The Five Acts of Diego Leon (37 page)

One morning, Javier called Diego to say that, after many hours of train travel and a series of delays, he was in Los Angeles again. Diego was excited; maybe this visit would allow him the opportunity to focus on something else besides the upheaval surrounding the studio and Bill and Tod Duren.

“I imagine you’re busy with your new film,” he said. “But I’d like to talk before I leave.”

“Of course,” he said. “Tell Lucía I look forward to seeing her again.”

“She’s not with me, hermano. She left me for another man.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Meet me at Olvera Street,” Javier said. “There’s a rally planned.”

Dalton Perry had phoned him at four a.m. on the day he was to see Javier. An unexpected delay and word from up top to speed up production meant that they would have to film that day after all.

“Sorry,” Perry said. “I know you haven’t had a day off in a long time. But, such is business. I can send a car for you.”

“No,” he told him. “I’ll drive myself there.”

Hours of filming under a hot sun—with countless extras, a cavalry of temperamental horses, one of which had bucked a trainer off its back when he tried mounting it, sending him flying into the air where he landed on top of a craft service table and had to be rushed to the hospital, of buzzing flies and a chorus of shouts and curses as Perry tried orchestrating a complex scene—had left Diego drained and overwhelmed. He barely had enough time to rush home, bathe and change, before rushing out again. Now, well past noon, he drove on, his foot pressing down on the gas pedal as the car continued toward downtown Los Angeles.

Olvera Street, a former dilapidated alley near downtown, had been reconstructed back in 1925 to look like a quaint Mexican bazaar. The
old adobe and brick structures were renovated. Along its walkway, lined with trees and fountains, tourists shopped for serapes, toys, clay pots, cacti, candles, sweets, and candies. The female merchants of these shops donned frilly costumes and lace skirts, their hair in thick braided ponytails. The men wore vaquero pants with pointed boots, embroidered shirts and large sombreros. It was almost like a movie set. It was more like Mexico than the Mexico Diego remembered.

He’d gained increasing popularity among Mexican-American movie audiences, and he didn’t feel like being recognized today, so he hid behind dark sunglasses, his hat pulled down low, as he weaved in and out under the brightly colored cloth tarps, brushing past groups of tourists huddled together whispering and pointing at the paper piñatas, the wooden whistles, the bags hanging from hooks on posts. The air was heavy with the scent of cinnamon, corn, refried beans, and leather. Boys in overalls and wool driver’s caps darted about, polishing the shoes of old men who sat on benches reading the paper. The shops and eateries facing the narrow, cobblestone avenue were crowded with people. Mariachi musicians strolled from table to table, singing songs for money. Diego stretched and craned his neck, past the heads of the pedestrians, toward the front entrance. The street spilled out into the principal plaza, a large concrete square with Main Street to its west and Alameda to its east. Up ahead, City Hall loomed large and bright white in the afternoon sun, and he remembered the day he first arrived in Los Angeles, remembered men scaling up the metal beams like ants.

In the plaza a modest crowd of people had assembled around a raised wooden platform. They carried banners in various sizes and colors:
International Brotherhood of Workers, IFC, Ejército Mexicanos Unidos
. There were members of the Communist and Socialist parties, trade union representatives, and other activist groups. Diego searched the crowd and saw Javier standing with a few others, looking out across the square to a group of police officers standing, shoulder to shoulder, along the perimeter of the plaza near Alameda Street.

“What’s happening?” Diego asked once he reached Javier.

Javier shook his head. “It seems that the police are here as well.” He said something to the group, and he led Diego away from the crowd and toward the vendor stalls along the avenue. “Just like being back home, isn’t it?”

“Almost.” Diego laughed. “But not quite.”

“Do you ever think about returning?”

“Sometimes,” Diego said. “But I’m not sure my grandparents would have me. Anyway, I think this is my home now.”

He looked back. He could see that the crowd had grown some; more men and women had joined the mass, waving banners and flags in the air, their chants growing louder and louder, mixing with the guitar strums of the mariachi musicians strolling through the street.

Javier placed his arm around Diego’s shoulder. “Come back,” he said. “With me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about quitting your work here. I’m talking about returning with me. Helping me in the fight.”

