Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XVI

Reasonably or not, I’ve lived to write. Literature, almost since I was a child, has been the filter of experience for me, from fear of being punished by my father to my most recent night of love. Sex, politics, soul — it all passes through my literary experience. The expectations of the book refine and strengthen the facts of lived life. Perhaps nothing of this is true, or perhaps in reality it’s the other way around: it’s literary imagination that determines, provokes the “real” situations in my life.

But if that’s the way it is, I’m not aware of it. Yes, I would like to be aware that for me reality is not a simple fact or that it’s defined by only one of its dimensions. There are people for whom reality is only the objective, concrete world — the chair is the chair, the mountain has always been there, the cloud passes over but obeys the laws of physics — all that is real. For other people, the only reality is internal, subjective reality. The mind is a vast unfurnished room that slowly but surely fills us up as we live with the furniture of perceptions. The objective world exists, but it has no meaning unless it passes through the sieve of my mind. Subjectivity gives reality to a world of mute, inanimate objects.

But there is a third dimension, which is where my individuality comes into contact with others, with my society, my culture. That is, something exists that is neither paradox nor impossibility, something called collective individuality. Within it, I feel myself to be most complete, in greatest consonance with the world. It’s in that shared individuality where I find family, women and sex, friends … So reality for me is a three-pointed star: matter, psyche, and culture. Material reality, subjective reality, and the reality of the contact between my ego and the world. I don’t like sacrificing any of them. Only when the three are present can I say I’m happy.

Our evening parlor games continued and one of them was Scrabble. Now, the alphabetic combinations change according to which language you play in: Spanish abounds in vowels, while English is rich in consonants. The English w, the sh, the double tt, mm, or ss make for inconceivable conjunctions in Spanish. On the other hand, we do have that clitoris of language, the ñ, which drives foreigners insane because they think of it as a Hispanic, medieval extravagance comparable to the Holy Inquisition, when it’s actually a futurist letter that embraces and suppresses the laborious gn of French, the nh of Portuguese, and the unpronounceable English ny.

The three of us — Diana, Lew, and I — played like a bored, well-established family, using an English alphabet. While I know English well, it isn’t mine nor I its. I’ve never dreamed in English. I speak it, but I’m mentally translating very fast from Spanish. It’s easy to see because my English abounds in Spanish cognates, in locutions derived from Latin or Arabic rather than Saxon or German. My error that night came when I had before my eyes the word wheel, perfectly formed, and with six spaces after it that I could fill in to pick up some great points. All that I could think of was wheelbarrow, because sometimes I’d hum a pretty Irish song about “Sweet Molly Malone,” who “wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets long and narrow,” but though barrow was six letters, I didn’t have the right ones. I had to pass, and Lew filled the space I coveted with his six letters, wright—the old Saxon word wheelwright. I said I didn’t know that word. Diana gave me a mocking look. Then she brusquely turned my letters around and showed that I could have filled at least five of the spaces with chair and gotten wheelchair.

“So you think you’re going to teach in a university in the U.S.?” she asked, her tone unbearably sarcastic. “Be careful. The students might end up teaching you.”

“Do they know everything, or do they only think they know everything?”

“They know more than you, you can be sure of that,” said Diana. Lew lowered his eyes and asked if we could go on playing.

But it was Lew Cooper who suggested another game for our nights of Durango tedium. Let’s imagine, he said, that we’re Rip Van Winkle and we’ve been asleep for twenty years. When we wake up, what kind of country will we find?

“Mexico or the United States?” I asked, to make it clear there was more than one country in the world.

They stared at me as if I were a complete idiot.

Cooper immediately launched into the inevitable theme of the loss of innocence, which so obsesses the gringos. I always wondered, When were they innocent: when they were killing Indians, when they took up manifest destiny and unleashed their continental ambitions from coast to coast, when? In Mexico, we cherish the memory of the cadets who threw themselves off the walls of Chapultepec Castle rather than surrender to the invading forces of General Winfield Scott. Were they just perverse adolescents who refused to hand their banners over to invading innocence? When was the United States ever innocent? When it exploited enslaved black labor, when its citizens massacred one another during the Civil War, when it exploited the labor of children and immigrants and amassed colossal fortunes acquired, no doubt, in an innocent way? When it trampled defenseless nations like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala? When it dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? When McCarthy and his committees destroyed lives and careers through mere insinuation, suspicion, and paranoia? When it defoliated the jungles of Indochina with poison?

