A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Sure, Elizabeth. The flag of Revlon. The national anthem of Disneyland. General Motors’ army. And the countries are called U. S. Steel and Conrad Hilton and IBM. That’s the atlas of the stinking world we live in today.”

  Sea of Orestes and Electra.

  “We don’t have myths any more?”

  “No, suddenly they are only dreams. But a dream you can touch is called a myth.”

  Sea of little voyages that cannot reach the regions of the sun.

  “And a place, caifán. There has to be a place. It can be any place, even an imaginary one. So that we can go there and return reborn.”

  “A setting, Dragoness, a place to stand fast. The Last Time I Saw Paris. Or San Francisco, Here I Come.

  Sea dyed with the blood of Agamemnon.

  “What’s wrong with Greece? The harmony, the classicism, the spirit. Our cradle.”

  “Pay now, travel later.”

  Rock of lamentation.

  “I was more bored than an oyster. I don’t know what you’re going to tell.”

  “Yes, Medea.”

  Watched sea, guarded sea.

  “Who told you?”

  “Jason.”

  Sea of pitch.

  “You found our traveling world.”

  “And opened its little drawers.”

  Port of nocturnal daggers.

  “You know everything.”

  “Almost everything. As far as to where you wrote.”

  Sea of bloody vines.

  “We were on the ship almost three weeks, caifán. An eternity. We had to amuse ourselves somehow.”

  “Yes, that’s the simplest answer. Why make life complicated?”

  Sea of conquest.

  “I don’t know if we foresaw everything or if it was that every time we wrote a scene that made us roll with laughter, and threw the page into the trunk, into the drawers of that world we traveled with, we condemned ourselves to live it out in real life sooner or later…”

  “But there, then, there were only two characters. You and Javier. Remember?”

  Sea of the rudder and sword of fortune.

  “Yes, only two.”

  “Everything could be written, Allah willing, everything could be foreseen, and then the actors failed. They couldn’t handle their roles.”

  Tomb of star watchers.

  “The plan was so perfect. Only he, only I. Living what we had written in the steam of the ship.”

  “It wasn’t perfect at all. No one can play all the roles in a movie, not even Erich von Stroheim. You have to have supporting actors.”

  “Promise me that you’ll never mention any of this again.”

  Sea.

  “Never again, Dragoness. I burned the pages. I had one hell of a time finding that trunk, let me tell you. I smelled my way through all of Mexico City. Finally one day I came across a place on Tacuba where an old Jew collected things people had given him or thrown away. So many Jews came to Mexico City during the war. And afterward, so many Germans. They never talk about these things, they’ve forgotten them, old trunks, suitcases, boxes tied with string, fetuses in alcohol, naked dolls, cellos, petticoats and hats, old picture albums, Nazi flags and armbands, old movie film, broken records, books without covers. Junk enough to write ten books about.”

  “It’s funny. We would have liked to live our own novel, just the two of us, together.”

  United only by your hands. You fell on your knees before him in order to give it its name. He standing before you, you kneeling before him, you embraced his legs harder and harder and moved your hands up to his waist as he reached down and held you by the hands only, you always lower, seeking the floor, he always higher. You rose, you sought him standing, joined together and sustained by your hands, then pushed backward without need for kisses or caresses, united and sustained, you over him and he beneath you, he pulling you upon him and you penetrating, imitating him, doing what he did, believing that you were possessing him in the way he possessed you, lying upon his thighs as he entered your thighs, saying to him: take my skin, Javier, take my breasts, learn to fulfill all your desires, sleep upon my breasts and don’t wake until the day is as warm as we are and Elena knocks at the door …

  * * *

  Δ The motor started and the car moved off with a growl of gears and Javier observed that as a boy he had often gone to the States by train with his father, who had been a businessman. But only to the border, to the other side of the Rio Grande, to Laredo. And he had used to return to Mexico with a feeling he could not define, shame, perhaps, or sadness. That was why a year ago he had traveled all the way to New York by train. He had wanted to remove the contrast with Mexico, to see the States not in relation to another country but isolated, a single canvas.

