A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  Before, when Raúl was with them, life was different. Or maybe it merely seems that it was different because now Raúl has gone. No, it really had been different. With Raúl he would go out walking, holding his father’s hand, without worry or fear, walking slowly and enjoying himself. Very early Sunday mornings they would make their way to Chapultepec park. Sometimes they would rent a boat and row on the artificial lake looking at the girls who were rowing alone and at the boys who took other boats to follow the girls and scare them. Entire families would be out rowing, loaded down with paper bags and buckets of ice from which stuck the necks of cooling soft-drink bottles. Sometimes a boat would sink and the girls would shriek and the youths in shirt-sleeves laugh. And there were popsicles and clouds of sugar cotton, yellow and blue balloons, bags of peanuts, the cries of children, the whistles of the balloon venders. Hand in hand with his father he would walk the yellow meadows beneath trees stirred by the wind or stroll along the central avenue of the park watching passing cars, high and black, tops down, sounding horns to spread the swarms of pedestrians out of the way, moving slowly as if promenading, exchanging from car to car stares of interrogation, cries of recognition, words of alarmed or disarmed modesty. They would sit in front of the pergola where the band played Weber and Rossini overtures and Javier would laugh when his father signaled to the musicians with a finger. The imperturbable musicians, concentrated and serious as they puffed and plucked and bowed or adjusted their music stands or put a folded handkerchief to the shoulder. They played continuously and Raúl smelled of sweat, tobacco, leather, and shaving soap, and for the boy he came to be that Sunday music, the band in the pergola and the guitarists in the little open structures of iron where there were tables and benches and beer, soft drinks, and sandwiches could be bought. And away from the park a small fair was set up in a vacant lot, a few patched tents, a few booths, a rickety Ferris wheel, and the wooden horses of the merry-go-round whirled to the scratched music of a record, and down forgotten streets wandering entertainers walked, tooting their feeble trumpets, and an organ-grinder turned his crank while servant girls who had not gone out for the day listened from open windows. Sunday, their one day of freedom and companionship together, the day when they would go to all these places and hear all these sounds and he would ask his father what other people did on Sunday and Raúl laughed and said that some stood in line at movies and others slept all day, some did not shave, some dressed up in their best clothes, some read the comics and some pushed a baby carriage and many worked at weekend jobs to eke out their too small incomes, the women went to Mass and at four in the afternoon there were the bullfights. But that was not what Lupe, the servant, told him. Lupe said that on Sunday she sometimes would go to Tlaxcala to visit her family or enjoy a triple-feature movie or take the bus to the radio studios and enter free and obey the instructions of the master of ceremonies: laughter, applause, silence. Or she might merely go to the park and lie on the grass and let herself be sprinkled by spray blown from a fountain. And occasionally she had sex on Sunday:

  “She used to pay a peso, Ligeia, for admission to a dark room where a man would fuck her standing, sometimes the same man, sometimes an unknown one, beside other couples.”

  On Sunday sounds were different, clearer. Even the barking of dogs was louder and sharper. And it was the day when the wives of prisoners went to the prisons to visit and sleep with their husbands. Raúl said that it must be a very sad thing to die on Sunday. He rubbed Javier’s head and then Ofelia called to him and they shut themselves up in their bedroom and spoke in voices so low that not even a murmur could be heard.

  “Can memory return to us the places we have known, the people, the feelings, make us experience them again? I don’t know, Ligeia. But I know that you and I have come home and that you must accept it.”

  * * *

  Δ The highway twisted back and forth pressed upon by basalt walls scarred by picks and showing dark veins of hard stone separated by pale, softer bands. Franz drove swiftly, expertly, gradually accelerating as the stone walls spread apart to become a canyon of lustrous clay. Javier moved away from Isabel and leaned forward resting his elbows on the back of Franz’s seat. He touched Franz’s shoulder.

