“Whore, white cunt…”
He called her the next night to ask forgiveness. He tried to explain himself with a humility that seemed suspicious to me. He told her that she wanted to change the system. Then he added, in humble scorn, in the voice of Little Black Sambo, How good you are, how compassionate, and how hypocritical. She had to understand that the system doesn’t change, he said, slowly but surely recovering his normal aggressive tone; the system has to be smashed. She was silent, didn’t get the joke, then said, honestly and with sincere emotion, that she wanted to help them. “But I don’t think I know how …”
“You can begin by not reminding me I’m a mulatto.”
“But you are. I like you like that. I love you like that. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
She should tell him that he, too, was going to give in to temptation, like his ancestors, that he, too, was going to fall for a white slut, that he, too, was going to have a mulatto child with her. What did she think of that? Would she honestly accept it? Wouldn’t she run around screaming, not her, she wasn’t promiscuous, it was a lie, she would never have children that weren’t Aryan, white, Nordic …?
“Me, I’m going to insult all the blacks.” Now the absent mulatto was speaking with a voice like a sea in chains. “All the blacks that should have stayed African and who betrayed their race giving in to temptation and screwing a white woman and having café-au-lait children. Say that, whore. Think that, give me that slap. No matter how far away you are, Aretha, I swear I’m going to feel your slap. It’ll hurt even more because you’re far away, screwing a white man. I can see you from here. There’s not enough distance between California and Mexico for me not to see you or smell your blond cunt and spit on it …”
“Don’t mention names, don’t say names …”
“Don’t be a jerk. They know everything. They tape everything. Are you out of your head?”
“I’m Aretha. My name is Aretha.”
“Make yourself black.”
“How? I’m white.”
“You’ll figure out how to do it. I can’t accept you if you don’t.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Fuck off, bitch.”
The next night was the last call. He spoke very calmly and said that Diana’s error was to think everyone was guilty, including her, including the oppressors. If that were so, they’d all be innocent. No, only the kids who didn’t leave the ghetto were oppressed, the drug-addict mothers, the fathers forced to steal, the men castrated by the Klan — those were the oppressed, not the poor oppressors.
“Know how you can make yourself black, Aretha? Have you figured out that in this country the only crimes people get convicted for committing are crimes committed by blacks? Have you realized that black victims never arouse compassion, only white ones? That’s what I’m asking you to do, Aretha: make yourself into a black victim and you’ll see how they throw you into the street like a dog so the trucks roll over you and turn you into a bloody, rotten chunk of meat. Commit a crime as a black and pay for it as a black. Be a victim as a black so nobody feels sorry for you.”
The black started laughing and crying at the same time. My hand was shaking, but I hung up carefully and returned to bed before she did, as I had all the other nights. I pretended to be asleep. Diana counted on my deep sleep and the stupor of the hangover I’d have in the morning. She came back in and got into bed silently. I could sense that she fell asleep immediately, content, relieved, as if nothing satisfied her more than this nightly exchange of insults, passions, and guilt.
Eyes open, prisoner of the ceiling of this suddenly frozen bedroom, a faded battleground, I repeated to myself over and over, like someone counting sheep, that my passion was nothing compared with those I’d just heard, that having listened to the passion of Diana and her black I should accept that my own was a passing fancy, and that perhaps the honorable thing to do was to give up this arrangement, turn my back on Diana, and go back to my life in Mexico City.
But in the course of that night’s insomnia, which diminished my own passion considerably, another certainty asserted itself little by little, involuntarily, an idea that was part of me though I hadn’t formulated it clearly. I was sorry, I said to myself. Both within myself and in the outside world, I saw manifested the idea that civilized life respects laws while savage life disdains them. I didn’t want to say it or even think it, because it contradicted or, in its own way, disparaged the sorrow I could feel in the rage of Diana’s black lover. Yet despite that, I was as repelled by the idea of black supremacy as of white supremacy. I couldn’t put myself in the shoes of that unknown interlocutor. I didn’t need to tell Diana I couldn’t jive, didn’t swing to black street rhythms …
I wanted to be sincere and to imagine myself, on the other hand, in the sandals of that boy who’d played the part of Juárez. Would I have helped the boy Juárez? Would I have helped him become what he became — a white Indian, a Zapotec with the Napoleonic Code for his pillow, a Cartesian lawyer, a Republican shyster instead of a shaman, a paper pusher instead of a sorcerer in contact with nature and death, animator of the inanimate, owner of things that cannot be possessed, millionaire of misery? What would I have done for the boy Juárez?
Nothing. Diana’s black — her Panther, I decided to call him — knew me better than I knew him and maybe even better than I knew myself. He knew that I could take everything away from him whenever I wanted. Everything. The castrated, hanged, lynched blacks, like milestones in American history — they are also a book of martyrs for innocent blacks. The Panther decided he would no longer be the victim. God never stopped the homicidal hand of the white Abraham when he sank his dagger into the heart of his son, the black Isaac.
XXV
I had a bad morning, but at lunchtime I decided to visit the club and see if General Agustín Cedillo was there, as he was every day. In the old-fashioned way, he was drinking a cognac before lunch and invited me to sit with him. I had a beer instead of a cognac because no beer in the world is better than ours. It made me feel rather chauvinist, but I was thankful for that feeling. I remembered what Diana had told me James Baldwin said — that a black and a white, because they’re both Americans, know more about themselves and one another than any European knows about either of them. The same thing is true of Mexicans.
The other night I had felt class hatred flare up between the general and me. This afternoon the beer raised my spirits and made me recognize myself in him. In one voice we both ordered “two Tehuacans,” knowing well that in no other part of the world would anyone understand what that mineral water was. Then he invited me to join him. The ritual of dining — from ordering quesadillas with huitlacoche (only we Mexicans understand and enjoy eating the black cancer of corn) to being handed a basket of hot tortillas and delicately picking one out, spreading guacamole on it, adding a dash of chile, and rolling it all up; from the diminutive and possessive references to all edibles (your little beans, your little chiles, your little tortillas) to the guarded, familiar, tender allusions to health, weather, age (he’s not well, the rain’s letting up, he’s getting so elderly) — created a favorable climate for bringing up the theme that concerned me. It also allowed me to free myself, in an involvement the general knew nothing of, from the extreme alienation, still buzzing in my ears, of that pair Diana Soren and her Panther. They were other. But everything at the table was Mexican, right down to my possessive when I addressed General Cedillo: My general, my general, dear, oh dear. That was it: he was mine.