A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  “I don’t remember what it was. In that heat…”

  He inclined his head slightly in greeting to you and you returned the salutation. Then you both settled to your reading, turning the pages almost at the same time, and as you grew engrossed, you forgot the youth. The adventures of the gaucho Moreira on his home ground. You thought of Javier as you observed how Moreira was both the actor and the victim of his own words: “Fearless and sure of himself, always in the middle of things, not very Catholic, sticking to his enemies like their shadows, good at dancing, his eyes always open, always a little suspicious and always alert…”

  You read until the sun dropped below the branches of the trees and struck your face. You closed the book. In the glare and shadow of the sun, the buildings that surrounded the plaza had lost all detail and become shapes and farther off you could see the smoke plumes of the Retiro train station and the haze leading down to the docks along the brownish Río de la Plata, as opaque as the skin of a lizard despite the setting sun. You looked at your watch. It would soon be five. You got up and nodded goodbye to the boy and he rose to his feet for a moment and you walked off toward Santa Fe. A record shop detained you for a moment. Noches del Palais de Glace … dream … ya no estás … se me encoge el corazón …

  The little tearoom was air-conditioned. You seated yourself on green velvet before a table of gray marble with mahogany legs where a service for two was already laid out, cups, small plates, sugar bowl, silver spoons and forks. You ordered tea and paté sandwiches and took your Chesterfields from your purse. The waiter came with the flame of his lighter. You breathed in slowly, your eyes closed, without looking around you, without paying attention to the quiet conversations of the no-longer-young ladies who were habituées of the tearoom. You held your cigarette between your fingers and studied the ring of saliva that you always left on a cigarette when you smoked: Javier had told you that it looked very ugly. Five-ten. Your tea was served and you said that you didn’t need cream. You unwrapped two lumps of sugar and let them drop into the cup with a noise that was surprisingly loud. You squeezed lemon juice and watched it begin to dissolve the sugar, and you waited before pouring the tea. You waited. After only two or three puffs you put out your cigarette. A string trio was playing something by Lehar,

  “Maybe it was the Merry Widow Waltz…” and finally you took the teapot and poured your cup. You sipped the tea slowly. When it was all gone, you took the silver fork and began to plow furrows and construct four-lane highways across the white tablecloth. Straight lines, then circles, then crosses. Again. Still again, imagining that the tablecloth was a snow-covered landscape seen from the air. Then you beat jerky time to the waltz, moving the fork back and forth and destroying the fields and roads you had made. You lit another cigarette and let it hang from your lips while you went on making lines with the fork. Five-twenty. The waiter coughed beside your elbow and you looked up and smiled at him and with your hand concealed the marks you had made on the tablecloth. The waiter asked if you were expecting someone to join you. You didn’t answer. You looked away from his angular face, his graying hair somewhat darkened by the brilliantine that pasted it down. His high thin eyebrows, his aquiline nose, his lips pressed firmly together to conceal, no doubt, a black denture.

  Without looking at the waiter again, you snuffed out your cigarette. You picked up your white kid gloves and caressed them, smelled them, lifted them to your lips. You began to toy with them. Empty white gloves. You spread them out finger by finger. You rubbed one against the other. You made them dance together, thumb to thumb. You hung them from the points of your fingers. You squeezed them in your fist to wad them against the open palm of the other hand. Five thirty-five. You laid your gloves on your purse again. The waiter was holding his lighter for you. You moved your Chesterfield into the small flame without looking at him.

  “Don’t you care for the sandwiches, Señora?”

  You looked down at the little damp sandwiches. Rye bread, paté. The waiter suddenly half bowed and said good afternoon and moved to the chair opposite you and pulled it back.

  “Yes, it’s clear that it’s a small world.”

  Larraín smiled, wrinkling his nose. With a gesture of his right hand he invited himself to sit down as the waiter brushed the chair off with a napkin and held it for him. You blushed.

  “No … I’m late already. Waiter, my check, please.”

  They stood before you in confusion while you went on blushing. The minutes would pass while the waiter went for the check and brought it and then went to get your change.

