Without a word Javier got up from the coaster and went inside. He turned his back on Miriam, and Miriam, as if an invisible signal had reached her, drew the blue curtain to dress or undress, to receive her lover, to take a nap. Neither of you went out on the balcony again. Spring came, the end of the season, the closing of the Teatro Colón, your fur coat put away with mothballs, your print dresses to be cleaned, Perón in power, Eva on the balconies of the Plaza de Mayo, slogans chanted at mass meetings, and the lindens turned green again, the foliage began to thicken, hiding your view of the building across the street.
But the leaves were not too thick to prevent you from discovering, one afternoon when you happened to look out across the balcony, that the blue curtain had disappeared. There was only a bare window, an empty room now. Empty rooms seem larger, lighter. The shadows of the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the clothing thrown over the back of a chair, had all vanished, as if by witchcraft.
* * *
Δ Speaking of witchcraft, Dragoness, you won’t believe this but it is right here in the newspaper. Mistress Jane, daughter of the wealthy burgess Robert Throckmorton, a resident of Warboys, at the age of ten is the victim of strange and violent attacks. She sneezes for half an hour and then faints with her eyes still open. Afterward her belly swells up and she cannot be persuaded to lie down. Her legs quiver, sometimes one, sometimes the other. An elderly woman of the neighborhood, Mrs. Alice Samuel, seventy, comes to visit the family and is taken into the bedroom to see the sick child. Jane cries out: “Look at the witch sitting there! Have you ever seen anyone who looked more like a witch?” Mrs. Throckmorton, a sensible woman, pays no attention, and the doctors go on treating her daughter. But two months later Jane’s four sisters—the youngest is nine, the eldest fifteen—show the same symptoms, and soon afterward seven of the Throckmorton servant girls begin to sneeze, cry, faint, shake their arms and legs, and so on. One of the physicians attending admits that they are dealing with a clear case of witchcraft and the parents bring their children face to face with their elderly neighbor, Nanny Samuel. The children burst out weeping, throw themselves on the floor in strange torments, and extend their arms beseechingly to the old woman. For a time the attacks occur only when Nanny Samuel is near. Then they begin to happen at all hours and the children insist that they feel better when Mrs. Samuel is with them. The Throckmortons thereupon take the old woman into their household, forcing her to sleep in the same room with their daughters, and the girls disturb her mightily by asking her if she cannot see the shapes that run and jump and play around them. In September of 1590 Lady Cromwell, the most distinguished lady in the county, visits the Throckmortons and when she sees Nanny Samuel declares her to be an obvious witch, knocks off her bonnet with a single blow, and orders that a lock of her hair be burned. The old woman weeps, but it is known that later Lady Cromwell begins to suffer nightmares, her health fails, and finally she dies in July of 1592. The Throckmorton daughters continue to suffer their strange attacks until Christmas of that year, when Nanny Samuel pleads with them to start behaving themselves. The attacks cease. Now Mr. and Mrs. Throckmorton have no doubts and Alice Samuel herself ceases to believe in her innocence and asks them to forgive her. At last, Pastor Dorrington persuades the old woman to confess. On the following day, however, after resting overnight, Mrs. Samuel retracts her confession. She is taken by the sheriff and put to judgment, the Throckmorton girls appearing as her accusers, once again possessed by their attacks. They insinuate that Mrs. Samuel caused the death of Lady Cromwell. Exalted by their great adventure, laughing nervously and looking at each other with malicious glee, the girls do not rest until Nanny Samuel confesses again and accepts everything with which she is charged, including carnal knowledge of the devil. When it is suggested, however, that she can escape being hanged if she will admit that she is pregnant by Satan, the old woman puts the noose around her neck herself and cries out: “I may be a witch, but I was never a whore!” And thus exits Mrs. Alice Samuel.
“I know these charms,” said Medea.
“Are you through?”
