A Change of Skin (2 page)

At dawn the next morning the Spaniards are awakened by the echoing laughter of Cholula. The trap is ready; now it will be sprung. But Cortés and his lieutenants calmly make their way to the Great Pyramid, accompanied by part of the artillery. There he confronts the caciques and priests in the central patio of the temple. Kettles of salt, chile, and tomatoes have already been made ready for the flesh of the twenty Spaniards whose sacrifice has been ordered by Montezuma, Emperor of the Golden Chair. On horseback, Cortés quietly gives a command and the guns explode. Cholula's caciques fall, their cotton tunics turning red; the black-clad priests fall. It is the signal for general battle. Whinnying horses charge. Plumed headdresses rise from the brush outside the city and advance running. A din of drums, whistles, conch horns, trumpets, kettledrums, cannon fire. The twang of crossbows. The crash of ballista stones. Screaming, armed with two-handed swords, protected by shields matted over with cotton, the thousand Tlaxcalans enter the city and advance smashing doors, setting fires, climbing to the rooftops to rape women while in the streets below the battle goes on man to man, hand to hand, feathered headdresses and iron helmets, humming arrows and darts, brown flesh and white flesh, cotton doublets and steel breastplates, ripped chinchilla cloaks and sweat-soaked wool, slings whirling fist-sized rocks, the cannon depressed to fire level across the flat ground, trumpets and whistles, copal incense burning in the temples, smashed casks of pulque drenching the streets with sticky alcohol that mixes with flowing blood, bags of grain slashed and spilling, dogs running swiftly and quietly, their muzzles greasy from bacon and white from cassava, burned arrow shafts in dark flesh, crash and shout, finally the red and white standards fall, the Tlaxcalans trot through burdened with captured gold, garments, cotton, salt, freed slaves swarm in naked crowds, Cholula reeks of fresh blood and eternal copal, of bacon, pulque, of guts. Cortés orders the towers and fortresses put to the torch. The Spaniards overturn and destroy the idols. In a shrine they hurriedly purify with a splatter of whitewash, they set up a cross. They free those the Cholulans had destined for sacrifice. The battle has lasted only five hours. Three thousand lie dead in the streets, in the ashes of the temples.

“They are gods,” the word passes through the city. “They divine treachery and take their vengeance. No power can oppose them.”

Thus the way to the city of Mexico, Great Tenochtitlán, is opened. Upon the ruins of Cholula are built four hundred churches, their foundations the razed cues, the platforms of the pyramids.

I watched the four of you cross the plaza toward the church of San Francisco. The convent. The fortress surrounded by a wall that in olden times turned back Indian attacks. You, Elizabeth, saw me as you passed, but you pretended not to see me. But you, Pussycat, little Isabel, abruptly stopped, staring nervously. Fortunately the others were looking across the wide expanse of the esplanade and no one noticed. Three ash trees, two pines, and a stone cross. The church has a series of arches and a walled-up porter's lodge. Like the wall of the surrounding fortress, it is battlemented. A yellow façade, the buttresses brown stone sprinkled with black. Javier pointed to the center of the façade: the favorite motif of the native sculptors, a serpent—the serpent, always the serpent, Elizabeth thought for the second time today—worked in stone surrounds the high window. The inscription is above the stone urns in relief over the entrance. Javier read it aloud:

IHS
SPORTAHECAPERTAIPECATORIBUSPENITENCIA

Indians fill the atrium on the Day of Resurrection. They move forward slowly carrying their offerings: folded cloaks of rabbit skin and cotton embroidered with the names of Jesus and Mary, fringed, decorated with flowers and crosses. Before the wide steps they spread the garments and kneel. They lift the cloaks to their foreheads and bow. Silently they pray. They push their children forward so that they may show their offerings also and learn how to kneel. A great multitude, each patiently waiting his turn. They wait in silence, their faces dark, dressed in the remnants of their old ceremonial robes, many in everyday work clothing carefully washed and mended. Their feet are bare. Above their heads float the fumes of burning copal, the scent of roses.

