Once I went to Taxco with a rich Mexican girl who complained about the hotel room. It seemed too low-class to her. I told her she was an intolerable rich brat, incapable of adapting to circumstances and devoid of fantasy or the spirit of adventure, but what I was really saying was: Just count yourself lucky that I actually brought you along for the weekend. I decided no Mexican woman was going to gain power over me through whim, vanity, pride. I’d always be one step ahead of them; I’d give them a dose of their own medicine. They’d hurt me too much when I was young. They were weak, vain, easy to convince when their parents crossed me off the eligible-bachelor list just because I had no money and my rivals did. Now that they were after me, I paid them back in kind, knowing all along that I was hurting myself more than I was hurting them. By denying Diana that share of her imagination which she demanded, I was letting myself be swept along by the inertia of my previous loves. She was no spoiled Mexican brat, and I was committing a serious error with an exceptional woman.
I quickly tried to make up for it, letting her know that I would bow to her desire to close the bathroom door and to imagine a snowy moonlit night. She was puzzled by my attitude, annoyed sometimes. She begged me to close the door. But she berated me scornfully for not helping her recover her lost imagination. That confirmed for me a basic Hispano-Arab conviction: in the harem it is not the eunuch who rules but the sultan. Diana would become terribly weak and sweet when she begged me please to leave the bathroom door closed, and I would feel guilty for not acceding to her wish. Perhaps I saw in her pleas something that always annoyed the hell out of me: someone giving me orders, especially orders about order.
I always had a good relationship with my father, a very good relationship, except on that one point. I loved to infuriate him with my disorder. He was the son of a German woman and was proud of his punctuality, his refined devotion to order. His closets, his papers, and his schedule were all examples of a well-ordered life. I piled papers on my desk, left my dirty shirts on the floor, and one day, right before his eyes, I put on my shoes and then tugged and pulled my trousers over them. The spectacle horrified and disgusted him. But it also aroused a tenderness in him I would never have expected. He saw my weakness. He accepted it. He forgave me. He never again gave me an order, and I never again took one from anybody. I organized my life around my work so as to be independent or, in any case, to choose my dependencies with a certain freedom. And my physical disorder became a motive for mental order. In the chaos of my work papers, books, and letters, I always know — and only I know — where things are. As if I had radar in my head, my hand shoots directly to the Leaning Tower of Paper and instantly finds exactly what it seeks. Sometimes the tower collapses, but the object is never lost.
Emotions, unlike papers, refuse to be catalogued in order or disorder. They challenge us to find their form — only to disappear like the perfume of certain flowers that seems to be the most fixed, the most real thing in the world and yet has no more form than the rose or iris from which it emanates. We know, of course, that the form of the rose is not its scent, but in effect, its scent is a phantom similar to emotions, which are the realest but least apprehensible things in the world. I punished myself mentally for my mistakes in dealing with a woman like Diana Soren, allowing myself to slide on the little sled of my domestic loves. I convinced myself that she was giving me passion and tenderness, and I was too lucky not to realize the privilege it was to love her, even if that meant giving in, if necessary, to her whims and imaginings.
Another night, she woke up agitated. She told me she’d imagined herself entering a salon she expected to find full of people. From far off, she could hear the conversations, the laughter, the music, even the tinkle of glasses. But when she walked in, no one was there. She heard only the rustle of a long skirt, as of taffeta. She began to shout so she’d be heard outside. She woke; I thought about the Posada I’d given her.
XXII
Diana’s whims and nocturnal frights lulled me into inattention. If I heard her stirring at night, I ignored it. If she got out of bed, still half asleep I would imagine her opening curtains and closing doors. When she appeared in my dreams, she was wearing black, standing opposite a balcony while another woman, identically dressed, shot her.
But there was no music in this catalog of grotesque images. Everything occurred during long silences punctuated by the shots. One night Diana’s voice, far off and odd, was chanting something in a voice that wasn’t her own, as if another, far-off, maybe even dead voice had come back to possess hers, taking advantage of the night to recover a presence lost in oblivion, death, the usury of time.
The sensation was so strange, so alarming that I focused all my attention on it, clearing the cobwebs from my head to hear and see her clearly. That night the full moon was indeed pouring in through the open window like a huge white embrace: Diana was sitting next to it wearing her white baby-dolls, whispering a song I soon identified. It was one of Tina Turner’s early hits, a song called “Remake Me” or “Make Me Over.”
Diana had something in her hands; she was singing to an object. Of course — the telephone, I admitted with pain and instant jealousy, banishing the image of a woman perturbed by the full moon, a forlorn she-wolf howling to the goddess of the night: Artemis, her nemesis; Diana, her namesake.
If the flash of pain told me first that she was insane, the stab of jealousy quickly put me on notice: she was singing to someone … Should I break up this melodrama with a scene of my own, a jealous, furious scene? Caution overcame honor, and curiosity prevailed over both. Neither Hamlet nor Othello, that night I was just Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, interested more in knowing what was happening than in stopping or ignoring it. If I didn’t proceed carefully, I’d never know what was going on… I opened Pandora’s box.
I pretended to be asleep. I stopped listening to her. After a while, I felt her warm body next to mine, but it was strangely distant and she didn’t feel around with her feet for mine that night, as she did on others …
How long could I control my desire to know to whom Diana was talking at three in the morning, to whom she was singing Tina Turner songs over the telephone? Because, beginning that night, she talked every night, sitting in a pool of light shed by the waning moon, in a distant and at first incomprehensible voice (another voice, imitated or possessive; Diana, owner of a mimic’s voice, or the mimic’s voice possessing Diana, I don’t know which) that became louder as the moon died, more audible, passing from the lyrics of “Remake Me” to sentences not sung but spoken in that same deep, velvety voice, which wasn’t Diana’s. Her normal voice came from above, from her clear eyes, or maybe even from her lovely soft white breasts; this nocturnal voice came from her guts, her ovaries, maybe even from her solar plexus. She was saying things I couldn’t understand without knowing the question or answer to which they were directed on the other end of the line, wherever that might be …
I remembered the Capitano toothpaste sent from Italy and imagined long-distance communication with who knows what place on the globe. Impossible to guess; all I heard, with ever-increasing unease, was Diana’s different voice and the inexplicable words “Who takes care of me?”
I knew it sure wasn’t me. She wasn’t asking me to take care of her. But she was asking someone else, maybe more than one someone else. A lover, her parents, her husband, with whom she maintained a close and affectionate relationship (three in the morning in Mexico, midday in Paris)? But I knew that the woman talking wasn’t Diana. She said it clearly. One night she was saying, I’m Tina; another, I’m Aretha; another I’m Billie … I understood the allusions, in retrospect. Billie Holiday was the Our Lady of Sorrows of jazz singers, our voice of every grief, the voice which we dare not listen to in ourselves but which she takes on in our name, like a black, feminine Christ, a crucified Christ to bear all our sins: