Diana (17 page)

“Look, my friend, I'm not a professional suspicion monger. I don't go around seeing enemies behind every tree. But the fact is, here and there agitators do exist. You understand me. We wouldn't want Miss Soren to find herself compromised for an indiscretion.”

“Do you mean Black Panthers there and the League guerrillas here?”

“Not exactly. I mean FBI everywhere, that's what I mean. Watch out.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“You're a friend of the gentleman who runs the Department of Internal Affairs.”

“You mean Mario Moya Palencia. We went to school together. He's an old, close friend.”

“Go visit him in Mexico City. Be careful. Watch out for your girlfriend. It's not worth the trouble.”

When Diana came back that night, I told her I'd be leaving for Mexico City the next day. I had to attend to some unfinished business. She knew I'd left everything hanging in midair to follow her to Santiago. In a few days, a week at the most, I'd be back. She looked at me with a melancholy expression, trying to guess the truth, imagining that perhaps I'd guessed the truth about her but laying open a range of possibilities. How much did I know? Was this the end? Was I leaving for good? Was this the end of our relationship? Was I being drawn back by my wife, my daughter, my business in the capital?

“I'm leaving everything here—my books, my papers, my typewriter…”

“Take the toothpaste with you.”

Nothing lessened the sadness in her eyes.

“Just one tube. Everything else stays in the pawnshop.”

“In the pawnshop? I like that. Maybe all of us are only in the pawnshop here.”

“Don't start imagining God as some Jewish pawnbroker.”

“No. But I do believe in God. So much, you know, that I can't imagine He put us on earth just to be no one.”

“I love you, Diana.” I kissed her.

XXVI

The first thing I did when I got back to Mexico City was to call my friend Luis Buñuel and ask to see him. Once or twice a month I'd visit him between four and six in the afternoon. His conversation nourished and stimulated me in extraordinary ways. Buñuel not only had witnessed the century (they were coevals—he was born in 1900) but had been one of its greatest creators. Everyone knows that, even as they demand automatic writing and a “disordering of the senses,” the French theoreticians of surrealism have given us beautiful essays and other texts written with Cartesian clarity. Beyond mere provocation, the French Surrealists seem not to compromise their rationalist culture or to give it back that blast of madness that must have animated Villon or Rabelais. But the Surrealists without theory, the intuitive ones like Buñuel in Spain or Max Ernst in Germany, succeed in incorporating their culture into their art, giving the past a critical presence and placing historically perverse limits on modern pretensions to novelty. Everything is rooted in distant memories and ancient soil. Dig them up and true modernity bursts forth: the presence of the past, a warning against the pride of progress. The Spanish mystics, the picaresque novel, Cervantes, and Goya were the fathers of Buñuel's surrealism, just as the cruel, excessive nocturnal fantasy of the Germanic fairy tale was mother to Ernst.

Buñuel's house in Colonia del Valle lacked all character. That, in effect, was its character: it had none. A two-story red brick building, it looked like any middle-class house in the world. The living room resembled a dentist's waiting room, and although I never saw the artist's bedroom, I know he liked to look at bare walls and to sleep on the floor or, at most, on a wooden bed with no mattress or springs. Those penances fit nicely with his strict morality, oppressively bourgeois and puritanical for some, ascetically monastic for others. His house was almost devoid of decoration, except for a portrait of Buñuel as a young man painted by Dalí in the 1920s. Since World War II they'd been enemies, but Luis kept the portrait in his vestibule as a heartfelt homage to his youth and also to a lost friendship …

He'd receive guests around a liquor cabinet in a room equipped with a real bar he'd bought at the Liverpool department store around the corner. It was as well stocked as the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York—the place where Buñuel liked to drink the “best martinis in the world,” as he put it. Now he was mixing up a
buñueloni
for me, a delicious but intoxicating mixture of gin, Carpano, and Angostura, and proclaiming, “I drink a liter of alcohol every day. Alcohol's going to kill me.”

“But you look very well,” I said, admiring his robust physique at the age of seventy, his well-rounded shoulders, his powerful chest, and his arms, strong but thin.