I lit a cigarette and followed your movements. You tried to avoid my eyes, Isabel. With your companions you studied the three yellow-painted bell-chapels along the length of the old rampart. The simplicity of those chapels contrasts starkly with the rich ornamentation of the side entrance to the church. Innovation imposed upon the severity of the sixteenth century: the portal born again with mortised columns that are like sumptuous vines, born again in the Romantic spirit of the tombs which a century ago were ordered placed in this sacred ground by Cholula's wealthy: crosses of stone made to look like wood, false garlands of stone, stone missives addressed to the departed. And behind, the dark buttresses and the high grille-protected windows and a file of children passing with their ruler-armed Catechists, shrill vioces repeating, “Three separate Persons, one true God.”

The children learn to kneel. They offer copal and small crosses covered with gold, silver, feathers. They offer thick candles ornamented with green feathers and silver tracery, and they offer the stewed food they have brought in plates and bowls. Their parents lead forward living animals, pigs and lambs bound to poles. When they ascend to receive the benediction, they take the animals up in their arms and a wave of laughter spreads as one worshipper tries vainly to hold his piglet's feet, squelch its squeals.

You moved toward the royal chapel and I ground out my cigarette on the sole of my shoe. You turned, Isabel, pretending to admire the chapel but in reality looking to see if I was following; we both hid behind our dark glasses. In style the chapel originally was Arabic, with open arches in its seven naves where in olden times pageants were presented to the Indians gathered in the atrium, to teach them the myths of their new religion. Now the naves have been closed and the chapel has battlements, Gothic spires, gargoyle waterspouts, and all that remains of the original Arabic line, from the outside, is the mushroom cupolas set with square panes of old glass to illuminate the interior. The long chapel ends in a final tower, a yellow bell tower, which is entered by a door with two escutcheons: one portrays St. Francis's arm crossed with the arm of an Indian, while the other gives a native view of the five wounds of Christ, strange wounds of blood and feathers, the largest like a fist of mulberry leaves and berries.

You entered the chapel. I followed and waited in the door. You, Elizabeth, Dragoness, wet your fingers in one of the two baptismal fonts and I saw you smile as you realized the incongruity: those fonts are the ancient pagan urns into which the priests of Cholula used to cast the hearts of their human sacrifices. Pearl light filtered down from the Christo-Arabic arches and dulled the burned color of the tezontle-stone floor, giving to it an in-between tone, a middle tone of transition between the burning hell below and the opaque heaven above. The room is vast and almost empty. There is a Christ wearing mockery, a lace jacket and skirt and the crown of an emperor of thorns around a carefully frizzled wig, vinegar dripping from his lips, drops of blood clotted on his forehead, the absurd staff of his buffoon power between his hands: a figure of inglorious humiliation, far removed from the four polychrome angels who guard the altar, but very near the symbols of purgatory that are the chief elements within the chapel: an altarpiece in relief in which the Queen of Heaven, crowned by angels, presides over the sufferings of mustached gentlemen, ladies with nude torsos and rosy breasts, tonsured friars, king and bishop licked by flames of repentance; and before the altarpiece is the tomb of a bishop, a skeleton with fallen miter and open intestines, and above it a tapestry of tortured spirits consumed by fire:

STATUM EST HOMINIBUS SE MELMORE & POST HOC IUDICIUM

Indians seated in the great atrium smile as they watch the pageant portraying God's judgment against the first mortals, the couple who had no umbilicus. Huge rocks, trees, the whole garden of man's original felicity has been constructed between the chapel's arches. Golden birds with real feathers perch among the branches. Parrots chatter, monkeys wink at the fields of Eden. In the center stands the tree of life with its golden apples. A paradise of April and May. Turkeys strut across the scene shaking their combs and red mantles. Children dressed as animals scamper. Adam and Eve appear in their pristine innocence. Eve alluringly fondles Adam, tries to make him respond to her, pleads, but he rejects her with exaggerated dread. She eats from the tree, offers him the apple, and he finally consents to bite it. For a moment the audience laugh, but their faces fill with terror as mighty God and his angels descend. God orders Adam and Eve clothed. The angels instruct Adam in cultivation of the earth and give Eve a spindle for spinning thread. Then the fallen pair are driven out into the world and the watching Indians weep while the angels face them and sing:

Why did you eat,

Thou first wife,

Why did you taste

The forbidden fruit?

I'll give you back

Your time.

