Diana (7 page)

There were no processions. There was a common grave. My wife, Luisa Guzmán, sent me tranquil but secretly anguished letters: “I was rehearsing in the Comonfort theater in the Bellas Artes complex, just opposite Tlatelolco, when I began to hear a lot of shooting. I saw the government helicopters mowing down students and ordinary people indiscriminately. It went on for more than an hour, and when I left the theater the students threw themselves at me and the other actors, shouting, ‘They're killing your children!' I've never heard such screams of horror and desperation. It was the worst night in many lives. The next day, the newspapers made no mention of the helicopters and said thirty people had lost their lives. No one knows how the shooting began. The kids said some agents mixed in with the demonstrators probably fired the first shots. Then someone saw them receiving arms and orders from the soldiers. Everyone has a different version of what happened. Everyone is also more and more afraid every day, not only of the violence but of what's behind the violence, and so as not to serve secret interests they prefer to serve no one…”

I answered that I wanted to come home to Mexico and get more involved. I'd just visited Prague. The world was changing its skin; something had to be done.

“Mexico is not Prague,” Luisa Guzmán wrote back, “as you well know. The middle class is scared and is siding with the authorities, with law and order. I've talked to taxi drivers and poor people. Their ignorance and indifference are still unshakable. They swallow all the lies they hear on television or read in the papers, and they go on believing in the red-menace bogeyman. I know, I know, in spite of all that or because of it, we have to continue fighting, and if someone gets caught in the crossfire, well, it's just bad luck. But to come and put your head in the wolf's mouth only to find out it was a trap set to catch idealists seems to me absurd, sad, and even ridiculous. Student leaders disappear mysteriously, without a trace. Others have been all but killed by torture. Your only chance to take part would be from underground. Betrayal and corruption are too deeply rooted here. Perhaps there are half a dozen young people who could actually withstand the bombardment of half a million pesos, but most would end up giving in. Pardon my pessimism—I don't want to avoid responsibility, but I do want to calm down that enthusiasm you picked up in Czechoslovakia. Not a day goes by here without someone calling you, in writing or out loud, a traitor to your country. You shouldn't come back. It's all the same to me whether you're a hero or a traitor, and I refuse to talk to anyone. I'm tired of hearing superficial judgments…”

I did return in February 1969. One morning, angry and tearful, Luisa Guzmán and I walked hand in hand around Tlatelolco Plaza. My literary imagination would allow me only to write a theatrical oratorio on the Conquest of Mexico, another of those savage wounds driven in the body of what we call, with no clear definitions, the state, the country, the nation … Mexico was always sewn together with stabs, always invented by means of survival. Elena Poniatowska and Luis González de Alba wrote the great books on the Tlatelolco tragedy, and I had to content myself with admiring them, feeling they spoke in my name.

Now this accidental meeting with the student Carlos Ortiz in the Santiago plaza awakened all those feelings in me again. Not everyone had given in, as Luisa Guzmán had predicted they would. But the one who had been hiding was me; the traitor was me. I couldn't respond with the courage I owed to the loyalty and patience of my wife. I had returned to Mexico and tried to compensate for my double burden of political horror and writing block with the plaything of love, refusing—perhaps forever—to enter further into Luisa's love, to make it exclusive, to penetrate more deeply into the life of the woman who in those moments would have enabled me to venture more deeply into politics and literature. I broke Ariadne's thread. My frivolity is unforgivable. I was to pay for my abandonment of Luisa many times, again and again, in the years left to me. I just couldn't start over with her. Perhaps I should have reconstructed our love. Was it reconstructible, or was it already a great void, a lie, a repetition? Hand in hand with her, I walked Tlatelolco Plaza. Tenderness and horror mixed in my heart: was my rejection of this ceremony of death only a pretext to affirm a capacity for abstract, general love without specific content? Was I incapable of truly loving someone? Was I able to bedazzle myself by multiplying adventures only in order to convince myself, falsely, that I really could love? Why didn't I see that the love she was offering me then, at my side, was known, maybe even routine, but certain?