  “Sit down, Larraín, and keep the table if you want to.”

  Larraín sat with his insufferable air of knowing all the secrets of your life, of having surprised you in some act of abandoned vice. He arched an eyebrow, as if expecting an explanation.

  “He sat in front of me, Javier, and I refused to let him suspect that I had been there forty minutes waiting for you.”

  The waiter brought the check. Larraín pursed his lips and lifted an index finger and took his billfold from the inside pocket of his coat. You got up. You said neither goodbye nor thanks. You simply walked out. Santa Fe, filled with tall young women with long legs and flaming cheeks, beautiful young women, the women of Buenos Aires …

  “And I knew them: servants, maids, clerks in shops and offices, performers…”

  There was still sunlight. You stopped in front of the record shop again. Me dejaste en la palmera, me afanaste … You felt the sticky heat.

  “You had told me, ‘At five, but I’m not sure I will make it. Maybe I will. In any case, wait for me there. But I’m not sure. I have so many things to do today. If I’m not there by five-fifteen, don’t wait any longer.’”

  Pickpockets. You. Your mother, your father. You walked along Santa Fe and on to the apartment building on Quintana. The doorman greeted you with his Polish accent. The lobby smelled of gardenias. Javier was not in the apartment. You lay down on the sofa and let your shoes slip off.

  “Oh, shit, Javier! Shit, shit, shit!”

  You stood and in your stockinged feet went into the bedroom and opened the closet and stood there touching Javier’s clothing, the jackets, the trousers, the orderly shirts, smelling the soap that he had placed among his handkerchiefs.

  * * *

  Δ Franz braked, at the same time accelerating the engine to shift down. You heard the gears, Isabel, the growl and then the smooth even whir. You were staring at the rearview mirror, trying to see Franz. For a moment he glanced up and saw your green eyes looking at him. Then your head moved out of sight and was replaced by the swift, receding landscape. High Oriental straw roofs topping huts of woven reeds. Copper-colored faces, wide, the flat cheekbones pushed out and the eyes buried and slightly slanted. You moved your head near Javier’s and in his ear whispered: “Tell me again. I want to hear it again.”

  “It isn’t original with me,” Javier said, whispering also. “It’s a classic. To take the body of a woman and to enjoy sex with her is proof enough of possession for a modest man, but another, with a thirst for possession more suspicious and ambitious, understands the doubtful and merely apparent nature of physical union and demands more convincing evidence, insisting that the woman must not only give herself to him but in doing so renounce for his sake everything that she possesses or would like to possess. But still a third type is not even satisfied by that. He asks himself dubiously whether the woman in renouncing everything for his sake has not done it because she has an illusory image of him, is mistaken about him. He demands that she know him truly, deeply, and completely. So in order to be loved, he discloses himself to her. Only then, when she is not deceived about him, can he feel that she is really his…”

  * * *

  Δ Yes, Dragoness, that first night in your apartment at the corner of Rin and Nazas you talked like your husband. Like him and about him and to him, despite the fact that I was apparently your listener and had my stiff cat’s head buried in your pleasant fishbowl whi
le Javier, your perfect model of a modern spouse, lay passed out on the sofa in the living room. You spoke of the Greek sea, their wine, their islands, your name, and above all, over and over, of sex …

  “Ligeia. You gave me that name. My real name is Elizabeth. Ligeia. How silly. You remembered something. ‘A man does not completely surrender to the angels, not even in death, except from the debility of his will.’ You remembered that and you named me Ligeia. How silly, silly. Bette, Beth, Betele, Liz, Lizabeth, Liza. You were very different then. At times you understood exactly what I wanted and at other times…”

