“It’s your fault. You should have drawn the line the first time I was with another woman.”
“Tender and evil. How do you expect …?”
“For years you’ve put up with my infidelities …”
“Excuse me. I can’t compete anymore with all these imaginative efforts and the fantasy of all the women in the world …”
“By maintaining our love, we ended up killing it — you’re right …”
She hurled the glass, heavy as an ashtray, at me, hitting my lower lip. I gave the melancholy panda a melancholy look, stood up, rubbing my painful lip, and left forever.
XXVIII
I didn’t find Mario Moya. He was at a conference on population growth in Bucharest and wouldn’t be back for two weeks. I shrugged and hoped the matter could wait. That was more or less the amount of time it would take to finish filming in Santiago. Then all of us would go back to … Where would Diana go? Where would I go? Would we stay together? I doubted it. Her husband was waiting for her in Paris. In Los Angeles, a Black Panther whom she talked to on the telephone at three in the morning. In Jeffersontown, Iowa, an idealized lost boyfriend, a midwestern Tristan who by now, perhaps, was a potbellied pharmacist, swollen with Miller beer, a fanatical Chicago Cubs fan.
I had no illusions. She wouldn’t go along with me to some idyllic ivy-covered American campus. What I didn’t want was for anything to interrupt present time, our time together in Santiago and later, with a little luck, a few days in Mexico City, a rendezvous in Paris … I did have illusions of our spending a summer together on Mallorca, an island we both adored, where I had recently spent time exploring with a marvelous friend, the writer Hélène Cixous, and where Diana and Ivan had a house …
Anything, I told myself on the flight back to Durango, anything but losing her for these last two weeks. One possibility came to my mind incessantly, excluding all others. I was her lover because they would not allow her real lover, the leader of the Black Panthers, to enter Mexico. Should I anticipate her rebuff, the break between us? Should I be the one to take the initiative and break with her before she, going even further, abandoned me, left, and forgot everything we were?
I had called her a few times from the capital. I have a hard time communicating by telephone. The invisibility of the person I’m talking to fills me with impatience and anguish. I can’t match the words with the facial expression. I can’t know if the person talking to me is alone or with someone, dressed or naked, made-up or clean-faced. The more technology advances, the more we compensate for our moral or imaginative deficiency with the only weapon available: lies. I’ve just stepped out of the shower. I’m naked. I’m just walking out the door. I’m sorry. I’m alone. I’m alone. I’m alone.
“I love you, Diana.”
“Words are very pretty and don’t cost much.”
“I miss you.”
“And yet you aren’t here. Well, well.”
“I’ll be back on Friday. We’ll spend the weekend together.”
“I’m dying of impatience. ’Bye.”
I didn’t have time to tell her that I was afraid for her, that she should watch out, that it was for that reason I’d gone to the capital, to try to find something out and protect her. But my relations with the Díaz Ordaz government were terrible. I had only one friend in it, my schoolmate Mario Moya, Undersecretary of Internal Affairs, and he was away.
“I came here for your sake, Diana. I’m here because of you,” I would have wanted to shout to her, but I was uncertain about things. There was no hurry, I told myself. I was much more concerned now with knowing what her expression had been when she spoke so abruptly to me. Would that be the next technological advance — a telephone with a screen so we can see the face of the person speaking to us? What an atrocious violation of our privacy, I told myself, what infinite complications: always being ready, hair combed, makeup fresh, dressed (or undressed, depending). Or quickly messing up one’s hair to justify one’s drowsiness: “You woke me up, darling. I was sleeping — alone.” And a paunchy, bearded guy in a T-shirt next to her, watching football on television and chugging a mug of beer.
I began to be haunted by the idea that Diana was a work of art that had to be destroyed to be possessed. In sex, as in art, interrupted pleasure is a poison, but it also stimulates an ambiguity that is the amniotic fluid of both passion and art. Could I come out of this ecstasy at the cost of destroying Diana, the object that caused it? Should I, in other words, anticipate her? Should I ensure the possibility of continued pleasure in its unique atmosphere of ambiguity, of might-have-been or might-have-not-been, nothing resolved, everything in the marvelous realm of the possible, where alternatives, for a story or for a passion, multiply and open like a fan that compromises but enriches our freedom?
I landed in Santiago at five in the afternoon, still unable to answer my own questions.
The ride from the airport to Diana’s house seemed especially long this time. The tedium of the town, its stores closing and their metal gates crashing down like deafening waterfalls of steel, was broken only by the swish of the trees and the growing shadow of the mountain, which dominated the city. I saw nervous turkeys and scarred cactus fences covered with the markings of lovers — names (Agapito loves Cordelia), linked hearts — mortal wounds that left dark scars on the green flesh.
“What’s going on?” I asked the cabdriver. “Why are we going so slowly?”
“It’s a demonstration. Another student protest. Why don’t they spend their time studying? Bunch of lazy bastards.”
The town square smelled of mustard. A vague, depressing cloud covered it. People ran for the side streets, coughing, covering their noses with handkerchiefs, sweaters, newspapers. I imagined the governor barking behind a window. I saw the young leader Carlos Ortiz run by, blood pouring down his face.
“Close your window, señor, and hold on.”
He made a U-turn and escaped toward the neighborhood where my temporary home, my papers, and my books were. I felt the landscape of Santiago falling to pieces, its inhabitants rapidly losing their features …
XXIX
The expression on Azucena’s face told me something was up. She never showed anything, and I knew nothing of her emotions. Sometimes we chatted, very cordially, as I’ve said. We were linked by language — lines of poetry we all learned in Spanish-language schools: “Yesterday’s gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived.”
I respected her, as I’ve also said, for her dignity, her pride in doing well what it had fallen to her to do well in this world. In the little world of Hollywood transplanted to Santiago, she was the only one, in the end, who was neither sorry for herself nor devoured by a desire to rise in the world. She was superior to her mistress. She didn’t want to be someone else. She was someone else. She was herself.
Now she received me in a dimly lit, strangely silent house. She had an unaccustomed grimace on her face, and it took me a while to find in it any sympathy, any affection, any solidarity with the other Hispanic person present. For a moment I felt perfectly melodramatic, like the poet Rodolfo asking his Bohemian companions why they’re walking around so silent, why they’re weeping. Mimí is dead. Azucena was holding back, unintentionally of course, something like a death announcement.