A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  Your husband pays you no attention. He unzips his little leather bag and one by one places his bottles and vials on the narrow glass shelf held by two nails above the washbasin in the bathroom. He sees himself in the mirror there and in a low voice asks, “Don’t you want to unpack your things?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I asked if you don’t want … oh, nothing.”

  He places his shaving mug on the shelf, lifting it by its handle, and then puts the white-bristled brush within it, the silvery straight razor flat beside it.

  “Ligeia, listen. The party was just about over…”

  “What?”

  “Worn down, tired, nearing its end, though the moment had come, as it comes to all parties, when those still present could believe that it had never begun and would never end. But to a newcomer just arriving, to me as I arrived, it was clear that the party was almost over.”

  He stands in the door of the bathroom looking at you and you say wearily: “Please, Javier, please. I know that old story. We both know it. It’s past, done for, a closed chapter. Please don’t go through it again.”

  “They greeted me with a certain coldness precisely for that reason, because I knew that it was over and they didn’t want to know.” He goes back into the bathroom and continues talking while he takes out bottles and places them in a row: the cologne—Jean-Marie Farina; the eyedrops; the Alka-Seltzer. Then his manicure tweezers and the bottle of Vitamin C tablets. The capsules of Desenfriol. “Yet they pretended gaiety, to be receiving me as a kind of prodigal son, the latecomer who could be forgiven because his arrival gave an excuse to go on, put on another record, look for an unopened bottle. But after a few brief and intoxicated words they abandoned me. Left me to my own devices and I searched for a clean glass and ice and something to drink.”

  The tortoiseshell comb. The bottle of deodorant. The round celluloid package of condoms wrapped in gold paper.

  “Ligeia.”

  “What, Javier, what?”

  “I forgot my toothbrush and toothpaste.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t brush my teeth. Why don’t you take care of these things? Now we’ll have to go out to a drugstore.”

  “If there is a drugstore.”

  “What?”

  “If there is one, such a luxury as a drugstore in this damn place.”

  He laughs quietly. He goes on: “I couldn’t find a clean glass. I had to be satisfied with one some girl had used and had left marked with lipstick. It was given to me by the hand of a girl I couldn’t see. Only her hand, her arm…”

  He raises the opaque bottle with the green label and reads: 10 mgs. hydrochloride of 7-chlor-2-methylamine-5-phenyl-3-H-4-benzodiazepine oxide, with excipient 190 mgs., following the formula of F-Hoffmann-LaRoche & Cie., S.A., Basel, Switzerland. He places the bottle on the shelf.

  “… her hand and arm and the drink she held out to me. Amber liquid. Ice that had almost melted. The rim stained with her orange lipstick. A copper bracelet on her wrist. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Javier, I’m listening.”

  “The record player was playing and in the living room several couples were dancing. Someone had turned off the lights in the hall. I couldn’t see her face in that broken, dim, flickering light. I could hear her voice singing very softly and I tried to imagine her orange lips, her invisible smile…”

  Sitting in the rocker, you begin to hum. Finally the words come back to you: It’s the wrong song, in the wrong style, though your smile is lovely, it’s the wrong smile …

  Again he is reading: Each troche contains 1.18 mgs. of Tripluoperazine cyclohydrate, Isopramide diiodide 6.79 mgs. Mode of administration: oral. Dosage as instructed by the physician. To be dispensed only by the prescription and under the supervision of a physician licensed by the Department of Health and Assistance.

  “Her voice was sugary and so very low that I could hardly hear it against the hidden voice from the record player. Presently she stopped singing and spoke.”

  “Hello. You’re very handsome tonight.”

  “Yes, that’s right. How did you know? I took her hand and drew her near me and put my other hand on her naked back. One of her arms went around my shoulders and the other dropped for me to take her wrist. We began to dance, dancing…”

  You sing quietly: “You don’t know how happy I am that we met. I’m strangely attracted to you…”

  “… very slowly, hardly moving, our bodies touching lightly and then separating. I could see her face now in the faint light, but not clearly. To have seen her clearly I would have had to step back from her and I preferred not to but rather to discover her without my eyes, a warm and elemental discovery of someone more forgotten than unknown.”

  Javier lifts the bottle of Stelabid that he is holding and places it beside the reflection of his face in the bathroom mirror. You come into the bathroom and are reflected behind him. You look down at one of the bottles: Oratic acid 55.80 mgs., Xanthine 6.66 mgs., Adenine 3.34 mgs. Excipient c.p.b. 250 mgs. You put the bottle on the shelf.

  “I didn’t speak to her. I was afraid that anything I said might only provoke her to laugh. Or that she, like me, would be able to speak only in clichés. So I kept silent. I closed my eyes against her cheek and felt her warm young breath and the vague fragrance of her high breasts, which as we separated from the embrace of dancing were illuminated by the flickering light. It drew her profile…”

  You take off your blouse and hang it over the back of the toilet. With your hip you push Javier to the side of the washbasin. You turn on the water.