* * *
Δ “No, not yet. We closed the door. Ulrich opened the refrigerator and I nodded. We picked up the body of Herr Urs. We removed the red bedspread in which we had wrapped him and stood him up. He was wearing a very long nightgown and in life would have tripped over its tails. We straightened, with difficulty, his legs and moved his arms from their sleeping posture and tied them at his hips. His head refused to go straight and remained leaning on one shoulder, but we closed his eyes and pulled his jaw up and tied it with a handkerchief around his head. I quickly took out the cheese, the beer, and the lettuce. And Herr von Schnepelbrücke entered the refrigerator, slightly bowlegged but on the whole erect and dignified enough. We closed the refrigerator and sighed. Give me a cigarette, Lisbeth.”
“It’s good, Franz,” you said as you lit two cigarettes and passed him one of them. “It’s very good. I didn’t expect it. But do you know what it makes me miss? The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Monk. The Castle of Otranto. Melmoth the Wanderer. Mrs. Radcliffe. Monk Lewis. Walpole. Maturin. Do you know what I enjoy most? Jean Epstein. Robert Weine. Henrik Gaalen. Paul Leni. Murnau. Fritz Lang. Conrad Veidt. When I was a little girl I used to dream about Conrad Veidt. Dreams in which all his faces appeared superimposed on each other, but each completely present and visible. Have you finished yet?”
You pass, Dragoness. Whoever made up that line that the heroine is the princess and not the witch? Pitee ye poore Monsters, Dragoness! Your classic of 91 Revere Street advises this and I assure you it’s not mistaken. Have pity on Herr Voivode Dracula, even when he dons his alias of Nosferatu, for he lacks what we mortals have but don’t need. Or what we believe, fools that we are, that we don’t need. Imagine the vista that opens if alongside the so ordinary necessities to wake to the alarm clock, shave with brushless cream, breakfast on stereophonic cereal, and take the tram at eight to the office, there exist the parallel necessities to drink the blood of English young ladies, surround oneself with vampires in a pad in the Carpathians, voyage in a ship without a crew, take one’s daily nap in an iron coffin filled with Transylvanian earth. To say nothing of the fact that mirrors refuse to reflect you. And consider that to the alarm clock they give social security and paid vacations and a pension plan and a senior citizens’ community with nurse service and bingo, and that all this provokes endless debate in parliament, endless echoes in the press and in citizens’ campaigns, but for poor Dracula there exists no humanitarian legislation by which he can enjoy a tranquil eternity with regular fixes of hemoglobin. Do we hear someone object that Voivode performs no function useful to society? Bah, successful disguise is itself an uncommonly useful function socially. Don’t we all put on our disguises when we need them, when we don’t care to be recognized by the shopkeeper or greeted by the landlord or dressed down by the boss? And if you would follow a truly revolutionary road, Dragoness, you would don the disguise of Major Barbara and with your blue coif and your beggar’s bowl circulate, demanding suffrage for the witches of Macbeth, so that when the hurly-burly’s done they might count on their old folks’ home and when finally, as tired as we, preceding us and acting as our heralds, they renounce immortality, they might find rest in some more dignified spectral Forest Lawn. And that’s the point: our witches and monsters refuse the last curtain and thereby expose themselves, while we go on tied to this mortal coil; they opt to be immortal, which is a much harder apple to peel than the anguish of dead-ended living. They make their way to that other land that is beyond both mortality and immortality, that is a parallel of mortality of which we do not even receive distant sniffs despite the fact that Purdy, wreathed with acanthus, has informed us that “Silhouettes tell everything.” And who indeed has the right to snap the endless thread of a Medusa, a creature who represents a way of remaining fixed and stable rather than rattling from here to there with a too sentimental, worn-out, and rather useless nervous system? Consider Perseus,
