Diana (5 page)

Ernesto Guevara, dead, laid out like Mantegna's Christ, was our era's most beautiful cadaver. Che Guevara was the Saint Thomas More of the Second (or Millionth) European Discovery of the New World. Ever since the sixteenth century, we've been the utopia where Europe can cleanse itself of its sins of blood, avarice, and death. And Hollywood has been the U.S. Sodom that waves revolutionary flags to disguise its vices, its hypocrisy, its love of money pure and simple. Was Diana different, or was she just one more in that legion of Californian utopians, now purified, thanks to her husband, by French revolutionary sentimentalism?

I never stopped having these thoughts. But Diana's charm, her seduction, her infinite sexual capacity intoxicated me, intrigued me, obliterated my better judgment. After all, I said to myself, what could I criticize in her that I couldn't just as well criticize in myself? Hypocrite actress, my double, my sister. Diana Soren.

I had a peach taste in my mouth. Let me admit it: before that night, I knew nothing about fruit-flavored vaginal creams. During the nights that followed I would discover strawberry, pineapple, orange flavors, reminding me of the ice creams I loved to lick, when I was a boy, in a marvelous icecream parlor, the Salamanca, where unique Mexican fruits turned into subtle, vaporous snows, melted at the peak of their perfection when they touched our tongues and palates, yielding their essence in the instant of their evaporation. I would imagine Diana with the tastes of my childhood in her vagina—mamey, guava, sapodilla, custard apple, mango … She made marvelous use of this bizarre commercial product, fruit-flavored vaginal cream, which my imagination could take hold of, something it could never do with the lingerie she kept in the hotel-room dresser. I won't try to describe that. It was indescribable. A provocation, a gift, a madness. The quality of the lace and the silk, the way it intertwined, opened and closed, revealed and concealed, imitated and transformed, appeared and disappeared, contrasted wonderfully with that androgynous warrior-maiden simplicity I've already noted: Diana the fighting saint, Diana the Parisian
gamine.
I censored myself. She hated that word.
Désolé.

What a glance, only a glance (because something kept me from touching the contents of her dresser, delighting in those textures) made me do was to see, touch, and delight in the flesh that could be hidden within such delirious objects. How incredible: a girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and underneath that ordinary costume the intimacies of a goddess. Which goddess?

She herself gave me a clue the second night of our love. During the first, she had secretly guided me toward her lingerie by sitting on my lap and changing her voice, whispering into my ear in a little girl's voice, lift up my little skirt, you will lift up my little skirt, won't you? aren't you going to touch my panties? touch my panties, honey, pretty please with sugar on it, lift up my little skirt and take off my panties, don't be afraid, I'm only ten years old but I won't tell anyone, tell me what you're touching, darling, tell me what you feel when you lift up my little skirt and touch my little pussy and then you take off my panties.

The second night, naked, stretched out on the bed, she evoked other spaces, other lights. She was in the auditorium of her high school in Iowa. It was nightfall. Outside, it had snowed. All day, they'd been rehearsing carols for the Christmas Eve party. She and he had stayed behind to practice a bit more. It gets late, suddenly the December night falls, blue and white. There was a skylight in the auditorium. Leaning back, the two of them looking up, they saw the clouds scud by. Then there were no more clouds. There was only the moon. The moon illuminated them. She was fourteen. That was the first time she made love completely, virginally, with a man …

It was then I found out which goddess she was, or rather, which goddesses, because she was several. She was Artemis, Apollo's sister, virgin hunter whose arrows hasten the death of the impious, goddess of the moon. She was Cybele, patron of those orgiasts who in her honor castrated themselves by moonlight, surrounding the goddess flanked by the lions she used to dominate nature. She wore a crown of towers. Diana was Astarte, Syria's nocturnal goddess, who, with the moon under her control, moved the forces of birth, fertility, decay, and death. She was, finally and especially, Diana, her own name, a goddess whose only mirror is a lake where she and her tutelary sphere, the moon, may reflect themselves. Diana and her screen. Diana and her camera. Diana and her sacrifice, her celebrity, her arrows rising and falling in the implacable ratings of the box office.

