Carlos Fuentes - Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

“Do they believe you? Do you think they believe you?”

“Let’s play Scrabble. It’s not even eight.”

We invented different parlor games to pass the evenings. The most durable proved to be truth or consequences. The punishment for lying was a pleasure: to give the liar a kiss. Of course, it was better to say only true things and save the kisses for bed. But even though Cooper, the old actor, was alone, he wanted neither to kiss nor to be kissed.

The question that evening was one I proposed: Why do we restrain our great passions?

What do you mean? asked the actor. If we didn’t restrain them, we’d go straight back to the law of the jungle. We already knew that, he said with the disdainful snort and sneering lips that characterized all his film roles.

No, I explained, I’m asking you to declare personally why, in most cases, when the opportunity to live a great personal passion presents itself, we let it pass, we become stupid, sometimes blind, even though it’s our best chance to involve ourselves in something that would give us a superior satisfaction, a—

“Or leave us profoundly unsatisfied,” said Diana.

“That’s possible, too,” I said. “But let’s go one at a time. Lew.”

“Okay, I won’t say that all great passions turn us back into animals and shatter the laws of civilization. But it does happen every once in a while, from having sex with your wife to politics. Perhaps the most secret fear is that a blind, unthinking passion might rip us away from the group we belong to, make us guilty of betrayal …”

It was painful for the old man to go on. I interrupted him, not realizing I was breaking my own ground rule. I wouldn’t let him give himself over to his passion, because I felt he was personalizing it, identifying too much with his own experience …

Diana shot me a curious glance, pondering my good manners, my tendency to avoid conflict… “You mean sex, sexual passion?”

No, said Cooper’s eyes to me. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. Passion takes us away from the family. It can violate endogamy. Endogamy and exogamy. Those are the two fundamental laws of life. Life with the group or outside it. Sex within or outside. Deciding that, knowing whether our blood stays home or is out there wandering around aimlessly, that’s what keeps us from following great passions. Otherwise, we dive right into the abyss of the unknown. We need rules. It doesn’t matter if they’re implicit. They have to be fixed, clear in our mind. You marry within the clan. Or you marry outside it. Your children will either be of our family or outsiders. You either stay near the home of your grandparents. Or you go out into the world.”

“Your people have gone out into the world,” I said to the two North Americans. “We Mexicans have stayed inside. We even gave you half our country because we didn’t populate it in time.”

“Don’t worry.” Diana laughed. “Pretty soon California will belong to you again. Everybody there speaks Spanish.”

“No,” I said. “Answer the question from the game.”

“You first. Ladies last.” She curled up around herself like an Angora cat. Her dimples were never so deep or so promising.

“I have to admit I’m afraid of a passion that would take away the time I need to write. I’ve let lots of chances for pleasure pass because I could foresee the negative consequences for my writing.”

“Tell us what they are.” More dimples than ever, almost wanton dimples.

“Jealousy. Doubt. Time. Going around and around. Trysts. Confusions. Misunderstandings. Lies.”

“Everything that takes passion away from passion,” Diana said with a comic toss of her blond head.

“There is no woman you can’t conquer if you dedicate time and flattery to her. Those are more important than money or beauty. Time, time, a woman devours a man’s time — that’s it. Dedicate a lot of time to them.”

“We didn’t waste any time. We saw each other and that was that,” said Diana, as if she were drinking an invisible highball. “You and I.”

I went on. “I’m terrified of being left with no time to write. Writing is my passion. Every writer is born with a limited amount of time. From the moment you sit down to write, you begin a battle against death. Every day, death whispers into my ear, One day less. You won’t have time.”

“There’s something worse,” said Cooper. “A friend of mine who’s a scientist at UCLA told me that the day will come when they’ll be able to tell when you’re born, first, what you’re going to die of, and second, when you’re going to die. Is it worth it to live like that?”

“That’s another game, Lew. We’ll deal with that question tomorrow.” I laughed. “We’ve got lots of long Santiago nights left with no movies, no TV, no decent restaurants…”

I looked at Diana’s eyes, but my gaze, imploring, not affirming, many nights ahead of us, did not dissolve the disillusion in hers. I spoke the truth. Would I deserve a kiss that night? Would Diana kiss me just to say “Did you lie? You prefer me. You’ll leave everything for me. Your mornings as a writer are a farce. You live to love me at night. I know it. I feel it. Everything you write here will be shit because your passion isn’t in it. Your passion is between my sheets, not between your pages.”

“We should have done it,” said Diana.

Lew and I looked at her, not understanding. She understood.

“Nothing should keep us from a passion. Absolutely nothing. Get me something to drink, love.”

I did, while she went on to say that life is never generous twice. There are forces that present themselves once and never again. Forces, she repeated, sleepily nodding several times, staring at the polished nails of her bare feet, her chin perched on her knees. Forces, not opportunities. Forces for love, politics, artistic creation, sports, who knows what else. They come by only once. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone, mad at us because we paid them no mind. We didn’t want passion. Then passion didn’t want us either.

She burst into tears, so I picked her up in my arms and carried her to bed. She was the size of a little girl.

I put her to bed: she was soft, worn out, and crying. I was getting used to the care which she seemed to require and which it gave me immense pleasure to give her. She looked like a little girl, turned on her side, crying softly, shuddering slightly in her physical smallness, begging protection and tenderness. I wanted to give it to her. I settled her on the bed, pulled up the covers to keep out the desert cold, and caressed the head I had grown so accustomed to, the Saint Joan hair, always ready for either war or fire. Unlike other women, she never left stray hairs on the pillow. In truth, she never left a trace of any kind, as if she were pure spirit, immaterial, in her Swedish, Lutheran cleanliness, as fresh as a forest, as blue as a fjord, clinging desperately to the long hours of summer, as if the winter without light were the dark mirror of death.

I saw and felt all this as I tucked her in that night while she wept and thought (I imagined) about lost opportunities for passion, the moments that passed, that called us, that we disregard, and that went away forever. It’s useless to try to recover them. They’re gone forever. They never turned into habit.

But, I told myself as I caressed her head and she sank into invisible dreams, everything we accept turns into habit, even passion. I smiled, caressing her blond head of very short hair; the role of Saint Joan had become a habit for Diana. She would always be a petite woman, the sparrow, the pucelle, the virgin, the Maid of Orléans, the battling saint, small, blond, hair cut in military style so that no one would doubt her warrior’s will, so her helmet would fit properly: her hair cut very short so there would be less to burn in the bonfire. I told her silently that God would give her a halo. A head of long hair burning in the night, dragged across the night, would be seen as the trail of the devil.