“Isabel, Isabel.”
“Ayyy, papacito.”
“Is it good, my love?”
“It’s good, good.”
“Listen to me. So it won’t stop. It’s like the first time.”
“Don’t talk. Let me concentrate.”
“Let me do it, Ligeia.”
“Yes, darling. Keep on. Keep on.”
“I don’t want to begin all over each time…”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“In, out, slowly, slowly.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“And now…”
“Yes.”
“Now no more.”
Javier moved off of your body and fell face down on the pillow as if he were hiding. You remained as you were. Javier looked at you from the corner of his eye. You did not turn your head, did not seek him.
“Isabel,” he murmured.
“Not so good, Javier?”
“No, my love. Not so good. This miserable room. We can’t go on this way, Isabel. Now we’ll go back to Mexico City and it will be motel rooms again, the cold sheets and the cold walls. The telephone beside the bed. The taxi waiting for us outside. The window with a curtain of orange stripes. Bah. When I think about the places we’ve met on the road to Toluca, I feel sick. Maybe…”
“I know. Yes, Javier!”
“Yes what?”
“We’ll rent a little apartment!”
“An apartment?”
“Of course, darling, and I have it picked out already! A really cool studio in Coyoacán. You won’t believe it when you see it. We’ll…”
“But Isabel, I didn’t mean…”
“Look, it’s right over a pop-art store. I’ll decorate it.”
“But I…”
“It’s really only a studio. One huge room, a little bath, and a kitchen. Oh, it’s terrific, Javier! I’ll have them wax the floor as soon as we get back.”
“Isabel, I meant…”
“Paint the beams and whitewash the walls. Yellow curtains, good thick ones, for the big window. It looks out on the plaza of Chimalistac.”
“But I was thinking that…”
“I’ll track down some light cedar furniture and have the cushions made of blue Indian-head cotton. We’ll need some tables, wrought-iron and glass. I’ll buy some papier-mâché Judas figures downstairs in the pop-art store and hang them around the walls. A sofa that converts into a bed. You’ll bring your books and I’ll buy an antique writing table I saw in San Angel. It’s a colonial table of marquetry, with drawers and all sorts of things. You can keep your writing there, eh?”
“But how much is all this going to cost?”
“Cost? Well, figure it yourself. Furniture, curtains, material for the cushions, paint, varnish, wax, ashtrays, utensils for the kitchen, light, gas, telephone … I’d say about forty thousand pesos.”
“A motel room is only thirty pesos, Isabel. Well, at least we will save on food. We won’t be eating out.”
“Oh, yes, we will. I like to show you off and I don’t know how to cook. I like to broil my steaks at Delmonico’s, Javier, to cook my Dutch tongue on Jena and my quenelles in La Lorraine…” You laughed. Then you went on, “No, I don’t mean it. I don’t care about fancy restaurants. The important thing is to be with you, and it doesn’t matter where. There’s another point … we won’t waste so much time. Oh, yes, a record player. I can’t live without a record player.”
“Live?”
“Two or three nights a week, silly. And if one of us wants to be alone, the other takes off. Don’t you like to be alone now and then?”
You rubbed your chin, put on a record, and began to whirl slowly.
“Trini López at PJ’s. Recorded live. If I had a hammer…”
You went into the bathroom and closed the door behind you. Javier sat alone on the bed. He tapped his stomach reflectively. Water began to run loudly.
“Isabel?”
You did not answer.
“Isabel!” he raised his voice.
“What?” you said from the bathroom.
“I didn’t expect you to suggest an apartment. I was hoping that…”
“I can’t hear you, Javier. I’ll be out in a second.”
“You’re tired of it now. You have other things to do. Okay, I understand. Yes. Thanks anyhow…”
I’d hammer in the morning …
“… ‘You’re older than I am. Your life is settled, you don’t want to change it. Your character, too. I can understand … Thanks, thanks for everything. It was nice while it lasted. I’ll never forget you…’ Oh, shit.”
If I had a bell …
“‘… Oh, I knew it couldn’t go on. I never had any illusions…’”
I’d ring it in the morning …
“‘… But I didn’t just make you up. I touched you and you were real…’”
It’s the bell of freedom …
“A motel room on the road to Toluca, Isabel. With the taxi waiting outside. Is that all?”
“I’m coming right out. Be a little patient.”
“The same old thing? Believing that now it is different?”
The record ended. Javier listened to the gurgle and bubble of the water running from the faucets and in the bowl of the toilet.
You came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. With one hand you shook out your wet hair.
“What were you saying?”
Javier covered his lower abdomen. You hummed to yourself as you worked your hair into a ponytail and tied it with a yellow ribbon. You threw your hair forward over your head again, the hairpins between your teeth. When you finished putting your hair up, you rubbed your head with both hands and looked for your lipstick in the disorder of the dresser top. You pursed your lips to paint them orange.
“Isabel, when we were at Xochicalco today…” Javier began quietly.
You stopped with the lipstick raised to your mouth. “No, Javier.”
“Yes, no. None of you ever understand.”
“Just no.” You got up, dropping the towel.
“But listen to me.”
