Diana Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer so nonchalant, peered into the mirror to make certain of their existence and found their faces dotted with pieces of balloon bearing the logo of the Mexican Olympiad of 1968. They looked like three explorers suddenly transformed by the sorcery of a tribal sacrifice into priests tattooed by the very rites they’d come to exorcise. One of them—I’d recovered my senses—saved our lives by opening a window to let in a breeze that came, no doubt about it, straight from the Scottish Highlands.
    Luisa saved herself and her impeccable appearance: she’d gone up to the powder room and now came back down in alarm. Just at that moment, the front door opened, and Eduardo Terrazas walked in with Diana Soren, whom he’d gone to fetch from another party.
    â€œAre we too late?” asked our host, watching us, dazed, get up from the floor.

V
    Can you extricate yourself from one romance and get into another without hurting someone? This is just one simple example of the myriad questions you ask yourself when you suddenly realize something’s going to begin at the expense of something that’s going to end. She was small, blond, with boyishly cut hair, fair, pale, with blue or perhaps gray eyes, very jolly eyes, that nicely matched her dimpled cheeks. Her dress wasn’t very attractive: a long Greco-Californian evening gown, which didn’t suit her because it made her seem shorter than she was, like a thumbtack.
    I—who else?—remembered her from her two major films. In both, Diana Soren used her adolescent physique to full advantage by dressing as a man. First she was Joan of Arc, and the armor allowed her to move with energy and fluidity, comfortable in war as she never would have been in a court of hoop skirts and white wigs, armed to fight like a soldier, dressed as a soldier. In the bonfire, she would pay dearly for the privilege, accused of witchcraft but also perhaps, silently, of lesbianism and androgyny. In the only good movie she made after that, in France, she was a girl in a T-shirt and jeans running back and forth on the Champs Elysées waving her copy of the Herald Tribune  … Loose, free, the warrior maiden of Orléans or the vestal virgin of the Latin Quarter, adorably feminine because to get to her you had to negotiate the twists and turns of androgyny and homoeroticism. On the screen, I’d always seen Diana Soren with an unwritten subtitle: There is the love that dares not speak its name, but there is something worse, which is the love without a name. What name can I give the possible love with this pure possibility which entered the 1970 New Year’s Eve party after a gas explosion and which was called Diana Soren?
    I looked at her. She looked at me. Luisa looked at us looking at each other. My wife walked over to me and said point-blank, “I think we should be on our way.”
    â€œBut the party hasn’t even started,” I protested.
    â€œFor me it’s over.”
    â€œBecause of the explosion? I’m fine. Look.” I showed her my steady hands.
    â€œYou promised tonight to me.”
    â€œDon’t be so self-centered. Look who’s just walked in. We’re both fans of hers.”
    â€œForget the plural, please.”
    â€œI just want to chat with her for a while.”
    â€œDon’t come home too late.” She raised her eyebrow, an almost inevitable, Pavlovian, instinctive reflex in a Mexican actress.
    I never went home. Seated next to Diana Soren, talking about movies, about life in Paris, discovering mutual friends, I felt I was being unfaithful and, as always, told myself that, if I wasn’t being unfaithful to literature, I wasn’t being unfaithful to myself; nothing else mattered. But when I caressed Diana Soren’s hand with the tips of my fingers, I had the sensation that the infidelity, if there was any, had to be double.
    After all, Diana was married to Ivan Gravet, a very popular,