  At other times he made you understand. But those were not your best times. Your best times were when everything was as spontaneous and natural as sleeping or waking. If you saw him exhausted, not from having emptied himself but because he had worked all day yet had accomplished nothing, and his energy, so nervous and volatile, had found no escape, you would undress slowly before him, in the living room or the kitchen or wherever you happened to be and whatever you happened to be doing, smoking, opening a soft drink, preparing a sandwich. If he was angry with himself you would rub his temples and pull him back on your lap, light his cigarette for him between your lips, place the cushions on the floor and wait for him with a certainty that you do not feel today, that you have lost today, and that then, without your knowing it, offended you in a way: the certainty that as you gave yourself to him because he needed you, an outlet for his frustration, as you gave him yourself because you also needed it, you would meet on the spread cushions naked and panting and would loose the tight reins of the words that neither of you had ever dared to speak, neither he in his writing nor you with your lips, and nothing would have to be overcome, there would be no obstacle, no difficulty. And it was different again and worse when there did not exist even that invitation to give yourself, his frustration and anger and irritation, when without any pretext or any special reason

  “… we would grab each other blindly, in the darkness of waking at dawn, and it would be only my body and your body, two bodies that came together and united for no reason except their closeness, the warmth of their skin, the cold of the morning, the fact that we were husband and wife now and lived together. It couldn’t go on that way, so pointlessly and mechanically. Who was it, was it you or I, who first asked for something more? To possess, to possess. How we appeased our dissatisfaction during those first years by telling ourselves that each of us possessed the other. That was enough, we tried to insist. Enough, shit. Did either of us count the times we possessed and wasted each other in those days? Without either of us losing himself, only because we happened to be together. Your obscenities in Spanish and mine in English, sometimes exchanging our languages in order to try to say the same thing, just what we didn’t know, we had to learn, your kisses finding me and taking apart all my secrets, discovering every inch of my flesh, moving across my forehead and down my back and I felt your breath on my face and then on my thighs and then between my buttocks while your tongue touched every part of me, your spit tried to possess me, your tongue and your fingers and your breath and your hair and your eyelashes…”

  How many places. On a wet gray Atlantic beach under the rain. In a hut of old beams and white plaster on the island of Rhodes, beside a wooden table soaked by spilled wine and scarred by heavy knives. On a Spanish steamer, twenty days from Vigo to Veracruz, when Javier decided that the time had come to return to Mexico City, that he needed Mexico again, that if he did not face and overcome its terrible negations he would always believe that he had taken the easy road and his writing could have no value: on the Spanish steamer beneath a porthole dirty from smoke and encrusted salt, in a narrow bunk. In your apartment in Colonia Cuauhtémoc on a wide bed in a room decorated with posters from the shows you had visited before the war in Paris and Haarlem and Milan, dramatic letters and brilliant, contrasting colors, the names and images that now were lost, Franz Hals, Gustave Moreau, Paul Klee, Ivan Meštrović.

  “Every month those old posters became a little more tattered until finally we forgot them and painted the walls and threw the posters out. For we had come home to Mexico City. We had sold the furniture that had been left from the old house on Calzada del Niño Perdido. You had been taken, as usual, practically giving the furniture away, but nevertheless we had a little money again and could go on living and you could devote yourself to writing. You would leave the apartment and roam all over the city looking for God knows what, contrasts, images, words, profiles, masks. For you were writing the poetry of the commonplace, the visible-invisible ordinary and everyday, and you went out to find your words in that world that belonged to you and that I was discovering beside you. The poetry of the commonplace. You know, someday I’d like to read that poetry, I wish someone would write it, the poetry of the old movies we remember and the old songs, the things that take up more than half our lives. So many lovely forgotten songs. Remember The Isle of Capri? In a Secluded Rendezvous? Flying down to Rio? Cheek to Cheek? What was I saying?”

