Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XXII

Diana’s whims and nocturnal frights lulled me into inattention. If I heard her stirring at night, I ignored it. If she got out of bed, still half asleep I would imagine her opening curtains and closing doors. When she appeared in my dreams, she was wearing black, standing opposite a balcony while another woman, identically dressed, shot her.

But there was no music in this catalog of grotesque images. Everything occurred during long silences punctuated by the shots. One night Diana’s voice, far off and odd, was chanting something in a voice that wasn’t her own, as if another, far-off, maybe even dead voice had come back to possess hers, taking advantage of the night to recover a presence lost in oblivion, death, the usury of time.

The sensation was so strange, so alarming that I focused all my attention on it, clearing the cobwebs from my head to hear and see her clearly. That night the full moon was indeed pouring in through the open window like a huge white embrace: Diana was sitting next to it wearing her white baby-dolls, whispering a song I soon identified. It was one of Tina Turner’s early hits, a song called “Remake Me” or “Make Me Over.”

Diana had something in her hands; she was singing to an object. Of course — the telephone, I admitted with pain and instant jealousy, banishing the image of a woman perturbed by the full moon, a forlorn she-wolf howling to the goddess of the night: Artemis, her nemesis; Diana, her namesake.

If the flash of pain told me first that she was insane, the stab of jealousy quickly put me on notice: she was singing to someone … Should I break up this melodrama with a scene of my own, a jealous, furious scene? Caution overcame honor, and curiosity prevailed over both. Neither Hamlet nor Othello, that night I was just Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, interested more in knowing what was happening than in stopping or ignoring it. If I didn’t proceed carefully, I’d never know what was going on… I opened Pandora’s box.

I pretended to be asleep. I stopped listening to her. After a while, I felt her warm body next to mine, but it was strangely distant and she didn’t feel around with her feet for mine that night, as she did on others …

How long could I control my desire to know to whom Diana was talking at three in the morning, to whom she was singing Tina Turner songs over the telephone? Because, beginning that night, she talked every night, sitting in a pool of light shed by the waning moon, in a distant and at first incomprehensible voice (another voice, imitated or possessive; Diana, owner of a mimic’s voice, or the mimic’s voice possessing Diana, I don’t know which) that became louder as the moon died, more audible, passing from the lyrics of “Remake Me” to sentences not sung but spoken in that same deep, velvety voice, which wasn’t Diana’s. Her normal voice came from above, from her clear eyes, or maybe even from her lovely soft white breasts; this nocturnal voice came from her guts, her ovaries, maybe even from her solar plexus. She was saying things I couldn’t understand without knowing the question or answer to which they were directed on the other end of the line, wherever that might be …

I remembered the Capitano toothpaste sent from Italy and imagined long-distance communication with who knows what place on the globe. Impossible to guess; all I heard, with ever-increasing unease, was Diana’s different voice and the inexplicable words “Who takes care of me?”

I knew it sure wasn’t me. She wasn’t asking me to take care of her. But she was asking someone else, maybe more than one someone else. A lover, her parents, her husband, with whom she maintained a close and affectionate relationship (three in the morning in Mexico, midday in Paris)? But I knew that the woman talking wasn’t Diana. She said it clearly. One night she was saying, I’m Tina; another, I’m Aretha; another I’m Billie … I understood the allusions, in retrospect. Billie Holiday was the Our Lady of Sorrows of jazz singers, our voice of every grief, the voice which we dare not listen to in ourselves but which she takes on in our name, like a black, feminine Christ, a crucified Christ to bear all our sins:

Got the moon above me

But no one to love me

Lover man, where can you be?

Aretha Franklin was the joyful voice of the soul, the grand, collective ceremony of redemption, a renewed, purifying baptism that peels off our used-up, worn-out names and gives us new ones, clean and shining.

A woman’s only human, you’ve got to understand.

And Tina Turner was the woman abused, wounded, victimized by society, prejudice, machismo; the young woman who, no matter what, felt in her subjugation the promise of a free, clear maturity that would fill the world with joy because she’d known great sorrows.

You might as well face it:

You’re addicted to love.

Between the songs, I listened to phrases that had no meaning for me — they weren’t part of a well-known song, recorded and repeated by everyone — garbled chunks of a dialogue that for me was Diana’s monologue in the moonlight.

“How? I’m white.”

What was being said to her? What was she answering, what was being asked? What did Diana mean when she said into the phone, “Make me see myself as another woman”? These questions began to torture me because of their intrinsic mystery, because of the distance the mystery created between my lover and me, because my obsession with knowing what was going on, whom Diana was speaking with, interrupted my mornings, kept me from working, plunged me into a literary depression. Reluctantly I revised my pages and found them lifeless, mechanical, devoid of the passion and enigma of my possible daily life: Diana was my enigma, but I myself was becoming an enigma to myself. Both of us were only possibilities.

I would wait impatiently for night and the mystery.

I didn’t dare, from the bed, interrupt Diana’s secret dialogue. It would only cause a scene, perhaps a complete break. Once again, I confessed to myself that I was a coward when faced with the idea of losing my adored lover. I’d gain nothing by getting out of bed, going over to her, grabbing the telephone from her hand, and demanding, like some husband in a melodrama, Who are you talking to, who are you cheating on me with?

I humiliated myself by searching through Diana’s things to see if I could find a name written down by chance, a telephone number, a letter, any clue about her mysterious nocturnal interlocutor. I felt dirty, small, despicable, opening drawers, handbags, suitcases, zippers, slipping my fingers like dark worms through panties, stockings, brassieres, all the indescribable lingerie that once had dazzled me and that now I was handling as if it were old rags, Kleenex to be thrown out, soiled Kotex …

She had to give me the chance I needed. One night, she did. She invited me, I’m sure of it, to share her mystery.