“I just saw the doctor. Here's the list: I've got emphysema, diverticulosis, high cholesterol, and a gigantic prostate. If I deal with them one at a time, I'm in perfect shape. But if they all gang up on me, I'll drop dead.”

Generally, he wore short-sleeved sport shirts, which accentuated the bareness of his peasant-philosopher head. His baldness and his face creased by time made him look like Picasso, de Falla, Ortega y Gasset. Illustrious Spaniards end up looking like retired picadors. Buñuel came from the same region as Goya, from Aragon, a famous breeding ground of stubborn individuals. The truth is that no one dreams more than the Aragonese. Their wild dreams are about witches' Sabbaths and communication between men, animals, and insects. Everyone knows that ants are the beings that communicate among themselves best—telepathically, over huge distances—and I think Luis Buñuel had a passion for entomology because the Aragonese, like ants, communicate with one another across space and time. They're in contact through their nightmares, their witches, their drums.

He wasn't pleased with me that afternoon. He was a confirmed believer in matrimonial fidelity and in the inviolability of man and wife. It seemed intolerable to him that a couple, having made a pact to live together, should break it. He reproached me openly for abandoning Luisa Guzmán, whom he loved a lot and whom he'd used in one or two of his pictures. But along with that exaltation of the bonds of matrimony, Buñuel did not hide his horror of the sexual act. It was rare in his pictures to see a naked person, except as a necessary counterpoint to the plot; there was never a kiss, which seemed an “indecency” to him, and never fornication, only desire, rolling around in the gardens of the Golden Age, desire forever unsatisfied so as to maintain the flame of passion at its highest intensity.

I looked at his green eyes, as distant as a sea I'd never sailed, and through them I saw sail the ship of Tristan, Buñuel's secret hero, the hero of chaste, unconsummated love. The Middle Ages was Buñuel's real era, his natural time, and it was there his gaze navigated; he was accidentally anchored in our “detestable time.” He had to be seen and understood as someone exiled from the past, a foreigner from the thirteenth century almost naked among us, dressed in a short-sleeved sport shirt like a hermit monk given only a loincloth to cover his shame.

It was from that lost era that Buñuel got the idea he was repeating to me now—of sex as a habit of animals,
more bestiarum,
in the words of Saint Augustine. “Sex,” he was saying, “is a hairy spider, an all-devouring tarantula, a black hole from which you never emerge if you give in to it.” He was deaf (again, like Goya) and had abandoned the use of music in his pictures unless it fit in naturally: a radio, an organ grinder, an orchestra at a ski resort. Before, he'd filled his movies with the infinitely impassioned, sweet, stormy refrains of Wagner's
Liebestraum.
The music of
Tristan and Isolde
was the cantata to chaste love from which the tarantulas of sex have been expelled.

“But Saint John Chrysostom prohibited even chaste love, saying it succeeded only in making passion greater, adding more flames to desire,” I recalled.

“Well, now, don't you see why it's the most exciting thing in the world? Sex without sin is like an egg without salt.”

I always fell into his trap. Buñuel preached chastity as the means to augment pleasure, desire, the thirst for the amatory body. He was a reader of Saint Augustine and understood that the Fall only meant that the law of love had been broken. Love has a law, which is to love God. To love ourselves is to break the law of God and start down the road of perdition, which wends lower and lower through the black hole of sex to the final hole of death. To return to love means to pass through chastity, but for that we need help. We can't do it alone. To return to God from the hell of flesh and its self-gratification is like defying the law of gravity. Not falling but flying.

“Who's going to help us?” I asked.

“Not power,” he said passionately. “Never those wielding power, whether it's civil or ecclesiastic. Only the poor, the rebels, the outcasts, children, lovers … only those can help us.”

He said all this with great emotion, and through my memory paraded the abandoned children of his movies, the ardent couples, the damned beggars, the priests humiliated because of their Christian devotion, all those who renounced the vanity of this world and hoped only for the embrace of a brother. Rebels, too? I asked Buñuel. Rebels help us as well?

“If they don't obey any power,” Luis answered. “If they are totally gratuitous.”

