Diana by Carlos Fuentes

an infinitely sad Joan, sweetheart—I didn’t have that sadness, there was no place inside from which I could extract it…”
    â€œSo you decided to be Saint Joan in life.”
    She looked at me inquisitively. “No. I decided Joan was crazy and deserved to die in the flames.”
    Surprised, I pressed her to go on.
    â€œYes. Anyone who fights for justice is crazy. Christianity is madness; freedom, socialism, the end of racism and poverty, they’re all crazy. If you defend all those crazy things, you’re a witch and you’ll end up in the fire…”
    Never did she look at me with greater melancholy, as if through her nocturnal eyes, so clear, were passing Dreyer’s chiaroscuro images—Falconetti with her hair shaved off and her eyes bloodshot like grapes, the white walls, the bishops’ black robes, Antonin Artaud’s bloodless lips promising other paradises …
    â€œThere’s a very old philosopher from Andalusia, María Zambrano, who says the following: Revolution is an annunciation. And the vigor of the revolution may be measured by the eclipses and falls that it survives. Joan was a revolutionary. She was a Christian.”
    â€œThe bad thing”—she spoke with sudden bitterness—“is that the director didn’t understand that … The idiot thought Joan was a saint because she suffered, not because she enjoyed being intolerable for everyone.”
    â€œShe had to be burned,” I said in conclusion, rather thoughtlessly.
    â€œLiterally, literally. The director tied me to the stake, he ordered the fire lit, and he didn’t even film the scene. He watched how the flames came closer and closer to me. He wanted to see me terrified so he could make me into his Saint Joan. He should have let me be burned up then and there, the son of a bitch. The crew saved me when the flames were touching my robe. The director was happy. I had suffered: I was a saint. He didn’t let me be a rebel. We both failed.”
    This statement restored Diana’s serenity.
    â€œTo escape the director’s tyranny, I married a famous writer who could dominate the director and every studio in Hollywood.”
    â€œDid he also satisfy you?”
    â€œNever say anything bad about Ivan.”
    She glared at me as if I were someone else, a man made of glass, another glass graduate.
    â€œI admire him greatly,” I said with a cordial smile.
    â€œNever laugh when you talk about him, either.”
    She turned on her heel and walked back into the living room. I followed her. The actor, by now very drunk, hopelessly lost in the geography of Mexico, repeated incessantly, “I’m very cross in Vera Cruz, I’m very cross in Vera Cruz”; his girlfriend wondered if Lilly, the rising star, would last or not; and the cinematographer said he had a portable solution to all problems of sexual solitude while on distant locations: he pulled down his zipper and showed us his sex (which looked like a huge bruised pear), shouting: Long live self-love! And the actor declaimed, Very cross in Veracruz, and his girlfriend begged him, Don’t be a has-been. I’d leave you. I swear I’d leave you for another man. Success is my aphrodisiac …
    â€œSee?” whispered Diana, as the station wagon brought us to the center of Santiago. “Hollywood is a series of capsule biographies, vitamins or poison you can buy in the drugstore.”

XII
    Azucena needed no capsule biography. Everything about her seemed uncertain to me at first. Her age, of course. She was short, very thin, with almost masculine sinews, which no doubt derived from a life (maybe more than one) of hard work. The nature of this job with Diana Soren was not uncertain. Azucena was invisibly involved in everything. She packed the bags for trips, unpacked them on arrival, put everything in its proper place. She made sure the clothes were always clean and pressed.