Diana Read Online Free PDF

prizewinning French writer who’d written two beautiful books about his youth, the first about his escape from Eastern Europe, the second about when he’d fought in the war. His latest novels seemed written for the movies and were produced in Hollywood, but in everything he wrote there was always both intelligence and a growing disenchantment. I could imagine him capable of a final joke, excessive but devoid of illusion. He was a fellow writer. Could I betray him? He himself, if he was like me, would say books are more valuable than women … I began to desire Diana.
    Encounters between a man and a woman take place on two levels. One is external—filmable, if you like—the level of gesture, attitude, eyes, movement. More interesting is the internal level, where sensations, questions, doubts, games you play with yourself, fantasies begin to materialize and crowd in. She herself: what could she be thinking, what’s she like, what can she be thinking about me? Facing the charm of that blond head, sculpted like a helmet for medieval warfare or for the street fighting of the 1960s (fading into the distance that night, suddenly as far off as the Hundred Years’ War), I imagined an overwhelming carnal invitation, Diana Soren’s head saying to me, Imagine my body, I command you. Each detail of my head, my face, has its equivalent in my body. Search my body for the smile of my visible mouth, search my body for the dimples in my cheeks, search my body for the breathing of my turned-up little nose, search for the tactile and excitable counterpart of my eyes, search for the twin companion of my smooth blond hair, freshly washed, short, sometimes combed, otherwise free as the wind, but near, ever so near to its most intimate, invisible, insecure model: my flesh.
    That was one level of my incipient desire as we chatted amiably on the sofa in Eduardo Terrazas’s house. I must not reveal it: another clause in the constitution of encounters orders us never to give a woman the ammunition she can store up to fire at you when she needs to attack you (which, one day, she will). It’s something inherent in women: to store away our sins and dump them on us when they need to and when we least expect it. Self-defense? No. Women are great at the art of making us feel guilty. To disguise my own immediate desire, I resorted to the anti-aphrodisiac idea of woman as producer of guilt, woman as the true Federal Reserve or Fort Knox of Guilt. They stockpile guilt to avoid inflation and then release those ingots of reproach little by little, distilled, wounding, poisoned, ultimately victorious, because we men, marvelous paradigms of generosity, would never do that … I thought about the unfaithfulness that in my case had already been consummated even if nothing had taken place with Diana Soren. I thought about Luisa, alone back in the San Angel house, and the unfaithfulness she might perpetrate if I went ahead with my own that night. More than ever, I decided it must be a double infidelity, shared, that would link us and excite us …
    Luisa and Ivan—our absent witnesses—suspended like two exterminating angels over our bodies but respecting our unfaithful integrity because, after all, they loved us, remembered us with pleasure, and never lost the hope of being with us. And did we have the hope of being with them?
    We talked of other places, other friends scattered around the world, and we felt that what was beginning to link us was not only that cosmopolitan, footloose fraternity but also the price of membership in it. To be from everywhere, we said, was to be from nowhere … Where would she feel comfortable? In Paris, in Mallorca, she said. Los Angeles? She laughed. A place that looked horrible externally, physically, and was horrible inside as well, hopeless.
    â€œThere’s a word in English that’s perfect for Hollywood: smug. How do you say that in Spanish?”
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