Free Diana by Carlos Fuentes Page B

surrender a few minutes before offering him a frozen, disdainful face, since of course waiting his turn is the next, et cetera. All of this while balancing a drink in one hand and in the other a Vienna sausage wrapped in greasy bacon, which means one shakes hands with only two fingers and with one’s mouth more puffed out than the cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie playing his trumpet.
    â€œWhat was it like when you went to Hollywood?” I interrupted myself.
    That night, Diana did not smell of perfumed ointments. She smelled of soap and wore overalls over a white T-shirt. Only I knew the exciting delights hidden under that simplicity.
    She told me many things I already knew and others I didn’t.
    She was chosen for the role of Saint Joan out of eighteen thousand applicants. Stardom by elimination—everything in the U.S. is like a relay race: one after another the girls were rejected because they didn’t conform to the model. This one’s nose was too long or short, for others it was a neck that was too long or too short; others looked too big on screen.
    â€œThe screen makes you look bigger. Ideally you have to be small and thin, or if you are big, you should be svelte and graceful in your movements like Ava Gardner, or mysterious like Garbo, or believable like Ingrid Bergman. Other girls had the most beautiful eyes in the world, but God gave them cortisone necks. Others had bodies like Venus, but moon faces.”
    â€œYou’re Diana, the goddess who hunts by moonlight.”
    She laughed. “I heard it right from the first day on the set. A very little girl for a very big part, they whispered. A great English actor took pity on me. He told me, You’re going to be a star before being an actress. What horrified me were his good intentions, his pity, not the tyrannical demands of the director. He actually thought he had a clear idea of what Shaw wanted. All he asked of me was to be at the same level as the author, to be Saint Joan, and he didn’t care if I was an actress or a star or if I was too small or too big for the part. Remember what Shaw says about his saint?”
    I said I did, that it was a play I liked a lot. “Shaw sees the Middle Ages as a pool filled with eccentrics and Saint Joan as one of its strangest fish. Annoying everyone. A woman dressed as a man: she irritated feudal machismo. By saying she was an emissary from God, she irritated the bishops, to whom she felt superior. She gave orders to the King of France and tried to humiliate England. She told generals to go to hell and showed she was a better strategist than they were. How could they not burn a woman like that?”
    Diana hung her head. “The director told me, If she’d dealt diplomatically with all of them—the kings, the generals, the bishops, and the feudal lords—she would have lived a long time. She was a woman who couldn’t give an inch. She didn’t know how to compromise. She was a masochist. She wanted to suffer so she could go to heaven.”
    She threw her arms around my neck, deeply moved, almost sobbing: What should we do, give in, stand fast, live a long life or die young, burned at the stake, what? Tell me, love.
    I tried to be good-humored because my emotions were taking control of me as well. But nothing came out; the Holy Spirit did not visit me that night. I made a sign of discretion with my finger so everyone would understand. They stared at us, shocked. I led her out to the wooden balcony that hung over a ravine. The cold night air of the desert revived us. “If only you’d directed me.” Diana presented me with her dimpled smile.
    â€œShaw says Joan was like Socrates and Christ. She was killed and no one lifted a finger to defend her.”
    â€œI asked to see Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc. They—the studio—didn’t want me to. They thought it would influence me. That the comparison would devastate me. Falconetti was such