A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  You turned your head and looked out at the stumps that had been the forest, at the deep gullies worn by the swift muddy water that carries Mexico’s mountains down and levels her hills and presents us with a land of excrement, dry, suffocated, hostile. You closed your eyes and let yourself be lulled by the steady drone of the engine and the sway of the highway. Presently you heard Javier ask Franz to turn on the radio again, but Franz shook his head and said that you had gone to sleep. And then again presently you had opened your eyes with a start and interrupted Franz, who was saying something about the tightness of the curves, by asking: “Didn’t they once have a big race all the way from one border to the other?”

  Yes, Isabel replied, it was called the Pan-American Race, and no one who drove it survived. You paid no attention to Javier’s nasal laugh, for now you were intent upon your purse, looking in it for your mirror and comb. You combed your ash-dyed hair with quick strokes, making a face of disapproval as you saw your reflection. You took out your lipstick and puckered your mouth and applied red to those lips which are indeed, sweet Dragoness, wide and full. You moved the mirror around in front of your face and allowed your gray eyes to study themselves. Now you noticed that Javier was talking again and that from time to time Franz was nodding without looking away from the road ahead. Javier was saying that perhaps simply to know it was enough for the woman, but it forced him, the man, to create something that might correspond. You turned and faced Javier and stared at him while Franz said dryly that after all there was the matter of the pleasure involved and that for his part he did not insist that any woman be this or that or the other, simply what she was. Franz pointed toward the valley and said that from here on the road was easier. That would be absurd, certainly, said your husband. Yes, that was what he said. You looked at him and spoke again: “How many hours before we’ll get to the sea?”

  “To the sea?” smiled Javier. “When, Franz?”

  “Not until tomorrow.”

  You turned and closed your eyes again. For several minutes you were all silent. You sensed Franz feeling in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and opened your eyes and reached across his chest and got the pack. You lit a cigarette and passed it to him stained with the red circle of your lips. Then you lit one for yourself. Only when you had finished the cigarette did you say, as if the conversation had not been interrupted for a moment: “I can accept everything except the same old thing forever repeated. Nothing is so marvelous that it can’t eventually become boring.”

  You felt Javier’s eyes and passed your hand over your hair.

  “The truth of it is that love can be created without passion,” Javier said. “One can appreciate beauty and a woman’s character quite coldly and with no desire. Love without hunger, without urgency.” Franz raised an eyebrow and shrugged his shoulder. I would have done the same, Dragoness. Really I would.

  Now you were passing through a village and Franz slowed down. You deliberately turned your head away from the window. But Isabel pressed her nose to the glass and watched the gray, unwhitewashed, one-story adobe houses go by, the little roadside stands selling eggnog and mulberries and plums and cheap crockery junk, the motionless figures stiff with cold and wrapped in gray cloaks. Her nose was against the glass and her breath clouded it and she drew a cat in the cloud and then began to play tick-tack-toe with herself, drawing round O’s and X’s. Ah, me. Her right hand, which was drawing the X’s, was defeated by the O’s of her left. She stopped and stroked her fingers across the sun-brown skin of her arm. Now there was a true forest to the right and against that dark background Isabel ought to have been able to see her eyes reflected in the window, green and brilliant above her smooth high cheeks. A lovely woman, Dragoness. No one can accuse me of not appreciating her. No one. Suddenly she moved forward and leaned across the seat and opened the door beside you and without a sound lunged toward it. Javier caught her by the shoulders and jerked her back just as soundlessly while you reached and pulled the door shut again and Franz said evenly and without surprise, “Careful there.” Then Isabel had fallen face down across Javier’s crossed legs, her mouth open against his thighs, and was crying, waiting for him to caress and calm her, touch her long dark hair, wipe away her tears. Javier paid her no attention. When he moved his hands, it was only to raise them and study his fingernails. He laughed softly and reached forward and touched the back of your neck. You did not move, Elizabeth. You stared straight ahead. Bravo. As you would put it, you had graduated and joined the Navy, ship ahoy.

