Diana’s enthusiasm inhabited it, the only lavishness or distinction the house could boast. I was amazed by her good spirits. Here we were in a literally godforsaken village, as if God, wanting to take revenge on mankind for having disillusioned Him so, sent these people to live on this dry, rocky plateau, burning by day, frozen by night, a hard, useless crown of volcanic rock surrounded by canyons, cut off from the world as if by a huge knife, as if God Himself had not wanted anyone to come here except those condemned for their sins.
“Everyone says this is the most boring place in the world,” said Diana as she set about neatly hanging my clothes in the closet. “Who knows how many Westerns have been shot here? It seems the landscape is spectacular and the local salaries low. An irresistible combination for Hollywood.”
It was true. That very weekend, we discovered there were no restaurants although plenty of pharmacies, no foreign papers except the indispensable Time and Newsweek—though these were already a week old, their news stale. As for nightlife: there weren’t even amusing attempts at inventing impossible “tropical” spots in the Mexican mountains, only bars that stank of beer and pulque, from which soldiers, priests, minors, and women were excluded by law, and one movie-house, which specialized in Clavillazo’s comedies and in fleas. Television had yet to extend its parabolic wings toward the universe, and no one on the set would waste a single minute watching a Mexican soap opera in black and white. The gringos would go into raptures of nostalgia watching ads for Yankee products. That’s it.
Diana’s hairdresser offered to cut my hair to save me from the boot-camp haircuts that seemed to be the fashion among Santiago men. They used an ultramodern method: put a bowl on top of the head and mercilessly cut off everything that pokes out from underneath it. The nape of every masculine neck boasted that abrupt cut, which resembled the local ravines. Betty the hairdresser, as I said, decided to spare me that horror.
“How good it is you came,” she said as she wet my hair. “You saved Diana from the stuntman.”
I shot her a questioning look. She picked up her scissors and asked me to keep my head still.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen him. He’s a very professional guy, good at his job. They use him a lot in Westerns because of how he rides, but especially for how he falls off a horse. He’s been after Diana since the last picture we made in Oregon. But the competition there was stiff.”
Betty laughed so hard she almost left me looking like van Gogh.
“Careful.”
“He said he’d conquer her in Mexico. And then you turned up.”
She sighed.
“Being on location is really boring. What do you expect a girl to do without a boyfriend. We’d go crazy. So we make do with what’s around.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, they said you were tender, passionate, and cultured. Actually, you look good.”
“I already thanked you once, Betty.”
“If you go onto the set, you’ll see him. He’s a short guy but leathery, nicely broken in, like a saddle. Blond, with suspicious eyes…”
“So why don’t you grab him?”
Betty laughed with pleasure, but there was more pleasure than fun in that laugh.
Betty’s comments about the last location in Oregon set me to imagining things. I tried to convince myself, perversely, that the only way to love a woman is to know how other men loved her, what they said about her, and what they were like. I didn’t bring this up with Diana; it was too soon. I held it back for a moment I foresaw as inevitable. On the other hand, I could tell her that if she made love today, she’d do it only with me, but if she died today, she would die for all her lovers; all of them would think about their love with her with as much right as I would.
I told her that one cold night when the freshly washed, still moist sheets kept us from falling asleep, annoying us, making us aware of the discomfort that surrounded us in this place but that we were intent on overcoming, beginning with the cold sheets: we’d warm them up. Our love was going to be invincible.
“I’m alone with you only as long as you’re alive, Diana. I can’t be alone with you if you die. All the ghosts of your other loves would accompany us. They’d have the right, they’d be justified — don’t you think?”
“Oh, darling, the only thing that scares me is thinking that one of us, you or I, could die before the other. One of us would be left alone; that’s what makes me sad …”
“Swear that if it happens, we’re going to imagine each other as hard as we can, Diana, as hard as we can. You’ll imagine me, I’ll imagine you …”
“As hard as I can, I swear …”
“As hard as we can, as hard as we can …”
She said that the only real deathbed is the bed we sleep in alone. I’d told her that death is the greatest adultery, because then we can’t keep others from possessing the one we love. Yet in life, I knew from experience, I should avoid even the slightest glint of possessiveness in my eyes. Despite our passionate words, I didn’t want to lose sight of the transitory nature of our relationship. I was afraid of falling in love, of really giving my heart to Diana. Even so, no matter what I wanted, I could see the possibility. I relieved my fear the first night of our shared life in that high Mexican desert by summarizing my perverse fantasy in an almost scientific idea.
“We all form triangles,” I told her. “A couple is only an incomplete triangle, a solitary angle, an abbreviated figure.”
“Norman Mailer wrote that the modern couple consists of a man, a woman, and a psychiatrist.”
“And in Stalin’s Russia they defined Socialist Realist literature as the eternal triangle made up of two Stakhonovites and a tractor. Don’t make jokes, Diana. Tell me what you think of my idea: We all form triangles. All we have to do is discover which. Which?”
“Well, you and I and your wife are already one. My husband, you, and I are another.”
“Obviously. There must be something more exciting, more secret…”
She looked at me as if she was holding back, as if she loved my idea but at the same time rejected it for the moment … I felt (or tried to imagine) that she hadn’t rejected it completely, that there was something exciting about the idea of each of us having a lover on the side, but there was something much more exciting in sharing the bed with a third person — man or woman, it didn’t matter. Or taking turns — a woman for her and for me one night, a man for the two of us on the next…
We were in our romantic phase. We quickly returned to the plenitude of the couple we were, without need for supplements. And we went back further, much, much further, to an adorable sentiment she expressed.