A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  “‘But the voyager no longer recognizes his homeland. That’s the point.’”

  “‘All right,’ said the girl. ‘Go on.’”

  “‘I shall go down into the labyrinth with you.’”

  “‘Yeees,’ she said. She was not certain now.”

  “‘And together with you either be saved or be lost.’”

  “‘Noooo,’ said the girl. She was not sure at all. She was…”

  “‘Kiss me,’ I said. I didn’t know the scene we were acting now. But I could guess what had to be done. ‘Minstrel. Idiot. This cold night will turn us all to fools or madmen.’ I was trapped by her lips, by your lips, Ligeia. To fools and madmen. You wouldn’t let me go. This cold night.”

  “‘Dost thou call me fool, boy?’ she smiled at you.”

  “‘A bitter fool!’ I told her.”

  “‘Bitter, perhaps,’ the girl said. ‘We’ve played it before, Javier. It’s worn out too.’”

  “‘You have never given the right answer,’ I told her.”

  “‘All right,’ she said. ‘What should I have said?’”

  “‘All thy other titles thou hast given away. That thou wert born with. You were born a fool and you will die a fool. Without ever knowing or understanding. Just as you were born flat on your back between the legs of your mother, so you will be carried away flat on your back on the shoulders of your pallbearers, a fool to the last, even in death. Womb to the tomb.’ Then I added quietly, ‘No. Can’t pride be generous sometimes?’”

  “And the girl answered, ‘Yes, when it gives in.’”

  “‘Gives in or is yoked?’ I asked her.”

  “‘I don’t know, Javier,’ the girl said. ‘Tonight I don’t know anything. I don’t understand anything.’”

  “‘I’m going to have to leave you.’”

  “‘No,’ she said. ‘Please don’t do that.’”

  “‘And you won’t be able to give yourself until I come back. And when you know my sin, when you learn the destiny that destroys me, you won’t die less, but you will die feeling more guilty.’”

  “‘Bah,’ the girl said. ‘What difference does dying make?’”

  “I laughed again and hugged her and kissed her. She was wonderful. Simply wonderful. She had followed me like my own shadow, I couldn’t confuse her. I wanted to leave with her now, quickly, to give her a reward for the seriousness with which she had confronted and defeated my mockery. And she wanted to give me my reward too and she said, I said, we said it together, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Nat King Cole as we pushed our way past couples neither of us knew and out a door into the light of a hall where the women’s coats were piled on a sofa. She searched for hers, the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, looked for her coat still holding my hand, turning the linings to find her initials, they’re only made of clay, but our love is here to stay. In the taxi, we kissed again. We kissed with closed eyes, a kiss that did not end, but at the same time I was alert to every sound, as alert as I had ever been in my life. The silence of the expensive streets of Las Lomas. The whistles of night watchmen walking their rounds. The sounds of engines whirring swiftly past, the whiplike sounds of tires passing. The radio in the taxi: the voice of a little boy singing out winning national lottery tickets, and outside, the whisper of falling water at the fountain of Diana the Huntress. Another long silence. We stopped for a light. The mocking whistles of some kids in a car stopped alongside us. Radio music from other cars. A newsboy who wanted to get rid of his last copy of Ultimas Noticias. He stuck the paper in through the open window on the right and we separated from our kiss and she began to fix her hair while the cab driver took out a peso and gave it to the newsboy, at the same time rapping his knuckles and saying in English, ‘Never,’ as if we had been his partners in a conversation, and looking at us in his mirror, as he probably had been watching us all the time, he went on in Spanish,

  “‘You got to watch them all. There are some black souls in this town who will reach in and knock the flag down when you’re stopped, and then you drive away with the meter off and your fare has a free ride.’

  “‘Let’s go to the apartment,’ the girl said to me. ‘Now, quick.’

  “No, I told her, we weren’t going to the apartment. I told the cab driver to take us to the head of Avenida Juárez. He waved a hand in the air and I remember what he said:

  “‘Just as you say, Mustafa. It’s your dough. No more one-peso pickups to bother with for a while. Let ’em bang on the door if they want to, I’m in business now.’

  “‘Where?’ said the girl. ‘Javier, I want to be with you. Now. Where are you taking me? Let’s go to the apartment.’

