A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  Wine-dark sea of Ulysses.

  “How did you pay for your trip to Greece?”

  “I’ve told you. With the money from selling Javier’s home. Or was it the money from his fellowship? I don’t remember for sure.”

  Nymphs and sirens and ears sealed against the enchantment and temptation of the sea.

  “A Lloyd-Triestino ship. An old tub.”

  Sea without bound or limit.

  “How many days?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. An orchestra playing waltzes and jazz too. You know how time slides by when you’re at sea. How can you keep count of days?”

  Choleric breath.

  “Did you go first class?”

  “No, we couldn’t afford that. We traveled like sandwiches, between first class and steerage. Stop asking questions. Read Ship of Fools. Go see an old movie starring Kay Francis and William Powell.”

  Sea that is the home of the most powerful of gods.

  “One Way Passage.”

  “Sure. They’re all dead, you see, and they don’t know it. The ship of Charon and all the rest. No. That’s Outward Bound. Sorry.”

  Poseidon of the golden trident.

  “Did you have much baggage?”

  “Don’t joke. One steamer trunk. A world. At that time everyone always traveled with a trunk.”

  Sea belting the earth.

  “Sure. The three Marx brothers could have stowed away in one of those trunks.”

  “We died laughing at it. The hinges squeaked, the little drawers squeaked. The trunk was almost empty.”

  Sea boiling with winged weightless fish.

  “But at that time you couldn’t go anywhere without taking a world with you. It was a must. All for show. And out hopped Harpo with his harp and his eyes of a harmless madman.”

  Dolphins beloved by the muses.

  “Harmless? Ask the ship’s manicurist.”

  “You’re way off, caifán. But you know about as much about the movies as I know about magnetic fields. Harpo was harmless, I tell you; the wolf was Groucho. But we staggered around more than any Marxist in that fifth-rate steamer.”

  Children of the sea.

  “We wrote letters on notepaper and stuck them in the empty drawers of the trunk.”

  “What did you write about?”

  Children of the Nereids.

  “I won’t tell you. You’re too inquisitive.”

  “Okay. What clothes did you take along?”

  Breast-fed by Amphitrite.

  “The things that were in style then. I told you, like Kay Francis. A flowered print for daytime. An evening dress with wide skirts. Those tailored suits with a short jacket, a long skirt, and a blouse like a tuxedo, of piqué. That satisfy you?”

  Sea of ships that open their wakes across the level green plain.

  “Did you do your own washing in Falaraki?”

  “Elena helped me.”

  Trackless sea.

  “Who’s Elena?”

  “You don’t pay close enough attention. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. What are you going to do with all these little details? Are you Gallup or Kinsey? Are you a recruiter for the war in Vietnam?”

  Sea of purple-shadowed waves.

  “You had money enough to pay a laundress?”

  “You like to make the story go your way, don’t you? Be patient, my love. Elena liked us. Understand?”

  Sea joined to the dark good earth.

  “Who did the cooking?”

  “I did. But we bought most things. In winter the fishermen brought us things. Almost all of it was ready to begin with. You know, cheese, olives, wine. Sometimes I’d fry a squid. But we preferred food that came from the land. A land so dry … Jesus, I don’t know how we survived.”

  Burned by the marine sun of Apollo.

  “Like Crusoe and Friday, Dragoness. Like the Medusa’s shipwrecked sailors. On the fare of the people themselves. I approve. Some day you and I will be worthy of each other. What was that fireplace like? Brick? Tile, stone?”

  “It’s easy to see you haven’t traveled much. Everything is white there. It’s not the material that matters, it’s the color. Everything is plastered and white. Everything. Why don’t you put out that marijuana? It stinks.”

  Sea of sails whipped by the tempest.

  “And Javier?”

  “Javier what? Let’s don’t go into Javier. Don’t try to be his psychiatrist. He’d like nothing better.”

  Before Sappho caused the moon of the sea to rise with its pallid fingers …

  “Psychoanalysis. Ho-hum. The science of feelings. Bullshit, caifán. All Freud did was make the melodramatic respectable. Oh, Javier loves it. He wants them to say ‘Oedipus’ or ‘Jason’ when he’s really nothing but a bastard blend of John O’Hara and Caroline Invernizzo transplanted to cactus land. It’s pure camp, all of it. Pure tango. Oh, don’t get me started on Javier. I’m not interested in Javier. And the point is that nobody is interested in Javier.”

  “No, I was merely wondering how he dressed.”

  Moon of the sea …

  “Free romantic bohemian, I suppose?”

  “Well, I’ve already told you. Barefoot. Corduroy pants. A turtle-neck sweater. No, that…”

  Surrounded by sea stars …

  “That was a beach in Maine, the first time we…”

  “Maine? I thought you said Long Island?”

  While on the shore girls danced.

