Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XIII

In very tender, very vulnerable moments that I thought I was sharing with Diana, investing her with qualities, if that’s what they were, or lacks of defense, which is what they turned out to be, I invited her to give it all up, to come with me to one of those North American university positions I was offered from time to time. I’d never taught in a gringo university. What I imagined was a bucolic haven surrounded by lakes, with ivy-covered libraries — and good stationers, the supreme attraction the Anglo-Saxon world holds for me.

I feel a professional distress in Latin countries: the low quality of the paper, my work material, is a negative comparable to a painter’s being deprived of paint or given brushes but no canvases. The ink bleeds through notebooks made in Mexico; Spanish paper comes right out of the ancient mercantile or accounting world Pérez Galdós describes in his novels — it’s first cousin to the abacus and brother to parchment — and in France a sourpuss salesgirl blocks the way to any writer curious to smell, touch, or feel the nearness of paper.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, the paper is as smooth as silk, the selection brilliant, extensive, well-ordered. To enter a stationery store in London or New York is to penetrate a paradise of writerly fruits, pens that fly like hawks, pads that are as pliant and responsive as a loving hand, paper clips that are silver brooches, portfolios as grand as protocols, labels that are credentials, notebooks that are deuteronomies… For years, I would go back to Mexico loaded with satin-paper notebooks for my friend Fernando Benítez so that he could write his great books about the survival of indigenous cultures in Mexico comfortably and sensually. The ideological exclusion laws of McCarthyism kept him from entering the States — he couldn’t even buy good workbooks. But that’s another story. The Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco says that the first thing he does before buying a book is to open it at random and stick his nose between its pages. That magnificent scent, comparable to aromas that might be found between a woman’s breasts or legs, is multiplied a thousandfold in the stacks of the great university libraries in the United States. Now I was inviting Diana, not too seriously, I admit, and with a kind of defenseless enthusiasm, I repeat. If you want, I said, we can live together in a university, you could go out and make your films …

She interrupted me. “It would be better than Santiago.”

I was thankful for the little notes she sent me every day from location up in the mountains while I went on writing my oratorio. The best one (which I’ll keep forever): “My love — If we manage somehow to survive this place, we will be invincible. What can separate us? I love you.” But now she said that yes, living on an American university campus would be nice. Every year, she would go back to her hometown in Iowa to celebrate the Thanksgiving that only gringos celebrate. It reminds them of their innocence, which is what they’re really celebrating. They evoke the completion of the first year spent in New England by the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony when they reached Plymouth Rock in 1620, fleeing from religious intolerance in England.

To amuse my friends, I refer to the Puritans as the first wetbacks in the United States. Where were their visas, their green cards? The Puritans were immigrant laborers, just like the Mexicans who cross the southern frontier of the U.S. today looking for work, finding instead, sometimes, billy clubs and bullets. Why? Because they’re invading — with their language, their food, their religion, their hands, and their sex — a space reserved for white civilization. They’re the savages returning. The Puritans, on the other hand, enjoy the easy conscience of the civilizer. They steal land, murder Indians, decree the separation of the sexes, impede the mixing of the races, impose an intolerance worse than what they left behind, hunt down imaginary witches, and yet are the symbols of innocence and abundance. Each November, a huge turkey stuffed with apples, nuts, and spices and dripping with rich gravy confirms the United States in the certitude of its double destiny: Innocence and Abundance.

“You go back to that every year?”

She said that was actually her best role. To pretend that she was still a simple country girl. It wasn’t hard for her to act out middle-class values. They were mother’s milk to her; she grew up with them. “It’s the role my parents expect of me. It’s not hard. I tell you, it’s my best part. I should get an Oscar for how well I carry it off. I become the girl next door again. The neighbor. You’re right.”

Her eyes veiled over with nostalgia. “Wherever I am, the last week in November I go back home and celebrate Thanksgiving.”

“How do they react? Your parents, I mean.”

“They serve wine. It’s the only time they do. They think that if they serve wine I’ll be happy, that I won’t miss Paris. They see me as a strange, sophisticated girl. I make them think I’m still the same small-town girl I always was. They serve French wines. It’s their way of telling me they know I’m different and they are always the same.”

“Do they believe you? Do you think they believe you?”

“Let’s play Scrabble. It’s not even eight.”

We invented different parlor games to pass the evenings. The most durable proved to be truth or consequences. The punishment for lying was a pleasure: to give the liar a kiss. Of course, it was better to say only true things and save the kisses for bed. But even though Cooper, the old actor, was alone, he wanted neither to kiss nor to be kissed.

The question that evening was one I proposed: Why do we restrain our great passions?

