Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

VI

That long, marvelous first day of January 1970 in the Hilton suite, we didn’t bother to get dressed, just wrapped ourselves in towels whenever the room-service people came. We discovered a thousand details that linked us: we were both born in November — Scorpios can sense each other. At first, I called her a gamine, but she didn’t like it, so I stopped. But we both liked another French word, désolé, desolate, I’m so sorry, and we said it all the time, désolé about this, désolé about that, especially when we asked each other for physical love: we pronounced ourselves désolés, I’m so sorry, but I would like to kiss you, I’m sorrier, but you could come closer … desolate, the two of us.

Close to her. Whenever I was, everything else faded into the background, vanished like the night itself as the first light of the new year broke over the intersection of Reforma and Insurgentes. My lovely, sinister city, center of all beauty and all horror, México, D.F. All too frequently, the only thing that would bring people together in my city was solitude, a craving for company, a group, the need to belong. Even sex in Mexico City, once you’re above a certain income bracket (everything here is determined by brutal class differences), is like going down a slide, riding a toboggan of pleasures — uncertain, partial, immediate — that are never postponed and end only with death. Then, when we die, we realize we were always dead.

Not Diana. She infuriated Beverly Hills gossips because they never knew whom she was sleeping with — in a city where every woman announced such things publicly. What she was doing now, it was clear to me, was an act of total commitment, one she desired, not an accident but at the same time, I sensed without knowing why, dangerous. I told myself, as afternoon came on and I remembered the pleasure of making love with Diana, that we had no illusions about each other, neither of us. Our relationship was a passing one. She was here to make a film, I was the lucky boy at a New Year’s Eve party. Transitory but not gratuitous, not a pis aller, not a better-than-nothing or, as we say expressively in Mexico, a peoresnada—“worse would be nothing.” Worse would be nothing, no one, Mr. Nothing, wiseguy. Mexicans and Spaniards delight in denying or diminishing other people’s existence. Gringos, Anglo-Saxons in general, are better than we are, at least in this respect. They have more concern for their fellowman, more than we do. Maybe that’s why they’re better philanthropists. Our cruel aristocratic spirit, the hidalgo dressed in black, hand on chest, is more aesthetic but more sterile.

I was intrigued with the idea of discovering precisely what Diana’s internal quality of cruelty, of destruction was, even if — as we all knew — she fervently supported, and was committed to, liberal, noble, sympathetic causes. Her name was on every petition against racism, in favor of civil rights, against the OAS and the fascist generals in Algeria, in favor of animal rights … She even had a sweatshirt imprinted with the image of the supreme 1960s icon, Che Guevara, transformed after his brutal death in 1967 into Chic Guevara, savior of all the good consciences of so-called radical chic in Europe and North America, that capacity of the West to find revolutionary paradises in the Third World and, in their lustrous waters, wash away its petit-bourgeois egoism … Was there any doubt about it?

Ernesto Guevara, dead, laid out like Mantegna’s Christ, was our era’s most beautiful cadaver. Che Guevara was the Saint Thomas More of the Second (or Millionth) European Discovery of the New World. Ever since the sixteenth century, we’ve been the utopia where Europe can cleanse itself of its sins of blood, avarice, and death. And Hollywood has been the U.S. Sodom that waves revolutionary flags to disguise its vices, its hypocrisy, its love of money pure and simple. Was Diana different, or was she just one more in that legion of Californian utopians, now purified, thanks to her husband, by French revolutionary sentimentalism?

I never stopped having these thoughts. But Diana’s charm, her seduction, her infinite sexual capacity intoxicated me, intrigued me, obliterated my better judgment. After all, I said to myself, what could I criticize in her that I couldn’t just as well criticize in myself? Hypocrite actress, my double, my sister. Diana Soren.

I had a peach taste in my mouth. Let me admit it: before that night, I knew nothing about fruit-flavored vaginal creams. During the nights that followed I would discover strawberry, pineapple, orange flavors, reminding me of the ice creams I loved to lick, when I was a boy, in a marvelous icecream parlor, the Salamanca, where unique Mexican fruits turned into subtle, vaporous snows, melted at the peak of their perfection when they touched our tongues and palates, yielding their essence in the instant of their evaporation. I would imagine Diana with the tastes of my childhood in her vagina — mamey, guava, sapodilla, custard apple, mango … She made marvelous use of this bizarre commercial product, fruit-flavored vaginal cream, which my imagination could take hold of, something it could never do with the lingerie she kept in the hotel-room dresser. I won’t try to describe that. It was indescribable. A provocation, a gift, a madness. The quality of the lace and the silk, the way it intertwined, opened and closed, revealed and concealed, imitated and transformed, appeared and disappeared, contrasted wonderfully with that androgynous warrior-maiden simplicity I’ve already noted: Diana the fighting saint, Diana the Parisian gamine. I censored myself. She hated that word. Désolé.

