Ligeia often laughed. But that was another story.
Oh, yes, you laugh, Dragoness. The wonder is that you haven’t died of laughter.
* * *
Δ “Dragoness,” I asked you, “tell me how it was the first time.”
“I’ll tell you, but don’t look at me that way. Let me laugh.”
“Okay, I’ll behave. Tell me.”
“He was sleeping. It had rained all afternoon and I took the subway to Flushing Meadows and he was in the motel sound asleep and I opened the door, soaked, my raincoat wet through…”
“You don’t have to lie to me, Elizabeth.”
“Who’s lying to you? I’m telling you how it happened. He was lying on the bed fast asleep and I came in soaked to the skin and stood there in the door and looked at him.”
“Okay. I’m not wondering what happened, but where it happened.”
“I looked at him and waited.”
“All evening?”
“No, caifán, not all evening. Stop interrupting. I waited because I was sure that my presence there would awaken him and because I wanted to feel him still asleep and feel myself waiting.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, caifán. I believe everything they tell me. But you’re a disbelieving type, aren’t you? You don’t trust people.”
“That depends. I’ve been roasted trusting people sometimes.”
“We’re getting old, old man, that’s all.”
“Sure. I’ll wear the bottoms of my pants rolled up. Forget it.”
“It bothers you? That’s funny, I think. Believe it or not, it doesn’t bother me at all. Except for one thing. You begin to be too damn tolerant. Consciously and deliberately tolerant. What a horror that is.”
“You’re depressing me, Dragoness. Okay, now enough suspense. You waited. Did he wake up?”
“Of course he woke up. Then I went close to him with my dripping raincoat and my wet hair and drops of rain all over my face. I went close to him finally. At last. The boy I had met at City College and decided I had to have. The handsome boy from Mexico, so damn good-looking that when you saw him you felt you had to pinch yourself to be sure.”
“A swarthy Apollo?”
“Yeah, you could say it that way. And I told my girlfriends, or maybe only myself, that one way or another, little by little and no matter how long it took, I was going to get that man.”
“Win his lightning fast-on-the-drawers beauty with time and patience?”
“Bullshit, caifán. Stop grinning. That’s the way it was.”
“You aren’t reading me clear, Dragoness.”
“Clear enough. Why do you always laugh?”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t care for solutions.”
“We’re leaving on a vacation trip tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“Veracruz. I want to see the sea again.”
“Who’s going?”
“Javier and I.”
“That’s all? Come on, Dragoness, give.”
“Little Isabel.”
“And that’s all?”
“All right. Franz.”
“Ahhh.”
“Well, it’s a solution, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s go back to that motel room.”
“I knelt on the bed and Javier opened his eyes and smiled at me. He reached his hand out and unbuttoned my raincoat. Under the raincoat I was wearing only panties. Javier was shocked, oh, he was scandalized. But really. ‘Did you come that way all the way from home?’ The same prude then that he is today, but at the time I thought it was his innocence, that he was pure, inexperienced. He was trembling…”
“And you, Elizabeth? What did you feel? Quick now.”
“Well, that … That everything was going to happen very very quickly. Too quickly.”
“For what?”
“Too quickly for … love, I suppose, magic, dream, reality. The word doesn’t matter. That it was going to be over and behind us very quickly because the whole world was pushing us forward toward it, making us urgent, unable to wait, take our time…”
“Yes, I think I get it. Go on, Elizabeth.”
“Well, then there we were. And now we had become a pareja, a couple.”
“Already a couple?”
“Yes, already. You know, after we got up from the bed we filled the washbasin and washed our hands together in the motel bathroom, soaped and washed our hands together, our fingers touching in the warm water…”
“This may be too personal, but were you couple enough to come together that first time?”
“Nothing you ask me or I tell you is too personal, caifán. No, not then. Only much later, after years together.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Afterward? I thanked him. I told him not to worry about it, just to try to let himself go as much as he could. That only by giving could he take, by spending, save. Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Sure, very true. How did he answer you?”
