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do was to see, touch, and delight in the flesh that could be hidden within such delirious objects. How incredible: a girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and underneath that ordinary costume the intimacies of a goddess. Which goddess?
    She herself gave me a clue the second night of our love. During the first, she had secretly guided me toward her lingerie by sitting on my lap and changing her voice, whispering into my ear in a little girl’s voice, lift up my little skirt, you will lift up my little skirt, won’t you? aren’t you going to touch my panties? touch my panties, honey, pretty please with sugar on it, lift up my little skirt and take off my panties, don’t be afraid, I’m only ten years old but I won’t tell anyone, tell me what you’re touching, darling, tell me what you feel when you lift up my little skirt and touch my little pussy and then you take off my panties.
    The second night, naked, stretched out on the bed, she evoked other spaces, other lights. She was in the auditorium of her high school in Iowa. It was nightfall. Outside, it had snowed. All day, they’d been rehearsing carols for the Christmas Eve party. She and he had stayed behind to practice a bit more. It gets late, suddenly the December night falls, blue and white. There was a skylight in the auditorium. Leaning back, the two of them looking up, they saw the clouds scud by. Then there were no more clouds. There was only the moon. The moon illuminated them. She was fourteen. That was the first time she made love completely, virginally, with a man …
    It was then I found out which goddess she was, or rather, which goddesses, because she was several. She was Artemis, Apollo’s sister, virgin hunter whose arrows hasten the death of the impious, goddess of the moon. She was Cybele, patron of those orgiasts who in her honor castrated themselves by moonlight, surrounding the goddess flanked by the lions she used to dominate nature. She wore a crown of towers. Diana was Astarte, Syria’s nocturnal goddess, who, with the moon under her control, moved the forces of birth, fertility, decay, and death. She was, finally and especially, Diana, her own name, a goddess whose only mirror is a lake where she and her tutelary sphere, the moon, may reflect themselves. Diana and her screen. Diana and her camera. Diana and her sacrifice, her celebrity, her arrows rising and falling in the implacable ratings of the box office.
    She was Diana Soren, an American actress who came to Mexico to make a cowboy film in some spectacular mountains near the city of Santiago. Filming would begin tomorrow, January 2, in set 6 of Churubusco Studios, Mexico City.
    On the set, she stopped belonging to me. The hair people, the makeup people, the costume people took control of her. But Diana would trust her real makeup only to Azucena, a Catalan, her secretary, lady’s maid, cook, and masseuse. That first morning on the set, marginalized, I had a great time examining the ointments Azucena used to make Diana beautiful. My mouth still tasted of peach. My Joan of Arc was lubricated with formulas that would have caused any medieval witch to be instantly burned at the stake if she had dared supply them secretly to the desperate, unsatisfied women in the villages of Brabant, Saxony, and Picardy. A concentrated anticellulite, multithinning gel to be applied daily to the stomach, hips, and buttocks until it completely penetrated her biomicrospheres; a thinning transdiffuser based on osmoactive systems of continuous diffusion; a restructuring and lipo-reducing cream to combat fatty skin; a translucent pink exfoliant foam to eliminate dead cells; an avocado and marigold unguent to soften her feet; an ox- marrow mask … My God! Could any of those concoctions be good for anything? Would they survive a night of love, a big bash, a good screw, a PRI political speech? Did they merely postpone what we all saw, a world of fat, wrinkled women with