Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

VIII

We discovered that the pharmacy in the town square, exactly as in Flaubert’s novels of provincial life, was the social center of Santiago. We amused ourselves seeing what it sold that could not be found elsewhere or what ordinary things in Europe or the United States were unavailable. The perfume section was horrible, all local products with a cheap nightclub smell. They made you want to go to church, inhale incense, and be purified. Any sign of MacLean’s toothpaste, Diana’s favorite? Not a chance. Bermuda Royal Lyme, my favorite aftershave? We were doomed to Forhans and Myrurgia. We quietly laughed, united in the citizenship of international consumption. Mexico! Land of high tariffs and industries protected from foreign competition!

Santiago’s university students would meet at the door of the pharmacy, and one of them came over to me one morning when I went there alone to buy razor blades and glycerin suppositories for my chronic constipation. He told me that he’d read some of my books, that he recognized me and wanted to tell me that in Santiago the governor and the other authorities had not been elected democratically but had been imposed from the capital by the PRI. They didn’t understand local problems, much less the problems of the students.

“They think we’re all peons and that we’re still in the age of Don Porfirio,” he said. “They don’t realize things have changed.”

“Despite 1968?” I asked.

“That’s the serious part. They just keep going on as if nothing happened. Our parents are peasants, workers, business people, and thanks to their labor we go to the university and learn things. We tell our parents we have more rights than they think. A peasant can organize a cooperative and tell the mill owner to grind up his mama …”

“Who’s probably a grind herself,” I said, without getting even a smile out of the student.

He went on, and I knew I could never expect humor from him. “… or the truck owners, who are the worst exploiters. They decide if they’ll carry the harvest to market, when, and for how much, and no discounts. The crops rot. A worker has the right to form associations and doesn’t have to be under the thumb of the thugs from the CTM.”

“That’s what you tell the people who work here?”

He said he did. “Someone’s got to inform them. Someone’s got to make them aware of things. Maybe you yourself, now that you’re here …”

“I’m writing a book. Besides, I don’t want to compromise my North American friends. They’re working and can’t get involved in politics. It would be a real pain if they did. I’m their guest. I have to respect them.”

“Okay. Maybe another time.”

I shook hands with him and asked him not to take offense. We could get together sometime for coffee. He smiled. His teeth were terrible. And yet he was tall, graceful, with languid eyes, and a sagging Zapata mustache — thin, like his unfinished, patchy, almost pubic beard.

“My name is Carlos Ortiz.”

“Well, well, we’re namesakes.”

That he liked. He thanked me for saying it and even smiled.

At night, Diana and I went on building our passion. I didn’t dare ask her anything about her past loves, and she didn’t ask me about mine. I’d ventured two ideas: the company of death and the natural tendency of couples to form triangles. In reality, what both of us wanted at that stage was to feel ourselves unique, without precedents, one of a kind. The first nights were a matter of words and acts, acts and words, sometimes the one first, other times the other, rarely both at once, because the words of sex are unrepeatable, infantile, often filthy, with no interest or excitement except for the lovers themselves.

On the other hand, the words before or after the act always tended, during those early days in Santiago, to proclaim the joy and singularity of what was happening to us. With Diana Soren in my arms, I came to feel that I had written nothing before I met her. Love meant starting over. She fed and strengthened that idea: she actually told me that we were getting to know each other at the creation, before the past, before Iowa and the little skirt and the moon — she actually said that. Ultimately, she transmuted everything (and I thanked her for it) into a fantastic vision of joy as simultaneity. Sometimes during orgasm she would shout, “Why doesn’t everything happen at the same time?” It wasn’t a question; it was a desire. A fervent desire in which I joined. Welded to her flesh and her words. Yes, please, let everything happen at the same time …

We were unique. Everything began with us. Then literature butted in. I remembered Proust: “To know Gilberte again, as in the time of the creation, as if the past did not yet exist.” And from there it was only a step to the Lucho Gatica bolero that sometimes floated through the window from the servants’ rooms: “Don’t ask me anything more, / let me imagine / that the past doesn’t exist / and that we were born/at the very moment when we met…”

It’s true she hadn’t read the sentence in a novel by her husband, Ivan Gravet, where he says, more or less, that a couple exists while it can invent itself or because shit’s better than solitude. A couple’s problems begin when the two of them stop inventing themselves.

I preferred to think I was captured inside the body of this woman like a fetus that grows and fears, when it’s thrown into the world, that it loses its nourishing mother, Diana, Artemis, Cybele, Astarte, first goddess …

“I love your cloudy brow,” Diana would say when I thought these things.

“But you always have a clear brow.”

“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if one day you see me suffer, you’ll pay for it.”