  “‘The Mustafa said Juárez,’ said the cab driver. He was watching us in his mirror. The girl was silent. You were silent, Ligeia. Presently we were in front of Bellas Artes and I told the driver to stop. I got out and held my arm to the girl. She didn’t want to get out. ‘Take me to Rin and Nazas,’ she said to the driver. But when I paid the driver and walked away, she left the cab and followed me along Aquiles-Serdán. I would stop and look back and she would stop and turn and touch the thick marble banister that runs beside Bellas Artes and then I would walk on and so would she. Our steps were one. And my senses were wire-tight. I heard the neon signs winking, bubbling, laughing in the night silence. The newspaper and magazine stands of galvanized iron were empty, their wire netting drawn. Trash along the street, thrown-away paper, tips of ice-cream cones, cigarette butts, torn cellophane, wads of gum, the river of refuse that flows along all the streets of Mexico City. The girl following, I walking ahead in the silence. My rubber-soled steps. Her clicking high heels. I waited for her to catch up and took her by the wrist.

  “‘No,’ she protested. ‘Not here. What do you want to do here?’

  “‘Here we enter our labyrinth,’ I said to her.

  “‘No, Javier, please.’”

  “‘The voyager does not remember his homeland. He must rediscover it.’ I laughed and pushed through the door, leading her by the wrist. Silence ended as they sang Lo bajaron por la sierra, todo liado como un cohete …

  “But rediscovery was hard in that smoke. ‘Have you ever seen such smoke?’ It clouded around us, almost suffocating.

  “‘It’s horrible,’ she said. ‘Please, please, let’s get out.’

  “‘We’re going to have some drinks.’

  “… lo traen desde San Miguel, lo llevan a Sombrerete …

  “‘Bards, Ligeia. Minstrels. Bards with dyed silver hats and bellies swollen by pulque. Let’s sit down. Let’s try to hear them. A violin. The guitar. A guitarrón. Bring us two tequilas.’

  “‘No, nothing for me.’

  “… Oiga usté, mi general, oiga usté, mi general …

  “‘Do you know what those voices remind me of, Ligeia?’

  “‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘What?’

  “‘Cries at birth. As though both mother and child were to go on shrieking their pain the rest of their lives.’

  “‘So what?’ the girl said to me. ‘It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me, Javier. I’m not interested.’

  “‘As though the act of giving birth had never ended. They shriek, howl, blindly…’

  “… yo también fuí hombre valiente; quiero que usté me afusile en público de la gente …

  “‘… as though the child were still tied by that blue flesh rope to his mother, who howls with him. As if he were still wrapped in the placenta. Look at them. In the eyes.’

  “‘I’m not interested, Javier. Let’s go.’

  “… tanto pelear y pelear, con el máuser en la mano …

  “‘Listen to them. Listen to how they live today on violence from the past, as if when they are born they can remember the brutality of the act of conception…’

  “‘God, Javier, enough, enough. How tedious you can be.’

  “‘Cheers, Ligeia. Bring us two more.’

  “‘None for me.’

  “‘The
n two for me.’

  “‘God, how tedious, how disagreeable…’

  “… para acabar fusilado en el panteón de Durango …

  “‘J’aime, je l’avouerai, cet orgueil généreux qui jamais n’a fléchi sous le joug amoureux…’

  “‘Cut it out. Javier. Don’t keep it up now. It’s broken already, beyond repair. It doesn’t matter now, there’s nothing you can do about it. Some other day.’

  “‘Oh, there’s to be another day! Mourez donc, et gardez un silence inhumain; mais pour fermer vos yeux cherchez une autre main. Cheers.’

  “… ya no vivan tan engreídos de este mundo traidor …

  “‘You’ve had enough,’ the girl said to me. ‘Don’t drink any more now.’

  “‘Look at their eyes, Ligeia. They’re the children of the great whore.’

  “‘Oh, my god, now he’s being original.’

  “‘Yes, look at them. They see us and they hate our guts. They don’t want us to visit them here. Why should they? To them we are Martians. We don’t speak as they do or think as they do. We never stop even to glance at them casually. We merely boss the shit out of them. If we do see them, it’s like the zoo. So let’s take a peek at the little bastards, Ligeia. See, they’re monkeys dressed up for carnival time. Howling like coyotes. And we are their enemies and they know it. We stand outside the bars of their cage looking in at them. Good. Maybe we should throw them some nuts. Here, monkey, catch.’

  “‘Javier! Stop it!’

  “‘Open your mouths and catch them, monkeys. Pumpkin seeds for the little monkey bastards on the other side of the bars. Catch ’em! Eat ’em!’