She was Diana Soren, an American actress who came to Mexico to make a cowboy film in some spectacular mountains near the city of Santiago. Filming would begin tomorrow, January 2, in set 6 of Churubusco Studios, Mexico City.

On the set, she stopped belonging to me. The hair people, the makeup people, the costume people took control of her. But Diana would trust her real makeup only to Azucena, a Catalan, her secretary, lady's maid, cook, and masseuse. That first morning on the set, marginalized, I had a great time examining the ointments Azucena used to make Diana beautiful. My mouth still tasted of peach. My Joan of Arc was lubricated with formulas that would have caused any medieval witch to be instantly burned at the stake if she had dared supply them secretly to the desperate, unsatisfied women in the villages of Brabant, Saxony, and Picardy. A concentrated anticellulite, multithinning gel to be applied daily to the stomach, hips, and buttocks until it completely penetrated her biomicrospheres; a thinning transdiffuser based on osmoactive systems of continuous diffusion; a restructuring and lipo-reducing cream to combat fatty skin; a translucent pink exfoliant foam to eliminate dead cells; an avocado and marigold unguent to soften her feet; an ox- marrow mask … My God! Could any of those concoctions be good for anything? Would they survive a night of love, a big bash, a good screw, a PRI political speech? Did they merely postpone what we all saw, a world of fat, wrinkled women with cellulite? Did the ointments mask death itself?

And only then, prepared by all that sorcery, both of us surrounded by the clamor of a movie set, isolated in the intimacy of her dressing room on wheels, did we surrender ourselves joyfully to Diana's demanding, inexhaustible love. Covered with balsams but asking to be used—use me, she said, use me up, I want to be used by you. Would I have the refined sense to recognize limits, so I wouldn't pass from use to abuse? She kept me from finding out. I never knew a woman so demanding yet so giving at the same time, smeared with ethereal, perfumed, tasty ointments without which, Diana, I would no longer know how to live.

Love is doing nothing else. Love is forgetting spouses, parents, children, friends, enemies. Love is eliminating all calculation, all preoccupation, all balancing of pros and cons.

It began with the scene on my lap with the panties.

It culminated in the memory of the auditorium, the snow-covered ground, and the light coming through the skylight.

She screwed without stopping.

“Someday,” she said, laughing, in excellent humor, “I'll be in a state of total subjectivity. I mean dead. Make love to me now.”

“Or in the meantime…”

She invited me to go with her on location in Santiago. Two months. The studio had rented her a house. She hadn't seen it yet, but if I went with her, we would be happy.

We parted. She went on ahead. I decided to follow her, wondering if literature, sex, and a lot of enthusiasm would be enough. I left a note for Luisa, begging forgiveness.

VII

“You're a complete nut.” Diana laughed when I reached the house in Santiago. She took me by the hands and, still facing me, ran backward without tripping, light and barefoot, to her bedroom. “Azucena, bring in the gentleman's bags,” she said to her lady's maid, and to me, “See? I already know the house backward and forward. I can find my way around it blindfolded. It's easy: the place may not be big, but it sure is ugly…”

She laughed again, and I agreed. In the taxi from the airport, I had caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the cathedral in the town square: two high, elegant, airy towers with balconies at each of the three levels of the ascent, and I had asked myself why the Spaniards build for eternity while we modern Mexicans build things that last only one presidential term … Santiago was never a big city, just an insignificant frontier town for daring adventurers who went looking for gold and silver and found mostly iron. To get it out they had to take on a few Indians, and they were more interested in practicing their archery than in killing criollos. I looked in vain for that other stage in our urban architecture which I think elegant, the neoclassical, or for even the Paris-inspired buildings of the Porfirio Díaz era, but there was none of either to be found … Boring cement, broken glass along the tops of walls, the instantaneous, instantly disintegrating, a stillborn modernity, a Nescafé architecture that spread out from the town square toward the house reserved for Diana, a one-story modernist cave, indescribable: entrance through the garage; interior patio with wrought-iron furniture; a good-sized living room with indescribable furniture draped with serapes; bedrooms; and I don't know what else. I've forgotten everything: it was a house without permanence that didn't deserve being remembered by anyone.