  “Which way here?” Franz asked.

  You and Javier spoke at the same time: “Don’t go through Cuernavaca.” “Just follow the highway.”

  “Yes, but how far?”

  “To the turnoff.”

  “Is it before or after the tollbooth?”

  “After. You pay toll to Alpuyeca. Before Alpuyeca, you turn off.”

  “I remember now.”

  “You mean you’ve been to Xochicalco before?”

  “Hell, Lisbeth, of course I have. All four of us were … I mean, the three of us were there just last year.”

  “How silly, I had forgotten. Little Isabel.” That bitchy smile of yours.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I meant that when we went to Xochicalco last year you hadn’t made your debut yet.”

  “Very funny,” Javier said slowly.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” At last you turned and looked back at them. But Isabel’s head was not resting on your husband’s thighs now. She was sitting up powdering her nose.

  “How much is the toll?”

  “I believe it’s five pesos.”

  “I don’t have change.”

  “I do. Here, take it.”

  “Then to the right?”

  “Yes. I think there’s an arrow you follow.”

  “Turn on the radio again, Franz.”

  “There, hold it, Franz. I like that.”

  “What waltz is it?”

  “The Merry Widow,” said Franz.

  And while the four of you sped along a winding road exchanging your pleasantries, I was traveling the superhighway to Puebla leaning comfortably back and looking over certain tourists’ pamphlets that are not passed out by travel agencies because a visit to such places gives a commission to no one. Still, one has to be informed. To know for example that the little fortress is entered by a stone door above the arch of which hangs a single yellow electric bulb, and on either side of the door is a window. Grass grows above from a thin scab of earth, as if the fortress were a cellar or a tomb or the buried gallery of a mine, and chimneys emerge factorylike from the grass. First is the administrative section with its flat ceilings: a reception room, the guards’ room, a hall with racks for rifles, then the Commandant’s office. To one side, the room where clothing is stored. Beyond, the garage, then the first yard, and at last you enter the prison proper. A brick wall encloses the yard. Around everything is a deep ditch bottomed with mud.

  You move the mirror in front of your face and let your gray eyes study themselves and you notice that Javier is talking again, saying that perhaps simply to know that one loves is enough for the woman but it forces him, the man, to create something, a vision of the woman to correspond to his love. You turn and rest your arm on the back of the seat and stare fixedly at Javier, afraid of what he may say next, imploring him silently not to go on, not to repeat everything, to leave at least some of those words you know by heart well hidden, known only to himself and to you. You interrupt: “How many hours before we get to the sea?” and you try to think of some subject that may interest and divert him, a subject broad, deep, long enough to last all the way to the sea.

  A village is passing and deliberately you turn away from the window and lift a hand to your eyes because you do not want to see it. One more village exactly like every other you have seen. None of them different from the first you saw when you first came to Mexico: all motionless wretched moribund. And you fool yourself thinking that was why you came: to discover
romantic Mexico, your husband’s homeland. If only he then, so handsome, so poetic, had resembled his country. Its misery, rags, sickness.

  That is one face of Mexico. The other is the tawdry face of a land that has given up its poverty in order to achieve only vulgarity, only to ape the lousy States. So that in coming here you escaped nothing. You remained a captive. No, Dragoness, I’m not telling you. I’m just asking.

  Isabel lies on Javier’s knees. He feels her warm moist breath through the thin cloth of his trousers and he is thinking, you can be sure, that in truth the appeal of this young woman is based on a catlike mimesis (Am I doing well, Dragoness? Have I caught him?) that may be her most significant charm as well as her most obvious one. He holds up his hands and passes his fingers through his gray, thinning hair and with a sigh reflects that the tenderness Isabel believes is enough for herself and for a lover too might, if he were younger, be enough even for him. And she does not understand that it isn’t enough. She does not know him.

