A Change of Skin (26 page)

Beside you Javier moved and you closed the notebook and looked over at him. He was sleeping the stupor of Cholula's afternoon. With one hand you covered your mouth to hold back your laughter as you read on:

… What beauty is this, and how does it differ from the beauty we know? Can you say? Yes: for us, our beauty is a model, an example to be followed, an incitement to transpose the model from its fixed expression into our own living experience. The example of art is held before us to be actualized again, though what we create may fall far short of the model, actualized in our daily life. Thus beauty ends up wasted in the merely fashionable. But the beauty I find here, this richness, this barbaric luxury of Xochicalco is something else. Something that is realized not as a model, not to be repeated, that indeed is incapable of further extension. The beauty of the barbaric ends in itself, lives in its distance from, not its identification with, life …

You could no longer restrain your laughter, Isabel. You say that it welled up from deep within you, from the very soles of your feet, and burst out, though you tried to stifle it with your hand and Javier's open notebook. You laughed so violently, though still silently, that the bed began to shake and Javier drowsily opened his eyes. Now you had no time to return the notebook to the night table. Javier opened his eyes and your laughter burst into sound and he could not understand it, and you, feeling caught, read aloud:
“You are in a moment when time seems to flee from you, yet stand still…”

Javier stared at you, his mouth hanging open. He still did not understand. You scrambled up and knelt on the bed beside him and read again:
“The beginning and the end are identical, like the serpent…”
You went on rocking with laughter.

Javier lifted himself on his elbows and across his face ran every possible emotion. He loves me, he hates me, you said to yourself. I please him. I humiliate him. I excite him. You read aloud a third time as he grabbed at your thigh and you jumped from the bed.
“And therefore there is neither beginning nor end but only an opaque and eternal nightmare during which one waits vainly…”

He grunted and jumped after you. You had never seen him like that. But you still laughed as you spun away from him, escaping his lethargic hands:
“… waits for another dawn…”

He leaped toward you and you fought back with the notebook, your mouth opened and your eyes shining. You dodged behind the table. Javier knocked the table over and you yelled something and ran swiftly toward the bed with the notebook between your hands. For the first time you were aware that you were naked. And he, just as naked, forgetting his flaccid exposed penis—that exhausted sunflower, Pussycat—and his flabby stomach, was seeing your nakedness for the first time, as if desire were being born again from his fury. You noticed something new in the swift rush of your blood, in the flush that spread over you as you stood there feeling fear for the first time, paralyzed, trapped, smelling all the smells that you had not left in the bathroom. He was attracted or even captured by those smells, you realized, and now only one decision was left to you, whether to walk to him and offer yourself quickly and quietly, or to stop and wait until he felt himself to be master of the situation simply because you were doing nothing. You say that you did not even turn your back on him, you continued facing him, so that he could see and feel your fear. But ah, Isabel, you understood that even that movement would have petrified him and made him see that you knew exactly what was happening. No, you didn't move. You stood there, rigid and motionless, the notebook in your hands, trying to disappear without daring to close your eyes. You were an ostrich with its head sunk in who knows what dark sands of your body. You were a chameleon, trying to take on the transparent color of the air. And he walked toward you as if you were not really there and as he embraced you, sluggishly, almost like a child, almost helplessly, you were aware of his nakedness too and that he smelled of something sour and spoiled. He took your shoulders and turned you until your back was against his chest, your damp hair, of black sand, against his face. His hand spread your buttocks, first very gently. Then the fingers stiffened and entered your anus and the sand of your hiding place broke apart and you were concealed no longer as the opening that had been dry and tense now softened to a melted, smooth stickiness. He passed his other hand forward between your legs and rubbed your clitoris. You bent like a stretched bow, Isabel, and fell on the bed face down, already lost in a dark forest of salty flowers and rotted ferns and damp roots. The fish, hard as silver, as glass, sought its stinking algae. Now there were no secrets. The mine had been opened and pierced to its deepest, rose and black gallery. Your ultimate shame had been uncovered and the conquest had turned you into a statue of salt. Nevertheless, it was your victory, one that you had forced upon him without saying it or wishing it, making him believe that he had accomplished what in reality was the consequence of the strength of your passivity, that enduring strength you had never before put to the proof and that now had made him reveal himself in the act of sodomy, made him destroy with each thrust and withdrawal, telling you by his violent panting that now the words and apologies were behind, literature had ended, there was only this ultimate liberty which you granted with clenched teeth and a pain like that of giving birth. It was new for both of you, yet you understood quite clearly what was happening to you for the first time at the age of twenty-three. He himself had let you read the explanation not long after you had first met him, back during those days when he still behaved as if you were only another student he had seduced, a girl who wanted to receive not his love but his knowledge. They were words written in the same blue notebook that now had fallen from your hands:

… Perhaps then, when I first met Ligeia, the tenderness that Isabel thinks is enough for her and enough for a lover would have been enough for me too. But she doesn't understand. She doesn't realize that a writer's entire life is like some absorbing novel read in the small hours of the morning during adolescence, read just as dawn breaks, a novel with the title
Lost Illusions.
It is a bitter and sad paradox that in attempting to say everything, to give everything its meaning, one ends by emptying all life of what meaning it has naturally and by coming to see that after all nothing can be said through the cold and artificial forms of literature. When did I discover this? Was it the very vulgarity of a vender of figs, skinny and penniless, who was forced off a beach by the owners of a restaurant? Was it my refusal to see her searching helpless eyes, to allow her and her problems to break the delicate balance between imagination and act that I had come to the islands to find? Was it losing Ligeia's collection of little pebbles? Why did I let all that distract me from my central passion, my poem, from the concentration of my purpose? What did my poem have to do with an old woman who sold figs, or with colored pebbles, or even with Ligeia? My unity was overcome by divisiveness: words could not conquer the fragmentation of reality, a fragmentation that was there already, before I tried to write it. Then once again only the determination to make everything fixed, and again the failure to fix the past, to devour the present, to accept all of the future's premonitions. Moi, j'aurais porté toute une société dans ma tête? Ah, ha, ha …

“God, what a difference!”

