Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

XXIX

The expression on Azucena’s face told me something was up. She never showed anything, and I knew nothing of her emotions. Sometimes we chatted, very cordially, as I’ve said. We were linked by language — lines of poetry we all learned in Spanish-language schools: “Yesterday’s gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived.”

I respected her, as I’ve also said, for her dignity, her pride in doing well what it had fallen to her to do well in this world. In the little world of Hollywood transplanted to Santiago, she was the only one, in the end, who was neither sorry for herself nor devoured by a desire to rise in the world. She was superior to her mistress. She didn’t want to be someone else. She was someone else. She was herself.

Now she received me in a dimly lit, strangely silent house. She had an unaccustomed grimace on her face, and it took me a while to find in it any sympathy, any affection, any solidarity with the other Hispanic person present. For a moment I felt perfectly melodramatic, like the poet Rodolfo asking his Bohemian companions why they’re walking around so silent, why they’re weeping. Mimí is dead. Azucena was holding back, unintentionally of course, something like a death announcement.

“Diana?” I asked, as I might have asked out loud, except that now I said her name almost in a whisper, as if I were afraid of interrupting a novena to the Virgin.

“Wait here. She’s on her way,” said Azucena, inviting me to stay in the living room.

Night was falling. Lew Cooper wasn’t there as he usually was, standing at the liquor cabinet mixing a cocktail justified by the hard work involved in exterior shots. The bedroom door was closed. But my clothes were there and, in the bathroom, my Italian toothpaste. Impatiently, angry, I walked to the corner where my typewriter, my papers, and my books were laid out. Someone had imposed order on everything. Everything was arranged in perfectly symmetrical piles.

I went back to find Azucena, to protest this violation of my creativity. Instead, I found Diana, divided by the light of the gallery at nightfall, half light, half shadow, perfectly cut in two, like one of Ingres’s female portraits, my beloved Diana Soren. She walked toward me, separated from herself by the light, yielding not an inch of her luminous person to her dark person, or vice versa. The contrast was such that even her short blond hair seemed white on the side of the gallery window and black on the wall side. The charm was broken by her outfit. In a pink quilted robe buttoned to her throat, totally domestic, and a pair of fluffy slippers, Diana Soren looked like an upside-down mushroom, a walking thumbtack …

It wasn’t that — not the magic of her appearing between light and shadow, not how absurd I instinctively judged her appearance to be — which kept me from walking over to her, embracing her, and kissing her as I’d always done. She never reached me. She stopped and sat down in a rattan chair, the most imperial object in this house devoid of pretensions, and she stared at me intently. I sat down in the thatch-backed chair opposite my desk and crossed my arms over my chest. Perhaps Diana had read my mind. Perhaps she imagined, as I did, how our love would end and what would follow it. It occurred to me to tell her, before saying anything else, how useless my trip to Mexico City had been. I found out nothing about the FBI threat General Cedillo had hinted at. I was going to tell her, but she spoke first, quickly, brutally.

“Forgive me. I have another lover.”

I controlled my confusion, my rage, my curiosity …

“In the U.S.?” I asked without daring to mention my telephone indiscretions.

“Another man is living here.”

“Who?” I asked, not daring now to think about The Return of Clint Eastwood and telling myself that at least they wouldn’t allow a Black Panther to cross the border. The stuntman? I laughed at myself for even thinking it. I laughed even more at the ludicrous possibility of old Lew Cooper’s sleeping in my bed, next to Diana.

“Carlos Ortiz.”

“Carlos Ortiz?”

“The student. You saw him here in Santiago. He says that he knows you and admires you and that he’s spoken with you.”

“Suppose he hated me and refused to speak with me.” I tried to smile.

“Excuse me?”

“This isn’t about excuses. It’s about talking things over.”

“I don’t like explaining myself.”

I stood up, enraged. “I just mean talking.”

“We can talk if you like.”

“Why, Diana? I thought we were very happy.”

“We also knew it would end.”