  “There you go again,” Elizabeth groaned.

  Only two or three clear impressions remained from that trip. The junkyards of old cars: the masses of twisted steel, the sooty air, the absolute rustiness of everything.

  “You could also see them like modern sculptures,” you interrupted him, Elizabeth. “Like unforeseen, unexpected sculptures…”

  No, said Javier. If Mexico is nature in ruin, the United States is machines in ruin. “In Mexico everything is a ruin because everything is promised and no promise is kept. In the United States all promises have been kept. Yet it is a ruin just the same.”

  “What else do you remember?” asked Isabel.

  “Negroes seated on their porches watching cars go by on the superhighways, just as if they were looking at cemeteries or the mountainous junk heaps. And then I saw some men standing behind a warehouse fence staring at the train as it passed, and I asked myself, ‘Who are they? Who can they be?’ I believe that’s all.”

  “Because that was all you wanted to see,” you smiled. “As for me, I get a kick out of places like Terre Haute or Indianapolis. I like to read the big signs over the factories. ‘This is the home of Goodyear Tires.’ ‘Here Shredded Wheat is manufactured.’ Those are the monuments of this century, just as Gothic cathedrals were monuments of another century. Or am I wrong?”

  No one replied and you turned on the radio and it sang: Help, I need somebody…”

  “Some time I’d like to go back to Europe,” Franz said.

  “How long have you been away?” said Javier.

  “Since the end of the war.”

  “Then why don’t you go back?”

  “They won’t give me a visa.”

  “Who won’t?” asked Isabel.

  “The Czechs. When I say Europe I mean Prague. That’s my home.”

  “Did you choose freedom?” Javier asked dryly.

  Franz laughed. Isabel hummed to the music of the Beatles: Not just anybody …

  “There you have an interesting thesis, Ligeia, if you want one,” Javier said after a moment. “Today the tone comes from England. Fashions, the times, everything. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Petula Clark. Agent 007.”

  “Well, someone has to take revenge for the Thirteen Colonies.” You yawned.

  Isabel fell asleep with her head on Javier’s shoulder. Franz tried to see her in the rearview mirror.

  * * *

  Δ You stretched out like a lizard on Franz’s body, supporting your face on the open palms of your hand, and looked at his face.

  “Tell me a new story, Franz, a true one. One about youth and young love. What you used to like to do, how you were, where you went. Anything, everything, so long as it’s true. What did you study?”

  “You know already, Lisbeth.”

  “That doesn’t matter, tell me again. Where did you live? Who did you love? What was Prague like?”

  Franz laughed and squeezed your shoulder and pulled you down on his chest again. He rubbed your head and said quietly, “I think sometimes that cities don’t exist. If you love a city as I loved Prague, you can come to believe that it is your own creation and that when you leave it, it disappears. It stops.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s
another way of saying that cities are kept alive by love. No, not quite that. I don’t know … Well, if a city were a human body, and we could open it with a scapel…”

  “Hold it. That scares me a little,” you laughed.

  “A city is a place where people are together. That’s all. Think about what it conceals and what it allows to live. The rubbish, the sewers, the garbage cans. The places where the things we eat come and go. The things we drink and love. The cemeteries.”

  You curled up. “No,” you said. “I don’t see it like that.”

  “How then?”

  You shook your head. “I can’t explain it very clearly. But it seems to me that cities have an unconscious too, just as we do, an unconscious that is joined to ours. I believe that we try to defend ourselves against that unconscious. The songs, the neon lights, the advertisements in windows, the touch of the people we pass in the street or stand next to in the subway. Do you see what I mean? I am what I am because I lived in New York and carry inside me a song that says any time at all and an ad that says don’t be this way when you can be that way. Contacts I neither wanted nor consciously accepted with someone’s sweaty skin, someone’s jacket or blouse. All that.”