Tlatelolco for me was a terrible sign—my own wound as a writer and a lover—of the separation between the vital content of things and their literary expression in my work. Now, in Santiago, I was going to sit down and prove to myself that I could climb out of my hole. Anguished, I was also happy. This mad love with Diana could be my new point of departure. If the original vein of my literature had run out, what would the new one be? Would love tell me? The answer would depend on the intensity of that tenderness. That's why I had abandoned my house, betrayed my wife, exposed myself to yet another cruel fall into disillusion. How could Diana ask me to spend the day watching her get made up and have her hair done on the set? There's nothing so tedious as making a movie. I was not going to waste my time. In my name or in hers.

“You and I share something,” I told Diana one cold, boring night. “We have forever lost the moment of beginning, the glory of our debut. You can lose it in movies, in literature, and in love, you know…”

“You're talking to a woman who stopped existing at age twenty,” replied Diana. “I was a has-been at twenty.”

I told her how I'd always been fascinated by that expression, the “has-been” implying a closed, finished destiny. I was too optimistic to think that way; I believe we're incomplete, unfinished individuals. I read and reread three great lines by my favorite poet, Quevedo. (Diana's never heard of him, but her secretary, Azucena, has and asks me to repeat them. Then I translate them, the three of us at the dining-room table, surrounded by tasteless white figurines in the rented house in Santiago.)

Yesterday's gone. Tomorrow hasn't arrived,

today's going by without stopping an instant;

I am a Was, a Will Be, and an Is grown tired …

Perhaps what the gringos lack, I said in a joking way, is a serious sense of death instead of a tragic sense of fame. No country gives so much value to fame as the United States. It's the culmination of the great modern fanfare, that blast of trumpets which for half a millennium has been saying that “we” is not enough, that not even “I” is enough, that we need to be known, we need renown, fame. By then, Andy Warhol had already declared we'd all be famous for fifteen minutes. I asked Diana if she really believed her fame had ended when she was twenty. She rested her blond, chiseled head on my shoulder and put her hand on my heart.

“As an actress, yes…”

“You're wrong,” I consoled her. “Should I tell you what I'm going through now as a writer? I promise you we're not so different.”

“Can we begin again if we love each other a lot?”

“I think we can, Diana,” I said. I was deeply moved.

Moments like that don't last. The will for passion can, and I exercised it with Diana against Diana, toward Diana, with all my strength. I was convinced that she felt the same toward me, in her way. For both of us, love was always the opportunity to start over, although, for her, living was living what had yet to be lived, while for me it was knowing again how to live what had already been lived. For better or worse, I don't want to abandon my own past to a wandering orphanhood.

For Diana, her early triumph in movies and then the mediocrity of her most recent films closed the door of her profession as actress. But that was the profession she got out of bed every morning to practice. From bed I watched her reacting to the alarm clock, drinking the coffee Azucena brought her on a nicely prepared tray (Azucena is a Spanish working woman; she likes her work; what she does makes her proud, so she does it well), slipping on a T-shirt and jeans—much like her most famous character, the maid of Orléans, who discovered the most comfortable style for a warrior woman: to dress like a man—then tying a kerchief over her head, and leaving, throwing me a dry kiss as I'd steal another hour's sleep. Later I'd wake, remembering night with Diana with intense pleasure. I'd take a shower and shave thinking about what I was going to write (the shower and the razor are my best springboards for creation: water and steel; I must really be Arab, really Castilian). I watched my lover sacrifice and discipline herself for a profession in which she didn't believe, in which she didn't see her self, in which she could not even glimpse her future, while I settled down for the rest of the day in this enigma, huge and tiny at the same time: what does Diana Soren really want if what she does is not what she wants to do?

X

The tedium of Santiago became the most tedious theme of our conversations. It seemed we'd reached an unbreachable consensus, in which all of us—Diana and I, her secretary, and the other members of the cast—concurred that Santiago was the most boring place in the world.

Instead of the well-wishing telegrams we usually send to friends on New Year's Day, this year Diana sent two or three desolate cables. They all said the same thing, just one word:
HELP
!