“Oh, quietly and with complicated words. But very sincerely. He told me that he loved me because I wasn’t an echo from his past, from his childhood or his teen years. That our relationship was authentic, not a parody. Something like that. Probably he had read it somewhere. But at the time he seemed very moved and very sincere.”
“What did you say then?”
“I asked him how he could know he wasn’t lying when he said he loved me.”
“A proper question.”
“He didn’t answer it. We made love again and we went on feeling that we were joined together deeply. A couple now.”
“That pretty couple. Self-sacramented. Stealing from each other.”
“I suppose. But I think I sensed even then that he wanted a problem, something to worry about, to be disturbed, troubled by. And that maybe that was what I was for him. The troublante, the difficulty. Lord, I forget what language I’m speaking.”
“You’re speaking pop language, Dragoness. Pop literature, you know. The big sign in the background:
POP LIT
“What, caifán? Slow down. Sometimes you buzz like a neon light.”
“Sorry, Pussycat. I was carried away. You say it was in Flushing Meadows?”
“What, Flushing Meadows? God, no. It was right here in Mexico. In a tourists’ court on the road to Toluca. He took me there in a broken-down taxi.”
“Off of it, Pussycat. No cracks about cabs. Cabs mean a lot to me. They bail me out. They keep me going. They’re one of my trades. By my cab alone…”
“Sometime you’re going to choke on pure air, caifán. Drowned by words.”
“Well, words are another of my trades. What did he say to you?”
“At the court? Oh, you know. That he loved me. That he loved me because with me everything was new and fresh, he wasn’t repeating anything from the past. You know the way he talks. That we weren’t living out a parody. Jazz like that.”
“And did you believe him?”
“Well, Proffy’s sweet, you know. I liked it that after we made love he got up and went to the bathroom with no dignity at all, half groggy, half out of it, nothing hip. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sure, Isabel, I always know what you mean.”
“He had brought along some panties and he made me put them on. Then he made me put on his trench coat and get in the shower and he turned on the water until I was soaked and laughing. He asked me to go outside and knock and come in again and look at him pretending to be asleep on the bed. I went to the bed and knelt beside him and he very slowly unbuttoned me and took the trench coat off. And there I was in those borrowed panties, so we made love and then we went to sleep. It was nice, caifán. Different.”
“You went to sleep and the dreams began? Thought became a dream that whittled itself down?”
“Man, how did you know?”
“Artaud said: We believe in the absolute power of contradiction.”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you? Let’s keep it a secret.”
* * *
Δ You walked down the path to the Volkswagen thinking, Elizabeth, remembering. You were seated in a café in Herakleion. Javier was reciting a poem by Gaspara Stampa and looking at you while you watched the men passing in their gold-embroidered trousers and then he alluded to the Duino Elegies and asked if you hadn’t been struck by the restraint of gesture and expression in the Greek stelae and you replied, sipping your Turkish coffee, that in Greece everything seemed to have its name while at home in the States so many things were nameless, undefined or very vaguely defined and therefore hard to talk about, even to think about, and that was one of the reasons that you had been glad to come here and sit in a café and look at the leathered faces of men who knew the names and the meanings of things. Javier smiled and pressed your hand and said that he had come to see the living embodiments of the restraint to be found in the stelae, the memory of those gestures still maintained, the way they moved, extended an arm, held their heads. From reading books, he went on, one could deduce a way of thinking or speaking. But not physical movement. He had wanted to try to discover how such restraint could nevertheless hold such passion. While he was still young enough he wanted to learn the lesson that was first of all in their architecture, where the form is its own content with no need for ornament or commentary. Just as their tragedy is architectonic, so their architecture is their theater enacted in stone. Everything is exactly what it appears to be. Gray-haired women with paunches and double chins and fat arms called back and forth from their balconies and then you and Javier left to look at the golden Mycenaean masks, those funerary suns that provide a third face, one that lies between the faces of life and death and is the only face that we can receive from others, the only possible homage to death: to understand that beyond life but this side of death can lie a visage containing both. You went to see the dead children covered with beaten gold, the sketches in marble of the Cycladic women with their high breasts, their very simple figures, slender, angular, yet soft, a sharp contrast to the broad-buttocked women in the statues at Aegina whose strong hands rest upon their heavy knees, an equal contrast to the Athenian caryatids placed by their builders in stances of support but transcending that destiny thanks to their blind distant eyes looking forever far away, far beyond their setting of eternal fixation, beyond the Acropolis and beyond the step their motionless legs are about to take into another time, having outlived the time of their creation.
