Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XXV

I had a bad morning, but at lunchtime I decided to visit the club and see if General Agustín Cedillo was there, as he was every day. In the old-fashioned way, he was drinking a cognac before lunch and invited me to sit with him. I had a beer instead of a cognac because no beer in the world is better than ours. It made me feel rather chauvinist, but I was thankful for that feeling. I remembered what Diana had told me James Baldwin said — that a black and a white, because they’re both Americans, know more about themselves and one another than any European knows about either of them. The same thing is true of Mexicans.

The other night I had felt class hatred flare up between the general and me. This afternoon the beer raised my spirits and made me recognize myself in him. In one voice we both ordered “two Tehuacans,” knowing well that in no other part of the world would anyone understand what that mineral water was. Then he invited me to join him. The ritual of dining — from ordering quesadillas with huitlacoche (only we Mexicans understand and enjoy eating the black cancer of corn) to being handed a basket of hot tortillas and delicately picking one out, spreading guacamole on it, adding a dash of chile, and rolling it all up; from the diminutive and possessive references to all edibles (your little beans, your little chiles, your little tortillas) to the guarded, familiar, tender allusions to health, weather, age (he’s not well, the rain’s letting up, he’s getting so elderly) — created a favorable climate for bringing up the theme that concerned me. It also allowed me to free myself, in an involvement the general knew nothing of, from the extreme alienation, still buzzing in my ears, of that pair Diana Soren and her Panther. They were other. But everything at the table was Mexican, right down to my possessive when I addressed General Cedillo: My general, my general, dear, oh dear. That was it: he was mine.

“You said the other night that my girlfriend should be careful. Why?”

“Look, my friend, I’m not a professional suspicion monger. I don’t go around seeing enemies behind every tree. But the fact is, here and there agitators do exist. You understand me. We wouldn’t want Miss Soren to find herself compromised for an indiscretion.”

“Do you mean Black Panthers there and the League guerrillas here?”

“Not exactly. I mean FBI everywhere, that’s what I mean. Watch out.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“You’re a friend of the gentleman who runs the Department of Internal Affairs.”

“You mean Mario Moya Palencia. We went to school together. He’s an old, close friend.”

“Go visit him in Mexico City. Be careful. Watch out for your girlfriend. It’s not worth the trouble.”

When Diana came back that night, I told her I’d be leaving for Mexico City the next day. I had to attend to some unfinished business. She knew I’d left everything hanging in midair to follow her to Santiago. In a few days, a week at the most, I’d be back. She looked at me with a melancholy expression, trying to guess the truth, imagining that perhaps I’d guessed the truth about her but laying open a range of possibilities. How much did I know? Was this the end? Was I leaving for good? Was this the end of our relationship? Was I being drawn back by my wife, my daughter, my business in the capital?

“I’m leaving everything here — my books, my papers, my typewriter …”

“Take the toothpaste with you.”

Nothing lessened the sadness in her eyes.

“Just one tube. Everything else stays in the pawnshop.”

“In the pawnshop? I like that. Maybe all of us are only in the pawnshop here.”

“Don’t start imagining God as some Jewish pawnbroker.”

“No. But I do believe in God. So much, you know, that I can’t imagine He put us on earth just to be no one.”

“I love you, Diana.” I kissed her.