An old Lincoln convertible stopped before the plaza arcade and its driver, a blond, bearded youth, set the hand brake and opened the door. Beside him a girl wearing black pants, black sweater, and black boots stretched and yawned and the Negro youth in a charro sombrero who was on the right kissed her neck and laughed. A tall boy wearing a leather jacket jumped from the back seat to the stone-paved street, his guitar in his hand. The second girl, almost hidden behind her mirror-opaque dark glasses, the turned-up lapels of her coat, and the wide brims of her hat, stood and removed her glasses and looked around at Cholula. She wore no makeup, her eyebrows were shaved, her lips were almost invisible under very pale lipstick. She wrinkled her eyes and offered a hand to the young man still seated. Unlike the others, he was dressed conventionally, a jacket of maroon tweed, gray flannel trousers. He closed the yellow portfolio on his knees and said quietly, “Some day I'll have to persuade them.”

“It doesn't matter,” said the girl in black. She shrugged her shoulders and stood there as if she already owned the arcade.

“Oh, but it does,” said the youth with the portfolio. “Music is inside. There is no need to wear a disguise. The true rebel dresses as I do.”

“Look, man, we'll scare him more this way.” The tall youth ran a mussing hand through his lank hair.

“Is he here?” said the girl with the shaved eyebrows. In the intense sunlight she was as defenseless as an albino.

“You can bet your life,” said the Negro.

In the street, the girl in black turned on her transistor radio and looked for a station.

The bearded driver of the car took out a white crayon and wrote across the windshield:
PROPERTY OF THE MONKS
, and the girl in black found her station and the tall youth wiped sweat from his forehead and began to strum his guitar in accompaniment to the music from the radio. All six of them joined arms and walked away under the arcade, singing:

I'll give you back your time.

But I could hear only the whimpering and sobbing, soft, fused, that I knew came from the trunk of their car.

2

IN BODY AND SOUL

Both are absent. “I wasn't there”: quotation from a letter directed by the Narrator to his German grandfather, dead in 1880, a Lassalle socialist expelled from the Reich by the Iron Chancellor. The letter is not received. A change of skin. Mutating genes. “I wasn't there.” Therefore the Narrator quotes Tristan Tzara: “Tout ce qu'on regarde est faux,” in order to save himself from the Museum, from Perfection, and to participate in a personal Happening, a novel written for immediate consumption: recreation. Michel Foucault speaks:

“Et puisque cette magie a été prévue et

décrite dans les livres, la différence

illusoire qu'elle introduit ne sera jamais

qu'une solitude enchantée.”

Les Mots et les Choses

 

Δ   You were going to tell me some day, Elizabeth, that the snail was moving across the wall and you, lying on the bed, lifted your head and saw first the silver track and followed it so slowly that several seconds passed before your eyes reached the dark shell. You felt drowsy and there you were on the bed in the second-rate hotel with your neck stretching out and your hands in your armpits and all you saw was a snail on a wall of peeling green paint. Javier had worked the cord of the drapes and the room was in shadow. Now he was unpacking, and you turned your head and watched him release the catches of the blue leather suitcase and pull the zipper and raise the top. Just then, Javier looked up and saw a second snail, this one gray-striped and motionless within its shell. The first snail approached the second and Javier looked down and admired the perfect order with which he had packed his clothing for this trip. You bent your knees and drew your heels back until they touched your buttocks and now you too observed that there was a second snail on the wall, that the first had stopped beside the second and was showing its head with the four tentacles. With one hand you smoothed your skirt while you studied the mouth of the snail, an open gap right in the middle of the wet horned head. Now the head of the second snail appeared too. Their shells were like small spirals pasted on the wall. Their sticky slaver dripped beneath them. The two sets of tentacles touched. You spread your eyes wider and wished that you could hear more acutely, microscopically as it were. The two soft driveling bodies slowly emerged from their shells and immediately, with a suave vigor, embraced. Javier, standing, was watching them. You, on the bed, spread your arms. The snails trembled lightly. Slowly they separated. They observed each other for a few seconds and then returned to their shells. You stretched a hand out and found your package of cigarettes on the table beside the bed. You lit a cigarette and wrinkled your eyebrows. Javier began to lift his trousers from the suitcase: the blue linen slacks, the cream linen slacks, the gray silk slacks. He laid them on the bed and smoothed them, passing his hand over the wrinkles. He went to the ancient wardrobe and got some coat hangers, carefully selected the least bent ones, returned to the suitcase on the bed. You observed every movement and you laughed with your cigarette resting against your cheek.