I laughed to myself, holding back my possible answer to the question of the Rip Van Winkle game. Yes, perhaps the U.S. was only really innocent in Vietnam, for the first and last time, thinking it could, as General Curtis LeMay, head of the U.S. Air Force, said, “bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.” How shocking it must have been for the country that had never lost a war to be losing one to a poor Asiatic, yellow people, a people ethnically inferior in the racist mind that, flagrant or suppressed, ashamed or defiant, every gringo has nailed to his forehead like a cross.

The two Yankees went on talking, and perhaps because both were actors, I imagined that the famous innocence was only an image of self-consolation especially promoted by movies. In literature, from the beginning, from Hawthorne’s tortured Puritanism, Poe’s nocturnal nightmares, and James’s daytime ones, there has been no innocence, just fear of the dark power each human being carries within himself. The enemy self, not a whale, is the protagonist of Moby-Dick, for instance. That’s almost a definition of good literature, the epic of the enemy self …

I don’t know if Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are true innocents or if it’s just a fine bucolic desire for contact with family (Tom) or the river (Huck) that distracts them momentarily from the obligation to make money, subjugate inferiors, and practice arrogance as a divine right. In any case, Mark Twain wasn’t innocent; he was ironic, and irony is negative, according to its modern inventor, Kierkegaard, “an abnormal development which … like the liver in Strasbourg geese finally kills the individual.” But at the same time it is a way of reaching the truth because it limits, defines, makes finite, abrogates, and castigates whatever we think true.

In American movies, the myth of innocence is created with no irony whatsoever. My childhood eyes were filled with figures from the countryside, from small towns, who come to big cities and are exposed to the worst dangers. They fight against sex (Lillian Gish), locomotives (Buster Keaton), and skyscrapers (Harold Lloyd). How I enjoyed, when I was a kid, the sentimentally innocent movies of Frank Capra, where the valiant small-town Quixote, Mr. Deeds or Mr. Smith, defeats with his innocence the powers of corruption and falsehood.

It was a beautiful myth, consistent with the moral and humanitarian policies of Franklin Roosevelt. Since the New Deal was followed by the world war and the struggle against Fascism, which not only wasn’t innocent but was diabolical, the Yankees (and we along with them) completely believed the myth of innocence. Thanks to their virtue, they saved the world twice, defeated the forces of evil, identified and annihilated the perfect villains, the Kaiser and Hitler. How many times have I heard Yankees of all classes say, “Twice we saved Europe during this century. They should be more grateful.”

For Yankees, as in Henry James’s “international” novels, Europe is corrupt, the United States innocent. I don’t think there’s any other country, especially a country so powerful, that feels innocent or brags about it. The hypocritical English, the cynical French, the haughty Germans (the blameworthy, self-flagellating Germans, so lacking in irony), the violent (or weepy) Russians — none of them thinks his nation has been innocent. As a result, the United States declares that its foreign policy is completely disinterested, almost an act of philanthropy. Since this is not and never has been true for any great power, including the United States, no one believes it, but U.S. self-deception drags everyone into confusion. Everyone knows what kind of interests are in play but no one’s supposed to admit it. What is pursued, disinterestedly, is liberty, democracy, saving the others from themselves.

I imagined Diana as a girl listening to Lutheran sermons in an Iowa church. What could have gone through that childish head when a pastor said that men are all guilty, unacceptable, condemned, yet that Christ accepts them despite their unacceptability, because the death of Christ gives more than sufficient expiation for all our sins? Does a doctrine of that caliber sentence us to live so as to justify Christ’s faith in us? Or does it condemn us to total irresponsibility, since our sins have all been redeemed on Golgotha?