  “The music stopped. What did the man look like, Ligeia? Can you remember him? I remember all right. He was dark-skinned and tall and he had a bushy mustache that ringed his mouth the way the bushy hair of a monkey rings its red ass. A circle of mustache, without beginning or end, a snake swallowing its tail. His sombrero was decorated with silver roses and he swept it off with a dramatic gesture and walked slowly toward me. He moved like a lean black panther, the movement we with our inner-spring mattresses, our porcelain toilets, our steel desks have forgotten. Like a forest animal pushing its way with his head through ferns and vines. Like Rousseau’s tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night. His teeth sharp and white. The veins in his neck swollen. Claws that grabbed me by the lapels and a voice that grated, Listen, drunk! Listen to me!’

  “‘Listen? Now is the hour, eh? The moment has come to listen and pray. Your prayer, Tiger. To Eurynome, the mother of everything, who rises naked from Chaos and by rubbing her hands on her belly creates the serpent Ophios and then dances wildly while he pushes up between her legs…’

  “‘Knock it off, drunk. Shut up! Have some respect for the musicians.’

  “‘… and copulates with the Mother of All Things, to the end that she may lay the great universal egg…’

  “‘Didn’t you hear me, drunk? I said shut up!’

  “‘… from which she hatches, while she sleeps, her son Ouranos, who sprinkles his semen between the legs of his mother and covers her with grass and rivers and flowers and birds. So the moral is, fuck your mother. Go look for your goddamn mother, Master of Musicians, and fuck her and this cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.’

  “He jerked me up by the lapels. I no longer saw you, Elizabeth. I saw instead the crazy whirl of the starlike lights in the ceiling, the thick blue smoke of that cold night, the circle of lunatic bastard monkeys who were crowding around us shouting and laughing and climbing on chairs and tables, howling, shrieking, laughing, their gold teeth, their flat noses, their pock-marked cheeks, their dark greasy hair, their heavy breasts, their powdered arms and their satin skirts and their spindly legs, their black mustaches, their forked red tongues, their eyes of polished coal, their short necks, their dirty T shirts. All the world that until that moment had been silence and obedience was screaming now. ‘Give it to the son of a bitch, smash him, send him to the Red Cross, gouge his eyes, cut his balls, knife him, put him in his coffin, drown him, hang him by his horn, stomp him, cream him, choke him. Up his ass for the shit we’ve had to swallow, for the right you are sir and the just as you say sir, the step right this way, ma’am, the thank you for nothing, not a goddamn thing, for the fat-assed queers on the prowl, for the pinched asses and the broken promises, for the quick gallows and the crooked courts, for the hand that holds a whip and a pistol, for the foot that stands on us and holds us down. Cold-cock him, shiv him, cut him up!’ A screaming circle of violence and fury and the tall tiger driving his fist home again and again, yet they still seemed far away and unimportant to me and I cried out to you where you stood looking on rigidly, loving me as you had never loved me before, my jerking body, my beaten face,

  “‘Et Phèdre au labyrinthe avec vous déscendue, se serait avec vous retrouvée ou perdue!’ and at the same time I tried to remember their words as they shrieked ‘Shut the bastard up! The fucking son of a bitch! Shut him up, shut him up!’ Then they were suddenly very close to me and fists were at my face, my chest, my belly, my testes, again and again until I fell crying to you…’

  “‘Phaedra. Theseus. I wasn’t so far off, was I?’”

  “and finally they dragged it out of me, a wild helpless groan, ‘Ahhhhggggg!’ as I fell on the dirty floor amid the cigarette butts and the sputum and phlegm and the spilled tequila, a cry that was identical to their cry. They had beaten me and captured me. I was on their side of the cage now. I was an animal too and all I could do was lie there with my knees drawn up to protect my testes and my hands over my face, moaning while I caught glimpses of the ceiling lights wrapped in yellow cellophane and the face of the dark-skinned tiger who had overcome me as he turned and walked away rubbing his knuckles and cocking his sombrero again. The music again. The guitar. The guitarrón. The trumpet. Again a voice singing. I struggled up and hung on your neck. I couldn’t see your eyes as you took a handkerchief and wiped off my face. We moved toward the door. Someone was waiting there and helped us outside into the cold air of the street. It was the same cab driver who had brought us down from the Lomas. I smelled steam and coal smoke from locomotives. I tried to see what time it was, what had happened to the moon. Dawn was breaking. I heard the swish of sewers and the roar of the great trucks that come into the city at dawn loaded high with vegetables, beer, cheese, bales of cotton, fruit, frozen seafood, crates of eggs, flowers. Roaring motors of red-fingered dawn. Huge eight-wheeled trucks driven by men in leather jackets wearing straw sombreros who have driven all night from Veracruz or Monterrey, from the coast of Guerrero or the mountains of Oaxaca. To feed us. To prevent us from once again eating each other’s flesh.