  You were saying that in the Orient all the men wore pith sun helmets and white suits à la Clark Gable in China Seas and the background would be a shot of Singapore or Macao and gliding by would be Anna May Wong, Sessue Hayakawa, and Warner Oland, who was also Charlie Chan; even Peter Lorre, who played Mr. Moto. Marlene Dietrich you discovered, of course, in The Blue Angel, with Emil Jannings, and you remember it as if it were only yesterday or a moment ago, Marlene sitting astride to sing in a silver top hat and black stockings. No, Marlene and Garbo never acted in the same picture. Garbo, wrapped in fox, entered the Grand Hotel where John Barrymore was smoking as he paced the floor in his black silk pajamas and Joan Crawford was taking dictation from Wallace Beery, who played a horny industrialist dressed in a jacket with a wing-collar shirt. “He pretended to have a German accent and Lionel sat at an enormous chrome bar and got drunk and the hotel was run by Lewis Stone, who hid half his face because it had been burned by acid, and Lionel was dying of cancer and that was why Crawford, in a dark dress with a large white voile collar, agreed to marry him, it would be for only a few months and then she would inherit his money. She was called Flemschen … Flemschen or something like Flemschen, and she was simply divine, the best actress in the movie, the most modern of them all. Even Jean Hersholt played in Grand Hotel. Do you remember? Afterward he played the doctor who brought the quintuplets into the world. Dr. Dafoe. You don’t remember. I bet you don’t. But we used to know them all. Every afternoon after school we would go to the movies. Or we would sit in the soda fountain and ask movie riddles, to see who knew the casts best, the cameramen, the other technicians. Yes, we even knew the names of the cameramen. And today the only ones I remember are Tolland and James Wong Howe, and Tissé, who was Eisenstein’s cameraman. But then we knew them all, both of us, Javier. We were like one memory, we went to the movies like one pair of eyes and ears, do you remember? And which of us was the first to ask for something more? Were you thinking then what I was thinking? I heard you come home one night…”

  You heard the key scratching, Elizabeth, searching for and finding the keyhole. Then silence as he remembered that it had to be upside down, the serrated edge up, and the scratch as he tried again, this time with too much force, for that lock required

  “Gentleness, almost tenderness, as if you were threading the eye of a needle or making a cheese soufflé…”

  He tried a third time, now inserting the key slowly, and the lock turned and you heard the squeak of the hinges and then the creaking of a board in the floor and all these very habitual sounds irritated you precisely because they were so habitual, pointless, involuntary, yet so significant, his steps across the living room, a pause as he picked up the mail, a tearing of paper as he slit the envelopes with his fingernail, the soft sound as he sat down on the sofa, then again the step you knew so well approaching the bedroom and

  “That disgusting politeness, that night for the first time, the first time you had ever used it with me, your fingers tapping the door
as if you had to warn me, as if you were afraid you might find me with a lover and wanted to avoid a scene, or as if you were playing a game with the first girl you ever slept with, and above all, and this was your irony, as if you wanted to flatter me with a show of respect I had never asked of you, treating me like your hired housekeeper, and maybe you didn’t mean it that way but that was how I took it and I was as furious because that afternoon a survey-taker came and asked me if I was listening to station XEW and without asking me wrote down on his tablet that my occupation was ‘housekeeper.’ That eternal Mexican ‘may I,’ that damned monotonous and completely false, merely decorative courtesy which is valued because it provides a contrast for your violence and brutality: before you drive the knife into the belly of your wife’s lover you tell him to make himself at ease, your home will always be his home. Then you opened the door and came in and I saw your body and your hair and eyes and hands and for a moment I felt you as I liked to feel you, handsome, warm, generous, ready to do anything to please me. And it was that that disturbed me more than anything, Javier. That absolute and unreserved admiration I felt for you, the gratitude I felt because you loved me and knew how to love me, my gratefulness for what each of us gave the other. And I really was grateful to you. It was thanks to you that I had escaped from New York, the Bronx, from Gershon and Becky and dead Jake. Yet I felt that to feel so grateful was somehow belittling to me, and again and again I had a deep urge to show myself to you differently, in a way that would be just as honest and more dignified but that you, with your good looks and your constant tenderness, would not let me attempt. And I knew, not that night, no, nor the following day, but many days, maybe even many months, a long time afterward, I knew that I had to let you know me in order to force you to let me know you. Our mere possession of each other, so complete, was blocking me up and shutting me off and denying a possibility that I carried inside myself and that could lead you to love me not the same, differently, but with just as much intensity. I wanted you to be not just gentle and amiable and obliging, but what you really were, what I didn’t know about you. If we could be ourselves completely, our love would be the richer for it.