Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XV

It goes without saying that I didn’t write a single line that morning. How was I going to take up the love of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche when my own had become so mysteriously complicated? What did a rough soldier from Extremadura and a captive princess, from Tabasco no less, give each other, what could they give each other? Something more than a political alliance mediated by sex? Something more than the verbal, carnal union of two languages — two tongues? By the same token, Diana went off to film a ridiculous Western in the Sierra Madre, and there I was, pondering the pleasure that apparently I hadn’t given her, taking it only for myself.

For a moment, I almost convinced myself that I was like all other men, especially Latin American men, who go after their own immediate satisfaction and don’t give a shit about the woman’s. I was my own best lawyer: I quickly convinced myself that this didn’t apply in my case. I’d showered Diana Soren with warmth and attention; neither my patience nor my passion was in doubt. She was as voracious as I was desirous of satisfying her. If the masculine pleasure to which she referred that morning was the simple, direct pleasure of mounting her and coming, I never did it without all the preambles, the foreplay, that sexual urbanity requires in order to satisfy the woman and bring her to the point just before the culmination that leads, with luck, to shared orgasm, profound lovemaking, composed equally of flesh and spirit: coming together, soaring to heaven …

Did I fail in some other area? I reviewed them all. I asked her for a blowjob when I sensed she wanted to give me one, when taking her by the nape of the neck and bringing her close to my erect penis as if she were a docile slave was the pleasure we both wanted. But I also understood when what Diana wanted was slow, dazzling cunnilingus in which my tongue explored her invisible sex, when I was ashamed of the brutal obstruction of my mere masculine form, awkward, as obvious as a hose abandoned in a garden of blond grass. In her, in Diana, sex was a hidden luxury, behind the hair, between the folds that my tongue explored until it reached the tiny, nervous, quivering, dithering thrill of pure quicksilver clitoris.

There was no dearth of sixty-nines, and she possessed the infinite wisdom of true lovers who know where the roots of a man’s sex are, the knot of nerves between his legs, equidistant between testicles and anus, where all virile tremors meet when a woman’s hand caresses us there, threatening, promising, insinuating one of the two paths, the heterosexual at the testicles or the homosexual at the asshole. That hand holds us suspended between our open or secret inclinations, our amorous potentialities with the opposite or the same sex. A true lover knows how to give us the two pleasures and give them, besides, as a promise, that is, with the maximum intensity of what is only desired, of what is incomplete. Total love is always androgynous.

Didn’t she herself want me to sodomize her? I did it two ways, turning her over on her stomach to enter her vagina from the rear, or lubricating her anus to enter, to tear open, her most intimate bud. I covered her with oils, and one night I showered her with champagne, both of us spraying each other in a torrent of laughter; I’ve already spoken of her splendid vaginal aromas of ripe fruits; I sprayed my cologne in her armpits and between her legs; she hid her own perfume behind my ear, so it would stay there, she said, forever; I tricked her out like a domestic Venus, not in sea foam but in the foam of my shaving cream (Noxema), and one boring Sunday afternoon I shaved her armpits and her pubis, keeping everything in a leftover marmalade jar until it either flowered or rotted horribly, whichever.

I finally laughed out loud at all that nonsense, remembering in the end (I believed at the time) the marvelous words of Ben Jonson’s lascivious millionaire Volpone, who speaks of desiring “women and men of every sex and age …”

Was that what was missing: sharing sex with others? Was that the pleasure Diana was talking about? What did she want? A ménage à trois? With whom? The stuntman I’d neutralized? But then why make him our third? She’d end up alone with him; I wasn’t going to forgo that turn of the screw — I’d leave her alone with the man I was instrumental in getting rid of, she’d be alone with him and without the ménage à trois … The partouze, the French orgy, didn’t seem terribly interesting to me or, for that matter, practicable with an old actor, a hairdresser who chewed gum, an austere Spanish lady’s maid, a short, obese, bearded director, and a cameraman who proclaimed his devotion to the cult of Onan as a saving and certain pleasure during long location shoots.

With animals?

Fetishism?

The mirror. Perhaps we hadn’t played with mirrors enough.

I couldn’t develop that fantasy because when I looked in the mirror on one of the closet doors I saw the eyes of the Metaphysical Cowboy Clint Eastwood, and right then and there I figured it all out. I knew what Diana wanted.

Naked in bed that night I could sense her frigidity and asked her if she wanted to make love.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you asked me if I like making love with you?” she said, curling up between the sheets.

“Okay. I’m asking you.”

“What?”

“Do you like making love with me?”

“Jerk,” she said with her most dazzling, most dimpled smile.

“I’d like to make love to you in the name of all the men who’ve made love with you,” I told her, thrusting my mouth next to her ear.

“Don’t say that.” She trembled slightly.

I grasped her around the waist. “I don’t know if I should say it.”

“We’re free. We don’t hold anything back, you and I.”

“There’s something I like about you. You always pretend we’re alone when we screw.”

“Aren’t we?”

“No. When we go to bed I see a horde of men pass over your skin, from your first lover up to the ones who aren’t here but who are still on the active list…”

I glanced at the photo of the star of A Fistful of Dollars and felt a chill.

“Go on, go on.”

I no longer knew what I was doing with my hands. I only knew my words.

“Can there be sex between only two people?”

“No, no.”

“Do you like to know that when I’m screwing you I think about all the men who’ve enjoyed you?”

“You have a nerve, telling me that.”

“Didn’t you know that, Diana? Don’t you like it, too?”

“Don’t say that to me, please.”

“Do I disillusion you when I say that?”

“No,” she almost shouted. “No, I like it…”

“To think that along with me all the men who’ve ever screwed you in your life are with me?”

“I like it, I like it …”

“I thought you weren’t going to like it.”

“Don’t say anything. Feel what I’m feeling…”

“Why don’t we dare to feel that pleasure if we like it so much?”

“Which pleasure? What are you saying?”

“This pleasure. The one I give to you thinking I’m someone else, the one you feel imagining that I, too, am someone else— admit it…”

“Yes, I like it, it drives me crazy, don’t stop …”

“I wish that all of them were here, seeing us screw, you and I …”

“So do I, don’t stop, go on …”

“Don’t come yet…”

“But you’re giving me lots of dicks today …”

“Wait, Diana, they’re all watching us, from that mirror, they’re watching us and they’re jealous …”

“Tell me you like it, too, that they’re looking at us …”

“I like that you pretend we do it alone. I like to know you like it …”

“I like it I like it I like it …”

When we finished, she turned toward me, half closed her gray (blue?) eyes that were like a forgotten mist, and said, “You have no imagination.”