“But not like this, suddenly, prematurely, before the filming was over, and with a boy—”

“Younger than I am?”

“No, that doesn’t matter.”

“Well, what does? The fact that I hurt you, humiliated you — do you think I like doing that?”

“Not having carried our love to its end, not having used it up completely, that—”

“I don’t think there’s anything left.”

“Diana, I offered you everything I could — to go on being together if that’s what you wanted, to go together to some university,” I said stupidly, confused by a sudden vague feeling of sentimental blindness.

She was right to answer me like this, brutally, without sentiment. “Don’t be naïve. Do you really think I’d waste my life in some shitty hick town covered with ivy but made of nothing? You must be crazy.”

“Why crazy? You’ve been running away from another hick town, and you never want to give yourself the opportunity, the chance to go home and then leave again, be renewed.”

“Darling, you’re delirious. I felt suffocated in that town. I would have left there no matter what.”

Gently I asked her to explain. I think she sensed how I felt, because she added something I liked. She said I shouldn’t misunderstand her, that in Jeffersontown she felt suffocated not only by its smallness but by the immensity of the nature surrounding it. It was a world she couldn’t grasp.

And in the world you did choose, I asked her, do you feel protected? Will you ever know who you are, Diana? You have to be protected by other people, by the sect, by the beautiful people, the jet set, the Black Panthers, the revolutionaries — anyone, as long as there’s noise, weeping, joy, commotion, belonging. That’s what you want, that’s what I don’t give you, because I’m stuck in a corner writing for hours at a time?

I was making a fool of myself. I’d lost control. I was falling into everything I hated. I deserved Diana’s response.

“I know who I am.”

“No, you don’t!” I shouted. “That’s your problem. I heard you talking with that black man on the telephone. You want to be someone else, you want to absorb the suffering of others so you can be another person. You think no one suffers more than a black person. When are you going to learn, you fool, that suffering is universal, even white?”

“Carlos is teaching me all about it.”

“Carlos?” I said it like an echo not only of my own voice but of my own soul, incapable of telling Diana that I’d just seen him, injured, in a demonstration in Santiago.

“It’s in your books,” Diana said coldly.

“Did he tell you that?”

“No, I read them. I thought you were a real revolutionary. Someone who puts his actions where he puts his words. It’s not true. You write, but you do nothing. You’re like an American liberal.”

“You’re crazy. You don’t understand anything. Creation is an action, the only action. You don’t have to die in order to imagine death. You don’t have to be imprisoned in order to describe what a prison’s like. And if you get shot or murdered, you’re useless. You don’t write any more books.”

“Che went out to be killed.”

“He was a martyr, a hero. A writer is something much more modest, Diana.” I kept on talking to her, exasperated but now, possibly, in control of my arguments.

“Carlos would climb a mountain to fight. You wouldn’t.”

“So what’s that got to do with you? You’re going to follow him? Going to be the warrior’s woman?”

“No. His base is here. He fights here. He’d never follow me.”

“That makes things work out fine for you, right? Knowing that poor kid won’t follow you. Unless he gives up the guerrilla business and becomes a gigolo. Poor Diana. You want to be someone else? Do you want to be the midwife of universal revolution? Do you want the role of Joan of Arc married to Malcolm X? Let me tell you something. Try to be a good actress. That’s your problem, sweetheart. You’re a mediocre, bland actress, and you want to compensate for your mediocrity with all the furies of your real-life person. Why don’t you really work at the roles you get in movies? Why do you reject them and take on characters you’ve only heard talked about?”

“You don’t understand a thing. I’ve already had you.”

“One month three weeks and four days.”

“No, I know you through and through. I know who you are. I should have known from the first instant, but I let myself be dragged along by the fantasy that you were different — action and thought, like Malraux …”

“For God’s sake, spare me these revolting comparisons …”

“Naïve. All you can offer me is decency. Naïve. Decent. And cultured!”

“All defects of the worst kind …”

“No, I admire your culture. Really. A solid base, no doubt about it. Very solid. Classic, man, classic.”

