Clint Eastwood’s eyes kept me from waking her up right then and there to ask her the question whose answer I already knew. She was crying today because she didn’t cry when she should have before. She had just made a movie in Oregon with Clint Eastwood. It was a long shoot. Lasted months. They were lovers. But it wasn’t my place to ask anything, find out anything. It wasn’t hers either. That was really an unwritten law, a tacit agreement between lovers. Modern lovers, which is to say liberated ones. Not to go around investigating what happened before, with whom, when, for how long. The civilized rule was not to ask. If she wanted to tell me something, fine. I wasn’t going to show curiosity, jealousy, even good humor. I was going to maintain an absolute serenity staring day and night at the eyes of the warrior of the West as if he’d been the Sacred Heart of Jesus, placed next to me on a night table to bless and protect us.
I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking about anything. If she wanted to say something about Clint Eastwood and his picture, which had suddenly appeared like a votive offering of gratitude by the headboard of our erotic bed, it was her problem. Passion and jealousy were telling me, Raise the roof, make a scene, tell this gringo whore to go to hell. My intelligence told me, Don’t give her the satisfaction. She’d be delighted. Then what? Then she’d get mad at me and break up with me, I’d leave, and then? Then everything.
That was the problem: that real passion, what I was feeling for her then, kept me from doing anything to endanger my being next to her, that’s all. I wasn’t fooling myself. There was plenty of indignity, of an almost bitchy kind, in that. She was sticking the photo of her previous flame right down my throat and I was putting up with it. I was putting up with it because I didn’t want to break up with her. I didn’t want anything to break the charm of our love. But she did. That photo was a provocation. Or was it her way of telling me that both of us would have other loves after ours? I didn’t want to anticipate a breakup in all that. I couldn’t admit it. It would negate the intensity of my own passion, which was to be with her, screw with her, always, always…
Between jealousy and separation lay the road of serenity, sophistication, the civilized reaction. Pay no attention. Take it all sans façon. Did she want to hang photos of Clint Eastwood all over the house? Fine. I would see her as a kind of provocative sixteen-year-old, a tease, alienated, whose measles would be cured by my patient, civilized maturity. I was ten years older. Did Diana want to stick her tongue out at me? I would suck it.
But the fact is, I didn’t sleep well. I wasn’t convinced by my own explanation. It was all too simple. There had to be something more, and that morning, when she woke up at five and rolled over, giving and offering her daily love, my answer was almost mechanical, and afterward, getting out of bed wrapped in a towel, as if the staring eyes of Clint Eastwood and your humble servant were, taken together, a bit too much, she said this to me: “Mister, you’ve had two weeks of pleasure. When are you planning to give me some?”
XV
It goes without saying that I didn’t write a single line that morning. How was I going to take up the love of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche when my own had become so mysteriously complicated? What did a rough soldier from Extremadura and a captive princess, from Tabasco no less, give each other, what could they give each other? Something more than a political alliance mediated by sex? Something more than the verbal, carnal union of two languages — two tongues? By the same token, Diana went off to film a ridiculous Western in the Sierra Madre, and there I was, pondering the pleasure that apparently I hadn’t given her, taking it only for myself.
For a moment, I almost convinced myself that I was like all other men, especially Latin American men, who go after their own immediate satisfaction and don’t give a shit about the woman’s. I was my own best lawyer: I quickly convinced myself that this didn’t apply in my case. I’d showered Diana Soren with warmth and attention; neither my patience nor my passion was in doubt. She was as voracious as I was desirous of satisfying her. If the masculine pleasure to which she referred that morning was the simple, direct pleasure of mounting her and coming, I never did it without all the preambles, the foreplay, that sexual urbanity requires in order to satisfy the woman and bring her to the point just before the culmination that leads, with luck, to shared orgasm, profound lovemaking, composed equally of flesh and spirit: coming together, soaring to heaven …
Did I fail in some other area? I reviewed them all. I asked her for a blowjob when I sensed she wanted to give me one, when taking her by the nape of the neck and bringing her close to my erect penis as if she were a docile slave was the pleasure we both wanted. But I also understood when what Diana wanted was slow, dazzling cunnilingus in which my tongue explored her invisible sex, when I was ashamed of the brutal obstruction of my mere masculine form, awkward, as obvious as a hose abandoned in a garden of blond grass. In her, in Diana, sex was a hidden luxury, behind the hair, between the folds that my tongue explored until it reached the tiny, nervous, quivering, dithering thrill of pure quicksilver clitoris.
There was no dearth of sixty-nines, and she possessed the infinite wisdom of true lovers who know where the roots of a man’s sex are, the knot of nerves between his legs, equidistant between testicles and anus, where all virile tremors meet when a woman’s hand caresses us there, threatening, promising, insinuating one of the two paths, the heterosexual at the testicles or the homosexual at the asshole. That hand holds us suspended between our open or secret inclinations, our amorous potentialities with the opposite or the same sex. A true lover knows how to give us the two pleasures and give them, besides, as a promise, that is, with the maximum intensity of what is only desired, of what is incomplete. Total love is always androgynous.
Didn’t she herself want me to sodomize her? I did it two ways, turning her over on her stomach to enter her vagina from the rear, or lubricating her anus to enter, to tear open, her most intimate bud. I covered her with oils, and one night I showered her with champagne, both of us spraying each other in a torrent of laughter; I’ve already spoken of her splendid vaginal aromas of ripe fruits; I sprayed my cologne in her armpits and between her legs; she hid her own perfume behind my ear, so it would stay there, she said, forever; I tricked her out like a domestic Venus, not in sea foam but in the foam of my shaving cream (Noxema), and one boring Sunday afternoon I shaved her armpits and her pubis, keeping everything in a leftover marmalade jar until it either flowered or rotted horribly, whichever.
I finally laughed out loud at all that nonsense, remembering in the end (I believed at the time) the marvelous words of Ben Jonson’s lascivious millionaire Volpone, who speaks of desiring “women and men of every sex and age …”
Was that what was missing: sharing sex with others? Was that the pleasure Diana was talking about? What did she want? A ménage à trois? With whom? The stuntman I’d neutralized? But then why make him our third? She’d end up alone with him; I wasn’t going to forgo that turn of the screw — I’d leave her alone with the man I was instrumental in getting rid of, she’d be alone with him and without the ménage à trois … The partouze, the French orgy, didn’t seem terribly interesting to me or, for that matter, practicable with an old actor, a hairdresser who chewed gum, an austere Spanish lady’s maid, a short, obese, bearded director, and a cameraman who proclaimed his devotion to the cult of Onan as a saving and certain pleasure during long location shoots.