Free Diana by Carlos Fuentes Page A

can go back to their home away from home, the Holiday Inn, the same menu, every night. Movie stars, on the other hand, have seen everything, are tired, impressed by nothing. Being on location is a necessary evil—may it pass quickly; let’s kill our tedium with sex, alcohol, gossip, immortality. The combination didn’t surprise me. Sex told us we were alive even if the place was dead. The alcohol replaced the exceptional (because powerful and physical) nature of sex with a vaguely dreamlike, floating state that, as the leading man said, brought everything into present time: Do you realize that? All you need is a couple of martinis for everything that ever happened to you to be happening now …
    â€œWhat do you mean, sugar? I don’t get you,” said his girlfriend.
    â€œWould you like to be happy all the time?” he asked her, putting a finger under her chin and staring straight into her eyes.
    â€œWell, who wouldn’t?”
    â€œBut you’re not, right?”
    â€œSo who is?”
    â€œBut when you’re drinking, you’re happy…”
    â€œSure, but I pay for it the next morning…” She laughed like a jackass.
    â€œThat’s not the point. You drink and you’re not only happy.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œNo. You’re combining all your moments of happiness, as if you were living them all together at the same time, here and now. See?”
    â€œYeah, I see. Know why I love you so much? Nobody else makes me understand things…”
    The actor laughed gutturally and hugged his girlfriend’s reddish head against his hairy chest, which overflowed out of his shirt, red as a bullfighter’s cape. But she shrieked because of the chain that also glittered on the actor’s chest: Ow, it’s hurting me, it’s scraping my eyebrows …
    He had taxidermic eyes, and when he looked at her she swooned, saying, I’ve only seen eyes like that in deer trophies hanging in country clubs …
    Sex, alcohol, and gossip. If alcohol made us happy, it also loosened our tongues: who was sleeping with whom, for how long, why, what part did they give Lilly, who’d she steal it from, who’s on the way out, who’s rising like the head on beer? Immortality.
    â€œThink Lilly’s going to last?”
    â€œDon’t know. Everything’s relative. Last longer than what?”
    â€œAll right, less than the faces on Mount Rushmore, of course.”
    â€œOr more than who, then?”
    â€œGarbo lasted a long time and retired at the right moment. Anna Sten lasted a minute, and they retired her at the right moment. Lupe Vélez lasted a long time but didn’t know how to retire at the right moment. Death retired Valentino when he was thirty…”
    â€œLook, the important thing is not what your place is but how big it is. It’s the space that counts, not the time. A short time but a lot of space—you’ve got it made. A small space for a long time, you’re a poor jerk.”
    â€œDepends on publicity. And talent, of course.”
    But with the word talent everyone’s eyes became glassy; they all looked at one another as if they weren’t there or as if they were all glass, like Cervantes’s character, the university graduate who wakes up imagining he’s made of glass. Then it was time to think about sex again, alcohol, gossip, immortality, who’s going to survive, who’s going to last, let’s screw, let’s have a drink, let’s gossip, are we going to last?
    I whispered to Diana that all this reminded me of one of the most repulsive institutions in the world, the gringo cocktail party, where no one deigns to concede more than two or three minutes to anyone, not the most fascinating stranger, not even one’s oldest and dearest friend. Yes, you’re made of glass, they look right through you to see who the next favored person is to whom they will