A Change of Skin (20 page)

“I always believe you.”

“Some of the chairs have leather backs with copper tacks. Some have blue embroidering and skinny legs, and some have lilac brocade and enormous fat legs. And don't even mention my bedroom.”

“I'd never dare to.”

“Silly. When I turned fifteen and became a young lady, they bought everything new for me. A bed with a canopy, you know, and some prints that Mother said were French. Rosy-cheeked girls carrying parasols. A dressing table that would make you upchuck, darling, all cambric and tulle. Everything for a very well-bred young lady.”

The record stopped and you stood with your legs apart and your arms akimbo and tossed your head to throw your hair back.

“Don't you want a Coke?”

“No, Isabel. You know that I can't drink soda.”

“
Ay, tú.
You and your precious stomach.” You opened another bottle and drank it quickly. “Then the old man pulled another little deal. Remember the last devaluation?”

“Yes, I do, but you don't. You were still a baby then.”

“Well, I found out about it later. Father knew ahead of time and bought dollars like a lunatic.”

“I suppose he cries when they play the national anthem.”

“Oh, at least. It was on a Friday. Saturday the news broke and dear Papa had made I don't know how many millions without turning a finger. What do you think of that?”

“A man of great ability, Isabel. He's got it. He's…”

“I've never heard of anyone who's made so much doing so little. He's a genius. And he believes it, too. He talks the livelong day about work and struggle and hardship and how we manage to skimp by, only thanks to his sweat. Shall I go on?”

“If I may go on listening.”

“Listen, then. Then there's Mother. She's an antique herself. From the time I started kindergarten, I had to study with the nuns. Everything always just so. Confession and communion every first Friday. Don't step outside the house during Holy Week. And what ideas. ‘Chabela, don't dance. Don't go to the movies. Watch out for boys. Don't wear makeup. Chabela, be careful, you are a lily the devil would like to pluck.' Ay, that old debbil devil! He plays the clarinet at dances. He waits to pick you up outside movie houses. He drives by in a convertible whistling at you. And Mother, always the contritest of the contrite, with all her hopes in me.”

“I can believe that.”

“Yes. I had to be a saint who would out-virgin the Virgin of Fatima. And I had to cry by the bucketful, so that my tears could wash away poor Mother's sins. But what sins, darling? I would puzzle and puzzle and still couldn't think of a single one. But there was one. Oh, yes!”

“A terrible sin,” Javier smiled.

“Can you guess? One day I went to steal a cigarette from Father's night table and there they were. Their condoms. That was her great sin. Violins, please. She couldn't accept the stream of brats the good Lord might want to send through her, so they used rubbers and that was why she felt somewhat less holy than the Magdalene and never went to confession even though she attended Mass every morning. I laughed and laughed and after that I was never able to take them seriously again. I asked her, you know. She broke into tears. How could an innocent girl like Chabela know about such things? So, I graduated from the nuns' school and entered the university, and the end of the story is that now they just give me my allowance and leave me alone. Now and then they come to the end of the rope and they jump me and ask how I can ever hope to become engaged to a decent young man with a good future when I spend all my time hanging around those university good-for-nothings, who are all Reds and troublemakers. So, Proffy! Sweet and lovely, tra-la-la-la, the girl with the Ipana smile. Now stop writing. That's enough.”

“But I haven't even started yet.”

“Don't start yet. You have plenty of time. All the time in the world.”

“Isabel, Isabel.”

Javier kissed the hands that went around his neck.

*   *   *

Δ   The girl appeared when autumn came. Your apartment had a small balcony, hardly large enough for the awning-shaded coaster. During the heat of summer you both stayed inside, for the apartment was air-conditioned. Now, however, as cooler weather came on, you began to use the balcony. Several linden trees grew as high as the story above you and during the summer their thick-leaved branches hung over the balcony. Now the leaves gradually disappeared, first turning golden, then floating down in the silent breeze. You and Javier would sit swinging gently in the coaster watching the leaves fall, he in his old turtle-neck sweater, you hugging yourself with your arms, and every day the sunlight was weaker and cooler. Sometimes Javier would precede you outside. He would put a mixture of blues and fox-trot records on the phonograph and go out to rock in the coaster and you would throw a sweater over your shoulders and follow him and sit beside him. You would talk a little, with long intervals of silence. He told you about happenings at the embassy, about invitations to dinners and cocktail parties. You made plans to go to Bariloche, in the south, or across the river to Carrasco, if Javier could get ten days off in June or November. And you would watch summer's curtain of leaves drift down and reveal the pastel-colored building across the street, a building neither of you had noticed before.