What do you mean? asked the actor. If we didn’t restrain them, we’d go straight back to the law of the jungle. We already knew that, he said with the disdainful snort and sneering lips that characterized all his film roles.

No, I explained, I’m asking you to declare personally why, in most cases, when the opportunity to live a great personal passion presents itself, we let it pass, we become stupid, sometimes blind, even though it’s our best chance to involve ourselves in something that would give us a superior satisfaction, a—

“Or leave us profoundly unsatisfied,” said Diana.

“That’s possible, too,” I said. “But let’s go one at a time. Lew.”

“Okay, I won’t say that all great passions turn us back into animals and shatter the laws of civilization. But it does happen every once in a while, from having sex with your wife to politics. Perhaps the most secret fear is that a blind, unthinking passion might rip us away from the group we belong to, make us guilty of betrayal …”

It was painful for the old man to go on. I interrupted him, not realizing I was breaking my own ground rule. I wouldn’t let him give himself over to his passion, because I felt he was personalizing it, identifying too much with his own experience …

Diana shot me a curious glance, pondering my good manners, my tendency to avoid conflict… “You mean sex, sexual passion?”

No, said Cooper’s eyes to me. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. Passion takes us away from the family. It can violate endogamy. Endogamy and exogamy. Those are the two fundamental laws of life. Life with the group or outside it. Sex within or outside. Deciding that, knowing whether our blood stays home or is out there wandering around aimlessly, that’s what keeps us from following great passions. Otherwise, we dive right into the abyss of the unknown. We need rules. It doesn’t matter if they’re implicit. They have to be fixed, clear in our mind. You marry within the clan. Or you marry outside it. Your children will either be of our family or outsiders. You either stay near the home of your grandparents. Or you go out into the world.”

“Your people have gone out into the world,” I said to the two North Americans. “We Mexicans have stayed inside. We even gave you half our country because we didn’t populate it in time.”

“Don’t worry.” Diana laughed. “Pretty soon California will belong to you again. Everybody there speaks Spanish.”

“No,” I said. “Answer the question from the game.”

“You first. Ladies last.” She curled up around herself like an Angora cat. Her dimples were never so deep or so promising.

“I have to admit I’m afraid of a passion that would take away the time I need to write. I’ve let lots of chances for pleasure pass because I could foresee the negative consequences for my writing.”

“Tell us what they are.” More dimples than ever, almost wanton dimples.

“Jealousy. Doubt. Time. Going around and around. Trysts. Confusions. Misunderstandings. Lies.”

“Everything that takes passion away from passion,” Diana said with a comic toss of her blond head.

“There is no woman you can’t conquer if you dedicate time and flattery to her. Those are more important than money or beauty. Time, time, a woman devours a man’s time — that’s it. Dedicate a lot of time to them.”

“We didn’t waste any time. We saw each other and that was that,” said Diana, as if she were drinking an invisible highball. “You and I.”

I went on. “I’m terrified of being left with no time to write. Writing is my passion. Every writer is born with a limited amount of time. From the moment you sit down to write, you begin a battle against death. Every day, death whispers into my ear, One day less. You won’t have time.”

“There’s something worse,” said Cooper. “A friend of mine who’s a scientist at UCLA told me that the day will come when they’ll be able to tell when you’re born, first, what you’re going to die of, and second, when you’re going to die. Is it worth it to live like that?”

“That’s another game, Lew. We’ll deal with that question tomorrow.” I laughed. “We’ve got lots of long Santiago nights left with no movies, no TV, no decent restaurants…”

I looked at Diana’s eyes, but my gaze, imploring, not affirming, many nights ahead of us, did not dissolve the disillusion in hers. I spoke the truth. Would I deserve a kiss that night? Would Diana kiss me just to say “Did you lie? You prefer me. You’ll leave everything for me. Your mornings as a writer are a farce. You live to love me at night. I know it. I feel it. Everything you write here will be shit because your passion isn’t in it. Your passion is between my sheets, not between your pages.”

“We should have done it,” said Diana.

Lew and I looked at her, not understanding. She understood.

“Nothing should keep us from a passion. Absolutely nothing. Get me something to drink, love.”

I did, while she went on to say that life is never generous twice. There are forces that present themselves once and never again. Forces, she repeated, sleepily nodding several times, staring at the polished nails of her bare feet, her chin perched on her knees. Forces, not opportunities. Forces for love, politics, artistic creation, sports, who knows what else. They come by only once. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone, mad at us because we paid them no mind. We didn’t want passion. Then passion didn’t want us either.

She burst into tears, so I picked her up in my arms and carried her to bed. She was the size of a little girl.