  Isabel cries, thinking that you and Franz can’t hear her. What a childish, transparent act, you say silently. Well, let her cry until his pants are soaked, if she wants to. God knows who can understand her. And now he, just as transparent, is touching my neck and trying to tease me into looking back, but I won’t do it. He wants me to turn and see him pawing her, letting her embrace him, kiss him, young, weak, young with the intuitive perversity of innocence, another woman, his little Isabel. I won’t look back at them. I will keep my eyes straight ahead on the white line that separates traffic and proclaims that if you cross it you risk an accident, you chance death itself. A white line that will not end until we reach the sea.

  “Have a cookie, Franz?”

  He shook his head. You took one of the cookies and it crunched in your mouth. You held the small cellophane-wrapped package behind your head. “Want a cookie back there?”

  “What are they?” said Javier.

  “Chocolate. Don’t be afraid, they’re from Sanborns. Especially baked for gringo stomachs.” You laughed and waved the package around.

  “How nicely Yankees offer everything,” said Javier. “Crumbs for beggars.”

  “Now, now, please.” You made a face of mock disapproval. “Please don’t start your Yankee-baiting. Javier is like all Mexicans. They speak badly of gringos but they imitate us in everything. Pure envy.” You tapped his hand lightly and withdrew the package. “Are you sure, Franz?”

  Franz shook his head. The Merry Widow Waltz ended and the announcer began a commercial about a new subdivision. You snapped off the radio. All of you were silent for a time as the Volkswagen passed fields cultivated with rice and the other cereals that grow in the shadows of Mexico’s volcanoes. But soon fertility, always isolated and unconvincing in this dry land, was left behind. The car began to climb a graveled road with small thirsty trees on both sides. Franz braked and stopped near the edge of a great cliff. You all got out and stretched your cramped, twitchy legs and brushed off crumbs and smoothed your wrinkled clothing. Before you lay the undulating immensity of the valley. Every tone of green from the pale washed green of young corn to the intense chrome-green of sugar cane and the dry, dead, straw-brown green of land that has been worn out or forgotten. And above, quick clouds in the Mexican sky that is and has to be incredibly beautiful as a kind of compensation for the waste and hopelessness of the earth it arches. Like your famous Greek sea, Elizabeth. There are lands that left to themselves would not endure a day: they must have the mirror of the sky—Mexico—or the sea—Greece. Quick eye-blinks of light and shadow as the small clouds now concealed, now revealed Mexico’s sun. Sun and shadow and silence combined to pattern the valley in moving checks of light and darkness, to sculpture the hills and depressions, to end by defining, at the jagged mountainous limit of the horizon, the reciprocity between a land that thrusts itself up in walls and peaks, and a sky that sags upon those natural accidents. Rotund small hills. High volcanoes. Dry craters. And surrounding everything the mass and violence of the mountains, which at this hour were clear, not far from the eye and the hand but already, in the farthest distance, beginning to haze toward the transparency of afternoon.

  Isabel stood beside your husband. Her bare arm was just touching his arm. She was trembling slightly and in that faint movement Javier, always subtle and wary, could detect her woman’s urge to fuse her beauty with the natural beauty spread before you, to make nature her accomplice first in love, then in possessiveness, and finally in her need to dominate. Javier, who forever walks the wrong way, turned his back on the scene and on Isabel too and she crossed her arm below her breasts and let the other arm hang, the fingers moving nervously on her thigh while she looked up at the sky and tried to find whales, faces, animals in the hurrying clouds.

  You took Franz by the hand and moved up the path that leads to the ancient Toltecan ceremonial center. Goats, their accustomed peace violated, jumped away with their hooves sounding like stone against stone. The path was rocky and on both sides were thorn bushes and dwarf ferns. You climbed quickly and reached the esplanade. Franz spread his arms. You, also smiling, were about to say that you were glad not to remember that visit here last year, it made this like the first time, the original surprise and pleasure, but Franz spoke first: “I had forgotten.”

