There I arranged my portable typewriter, my paper, and my books. Diana looked at me with smiling surprise. “Won’t you be coming to the set with me?” “You know I can’t. I write from eight in the morning until one—it’s the way I work.” “I want to show you off on the set. I want to be seen with you.” “I’m sorry. We’ll see each other every afternoon, when the day’s shooting is done.” “My men always accompany me on the set,” she said, accentuating the smile. “I can’t, Diana. Our whole relationship would fall apart in twenty-four hours. I love you at night. Let me write during the day. If you don’t, we’ll never get along. I swear.” The truth is, I was going through a creative crisis whose full dimensions I had yet to measure. My first novels had been successful because a new readership in Mexico identified itself (or, rather, misidentified itself) in them, saying we are or we aren’t like that but, either way, giving an engaged, occasionally impassioned response to three or four of my books, which were seen as a bridge between a convulsed, dejected, rural, self-enclosed country and a new urban society that was open but perhaps too apathetic, too comfortable and thoughtless.