  “Forget it. He was writing a novel. I got mixed up for a minute.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember what he wrote in?”

  “In Aramaic, wise guy, so Christ could understand. Oh, I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus.”

  “There’s flies on you and there’s flies on me, but there’s no flies on old J.C. With the best-seller of all time. And ghost writers. Blood, balls, and the Holy Spirit, via Lloyd C. Douglas and Cecil B. De Mille.”

  And the sleep of dark eyes fell upon them and their wings closed.

  “No, I meant what kind of paper. What sort of notebook.”

  “Hah! There he was always prepared. Wherever he went, he always took his notebooks. School notebooks, with lined pages.”

  Sea of Orpheus.

  “He loaded up at a Woolworth’s before we left New York. Ink, erasers, Faber pencils, an old orange-colored pen like Gironella’s, Scotch tape, paper clips. Enough junk to make Barbara Hutton even richer.”

  “Dragoness, that isn’t quite right.”

  Chieftain, immortal virgin.

  “What isn’t quite right?”

  “Scotch tape hadn’t been invented then.”

  “No. Excuse me. Anyone can make a slip. Don’t look at me like that.”

  God-root of the sea.

  “The notebooks.”

  “Lined. Marble covers. A multiplication table. The year’s calendar.”

  Sea that stretches like the horns of a bull.

  “And what year was that?”

  “Oh, no, nosy. How do I know what year? You’re trying to find out how old I am.”

  Sea that rocks in its immense awkwardness.

  “What color ink did he use?”

  “White. It didn’t leave a trace, not a word. Invisible ink!”

  Sea that sleeps at midday upon its bed of waves.

  “I’ve seen his handwriting. It’s small, very neat.”

  “Baloney. He writes like a hurricane. With waves, tides, mountain ranges. And tick-tack-toe and doodles.”

  Prophetic sea.

  “You didn’t have electric lights. What did you do after dark?”

  “We played footsie, Mr. District Attorney. Look, we’re getting nowhere fast. It was a time of feeling, love, poetry, and you want to hold an auction of it.”

  Sea armed with the ships of Troy.

  “Pop lit, Dragoness. Does it bore you?”

  “Okay, you have a point. Excuse me.”

  Sea of Prometheus who destroyed the tri
dent of the ocean.

  “But really, weren’t you bored?”

  “No. I had my collection of pebbles.”

  Blond sea.

  “Just the same…”

  “The best-seller that year was … was … Anthony Adverse. I read Anthony Adverse from cover to cover.”

  Mirror of the youth, of the little girl, of the tree, of the bird.

  “I thought you had only seen the movie.”

  “No, I read the book and saw the movie, too. Fredric March and Claude Rains. And Olivia de Havilland when she was still lovely, before that miserable snake-pit thing.”

  Mirror of its own fish mute in its profundities.

  “Holy macaroni!”

  “Gulp! You mean you don’t believe me? You doubt my veracity, eh? Well, just let me tell you what happened that year we went to Greece. Hitler gobbled up Austria. Mussolini pulled out of the League of Nations. We listened to Kate Smith and Kay Kyser and laughed at Jack Benny. Father Coughlin was spouting off. Huey Long was killed, I think. Cárdenas expropriated the oil companies. Garbo loved Taylor. Dick Tracy was working on Boris Arson. Little Orphan Annie didn’t grow an inch. Léon Blum’s cabinet fell. Alice served tea to four lunatics at Berchtesgaden. John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath and John Ford made the movie with Henry Fonda. We were humming a tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket. Li’l Abner escaped from Daisy Mae again. Orson Welles invaded New Jersey. Let’s see, what else? Snow White and her seven dwarfs. Enough?”

  Sea: element withdrawn from the original One, that by losing itself, it might recover itself.

  “Okay, okay, so we used acetylene lights. Write it down.”

  “Ten point o and you win your diploma, Dragoness. What about letters? Did you write home? To Gershon?”

  “Are you nuts? Haven’t I already told you? We threw the letters into the trunk.”

  “Well, the point is, I have an old envelope here.”

  Sea of whiteness.

  “Give me that. Where in God’s name did you find it?”

  “In an old trunk, Dragoness. So?”

  Cradle of dreams that ignore grief.

  “Check the address. Avenida Amsterdam 85, Colonia Hipódromo, Mexico, D.F.”

  “No! You have no right! Not yet. Where did you find the trunk?”

  Prince of magic hours.

  “What’s more, it isn’t true … No … 85 West 99th Street. Yes, that’s it. Or some address in the Bronx. I don’t remember now. It’s so long ago.”

  “Take it easy, Dragoness. We all want to be different from what we are.”

  Sea that receives the ashes of brothers.

  “We can’t be different today. Listen, caifán. We need something to hang on to. And this is all I can see, it’s all that can be seen and touched, not Greece and not Mexico, not anything, just the world called Paramount Pictures Presents…”