Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2012-08-16T06:00:00+00:00

XVII

With my prerogative to stay at home and write all day firmly established, I paid a surprise visit to the set one morning. Diana wasn’t mad at me for not warning her; she received me with a big display of cheerfulness, showed me off, introduced me to everyone, and invited me to have coffee in her trailer. It was the same one we used at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. Now, she said, with a roguish look in her eyes, we don’t have to use it the way we did then. Why not? I answered.

When we left the trailer, the makeup and hair people were waiting impatiently. The director was edgy. The cloudy day was going to clear up. He peered at the sky through a very fine and mysterious apparatus, squinting one eye and wrinkling up his entire face, as if he were expecting instructions from above so he could go on filming and saving money for a company that no doubt worked at the right hand of God, with His blessing and mandate.

The landscape of the Santiago mountains falls apart and reconstructs itself according to the whims of the light. I walked across the plain toward the mountains that were storing up all the shade of the day, swaying like trees under the tricky sky. Some kids were playing soccer on an improvised field. The spectacle was funny because the goats the children were tending didn’t respect the boundaries set for the game and would periodically invade, at which point the boys would stop being rustic Pelés and go back to being shepherds.

A flock of stolid lambs, their wool as curly as a filthy wig on an English magistrate, came tumbling down toward the playing field. The boy tending them was received with whistles and insults by the players. One of them even went so far as to jump the shepherd, grab his staff out of his hand, and begin to beat him with it. I ran to stop it, separated them, called the attacker a bully, because he was taller than his victim, and the other members of both teams thugs, because they were taking their revenge on the lambs who were erasing the boundaries marked out with chalk.

“Leave him alone, you thugs. It’s not his fault.”

“Yes, it is his fault,” said the tall boy. “He’s conceited. Who does he think he is? Just because he was Benito Juárez.”

This allusion to a hero of Mexican history seemed so outrageous to me that at first I laughed. Then I grew curious. I carefully studied the boy who’d been attacked. He couldn’t be more than thirteen and looked very Indian, his cheeks like two broken clay pots, his eyes reflecting an inherited sadness, passed down from century to century. He was wearing a shirt, overalls, a straw hat, and huaraches and was even tending a flock. He really was another Benito Juárez, who until he was twelve was an illiterate shepherd who spoke no Spanish and then was president,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.