Carlos Fuentes: Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

No, justice is not what God is but what God gives. What God grants. What you can never give to yourself or anyone else. Even if you are just, you cannot give justice to anyone except through God. Blasphemous people: imagine a God as unjust as you or as just as you would like to be. It doesn’t matter — nothing matters, nothing, nothing. Only God can dispense justice, not you. Only God can impart the law, even if He himself violates it by creating you. Live with that, beloved flock, try to live with that conviction. Have the courage but also the anguish of knowing the truth about God: we receive justice; we do not have justice; justice is not given, justice is not deserved, justice is something that God gives us when He decides, because not even God Himself is just, God only has power, the power to pardon even though He himself deserves no pardon. How can He deserve it when He committed the error of creating the lustful, criminal, ungrateful, stupid, self-destructive beings that we all are, the creatures of a guilty God? Live with this, brothers and sisters. Have the strength to live with our impossible and demanding faith. Think about a God who deserves no forgiveness but who has the power to pardon us. Do not fall into despair. Hope, and be confident.

He finished. He smiled. He gave a laugh; he stifled it with a hand over his mouth.

After the service, I walked the streets of Jeffersontown, where Diana Soren was born and grew up. On the porches the old people rocked, with white hair and blue, innocent, always innocent eyes, so distant from geography and history, so innocent they didn’t want to know what their leaders were doing in those unknown places full of spicks, dagos, niggers, and especially Communists. At nightfall the eyes of innocence look at a paper moon over a tiny town in Iowa and give free rein to Thomas Jefferson because he’s white and elegant even if he has slaves. He’s more intelligent than all of them together — that’s why they elected him. We have only one president at a time; you’ve got to believe in him, put his profile on the mountains and the coins, toss the Indian-and-buffalo coins in the air: let’s see where they fall. The earth is immense, black as a slave, rotten as a Communist, wet as a Mexican’s back; the earth goes on growing, fructifying, because the earth’s been putrefying for millions of years.

It was her paper moon, the same one that she saw, mythical symbol of her femininity, before going out into the world with a single arrow and a bow, Diana the solitary huntress over the black, rotten earth of Iowa. It was her paper moon, the same one that illuminated the last night of the buffalo, when the boys hunted them on horseback, firing their rifles until they shot out the moon itself. The same moon that allowed the angry raccoons to reach their dens in the tree hollows, chased by the boys who killed the last bison on the plains. But they hunt in a pack, all together, shouting, victoriously raising their phallic rifles under the moon. Only she hunts in solitude, waiting to be touched both by the rays of moonlight and by the compassion of the capricious, culpable God who created her.

I’m sure that, thinking about all this, the pastor smiled and might have wanted to laugh and laugh, to make a joke, to make a good impression, to exonerate himself of the anguish of his own sermon. But none of that mattered. That night the waters of the Mississippi, to the east, rose along with those of the Missouri, to the west, overflowing their tributaries and flooding the earth of Iowa from Osceola to Pottawattamie, from Winnebago to Appanoose; carrying away in its muddy stream houses and carriages, wooden posts and neo-Hellenic columns, church steeples, wheat and corn crops, potatoes with Cyclopean eyes and roosters with crests like imperial banners; erasing the tracks of buffalo and drowning the desperate raccoons; putting the inundated plain to sleep in order to return to the Indian name for the land. Iowa: sleeping land but land watched over by the antonym of the white nation. Iowa: hawkeye. Sleepy some moments, alert at others, the land sinks, disappears, and no one, as time passes, can go home to it again.

Diana Soren is dead. She was found putrefying inside a Renault parked in a Paris alley. She’d been there for two weeks. She was wrapped in a Saltillo serape. Could it have been the one she bought with me in Santiago? The news article says that with her body there was an empty bottle of mineral water and a suicide note. The Paris police had to call the sanitation squad to decontaminate the dead end where they found her body locked up with death for two weeks. What was left of her was covered with cigarette burns. Even so, I wondered if finally, in death, she’d been comfortable in her own skin.

The FBI rendered Diana a posthumous homage. The Bureau admitted it had slandered her in 1970 as part of a counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. The director of the agency at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, approved the plan: Diana Soren was destroyed because she was destructible. In 1980, Acting Director William H. Webster declared that the days when the FBI used derogatory information to fight supporters of “unpopular causes” were gone forever. Calumny, he said, is no longer our business. Our only concern is criminal conduct.