The Five Acts of Diego Leon (39 page)

“I’m a bit of a shame to my family.” Fiona shook her head. “They hate that I had a baby out of wedlock, that there’s no father.”

“And who is the father?”

“Someone,” she said, placing her hand on his. “A nice young man I met one day. An actor.”

Diego pulled his hand back. He was beginning to understand. “Fiona, am I the—?”

“My boy’s real smart,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “The best kid around. I love him so.”

He hugged her close. What if he were to leave it all behind—the acting, the schedules, the public scrutiny, all of it—like so many others had. He could be here with her and the boy, he insisted, live a simpler life.

She laughed, shrugged her shoulders. “This life’s anything but simple.”

“Let me back in, Fiona,” he said. “Please.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry. We’ve been down there before, you and me. We’re different people. There’s no way we could ever make it work now that I am who I am.”

“And who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a mother who gardens, whose knees are scraped and who goes to bed exhausted, happy but exhausted. You’re a star now.”

“Who knows for how long.” He smirked. “Fi, my contract is up. Frontier doesn’t plan on renewing it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry, angel.”

“You see? I have few choices now. Let me back in. Please,” he said. “I love you.”

“You don’t love me,” she said. “You can’t.”

“I’ll prove it. Let’s get married.”

“No.” Here she paused. “You have other … interests. I know. I’ve always known.”

“I’ll change. I’ll be different.”

She pulled Diego away. “No. You’ll grow to resent me.” Fiona held his hand and said, “I see the real you. And I accept him. It’s time you stop denying it and start doing the same thing, angel. You have to.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m not strong enough.”

“Oh, but you are. You always have been.”

She kissed him on the cheek, said she needed to get back inside. Her son would be waking from his nap soon and would be wondering where she was. Fiona didn’t invite him in. She walked inside and closed the screen door.

“I’ll tell him,” she said.

“What?” he asked. “Tell him what?”

She was once again a shadow, a silhouette framed by the screen
door’s edge. “About you. When he sees your movies he’ll know you. I promise.”

“What is the little bugger’s name?” he asked, smiling, tears welling up in his eyes.

“I named him after his daddy,” she said, folding her arms, nodding triumphantly.

He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. “That’s good. It’s a great name.” He smiled. “I love you,” Diego said. “I mean it. I do. I always have.”

“Thank you. I really did need to hear that after all these years. Thank you.”

He could see that she was smiling as she closed the front door and locked it.

It was amazing. What they could make. What they could do with wood and concrete, metal and glass. How they could turn day into night, a summer breeze into a blizzard, a barren wasteland into a fertile valley.
Amazing
, Diego thought.
Truly amazing
.

The entire south side of the soundstage had been converted into a quaint Mexican village, nestled among the hills and valleys of that nation. This was Demetrio Macías’s home, the one he returns to at the end of the book, where his wife and child are waiting for him. The carpenters had cobbled the street, setting each stone in place individually, one after the other, by hand. The shacks lining either side of the road were constructed of actual bricks, not foam, and truck-loads of straw and palm fronds had been brought in to make the roofs of each dwelling. The hens and roosters, the goats and pigs, the horse and mules were all real. The extras playing the village residents stoked real fires, and the women ground real corn on actual stone metates. One extra gossiped with a lighting technician as she practiced patting tortillas. Another smoked a cigarette and read a copy of
Screenshots
. Two men dressed as campesinos in tattered trousers and frayed huaraches played poker and used a stack of film reel canisters to shuffle their decks and lay their hands down. Behind them, the set designers hung a large canvas with large and billowy thunderclouds
painted on its surface. They climbed up ladders and used pulleys and cranks to stretch it out, covering the studio’s metal walls.

“Over here! Mr. Cortez,” shouted a makeup assistant. “Over here.” The girl took him by the arm. “We have to hurry,” she said, leading him to a chair where he sat.

He was nervous, and a queasy feeling filled his stomach. His mouth watered as he sat at the makeup table while the girl dabbed his forehead.

“My, but you’re perspiring a lot,” she said, fanning him with her hand as she worked.

“Sorry,” he told her. A copy of the script lay opened on his lap, and he was trying to focus, trying to go over his lines, just words, he reminded himself, when Dalton approached.

