Johnson, Nixon, the great voices of hypocrisy, ignorance, stupidity — how could they not cause an entire generation to lose its illusions; how could they not end up shooting students at Kent State, beating up demonstrators in Chicago, jailing Black Panthers? And for what? Diana’s voice rose, and she seemed to wake from an extremely long sleep behind a silver screen that was her own way of looking at the world. Not to make fortunes, not for the sake of vulgar corruption, however rich they made a hundred contractors or a dozen large defense companies; that was okay, that I can even understand, but what drives me crazy is the way those creeps fall in love with their power, believe in their power as something that not only will last but is important. My God, the idiots think their power is important — they don’t know that the only important thing is the life of the boy they sent off to die uselessly in an Asian jungle, a confused boy who, to justify his presence there, burned a village and killed all its inhabitants because if he didn’t why was he there, what was the use of that automatic rifle whose manufacturing provided livings for thousands of workers and their families, a single automatic rifle that gave power to Lyndon Johnson, to Richard Nixon, to the Goddess Lie, to the Whore Power?
Diana Soren was losing it. Her voice was falling into a strange, empty abyss; she would go back to sleep for twenty more years as long as she didn’t have to know what was going on in that home to which she could never return … America was what was going on outside her sleep.
She pushed the button on her tape deck and out came the voice of José Feliciano singing “Come On, Baby, Light My Fire.” Cooper stood up, indignant, and turned it off. He parodied Feliciano’s voice. That’s what we’ve come to. That was today’s music, savage music for idiots — come on, baby, light my fire. He mimicked it hideously and excused himself to go to bed.
XVII
With my prerogative to stay at home and write all day firmly established, I paid a surprise visit to the set one morning. Diana wasn’t mad at me for not warning her; she received me with a big display of cheerfulness, showed me off, introduced me to everyone, and invited me to have coffee in her trailer. It was the same one we used at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. Now, she said, with a roguish look in her eyes, we don’t have to use it the way we did then. Why not? I answered.
When we left the trailer, the makeup and hair people were waiting impatiently. The director was edgy. The cloudy day was going to clear up. He peered at the sky through a very fine and mysterious apparatus, squinting one eye and wrinkling up his entire face, as if he were expecting instructions from above so he could go on filming and saving money for a company that no doubt worked at the right hand of God, with His blessing and mandate.
The landscape of the Santiago mountains falls apart and reconstructs itself according to the whims of the light. I walked across the plain toward the mountains that were storing up all the shade of the day, swaying like trees under the tricky sky. Some kids were playing soccer on an improvised field. The spectacle was funny because the goats the children were tending didn’t respect the boundaries set for the game and would periodically invade, at which point the boys would stop being rustic Pelés and go back to being shepherds.
A flock of stolid lambs, their wool as curly as a filthy wig on an English magistrate, came tumbling down toward the playing field. The boy tending them was received with whistles and insults by the players. One of them even went so far as to jump the shepherd, grab his staff out of his hand, and begin to beat him with it. I ran to stop it, separated them, called the attacker a bully, because he was taller than his victim, and the other members of both teams thugs, because they were taking their revenge on the lambs who were erasing the boundaries marked out with chalk.
“Leave him alone, you thugs. It’s not his fault.”
“Yes, it is his fault,” said the tall boy. “He’s conceited. Who does he think he is? Just because he was Benito Juárez.”
This allusion to a hero of Mexican history seemed so outrageous to me that at first I laughed. Then I grew curious. I carefully studied the boy who’d been attacked. He couldn’t be more than thirteen and looked very Indian, his cheeks like two broken clay pots, his eyes reflecting an inherited sadness, passed down from century to century. He was wearing a shirt, overalls, a straw hat, and huaraches and was even tending a flock. He really was another Benito Juárez, who until he was twelve was an illiterate shepherd who spoke no Spanish and then was president, victor over Maximilian and the French, the “Benefactor of the Americas,” and a specialist in coining celebrated sayings. His impassive face is in a thousand plazas in a hundred Mexican cities. Juárez was born to be a statue. This boy was the original.
I offered him a Coke, and we walked toward the movie set.
“Why do they go after you?”
“It pissed them off that I was Juárez.”
“Tell me how that happened.”
He told me that a year before, an English television company was there making a picture, and they offered him the part of the boy Juárez tending his flock. All he had to do was walk past the cameras with his sheep. They gave him ten dollars. The other boys were furious, even though he spent part of his money treating them all to Cokes. The rest of the money he gave to his father. The boys never eased up. They had it in for him and shut him out. He asked the English people, “When will the movie come out. Can I see it?” They said in a year. It would certainly be announced in newspapers and in TV listings. He told that to the boys, and it only made them angrier. When do we get to see you on TV, Benito? What? They’re going to make you into a movie star, Benito? What a laugh!
He asked me if I knew if the film had been released and when it would come to Santiago, so he could shut these bastards up once and for all.
No, I told him, I don’t know a thing about it. I’ve never heard anything about that picture …
The boy clenched his teeth and left half of the Coke. He asked permission to return to his flock.
I went back to the set. The stuntman was being filmed in a scene in which he was breaking a wild horse. He was wearing the clothes of the male lead, who was watching him from a folding chair, drinking a Bloody Mary. The director ordered a shot to be fired to agitate the pony, and then the stuntman began to break him. His eyes sought out Diana, who was sitting next to the actor, and the director stopped the action to scold him — he had no reason to be looking at the actors, he didn’t need anyone’s approval. Didn’t he realize that he was alone on a Mexican mountain breaking a wild horse, didn’t he know by now that there’s a scenic illusion that consists in denying the existence of the fourth wall of the set, the one that opens onto the audience, the city, the world, to magic? The director became very eloquent, and I could see how in his eyes the student of the arts of Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg had been reduced (or magnified, depending on how you saw it) to this task of creating an art where art must never be detected. He was good, I said. It was a good compromise. In the hands of a Buñuel, a Ford, a Hitchcock, it was the best compromise: to say everything with artistry so superior and intense as to be undetectable, fusing with the clarity of technical execution. An art identical to a pair of eyes watching.