“What was it like when you went to Hollywood?” I interrupted myself.
That night, Diana did not smell of perfumed ointments. She smelled of soap and wore overalls over a white T-shirt. Only I knew the exciting delights hidden under that simplicity.
She told me many things I already knew and others I didn’t.
She was chosen for the role of Saint Joan out of eighteen thousand applicants. Stardom by elimination — everything in the U.S. is like a relay race: one after another the girls were rejected because they didn’t conform to the model. This one’s nose was too long or short, for others it was a neck that was too long or too short; others looked too big on screen.
“The screen makes you look bigger. Ideally you have to be small and thin, or if you are big, you should be svelte and graceful in your movements like Ava Gardner, or mysterious like Garbo, or believable like Ingrid Bergman. Other girls had the most beautiful eyes in the world, but God gave them cortisone necks. Others had bodies like Venus, but moon faces.”
“You’re Diana, the goddess who hunts by moonlight.”
She laughed. “I heard it right from the first day on the set. A very little girl for a very big part, they whispered. A great English actor took pity on me. He told me, You’re going to be a star before being an actress. What horrified me were his good intentions, his pity, not the tyrannical demands of the director. He actually thought he had a clear idea of what Shaw wanted. All he asked of me was to be at the same level as the author, to be Saint Joan, and he didn’t care if I was an actress or a star or if I was too small or too big for the part. Remember what Shaw says about his saint?”
I said I did, that it was a play I liked a lot. “Shaw sees the Middle Ages as a pool filled with eccentrics and Saint Joan as one of its strangest fish. Annoying everyone. A woman dressed as a man: she irritated feudal machismo. By saying she was an emissary from God, she irritated the bishops, to whom she felt superior. She gave orders to the King of France and tried to humiliate England. She told generals to go to hell and showed she was a better strategist than they were. How could they not burn a woman like that?”
Diana hung her head. “The director told me, If she’d dealt diplomatically with all of them — the kings, the generals, the bishops, and the feudal lords — she would have lived a long time. She was a woman who couldn’t give an inch. She didn’t know how to compromise. She was a masochist. She wanted to suffer so she could go to heaven.”
She threw her arms around my neck, deeply moved, almost sobbing: What should we do, give in, stand fast, live a long life or die young, burned at the stake, what? Tell me, love.
I tried to be good-humored because my emotions were taking control of me as well. But nothing came out; the Holy Spirit did not visit me that night. I made a sign of discretion with my finger so everyone would understand. They stared at us, shocked. I led her out to the wooden balcony that hung over a ravine. The cold night air of the desert revived us. “If only you’d directed me.” Diana presented me with her dimpled smile.
“Shaw says Joan was like Socrates and Christ. She was killed and no one lifted a finger to defend her.”
“I asked to see Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc. They — the studio — didn’t want me to. They thought it would influence me. That the comparison would devastate me. Falconetti was such an infinitely sad Joan, sweetheart — I didn’t have that sadness, there was no place inside from which I could extract it…”
“So you decided to be Saint Joan in life.”
She looked at me inquisitively. “No. I decided Joan was crazy and deserved to die in the flames.”
Surprised, I pressed her to go on.
“Yes. Anyone who fights for justice is crazy. Christianity is madness; freedom, socialism, the end of racism and poverty, they’re all crazy. If you defend all those crazy things, you’re a witch and you’ll end up in the fire …”
Never did she look at me with greater melancholy, as if through her nocturnal eyes, so clear, were passing Dreyer’s chiaroscuro images — Falconetti with her hair shaved off and her eyes bloodshot like grapes, the white walls, the bishops’ black robes, Antonin Artaud’s bloodless lips promising other paradises …
“There’s a very old philosopher from Andalusia, Maria Zambrano, who says the following: Revolution is an annunciation. And the vigor of the revolution may be measured by the eclipses and falls that it survives. Joan was a revolutionary. She was a Christian.”
“The bad thing”—she spoke with sudden bitterness—“is that the director didn’t understand that… The idiot thought Joan was a saint because she suffered, not because she enjoyed being intolerable for everyone.”
“She had to be burned,” I said in conclusion, rather thoughtlessly.
“Literally, literally. The director tied me to the stake, he ordered the fire lit, and he didn’t even film the scene. He watched how the flames came closer and closer to me. He wanted to see me terrified so he could make me into his Saint Joan. He should have let me be burned up then and there, the son of a bitch. The crew saved me when the flames were touching my robe. The director was happy. I had suffered: I was a saint. He didn’t let me be a rebel. We both failed.”
This statement restored Diana’s serenity.
“To escape the director’s tyranny, I married a famous writer who could dominate the director and every studio in Hollywood.”
“Did he also satisfy you?”
“Never say anything bad about Ivan.”
She glared at me as if I were someone else, a man made of glass, another glass graduate.
“I admire him greatly,” I said with a cordial smile.
“Never laugh when you talk about him, either.”
She turned on her heel and walked back into the living room. I followed her. The actor, by now very drunk, hopelessly lost in the geography of Mexico, repeated incessantly, “I’m very cross in Vera Cruz, I’m very cross in Vera Cruz”; his girlfriend wondered if Lilly, the rising star, would last or not; and the cinematographer said he had a portable solution to all problems of sexual solitude while on distant locations: he pulled down his zipper and showed us his sex (which looked like a huge bruised pear), shouting: Long live self-love! And the actor declaimed, Very cross in Veracruz, and his girlfriend begged him, Don’t be a has-been. I’d leave you. I swear I’d leave you for another man. Success is my aphrodisiac …
“See?” whispered Diana, as the station wagon brought us to the center of Santiago. “Hollywood is a series of capsule biographies, vitamins or poison you can buy in the drugstore.”
XII
Azucena needed no capsule biography. Everything about her seemed uncertain to me at first. Her age, of course. She was short, very thin, with almost masculine sinews, which no doubt derived from a life (maybe more than one) of hard work. The nature of this job with Diana Soren was not uncertain. Azucena was invisibly involved in everything. She packed the bags for trips, unpacked them on arrival, put everything in its proper place. She made sure the clothes were always clean and pressed. She was the one who woke Diana up, brought her breakfast, and organized meals for all of us. She made the indispensable phone calls, got the plane tickets, made hotel reservations, answered telegrams, sent presigned photos of the star (how many requests, on average, came each month?), screened telephone calls, pertinent and impertinent requests. Secretary, lady’s maid, deluxe servant, accomplice, bodyguard? What to call her?