  He kissed your cheek and smiled. “Yes. Prague is clean. That’s why I love it. It’s pure, it doesn’t take liberties with your privacy. The city and its people are one there. Or at least that’s how it used to be. That’s why I can’t understand a place like Xochicalco. I can’t imagine that living men ever loved that frozen stone.”

  “I think I understand. Maybe they didn’t love it but were afraid of it.”

  “I don’t know. Lie back, Elizabeth. I don’t like your breath on my chest.”

  “That better?”

  “Yes. In the old days when I used to cross the Karlsbrücke, when I was about nineteen, whether it was winter or summer I always left the city behind me wrapped in fog. Fog in Prague is different in the morning and the evening. And in winter it’s gray, almost white. As if the breath from the statues on the bridge were condensing in clouds. In summer it’s yellow and seems to come from far away. From the headwaters of the river. I used to stand in the middle of the bridge in those days, going and coming from my classes, with the fog wrapped around me. I felt myself at the same time both in the city and away from it. The fog surrounded me and carried me away. Or it took me back, just as I willed. From the Karlsbrücke you can see the entire city but still be in the city.”

  “Like taking the ferry to Staten Island and looking at Manhattan.”

  “No, that’s not the same. There you’ve left the city. On the bridge, you see, it’s still all around you. You can reach out and touch the Mala Strana and Hradcany on one side. On the other, St. Mesto and the hills of Bubeneč.”

  “Those are your names, Franz. They don’t mean anything to me.”

  And from the ends of the bridge you can see the channels of the Vltava. They run beside yellow houses and from the bridge you look down on the grass of the river in the background, tones of green that change as the hours change and the season changes. There are barges anchored the length of the canals that flow into the river and under the bridge there are fishing skiffs. The walls of the houses that face the river are decorated with white figures on a dark ground. It’s a tranquil river, flanked by ocher-colored palaces. There are willows along the banks and the shores are pebbled and lined sometimes with fishermen, stubborn old men who use two lines and wear berets and canvas coats. Farther down, toward Hradcany, the castle of Prague with its heaped, asymmetrical roofs. Skylights and chimneys, church towers, Catholic spires, Byzantine domes, Protestant stained glass. The bells of Mala Strana are heard and you can smell the laurels and cypresses in the courtyards hidden behind the houses. You can also smell the stagnant water and the rotting leaves in clumps at the mouths of the drains, and the wild scent of the chestnut trees.

  “I walked across the bridge every day toward Mala Strana, where Professor Maher lived.”

  “Who walked with you?”

  “No one. I went alone. Lisbeth, it’s very hot. Open the window.”

  You got out of bed, nude and willowy, and walked to the window. You opened it and spread your arms. And with your arms extended like wands you turned on your heels so that Franz could look at you. His eyes moved up and down your body appreciatively. A slender body, curiously short without high heels, a little loose-jointed. Your ash-dyed hair and the graying hair at your pubis. The depression of the muscles between your chest and umbilicus, the pale blue line of your stomach.

  “Don’t move, Lisbeth. Just stand there.”

  “I think I can feel a breeze beginning.”

  “You look lovely.”

  “Do I, Franz? I like to show myself to you like this. It’s like a little secret voyage. Ship ahoy. It’s a slap in the face of these super-modest Mexicans. I play the bitch with these people as often as I can. Their hypocrisy about sex makes me sick. Do you know that Javier’s grandmother used to sleep in a nightgown down to her ankles with an embroidered hole in it for screwing? And before they made love, they would kneel down in front of a candle and recite a little poem Javier told me.” You knelt beside the bed and rolled your eyes up and struck your chest with your fist:

  Oh it isn’t from vice,

  It isn’t to fornicate,

  It’s to make a child

  Who Thy service will take!

  You laughed and Franz, laughing too, kissed your neck. You went on: “And the old grandfather every time he would ejaculate would cry out, ‘Kyrie eleison!’ and his sainted wife would answer, ‘Christe eleison!’ God! I tell you, Mexico is the most morbid, puritanical country in the world. It disgusts me. Let’s get out, Franz. Tell me that some day we’ll take off together and leave it. Like Magellan or Gagarin. Tell me.”