  “You slipped off from our talk after the movie the other night. I still hold that love is created, that it is an act of the will…”

  Franz did not reply. You half turned, Dragoness, and said to your husband, “Please, Javier. You told us that only a few minutes ago. You’ve said it a thousand times. Please don’t make us listen again.”

  Javier tilted his head to observe your head tilted, its vertical line now formed by your eyebrows. A real mocker, Elizabeth. He said dryly, “Since the first day you knew me, all I have done is repeat one or two ideas that had been written before you knew me, in that little book that won me the fellowship to the United States and so allowed you to hear my ideas.”

  “I haven’t heard them,” said Isabel, touching Javier’s arm. “To me everything you say is new.”

  “At any event, they are words that can stand to be revivified.” Javier leaned back and spread his knees. “As if they were being taken from some ancient ceremonial urn and burned in penitence for our deaths. Our deaths, Ligeia. We ourselves, the death of what we once were but have ceased to be. For all of us, except Isabel, of course, have been very different persons than we are today.”

  “Why did the audience laugh and hoot and yawn during the movie?” Isabel asked. Javier looked at her appreciatively. She was holding a characteristic pose, her hands together beneath her breasts ready to caress or squeeze her body with a grace and smoothness that would be accentuated by the opaque sheen of her yellow shantung dress.

  “Because they didn’t understand it,” said Javier. “They’re not used to seeing life itself on a screen. But ask Ligeia. She’s the expert on movies. She spent her entire teens in one long movie.”

  You did not look at him, Dragoness. “No, it’s more than that.” Nervously you opened your handbag and searched for your mirror and didn’t find it. You closed the bag. “Those apes who whistle and make cracks during a movie like that do it because they feel outraged. They can’t take it that Antonioni deals with Monica Vitti with respect and love, that he sees her as a human being.”

  “You mean that he communicates his own rhythm while receiving that of another,” Javier said. “Be careful now.”

  With your left hand you nervously twisted the rear-view mirror until you could see your reflection in it.

  “Come on, Elizabeth,” Franz said brusquely. “This is a damn dangerous road.” He raised his hand and readjusted the mirror and looked into it briefly at the car behind just swinging out to pass. The car, a Ford, went by, floating back a string of curses.

  “It bothers them to see simple objects,” said Javier. “Books, ashtrays, lamps, the things that are part of our lives but not part of us. They would prefer to humanize everything, it’s their guilt complex. The things a woman touches when she and her lover separate. That part of her life which is not her, which she won’t see or touch again, which has value precisely because it isn’t her. It disturbs them to see how living men and women leave each other. They would prefer something melodramatic that would give a kind of integrity to the disguise they insist life must wear. They are, as Usigli has said, gesticulators, in love with the gestures of living, not with life itself. They don’t care to accept that people simply lose time, walk along a street, stop to think. They don’t care to see the true slow light of dawn, day, sunset, darkness. They want to go on hearing the lies that have comforted them for a century and a half, from the time poetry was written for young ladies down to the latest suds opus on Channel 4. They live in eclipse and honest light terrifies them.”

  “No, it’s more than that,” you said again. “What they can’t stand is that a woman should be more than simply a cunt dressed out in some romantic illusion. To see the birth of a love in which the woman is just as free and just as much a person as the man
makes them furious. When Vitti and Delon go to the apartment and instead of jumping straight into bed take time to discover themselves slowly to each other, to play together like little rabbits and to do this because they must discover themselves first and share laughter and a game in order to go to bed only later, only apocalyptically, if you see what I mean, everything for everything, entirely committed with all their defects and fears and hatreds and weaknesses … that’s what offends your Mexican he-man macho male. What did they call out during that scene?”

  “Put it to her, put it to her,” Isabel laughed.

  “Yes, that’s right.” You directed a dry smile to Isabel. “Put it to her. Get it over and done with fast, pronto, for that’s what a woman is for. Underneath, the macho Mexican is merely an onanist. If he could have intercourse with himself, he would do it. The woman he takes is no more than an object that happens to be neccessary. Bah, they disgust me. Underneath they are secret homosexuals. The hidden desire of every one of the mustached bastards is enchiladas with cold cream, as a caifán friend of mine once said.”

