“No,” said Diana, her eyes wide with fright, “more than that. To refuse to take on the parts they assign you, to take on instead characters you’ve only heard talked about …”
Right then and there I repeated her words, personalizing them, rooting them in her, taking away the disguise of the infinitive (“to be or not to be”) and that impersonal “you” Americans use. You refuse to take on the parts they give you. You interpret characters that you’ve only heard talked about…
I said all that to avoid saying what I really wanted to: Whom were you talking to on the telephone at three in the morning? My rage simply took twisted paths. The actor felt the tension between us rising above his own, so he went on with his evocation.
“I heard Luise Rainer say something very beautiful to Clifford Odets. She said she was born prematurely, so she was always searching for the two months she missed. Then she said, I found them with you. But he was a left-wing radical and rewrote her words: The general strike gave me the two months I was missing. Not love but the strike. The truth is, we’re all looking for the months we’re missing. Two. Or nine. It’s all the same. We want more. We want to be someone else. Diana’s right … Odets sacrificed his wife to coin a political slogan.”
“Diana wants to disguise herself and to disguise us.” I laughed sarcastically, offensively. “She invited you to live here to disguise our little affair. Even if it’s a fact and everyone knows it, she must disguise it, you see, so as to act, to be someone else, to be a good actress in life because she can’t be a good one on screen … I hate whores who want to be seen as bourgeois housewives.”
“Good night,” said Lew, getting up abruptly and looking at me with disdain.
“No. Don’t leave yet. Don’t you know that you and I are living here in a monastery with Diana, you the father superior, I the novice? Or could it be some kind of artistic utopia, you the minstrel, I the scribe, Azucena the sluttish maid. But no one fornicates here — not a chance. Who ever heard of that? People come here to take refuge, they don’t take refuge here to come. Filthy convent, crummy utopia …”
“I’d rather listen to rock and roll, which I loathe, than to this stupid litany. Good night, Diana.”
“Good night, Lew,” she said, her eyes anxious but resigned.
I parodied her in falsetto. “Oh dear, oh dear! Why did I ever invite these people to share my house?”
“Come to bed, sweetheart. You’ve had a lot to drink today.”
XXIV
She was right, and it was hard for me to fall asleep. I understood everything. That night she got up. Ostentatiously she did not turn to see if I was asleep. She left the bedroom. The curtains were open. The moonlight fell freely on the old black telephone. I heard a light click. I got up, walked to the lunar pool. I held out my hand to take the telephone. I stopped out of fear. Would she realize I knew? Was she talking at that very moment from another part of the house? Did I have the right to listen in on a private conversation? I’d already pawed through bags, drawers, lingerie … What would one more indignity matter?
I picked up the telephone and heard the two voices talking on the extension. Hers was the unknown voice I’d learned to recognize at night, in secret. A voice that came from a different geography, another age, to take control of hers … that was my fantasy. Actually, it was just the voice of the actress Diana Soren acting a part she’d never be given in a film. The voice of a black woman. She was talking with a black man. That was clear. Even if it was a white man imitating a black, just as she was imitating a black woman, it was a black man’s voice. I mean it was the voice of someone who wanted to be black, only black. That impressed me, blowing away the alcoholic mist of my growing bitterness (as the tango — or is it the bolero? — goes …). Now I understood what I had heard in the bedroom, the previous nights, when she said things like “Make me see myself as another woman” or “How? I’m white.”
“Make yourself black.”
“How? I’m white.”
“You’ll figure out how.”
“I’m trying hard.”
“No, Aretha. Don’t be stupid. I’m not asking you to change the color of your skin. You understand what I mean.”
“I want to be with you,” said Diana, transformed into Aretha. “I’d give anything to be with you, in your bed …”
“You can’t, baby, you’re in your cage. I already got out of mine …”
“I’m not talking about a cage, I’m talking about a bed, with both of us in it …”
“Set us free, Aretha. Free the black man who doesn’t want a white woman, because he’d be betraying his mother. Free the white man who doesn’t want a black woman, because he’d be betraying his prejudices. Free the black man who wants a white woman to avenge his father. Free the white man who wants a black woman to humiliate, abandon, make a slave even in pleasure. Do all that, baby, and then I’ll be yours …”
“I’ll try to change my soul, if that’s what you want, darling.”
“You can’t.”
“Why? Don’t—”
The black man hung up but Diana sat there listening to the telephone static. I quickly hung up and went back to bed, feeling horribly guilty. But the next night I couldn’t resist the temptation to go on listening to the interrupted but eternal conversation, night after night…
She told him she’d try to change her soul, and he said, You can’t. She begged him not to condemn her that way, not to be unjust, but he insisted, You can’t. At heart you think we want to be white — that’s why you’ll never be able to be black. Diana Soren said she wanted justice for all. She reminded the black man she was against racism, she’d marched, she’d demonstrated; he knew it. Why didn’t he accept her as an equal? His burst of laughter must have wakened all the sleeping birds between Los Angeles and Santiago. You want them to let us into country clubs, he said to Diana, into luxury hotels, into McDonald’s, but we don’t want to get in. We want them to keep us out, we want them to do us the favor of telling us, Don’t come in, you’re different, we hate you, you smell bad, you’re ugly, you look like monkeys, you’re stupid, you’re not like us. He was gasping for breath and said that every time a liberal, philanthropic white spoke against racism he felt like castrating him and making him eat his own balls.
“I don’t want to be like you whites. I don’t want to be like you!”
The next night, she told him she only wanted to see herself as another woman so she could see herself as she really was. Everyone had his objective — he had his, and she had hers …
“Respect me. After all, I’m an actress, not a politician …”
The man burst into laughter again.
“Then dedicate yourself to your thing and don’t play with fire, asshole. But let’s get something straight. Nobody can see himself as he is unless he sees himself separated, divorced from the human race, radically separated, a leper, alone, with his own kind …”
Almost crying, she told him she couldn’t, that what he wanted was impossible, and he insulted her — You cunt, you fucking white cunt — and she gave something like a sigh of joy …
“You’d have to be pure black, a black from Africa before he was brought here, before mixing, and not even then could you live separated …”
“Shut up, Aretha. Shut up, whore …”
Triumphantly, Diana told him there were no pure blacks in America; they were all descended from whites as well … “I’m not saying that to offend you. I’m saying it so you’ll think you share something with me …”
“Shut up, whore. You don’t have a drop of black blood, you don’t have a mulatto child …”
She said she’d like to give in to that temptation, but of her own free will, not to prove a point. “I don’t want to use my sex to win arguments.”