  “Is there any hot water in this hole?”

  You dip your fingers into the gush of rust-colored water.

  “Cold. Of course. What can you do? Give me your razor, Javier.”

  “We looked at each other. I saw her dark eyes, her eyelids long and thick as an Oriental’s, her orange lips, the deep hollows in her tense cheeks, the lightly tanned skin…”

  You cock your arm over your head and begin to soap your armpit.

  “I held her in my arms. I could see her then and forever.”

  “Forever?” You furrow your brow with concentration and scrape the razor carefully across your armpit. Javier embraces you around the waist. He touches your breasts. “No!” he says sharply. “I tell you it’s all over, past and gone, done for! There’s no going back to it. That record has finished. There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget.…” “Javier! Damn it, you’ve made me cut myself!” You put your fingers to your armpit and show them smeared with blood. “Give me some of that cologne.”

  “I went back to the table where I had left my glass. I couldn’t find it. I looked exactly where I had left it, but it wasn’t there.” He empties a squirt of cologne into his hand. “And then I looked, standing there, motionless, for the girl…”

  “Please, Javier, hurry. I’m bleeding.”

  He rubs cologne in your armpit. The armpit of Señora Elizabeth Jonas de Ortega.

  “Ouch! It burns.”

  “I tried to find her among the couples who were dancing slowly to the music of a new record. I remembered her waist, her cheek, the lobe of her ear, her smell. I remembered that we hadn’t spoken, that I had not said a word, that it was over, gone…”

  “Javier, please get back out of the way and leave me in peace.” You begin to soap the other armpit. Javier leans against the wall. A wall of unevenly set tiles that here and there were once plastered. A plus in application, you grade him silently. F minus in conduct.

  “No, it wasn’t like that, Ligeia. Not like that. I’ve been lying.”

  Singing softly, “You don’t know how happy I am that we met,” you shave yourself. “I’m strangely attracted to you. There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget. Don’t you want to forget someone too…”

  “Listen, Ligeia. Will you promise to be quiet and listen?”

  “I think it’s starting, Javier.”

  “What’s starting?”


  “My period, dope. See if we brought some Kotex among your medicinal treasures.”

  Javier opens the little leather case again and searches through the cotton, the adhesive tape, the gauze, the bottle of iodine.

  “No, we didn’t bring any.”

  Angry, you stop and stare at him. “No Kotex? Go on, make poetry of that.”

  “You should have taken care of it. You know…”

  “But we didn’t forget any of that crap for your nerves. The pills that merely poison you more.”

  He grabs your shoulders. “I’m a sick man. I need my medicine.”

  His hands are hurting you and you make a face but go on calmly: “Bullshit, my love. It’s all in your mind. Every doctor tells you that. It’s all…”

  “The doctors don’t know everything!” he begins to shake you violently.

  “Javier, you’re hurting me.” You relax, let yourself go limp.

  “I know when I have a pain and when I don’t have a pain!”

  “All right, Javier, of course you know.”

  He releases you finally and you squeeze yourself with your arms.

  “Give me a little of that cotton, Javier.”

  Javier carefully pulls loose a handful of cotton and gives it to you. He leaves the bathroom and in the mirror you see him go to the bed and lie down. When you too leave the bathroom and walk across the squeaky boards of the bedroom, he rises again. You fall on the bed. You have been in that cheap room only two hours and yet you have already found two fleas fat with blood. The two splotches where you crushed them smear the wall above the bed.

  “We should have gone straight through to Veracruz, Javier.”

  “It wasn’t I who insisted on seeing the ruins. For my part…”

  “And that story of yours bores me terribly.”

  He watches you stretch across the bed, and he thinks that, despite everything, your waist is still as flexible as a reed. What reed? It would be a pedantry, he tells himself, to remember its scientific name. Nevertheless, he murmurs, hoping that you do not hear him, “Phragmites communis.” Well, Dragoness, man does not live by bread alone, and especially Javier doesn’t. He commands himself again to be silent but already and automatically is giving the old definition: “Un roseau pensant…”

  “I could tell some stories too, if I wanted to,” you go on. You are face down across the bed and you let your head hang over one side, your feet over the other. The coverlet is white, here and there stained with yellow.

  “Javier, please take a Kleenex and wipe away those two fleas I squashed.”

  Blood runs toward your head and swells the veins of your temples and forehead and neck. You let your shoes fall from your tired feet. You wriggle your toes as if they were fingers on a keyboard.

  “Oh, if I wanted to, I could tell stories that would bore you too.”

  Javier fiddles with the bronze curtain rod from which hang the muslin curtains that cover the glass-paned door.

  “Javier, it’s smelly in here. Haven’t you noticed? Doesn’t it bother you? Why don’t you go and complain to the manager.”

  “The picturesque usually smells a bit. Don’t worry. Some day there will be a Cholula-Hilton.”

  The pressure of blood in your head begins to make you dizzy. And the squashed fleas are still there on the wall. Again you close your eyes. “For example, I could tell the story of Elena.”

