Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XIX

The Santiago authorities hosted a banquet in honor of the film crew. One of the patios of the colonial-era town hall was set up with tables and chairs and decorated with crepe and paper lanterns. The functionaries were distributed equitably: the governor with the director, the municipal president with the leading man and his girlfriend, the commander of the military zone, a general of strikingly Oriental appearance, with Diana and me.

They say the French general Maxime Weygand was the bastard son of Empress Carlota by a certain Colonel López, Maximilian’s aide-de-camp. López betrayed the Emperor twice: first with the empress, and then during the Republican siege of Querétaro, when he opened the way for Juárez’s troops to capture the Austrian Emperor. By then, Carlota had already gone back to Europe to beg help from Napoleon III, another traitor, and Pope Pius IX. She went mad in the Vatican, and was the first woman (officially) to spend the night in the pontifical bedrooms.

Did she go crazy or was that merely a pretext to cover up her pregnancy and delivery? She never again left the seclusion of her castle, but the royal government of Belgium supplied young cadet Weygand, born in 1867 in Brussels, with tuition at St. Cyr. He became chief of Foch’s general staff during World War I and supreme commander when World War II broke out. In France, the Manchu face — high cheekbones, Mayan nose, lips as thin as a knife blade and crowned by a sparse, very fine mustache, barely a shadow — must have caused some comment. Short, small-boned, with a rather stiff bearing, his black hair shaved at the temples: I’m describing General Weygand only to describe General Agustín Cedillo, commander of the Santiago military zone. I associate him with the empire imposed on Mexico by Napoleon III because, physical parallels aside, there survived on one of the balconies of the patio, surely a Republican oversight, the arms of the empire: the eagle and serpent but with a crown above and, at the foot of the cactus, the motto EQUITY IN JUSTICE.

Sitting opposite me and next to Diana, General Cedillo, curious, looked us over out of the corner of his eye, as if he kept a direct gaze in reserve for great occasions. I imagined that those could only be challenges and death. I had no doubt whatsoever: this man would look with perfect equanimity directly at a firing squad whether giving it orders to shoot or receiving its bullets. He would take care, on the other hand, not to look directly at anyone in daily life, because in our country, among men, a direct stare is a challenge and provokes one of two reactions. The coward lowers his eyes — lower your head and step aside, as the song says. The brave man endures the stare of the other to see who will lower his eyes first. The situation moves to another plane when one brave man pronounces the ritual words “What are you looking at me for, mister?” The violence increases if the “mister” is excluded: “What are you looking at me for?” And there’s no way out if a direct insult is substituted: “What are you looking at me for, stupid, asshole, son of a bitch?”

Familiar with the protocol of eyes in Mexico, I looked at General Cedillo out of the corner of my eye the same way he was looking at Diana and me. Glancing around the patio, I saw that the same look was being repeated at each table. Everyone except the innocent gringos avoided one another’s eyes. The governor peered surreptitiously at the commander and likewise at the governor; the mayor tried to avoid the eyes of both of them, and I saw in a corner of the patio a group of young people just standing there, among them the boy who’d approached me in the plaza to propose we talk, the boy with the Zapata mustache and languid eyes named Carlos Ortiz, my namesake.

The commander noticed my glance and asked me, without turning his head, “Do you know the students here?”

I told him I didn’t, only by accident, that one of them had read my books.

“There are no bookstores here.”

“How terrible. And how shameful.”

“That’s what I say. Books have to be brought in from Mexico City.”

“Ah, they’re exotic import products,” I said, flashing my friendliest smile but slipping into the humorous, mischievous vein that conversations with authority figures invariably provoke in me. “Subversive, perhaps.”

“No. Whatever we know here, we find out by reading the newspapers.”

“Then you must not know much — the local papers are very bad.”

“I mean the common folk.”

That old-fashioned expression made me laugh and forced me to think about the commander’s social origins. His appearance, I admit, was an enigma. Class differences in Mexico are so brutal that it’s easy to pigeonhole people: Indian, peasant, worker, lower middle class, etcetera. What’s interesting are people who can’t easily be categorized, people who not only rise socially or become refined but, in rising, bring with them another kind of refinement, secret, extremely ancient, inherited from who knows how many lost ancestors — princes perhaps or shamans, or warriors in one of the thousand archaic nations of old Mexico.