for bad example. That paragon of clean homey Olympic youth frustrated us forever with his damn dutiful hypocrisy, robbed us of the one monster worth careful contemplation, took him to the boat and thus shipped a good and useful potential for thought clean out of the repertory of the natural and possible. But if someone needs to be eliminated, then let fried sausage be made of that Al Capone of antiquity, bloody Hercules, whose murders twisted nature awry and removed from her and from us the invulnerable lion, the seminal hydra, the mad bull and the charmed oxen, beings which represented alternative possibilities for nature, who today observes us coldly if not suspiciously, doubtless wondering whether we may not once again give the name of hero to any mere advocate of straightforwardness who may insist that we make her complexity conform to our own anthropomorphic simplicity. No, let us have variety, for God’s sake. Noah committed a great goof when he left to drown the couples of the unicorn, the salamander, and the phoenix. And who the hell told Orestes that he ought to subjugate the Furies and chase them underground where their sacred blood could no longer drain rivers dry and burn harvests? They also were obeying nature. Sanctimonious Orestes, a Boy Scout in Greek sandals, merely opened to them the opportunities of the negated: the chance to reappear sea-changed, their visages simulating neatness and order but their blood still envenomed, still sowing confusion. And there you have it: when the ancient heroes slaughtered nature’s darker powers and forced them to return to the human scene disguised, they gave birth to literature, to the epic, the lyric, to tragedy, psychology, and all those moral dramas that hang upon struggle, a surprise, a divorce, a masturbation, upon the ambiguity between the limited Hero and the depthless Furies who remain as they have always been the children of proliferating and all-including nature. What I am most annoyed by is those Sherlocks of history who rush around with their lenses and their analyses, pursuing the guilty. There are no guilty. Leave Professor Moriarty in peace, and be grateful that he helped to create a little confusion among nations and to kick flags and loyalty to king and country in the ass. He had his revenge upon Sherlock when Holmes took that Victorian square Watson to cohabitate with him; what was elementary about the good Galenist was not limited to his noodle, and Holmes’s continual complaint would be a fit study by Wilhelm Reich. But one good turn deserves another, so today the English themselves have given us the sex-sleuth, James Bond. The cape and dagger become pretexts for ejaculation. Sure, something big is coming up, and it is not the robbery of Fort Knox but the fleshy horn of Agent 007. Orrida maestà nel fiero aspetto! Or, to quote your classic Baudelaire that Javier was wrestling with before you left Mexico City (Flowers of Evil is a fine little book to read before a vacation, Dragoness), “Jusqu’à cette froideur par où tu m’es plus belle!” Or did you know already that everything that maims morality enhances poetry? And whether you hail from heaven or hell, what the hell difference does it make: Oh, Beauty, enormous monster, horrendous, naïve …
I think I’m going to put the Sunday paper aside for a while, Dragoness. That editorial was too boring.
* * *
Δ “Yes, if you want me to, I’ll tell you how I pass my days.”
“Fine. Let’s start with getting up. Do you find it hard, Dragoness?”
“Hard to wake up, caifán. Not hard to get up. The moment I sense myself awake, before I open my eyes, I feel around with my feet for a cool spot, a spot that hasn’t been slept on, you know, and when I find one, there’s a terrific temptation to go back to sleep.”
“But you put down the temptation.”
“Usually, yes.”
“Because Javier has to go to the office.”
“That’s right. And I have to get up before he does.”
“Why? To cook his breakfast?”
“Of course not. You won’t believe me.”
“I believe everything you tell me, Elizabeth, even when you don’t believe it.”
“Some time I’ll have to think about that. Well, I get up first to win a little victory over Javier. To prove that I’m very active and energetic, that while he still lies there in bed, I’m already ready for whatever the day may bring.”
“The war between the sexes narrowed down to the civil war of wife against husband.”
“What else? And while he watches me with eyes that keep falling shut again, I open the window, oh, very briskly, and do my yoga exercises. And that’s another victory. I haven’t changed a pound or an inch in twenty years, and he is beginning to develop a pot.”
“And so you prove your Yankee mental and moral superiority to a drowsy Mexican male. That’s psychological imperialism, Dragoness.”
“My drowsy Mexican male brings it on himself, like most forms of imperialism. God, how he provokes me. His laziness, his hypochondria, his flabby body.”
“What else provokes you? I don’t necessarily mean Javier. Don’t you like Mexico?”
“I think I may love Mexico, but I’m damn sure I often don’t like it. This city is impossible. You have a secret code by which you communicate here. And just when an outsider thinks he has it figured, everything backfires. I mean, he goes into Bar X and buys a drink for the house and they love him and cry with him and call him cuate, mano, whatever you want. Then he goes into Bar Y and buys everyone a round and they take out their knives and ya, the communication ends with his guts spilling out.”
