Carlos Fuentes - Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

“I’m going to look for the film, I’m going to bring it here, and I’m going to show it to the boy, his family, his friends …”

“Who will hate him more than ever. They’ll be jealous of him, Diana, and there won’t be any sequels. He won’t make any more pictures …”

“You have no imagination. I’m telling you, no imagination, and no compassion whatsoever …”

“For you, it’s all Italian toothpaste …”

We turned our backs on each other, staring attentively at a landscape devoid of interest, abolished, erased.

“You left the door open.”

“You’re mistaken. Look at it. It’s tight shut.”

“I mean the bathroom door.”

“Yes. It’s open. So what?”

“I asked you always to keep it closed.”

“Well, it so happens that at this particular time I’m going in and out a lot.”

“Why?”

“What’s it to you? Because I’ve just come down with a case of Montezuma’s revenge, because …”

“You’re lying. You Mexicans never get that. You reserve that for us …”

“Diarrhea recognizes neither frontiers nor cultures. Didn’t you know that?”

“How can you be so horribly vulgar?”

“Why’s it such a big deal whether the bathroom door is open or closed?”

“I’m asking it as a favor.”

“How delicate we are. At least you’re not giving me a direct order. After all, I am living in your house.”

“I never said that. All I’m asking is that you respect …”

“Your manias?”

“My insecurity, stupid. I’m very sensitive to things that are open or closed. I’m afraid. Help me, respect me …”

“So our relationship is going to depend on whether I close the bathroom door or leave it open?”

“It’s such a little thing. And since you put it that way, yes, you are in my house …”

“And you’re in my country.”

“Eating shit, that’s true.”

“We could go back to Iowa and eat fried chicken in cellophane or dog-meat hamburgers. I’m ready when you are …”

“Since you don’t respect my vulnerability, you can use another bathroom and let me have this one …”

“I can also sleep in a different bedroom.”

“I’m asking you to do me the tiniest favor. Close the bathroom door. Open bathroom doors scare me, okay?”

“But it doesn’t bother you to sleep with the bedroom curtains open?”

“I like that.”

“Well, I don’t. The sun comes blazing in early and I can’t sleep.”

“I’ll lend you an American Airlines sleep mask.”

“You get up at dawn, so you’re fine. But I end up with a fucking migraine.”

“You’ll find all the aspirin you need at the drugstore.”

“Why do you insist on sleeping with the curtains open?”

“I’m waiting.”

“For whom? Dracula?”

“There are beautiful nights when the moon invades a bedroom, transforms it, and transports you to another moment in your life. Maybe that will happen again.”

“Again?”

“Right. Moonlight inside a bedroom, inside an auditorium, it transforms the world — that’s something you really can believe in.”

“You told me not to believe in your biography.”

“Just believe in the images I offer you from time to time.”

“Please excuse me. I’ll leave the door closed. I wouldn’t want a single moonbeam to escape.”

“Thank you.”

“Assuming one does arrive some night.”

“It will. My life depends on it.”

“I think you really mean, my memory.”

“Don’t you remember any night you’d like to recapture?”

“Lots of them.”

“No, it can’t be ‘lots of them.’ Only one or none at all.”

“I’d have to think about it.”

“No. Imagine it.”

“Tell me what props I’d need, O Duse.”

“Don’t laugh.”

“Duse Medusa.”

“You’d need snow.”

“Here?”

“Snow all the time. Snow all four seasons of the year. I can’t imagine it without snow. Snow outside. A circle. A circular theater. An auditorium. A skylight. Night. Me stretched out on the stage. The two of us alone. Him on top of me. Searching with his hand. Lifting my little skirt.”

“Like this?”

“Exploring me with a marvelous tenderness no other man has ever known how to give me.”

“Like this?”

“He’s patient, exploring, lifting my little skirt, sliding his hand under my panties, searching in the darkness …”

“Like this.”

“Until the moon rises and the light floods over us, the moonlight shines on my first night of love, my love …”

“Like this, like this…”

“Like this. Please, quickly.”

“But there’s no moon. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“There’s no moon here. We’ll have to wait. Or if you’d like, I could buy a paper moon and hang it over the bed.”

“You have no imagination, I told you already.”

“Listen, don’t cry. It’s no big deal.”

“Almost. You almost made it. What a shame.”

“Here.”

“What are you doing? What is this?”

“A present. In exchange for the toothpaste.”

“You killed my imagination. You don’t have any right to do that.”

“It’s three o’clock in the morning. You’ve got to get up very early. Want anything else?”

“Get up and close the bathroom door, please.”

“Good night.”

The Santiago authorities hosted a banquet in honor of the film crew. One of the patios of the colonial-era town hall was set up with tables and chairs and decorated with crepe and paper lanterns. The functionaries were distributed equitably: the governor with the director, the municipal president with the leading man and his girlfriend, the commander of the military zone, a general of strikingly Oriental appearance, with Diana and me.

They say the French general Maxime Weygand was the bastard son of Empress Carlota by a certain Colonel López, Maximilian’s aide-de-camp. López betrayed the Emperor twice: first with the empress, and then during the Republican siege of Querétaro, when he opened the way for Juárez’s troops to capture the Austrian Emperor. By then, Carlota had already gone back to Europe to beg help from Napoleon III, another traitor, and Pope Pius IX. She went mad in the Vatican, and was the first woman (officially) to spend the night in the pontifical bedrooms.

Did she go crazy or was that merely a pretext to cover up her pregnancy and delivery? She never again left the seclusion of her castle, but the royal government of Belgium supplied young cadet Weygand, born in 1867 in Brussels, with tuition at St. Cyr. He became chief of Foch’s general staff during World War I and supreme commander when World War II broke out. In France, the Manchu face — high cheekbones, Mayan nose, lips as thin as a knife blade and crowned by a sparse, very fine mustache, barely a shadow — must have caused some comment. Short, small-boned, with a rather stiff bearing, his black hair shaved at the temples: I’m describing General Weygand only to describe General Agustín Cedillo, commander of the Santiago military zone. I associate him with the empire imposed on Mexico by Napoleon III because, physical parallels aside, there survived on one of the balconies of the patio, surely a Republican oversight, the arms of the empire: the eagle and serpent but with a crown above and, at the foot of the cactus, the motto EQUITY IN JUSTICE.

Sitting opposite me and next to Diana, General Cedillo, curious, looked us over out of the corner of his eye, as if he kept a direct gaze in reserve for great occasions. I imagined that those could only be challenges and death. I had no doubt whatsoever: this man would look with perfect equanimity directly at a firing squad whether giving it orders to shoot or receiving its bullets. He would take care, on the other hand, not to look directly at anyone in daily life, because in our country, among men, a direct stare is a challenge and provokes one of two reactions. The coward lowers his eyes — lower your head and step aside, as the song says. The brave man endures the stare of the other to see who will lower his eyes first. The situation moves to another plane when one brave man pronounces the ritual words “What are you looking at me for, mister?” The violence increases if the “mister” is excluded: “What are you looking at me for?” And there’s no way out if a direct insult is substituted: “What are you looking at me for, stupid, asshole, son of a bitch?”