At the time, Buñuel was working on a script for a film he never made, based on the story of the French anarchist Ravachol, who started out as a thief and a murderer. Back in the provinces, he had killed an old ragman and an elderly hermit, violated the grave of a countess, and stabbed to death two spinsters who owned a forge. All that was gratuitous. But one fine day he declared that he'd stolen the hermit's and the spinster's money and the jewels buried with the countess for the sake of the anarchist cause.

Even so, the anarchists did not give him their blessing until Ravachol moved to Paris and, with an assistant named Simon the Biscuit, dedicated himself to making bombs he placed at judges' doors. Unfortunately, the Biscuit confused doors, and it wasn't the judges who died but some innocent passers-by. That in itself, observed Buñuel, gave a fantastic gratuitousness to the whole thing.

Only when Ravachol was executed on July 11, 1892, did the anarchists claim him as one of their own, canonizing him and even coining a verb, “to ravacholize,” which means to explode into pieces which inspired a cute song that goes something like
“Dansons la ravachole. Vive le son de l'explosion!”

“When he ascended the gallows, he shouted, Long live anarchism! He was a bastard and used rouge to cover the pallor of his cheeks.”

“Do you approve of him, Luis?”

“Yes, in theory.”

“What does that mean?”

“That anarchism is marvelous as an idea of freedom—you have no one above you. No superior power, no chains. There isn't an idea more marvelous than that. There isn't one less practicable, either. But we've got to maintain the utopia of ideas. If we don't, we become animals. Practical life is also a black hole that leads us to death. Revolution, anarchy, and freedom are the prizes of thought. The only throne they have is in our heads.”

He went on to say that there was no more beautiful idea than blowing up the Louvre and telling humanity and all its creations to go to hell—but only so long as it remained an idea, so long as it was never put into practice. Why don't we make clear distinctions between ideas and practice? What makes us turn ideas into practice? Doesn't that inevitably plunge us into failure and despair? Aren't dreams enough in themselves? We'd go crazy if we asked each dream we have at night either to turn into reality or else. Has anyone ever been able to shoot a dream?

“Yes,” I replied, “but not with rifles. It took spears. The Aztec emperor Montezuma summoned everyone who'd dreamed of the end of his empire and the arrival of the conquistadors and had them put to death…”

He looked at his watch. It was seven. Time to leave. He wasn't interested in the Aztecs, and Mexico seemed to him a protective wall topped with broken glass.

XXVII

I'm sitting opposite my wife, Luisa Guzmán, in the spacious living room of the house we shared for ten years in the cobblestoned neighborhood of San Angel. Each of us is holding a glass of whiskey, each stares at the other and thinks something, the same thing or something different from what the other thinks. The glasses are heavy, rounded, their thick, rippling bottoms like the eye of an octopus at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea. She's also hugging her stuffed panda.

I look at her and tell myself we'll have to do something that bears no resemblance to the rest of our lives. That's what imagination is all about. But looking at her sitting opposite me, imagining her as she imagines me, I prefer to be clear and concise. During those years, Luisa Guzmán did not manage my social life (she was reclusive) or my financial life (she was supremely indifferent to money). She encouraged my literary life; she was patient about my work as a writer and reader. But what she did manage was my sexual life. Which is to say, she put up no obstacles to it. She thought that by standing aside she was ensuring my next return to her. That's how it had always been.

In any case, sitting there watching her watch me, with all the burden of memory on our shoulders, I realized that each time she had been one step ahead of me. She could not conceive a fidelity that could withstand the success of my first book. At the age of twenty-nine, I attained a celebrity I myself didn't celebrate very much. If there's one thing I've always known, it's that literature is a long apprenticeship that is always open to imperfection when things go well, to perfection when things go badly, and to risk at all times—if we want to deserve what we write. I didn't believe the praise heaped on me, because I knew I was far from achieving the goals I imagined; I didn't believe the attacks either. I listened to the voices of my friends, and they encouraged me. I listened to my own voice, and all I heard was this: “Don't accept success. Don't repeat it superficially. Set yourself impossible challenges. It's better to fail by taking the high road than to triumph on the low road. Avoid security. Take chances.”