“Fight for what?”

“For workers’ rights. Men like your father. Campesinos. The poor. The people you once were like.”

He said Diego was famous in Mexico. His face, his name, could do a lot to further the cause, to help Javier shore up support. Things, he admitted, had not gone as well as he hoped in the United States. America, he said, chuckling, had its hands full, had its own hungry and destitute people.

“Lucía left me,” Javier said. “Even she got … disillusioned. Met an artist in New York City. Fell in love with him.” They found a bench and sat down. Pigeons dotted the alleyway, and Diego watched them pick the ground and fight over bits of bread and seeds someone had scattered on the ground.

“What do you say?” Javier told him. “We could move to Mexico City. Start a newspaper or something. Just the two of us. Like we used to talk about.”

“Javier, I can’t just—”

“Come on, hermano,” he pleaded. “I need you. I need your help.”

Diego stood and took a few steps forward, startling the pigeons. They fluttered away in a panic, and he watched them fly off, past the branches and telephone poles, their wings beating fast.

“No,” he said. “I can’t.”

Javier only wanted Diego to help him further the cause. That wasn’t friendship or loyalty or love, he understood. It was to keep the cause alive, to keep the fight going, to simply survive.

Javier sighed. “There’s nothing here for you, Diego. Anyone can see that. You’re alone. In exile. No one respects you or your work. Back there, you’re known. You’re loved and you’re missed in Mexico.”

“I’m not missed.” Diego laughed.

“Oh, but you are,” Javier urged him, his eyes moist. “You are, Diego.”

“No one misses me.”

“They do,” he said. “My mother, your grandparents, even I—”

“Enough,” Diego told him. “I’m not going back, Javier. I’m simply not.”

“Very well,” he said. “I’m disappointed. I guess I should go then. The rally’s about to start.” Javier stood and gave Diego a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I admire you,” he said. “Your conviction. Your belief in yourself.”

“It’s all I have left,” Diego said. “It’s all that I am now.”

“It’s all any of us are,” Javier said.

Diego wanted to be with him, but he knew such a thing was impossible now, more so than it had been years before. He watched his old friend walk past the street vendors and stalls to the rally, a group of people shouting and chanting, their fists puncturing the sky above them.

March 1936

T
HERE WERE SEVERAL DELAYS—THREATS OF STRIKE, INJURIES
, disagreements—so filming on
The Revolutionists
dragged into the following year. One day, a girl in a gray tweed skirt came to the set and handed Diego a slip of paper.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Message from Mister Cage,” she said, then turned and left.

He opened it and read:

Please come and see me this afternoon
.
Three PM
.
WC

He found him in his office, rifling through a stack of papers. Sit, he urged, and didn’t look up as he pointed to the chair across from his desk.

“You wanted to see me?” Diego asked.

“I did,” he said.

“What about?”

Bill leaned back in his chair, and sighed. He stared intently at Diego, removed his glasses and scratched the bridge of his nose. “Your contract’s up,” he said. “After you finish this project. I’m sorry to tell you that we won’t be renewing it.”

“Come again?” Diego asked, stunned.

Bill shook his head. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. Frontier’s
having to make a lot of tough calls right now and, to put it bluntly, you’re no longer considered a viable commodity.”

“What do you mean I’m not viable? What about this film I’m about to finish up? I thought you said it was big, that it would save the studio?”

“That may be, but polls show your popularity slipping, and your other projects haven’t made us much money, and we, the studio, just don’t feel it’s fiscally sound to be investing in you anymore.”

Diego stopped listening. He felt his skin grow hot, his limbs tingle. He rose and walked over to the window and loosened his tie. Everything spun, and he gripped the wall to keep from losing his balance. Bill went on, explaining the details of what releasing him from his contract would mean in a noncommittal tone, as if he were rattling off a list of instructions.

“The Latin thing’s over,” he said. “It’s no longer exotic, it doesn’t sell.” Trends changed, he went on. Tastes were different now. “Audiences are fickle. They want a fresh face. The ‘boy-next-door’ type.”

