Carlos Fuentes - Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

It was a beautiful myth, consistent with the moral and humanitarian policies of Franklin Roosevelt. Since the New Deal was followed by the world war and the struggle against Fascism, which not only wasn’t innocent but was diabolical, the Yankees (and we along with them) completely believed the myth of innocence. Thanks to their virtue, they saved the world twice, defeated the forces of evil, identified and annihilated the perfect villains, the Kaiser and Hitler. How many times have I heard Yankees of all classes say, “Twice we saved Europe during this century. They should be more grateful.”

For Yankees, as in Henry James’s “international” novels, Europe is corrupt, the United States innocent. I don’t think there’s any other country, especially a country so powerful, that feels innocent or brags about it. The hypocritical English, the cynical French, the haughty Germans (the blameworthy, self-flagellating Germans, so lacking in irony), the violent (or weepy) Russians — none of them thinks his nation has been innocent. As a result, the United States declares that its foreign policy is completely disinterested, almost an act of philanthropy. Since this is not and never has been true for any great power, including the United States, no one believes it, but U.S. self-deception drags everyone into confusion. Everyone knows what kind of interests are in play but no one’s supposed to admit it. What is pursued, disinterestedly, is liberty, democracy, saving the others from themselves.

I imagined Diana as a girl listening to Lutheran sermons in an Iowa church. What could have gone through that childish head when a pastor said that men are all guilty, unacceptable, condemned, yet that Christ accepts them despite their unacceptability, because the death of Christ gives more than sufficient expiation for all our sins? Does a doctrine of that caliber sentence us to live so as to justify Christ’s faith in us? Or does it condemn us to total irresponsibility, since our sins have all been redeemed on Golgotha?

The words of the old actor had drifted far from my own musings. His Rip Van Winkle woke up and didn’t recognize the nation founded by Washington and Jefferson. Lew Cooper saw what he himself lived through with his eyes wide open. He saw the terrible puritanical need to have a visible, indubitable enemy who could be named. The U.S. sickness was a Manichaean obsession that can only conceive of the world as divided into good and evil, with no redemption possible. Cooper said that no Yankee can live in peace unless he knows whom he’s fighting against. He disguises that by saying he’s got to figure out who the bad guys are so he can defend the good guys. But when Rip Van Winkle wakes up, he discovers that, in defending themselves, the good guys have taken on the traits of the bad guys. McCarthy didn’t hunt down the Communists he saw hiding under the bed. He hunted down and humiliated and ruined Democrats, with the same methods that Vyshinsky used in the Soviet Union to fight — of course — Communists. The victims of McCarthyism, of the House Un-American Activities Committee, of the Dies Committee, of all those new-model tribunals of the Inquisition, were Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Cooper said, deeply melancholic. We’re condemning ourselves. Rip Van Winkle would rather return to his hollow tree and sleep twenty more years. He knows that when he wakes up he’ll find exactly the same thing.

“A country that despite everything hasn’t lived up to its own ideals?” I asked my fellow players.

“Right,” said Cooper. “No nation has ever lived up to its ideals. But the others are more cynical. We’re idealists, didn’t you know that? We’re always on the side of good. Wherever we are, that’s where good is. When we don’t believe that, we go crazy.”

“We should never leave home,” Diana said very simply. I remember her at that moment, sitting on the rug with her legs crossed and her hands folded on her lap. “The title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel is You Can’t Go Home Again … that’s the truest title in all of American literature … You walk out of your house, and you can never go back, no matter how much you want to …” she added with a tired look.

I asked her if that was her case. She shook her head.

She said that when she came back after living in France, she found a whole new generation in California, in the Midwest, and on the East Coast who wanted to give the best they had but who weren’t allowed to. There was a huge difference between the ideals of the young people of the 1960s and the corruption, the immense mendacity of the government, the violence pouring out of every orifice of society … That night, Diana said what was on everyone’s mind, but she told it from her own point of view, that of a girl from the Midwest who had gone off to Paris to sleep and then, like Rip Van Winkle, had returned to the whirlwind — the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., the deaths of tens of thousands of boys who’d gone from small towns to the Asian jungles, the dead of Vietnam, the drugged soldiers, the useless dead, all for nothing — well, at least it wasn’t white boys who were out in front but blacks and chicanos, cannon fodder — and at home a chorus of liars was saying we’re containing China, saving Vietnamese democracy, keeping the dominoes from falling …

Johnson, Nixon, the great voices of hypocrisy, ignorance, stupidity — how could they not cause an entire generation to lose its illusions; how could they not end up shooting students at Kent State, beating up demonstrators in Chicago, jailing Black Panthers? And for what? Diana’s voice rose, and she seemed to wake from an extremely long sleep behind a silver screen that was her own way of looking at the world. Not to make fortunes, not for the sake of vulgar corruption, however rich they made a hundred contractors or a dozen large defense companies; that was okay, that I can even understand, but what drives me crazy is the way those creeps fall in love with their power, believe in their power as something that not only will last but is important. My God, the idiots think their power is important — they don’t know that the only important thing is the life of the boy they sent off to die uselessly in an Asian jungle, a confused boy who, to justify his presence there, burned a village and killed all its inhabitants because if he didn’t why was he there, what was the use of that automatic rifle whose manufacturing provided livings for thousands of workers and their families, a single automatic rifle that gave power to Lyndon Johnson, to Richard Nixon, to the Goddess Lie, to the Whore Power?

Diana Soren was losing it. Her voice was falling into a strange, empty abyss; she would go back to sleep for twenty more years as long as she didn’t have to know what was going on in that home to which she could never return … America was what was going on outside her sleep.

She pushed the button on her tape deck and out came the voice of José Feliciano singing “Come On, Baby, Light My Fire.” Cooper stood up, indignant, and turned it off. He parodied Feliciano’s voice. That’s what we’ve come to. That was today’s music, savage music for idiots — come on, baby, light my fire. He mimicked it hideously and excused himself to go to bed.

With my prerogative to stay at home and write all day firmly established, I paid a surprise visit to the set one morning. Diana wasn’t mad at me for not warning her; she received me with a big display of cheerfulness, showed me off, introduced me to everyone, and invited me to have coffee in her trailer. It was the same one we used at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. Now, she said, with a roguish look in her eyes, we don’t have to use it the way we did then. Why not? I answered.