We heard the happy voice of Gabriella calling for us in the maze, summoning us in to lunch …
XXXIII
It was Azucena who told me the most terrible version of Diana’s end. I ran into her quite by chance on the Ramblas in Barcelona sometime in the mid-1980s. I was visiting my friend and literary agent Carmen Balcells on a mission of mercy. I wanted to ask her to support the Ecuadoran novelist Marcelo Chiriboga, unjustly overlooked by everyone but José Donoso and me. He had a minor post in the Foreign Ministry in Quito, where the altitude was suffocating him and the work left him no time to write. What could we do for him?
Seeing Azucena reminded me of the days we’d spent in Mexico and the pleasant experience of her always dignified presence. As we walked toward Paseo de Gracia, where I was staying, she spoke with her head lowered, giving a grim, objective account of the events, which, out of respect for Diana and herself, she did not want to cheapen with sentimentalism.
Azucena went to the United States with Diana for the baby’s funeral in Jeffersontown. On the flight from Paris to New York and then on to Iowa, Diana was calm, with a distant, almost beatific smile on her face, imagining the body in the white coffin that was with her on this trip, a trip she’d made dozens of times before. But on the return flight, from JFK to De Gaulle, something horrible happened. Diana excused herself to go to the lavatory. Three minutes later, she came screaming and running down the aisle, naked. No one dared to touch or stop her until a powerful black man intervened. He wrapped her in a blanket and returned her, suddenly calm but staring intently at the man’s eyes, to her seat next to Azucena in first class. Azucena gave her some sleeping pills and assured the stewardesses that Diana would sleep for the rest of the flight.
She stayed quietly in Paris for some time, sharing the apartment on Boulevard Raspail with Ivan, whom she no longer had relations with. She preferred to pick up boys in bars and hotels, especially hippies with a spiritual air and a dedication to drugs, which she then began, of course, to use seriously, as if they were the next step in her spiritual maturation and her rebellion. But she also belonged to an alcohol culture, and Diana was not a woman who would abandon an earlier phase in her life when she was diving into a new one.
From what Azucena told me, I came to understand an important truth about my old, momentary lover. She loved everything, but not greedily or egoistically. On the contrary, she loved things as a form of generosity toward herself but also toward the world or worlds she was living in. The provincial world of the Midwest and Hollywood, the intellectual world her husband offered her in Paris, the rebellion of the 1960s, liberal causes, the Black Panthers, the Mexican revolutionary — she collected all these worlds so they would go on being hers, but, most of all, so that none would consider her an ingrate, unable to take responsibility for her past. The past was an unfulfilled obligation that she had to bear, even if she failed.
“Is that why she wouldn’t sacrifice anything? Is that why she went back to Iowa with the dead baby?”
“I don’t know,” Azucena said simply. “The truth is that Diana suffered greatly. She would get in trouble and never get out except by getting in more trouble.”
She wanted to stay thin so she could go back to movies. Quick diets made her weak and strained her nerves. To quiet her fears, she would drink more. The alcohol would make her fat. So she’d use more drugs to get thin and stop drinking. She was in and out of one clinic after another. In one, she would dedicate herself to repeating again and again the simplest gestures and tasks. Azucena would visit her every day and see her get up, go to the bathroom, urinate, defecate, eat her breakfast, wash her clothing in the sink, straighten her bed, and climb back in it. But each of those acts, each one, would take two to three hours and wear her out. After sweeping the room, she would sleep till the next morning, when she’d get up, go to the bathroom, and begin the round all over again.
She would stare at Azucena during these times, with a mixture of attitudes and emotions. She would watch her out of the corner of her eye to make sure that Azucena was looking at her, that she was aware of what she was doing, and, most important, that she was approving, applauding her effort and the importance of each one of her actions …
For a long time she stayed in a sanatorium near Paris, overlooking the river. All one could see from her window was factory chimneys. There, Diana set about rediscovering her face, tracing it with her hand in the mirror, as if she were trying to remember herself. That act became a daily ritual. The permanence of her features seemed to depend on it. Without that ritual, Diana would have lost her own face.
One day, though, Azucena noticed that Diana’s fingers no longer followed the shape of her face. Instead — Azucena saw it by coming closer — they drew something else over it. She didn’t want to alarm her. Curious, she observed her for several days, concerned, trying to figure it out. With her finger, the woman was drawing over her face the exterior landscape of the chimneys. She wanted the world. She wanted to create it. She could reproduce it only as an invisible tattoo on her face in a misted-over mirror.
Inside, she was dead. Her interior death preceded her exterior death. The men she was with were, at best, her guards, her jailers. They also used drugs. She saw them as friends one day, enemies the next. She’d run away from them to pick up total strangers outside the hotels near the big train stations — the Gare de Lyon, Austerlitz, the Gare du Nord. The stations for anonymous businessmen, traveling light. Who were they? That was the point: no one. Sex without baggage, nothing that would truly enter her life, because she let nothing go and excess baggage was very heavy and very expensive …
“She simplified her life so much that at the end she was only eating dog food.”
No one would give her work. She imagined a strange movie — Azucena told me that afternoon in Barcelona, sitting in a café on the Ramblas — in which nothing happened but in which everything happened at the same time. There were four simultaneous scenes, with no people, just places, colors, sensations. One place was a desert. That was Mexico. Another place was pure stone. That was Paris. Another place was lights — many, many lights. That was Los Angeles. Another place was snow and night. That was Iowa. She wanted to bring them together in a film, and only then, when all of them were joined, would she enter the picture.
“Know something, Azucena? Now I’m going to go back and see for the last time each one of the places where I’ve lived.”
That was the last thing Diana said to her.
XXXIV
Toward the end of the 1970s, I ran into Diana in a Paris restaurant. She smiled at me fixedly but didn’t recognize me. She was like a dead woman whose eyes hadn’t been closed. Her smile was meant for no one in particular. Her stare was out of phase with the objects before it. A zombie with swollen flesh. A miserable body. A malnourished beauty. I had a useless feeling that I couldn’t keep from overwhelming me. Might I have helped her? Was I in some way guilty for what I was seeing and what was looking at me without recognizing me? Would only a Midwestern boy have made her happy forever? Is there a part of life that won’t let itself be purified? I have no explanation for the inexplicable. But neither does the world.
XXXV
A few years later, I took a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New York. I had just given a series of lectures at some California colleges and decided to reward myself with the luxury of a first-class seat on a jumbo jet so I could sprawl out comfortably for the six-and-a-half-hour flight. There were very few people in first class. After we were all seated, an airline official escorted a splendid woman to the first row. She passed in a cloud of perfume that conjured both Olympus and the jungle: a black woman in a short skirt, with long legs, perfect thighs, marvelous breasts, but a maternal belly, the belly of a goddess of the subjugated earth of Africa and America. Her tensed neck emblematized and betrayed all the cares, fears, and timidity of this lioness, which is what she was, crowned with an animal mane the colors of a sunflower — copper, red, blond, black, pubic.