  “The same taxi was waiting and the driver opened the back door and pushed me in roughly and I sprawled there, drunk and exhausted, hardly conscious. You told him to take us to the corner of Rin and Nazas and you got in front beside him.

  “‘Sure, little pigeon, I’ll take you straight to your cage. We’ll let the Mustafa rest in peace behind. I’ll even go in with you before you fall dead too and I find myself out a fare.’

  “We were in Mexico City again, Ligeia. We had returned.”

  Javier closed his eyes for a moment. Only a moment, he was sure of that. But when he clawed the sheet away from his face, you were no longer there.

  “Ligeia! Ligeia!”

  You were no longer seated on the bed where he had last seen and heard you. The imprint of your body remained on the sheets and pillow. He looked toward the bathroom. The light there had been turned off.

  “Ligeia, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered. “We have come home again. Accept it. Accept it.”

  Lord, prevent that we fall into darkness.

  * * *

  Δ “What are you doing? What? What are you thinking? Tell me!”

  “Mother, please.”

  Raúl was different. Raúl asked no questions. Neither did he speak often. Of course he had attitudes: nearly always in supp
ort of his wife when she was correcting Javier, saying over and over that “For success in life good manners are indispensable,” and not only his attitudes but also his quirks: he crumbled his bread and dropped the pieces into his soup, he dipped his pastry in his chocolate, he read the Montgomery Ward catalogue, while Ofelia’s quirks were more enormous and complicated and made much more difference: she would snuff the lights and close the curtains as if she believed that in shadow their poverty would be less visible and the huge old house, naked of all except the most indispensable furniture, with its unused rooms, like the forbidden stairs to the mansard attic, always shut and padlocked, might seem almost homelike. In the evenings Javier did his homework and Raúl read the Montgomery Ward catalogue and made marks with a blue and red pencil and scratched his bald head and said that he was getting old, he couldn’t remember any more, and Javier could not see Ofelia’s only response, a movement of her face, because she had made the room dark and was hidden in its shadow.

  His escape was to the patio, where he did not have to pretend. Tall crockery vases shining with inset studs of glass and porcelain. Water drips from the iron railing and the shadow-loving plants are in the planter boxes on the stairs. Shirts and sheets cross in all directions. He sits there in the twilight of a March afternoon, one of those fevered days that always make him so restless. The cold transparency of winter has vanished and without a season of transition heat has come and the dust has risen and hangs over the city in clouds. A yellow mantle every afternoon, and through it the sun seems to gain heaviness and penetration, and he wishes that it were rainy July, just as in July he wishes it were dry January, as he sits on the wicker chair near the high vases with his hands behind his head feeling that some of the dampness of the plants has worked its way deep into his vitals. The parrots have gone to sleep. Soon Ofelia comes and makes the round of the patio covering the birdcages with hoods of old sheeting. Into some of the red and white cages she tosses a handful of seed. The boy and mother do not speak, though their glances cross. He stretches his leg. Ofelia disappears but she has not gone. She is behind the partially opened door watching him, spying on him this afternoon as every afternoon. She sees him bathed in the misty light, calm, quiet, and her eyes pass from his curly hair down to his bare feet on the tezontle stones that in March evaporate so quickly and secretly the bucketfuls of water that the servant throws upon them every morning. She is wrapped in her flowered robe, her red hair is neatly combed, her face is drowsy as she stands behind the cracked door and watches him. The boy, fourteen now, sits in the rocker and reads and feels her eyes and senses clearly that one of the reasons she spies upon him is that he reminds her of his father, who is gone now. Like Raúl, he is dark and silent, captured by his own distance, lost in dreams. He is incomprehensible to her and she is trying perhaps bitterly, perhaps desperately or maybe only in loneliness, but always secretly and always avidly, to fix and simplify him, understand him. Now that Raúl has gone, she is far different from the woman who bought new dresses in Laredo, Texas. Her face is a red purse, her bust a heavy tide, her abdomen round and hard, and she stands with her legs well spread and her hands pressed to her belly as if she were trying to remember with her touch the pain that is the first memory she has of him; wearing a cotton skirt and the apron that has become eternal, the apron of their hurried meals and her hurried cleaning, she stands at the door and spies on him unaware that he heard the creak of the hinges when she cracked the door and can see her eyes against the dark background of the bedroom, kept in shadow to disguise their poverty. And after their meals, meals to which only the two of them sit now that Raúl has gone, she still leaves the house and disappears without saying where she is going and he makes no attempt to follow her because he knows that if he tries, he will only end by getting lost, he still does not know the city, still must confine himself to the limits of the familiar and obligatory streets.