What a glance, only a glance (because something kept me from touching the contents of her dresser, delighting in those textures) made me do was to see, touch, and delight in the flesh that could be hidden within such delirious objects. How incredible: a girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and underneath that ordinary costume the intimacies of a goddess. Which goddess?

She herself gave me a clue the second night of our love. During the first, she had secretly guided me toward her lingerie by sitting on my lap and changing her voice, whispering into my ear in a little girl’s voice, lift up my little skirt, you will lift up my little skirt, won’t you? aren’t you going to touch my panties? touch my panties, honey, pretty please with sugar on it, lift up my little skirt and take off my panties, don’t be afraid, I’m only ten years old but I won’t tell anyone, tell me what you’re touching, darling, tell me what you feel when you lift up my little skirt and touch my little pussy and then you take off my panties.

The second night, naked, stretched out on the bed, she evoked other spaces, other lights. She was in the auditorium of her high school in Iowa. It was nightfall. Outside, it had snowed. All day, they’d been rehearsing carols for the Christmas Eve party. She and he had stayed behind to practice a bit more. It gets late, suddenly the December night falls, blue and white. There was a skylight in the auditorium. Leaning back, the two of them looking up, they saw the clouds scud by. Then there were no more clouds. There was only the moon. The moon illuminated them. She was fourteen. That was the first time she made love completely, virginally, with a man …

It was then I found out which goddess she was, or rather, which goddesses, because she was several. She was Artemis, Apollo’s sister, virgin hunter whose arrows hasten the death of the impious, goddess of the moon. She was Cybele, patron of those orgiasts who in her honor castrated themselves by moonlight, surrounding the goddess flanked by the lions she used to dominate nature. She wore a crown of towers. Diana was Astarte, Syria’s nocturnal goddess, who, with the moon under her control, moved the forces of birth, fertility, decay, and death. She was, finally and especially, Diana, her own name, a goddess whose only mirror is a lake where she and her tutelary sphere, the moon, may reflect themselves. Diana and her screen. Diana and her camera. Diana and her sacrifice, her celebrity, her arrows rising and falling in the implacable ratings of the box office.

She was Diana Soren, an American actress who came to Mexico to make a cowboy film in some spectacular mountains near the city of Santiago. Filming would begin tomorrow, January 2, in set 6 of Churubusco Studios, Mexico City.

On the set, she stopped belonging to me. The hair people, the makeup people, the costume people took control of her. But Diana would trust her real makeup only to Azucena, a Catalan, her secretary, lady’s maid, cook, and masseuse. That first morning on the set, marginalized, I had a great time examining the ointments Azucena used to make Diana beautiful. My mouth still tasted of peach. My Joan of Arc was lubricated with formulas that would have caused any medieval witch to be instantly burned at the stake if she had dared supply them secretly to the desperate, unsatisfied women in the villages of Brabant, Saxony, and Picardy. A concentrated anticellulite, multithinning gel to be applied daily to the stomach, hips, and buttocks until it completely penetrated her biomicrospheres; a thinning transdiffuser based on osmoactive systems of continuous diffusion; a restructuring and lipo-reducing cream to combat fatty skin; a translucent pink exfoliant foam to eliminate dead cells; an avocado and marigold unguent to soften her feet; an ox- marrow mask … My God! Could any of those concoctions be good for anything? Would they survive a night of love, a big bash, a good screw, a PRI political speech? Did they merely postpone what we all saw, a world of fat, wrinkled women with cellulite? Did the ointments mask death itself?

And only then, prepared by all that sorcery, both of us surrounded by the clamor of a movie set, isolated in the intimacy of her dressing room on wheels, did we surrender ourselves joyfully to Diana’s demanding, inexhaustible love. Covered with balsams but asking to be used — use me, she said, use me up, I want to be used by you. Would I have the refined sense to recognize limits, so I wouldn’t pass from use to abuse? She kept me from finding out. I never knew a woman so demanding yet so giving at the same time, smeared with ethereal, perfumed, tasty ointments without which, Diana, I would no longer know how to live.

Love is doing nothing else. Love is forgetting spouses, parents, children, friends, enemies. Love is eliminating all calculation, all preoccupation, all balancing of pros and cons.

It began with the scene on my lap with the panties.

It culminated in the memory of the auditorium, the snow-covered ground, and the light coming through the skylight.

She screwed without stopping.

“Someday,” she said, laughing, in excellent humor, “I’ll be in a state of total subjectivity. I mean dead. Make love to me now.”

“Or in the meantime …”

She invited me to go with her on location in Santiago. Two months. The studio had rented her a house. She hadn’t seen it yet, but if I went with her, we would be happy.

We parted. She went on ahead. I decided to follow her, wondering if literature, sex, and a lot of enthusiasm would be enough. I left a note for Luisa, begging forgiveness.