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was a passing one. She was here to make a film, I was the lucky boy at a New Year’s Eve party. Transitory but not gratuitous, not a pis aller, not a better-than-nothing or, as we say expressively in Mexico, a peoresnada —“worse would be nothing.” Worse would be nothing, no one, Mr. Nothing, wiseguy. Mexicans and Spaniards delight in denying or diminishing other people’s existence. Gringos, Anglo-Saxons in general, are better than we are, at least in this respect. They have more concern for their fellowman, more than we do. Maybe that’s why they’re better philanthropists. Our cruel aristocratic spirit, the hidalgo dressed in black, hand on chest, is more aesthetic but more sterile.
    I was intrigued with the idea of discovering precisely what Diana’s internal quality of cruelty, of destruction was, even if—as we all knew—she fervently supported, and was committed to, liberal, noble, sympathetic causes. Her name was on every petition against racism, in favor of civil rights, against the OAS and the fascist generals in Algeria, in favor of animal rights … She even had a sweatshirt imprinted with the image of the supreme 1960s icon, Che Guevara, transformed after his brutal death in 1967 into Chic Guevara, savior of all the good consciences of so-called radical chic in Europe and North America, that capacity of the West to find revolutionary paradises in the Third World and, in their lustrous waters, wash away its petit-bourgeois egoism … Was there any doubt about it?
    Ernesto Guevara, dead, laid out like Mantegna’s Christ, was our era’s most beautiful cadaver. Che Guevara was the Saint Thomas More of the Second (or Millionth) European Discovery of the New World. Ever since the sixteenth century, we’ve been the utopia where Europe can cleanse itself of its sins of blood, avarice, and death. And Hollywood has been the U.S. Sodom that waves revolutionary flags to disguise its vices, its hypocrisy, its love of money pure and simple. Was Diana different, or was she just one more in that legion of Californian utopians, now purified, thanks to her husband, by French revolutionary sentimentalism?
    I never stopped having these thoughts. But Diana’s charm, her seduction, her infinite sexual capacity intoxicated me, intrigued me, obliterated my better judgment. After all, I said to myself, what could I criticize in her that I couldn’t just as well criticize in myself? Hypocrite actress, my double, my sister. Diana Soren.
    I had a peach taste in my mouth. Let me admit it: before that night, I knew nothing about fruit-flavored vaginal creams. During the nights that followed I would discover strawberry, pineapple, orange flavors, reminding me of the ice creams I loved to lick, when I was a boy, in a marvelous icecream parlor, the Salamanca, where unique Mexican fruits turned into subtle, vaporous snows, melted at the peak of their perfection when they touched our tongues and palates, yielding their essence in the instant of their evaporation. I would imagine Diana with the tastes of my childhood in her vagina—mamey, guava, sapodilla, custard apple, mango … She made marvelous use of this bizarre commercial product, fruit-flavored vaginal cream, which my imagination could take hold of, something it could never do with the lingerie she kept in the hotel-room dresser. I won’t try to describe that. It was indescribable. A provocation, a gift, a madness. The quality of the lace and the silk, the way it intertwined, opened and closed, revealed and concealed, imitated and transformed, appeared and disappeared, contrasted wonderfully with that androgynous warrior-maiden simplicity I’ve already noted: Diana the fighting saint, Diana the Parisian gamine. I censored myself. She hated that word. Désolé.
    What a glance, only a glance (because something kept me from touching the contents of her dresser, delighting in those textures) made me