Diana's enthusiasm inhabited it, the only lavishness or distinction the house could boast. I was amazed by her good spirits. Here we were in a literally godforsaken village, as if God, wanting to take revenge on mankind for having disillusioned Him so, sent these people to live on this dry, rocky plateau, burning by day, frozen by night, a hard, useless crown of volcanic rock surrounded by canyons, cut off from the world as if by a huge knife, as if God Himself had not wanted anyone to come here except those condemned for their sins.

“Everyone says this is the most boring place in the world,” said Diana as she set about neatly hanging my clothes in the closet. “Who knows how many Westerns have been shot here? It seems the landscape is spectacular and the local salaries low. An irresistible combination for Hollywood.”

It was true. That very weekend, we discovered there were no restaurants although plenty of pharmacies, no foreign papers except the indispensable
Time
and
Newsweek
—though these were already a week old, their news stale. As for nightlife: there weren't even amusing attempts at inventing impossible “tropical” spots in the Mexican mountains, only bars that stank of beer and pulque, from which soldiers, priests, minors, and women were excluded by law, and one movie-house, which specialized in Clavillazo's comedies and in fleas. Television had yet to extend its parabolic wings toward the universe, and no one on the set would waste a single minute watching a Mexican soap opera in black and white. The gringos would go into raptures of nostalgia watching ads for Yankee products. That's it.

Diana's hairdresser offered to cut my hair to save me from the boot-camp haircuts that seemed to be the fashion among Santiago men. They used an ultramodern method: put a bowl on top of the head and mercilessly cut off everything that pokes out from underneath it. The nape of every masculine neck boasted that abrupt cut, which resembled the local ravines. Betty the hairdresser, as I said, decided to spare me that horror.

“How good it is you came,” she said as she wet my hair. “You saved Diana from the stuntman.”

I shot her a questioning look. She picked up her scissors and asked me to keep my head still.

“I don't know if you've seen him. He's a very professional guy, good at his job. They use him a lot in Westerns because of how he rides, but especially for how he falls off a horse. He's been after Diana since the last picture we made in Oregon. But the competition there was stiff.”

Betty laughed so hard she almost left me looking like van Gogh.

“Careful.”

“He said he'd conquer her in Mexico. And then you turned up.”

She sighed.

“Being on location is really boring. What do you expect a girl to do without a boyfriend. We'd go crazy. So we make do with what's around.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“No, they said you were tender, passionate, and cultured. Actually, you look good.”

“I already thanked you once, Betty.”

“If you go onto the set, you'll see him. He's a short guy but leathery, nicely broken in, like a saddle. Blond, with suspicious eyes…”

“So why don't you grab him?”

Betty laughed with pleasure, but there was more pleasure than fun in that laugh.

Betty's comments about the last location in Oregon set me to imagining things. I tried to convince myself, perversely, that the only way to love a woman is to know how other men loved her, what they said about her, and what they were like. I didn't bring this up with Diana; it was too soon. I held it back for a moment I foresaw as inevitable. On the other hand, I could tell her that if she made love today, she'd do it only with me, but if she died today, she would die for all her lovers; all of them would think about their love with her with as much right as I would.

I told her that one cold night when the freshly washed, still moist sheets kept us from falling asleep, annoying us, making us aware of the discomfort that surrounded us in this place but that we were intent on overcoming, beginning with the cold sheets: we'd warm them up. Our love was going to be invincible.

“I'm alone with you only as long as you're alive, Diana. I can't be alone with you if you die. All the ghosts of your other loves would accompany us. They'd have the right, they'd be justified—don't you think?”

“Oh, darling, the only thing that scares me is thinking that one of us, you or I, could die before the other. One of us would be left alone; that's what makes me sad…”

“Swear that if it happens, we're going to imagine each other as hard as we can, Diana, as hard as we can. You'll imagine me, I'll imagine you…”