Diana by Carlos Fuentes Page B

well. I wasn’t convinced by my own explanation. It was all too simple. There had to be something more, and that morning, when she woke up at five and rolled over, giving and offering her daily love, my answer was almost mechanical, and afterward, getting out of bed wrapped in a towel, as if the staring eyes of Clint Eastwood and your humble servant were, taken together, a bit too much, she said this to me: “Mister, you’ve had two weeks of pleasure. When are you planning to give me some?”

XV
    It goes without saying that I didn’t write a single line that morning. How was I going to take up the love of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche when my own had become so mysteriously complicated? What did a rough soldier from Extremadura and a captive princess, from Tabasco no less, give each other, what could they give each other? Something more than a political alliance mediated by sex? Something more than the verbal, carnal union of two languages—two tongues? By the same token, Diana went off to film a ridiculous Western in the Sierra Madre, and there I was, pondering the pleasure that apparently I hadn’t given her, taking it only for myself.
    For a moment, I almost convinced myself that I was like all other men, especially Latin American men, who go after their own immediate satisfaction and don’t give a shit about the woman’s. I was my own best lawyer: I quickly convinced myself that this didn’t apply in my case. I’d showered Diana Soren with warmth and attention; neither my patience nor my passion was in doubt. She was as voracious as I was desirous of satisfying her. If the masculine pleasure to which she referred that morning was the simple, direct pleasure of mounting her and coming, I never did it without all the preambles, the foreplay, that sexual urbanity requires in order to satisfy the woman and bring her to the point just before the culmination that leads, with luck, to shared orgasm, profound lovemaking, composed equally of flesh and spirit: coming together, soaring to heaven …
    Did I fail in some other area? I reviewed them all. I asked her for a blowjob when I sensed she wanted to give me one, when taking her by the nape of the neck and bringing her close to my erect penis as if she were a docile slave was the pleasure we both wanted. But I also understood when what Diana wanted was slow, dazzling cunnilingus in which my tongue explored her invisible sex, when I was ashamed of the brutal obstruction of my mere masculine form, awkward, as obvious as a hose abandoned in a garden of blond grass. In her, in Diana, sex was a hidden luxury, behind the hair, between the folds that my tongue explored until it reached the tiny, nervous, quivering, dithering thrill of pure quicksilver clitoris.
    There was no dearth of sixty-nines, and she possessed the infinite wisdom of true lovers who know where the roots of a man’s sex are, the knot of nerves between his legs, equidistant between testicles and anus, where all virile tremors meet when a woman’s hand caresses us there, threatening, promising, insinuating one of the two paths, the heterosexual at the testicles or the homosexual at the asshole. That hand holds us suspended between our open or secret inclinations, our amorous potentialities with the opposite or the same sex. A true lover knows how to give us the two pleasures and give them, besides, as a promise, that is, with the maximum intensity of what is only desired, of what is incomplete. Total love is always androgynous.
    Didn’t she herself want me to sodomize her? I did it two ways, turning her over on her stomach to enter her vagina from the rear, or lubricating her anus to enter, to tear open, her most intimate bud. I covered her with oils, and one night I showered her with champagne, both of us spraying each other in a torrent of laughter; I’ve already spoken of her splendid vaginal aromas of ripe fruits; I sprayed my cologne in her