“I’m sorry to hear the bad news,” he said, sighing. “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?”

Diego shrugged his shoulders. “Guess I was hoping it was a lie.”

“If it helps at all, I think they’re making a big mistake letting you go like that.”

“Thanks.” He nodded. “I appreciate it.”

“You’re a great actor, a great guy to work with. I know you’ll land on your feet.”

“Thanks a lot.”

After thirty minutes, Diego was called onto the set. The extras still milled about. Two girls gossiped about rumors on the set of another film. A little boy and a girl fought, and the boy was scolded by one of the supervisors when he pulled the girl’s pigtails and she began to cry. The actress playing Demetrio Macías’s wife walked onto the set. She wore a ruffled skirt and a white embroidered blouse with a rebozo draped over her shoulders. Her hair was in two pigtails that were adorned with brightly colored ribbons, tied at ends in two big bows. She wore red pumps, and a costume assistant walked over and handed the actress a pair of leather huaraches.

“Where do you want me?” the actress asked Dalton, placing the sandals on.

“Over there, Judy,” he said, pointing to the small shack at the very end of the row. He turned to Diego and asked, “Your son? Where’s your son?”

“What?” he asked, stunned, confused. “What are you—?”

“I’m right here! I’m
right
here!” the young boy who had been scolded earlier shouted, bursting through the crowd of extras, technicians, the costume and makeup assistants clustered around the set. He was about seven years old, Diego figured. Everyone took his or her mark when Dalton gave the order. The actress playing Demetrio’s wife walked to the end of the row of houses, the boy trailing behind her, as the remaining extras took positions throughout the village.

“Very well,” Dalton said, walking over to his chair, a copy of the script resting on his lap. “Macías has been away for a long time now,” he shouted to Diego.

“How long?” He stood in between the cameras and the very edge of the set.

Dalton looked down at his script. “Two years.”

“No,” Diego said. “It was longer than that. He was gone longer.”

“Who?” Dalton asked. He removed his glasses and scratched his forehead.

“Gabriel.”

“You mean Demetrio?”

“Yes,” Diego said. “Right. Him. Me. Demetrio.”

Judy looked at Diego, her eyebrows furrowed. “What’s the holdup?” she asked.

“Look, that doesn’t matter,” Dalton explained to Diego. “What does matter is that he comes back after years of fighting. He comes back disillusioned, defeated.”

“Why?” Diego asked.

“Why what?”

Diego remained quiet.

Dalton rose suddenly and walked over to him. He shouted, “Give us ten minutes alone!”

A chorus of voices came from the dark shouting, “Ten minutes,” again and again until they faded away. All of them—the stagehands and extras, script supervisors, sound engineers, Judy, the young boy—rose and walked out at once, leaving him and Dalton alone.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

Dalton placed his arm around Diego’s shoulder. “Asking all these questions, delaying things.”

“I’m not. I’m just trying to figure this out, just trying to understand it all.”

“I appreciate that. I really do. And I’ve admired every single thing you’ve done to make this picture good, but it’s over. Let’s just end it and move on, okay?”

But he didn’t want to move on. To what? Where? Diego chuckled and said, “And this is how we go? This is how it ends?”

“Are you okay? Did you bump your head?”

“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Let’s continue then, shall we?”

“Very well.”

They all marched back inside now, the multitude of faces and arms and torsos, assuming their rightful positions behind cameras and scaffolds, next to makeup tables and floodlights. The extras went to their marks. Judy strode in, passed him, and stood in front of the small house that was their home. The young boy took his mark beside her and Dalton Perry told him to grab hold of his mother’s skirt, see? Like this. He looked over to Diego now.

“When you see Macías coming from over there,” Dalton told Judy, pointing to where Diego stood, “you and the boy walk toward him and you all converge there.” He pointed to a yellow mark in the middle of the street.

The lights dimmed now, and the crew stood a few feet from the set holding tin cans with long and pointed nozzles puffing out threads of white smoke. A set of large fans with sleek metal blades near them remained off. These would be switched on, and the crew would stand to one side, pointing the nozzles to the current of air, and they would pump out clouds of smoke caused by the small fires the other villagers gathered around.