The words of the old actor had drifted far from my own musings. His Rip Van Winkle woke up and didn’t recognize the nation founded by Washington and Jefferson. Lew Cooper saw what he himself lived through with his eyes wide open. He saw the terrible puritanical need to have a visible, indubitable enemy who could be named. The U.S. sickness was a Manichaean obsession that can only conceive of the world as divided into good and evil, with no redemption possible. Cooper said that no Yankee can live in peace unless he knows whom he’s fighting against. He disguises that by saying he’s got to figure out who the bad guys are so he can defend the good guys. But when Rip Van Winkle wakes up, he discovers that, in defending themselves, the good guys have taken on the traits of the bad guys. McCarthy didn’t hunt down the Communists he saw hiding under the bed. He hunted down and humiliated and ruined Democrats, with the same methods that Vyshinsky used in the Soviet Union to fight — of course — Communists. The victims of McCarthyism, of the House Un-American Activities Committee, of the Dies Committee, of all those new-model tribunals of the Inquisition, were Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Cooper said, deeply melancholic. We’re condemning ourselves. Rip Van Winkle would rather return to his hollow tree and sleep twenty more years. He knows that when he wakes up he’ll find exactly the same thing.

“A country that despite everything hasn’t lived up to its own ideals?” I asked my fellow players.

“Right,” said Cooper. “No nation has ever lived up to its ideals. But the others are more cynical. We’re idealists, didn’t you know that? We’re always on the side of good. Wherever we are, that’s where good is. When we don’t believe that, we go crazy.”

“We should never leave home,” Diana said very simply. I remember her at that moment, sitting on the rug with her legs crossed and her hands folded on her lap. “The title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel is You Can’t Go Home Again … that’s the truest title in all of American literature … You walk out of your house, and you can never go back, no matter how much you want to …” she added with a tired look.

I asked her if that was her case. She shook her head.

She said that when she came back after living in France, she found a whole new generation in California, in the Midwest, and on the East Coast who wanted to give the best they had but who weren’t allowed to. There was a huge difference between the ideals of the young people of the 1960s and the corruption, the immense mendacity of the government, the violence pouring out of every orifice of society … That night, Diana said what was on everyone’s mind, but she told it from her own point of view, that of a girl from the Midwest who had gone off to Paris to sleep and then, like Rip Van Winkle, had returned to the whirlwind — the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., the deaths of tens of thousands of boys who’d gone from small towns to the Asian jungles, the dead of Vietnam, the drugged soldiers, the useless dead, all for nothing — well, at least it wasn’t white boys who were out in front but blacks and chicanos, cannon fodder — and at home a chorus of liars was saying we’re containing China, saving Vietnamese democracy, keeping the dominoes from falling …

Johnson, Nixon, the great voices of hypocrisy, ignorance, stupidity — how could they not cause an entire generation to lose its illusions; how could they not end up shooting students at Kent State, beating up demonstrators in Chicago, jailing Black Panthers? And for what? Diana’s voice rose, and she seemed to wake from an extremely long sleep behind a silver screen that was her own way of looking at the world. Not to make fortunes, not for the sake of vulgar corruption, however rich they made a hundred contractors or a dozen large defense companies; that was okay, that I can even understand, but what drives me crazy is the way those creeps fall in love with their power, believe in their power as something that not only will last but is important. My God, the idiots think their power is important — they don’t know that the only important thing is the life of the boy they sent off to die uselessly in an Asian jungle, a confused boy who, to justify his presence there, burned a village and killed all its inhabitants because if he didn’t why was he there, what was the use of that automatic rifle whose manufacturing provided livings for thousands of workers and their families, a single automatic rifle that gave power to Lyndon Johnson, to Richard Nixon, to the Goddess Lie, to the Whore Power?

Diana Soren was losing it. Her voice was falling into a strange, empty abyss; she would go back to sleep for twenty more years as long as she didn’t have to know what was going on in that home to which she could never return … America was what was going on outside her sleep.

She pushed the button on her tape deck and out came the voice of José Feliciano singing “Come On, Baby, Light My Fire.” Cooper stood up, indignant, and turned it off. He parodied Feliciano’s voice. That’s what we’ve come to. That was today’s music, savage music for idiots — come on, baby, light my fire. He mimicked it hideously and excused himself to go to bed.