“Well, at least it’s spontaneous.”
“Spontaneous, shit. It’s merely unconscious premeditation. Death and fiesta, they are your two poles, caifán, and everything in between is ceremonial rigidity.”
“If we’re stiff, Elizabeth, it’s because we’re scared stiff. Mexico is a country with a tiger sleeping on its belly and we’re all afraid that at any moment it may wake.”
“Yes. And in the meantime you keep it knocked out with the sleeping pill of corruption. Do you know that I gave up driving and we sold my car? Every time I went out, a cop would stop me and I would have to pay him a bribe. Every time, the same cop, as regular as Sunday. And I always believed that he was hooked up with the burglars that would rob the apartment periodically. When he saw me out and stopped me, he would phone them and tell them the coast was clear. It stinks, caifán. It really stinks. The crook robs the citizen and splits with the cop, who splits with his captain, who robs the cops under him and splits with the mayor, who robs from his captains and department heads and inspectors, and so on, and splits with the district commissioner, who robs from all the mayors he controls and splits with the PRI delegate, who robs all his districts and splits with the governor, who robs from all his delegates and splits with the minister, who robs from everyone he can and splits with the president. In Mexico you end up paying yourself a bribe every now and then. It’s lunacy.”
“It’s the old pyramid of power, Dragoness, that’s all. Can’t you admire its aesthetic? Everything in Mexico forms a pyramid: politics, economics, love, culture. You have to step on the poor bastard beneath you and let the son of a bitch above you step on you. Give and take. And the man above always solves the problem for the one below, right up to the supreme father at the top who is disguised in the name of society itself. We’re all disguised, one face when we look down, another when we look up.”
“I know. But you’re the worst actors in the world just the same. When I first came here, I enrolled in a theater-arts class to kill time and to learn Spanish. And you know, not one of the people in the class could act. I mean act … repeat words written by someone else with authenticity enough to make them your own words. Play a role. The people I was in the class with couldn’t come even close. Everything was always phony, phony, phony.”
“Because they had been playing a role, each one of them, all their lives, and to have taken on another would have been redundancy. You have to be somebody before you can pretend to be somebody else. And the only person you can really successfully pretend to be is yourself, which is the secret, I suspect, behind our excellent gunmen and our lousy bullfighters. How long did you study acting?”
&nb
sp; “Not long. Then I joined an English-language group and we did Noel Coward plays, one after the other, until that became a bore too. And then I read novels and that’s how I’ve passed my days since I came to Mexico, fifteen years of days, lover caifán. Ugh.”
“Well, at least one can choose among one’s memories.”
“Yes.”
“And fifteen years ago this city was a fun place.”
“You’re right, it was. A kind of innocent lay. The whorehouses with their emerald lights and their smell of disinfectant. The hundreds of cabarets dressed out in tinsel. The Indian prostitutes parading in their satin dresses. It was a city full of con men and bouncers and pimps. And people like Diego Rivera and Siqueiros and María Félix and Tongolele. It was a brash, sentimental, gutty world.”
“All that was left of the revolution, just before it became the Establishment.”
“I suppose. You’re always saying that the revolution was betrayed. I don’t know.”
“Revolutions are always betrayed, Elizabeth. It’s inevitable.”
“Why?”
“Look, a revolution destroys one status quo and creates another. That’s all. But in between the two there can be some glorious times. And that is all.”
“I guess. Our life has certainly gone on being the same these fifteen years. Javier with his nervous stomach and his X rays and his pills, his teaching at the university and his job with the United Nations. Me with my best-sellers. God, is there any point in even talking about it?”
“Tell me what you want, don’t tell me if you don’t want to. We aren’t writing a book.”
“Oh, hell no. And speaking of books, lover, the other day I was reading a really good one. A novel by Styron. If you ever need an epigraph, here’s one I memorized for you. ‘Didn’t that show you that the wages of sin is not death, but isolation?’”
A Change of Skin Page 17