  Thank you, Professoress Dragoness. I read you clear: Latins are lousy lovers.

  “Have you known anything better?” said Javier, arching an eyebrow.

  “Don’t be coarse, Javier.” You let your head rest back against the cushion. “You’re many things, but you aren’t coarse.”

  You closed your eyes and smiled and began to hum while your hand blindly looked for a radio station. ¿Dónde están mis amigos queridos de entonces? ¡A pan y agua! “Someday,” you murmured, “the women of the world will raise a statue to Michelangelo Antonioni. The David who cut down the Goliath of misogyny.” You laughed and went on without looking toward your husband, “You would like to accept it intellectually, Javier. But underneath you react like all Mexican men. You can’t help yourself.”

  “You’re wrong,” Javier protested. “I’m for womanhood too.”

  “There: ‘womanhood.’ But Antonioni is for this woman or that woman, and without demanding anything from her, he wants to give her everything.”

  Franz’s hand pushed your hand from the knob and he turned it, looking for a station.

  “Now who’s repeating?” said Javier. “That’s exactly what Franz said a little while back. And moreover, do you think to offer a woman only pessimism is really to offer her anything?”

  “Leave the tango, Franz. For an intellectual, you’re very thick sometimes, Javier. Don’t you see that we can’t help accepting that we will never attain some things, and that to admit this is not to deny the value of those things? It’s to find freedom.”

  You turned the volume of the radio up. Este tango nos unía en aquellas noches inolvidables de Armenonville. And the whole point, Dragoness, is to move first. To take hold of the world before it can take hold of you.

  * * *

  Δ Buenos Aires. January. Javier had rather uncertainly promised to meet you at a tearoom on Avenida Santa Fe. You remember the month because the streets were almost impossible. The tar of the macadam had melted in the heat and on some corners they had laid boards from sidewalk to sidewalk so that people could cross. You had walked all afternoon. Lunch alone. Then to Harrod’s to choose some wool material for an autumn suit, but when you pushed through the revolving door you changed your mind and walked on around and out again, the glass moving in front of you. A rebellion, but not a very important one. You felt the damp heat on your skin, heat mixed with the smells you always associate with that city: Argentine gasoline, which is different from any gasoline in the world and is the city’s most characteristic odor, even more identifying than its smells of the shops and restaurants, linen, wool, and leather, warmed-over pizza, grilled steaks, fried sausage, kishke, the fainter scent of chocolate-topped ice cream, and above everything, or within it, the smells from the docks: tar, coal, steam, frozen meat, livestock, fertilizer, bales of wool. Why had the thought of an autumn suit come to you in January? You walked on. A building was being constructed at the corner of Maipú and Sarmiento and the workers had stopped to eat. Some of them were standing on the sidewalk at the entrance to the job, others were seated high among the girders of the framework, as if in niches. They were eating long flutelike rolls stuffed with cheese and ham or slices of beef loin; they were drinking wine while conversing in Argentine Spanish with Polish and Italian accents. You stopped in front of store windows: crocodile purses, swatches of merino and alpaca, ponchos. A perfume shop on Maipú. You entered and they offered you ten or twelve perfumes in succession and you laughed and let them spray you with all of them and left the shop wrapped in fragrance and without buying anything. You would end, you knew, spending an hour in the Ateneo bookstore, finally emerging with a copy of Martín Fierro bound in cowhide. You avoided Florida, closed off at this hour of the day for auto traffic only. You walked along Lavalle to look at the placard-bearing tripods in front of the movie houses. Maybe there were some new movies playing, or an old one you had missed. They often showed, unadvertised, old Argentine films that you enjoyed enormously. Terrible melodramas with many tangos, thick with nostalgia for the Belle Époque of the Centenary, alive with folklore from the various parts of the great city. Walking slowly, you stopped in front of each of the thirty movie houses on Lavalle. You were wearing an orange silk print and white high heels that picked up the hot tar and you were carrying a purse you had bought in Buenos Aires and you looked at the placards, the stills of a triple-feature of Luis Sandrini and next door La Vuelta de Rocha was showing, with Mercedes Simone and Hugo del Carril, and the music of the city during that period enchanted you and in the summer you would go to the open-air restaurants on Maldonado and Belgrano, on the way to the Tigre, to hear the orchestras of Canaro or Pichuco. You also enjoyed music from the interior of the country, the carnavalito, the pericón, the vidalita. Malambo with Delia Garcés was showing. You saw many titles and names that were familiar because you had come here every afternoon since you and Javier had been living in Buenos Aires, to Lavalle Street to see movies, Floren Delbene, Tita Merello, Tres Hombres del Río, Nini Marshall, Esteban Serrador, Santiago Gómez Gou, Los Ojos Más Lindos del Mundo, Enrico Muiño, Angel Magaña, the Legrand sisters, Los Martes Orquídeas, Petrone, Amelia Bence, Silvana Roth, La Casa de los Millones, Olinda Bozán, Semillita …

