Carlos Fuentes: Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

I looked at her. She looked at me. Luisa looked at us looking at each other. My wife walked over to me and said point-blank, “I think we should be on our way.”

“But the party hasn’t even started,” I protested.

“For me it’s over.”

“Because of the explosion? I’m fine. Look.” I showed her my steady hands.

“You promised tonight to me.”

“Don’t be so self-centered. Look who’s just walked in. We’re both fans of hers.”

“Forget the plural, please.”

“I just want to chat with her for a while.”

“Don’t come home too late.” She raised her eyebrow, an almost inevitable, Pavlovian, instinctive reflex in a Mexican actress.

I never went home. Seated next to Diana Soren, talking about movies, about life in Paris, discovering mutual friends, I felt I was being unfaithful and, as always, told myself that, if I wasn’t being unfaithful to literature, I wasn’t being unfaithful to myself; nothing else mattered. But when I caressed Diana Soren’s hand with the tips of my fingers, I had the sensation that the infidelity, if there was any, had to be double.

After all, Diana was married to Ivan Gravet, a very popular, prizewinning French writer who’d written two beautiful books about his youth, the first about his escape from Eastern Europe, the second about when he’d fought in the war. His latest novels seemed written for the movies and were produced in Hollywood, but in everything he wrote there was always both intelligence and a growing disenchantment. I could imagine him capable of a final joke, excessive but devoid of illusion. He was a fellow writer. Could I betray him? He himself, if he was like me, would say books are more valuable than women … I began to desire Diana.

Encounters between a man and a woman take place on two levels. One is external — filmable, if you like — the level of gesture, attitude, eyes, movement. More interesting is the internal level, where sensations, questions, doubts, games you play with yourself, fantasies begin to materialize and crowd in. She herself: what could she be thinking, what’s she like, what can she be thinking about me? Facing the charm of that blond head, sculpted like a helmet for medieval warfare or for the street fighting of the 1960s (fading into the distance that night, suddenly as far off as the Hundred Years’ War), I imagined an overwhelming carnal invitation, Diana Soren’s head saying to me, Imagine my body, I command you. Each detail of my head, my face, has its equivalent in my body. Search my body for the smile of my visible mouth, search my body for the dimples in my cheeks, search my body for the breathing of my turned-up little nose, search for the tactile and excitable counterpart of my eyes, search for the twin companion of my smooth blond hair, freshly washed, short, sometimes combed, otherwise free as the wind, but near, ever so near to its most intimate, invisible, insecure model: my flesh.

That was one level of my incipient desire as we chatted amiably on the sofa in Eduardo Terrazas’s house. I must not reveal it: another clause in the constitution of encounters orders us never to give a woman the ammunition she can store up to fire at you when she needs to attack you (which, one day, she will). It’s something inherent in women: to store away our sins and dump them on us when they need to and when we least expect it. Self-defense? No. Women are great at the art of making us feel guilty. To disguise my own immediate desire, I resorted to the anti-aphrodisiac idea of woman as producer of guilt, woman as the true Federal Reserve or Fort Knox of Guilt. They stockpile guilt to avoid inflation and then release those ingots of reproach little by little, distilled, wounding, poisoned, ultimately victorious, because we men, marvelous paradigms of generosity, would never do that… I thought about the unfaithfulness that in my case had already been consummated even if nothing had taken place with Diana Soren. I thought about Luisa, alone back in the San Angel house, and the unfaithfulness she might perpetrate if I went ahead with my own that night. More than ever, I decided it must be a double infidelity, shared, that would link us and excite us …

Luisa and Ivan — our absent witnesses — suspended like two exterminating angels over our bodies but respecting our unfaithful integrity because, after all, they loved us, remembered us with pleasure, and never lost the hope of being with us. And did we have the hope of being with them?

We talked of other places, other friends scattered around the world, and we felt that what was beginning to link us was not only that cosmopolitan, footloose fraternity but also the price of membership in it. To be from everywhere, we said, was to be from nowhere … Where would she feel comfortable? In Paris, in Mallorca, she said. Los Angeles? She laughed. A place that looked horrible externally, physically, and was horrible inside as well, hopeless.

“There’s a word in English that’s perfect for Hollywood: smug. How do you say that in Spanish?”

“Pagado de sí, satisfecho de sí mismo: both mean smug.”

“I like them both.” She laughed. “You know — the presumption of being universal. The navel of the world. Whatever happens there is the most important thing in the universe. The rest of us are just hicks …”

“Payos in Spanish.”

“Only Hollywood is international, cosmopolitan. And boy, when you prove to them they aren’t cosmopolitan, they hate your guts. They make you pay for it. They hate your guts.”

“How can you tell? They’re all hiding behind those tan masks they call faces.”

“So are you!” She laughed, opening her eyes wide in mock astonishment, staring at the tan I’d brought back from Puerto Vallarta. She made me remember I’d gotten a good burn down there, in more ways than one.

That smile enchanted me. She could repeat it, I told myself, as many times as she wanted, for centuries, without ever boring me. Diana Soren’s smile and musical laugh, so light-hearted, so alive that New Year’s Eve in Mexico. How could I not adore her right then and there? I bit my lip. I was adoring an image I’d seen, pursued, and pitied for fifteen years … My vanity spurred me on. I wanted to go to bed with a woman desired by thousands of men. I wanted to feel her under me and feel the green breath of a hundred thousand green men on the back of my neck, all wanting to be me, to be where I was. I stopped short. How would she ever be able to share that pride and that vanity with me?

All that night, I underestimated the feminine capacity for conquest, the Don Juanism of the opposite sex. We don’t like to admire in a woman the perseverance or luck we admire in ourselves. Our vanity (or our blindness) is huge. Or, perhaps, they reveal a secret modesty that can be a person’s greatest attraction, his secret, irresistible weakness appealing unconsciously to the embrace of the mother-lover-protector who discovers the enigma of our vulnerability, which we’ve so carefully disguised, hidden, repressed …

Diana returned repeatedly to the theme of home and exile. She asked me if I knew James Baldwin, the black writer exiled in France. No. He was a good friend of my pal Bill Styron, but I didn’t know him. I’d only read his books.

“He says something.” Diana’s eyes focused on the colonial chandelier from which the sagging New Year’s Eve balloons hung like sad, dead planets. “A black and a white, because they’re both Americans, know more about themselves and about each other than any European knows about any American, black or white.”

“Do you think you can go home again?” I asked.

She shook her head again and again, drawing up her legs and bringing them together so she could rest her forehead on her knees.