“Her husband says he is …”
That sent the line of curious spectators into waves of laughter.
Diana Soren paid no attention. She was too busy taking photos of the tiny body in the white coffin. She took 180 photographs of the dead child.
XXXII
At the end of the 1970s, I met Ivan Gravet in Holland. We’d both been invited to spend a long weekend in the country at the castle of our mutual friend Gabriella van Zuylen. Gabriella is a charming, very beautiful woman, a lover of gardens and a friend of Russell Page, the magnificent British park designer, about whom she wrote a monograph.
The castle is an impressive pile, especially because in Holland’s flat landscape it stands out like a mountain. Gabriella has dedicated herself to extending, completing, and beautifying the tranquil, bovine Dutch landscape with the mystery of nature as conceived by the baroque imagination — contrived, varied, circular.
Among the curiosities of her garden was a labyrinth of very high hedges whose perfectly geometrical form, as regular as a botanical spiral, could only be appreciated fully from the roof of the castle. But if you were inside the maze, you quickly lost any sense of its form, and lost your way as well. Sooner or later, Gabriella’s thirty guests all explored the maze and all got lost until she came to our rescue, laughing.
My wife, who’s afraid of spaces without exits, refused to go in the maze and went off with Gabriella to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. I ventured in, willfully desiring to get lost. First of all, I wanted to play along with the maze’s intention. Secondly, I was convinced that to enter the maze with the goal of getting out was obviously how you’d become the prisoner of the mythic bull who inhabits it. But if you got lost, losing the will to survive, it would please the Minotaur, make him your ally, allay his suspicions. That’s how Theseus should have proceeded.
I did not have Ariadne’s thread. But when I suddenly found myself face-to-face with Ivan Gravet inside the maze, I decided that Diana Soren was the thread on which, in a certain way, both of us were relying at that moment — only at that moment. I’d seen him, of course, since Friday, at Gabriella’s magnificent dinners and lunches. At night, we were supposed to wear evening clothes, and Ivan was the sole exception, wearing a jacket I can only compare to those I saw in photos of Stalin or Mao: a gray tunic with very long sleeves, buttoned to the neck and worn without a tie. It wasn’t what was then called — during an attack of Third World fashion — a Mao or Nehru jacket. Ivan Gravet’s tunic looked as if it had either been bought in the GUM store in Red Square or been handed on from some member of the Politburo. The last time I’d seen one like it was in a photograph of the justly forgotten Malenkov. Khrushchev wore only suits and ties. In Ivan Gravet’s outfit — which he didn’t change the whole three nights we spent at the castle — there was nostalgia for a lost Russian world; there was humor, but there was also mourning…
We laughed when we met. We couldn’t have spoken any other way, said Ivan. Why? I asked; I’ve never said anything, no one would connect us. We’re in another country, I added brutally, and besides, the wench is dead. I was curious to know more, but I also wanted to force Ivan to react within the brief time we had in the maze. How strange: I felt that both of us ascribed less importance and devoted less time to this labyrinth, created to capture forever those who venture into it, than we did to going through customs at an airport.
“It’s that you didn’t know the difficulty of loving a woman you can’t help, change, or leave,” he said.
I agreed. Diana was part of a past that no longer concerned me. For eight years, I’d been living with my new wife, a healthy, modern, active, beautiful, and independent woman. We had two children and a loving sex life in which we treated each other with respect without submitting to each other, aware that the continuity of our relationship depended on our never taking it as something certain, customary, given, with no effort on our part.
Far from Diana, far from my past, I still felt close to the literary joy I’d recovered. I did not burn the pages I’d written in Santiago with Diana at my side, but I had leapt from them, with more strength and conviction than ever, to the work that was waiting for me, that summoned me, and that gave me the greatest happiness in my life. I hadn’t wanted to finish writing it. No novel gave me so many intelligent readers, readers who were close to me, who were permanent, who mattered to me … With that novel, I found my real readers, those whom I wanted to create, discover, keep. Those who, like me, wanted to discover the figure of greatest essential insecurity — not worn-out psychologies but helpless figures developing at another level of communication and discourse: language, history, epochs, absences, nonexistences as characters, and the novel as the meeting place of times and beings that would never otherwise encounter one another.
Ivan Gravet answered me affectionately. He was not offended by my little quotation from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. We were writers and men of the world. I had to understand two things about Diana’s fate. Diana and he had never protested the FBI’s lies, never succumbed to a surge of the racism in their Caucasian genes. There had been no doubt that the FBI had played that card. To protest the libel could have been taken as disgust for or rejection of a black baby. They, Diana and Ivan, saw the trap. But Diana’s anger was directed against the political manipulation of her sex. The FBI had reduced her to a sex object. It had presented her as a white woman hungry for a black man. Besides, finally, it was untrue. The father wasn’t black — as he and I know well. Nor was the baby.
“Did she have to exhibit it in Jeffersontown? I didn’t think public opinion there mattered to her.”
“It did. She never wanted to be judged as a schizoid personality — the small-town girl split between home, family, spiritual peace, middle-class stability, Christmas and Thanksgiving, and all the rest …”
“Did she have to photograph the child’s body? It seems to me a—”
“She had to be the witness to her own death. That’s all. She wanted to see how she would be seen if she came back to her town dead. She wanted to see the faces, hear the comments while she still could. That baby was a substitute Diana. See? The wench died in her own country. And she dies all the time.”
“Forgive me. Je suis désolé,” I said and remembered Diana.
He squeezed my arm. “She wanted to respond to oppression with something more than politics, which she didn’t understand. She thought sexuality and the romantic life would be her contribution to a world filled with both. She didn’t realize that one thing leads to another. You know? Rebellion leads to sexual excess, which leads to alcohol, alcohol to drugs, drugs to terror, to violence, to madness …”
“Then she will have to be judged just as she didn’t want to be judged — as the small-town girl who couldn’t resist the evil of a world she was unprepared for…”
“No. I loved her. Excuse me: I still love her.”
“I don’t anymore.”
“She was politically naïve. I warned her many times that democratic governments know that the best way to control a revolutionary movement is to create it. Instead of embodying it, the way totalitarian regimes do, they invent and control it and thus have an enemy they can count on. She never understood that. Again and again, she fell into the trap. The FBI decided to finish her off with a huge laugh.”
“I thought you were going to defend her.”
“Of course. Dear friend, Diana Soren was an ideal being. She epitomized the idealism of her generation, but she was incapable of overcoming a corrupt society and an immoral government. That’s all. Think of her that way.”