A Change of Skin (25 page)

“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 slowly, 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.

The bull stopped bellowing. He stiffened, as if for all to see him. His cowardice had become courage and there was also his physical pride in simply being there beneath the sun. His torpid eyes became large black coins, living and brilliant. He dilated his wet and elastic nostrils and snorted. He began to tremble with fury, his straight loins, his haunches and rump, the sharp ridge of his back. All his body was made for struggle now: the thick and powerful muscles in front, the lean swiftness behind. His hooves were black, his nostrils large, his chest deep, his breathing savage, and he was filled with the bravery that rises only from fear. Franz, the shawl cape held open at his side, was still approaching, and the two figures, the slow moving man and the motionless bull on the white sand, made an image fit for the painted wall of an ancient cave, the face of an imperial Roman coin, a Greek mosaic.

At last the bull's eyes understood that there were two objects before him: the man and the cape. Franz became still. He held the shawl motionless in his sun-browned fists and the wind hardly stirred it. The veins in his forearm were swollen and bluish. His heels were together, his right leg tense, ready to stiffen when the bull charged. You stared with fear, Elizabeth, while Isabel, tittering, held back her laughter and Javier merely looked on. Franz had dominated the bull. Everything, the scent of the cows, the bellowing of the other bulls and the yearlings, the roar of the waterfall, had disappeared, and the bull had become deaf, completely hypnotized by the man and the black cape. The bull charged. His head lifted the cape and he swept past Franz, furiously hooking his horns to the right. Carried forward by his weight, the bull skidded to the end of the strip of sand and bellowed with pain as he fell. He rose again. For a second he tried to rest, but Franz was already pressing him, pinning him where he stood by repeating “Toro! Toro!” Franz's jaw protruded, his lips were parted stiffly. Both man and animal were wet with fear. Franz's shirt stuck to his back, the dust had whitened his leather shoes. Beneath his clothing his body could be seen stripped down to violence and tenseness, stripped to nerves and muscles and concentration.

Again the bull charged. Again his head and shoulders swept past Franz's sucked-in belly, again he lifted the cape with his neck in a movement that was fixed yet flexible. He was completely dominated now. This time he did not slide and fall; he whirled like a spark and charged a third time as Javier turned his back and walked to the Volkswagen, opened the door and sat behind the wheel and with all his strength pushed down on the horn. The horn blared, guttural, cutting, penetrating, filled the silent air with noise, and Javier stared through the dusty windshield and saw the bull make a new charge and the moment of danger when Franz, distracted by the horn a moment before the bull reacted to it, raised his head. The bull's head was wrapped in the black shawl. The cattle jerked into sound and movement. Nervous, bellowing, they tried to locate the source of the frightening horn. Javier continued to press down as sweat dripped from his forehead. Franz stood on the strip of sand still trying to hold the bull's attention, and beyond were the herd with their growing fear. The first to move was a sandy-colored heifer who bellowed and turned; then a bull with a ragged hide and then all of them, bellowing, tossing their heads and snorting as fear ran from one to the other like an electric shock. Their sweat and slaver fell from them, urine dribbled, their bellies heaved. Some threw themselves into the river and were carried toward the falls. Others, caught up by terror, stampeded toward the far bank with their shoulders and horns bumping. Finally the bull facing Franz also caught the fear. He bellowed louder than any of them, shook his head crazily, and ran after the herd. The cattle reached the other side of the river and disappeared in a cloud of dust as they raced away from the lunatic racket of the horn.

Franz hung his head. You ran toward him, Elizabeth, and embraced him. Isabel smiled and walked to the car, where Javier, exhausted, was leaning forward upon the button of the still-sounding horn.

The ford was free. The bellowing and the sound of hooves became faint. The sun shone down on a green river of vague slime. Javier straightened and the horn stopped. Once again the chirruping of birds in the round trees across the river could be heard. Javier stepped out of the car and pushed the seat forward and got into the back seat. Isabel followed him. Her smile was hidden but showed in her mischievous eyes as she looked at Javier, trying to find the same amusement in him. You and Franz neared the car, Elizabeth. The two men had the same tenseness, the same serious pallor. To fight a bull: to rest a fist on the button of a horn.

“You put him in danger. Good God, didn't you know what you were doing?”

“It doesn't matter,” said Franz. “He chased them away better than I did.”

“Don't make excuses for him! What if they had stampeded toward us?”

“As it turned out, they didn't.”

“And he distracted you. You could have been gored. What a difference then!”

“Honestly, it isn't important.”

“My God, what a difference!”

Javier smiled at you, Elizabeth.

Franz started the engine. He drove forward without moving his head. His blue polo shirt was wet with sweat. His gray flannel trousers and his shoes were covered with dust.

Isabel whispered something.

“What?” said Javier.

You straightened Franz's corduroy coat on the back of the seat, Dragoness. His dark glasses fell out. You retrieved them and carefully cleaned them, using a handkerchief from your purse, and returned them to his pocket.

“This scene with the bulls,” Isabel whispered in Javier's ear, smiling. “Why don't you write it.”

“Isabel, Isabel,” Javier said, almost groaning.

*   *   *

Δ   Javier had gone to sleep on the bed, Isabel, and you were reading his notebook and quietly humming “Moon River.”

… But one must suspect that despite their apparent freedom and disinterest, all of the elements of the sky bow before the stone memory of the serpent that girds and imprisons the base of the altar. They were men. Where are they now? Does a hidden river of blood flow down the stairs? Stone cannot see, but the time that culminated here could see. And death can see. The water-sun flows over this world and its men die by drowning. The earth-sun—and I see you, sculptured earth that bears the weight of the pyramid, tilled earth as rigid as the fangs of the serpent in stone which will not endure so long as you—the earth-sun receives the blood. The fire-sun, above and within at the same time, consumes and murders. The air-sun, most ferocious of all, in its silence contains the others, earth, fire, and water. And where are you, you who were once living men? Come forth. Speak to me. What will you say? Look, eyes, and see. Don't lose a single heartbeat of this still living earth. We stand here, the four of us, facing your symbols, all that remains after the great conflagration of noon. Your symbols? And how are we different from you? Do we await, as you did, the cataclysm, the rupture of the veil, the appearance of the twilight monsters who will devour us? And are they not always here among us? I draw closer. I touch the stone feathers …