“I told you no.” You retrieved the towel and folded it like a wet, heavy whip.
“I want to talk with you about Xochicalco. About what we saw this morning.”
“I know what you want to talk about. No, it bores me.” You slapped Javier’s legs with the wet towel.
“Stop it, Isabel.” Javier drew his legs back. Laughing, you slapped his buttocks. “Stop it, it hurts.” He hunched up, chin to his knees, and closed his eyes.
“The silly things you say hurt more. Who wants to hear about Xochicalco? What’s Xochicalco to me?” You knelt on the bed beside him and tickled his waist. “What a tummy you have.”
Javier opened his eyes. “Why did you open that door this morning?”
“Which door?”
“The car door.” Javier did not look at you.
“Because you were talking to me, not to Betty, who I suppose is used to you.”
“What? What did I say?”
“The same thing you say so often. You need love without love. You prefer desire without desire. No, you weren’t talking to Betty. You were talking to me.” You put your mouth to Javier’s ear and whispered: “Do you know what you call me when we make love?”
Javier hid his face in the pillow. “Forgive me. Please, forgive me.”
You laughed and jerked the sheet off him.
“Stop it!” he cried sharply. “I tell you I don’t like it.”
“I’m not allowed to see it except when it’s stiff and hard? I’d like to see it taking a little nap sometime.”
“Then here, and stop talking.”
You moved between his legs and laughed. “Baby,” you said. “Big baby. What do you really think? Go on, chatter all you want to, I don’t really care. My darling. Do you know something? Today I’ve found out that you tell fibs.”
* * *
Δ “No, it was true. I made love to you twice because I
thought that you had understood. You had to understand, for not long afterward you repeated it. They sent me along with the secretariat to a conference in London. A Modigliani show was on at the Tate.”
You agreed to meet there after the morning plenary session and Javier said goodbye to you, to Elizabeth with the falsely gray hair and the heavy eyebrows and the thick lips and the Chanel suit with its torero jacket embroidered with pearls. He arrived at the Tate at two in the afternoon and did not look for you immediately. He studied the paintings with a certain distraction, seeking first a spontaneous reaction to those women with long necks and eyes lacking the cornea, with dark pubes and thin lips, women he had always associated with the twenties but who now he realized were the living women of Thessaly, Mycenae, and Crete, lank and linear; and now it all came back suddenly and without warning, the smells and lights and sounds of the time spent in Greece. Those women of Modigliani’s, fixed in their frames, gave off scents of hyacinth and hibiscus, sounds of draymen’s horses clomping along the pavement, of carpenters’ hammers, the light of the sun filtering through to the bottom of the sea. The orange of the fishing boats, the blue of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, the white of the stairs and pedestals at Mykonos, the ocher and red of the warrior-saint altar-pieces, the Naples yellow of the windmills; once again the haze of incense, the smells of smoking pigs with their bellies open, of donkeys lying dead beneath vultures and flies, of frying chitterlings in the impenetrable kitchens, of garlic, olives, cheese. Javier turned with the feeling that he was being stared through as if his body were transparent, and there they were, the English girls who had come here to see themselves in the Italian mirror, today’s women with loose dark hair and low-cut sweaters and red, green, black stockings of filigree, looking with their black and green eyes at their own images reflected in the paintings. The models had returned to life and were visiting themselves. And behind them, the woman, her hair dyed black now and loose like that of the nude woman on the blue cushion in the painting at her back, her eyebrows plucked thin, her lips painted narrow, her mascara-weighted lashes curling around her clear eyes, her neck made longer by the frill of lace that extended to her waist. She herself had contrived that out-of-date get up, the dress as loose and shapeless as a tunic, falling from her shoulders like a pen stroke. In her smile was readiness, in her eyes was nostalgia. Her long pale hands were joined at the level of her hips with a kind of self-consciousness, the knowledge that they could serve to hide or isolate or protect the sacred parts of a body that belonged to herself and to him at the same time.
“This effort to remember is in reality an attempt to forget, Dragoness.”
* * *
Δ Do you remember? Irene Dunne played the absent-minded millionairess. Jean Arthur was the vulgar newswoman with a heart of gold, William Powell the ironic majordomo, Alice Brady the lady with bats in the belfry, Eugene Pallette the diabetic millionaire, Myrna Loy the wife with a good sense of humor, Roland Young the rich tourist with a fondness for ectoplasm, Cary Grant the epitome of natural elegance, Charles Ruggles the man of large means who won the English valet in a poker game. And beautiful, mad, irresistible Carole Lombard, and Mae West who winked one eye and said “Beulah, peel me a grape” and wriggled her hourglass body. And you and Javier were holding hands in the Brooklyn movie and watching The Four Daughters because John Garfield was in it and you had never liked any actor as much as you liked John Garfield, who looked like Javier and whose name was Jules Garfinkle and who had lived walking with humiliation on one side and danger on the other, intuitively the first existential hero, before Bogart or Brando or Dean: that living contradiction, the hero-villain, the saint-assassin, the artist-vulgarian who died fucking. And today when the television shows some old movie featuring John Garfield, you see to it that Javier is there to watch and remember.