If that weren’t the case, where would such people get their reserves of patience, stoicism, dignity, and discretion, which contrast so strikingly with my country’s noisy, vain, ostentatious, and cruel plutocracies? In reality, Mexico’s two classes are composed, one, of people who allow themselves to be seduced by Western models that are alien, lacking as they do a culture of death and the sacred, and who become the vulgar, stupid middle class and, two, a group that preserves the Spanish and Indian heritage of aristocratic reserve. There’s nothing more pathetic in Mexico than the vulgar middle-class joker, situated between the Indian aristocracy and the Western bourgeoisie, who says hello by poking his finger in your belly button or runs on by without turning his face and shouts, “That guy with the little tie,” “That guy with the little hat,” “That guy with the little mustache …”

General Cedillo (so very similar to Maxime Weygand) seemed to come from these same depths as General Joaquín Amaro, who left the Yaqui mountains of Sonora, a red kerchief on his head and an earring hanging from one ear, to join the Northwest Division of Álvaro Obregón (a blond young man with blue eyes who, as a child, delivered milk to my maternal grandmother in Alamos) but who, thanks to his beautiful Creole wife, became a polo player and a most elegant martial figure and, by virtue of his own intelligence, the creator of the modern Mexican Army, which emanated from the revolution.

It was from that mold, it seemed to me, that General Cedillo came. He lacked the colorful touches of General Amaro, who had only one eye and spoke impeccable French. But in 1970, it wasn’t hard to imagine General Cedillo in the ranks of the revolution. He would have been a very young boy when he joined up, true, but he was also very old because he inherited centuries of refined peasant taciturnity. Diana stared at him, fascinated, admitting without saying so that she didn’t understand him. I, thinking I did understand him, kept to myself, ceding to the general a margin of impenetrable mystery but also feeling the writer’s inevitable urge: to mock authority.

“Did you have problems with the students in 1968?” I suddenly asked, trying to provoke him.

“The same as everywhere else. It was a movement of discontent that honored the kids who took part in it,” he answered, surprisingly.

I felt outflanked by the general and didn’t like it one bit.

“They were rebels,” I said, “just as you were when you were young, General.”

“They’ll give it up,” he responded, taking the lead I’d involuntarily given him. “He who isn’t a rebel as a boy becomes one as an old man. And an old rebel is ridiculous.”

He was about to use another, cruder term, but he glanced at Diana and lightly bowed his head, like a mandarin entering a pagoda.

“Was all that blood necessary?” I asked point-blank.

He looked over at the governor’s table with a spark of scorn in his eyes. “During the first demonstration, there were those who asked me to call out the troops and put it down. All I said was, Gentlemen, blood’s going to flow here, but not yet. Just wait a bit.”

“You have to choose the right moment for repression?”

“You have to know when what the people want is order and security, my friend. People get fed up with disorder. The party of stability is the majority party.”

That friendly allusion was in itself a challenge, its intent to put me in an inferior position vis-à-vis the man of power. And that power was the power of knowledge, of information. Inwardly, I laughed: first he talked about books and newspapers, only to let me know that true information, the kind that matters when you have to take political action, does not come from what Spaniards call the “black stuff,” printed words on paper.

A sumptuous regional dish was served then, interrupting the talk. It was pork rump with enmoladas, and I hoped to heaven I would not have to witness the stereotyped reaction on the Yankees’ faces — the shock, repugnance, terror, and incredulity. To eat or not to eat? That was the justified dilemma of the gringo in Mexico. I gave Diana a significant look, urging her to try the hot dish, begging her not to succumb to the stereotype. I’d already told her, I eat everything in your country or in my own, and I deal with getting sick there or here. You give a pathetic impression of helplessness when a dish of Mexican food is put in front of you. Why is it that we can have two cultures and you only one, which you comfortably expect to find wherever you go?

Diana tried the enmoladas, and next to her the governor laughed as if barking, as he watched the movie star taste the dish that embodied local pride.

“There are people who are novices in politics who get ahead of events and ruin everything,” said the general, less circumspectly but with growing scorn. He avoided looking at the governor, though he had to listen to the strange noises the man was making. The sounds could be explained either as culinary euphoria or because that moment the inevitable mariachi band entered, playing their inevitable anthem, the song of the Black Woman. “My little black-skinned sweety, eyes like fluttering paper,” intoned the jolly governor.

“But you could have avoided those errors by seizing power,” I said provocatively.

