“You said the other night that my girlfriend should be careful. Why?”
“Look, my friend, I’m not a professional suspicion monger. I don’t go around seeing enemies behind every tree. But the fact is, here and there agitators do exist. You understand me. We wouldn’t want Miss Soren to find herself compromised for an indiscretion.”
“Do you mean Black Panthers there and the League guerrillas here?”
“Not exactly. I mean FBI everywhere, that’s what I mean. Watch out.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
“You’re a friend of the gentleman who runs the Department of Internal Affairs.”
“You mean Mario Moya Palencia. We went to school together. He’s an old, close friend.”
“Go visit him in Mexico City. Be careful. Watch out for your girlfriend. It’s not worth the trouble.”
When Diana came back that night, I told her I’d be leaving for Mexico City the next day. I had to attend to some unfinished business. She knew I’d left everything hanging in midair to follow her to Santiago. In a few days, a week at the most, I’d be back. She looked at me with a melancholy expression, trying to guess the truth, imagining that perhaps I’d guessed the truth about her but laying open a range of possibilities. How much did I know? Was this the end? Was I leaving for good? Was this the end of our relationship? Was I being drawn back by my wife, my daughter, my business in the capital?
“I’m leaving everything here — my books, my papers, my typewriter …”
“Take the toothpaste with you.”
Nothing lessened the sadness in her eyes.
“Just one tube. Everything else stays in the pawnshop.”
“In the pawnshop? I like that. Maybe all of us are only in the pawnshop here.”
“Don’t start imagining God as some Jewish pawnbroker.”
“No. But I do believe in God. So much, you know, that I can’t imagine He put us on earth just to be no one.”
“I love you, Diana.” I kissed her.
XXVI
The first thing I did when I got back to Mexico City was to call my friend Luis Buñuel and ask to see him. Once or twice a month I’d visit him between four and six in the afternoon. His conversation nourished and stimulated me in extraordinary ways. Buñuel not only had witnessed the century (they were coevals — he was born in 1900) but had been one of its greatest creators. Everyone knows that, even as they demand automatic writing and a “disordering of the senses,” the French theoreticians of surrealism have given us beautiful essays and other texts written with Cartesian clarity. Beyond mere provocation, the French Surrealists seem not to compromise their rationalist culture or to give it back that blast of madness that must have animated Villon or Rabelais. But the Surrealists without theory, the intuitive ones like Buñuel in Spain or Max Ernst in Germany, succeed in incorporating their culture into their art, giving the past a critical presence and placing historically perverse limits on modern pretensions to novelty. Everything is rooted in distant memories and ancient soil. Dig them up and true modernity bursts forth: the presence of the past, a warning against the pride of progress. The Spanish mystics, the picaresque novel, Cervantes, and Goya were the fathers of Buñuel’s surrealism, just as the cruel, excessive nocturnal fantasy of the Germanic fairy tale was mother to Ernst.
Buñuel’s house in Colonia del Valle lacked all character. That, in effect, was its character: it had none. A two-story red brick building, it looked like any middle-class house in the world. The living room resembled a dentist’s waiting room, and although I never saw the artist’s bedroom, I know he liked to look at bare walls and to sleep on the floor or, at most, on a wooden bed with no mattress or springs. Those penances fit nicely with his strict morality, oppressively bourgeois and puritanical for some, ascetically monastic for others. His house was almost devoid of decoration, except for a portrait of Buñuel as a young man painted by Dalí in the 1920s. Since World War II they’d been enemies, but Luis kept the portrait in his vestibule as a heartfelt homage to his youth and also to a lost friendship …
He’d receive guests around a liquor cabinet in a room equipped with a real bar he’d bought at the Liverpool department store around the corner. It was as well stocked as the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York — the place where Buñuel liked to drink the “best martinis in the world,” as he put it. Now he was mixing up a buñueloni for me, a delicious but intoxicating mixture of gin, Carpano, and Angostura, and proclaiming, “I drink a liter of alcohol every day. Alcohol’s going to kill me.”
“But you look very well,” I said, admiring his robust physique at the age of seventy, his well-rounded shoulders, his powerful chest, and his arms, strong but thin.
“I just saw the doctor. Here’s the list: I’ve got emphysema, diverticulosis, high cholesterol, and a gigantic prostate. If I deal with them one at a time, I’m in perfect shape. But if they all gang up on me, I’ll drop dead.”
Generally, he wore short-sleeved sport shirts, which accentuated the bareness of his peasant-philosopher head. His baldness and his face creased by time made him look like Picasso, de Falla, Ortega y Gasset. Illustrious Spaniards end up looking like retired picadors. Buñuel came from the same region as Goya, from Aragon, a famous breeding ground of stubborn individuals. The truth is that no one dreams more than the Aragonese. Their wild dreams are about witches’ Sabbaths and communication between men, animals, and insects. Everyone knows that ants are the beings that communicate among themselves best — telepathically, over huge distances — and I think Luis Buñuel had a passion for entomology because the Aragonese, like ants, communicate with one another across space and time. They’re in contact through their nightmares, their witches, their drums.
He wasn’t pleased with me that afternoon. He was a confirmed believer in matrimonial fidelity and in the inviolability of man and wife. It seemed intolerable to him that a couple, having made a pact to live together, should break it. He reproached me openly for abandoning Luisa Guzmán, whom he loved a lot and whom he’d used in one or two of his pictures. But along with that exaltation of the bonds of matrimony, Buñuel did not hide his horror of the sexual act. It was rare in his pictures to see a naked person, except as a necessary counterpoint to the plot; there was never a kiss, which seemed an “indecency” to him, and never fornication, only desire, rolling around in the gardens of the Golden Age, desire forever unsatisfied so as to maintain the flame of passion at its highest intensity.
I looked at his green eyes, as distant as a sea I’d never sailed, and through them I saw sail the ship of Tristan, Buñuel’s secret hero, the hero of chaste, unconsummated love. The Middle Ages was Buñuel’s real era, his natural time, and it was there his gaze navigated; he was accidentally anchored in our “detestable time.” He had to be seen and understood as someone exiled from the past, a foreigner from the thirteenth century almost naked among us, dressed in a short-sleeved sport shirt like a hermit monk given only a loincloth to cover his shame.
It was from that lost era that Buñuel got the idea he was repeating to me now — of sex as a habit of animals, more bestiarum, in the words of Saint Augustine. “Sex,” he was saying, “is a hairy spider, an all-devouring tarantula, a black hole from which you never emerge if you give in to it.” He was deaf (again, like Goya) and had abandoned the use of music in his pictures unless it fit in naturally: a radio, an organ grinder, an orchestra at a ski resort. Before, he’d filled his movies with the infinitely impassioned, sweet, stormy refrains of Wagner’s Liebestraum. The music of Tristan and Isolde was the cantata to chaste love from which the tarantulas of sex have been expelled.