I looked at Diana’s eyes, but my gaze, imploring, not affirming, many nights ahead of us, did not dissolve the disillusion in hers. I spoke the truth. Would I deserve a kiss that night? Would Diana kiss me just to say “Did you lie? You prefer me. You’ll leave everything for me. Your mornings as a writer are a farce. You live to love me at night. I know it. I feel it. Everything you write here will be shit because your passion isn’t in it. Your passion is between my sheets, not between your pages.”
“We should have done it,” said Diana.
Lew and I looked at her, not understanding. She understood.
“Nothing should keep us from a passion. Absolutely nothing. Get me something to drink, love.”
I did, while she went on to say that life is never generous twice. There are forces that present themselves once and never again. Forces, she repeated, sleepily nodding several times, staring at the polished nails of her bare feet, her chin perched on her knees. Forces, not opportunities. Forces for love, politics, artistic creation, sports, who knows what else. They come by only once. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone, mad at us because we paid them no mind. We didn’t want passion. Then passion didn’t want us either.
She burst into tears, so I picked her up in my arms and carried her to bed. She was the size of a little girl.
XIV
I put her to bed: she was soft, worn out, and crying. I was getting used to the care which she seemed to require and which it gave me immense pleasure to give her. She looked like a little girl, turned on her side, crying softly, shuddering slightly in her physical smallness, begging protection and tenderness. I wanted to give it to her. I settled her on the bed, pulled up the covers to keep out the desert cold, and caressed the head I had grown so accustomed to, the Saint Joan hair, always ready for either war or fire. Unlike other women, she never left stray hairs on the pillow. In truth, she never left a trace of any kind, as if she were pure spirit, immaterial, in her Swedish, Lutheran cleanliness, as fresh as a forest, as blue as a fjord, clinging desperately to the long hours of summer, as if the winter without light were the dark mirror of death.
I saw and felt all this as I tucked her in that night while she wept and thought (I imagined) about lost opportunities for passion, the moments that passed, that called us, that we disregard, and that went away forever. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone forever. They never turned into habit.
But, I told myself as I caressed her head and she sank into invisible dreams, everything we accept turns into habit, even passion. I smiled, caressing her blond head of very short hair; the role of Saint Joan had become a habit for Diana. She would always be a petite woman, the sparrow, the pucelle, the virgin, the Maid of Orléans, the battling saint, small, blond, hair cut in military style so that no one would doubt her warrior’s will, so her helmet would fit properly: her hair cut very short so there would be less to burn in the bonfire. I told her silently that God would give her a halo. A head of long hair burning in the night, dragged across the night, would be seen as the trail of the devil.
Saint Joan … Even sainthood becomes habit, as do passion, death, love, everything. In the few weeks we’d spent together in Santiago, this bedroom had become a familiar, habitual place. We knew where to find everything. My clothes here. Hers there. The little bathroom divided equitably — which meant eighty percent for her, since she traveled with a luxurious and disconcerting variety of creams, pencils, nail polish, unguents, lotions, perfumes, lacquers … All I needed was space for my razor, shaving cream, my comb, and my toothbrush. I complained about the Colgate toothpaste I had to buy in Mexico, where high tariffs left us without much of a selection.
“That’s a problem? What brand do you like?” Diana asked.
Half seriously, half jokingly I told her I liked Capitano, a toothpaste I used in Venice that reminded me of toothpaste my grandmother made at home in Jalapa. My grandmother distrusted products made who knows where, who knows by whom that you were going to end up putting in your mouth. She tried to do everything at home — cooking, carpentry, sewing … Capitano toothpaste also reminded me of my grandmother because it was pink inside and white outside. On the tube was a picture of an illustrious turn-of-the-century gentleman with a huge mustache, presumably the Capitano himself, guaranteeing the product’s tradition and dependability. My grandfather, I told myself, must have looked like this nineteenth-century Capitano. My granny would have fallen in love with a man like that, with his mustache, his high, stiff collar, and his huge cravat.
“Capitano toothpaste.” I laughed.
Three days later, Diana handed me a package with ten tubes of the famous toothpaste. She’d had them sent from Italy. Just like that, by snapping her fingers, from Rome to Los Angeles to Mexico City, to the provincial city of Santiago. In three days, my lover satisfied a disproportionate, sudden whim. At the same time, something that seemed to me a mere boutade on my part, not even a passion, took up its habitual place in our bathroom. I no longer had to desire my Italian toothpaste. Here it was, as if Saint Apollonia, patron saint of dentists and toothaches, had sent it down to me from heaven.
I looked at the sleeping Diana. She lived in the world of instantaneous gratification. I knew that world existed. The young people of Paris, in May 1968, had rebelled against what they vaguely called the tyranny of consumption, a society that exchanged being for seeming and took acquisition as a proof of existence. A Mexican, no matter how much he travels the world, is always anchored in a society of need; we return to the need that surrounds us on all sides in Mexico, and if we have even the slightest spark of conscience, it’s hard for us to imagine a world where you can get everything you might want immediately, even pink toothpaste. I’ve always told myself that the vigor of Latin American art derives from the enormous risk of throwing yourself into the abyss of need, hoping to land on your feet on the other side, the side of satisfaction. It’s very hard for us — if not for us personally, then in the name of all those around us.
Toothpaste from Italy in three days. A habit, no longer a desire, not even a caprice. I shook my head, as if either to exit or to enter Diana’s dreams. Everything turns into habit. Diana sleeps on the right side of the bed, near the telephone and the photo of her child. I sleep on the left side, next to a couple of books, a notebook, and two ballpoint pens. But tonight, as I get into bed, reaching out to pick up a book, I raise my eyes and find those of Clint Eastwood. I drop the book in shock. Habit was broken. Diana had put a photograph of Clint Eastwood on my side of the bed, a photograph dedicated, with love, to Diana.
Those unmistakable laconic eyes, blue and icy, as intense as a bullet. His slow, spare way of speaking, as if parsimony in dialogue were a lubricant for the speed of the shot. A thin unlit cigar between tightly shut lips. It was the photo of a warrior who’d been at Troy, an Achilles of leather and stone, now transplanted far from Homer’s wine-dark sea to an epic without water, coastlines, or sails, an epic of thirst, the desert, and an absence of poets to sing the deeds of the hero. That was his sadness: no one sang of him. Clint Eastwood. From under sandy eyebrows, a bitter hero stared at me between blond eyelashes. The established habit had been broken. I should have foreseen it. I always should have known that no habit would last very long around Diana. Her tears that night were only the memory of the times she should have cried and didn’t.
I wanted to ask her about it someday: “Listen, do you only cry in the name of the times you didn’t when you should have?”