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hicks. Hollywood! Just imagine: if you don’t know the most recent gossip, who’s sleeping with who, what everyone’s salary is, they think you’re a moron, an illiterate. All their jokes are about provincial, local subjects. Inside jokes, you know? They don’t understand someone like me, who never gives them the pleasure of repeating gossip or even of telling them about my love life.”
    â€œBaldwin also says that Europe has what you Americans need—a sense of tragedy, of limits. On the other hand, you do have what the Europeans lack—a sense of life’s unlimited possibilities … An energy that…”
    â€œI like it. I like that. What you just said.”
    Diana’s burning hand in mine when the party ended and only she, Terrazas, and I were left. Diana invited us to have a nightcap in her hotel suite, and Eduardo said he’d drop us off while he went to pick up a girlfriend at Anderson’s on Paseo de la Reforma. He’d catch up with us at the Hilton, which wasn’t far away.
    He never showed up. Diana and I had fun writing joint telegrams to all our friends in Paris. We went on talking about Hollywood (she), Mexico (I), drinking champagne and beginning to play with each other, while I swore that I’d never love her, that love’s space was too vast for me to sacrifice it to love, that on that very night I could have substituted other women for her, lots of other women, that loving her, nevertheless, was an exciting temptation, and that I never wanted to wonder later if I could deprive myself of her … That night, yes, I could have left her, invented any damn pretext and walked out of that suite, which looked like an M-G-M set in a hotel destined to collapse in the next earthquake.
    While she undressed, I looked out the bedroom window at the statue of the Aztec king Cuauhtémoc holding his spear on high, standing guard over the pleasures of the city he’d lost.

VI
    That long, marvelous first day of January 1970 in the Hilton suite, we didn’t bother to get dressed, just wrapped ourselves in towels whenever the room-service people came. We discovered a thousand details that linked us: we were both born in November—Scorpios can sense each other. At first, I called her a gamine, but she didn’t like it, so I stopped. But we both liked another French word, désolé, desolate, I’m so sorry, and we said it all the time, désolé about this, désolé about that, especially when we asked each other for physical love: we pronounced ourselves désolés, I’m so sorry, but I would like to kiss you, I’m sorrier, but you could come closer … desolate, the two of us.
    Close to her. Whenever I was, everything else faded into the background, vanished like the night itself as the first light of the new year broke over the intersection of Reforma and Insurgentes. My lovely, sinister city, center of all beauty and all horror, México, D.F. All too frequently, the only thing that would bring people together in my city was solitude, a craving for company, a group, the need to belong. Even sex in Mexico City, once you’re above a certain income bracket (everything here is determined by brutal class differences), is like going down a slide, riding a toboggan of pleasures—uncertain, partial, immediate—that are never postponed and end only with death. Then, when we die, we realize we were always dead.
    Not Diana. She infuriated Beverly Hills gossips because they never knew whom she was sleeping with—in a city where every woman announced such things publicly. What she was doing now, it was clear to me, was an act of total commitment, one she desired, not an accident but at the same time, I sensed without knowing why, dangerous. I told myself, as afternoon came on and I remembered the pleasure of making love with Diana, that we had no illusions about each other, neither of us. Our relationship