“But Saint John Chrysostom prohibited even chaste love, saying it succeeded only in making passion greater, adding more flames to desire,” I recalled.
“Well, now, don’t you see why it’s the most exciting thing in the world? Sex without sin is like an egg without salt.”
I always fell into his trap. Buñuel preached chastity as the means to augment pleasure, desire, the thirst for the amatory body. He was a reader of Saint Augustine and understood that the Fall only meant that the law of love had been broken. Love has a law, which is to love God. To love ourselves is to break the law of God and start down the road of perdition, which wends lower and lower through the black hole of sex to the final hole of death. To return to love means to pass through chastity, but for that we need help. We can’t do it alone. To return to God from the hell of flesh and its self-gratification is like defying the law of gravity. Not falling but flying.
“Who’s going to help us?” I asked.
“Not power,” he said passionately. “Never those wielding power, whether it’s civil or ecclesiastic. Only the poor, the rebels, the outcasts, children, lovers … only those can help us.”
He said all this with great emotion, and through my memory paraded the abandoned children of his movies, the ardent couples, the damned beggars, the priests humiliated because of their Christian devotion, all those who renounced the vanity of this world and hoped only for the embrace of a brother. Rebels, too? I asked Buñuel. Rebels help us as well?
“If they don’t obey any power,” Luis answered. “If they are totally gratuitous.”
At the time, Buñuel was working on a script for a film he never made, based on the story of the French anarchist Ravachol, who started out as a thief and a murderer. Back in the provinces, he had killed an old ragman and an elderly hermit, violated the grave of a countess, and stabbed to death two spinsters who owned a forge. All that was gratuitous. But one fine day he declared that he’d stolen the hermit’s and the spinster’s money and the jewels buried with the countess for the sake of the anarchist cause.
Even so, the anarchists did not give him their blessing until Ravachol moved to Paris and, with an assistant named Simon the Biscuit, dedicated himself to making bombs he placed at judges’ doors. Unfortunately, the Biscuit confused doors, and it wasn’t the judges who died but some innocent passers-by. That in itself, observed Buñuel, gave a fantastic gratuitousness to the whole thing.
Only when Ravachol was executed on July 11, 1892, did the anarchists claim him as one of their own, canonizing him and even coining a verb, “to ravacholize,” which means to explode into pieces which inspired a cute song that goes something like “Dansons la ravachole. Vive le son de l’explosion!”
“When he ascended the gallows, he shouted, Long live anarchism! He was a bastard and used rouge to cover the pallor of his cheeks.”
“Do you approve of him, Luis?”
“Yes, in theory.”
“What does that mean?”
“That anarchism is marvelous as an idea of freedom — you have no one above you. No superior power, no chains. There isn’t an idea more marvelous than that. There isn’t one less practicable, either. But we’ve got to maintain the utopia of ideas. If we don’t, we become animals. Practical life is also a black hole that leads us to death. Revolution, anarchy, and freedom are the prizes of thought. The only throne they have is in our heads.”
He went on to say that there was no more beautiful idea than blowing up the Louvre and telling humanity and all its creations to go to hell — but only so long as it remained an idea, so long as it was never put into practice. Why don’t we make clear distinctions between ideas and practice? What makes us turn ideas into practice? Doesn’t that inevitably plunge us into failure and despair? Aren’t dreams enough in themselves? We’d go crazy if we asked each dream we have at night either to turn into reality or else. Has anyone ever been able to shoot a dream?
“Yes,” I replied, “but not with rifles. It took spears. The Aztec emperor Montezuma summoned everyone who’d dreamed of the end of his empire and the arrival of the conquistadors and had them put to death …”
He looked at his watch. It was seven. Time to leave. He wasn’t interested in the Aztecs, and Mexico seemed to him a protective wall topped with broken glass.
XXVII
I’m sitting opposite my wife, Luisa Guzmán, in the spacious living room of the house we shared for ten years in the cobblestoned neighborhood of San Angel. Each of us is holding a glass of whiskey, each stares at the other and thinks something, the same thing or something different from what the other thinks. The glasses are heavy, rounded, their thick, rippling bottoms like the eye of an octopus at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea. She’s also hugging her stuffed panda.
I look at her and tell myself we’ll have to do something that bears no resemblance to the rest of our lives. That’s what imagination is all about. But looking at her sitting opposite me, imagining her as she imagines me, I prefer to be clear and concise. During those years, Luisa Guzmán did not manage my social life (she was reclusive) or my financial life (she was supremely indifferent to money). She encouraged my literary life; she was patient about my work as a writer and reader. But what she did manage was my sexual life. Which is to say, she put up no obstacles to it. She thought that by standing aside she was ensuring my next return to her. That’s how it had always been.
In any case, sitting there watching her watch me, with all the burden of memory on our shoulders, I realized that each time she had been one step ahead of me. She could not conceive a fidelity that could withstand the success of my first book. At the age of twenty-nine, I attained a celebrity I myself didn’t celebrate very much. If there’s one thing I’ve always known, it’s that literature is a long apprenticeship that is always open to imperfection when things go well, to perfection when things go badly, and to risk at all times — if we want to deserve what we write. I didn’t believe the praise heaped on me, because I knew I was far from achieving the goals I imagined; I didn’t believe the attacks either. I listened to the voices of my friends, and they encouraged me. I listened to my own voice, and all I heard was this: “Don’t accept success. Don’t repeat it superficially. Set yourself impossible challenges. It’s better to fail by taking the high road than to triumph on the low road. Avoid security. Take chances.”
I don’t know when exactly in our relationship Luisa felt I needed more, needed something more but needed her as well — something that would be the erotic equivalent of literary risk. Or ambition. We laughed a lot when, a week after we fell in love, a very famous Mexican writer visited and berated her for preferring me to him. “I’m handsomer, more famous, and a better writer than your boyfriend.”
Our astonishment was due, more than to anything else, to the great author’s continuing his friendship with her and with me, undeterred. His delirious plea for her hand (or a change of hands) had failed, but his amiable smile never did. Nor did, and this we knew from the start, his limitless ambition — so genial, so well founded, even though he took a dim view of it — to achieve power and glory through writing. Luisa showed me (or confirmed me in the certainty) that it’s better to be a human being than a glorious author. But at times being a person involves greater cruelty than the naĩve promise of literary fame.
Now, as we sat opposite each other, there was no need to tell her I couldn’t do without Diana Soren; hugging her stuffed panda, a glass of whiskey in her hand, she reproached me, without saying a word, for all the accumulated cruelty in our relationship and threw in my face the ease with which I used the mask of literary creation to disguise it. Her eyes told me: You’re ceasing to be a person. As long as you were, I respected your love affairs. But I’ve just now realized you don’t respect yourself. You don’t respect the women you sleep with. You use them as a literary pretext. I refuse to go on being one.