Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XXVII

I’m sitting opposite my wife, Luisa Guzmán, in the spacious living room of the house we shared for ten years in the cobblestoned neighborhood of San Angel. Each of us is holding a glass of whiskey, each stares at the other and thinks something, the same thing or something different from what the other thinks. The glasses are heavy, rounded, their thick, rippling bottoms like the eye of an octopus at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea. She’s also hugging her stuffed panda.

I look at her and tell myself we’ll have to do something that bears no resemblance to the rest of our lives. That’s what imagination is all about. But looking at her sitting opposite me, imagining her as she imagines me, I prefer to be clear and concise. During those years, Luisa Guzmán did not manage my social life (she was reclusive) or my financial life (she was supremely indifferent to money). She encouraged my literary life; she was patient about my work as a writer and reader. But what she did manage was my sexual life. Which is to say, she put up no obstacles to it. She thought that by standing aside she was ensuring my next return to her. That’s how it had always been.

In any case, sitting there watching her watch me, with all the burden of memory on our shoulders, I realized that each time she had been one step ahead of me. She could not conceive a fidelity that could withstand the success of my first book. At the age of twenty-nine, I attained a celebrity I myself didn’t celebrate very much. If there’s one thing I’ve always known, it’s that literature is a long apprenticeship that is always open to imperfection when things go well, to perfection when things go badly, and to risk at all times — if we want to deserve what we write. I didn’t believe the praise heaped on me, because I knew I was far from achieving the goals I imagined; I didn’t believe the attacks either. I listened to the voices of my friends, and they encouraged me. I listened to my own voice, and all I heard was this: “Don’t accept success. Don’t repeat it superficially. Set yourself impossible challenges. It’s better to fail by taking the high road than to triumph on the low road. Avoid security. Take chances.”

I don’t know when exactly in our relationship Luisa felt I needed more, needed something more but needed her as well — something that would be the erotic equivalent of literary risk. Or ambition. We laughed a lot when, a week after we fell in love, a very famous Mexican writer visited and berated her for preferring me to him. “I’m handsomer, more famous, and a better writer than your boyfriend.”

Our astonishment was due, more than to anything else, to the great author’s continuing his friendship with her and with me, undeterred. His delirious plea for her hand (or a change of hands) had failed, but his amiable smile never did. Nor did, and this we knew from the start, his limitless ambition — so genial, so well founded, even though he took a dim view of it — to achieve power and glory through writing. Luisa showed me (or confirmed me in the certainty) that it’s better to be a human being than a glorious author. But at times being a person involves greater cruelty than the naĩve promise of literary fame.

Now, as we sat opposite each other, there was no need to tell her I couldn’t do without Diana Soren; hugging her stuffed panda, a glass of whiskey in her hand, she reproached me, without saying a word, for all the accumulated cruelty in our relationship and threw in my face the ease with which I used the mask of literary creation to disguise it. Her eyes told me: You’re ceasing to be a person. As long as you were, I respected your love affairs. But I’ve just now realized you don’t respect yourself. You don’t respect the women you sleep with. You use them as a literary pretext. I refuse to go on being one.

“It’s your fault. You should have drawn the line the first time I was with another woman.”

“Tender and evil. How do you expect …?”

“For years you’ve put up with my infidelities …”

“Excuse me. I can’t compete anymore with all these imaginative efforts and the fantasy of all the women in the world …”

“By maintaining our love, we ended up killing it — you’re right …”

She hurled the glass, heavy as an ashtray, at me, hitting my lower lip. I gave the melancholy panda a melancholy look, stood up, rubbing my painful lip, and left forever.