Diana by Carlos Fuentes Page A

desire. A fervent desire in which I joined. Welded to her flesh and her words. Yes, please, let everything happen at the same time …
    We were unique. Everything began with us. Then literature butted in. I remembered Proust: “To know Gilberte again, as in the time of the creation, as if the past did not yet exist.” And from there it was only a step to the Lucho Gatica bolero that sometimes floated through the window from the servants’ rooms: “Don’t ask me anything more, / let me imagine / that the past doesn’t exist / and that we were born / at the very moment when we met…”
    It’s true she hadn’t read the sentence in a novel by her husband, Ivan Gravet, where he says, more or less, that a couple exists while it can invent itself or because shit’s better than solitude. A couple’s problems begin when the two of them stop inventing themselves.
    I preferred to think I was captured inside the body of this woman like a fetus that grows and fears, when it’s thrown into the world, that it loses its nourishing mother, Diana, Artemis, Cybele, Astarte, first goddess …
    â€œI love your cloudy brow,” Diana would say when I thought these things.
    â€œBut you always have a clear brow.”
    â€œAh,” she exclaimed, “if one day you see me suffer, you’ll pay for it.”

IX
    No sooner did I move into Diana’s house than I claimed, like some sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, a territory of my own. There I arranged my portable typewriter, my paper, and my books. Diana looked at me with smiling surprise.
    â€œWon’t you be coming to the set with me?”
    â€œYou know I can’t. I write from eight in the morning until one—it’s the way I work.”
    â€œI want to show you off on the set. I want to be seen with you.”
    â€œI’m sorry. We’ll see each other every afternoon, when the day’s shooting is done.”
    â€œMy men always accompany me on the set,” she said, accentuating the smile.
    â€œI can’t, Diana. Our whole relationship would fall apart in twenty-four hours. I love you at night. Let me write during the day. If you don’t, we’ll never get along. I swear.”
    The truth is, I was going through a creative crisis whose full dimensions I had yet to measure. My first novels had been successful because a new readership in Mexico identified itself (or, rather, misidentified itself) in them, saying we are or we aren’t like that but, either way, giving an engaged, occasionally impassioned response to three or four of my books, which were seen as a bridge between a convulsed, dejected, rural, self-enclosed country and a new urban society that was open but perhaps too apathetic, too comfortable and thoughtless. One phantom of Mexican reality was disappearing, only so another could take its place. Which was better? What were we sacrificing in either case? “I’ll always be grateful to you,” said a woman who worked with me in the Foreign Office when I had published my first novel but still needed a bureaucratic salary, “for having mentioned the street where I live. I’d never seen it in print before in a novel. Thank you!”
    The truth is, the social dimension of those books would have no real value for me unless it went along with a formal renovation of the novel as a literary form. The way I said things was as important as, or even more important than, what I was saying. But every writer has a primary relationship with the themes that arise from the world around him, and a much more complex relationship with the forms he invents, inherits, copies, or parodies—every novel contains those elements, feeds on those sources. The novel as a genre and impurity as an idea are sisters; the concept of the novel and the concept of originality are like a pair of mothers-in-law. I did not want to repeat the success of my first novels. Perhaps I made