Javier discovered the girl first. You never knew just what he saw then, though you imagined that her behavior had been no different than it was later. You always saw her cut in half by the window, invisible below the torso, and sometimes, when the wind blew the curtain across the window, she was concealed entirely. In no way was she different from the girls who walked along Santa Fe or Florida in the afternoon. If it had been that important, you could have waited and seen her enter or leave the building dressed for the street. But you never did. You saw her only in the window with her arms raised as she tied her hair up with a ribbon, arms that were as bare and brown as her face. From the front sometimes, her armpit curly and her pectoral muscles standing out. Sometimes in profile, her bust small but erect. Sometimes from behind, the muscles of her back tense as she held her arms high to tie her hair, place her combs. You saw her in snapshot glimpses, snapshots of a turning statue. She would rub cream on her face, pluck her eyebrows, apply eye shadow and lipstick. Always alone: no one else ever entered that bedroom, although in the adjacent windows could be seen servants with feather dusters, students with open books, men grabbing a meal between their regular and their moonlight jobs. There surrounded by those conventional sights, a turning statue making herself up or combing her hair, every afternoon exactly at three. Sometimes she would put her head out the window and look down at the street. Sometimes her lips would move as if she were singing. Little by little, day by day, her skin lost the deep tan she had acquired at Punta del Este or Mar del Plata. She never smoked. Apparently she slept all day and got up at three. One day she drew back her blue curtain and had a glass in her hand. Immediately she disappeared. A little later she was seated as usual at her dressing table.

“I remember her partly because I discovered, when I tried to see her face clearly, that my eyes were bad.”

Really, Dragoness? Oh, come on, now!

You had to wrinkle your eyes in order to make out her thick eyebrows, her small precise mouth with its small full lips bright with lipstick, her almond eyes, her tipped-up nose, her slightly forward chin. So one day you went to an oculist and learned that your left eye was off one diopter and a half. You thought that Javier would laugh when he came home to lunch and saw you wearing your tortoiseshell glasses. He didn't laugh. He was shocked. He requested you, with an ill-humor that was not well concealed, not to wear the glasses on the street.

“And when I go to a movie?”

“No. Not there either.”

“And to see the girl in the window across the street better?”

He looked at you as if you had violated one of his most intimate secrets, Dragoness, and you went on sharply: Did he think that he had been the only one aware of her all these weeks? Did he believe that she was his private property? What were you supposed to look at, the bare branches of the trees, passing buses, maybe the Polish doorman? So that to see the unknown girl might be his privilege and not yours? And you understood: he would like to say to her all the words he had never dared to write and that he had spoken to you only silently. The secret, untouchable girl across the street. His in something more than just his imagination. Ship ahoy! His in the reverse of desire, his famous desire-without-desire. You laughed and put on your yellow sweater and went out on the balcony and Javier, who had not said a word, followed you. You proposed that you play games about the girl. That you try to guess her name, her education, whether she had ever been married, her hopes. She was a heroine, let her have the name of a heroine: Ulalume, Berenice, or perhaps even Ligeia? Aurelia, Myrto, Paquita of the golden eyes? Or, trying another tradition, Becky, perhaps, or Jane or Tess? And she had to have her hero: shadowy Heathcliff? Ridiculous Colonel Crawley? Frivolus de Marsay? How about Javier for the name of her hero? Or … Superman! Yes, let Superman fly to her window and discover whether she was a prostitute or a mezzo-soprano at the Maipo theater, a student of chemistry, a governess, a teacher of Yiddish. Yes, Yiddish: she was Rebecca or Sarah or Miriam, a Jewess despite her tipped-up nose, a beautiful dark Jewess, for with your new glasses you could see the drops of blue sweat on her temples, in her armpits, at the division of her breasts. A brunette Jewess, that he might have a contrasting pair: yourself the blond Saxon Jewess, Miriam the dark Eastern one, a woman of slow speech, of black prolonged orgasms, a woman who was married, who was having an affair, a virgin girl, a spinster, a widow.

“She's America just discovered, Javier. Bullshit. Why don't you go closer to her? There are only the sidewalk and the street between you. A bell, an elevator, and land ho! Go and get her and bring her back. Or don't bring her back. Just tell me about her. Tell me how you make love to a woman today.”

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.