The makeup assistant walked over to Diego to touch up his face, applying more layers of foundation. She scooped it out of small metal trays with a spatula. It looked more like putty or clay than makeup, Diego thought. It was flesh colored and frightening. She used a series of brushes and sponges to dab and smear it on, again
and again, until it felt heavy and thick on his face, and it dried the skin underneath and caused it to itch.

“You got a lot of that stuff on you, and I managed to get your skin to look a few shades darker,” she explained. “Let’s hope it’s good enough, though.”

It was caked on, like varnish, and he felt it penetrating his pores, invading the fibers of his own skin, his own flesh, hardening it like a shell, changing its color and appearance as it worked its way deeper and deeper inside, bonding with his flesh. When the makeup people and crewmembers, when the lighting and sound technicians, when they all receded back behind, into the darkness that swallowed everything around the stage whole, just before Dalton was about to yell action, Diego raised his hand and asked a question.

“What is it now?” Dalton said.

“The boy,” he said, pointing at him. “What’s his name? What’s his character’s name?”

“It’s irrelevant,” said Dalton.

“No. It’s not.”

“It’s irrelevant. Now, let’s get on with it. We have a busy schedule today.”

“Yeah,” said Judy. “I got another shoot in an hour. Let’s go. Who cares about a stinking name?” She held the boy’s hand now.

The whole crew moved out from behind the shadows, out from behind the edges of the darkness circling the set, and they watched him.

“Yes.” Dalton rubbed his eyes. “His name’s not necessary. Please. Let’s get on.”

“But—” he shouted.

Judy gave him a curious look. “Are you sauced?” she asked, chuckling.

“He’s supposed to be me,” Diego insisted.

“He’s not you,” Dalton shouted. “You’re you. What are you talking about?”

At the moment when the stories crossed, his own and that of the book and the movie, Diego León went from being to not being, to being again. He was back in Mexico, and he wasn’t. The walls of the
adobe homes that had been built and assembled a few hours before were stained to look aged and weathered, as though they had been there for generations. The sound of thunder was a recorded disk. The dark storm clouds were merely painted on, and they rolled by on the long and continuous strip of canvas. Two men used handheld cranks and pulleys to mimic motion, to mimic the sensation of them moving through the painted hills and fake valleys of a country, of a place he once knew, of a home he once lived in, of a family who once loved him. Diego thought only about history and memory, about the places where they all begin. Somehow, among all that lawlessness, among the feuds and poverty, beneath a great and ancient sky, in the green mountains of a village in Michoacán, along the banks of a wide lake filled with fish whose skins were whiter than ghosts, lived his ancestors. And though Elva recounted this story hundreds and thousands of times, it was only now, once he reached the end of all things, that he chose to remember. He was born of a people versed in the art of storytelling, versed in the art of artifice, in make-believe, in obfuscation. And now he searched in all of that light and untruth and half-truth for something to give him back that which he knew he was missing, that lost feeling, that unspoken thought, that trace of the shadow, that fragment of the bone, fossilized, and forever preserved which held the key to his salvation, to his knowing who he was and who he would become. Who would be left to remember them once they faded away into obscurity, into nothingness, like the countless before them and all of those yet to come?

Then Dalton called “action,” and Diego wound up the crooked street of that village now, and his wife saw him, and she walked on, toward him, stunned, unbelieving.

“You’re back,” she said. “Please tell me you’ll stay now. For me. For your son.” She said to the boy, “Look. It’s your father.”

Diego reached out, tried hugging him, but the child recoiled, hiding between his mother’s legs.

“Don’t be frightened,” his mother said. “It’s your father!”

Diego looked at the boy, and in his face he saw his own, still forming, on the verge of becoming what it would eventually turn into. He saw Fiona’s face and his child’s face and knew this to be his own. And he finally understood, finally knew what they’d lost, and
knew what they’d done to find themselves here, in a vague place, a shadow on a map. He could hear his thoughts now, his and this strange boy’s and Fiona’s child’s, all of them mixing together, ringing so loud in his head. He would not let the boy inherit that legacy of hardship and death, of humiliation and hunger carved into his skin and his father’s own skin.