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.
XXXVII
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.
XXXVIII
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.