“You found it so different? It really surprised you? Yet it didn't last long. How long does it take for an effrontery imposed upon the body to wear off? By contrast with what I have wanted to share with you, and you have never understood, what does this matter?”

… To struggle with a fleshless enemy. Never to know whether abstention rather than the work in progress is the sure way. I must think this through. How do you live suspended in air, uncertain of the real value of what you do and what you cease to do? If to act is to fail, and to abstain is to succeed because abstention leaves at least a mark of protest, then how can one describe an epoch that ought to be left undescribed? For this monstrosity of an era should not be allowed to leave any of its demented words for the ear of posterity …

“Would you laugh at me, Ligeia? Yes, you would. You can't understand.”

… From our first years together I always understood that the meaning of our age is to be found in taking all meaning away from it. The absurd. That is to be Byron today … and every effort to answer that deafness with a creative effort, a book or a painting or a score, is to cooperate with an era that deserves only its silence. The artist's work must remain within him and never be given light. To hand it over to those who do not deserve it is obvious weakness. So long as we do not share our work, our work can have value, that is the precondition for value today. Within me, within
me:
the whole struggle. The meeting between what I feel intuitively and what I understand. The bridge of my spirit, to be crossed only by my spirit. Within
me
the debate between the tradition's conventions, the strength of one century become the limitations and debilities of the next. Within
me
the search for the absolute, the failure of incompleteness, the creation of that incompleteness which, simply because it is all that can be attained, is converted into my tiny absolute. Within me the giants disguised as windmills: no one will ever believe that they are giants, that the insane has become the rational because it alone sees what reasonable fools cannot see. To hold faith: not to express anything, not to reveal anything. Not to expose ourselves, neither to attrition before dogma nor to the diminution of mere indifference: why should what we have be taken from us to be destroyed and prostituted? Better silence. Always silence, if we prefer not to accept the corruption of those who insist we be what we are not, and of those others who isolate us and gnaw upon us and render us harmless. I don't know. I don't want to look behind me. I don't live in some other century but in this one, a time that assassinates with prison or with success, that destroys with the gallows or with applause, that, whether it accepts or refuses what we write, nevertheless always attacks and annihilates us. There is no way out. So long as our age of ironic barbarism endures, we must hold fast and sing the panegyric of a society that insists upon being called holy, or hold fast and serve the grindstone wheels of that other society which already feels itself to be holy because it distributes refrigerators liberally. There's no solution. No one wants our work. Everyone demands us to be high priests, acolytes of the great cults. Who will save himself? He who must sing the glories of labor or he who must sing the glories of the products of labor? There is no way out. Better to keep silent.

“That is the heroism that you never recognize in me, Ligeia. Ah. It would be more heroic then to write, write, write, but never to publish, to hold back waiting for a better era. I don't know. Ask me some day and see if then I answer you. For now I don't know. Honestly, I do not know. Believe me.”

“Javier,” you whispered in his ear, Pussycat, as the car moved across the ford.

“What?”

“This scene with the bulls,” you smiled. “Why don't you write it?”

*   *   *

Δ   “Javier? Are you here? Put on the light, I can't see the bed. That goddamn mania you have for always drawing the curtains. Or is it night already? Javier, are you here? Did you take your blessed Nembutal? Okay, okay, if you don't want to answer, I don't really care.” For whether or not he was there, sleeping or paying you no attention, it was all the same. It made no difference at all.

You know, Dragoness, some actions lead to a magnificent absence of conclusions: nothingness is the real value of certain moments in life. And you say to Javier, who perhaps is not even in the room, that following the incident of your opening his letter, for many months you and he lived a suspended kind of life that consisted indeed of desiring and awaiting, but each alone and separately. You would like to recall it clearly, for it was the bridge across time that led you—little by little, of course, with all the fine gradations, the dead moments and the stretched ones, that one could ask for—to what you live and are today. Says who, eh? Greece, your return, the first months in Mexico City, when the war began, those days remained behind you, pushed back by a desire you both shared but neither mentioned aloud: to attain some new discovery that would not suppress but sharpen your passion. As you put it, Ship ahoy, to graduate and join the Navy. If the road toward that waiting and unknown truth was a time of imperceptible change, slow, marked by an absence of visible events, yet you walked it together. You can confess that when the change came, you were both hoping that it would be an explosion that would blow your lives up and split them apart.

“No, it wasn't like that. It was never like that. What can I know about him? I speak for myself alone.”

You speak for the silent although smiling breakfasts during which you waited without daring to drink your coffee, driven by God knows what need to preserve the surface of all those actions that concealed the happiness and the desperation of your desire. You would put the slices of bread in the toaster …

“… Adjust the heat, serve marmalade on the little plates. When the toast was ready, I would smear it with butter, and all the time, every morning, I waited for you to speak, to ask something of me, and you went on reading the newspaper in silence—and I shall never forget the names in those black headlines: Rundstedt, Wavell, Gamelin, Timoshenko—reading, sometimes smiling at me as in silence I implored you to tell me what you saw when you walked the city, how your writing was going, begged you to let me read what you wrote as you used to…”

“Do you remember Hart Crane's
The Bridge,
Ligeia? I want to find something like that. To give the city its echo in poetry.”