“Diana?” I asked, as I might have asked out loud, except that now I said her name almost in a whisper, as if I were afraid of interrupting a novena to the Virgin.
“Wait here. She’s on her way,” said Azucena, inviting me to stay in the living room.
Night was falling. Lew Cooper wasn’t there as he usually was, standing at the liquor cabinet mixing a cocktail justified by the hard work involved in exterior shots. The bedroom door was closed. But my clothes were there and, in the bathroom, my Italian toothpaste. Impatiently, angry, I walked to the corner where my typewriter, my papers, and my books were laid out. Someone had imposed order on everything. Everything was arranged in perfectly symmetrical piles.
I went back to find Azucena, to protest this violation of my creativity. Instead, I found Diana, divided by the light of the gallery at nightfall, half light, half shadow, perfectly cut in two, like one of Ingres’s female portraits, my beloved Diana Soren. She walked toward me, separated from herself by the light, yielding not an inch of her luminous person to her dark person, or vice versa. The contrast was such that even her short blond hair seemed white on the side of the gallery window and black on the wall side. The charm was broken by her outfit. In a pink quilted robe buttoned to her throat, totally domestic, and a pair of fluffy slippers, Diana Soren looked like an upside-down mushroom, a walking thumbtack …
It wasn’t that — not the magic of her appearing between light and shadow, not how absurd I instinctively judged her appearance to be — which kept me from walking over to her, embracing her, and kissing her as I’d always done. She never reached me. She stopped and sat down in a rattan chair, the most imperial object in this house devoid of pretensions, and she stared at me intently. I sat down in the thatch-backed chair opposite my desk and crossed my arms over my chest. Perhaps Diana had read my mind. Perhaps she imagined, as I did, how our love would end and what would follow it. It occurred to me to tell her, before saying anything else, how useless my trip to Mexico City had been. I found out nothing about the FBI threat General Cedillo had hinted at. I was going to tell her, but she spoke first, quickly, brutally.
“Forgive me. I have another lover.”
I controlled my confusion, my rage, my curiosity …
“In the U.S.?” I asked without daring to mention my telephone indiscretions.
“Another man is living here.”
“Who?” I asked, not daring now to think about The Return of Clint Eastwood and telling myself that at least they wouldn’t allow a Black Panther to cross the border. The stuntman? I laughed at myself for even thinking it. I laughed even more at the ludicrous possibility of old Lew Cooper’s sleeping in my bed, next to Diana.
“Carlos Ortiz.”
“Carlos Ortiz?”
“The student. You saw him here in Santiago. He says that he knows you and admires you and that he’s spoken with you.”
“Suppose he hated me and refused to speak with me.” I tried to smile.
“Excuse me?”
“This isn’t about excuses. It’s about talking things over.”
“I don’t like explaining myself.”
I stood up, enraged. “I just mean talking.”
“We can talk if you like.”
“Why, Diana? I thought we were very happy.”
“We also knew it would end.”
“But not like this, suddenly, prematurely, before the filming was over, and with a boy—”
“Younger than I am?”
“No, that doesn’t matter.”
“Well, what does? The fact that I hurt you, humiliated you — do you think I like doing that?”
“Not having carried our love to its end, not having used it up completely, that—”
“I don’t think there’s anything left.”
“Diana, I offered you everything I could — to go on being together if that’s what you wanted, to go together to some university,” I said stupidly, confused by a sudden vague feeling of sentimental blindness.
She was right to answer me like this, brutally, without sentiment. “Don’t be naïve. Do you really think I’d waste my life in some shitty hick town covered with ivy but made of nothing? You must be crazy.”
“Why crazy? You’ve been running away from another hick town, and you never want to give yourself the opportunity, the chance to go home and then leave again, be renewed.”
“Darling, you’re delirious. I felt suffocated in that town. I would have left there no matter what.”
Gently I asked her to explain. I think she sensed how I felt, because she added something I liked. She said I shouldn’t misunderstand her, that in Jeffersontown she felt suffocated not only by its smallness but by the immensity of the nature surrounding it. It was a world she couldn’t grasp.
And in the world you did choose, I asked her, do you feel protected? Will you ever know who you are, Diana? You have to be protected by other people, by the sect, by the beautiful people, the jet set, the Black Panthers, the revolutionaries — anyone, as long as there’s noise, weeping, joy, commotion, belonging. That’s what you want, that’s what I don’t give you, because I’m stuck in a corner writing for hours at a time?
I was making a fool of myself. I’d lost control. I was falling into everything I hated. I deserved Diana’s response.
“I know who I am.”
“No, you don’t!” I shouted. “That’s your problem. I heard you talking with that black man on the telephone. You want to be someone else, you want to absorb the suffering of others so you can be another person. You think no one suffers more than a black person. When are you going to learn, you fool, that suffering is universal, even white?”
“Carlos is teaching me all about it.”
“Carlos?” I said it like an echo not only of my own voice but of my own soul, incapable of telling Diana that I’d just seen him, injured, in a demonstration in Santiago.
“It’s in your books,” Diana said coldly.
“Did he tell you that?”
“No, I read them. I thought you were a real revolutionary. Someone who puts his actions where he puts his words. It’s not true. You write, but you do nothing. You’re like an American liberal.”
“You’re crazy. You don’t understand anything. Creation is an action, the only action. You don’t have to die in order to imagine death. You don’t have to be imprisoned in order to describe what a prison’s like. And if you get shot or murdered, you’re useless. You don’t write any more books.”
“Che went out to be killed.”
“He was a martyr, a hero. A writer is something much more modest, Diana.” I kept on talking to her, exasperated but now, possibly, in control of my arguments.
“Carlos would climb a mountain to fight. You wouldn’t.”
“So what’s that got to do with you? You’re going to follow him? Going to be the warrior’s woman?”
“No. His base is here. He fights here. He’d never follow me.”
“That makes things work out fine for you, right? Knowing that poor kid won’t follow you. Unless he gives up the guerrilla business and becomes a gigolo. Poor Diana. You want to be someone else? Do you want to be the midwife of universal revolution? Do you want the role of Joan of Arc married to Malcolm X? Let me tell you something. Try to be a good actress. That’s your problem, sweetheart. You’re a mediocre, bland actress, and you want to compensate for your mediocrity with all the furies of your real-life person. Why don’t you really work at the roles you get in movies? Why do you reject them and take on characters you’ve only heard talked about?”
“You don’t understand a thing. I’ve already had you.”
“One month three weeks and four days.”