  From the air Xochicalco must look like a sand castle after the tide has washed and smoothed it: it is pure form lacking all detail. The terraces rise with a capricious symmetry until the topmost culminates in the great main temple, alone in the center of its plaza but accompanied, distantly, by the broken columns of the roofless palace that hangs over the straight drop down to the lowest of the terraces, the ancient ball court with its blackened rings.

  Franz rested both hands on your shoulders. You moved away from him, passing Javier and Isabel, who had just reached the esplanade, and ran to the bas-relief that winds around the four sides of the base of the pyramid. That relief is a single serpent, a circle of serpents without beginning or end, a feathered serpent in flight, with many heads, many fanged gullets. You stopped and touched the gush of stone and then walked on around the pyramid. Out of sight, you stopped and touched it again, leaned forward with your arms resting upon the endless serpent whose contractions and prolongations seem provoked by the other figures in the relief, the men, animals, birds, and trees that are all contained within those twisting convolutions: seated Toltecan dignitaries wearing sumptuous ornaments, necklaces, and elaborate high headdresses; chopped-off trunks of cottonwoods; glyphs of human speech; jaguars, rabbits, crumbling eagles. You placed your face against one of the heads of the serpent and for a moment shared its profile, and I know the temptation you felt. You were thinking that this was how you would like to be swallowed up, to lose your will in this circle of violence, your identity in becoming the slave of a strength that resembled your own; that this was almost what you had always been searching for; that you would like to remain forever here in this house of prayer, this place of sacred rites, once more this beth hatefillah. Your hands caressed the ancient stone, the light and shadow made solid that had survived centuries and that you could believe contained the secret core of Mexico, the grain of that authentic being which is hidden behind our poverty and ostentation, our pride, wretchedness, cruelty, mediocrity. Here, you were thinking, was the occult greatness of this land: its eroded sun, its lost ray of moonlight. Okay, Dragoness, okay, we dig that you have read your D. H. Lawrence loud and clear. So there you were, leaning against the old granite snake and wanting to remain there in spirit although to the eye you would leave it and return to the Volkswagen and sit beside blond Franz and in front of graying Javier and young Isabel and resume speech, laughter, malice, love, despair, hope, while you waited, waited, hoped for the sea that you would not reach until tomorrow. You were tempted, Elizabeth. Oh, yes, you were tempted. To become the prisoner of the serpent’s rings, to be drowned in the flood of its crumbling feathers, to live with your eyes squinted tight shut once again and your hands crossed and motionl
ess while you exulted in the might of passivity, the power of surrender, deciding nothing, not even not to decide, doing nothing, never putting your will to the most minor of tests, surviving entirely by abstention, once again in your juiverie, your vicus Judaeorum, your carriera, your Judengasse, your damned ghetto. Here you could return to this land and end your exile. What, Elizabeth? Were you going to escape from one trap only to fall into another?

  You did not hear the steps of your quiet German, who had walked around the pyramid and now was standing some distance away watching you and smoking. Presently Isabel and Javier came and Franz deliberately blocked their view of you. “Let’s go up,” he said to them. The three moved away and climbed the great stairs to the flat top of the pyramid, where the tablets and reliefs are beyond the encircling power of the serpent at the base. Small glyphs float beside the lips of seated men. A jaguar, liberated, lies in ambush with its fangs showing. Stone jawbones that are part of no body chew a circle that is divided into quadrants by the foreign, intrusive cross.

  “Do you have a match?” Javier said to Franz.

  Franz held the match and waited for Javier to put his cigarette to his lips. Javier was staring into the distance. “Did you notice that there is only one serpent, that there are not several?” he said.

  “Yes, I noticed that.” The match burned down. Just before it would have burned him, Franz separated his fingers and let the match drop.

  “Excuse me,” Javier said.

  Franz smiled and struck another match.

  Isabel, putting on her straw hat and tying it under her chin with a kerchief of orange gauze, was standing before a group of amputated legs wearing high boots. Suddenly she laughed and skipped away, calling back: “Let’s pretend we’re enchanted!”