“Did you sense how heavy the atmosphere was?” I said to Diana.
“Yes. But I didn’t understand the reason for it. Did you?”
“No. Me neither.”
“We made them jealous because we love each other.” Then the woman laughed a beautiful laugh.
“That’s it. Yes. No doubt about it.”
The words of General Agustín Cedillo reverberated in my head. “Tell your girlfriend to be careful. Whenever you like, come by at two and have lunch with me at the club. Right here in Central Square.”
XX
To respond properly to the gift of the Italian toothpaste and to excuse myself for my attitude toward the shepherd boy, I went out one boring, blazing afternoon to find a present for Diana. The streets of Santiago were abysmally solitary during the afternoon; a leaden sun slammed against the benches, and there were few trees or awnings to provide shade. I felt tired and dizzy after walking ten blocks. I leaned against an ocote-pine-paneled door, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of a cave filled with treasure. It was an antique shop that, for provincial reasons I could not discern, had no sign.
There are restaurants like that in Oaxaca, bookstores in Guadalajara, bars in Guanajuato that don’t tell what they are. They believe, I imagine, that advertising isn’t needed to lure their clientele. These secret places in Mexico feel that the crowds brought in by publicity would only cheapen the quality of what they offer, and then they would have to satisfy the taste of the least common denominator. The truth is that there is a secret country within Mexico that does not advertise itself, that only tradition knows and recognizes. There, cuisines, legends, memories, conversations — everything that disappears, evaporated, the moment neon light blares it — gestate and continue.
There was lots of turn-of-the-century furniture. Families, when they modernized, when they emigrated from the province to the capital, abandoned these fin de siècle marvels: wicker armchairs, pier glasses, marble-topped dressers, wash-stands, genre paintings — hunting scenes, still lifes … The owner of the shop came over to me. He was a mestizo with slanty eyes, wearing a striped shirt with no collar or tie, although his vest was crossed by a valuable gold watch chain. I smiled and asked if business was going well. “I keep things,” he said. “I keep things from turning into dust.”
“May I look around?”
“Make yourself at home.”
I found an easel piled with posters and badly neglected engravings. I have no idea how posters for the Normandie, with its marvelous Art Deco lines, ended up there, even if I could imagine how the ones for the M-G-M films I had seen as a boy in the Iris theater in Mexico City—Mutiny on the Bounty, The Good Earth, Marie Antoinette—might have …
My fingers touched a sturdy wrinkled paper that had suffered much less than the posters. I smelled or sensed something in that touch and very carefully extracted it from the nest of forgotten colors. It was a Posada. An etching by José Guadalupe Posada, lost in that shop, well preserved, with the printer’s address: Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, No. 1 Santa Teresa Street, 1906. I extracted it as if I were in the Albertina in Vienna touching a Lucas Cranach etching. I’m not mistaken in my comparison. There is a relation, distant but certain, between the German painter of the sixteenth century and this artist of the Mexican provinces who died in 1913. They’re linked by a long dance of death, a galliard that goes its implacable way, weaving bodies together, day after day adding treasures to humanity’s most abundant wealth, death.
Clean, direct, savage, refined, Posada brought a message. A lady dressed in black with a train to her skirt, revolver in hand, had just murdered another lady, also dressed in black with a train to her skirt and also with a pistol in her hand. Obviously, the first lady had gotten the drop on the second. But the murderess had turned her back on an open balcony and to the light of the sun, as if the promise of her crime were, despite everything, life. The murdered woman, on the other hand, was imprisoned by a serpent whose coils were suffocating her, making the viewer doubt whether in fact she’d been murdered by her presumptive rival or whether Posada was depicting — as he did in other pictures, with a serpent wrapped tightly around a woman’s body, braiding her — an epileptic.
In any case, behind her opened the jaws of a devouring toothy monster that in fact was the entrance to a circus. Flying out of that open mouth were bats and demons, souls in torment, succubi and incubi: a whole carnival of malignant dreams, a nightmare that transformed the murder of an elegant woman dressed in black into one that would be its double, a Mardi Gras of sickness, death, laughter, gambling, news, all mixed together …
The little man with the golden chain asked so little money that I was about to give him twice as much, as a gift. I didn’t, because he would have taken offense. I waited until after dinner to give my present to Diana. But she was tired that night and fell asleep early. I read for a while and then followed her. Tomorrow I’d give her the present. Then I woke up with a shock, and she was sitting next to me, trembling.
“Diana, what’s the matter?”
“I was dreaming.”
I looked at her in silence. She told me this: A woman dressed in black shot her to death. Diana, also dressed in black, was falling, mortally wounded, though the instantaneous death was accompanied by convulsions.
“What else?”
“That’s all.”
“Wasn’t there a snake wrapped around you?”
“What are you talking about? The most important thing, I want you to know, was the sky, a little piece of sky that you could see through the window.”
“The murderess had her back to the open balcony.”
“How do you know?”
Diana’s dream upset me so much that I made the mistake of going too far, of asking her if there was also, behind her, a horrible mouth filled with vampires.
“No. Not even that snake around me. You can skip the Freud for Beginners, okay? I told you I don’t want a biographical chicken with Freudian dressing. I told you that before. When you hear someone say ’poor country girl devoured by instant success,’ don’t believe it. Don’t believe the story of the innocent girl abused by the tyrannical Teutonic director. Only believe in the images of me that you take away from our relationship.”
“You yourself give me so many, I don’t have to invent anything.”
“Then don’t believe anything about me.”
XXI
I decided not to play along with her irrational manias — the bathroom door always closed, the window curtains always open in expectation of moonlight pouring in on a snowy landscape. Her accusation annoyed me: “You have no imagination.” Actually, what I wanted was for us to share the imagination of the future instead of that morbid imagination of a past in which I didn’t figure. There was pride in that, but also fear, fear that Diana’s memory would enslave me and that we would both lose in a morbid reconstruction of irrecoverable moments.
It seemed strange to me to be in such a position, a Mexican supposedly loaded down with too much past, she a mid-western gringa supposedly devoid of memory. Was that why she wanted to invent for herself a treasure chest of memories, a true mnemonic treasure, inviting me to re-create it with her? No doubt about it. But at that moment I was living through a crisis of power with regard to women, a crisis precipitated by vanity and caprice. It excluded the vanity and caprice of women, eliminated them and occasionally eliminated the women, too, if they didn’t obey my desire for them to eliminate their own caprices.