Diana by Carlos Fuentes

international consumption. Mexico! Land of high tariffs and industries protected from foreign competition!
    Santiago’s university students would meet at the door of the pharmacy, and one of them came over to me one morning when I went there alone to buy razor blades and glycerin suppositories for my chronic constipation. He told me that he’d read some of my books, that he recognized me and wanted to tell me that in Santiago the governor and the other authorities had not been elected democratically but had been imposed from the capital by the PRI. They didn’t understand local problems, much less the problems of the students.
    â€œThey think we’re all peons and that we’re still in the age of Don Porfirio,” he said. “They don’t realize things have changed.”
    â€œDespite 1968?” I asked.
    â€œThat’s the serious part. They just keep going on as if nothing happened. Our parents are peasants, workers, business people, and thanks to their labor we go to the university and learn things. We tell our parents we have more rights than they think. A peasant can organize a cooperative and tell the mill owner to grind up his mama…”
    â€œWho’s probably a grind herself,” I said, without getting even a smile out of the student.
    He went on, and I knew I could never expect humor from him. “… or the truck owners, who are the worst exploiters. They decide if they’ll carry the harvest to market, when, and for how much, and no discounts. The crops rot. A worker has the right to form associations and doesn’t have to be under the thumb of the thugs from the CTM.”
    â€œThat’s what you tell the people who work here?”
    He said he did. “Someone’s got to inform them. Someone’s got to make them aware of things. Maybe you yourself, now that you’re here…”
    â€œI’m writing a book. Besides, I don’t want to compromise my North American friends. They’re working and can’t get involved in politics. It would be a real pain if they did. I’m their guest. I have to respect them.”
    â€œOkay. Maybe another time.”
    I shook hands with him and asked him not to take offense. We could get together sometime for coffee. He smiled. His teeth were terrible. And yet he was tall, graceful, with languid eyes, and a sagging Zapata mustache—thin, like his unfinished, patchy, almost pubic beard.
    â€œMy name is Carlos Ortiz.”
    â€œWell, well, we’re namesakes.”
    That he liked. He thanked me for saying it and even smiled.
    At night, Diana and I went on building our passion. I didn’t dare ask her anything about her past loves, and she didn’t ask me about mine. I’d ventured two ideas: the company of death and the natural tendency of couples to form triangles. In reality, what both of us wanted at that stage was to feel ourselves unique, without precedents, one of a kind. The first nights were a matter of words and acts, acts and words, sometimes the one first, other times the other, rarely both at once, because the words of sex are unrepeatable, infantile, often filthy, with no interest or excitement except for the lovers themselves.
    On the other hand, the words before or after the act always tended, during those early days in Santiago, to proclaim the joy and singularity of what was happening to us. With Diana Soren in my arms, I came to feel that I had written nothing before I met her. Love meant starting over. She fed and strengthened that idea: she actually told me that we were getting to know each other at the creation, before the past, before Iowa and the little skirt and the moon—she actually said that. Ultimately, she transmuted everything (and I thanked her for it) into a fantastic vision of joy as simultaneity. Sometimes during orgasm she would shout, “Why doesn’t everything happen at the same time?” It wasn’t a question; it was a