“Who do you mean?”

“You. The military.”

For the first time, General Cedillo opened his eyes and raised the folds on his forehead where his nonexistent eyebrows should have been.

“Not a chance. Don Benito Juárez would be spinning in his grave.”

I remembered the shepherd boy who’d been in the English film.

“Do you mean that the Mexican Army is not the Argentine Army, that you respect republican institutions come what may?”

“I mean that we are an army that emanated from the revolution, a people’s army …”

“That nevertheless fires on the people if necessary.”

“If it’s ordered by the constituted authority, civilians,” he said without so much as a blink, but I sensed that I’d wounded him, that I’d touched an open sore, that the memory of Tlatelolco was shameful to the army, which wanted to forget the episode and did not speak about it. But at the same time I was to understand what Cedillo was telling me: We only obeyed orders, our honor is intact.

“You shouldn’t have done the work of the police or the hawks,” I said, and immediately regretted it, not on my account but for my American friends, for Diana. I was breaking my own rule, the one I’d explained to the student Carlos Ortiz: I have no right to compromise them politically.

I was sorry for another reason. By comparing the army to cops and hired assassins, I had insulted it unnecessarily, I thought to myself, just because I was playing around, just because I, too, was a provocateur. But as always happens with me, the more I swore I wouldn’t get involved in politics, the more politics got involved with me.

“You were very critical of what happened in ’68, I know,” he said, wiping the pork-rump sauce off his lips.

“I didn’t say even half of what I wanted to,” I answered, now out of control, all but foaming at the mouth.

“Tell your girlfriend to be careful,” said the Mexican samurai, suddenly transformed into a genuine warlord, owner of the lives gathered that evening around his will, his whim, his mystery.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Tell your girlfriend to be careful? Is that what the general said? As if to remove any doubts, Cedillo then did what I feared he’d do: he looked at Diana. He stared directly at her, with no disguise, no reticence, a savage glint in his eyes, where I discerned, along with terror, lust, and death, an instinct tamed for centuries the more easily to leap on its prey, a prey already overwhelmed in that “right moment” the general had mentioned when we talked about 1968. He wanted her, he was threatening her, he hated me — he hated both of us, Diana and me. The commander’s eyes communicated to us in that moment an intense social hatred, an implacable class opposition, a resentment I felt in waves, and the intensity of that soldier’s stare (usually veiled) communicated it to the others at the table — the mayor, the governor, the local bigwigs, the bodyguards. Those brutes watched Cedillo like people receiving the Host at Communion who feel their bodies and souls full of the Lord. They stirred, moved around, regrouped, advanced slightly, raised their hands to the secret guns in their armpits — until the general’s eyelids lowered and the order to stand at ease was conveyed to them by those eyes so accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed without hesitation, from afar, blindly, if it came to that.

It was like being caught in a sudden undertow; the tide went out, the instant of tension went no further, the bodyguards went back to smoking and standing around in Masonic circles, the governor, the idiot, played the fool, the mayor ordered the coffee served. But within me the alarm the general aroused continued. His threat hadn’t dissipated; I knew it would be with me, much to my regret, for the rest of my time in Santiago, screwing up my love, my work, my tranquillity …

“Don’t get involved in anything in Mexico,” I told Diana after I had used her as an excuse to say good-bye. She had a 5:00 a.m. call, so we rose and slowly left the patio. “You get involved, and you’ll never get out of it.”

She gave me a determined look, as if I’d insulted her by recommending caution.

I was pleased to see the group of students in a corner of the patio and to realize I could easily tell them apart from the bodyguards. There was no way to confuse the two. Carlos Ortiz was very different from the general and his bodyguards. Knowing the students were different and new saved the evening for me — perhaps they themselves were saved … Even so, my anxiety about Diana because of what the general said prevailed over any desire for satisfaction. What did he mean? How could a Hollywood actress bother, interfere with, provoke a general in the Mexican Army?

“Did you sense how heavy the atmosphere was?” I said to Diana.

“Yes. But I didn’t understand the reason for it. Did you?”

“No. Me neither.”

“We made them jealous because we love each other.” Then the woman laughed a beautiful laugh.

“That’s it. Yes. No doubt about it.”

The words of General Agustín Cedillo reverberated in my head. “Tell your girlfriend to be careful. Whenever you like, come by at two and have lunch with me at the club. Right here in Central Square.”