“Thank you.”

“On the other hand, the boy …” She spoke with a ferocity I’d never seen in her, a hallucinatory savagery, as if finally she was showing me the dark side of the moon. “Everything about him is wrong. He smells bad, he’s got rotten teeth, he needs to see a dentist, his manners are awful, he’s got no refinement at all, he’s rough, I’m afraid he’s going to beat me up — and because of all that I like him, because of all that I find him irresistible. Now I need a man I don’t like, a man who’ll bring me back to the gutter, the sewer, who’ll make me feel I’m nobody, who’ll make me fight again, work my way up, feel I don’t have anything, that I have to earn everything, who’ll make my adrenaline flow …”

I ran to embrace her. I couldn’t hold back anymore. She was crying and she clung tightly to me, but she didn’t stop talking between sobs. “You’re crazy. I’m not looking for a black or a guerrilla, I’m looking for someone who’s not like you. I hate people like you, decent and cultured. I don’t want a famous author, decent, refined, Western no matter how Mexican he thinks he is, European like my husband. You’re my husband all over again, a repetition of Ivan Gravet, the same thing all over again. It bores me, it bores me, it bores me. At least my husband fought in a war, ran away from Russia, persecuted for being a Jew, for being a boy, for being poor. You, what have you ever run away from? What’s ever threatened you? Your table’s always been set, and you’ve always been chasing after me, trying to catch me, to catch my imagination … You’re my husband all over again, except that Ivan Gravet is more famous, more European, more cultured, more refined, and a better writer than you!”

She stopped for air, swallowing her tears. “I can’t stand men like you.”

She twisted out of my arms. She turned her back to me and walked to the liquor cabinet. I followed. She mixed a drink with trembling hands. She spoke to me with her back turned.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Have a drink, it’ll make you feel better. Don’t worry,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. A mistake.

“No. Don’t touch me.”

“I’m going to miss you. I’m going to cry over you.”

“I won’t cry over you.” She gave me a final look, the synthesis of all her looks — happy eyes, tired eyes, bedazzled eyes, lonely eyes, fugitive eyes, orphan eyes, remembering eyes, altruistic eyes, convent eyes, whorehouse eyes, fortunate eyes, unfortunate eyes, dead eyes.

She blinked several times in a strange, dreamlike, almost insane way, and said this: “Don’t cry over me. Ten years from now your gamine will be an old lady over forty. What are you going to do with a lark with a fat ass and short legs? Thank God you’re getting out in time. Count your blessings and cut your losses. Good-bye. Désolé.”

“Désolé.”

Azucena helped me pack my things. She took my clothes out of the bedroom. I asked her with a look if the student was there. We understood each other without having to speak. She shook her head. She didn’t have to help me — she did it out of pure goodwill, so I wouldn’t feel alone, cuckolded, thrown out, or, in the last instance, badly thought of by her. She also knew I didn’t need her help; I made her understand how thankful I was for it. We exchanged few words while we packed my books, papers, and pens into my two briefcases. Then I carefully covered my typewriter.

“She was a beginner, too. She likes to help people just starting out.”

I laughed. “The midwife of the revolution, that’s what I told her.”

“She’s a very unhappy person. Seriously. She feels persecuted.”

“I think she’s right. Sometimes I thought it was nothing but paranoia. I’m beginning to think she’s right. The boy’s only going to complicate her life.”

“Diana likes risks. You didn’t give her that.”

“So she told me. Tell her to watch out. I couldn’t do anything for her in Mexico City. I hope she gets a lot out of her new love.”

Azucena sighed. “A beautiful woman doesn’t look for beauty in her partner.”

It seemed a cruel remark coming from her. I imagined the roles reversed. Azucena and a handsome man. The equation was unfair. Once again, the man was the winner. Never the woman.

In the hall, I ran into Lew Cooper. He didn’t say anything to me. He just grunted.

Azucena ran out into the street after me and handed me something.

“You forgot this.”

It was a marmalade jar full of hairs.