“Twice I made love to you, because I thought you understood.”
Understand? You spent your days in Falaraki that summer and on into the soft Mediterranean autumn looking for beach pebbles. You became almost a tradition: the blond American girl who sought colored stones: Klondike Lizzie, the Pebble Rush.
And one day the sun did not come out. One day in November the little bay ran its waves agitated and cold against the shore and the sea became slate-gray and saltier than usual—you could taste it on your lips—stirred up, threatening. The fishermen decided not to go out. There was only one old man who stood far away on the rocks, flaying, under the rain, a dead octopus. You went to the empty beach because you wanted to swim. Javier trailed along some distance behind you. The rain wet his turtle-neck sweater and his corduroy pants and his bare feet sank into the once golden, now dark sand. You swam to the rock where the old man was flaying the octopus. You stretched your arms up from the water and the old fisherman grinned and threw the octopus down to you. Slowly you swam back. Everything seemed predetermined
“… as though you were living out a pact, Ligeia…”
and the white cat came from the house buried in the sand and waited for you, drenched and shivering on the sand
“… and you came out of the sea, Ligeia…”
out of the cold water, Elizabeth, with the black arms of the octopus twined around your own arms and your nude breasts. You stretched a hand and the cat moved to you and you lifted it up and placed it on top of your head and slowly, illuminated by a rose and ocher light that revealed all of the serene, almost static contours of your brown and blond figure crowned by a cat, you walked to Javier.
* * *
Δ Dragoness, just look at the day we are living in. Here you have it in the paper. Dated Pittman, Nevada. Crime of passion in which the weapon was a two-motored Cessna. Three victims who were inside a bar, while the target of the deed was untouched. John Covarrubias (hey, a compatriot!), thirty-eight years of age (more, a contemporary!), had a violent argument with his wife in a bar during the afternoon. In Pittman, Nevada. He wanted to effect a reconciliation and have her return to live with him, and when she refused, he became blind with fury and went and got his Cessna, flew over the town and dived at the bar. Missed. Destroyed two cars in the street, swiped the bar and injured three of its seated clients, and angry Mr. Covarrubias was killed but his good wife, who had just walked off down the street, was merely shocked and survived to live happily, we may suppose, ever after. And so it goes, sweet Elizabeth. Once you begin to monologue over the skull of Yorick you discover that the Dane’s doubt is the only way to affirm the elemental truth that we are, yet we are not; we were, yet we were not; we shall be, yet we shall not be. Now you see me, now you don’t: boo. That is: there is a state of nonbeing that summons us continually whether we are feeling terror or laughter or insanity. And we like to play games with it, but who knows, suddenly we may be only playing our role in earnest, our eternally present and eternally denied possibility of nothingness. Well, not everyone takes that step. The risks are too great. The devil takes you, or your name is Rimbaud. Which makes me ache with boredom, Elizabeth. And to return to you and yours, if we are ever going to know who Javier is and why he is, we must go back and remember and let him go back and remember. There is no other way, however tiring you find it as you sit in the rocker in your damp-smelling hotel room in Cholula and say to him: “You’re exhausted, Javier. So much talk always wears you out. Why don’t you lie down?”
A Change of Skin Page 5