“Like Tod Duren?” Diego asked. He walked over to a cart in the corner of the office where Bill kept his liquor and poured himself some whiskey. He reached for the cigar box and plucked one out.

“Excuse me, but those are …” Bill started to say.

Diego ignored him and lit it anyway.

“Yes. Tod Duren. We feel—”

“And who is ‘we’?”

The investors, Bill explained. The new investors who had their eyes on different faces, he told Diego. “Their approach is different from R. J.’s, and I welcome it.”

“And what about R. J.?” he asked.

Bill sighed and shook his head. “R. J. He didn’t see things the way we did.”

“You sold him out, you mean,” Diego said.

“We had a difference of opinion, and he was a gentleman about it.” R. J. understood, Bill claimed, that this was business, and that this was how things went sometimes. “Diego,” Bill said now, his voice softening, “I wish to God it were different, but it’s not. You’re not what we’re looking for anymore. You’re not what anybody wants.”

“Is that meant to make me feel better?”

“What do you
want
me to say?” He tapped his palm against his desk; a set of pens and an ink bottle trembled. “This isn’t easy for me.”

“What now?” Diego asked himself, asked Bill, puffing on the cigar, taking a drink of whiskey, and pouring himself more.

“That’s very expensive whiskey. I would really appreciate it if you didn’t—”

Diego ignored him, drank, and poured himself another glass.

Bill sighed. “Very well,” he said. “If it’ll make you feel better, finish it all.”

Cage told him that he would fulfill the rest of his contract by completing his work on
The Revolutionists
, by performing any publicity associated with the picture, and attending the premiere. After that point, he would be released.

“Released?” Diego asked. “What a beautiful word for such a horrible thing.”

He slammed his drink down and headed for the door, but Bill stopped him.

“You may find this hard to believe,” he said, “but I did care for you. Very much. And I’ll continue to. In a different life, you and me would be together. We’d be happy.”

Through the opened windows there came the sound of shouts and car horns honking, of ringing bells and whistles. All the work at the studio continued, moved forward, but there, in William Cage’s office, the air and everything around it remained still, suspended in time.

“I have to go now, Bill,” Diego said. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

“Diego, I’m really sorr …” Bill started to say, but Diego didn’t let him finish. He opened the door and walked out. He didn’t want to hear it.

He took a long drive up the highway skirting the ocean. He watched the tan cliffs unfold, the water lapping the edge of the shore, the seagulls drifting on currents of air. Diego pulled the car off the main road and followed a narrow trail up a winding bluff. He parked and
got out. He couldn’t feel anything but light passing through him, not through his physical body, but his soul, his being. He felt alert, cognizant yet without any real physical form, without any physical features. That wonderful sensation of warmth, of serenity, of at long last being at peace, was all he knew he had ever wanted. He stood at the edge of the earth, overlooking that vast and ever present ocean. Behind him, in the far distance, was a chain of green hills. Beneath the chain of hills, he imagined a fertile valley filled with fruit trees which people picked, tossing the harvest into large wicker baskets. The men sported strong arms that worked to lift children up to the trees to pick apples and oranges that tumbled down onto the ground when the slightest gust of ocean breeze fanned the branches. He felt the breeze, smelled the salt and brine. Below, the waves crashed against the rocks along the seashore. Far off, toward the horizon, the sun floated there, suspended, refusing to set, lighting everything up at once, and the land was golden and peaceful and the people were happy.

He wanted to sprout wings and fly off and away. Maybe he should have listened to Javier. Maybe he should have followed him back to Mexico. Things might have been different. They might have had a life together. What would he do now? he wondered. Who would he become?

As filming on
The Revolutionists
neared completion, along with his contract with Frontier, Diego was finding it harder and harder to summon up the energy to be there. It was exhausting, having to pretend, and he wanted to sleep more than anything in the world. To close his eyes for a good, long time and shut all the voices out until … until what? He went from days where he was hopeful, reminding himself that it wasn’t the end, that Frontier wasn’t the only studio in the business, to moments of fear and regret, moments when he looked back at the decisions he had made that led him here to this, this lonely life, this life where he truly had nothing at all left. It made him sick, this back-and-forth, this constant tugging and pulling. When would it end? How had he arrived here?