You and Javier do not see eye to eye about Latin American artists and intellectuals. “They are all alike,” you say vehemently. “Using art merely to be able to feel like aristocrats, to climb into the oligarchy they pretend to be struggling against. Everything they do is so elegant, so nice, so pretty-pretty. It’s simply their way to escape from the horrors of the crude, foolish, stuttering middle class. That’s all. They may call it ‘form’ or ‘good taste’ but it is really impotence and fear and a longing for the past. And most of all it is vulgar social climbing.”
“And your gringo artists?” Javier retorts. “The hero with hair on his chest? Aren’t they trying to escape their different middle class by pretending to be stevedores, baseball players, tiger hunters, railroad workers, boxers?”
It ends calmly. “Florence Rice,” you say quietly. “Who remembers Florence Rice today? Or Arline Judge? So many lovely faces that once were as famous as Rochelle Hudson and Madge Evans and Jean Parker, and today no one even knows their names.”
You held hands together in the movie and the movie made everything the same for both of you. Then when it was over you walked out into that other movie that had not changed all through your childood: the kleikodeschnik standing outside the synagogue with his face contrite and his hands joined, the ototot forever trimming his old Russian beard, the languid and cultivated schönerjud who played chess on the second floor of a neighborhood café, the old woman waiting for the funeral to emerge, her handkerchief already open to receive alms from the mourners, the emancipated radikalke with the shrill voice …
“And would you like that I should be such a crazy woman like that, Beth? That is what you would like I should be?”
“No, Mama. I didn’t say that.”
“Then stop paying attention to your father. Let him play pinochle and feel modern. Let him be all wrong, only don’t let him know it. Come and take my hand, Beth. Lie down here beside me. We can’t escape it. It’s deeper even than we think. You will see if then he doesn’t understand what I have understood. That the important thing in life is what we are leaving behind when we die. Those who will cry for us.”
You squeezed Javier’s hand in the Brooklyn theater and again watching television today. John Garfield, playing the piano. “It doesn’t seem the same today, does it? Today there is nothing unusual about it.”
“Today there is no point in the mother tongue,” whispered Gershon.
“Shut up! What are you saying? Renegade! Goy!”
“All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient,” you say to yourself as the car leaves the shadows of the avenue of trees. It is one in the afternoon. Franz glances at his watch. The earth is white. White trees. White hillsides. The fine dust rises. Ahead is the river, the ford. “Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
* * *
Δ Franz slowed to a stop, cut off the motor, and set the hand brake. All of you got out, silent, though Isabel held back for a moment. Dust swirled up around your legs. You stood beside the car. In the ford, almost motionless, was a herd of cattle. They covered the narrow strip of earth that stretched between the two arms of the river. Bulls, cows, yearlings, in the middle of the ford blocking your way. Bulls with short thin horns and brown hides glistening under the sun. Bulls with curly foreheads and short necks, with powerful haunches and planted hooves, motionless, guarding the passage across the river. Bulls with thick high skulls and long tails, their muzzles buried in the swift water. Short-horned heifers feeding on the white grass on the other side with a side-to-side munching movement of the head. Nervous, jumpy yearlings peering through between the legs and beneath the stomachs of the larger bulls. Bulls with myopic eyes, smoothly bellowing, bulls with rubber-capped horn tips and heavy dewlaps. The protruding sleepy eyes of the cows.
You walked forward, the four of you, to the edge of the finger of sandy soil from which extended the natural bridge the river had created between two whirling pools. Downstream a little way, the river poured over a falls. The cattle watched you with a low, lost gaze, moved their short round ears nervously, went on sweating sweat you could smell. Suddenly a cow lost her footing at the edge of the ford and slipped slo
wly, at first with a pathetic serenity and torpidity, then with nervous hopelessness, toward the deep water. She sank with all her weight, began to swim showing the crown of her head a few times, and then was swept out of sight over the waterfall. None of the animals turned toward her. Although nervous, their movements were peaceful. Slowly they munched the white grass, drank the green water. Their swollen eyes seemed distant and unseeing.
The four of you stared at the cattle. Isabel, very nervous, laughed and then covered her mouth. Abruptly, Franz took your black shawl, Dragoness, and walked out along the finger of sand toward a large bull that little by little, as Franz drew nearer, appeared more and more nervous. The bull swayed his head from side to side. He sniffed the air. So did the other animals, and suddenly the bull had become their chieftain. He did not conceal his fear of the man advancing toward him. Sweat poured out and made his black hide more lustrous. He humped and pissed, and his eyes became opaque. Franz continued to move toward him. Finally the bull’s eyes seemed to fix themselves upon the man, to separate him from his scent and from the sound of his feet sliding across the sand. Both eyes slowly focused and the bull bellowed and jerked his head violently backward. He was seeking anything, a smell or a snort or any noise, that might be able to draw his fear and attention away from the tenacious figure still walking toward him: the bull was seeking an escape, a way out. But the herd had become a motionless wall of black hides and eyes and green and white horns. His only escape was to move forward, to charge.
A Change of Skin Page 20