  “Elena?”

  You raise your head and look at him as if surprised.

  “Elena, of course. Elena. Don’t you remember the beach at Falaraki? The colored pebbles? The figs Elena sold? The hot, sun-rotted figs that she brought in a bucket and sold to sunbathers sprawled out on the sand under the sun that would end by rotting them too, the…”

  “The sun, always the sun.” While you are speaking, he closes the shutters of the door. “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always been looking for more sun.”

  “Why close the shutters at six in the afternoon?”

  “Because it is a public hall and you are lying there with your skirt up to your ass.”

  You laugh a bubbling laugh and Javier closes his eyes in the darkness. He is wrong about the hall, Dragoness. It is not open to the public. It’s a closed gallery that surrounds the four sides of a patio roofed with glass panes set in an iron spider web with dust gathered in its angles and crotches.

  Javier folds down the coverlet and the sheets and in silence lies on his stomach. You are seated with your legs drawn up, your knees holding the covers high. Although Javier tries to keep his face turned away, your woman’s smells come to him: cologne water, menstruation, fatigue. With a fold of the sheet over his face, he murmurs: “Men from the States are more sensitive to smells than we are. They are aseptic. Every odor seems aggressive to them. Offends them, irritates them. Here, we’re immune.”

  He removes the sheet from his face and out of the corner of his eye peeks at you as you sit smoking with open eyes that are pensive and distant. He covers his face again and again smells your smells.

  Just a deterioratin’ little boy, Mama-Dragoness.

  He believes, when he wakes, that he has slept only a few seconds. He had felt nothing. But when he removes the sheet from his face with a jerk and calls out, “Ligeia! Ligeia!” he sees that you are no longer seated there. Your imprint is still visible on the pillow and the sheets, but you, Elizabeth, have vanished. And the light has vanished too. He sighs and says bitterly: “Ligeia, oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  * * *

  Δ Sometimes I really don’t know how you speak or listen to him, Dragoness. He makes me too aware that all of us want to close the circle of our lives, to be able to think that the round line ends where it began, to want to live many lives within the one we do live, to be sure that if we only had more strength of mind, will, and dream, we could make our little pasts have meaning. Unconsciously we are all poets and we struggle to oppose nature with our patterns: nature which does not consider us individual beings at all but rather confluences of lives that cannot be isolated one from the other, that flow together in a great whirl that neither begins nor ends. Suppose then we are confronted by a man who believes that he has closed his circle once and for all, that he has left everything behind, that he has understood it all: what does he do when you address him speaking any words that may come to mind, any sentence whatsoever, no matter how cryptic. For example:

  “That is a finger bowl. When you finish eating your shrimp, you dip your fingers in it and wash them off. Like this, see? You must learn these things. If you don’t, people will say that we don’t know how to bring you up.”

  Then he will have to remember that he was thinking,

  “Where will I go after dinner?”

  and also that one day he wanted to follow her, to learn where she disappeared to every afternoon, but he fell too far behind and got lost. He was ten years old and it was the first time he had ever left the house without knowing where he was going. Before, when he went out alone, he always knew that it would be to the park or the candy store or to his school. And, moreover, he rode a school bus to school. This time he went beyond his coordinates—Calzada del Niño Perdido, Parque de Ajusco, the school of the Marist Fathers on Avenida Morelos—and in four or five blocks he was lost and he observed that he did not know the city, that in reality he knew nothing about it because he had never walked it alone.

  “Where were you this afternoon?”

  “I went to the movie at the Parisiana.”

  “Who with?”

  “Two boys from school.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Pedro and Enrique.”

  “What picture did you see.”

  “A talkie. I forget its name.”

  “Let me have the paper. It’ll be there.”

  And, after all, he had not grown up in the city. He had been living there only a year. Before that, the trains were everything, much more than the cities. Always running behind schedule. Often stopped by breakdowns, stuck som
etimes for twenty-four hours in a row in the middle of a desert while his mother dried herself with lace handkerchiefs and his father played cards with other men in the salon diner that smelled of too ripe bananas. At first the trainmen would say that no one should get off because the trouble was minor and they would be on their way again in twenty minutes. Then, when the rumor was circulating that the tracks ahead had been blown up, some of the passengers would get down and smoke cigarettes and drink from canteens but the sun would be too blistering and they would climb aboard again seeking refuge, shadow, and his mother dried the back of her neck and between her breasts and said to him, “Don’t get off the train. It’s too dangerous,” and on the other side of the dust-thick glass the desert could be seen like its own mirage, colorless, empty, a stage upon which at any moment something terrible might happen and all colors be born of the absence of any color. Only the clouds moved. They hurried along playing at racing each other and Javier could amuse himself watching them for a while, but not for long. He pretended that the train had gotten tired. It had huffed and puffed and groaned to reach the high desert and now it had fallen exhausted, mouth down, panting without strength, and everything smelled of tired steam, of grease and old food. With his finger he began to draw houses and trees and faces in the dust of the window.