  You stretched your hands out to him and Franz took them.

  * * *

  Δ Gershon squeezed your hand and said bitterly: “In ignorance there is never justice. Never, Lizzie.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Daddy.”

  “And how do you know such wisdom?”

  “I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.”

  Your father held his cup under his nose and looked at you half squinting as if he were trying to make the dim light clearer. You were in the coffee shop hidden in the mezzanine of the station. He put his cup down on its saucer of cheap porcelain and took out his handkerchief and honked his nose and then he laughed. He dried his eyes and went on laughing with his tongue pushed against his teeth. With the extended fingers of one hand he tapped his head, then immediately hit his head with the closed fist of the other hand. He repeated this several times, saying: “Head against muscle, nothing more, that’s what it is. That’s all it is.”

  “Your cold is bad, Daddy. You should have asked off.”

  “Bah. Shutting oneself up to nurse a cold is no medicine. Better one should go out and let it breathe fresh air.”

  “You shouldn’t have drunk that coffee.”

  “No? Tea I should be drinking?”

  He touched his forehead, then his bicep.

  “Brains against force. Always the same. Head against muscle.”

  The waiter approached with an air of bored disgust. He brushed flies away from the stiff cinnamon rolls and sighed and moved his head from side to side. Your hands gripped the cushion. The waiter tore off the check and threw it on the table. Gershon contemplated it for a moment and then looked down and began to feel for his wallet in the lining of his coat. He sneezed and the waiter stared up at the low ceiling and you closed your eyes and smelled the stale watery coffee and the grease and the glue of the dangling flypaper clustered with mounds and craters of dead flies. A faint scent of rottenness came from the flypaper. And the too-sweet smells of chocolate and blackberries and rootbeer. Old bread, fermented sugar, corruption. Gershon pushed a dollar bill toward the check. You opened your eyes and said, so that the waiter could hear you: “So a dollar is a dollar. Whose it is doesn’t matter.�
�

  Under the table Gershon squeezed your knee with your hand and you were silent as the waiter looked at you rather pityingly and turned his back without picking up either the check or the dollar. He murmured something that you and your father could not hear. You stared out at the people moving toward the platform gates of Pennsylvania Station.

  “Maybe you want something else, Lizzie? Another drink? Maybe a vanilla soda?”

  “No, Daddy. No, thanks.”

  A redhaired sailor passed, looking in all directions, freckled, his canvas ditty bag in his hand, obviously lost. And an old man with a faded felt hat that came down over his ears was led by a young woman who looked like him, the same damp eyes and high cheekbones, the same pointed trembling nose. She stopped and tried to straighten the black band of his hat and in so doing exposed felt that was not faded. The old man paid no attention and she led him off toward the platform for Baltimore. Two girls leaned against an iron railing and played with joined hands, swinging their hands without looking at each other but sometimes looking down at their red socks and patent-leather shoes, and then they began to giggle nervously and then to laugh and finally they were silent again, one of them raising a hand to her mouth, the other covering her face with both hands. They joined arms and leaned against the iron railing without looking at anything. Boys in white shirts, some short-sleeved with a school emblem, others sleeveless and tattered, crowded around the magazine kiosk and turned the pages of cowboy novels and muscle magazines full of pictures of strongmen wearing leopard-skin loincloths. Some of the boys took turns swelling out their biceps. Others laughed and rubbed the fuzz on their chests and in their armpits. The old man led by the woman passed again. They seemed as lost as the redheaded sailor, who was no longer in sight. He had found his train. But the old man and the woman had not found theirs. She supported him by the elbow as he stumbled. She looked through the window into the coffee shop, she looked at you. You closed your eyes again and again smelled the smells of coffee and grease and fermenting sugar and smoke from the trains and farther away, far away, the concrete sidewalks and the macadam streets and sweat-drenched clothing, sweat-darkened collars of this month of July.