was I the father? I don't think so—we'd taken precautions. Was the father young Carlos Ortiz, my successor in Diana's favors? That was more likely. She saw him as a revolutionary hero, while I was a tedious repetition of her own husband.

Still, a Mexican revolutionary does not have enough symbolic force to provoke the puritanical democratic white general public of the U.S.A. It would have been like having a baby with Marlon Brando—Viva Zapata!—an exotic experience, yet one that could readily be assimilated. But that the fair, blond star with blue (or were they gray?) eyes, descendant of Swedish immigrants, born in a small Midwestern town, brought up with soda fountains and Mickey Rooney movies, a Lutheran, a graduate of the local high school, the sweetheart of the football team and, one time, of a strong, healthy boy, a girl favored of the gods, chosen from among eighteen thousand hopefuls to play a saint; a rich, free woman married to a famous man, darling of the jet set—that this favorite of the white God would descend to the depths of miscegenation, to the murky, dark surrender of her Caucasian femininity to a brutal black penis, disturbed the night of the American soul, revived the bloody phantoms of castration, of blacks hung with their testicles in their mouths, of burning crosses, of the Klan galloping on …

A mulatto was only acceptable, imaginable, as the son of a white man and a black woman, the result of the whim or despair of the plantation owner, the white master too respectful of his white wife, the white master with the feudal right to spend the first night of marriage with the black bride, the white master enervated by his white wife's long pregnancy, the father of the mulattoes: a white patriarch …

But that a white woman might be the matriarch of the light-brown world, might populate the forests of the New World, the American utopia, with degraded mestizo bastards—no, that repelled even the most liberal conscience, that went to the very center of the Yankee heart, stirred up the guts and balls of Yankee decency. The child had to be black, the offspring of a black revolutionary and a frivolous, crazed white actress. If not, it would mean total horror. The white woman was the slave of the black.

The FBI is patient. It waited until Diana's pregnancy was obvious. Approval of the defamation plan went along these lines: Diana Soren has provided financial support to the Black Panther Party and must be neutralized. Her current pregnancy by [name blacked out] gives us the opportunity to do so.

The Bureau proceeded in the following manner. Agents planted a rumor with Hollywood's gossip columnists. They circulated a letter signed by a fictitious person: “I've been thinking about you, and I remembered that I owe you a favor. Imagine, I was in Paris last week and by accident I ran into Diana Soren, so pregnant she's as big as a house … At first I thought she'd gotten back together with Ivan, but she told me that the father is [name blacked out] of the Black Panthers. That girl sure gets around, as you can see. In any case, I wanted to give you first shot at this one…”

Hollywood gossip columns began to repeat the rumor: “The top item in today's news is that Miss D., the famous actress, is expecting. The proud papa is supposed to be a prominent Black Panther.” The news spread, scaled the heights of credulity, won more converts than the Bible, and was consecrated in an American news weekly with a worldwide circulation—in fact, it is so well distributed that it was one of the two magazines you could get at the drugstore in the Santiago town square, the place where I'd gone to buy toothpaste and where a young student approached me with an invitation to speak to his group …

“Excuse me,” I said then (I laugh at myself today), “but I don't want to compromise my North American friends. I'm their guest.”

The magazine was the first to mention Diana's name. She and Ivan sued them for libel and won something like ten thousand dollars.

The next thing I learned was that Diana had given birth prematurely by cesarean section and that the baby had died after three days.

The next week she flew from Paris to Jeffersontown to bury it. She displayed the body in a funeral parlor. The entire town marched around the coffin, eager to verify the color of the baby's skin.

“It isn't white.”

“It's not black, either. The features aren't black.”

“You can never tell with a mulatto. They're tricky.”

“How can you know if this is really Diana's baby? A black fetus is the easiest thing to throw in the garbage.”

“Do you mean she bought the body of a white baby just to bring it here for us to see?”

“How much would that cost?”

“Is it legal?”

“You look at that baby carefully. It's white.”

“But with a touch of the tar brush. Don't kid yourself.”

“So who's the father?”

“Her husband says he is…”

That sent the line of curious spectators into waves of laughter.

Diana Soren paid no attention. She was too busy taking photos of the tiny body in the white coffin. She took 180 photographs of the dead child.

XXXII

At the end of the 1970s, I met Ivan Gravet in Holland. We'd both been invited to spend a long weekend in the country at the castle of our mutual friend Gabriella van Zuylen. Gabriella is a charming, very beautiful woman, a lover of gardens and a friend of Russell Page, the magnificent British park designer, about whom she wrote a monograph.

The castle is an impressive pile, especially because in Holland's flat landscape it stands out like a mountain. Gabriella has dedicated herself to extending, completing, and beautifying the tranquil, bovine Dutch landscape with the mystery of nature as conceived by the baroque imagination—contrived, varied, circular.

Among the curiosities of her garden was a labyrinth of very high hedges whose perfectly geometrical form, as regular as a botanical spiral, could only be appreciated fully from the roof of the castle. But if you were inside the maze, you quickly lost any sense of its form, and lost your way as well. Sooner or later, Gabriella's thirty guests all explored the maze and all got lost until she came to our rescue, laughing.

My wife, who's afraid of spaces without exits, refused to go in the maze and went off with Gabriella to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. I ventured in, willfully desiring to get lost. First of all, I wanted to play along with the maze's intention. Secondly, I was convinced that to enter the maze with the goal of getting out was obviously how you'd become the prisoner of the mythic bull who inhabits it. But if you got lost, losing the will to survive, it would please the Minotaur, make him your ally, allay his suspicions. That's how Theseus should have proceeded.

I did not have Ariadne's thread. But when I suddenly found myself face-to-face with Ivan Gravet inside the maze, I decided that Diana Soren was the thread on which, in a certain way, both of us were relying at that moment—only at that moment. I'd seen him, of course, since Friday, at Gabriella's magnificent dinners and lunches. At night, we were supposed to wear evening clothes, and Ivan was the sole exception, wearing a jacket I can only compare to those I saw in photos of Stalin or Mao: a gray tunic with very long sleeves, buttoned to the neck and worn without a tie. It wasn't what was then called—during an attack of Third World fashion—a Mao or Nehru jacket. Ivan Gravet's tunic looked as if it had either been bought in the GUM store in Red Square or been handed on from some member of the Politburo. The last time I'd seen one like it was in a photograph of the justly forgotten Malenkov. Khrushchev wore only suits and ties. In Ivan Gravet's outfit—which he didn't change the whole three nights we spent at the castle—there was nostalgia for a lost Russian world; there was humor, but there was also mourning …