  “J’étais une vraie cinglée du cinéma argentin…”

  Finally you stopped before the stills of Los Muchachos de Antes No Usahan Gomina, a title you found amusing. You bought your ticket and went into the tiny theater, narrow, the wooden seats high and uncomfortable, the whir of the ventilating fans louder than the sound track of the film. You found a place in one of the front rows. The picture had already begun. Two dandies of the 1900’s were out on a carouse and had just met the great courtesan of the Centenary, blond Mireya, played by Mecha Ortiz, and they were dancing the milonga “The Swan” and you felt your hand touched and looked to the right and there was Larraín, the secretary of the Chilean embassy, sucking chocolate milk through a straw. He bent to greet you and said that it was a small world and offered you a sip of his drink, suggesting softly but shrilly that for that one afternoon you could pretend to be sweethearts, it would be a secret no one else would know. You wanted to sit there relaxed, escaped, and watch how Mireya would relentlessly descend the path of her destiny, a way as relentless as a tango, to end up an aged vender of flowers living in the gutter, to be rediscovered there by and by, in the last reel, by Arrieta and Parravicini, the dandies grown elderly. Twenty-five Aprils that will not return. The tango, you told yourself absently, is one of the few contemporary forms of tragedy, and you got up and moved toward the aisle.

  “But you’ve just come…”

  You murmured that you had forgotten an appointment and you walked out of the theater. To the Ateneo bookstore. There no one would bother you. You walked to Florida and let yourself be swept along toward Corrientes by the crowd of men in jackets with too wide shoulder pads, high stiff piqué collars with big-knotted ties, their hair pomade
d. Old men and youths were reading bulletins at La Nación. Women whose hair was dyed two tones. The bookstore was not crowded. The familiar clerks wearing linen dusters with their sleeves wrapped to the elbow in black damask. You came out eventually with a book bound in lambskin. “Moreira was never one of the cowardly sort of gaucho lost in crime and with a completely perverted moral sense.” You closed the book and escaped from Florida toward Maipú and went down to the San Martín Plaza and there sat on a bench facing the Torre de los Ingleses. You breathed the fresh scent of the high trees and looked, just to be looking at something, at the sidewalk with its design of pink squares. You opened the book again. “No, Moreira was like most of our gauchos. He was blessed with a strong soul and a generous heart, and if destiny had launched him along a more noble path, at the head of a regiment of cavalry, for example, he would have been a glory to his motherland.” There were many children about, for this was vacation time, children playing in white and blue dresses, youths in knickers who were reading Billiken, and you thought to yourself that you had never seen boys more serious or better reared than the Argentines. A boy whose hair was plastered smooth sat next to you, wearing a tie even in that heat, and opened one of the little volumes of the Sopena classics series.