Diana by Carlos Fuentes Page B

actors, the technicians, the producers, the director were all immensely anguished, hiding their anguish behind a jolly mask.
    The joke, perpetual joking, is another atrocious trait of North Americans. The wisecrack, the snappy retort, the ironic or witty answer—they’re all an extensive but thin mask covering the vast territory of the United States and disguising the anguish of its inhabitants, the anguish of moving around, of not being still in a single place, of arriving at another place, doing, getting things done, making it. North Americans detest what they’re doing because all of them, without exception, would like to do something else so as to be something more. The United States had no Middle Ages. That’s the big difference between it and Europe, of course, but it’s also the biggest difference between them and us. We Mexicans descend from the Aztecs but also from the Mediterranean—the Phoenicians, the Greeks and Romans, from the Jews and Arabs, and along with all of them, medieval Spain. To get to Mexico you must travel the route to Santiago—not the movie set in Mexico but Santiago de Compostela in Spain—as did pilgrims. Later, when my Harvard students would complain about the remote traditions I dragged out to explain contemporary Latin America, I ask them: “And for you, when does history begin?”
    They always answered: “In 1776, when our nation was born.”
    The U.S.A., sprung like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter, armed, whole, enlightened, free, envied … and blessed with social mobility, always higher, to be always something more, someone more, more than the person next door. The country without limits. That was its grandeur. Also its servitude.
    Azucena was the lady’s maid, the invisible, worthy, serenely satisfied servant. At times it was impossible to know if she was there or not. She walked through the Santiago house like a cat. One morning, she came in with the breakfast tray to wake Diana and found us screwing—well, ostensibly we were screwing: a sumptuous sixty-nine that we could not disguise. She dropped the tray. In the huge clatter, Diana and I awkwardly disconnected ourselves. By chance, because of my position or the light, my eyes caught Azucena’s. In her eyes, I saw the vertigo of her imagining herself loved.

XIII
    In very tender, very vulnerable moments that I thought I was sharing with Diana, investing her with qualities, if that’s what they were, or lacks of defense, which is what they turned out to be, I invited her to give it all up, to come with me to one of those North American university positions I was offered from time to time. I’d never taught in a gringo university. What I imagined was a bucolic haven surrounded by lakes, with ivy-covered libraries—and good stationers, the supreme attraction the Anglo-Saxon world holds for me.
    I feel a professional distress in Latin countries: the low quality of the paper, my work material, is a negative comparable to a painter’s being deprived of paint or given brushes but no canvases. The ink bleeds through notebooks made in Mexico; Spanish paper comes right out of the ancient mercantile or accounting world Pérez Galdós describes in his novels—it’s first cousin to the abacus and brother to parchment—and in France a sourpuss salesgirl blocks the way to any writer curious to smell, touch, or feel the nearness of paper.
    In the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, the paper is as smooth as silk, the selection brilliant, extensive, well-ordered. To enter a stationery store in London or New York is to penetrate a paradise of writerly fruits, pens that fly like hawks, pads that are as pliant and responsive as a loving hand, paper clips that are silver brooches, portfolios as grand as protocols, labels that are credentials, notebooks that are deuteronomies … For years, I would go back to Mexico loaded with satin-paper notebooks for my