Various circles formed. The leading man, famous as the hero of a television series, lived in a large, elegant house on the outskirts of Santiago with his girlfriend and the director, a saturnine but promising man who'd also made a name for himself in television. The melancholy hotel in the center of town was home to the cinematographer—an Englishman who explicitly worshipped at the altar of Onan—and an actor who'd been famous in the workers' theater movement of the 1930s. But the sun around which the entire production revolved was the leading man, his girlfriend, and the director.

“They're very nice, and I get along well with them,” said Diana. “But the deal is that we live apart and see one another very little. They like to spend their evenings drinking beer and playing poker.”

Something we would never do. But I did wonder what, aside from loving each other a great deal, we would do to pass the nights. Diana told me she'd invited the character actor of the film, an American named Lew Cooper, to live with us. “Don't worry. He's sixty and very intelligent. You'll like him.”

I knew very well who he was. First, because he was the greatest actor in Clifford Odets's plays during the 1930s and in Arthur Miller's in the 1940s. Second, because he was one of the victims of Senator McCarthy's witch-hunt in the 1950s. I was disgusted by all those who'd squealed on their colleagues, condemning the victims to hunger and, sometimes, to suicide. On the other hand, all those who, like Lillian Hellman, had refused to accommodate conscience to the political fashions of the day were my heroes. Cooper strangely fell between the two categories. Some said he was a totally apolitical man and that his statements to the House Un-American Activities Committee had been innocuous: he'd named those who'd already been named or who'd come forward and declared themselves Communists. He never added an unpublished name, so to speak, to the inquisitor's list. But even if he'd actually informed on no one, the moral fact is that he did give names, or at least repeat them.

How do you judge that kind of action? Cooper went on working. Others, who refused to talk, never again set foot on a movie set. Not part of the U.S. political world but from a moral world that transcended it, I was caught between my leftist convictions and my personal ethics, which rejected facile Manichaeanism and, above all, the slightest hint of Pharisaism. Was the case difficult to judge precisely because it stood between bloodthirsty, vengeful, envious, opportunistic squealing and the weaknesses and failures to which, perhaps, all of us are susceptible? Cooper's moral ambiguity made him more interesting than blameworthy. One among so many people had to be my own double. Who could reassure me that under certain circumstances I myself wouldn't have done what he did? My entire intellectual and moral self rebelled against the idea. But my sentimental side, human, affectionate, or whatever you'd like to call it, tended to forgive Cooper, just as one day someone else would have to forgive me something. There are people who replicate our weakness because we instantly recognize ourselves in them. Cooper deserved not my censure but my compassion.

Anyway, I was curious about all the people involved in the film, but Diana lost patience with my questions. “Hollywood adores capsule biographies. They save time and, best of all, excuse us from thinking. They let us put on airs of being objective, but actually we're just swallowing gossip consommé. Marilyn Monroe: a sad, lonely little girl. Irresponsible father. Insane mother. Bounced from orphanage to orphanage. She never should have stopped being Norma Jean Baker. She couldn't stand the burden of being Marilyn Monroe—pills, alcohol, death. Rock Hudson: an extremely handsome truck driver from Texas. Used to driving the highways by night, he would pick up boys and make love to them. He's discovered. He becomes a star. He's got to hide his homosexuality. He's locked in a closet filled with spotlights and cameras. Everyone knows he's a queen. The world has to believe he's the most virile of leading men. Who disillusioned them? Death, death…”

She laughed and poured herself a whiskey without bothering to ask me to do it for her. “Sweetheart, don't believe my biography. Don't believe it when they say: Diana Soren. Small-town girl. The girl next door. Wins a competition for the part of Shaw's Saint Joan. Wins out of eighteen thousand contestants. From anonymity to glory in a flash. A genuine sadist directs the film. He humiliates her, tries to get great acting out of her with his cruelty, but only manages to convince her she will never be a great actress. And that's a fact. Diana Soren will take any shitty part the studios offer her so she can disguise herself, so the world will believe Diana Soren is just that: only a mediocre actress. Then Diana can dedicate herself to being what she wants to be and no one can impose limits on her…”