A Change of Skin (27 page)

After breakfast he would go out to wander the city in search of the sounds he wanted to echo. And you would go out and walk too.

“Yes, like you, I would go out and walk alone. But we didn't walk the same parts of the city. I confined myself to our neighborhood, to the streets near Reforma. Reforma between Chapultepec and the Cuauhtémoc circle…”

… was your limited area. The length of the dusty promenade—today it is concrete—beneath the ash trees, past streets that in those days were quiet, past elaborate residences dating back to the turn of the century and boasting relief decorations of urns and vines, some boasting mansard roofs that awaited snow that would never come, carriage gates painted green, white-framed French windows, stone balustrades around the level roofs, up the steep steps to the reception floor. Damp cellars, servants standing in the half-opened doors, elderly inhabitants passing in and out in their elderly expensive cars, a Pierce-Arrow, an Isotta-Fraschini, a Rolls with fringed red-velvet cushions and much luster of gold, passing through wide green gates into the parklike gardens, invisible from the street because of the high walls, of manicured lawn and tall palms. It was a Mexico City you did not know, a disappearing Mexico City, a quarter from the past which had been reserved for you and welcomed you, defended you from the city you feared, that you knew only by fragmentary hurried glimpses caught while you were on your way to a movie downtown or to some restaurant: the shadowed city of hard faces, Dragoness, of criminal eyes, scars, misfortunes, curt and injurious speech, a city always near violence: Mesones, San Juan de Letrán, La Moneda, Corregidora, Argentina, Guerrero, Peralvillo: where the city's sleeping lions lie, the buyers and sellers of pot and horse, the women of the night who chew our language and spit it back at us transformed, our bat-breed. The bullfights, the cabarets, the cheap movie houses, the vaudeville theaters of that time, all these made you afraid, Dragoness. I know, oh, don't I know. You always felt that you were followed and spied upon, feared that the muttered compliment of some man who watched you pass might change, without the slightest hesitation, into an act of blood. You doubted your physical integrity: it was as if those glassy eyes, eyes not only of the staring men but of the women and children too, could see more about you than you knew yourself. It was as if they were all diviners and magicians, those dark-skinned millions with their intolerable passivity, their sudden violence, their unhappy smiles, their jeering sadness, their brutality and rancor; it was as if they were the priests of a magic that could turn a simple crossing of glances into some petty death, some destiny as shadowy as that carried in their dark eyes, their callused hands, their thick lips, in their centuries of humiliation and frustrated revenge.

“I think sometimes that all Mexicans just want to get even.”

No, you did not have to go to their haunts and lairs. You could remain far from them, in a neighborhood that at that time was peaceful. Soon the impoverished old families would sell their homes and Niza, Hamburgo, Génova, and Londres would become streets of fashionable restaurants, expensive shops, cabarets, and open-air cafés, a prowling ground for Lancias and Jaguars and vampires in black sweaters and black net stockings and immigrant gringos and the existential heroes of the Café Tirol and the Kinneret, those careful and impatient revolutionaries who make the revolution inside themselves in order to get it over and done with the quicker. And even then these streets would remain for you a barrier against the gangrenous darker city, the hovels of mud and galvanized iron, the bare feet, the scabies, the hands searching through trash and garbage, the black eyes with their criminal or scatological or magical purposes.

“Every Mexican's look has three possibilities. To kill or to undress or to bless. You had a question to ask of the city, Javier, but you didn't get an answer. The city had not changed, but you changed. Only a year and a half ago we came home to the apartment late one night and we met a death that didn't need to happen. That was what I thought. But you thought that it was a necessary death precisely because it was so trivial. I saw the boy's body lying there against the door of our building. I didn't know how to respond to it…”

No, Dragoness, for you Yankees have made it a law that in order to show respect for death, one must not know how to react to it. Above all, one must be shocked, believe that death has broken something and that it will break those who contemplate it. Above all, one must have no answer for death.

“I didn't know what to say. And before I said anything, I was filled with pain.”

Yes, Elizabeth. Pain must be silent at first. Later it may howl, but not immediately. Suffer. Then you have the right to talk about suffering. Be the suffering as little as a chance corpse on your doorstep, or as much as a chance cancer in your guts, don't speak about it until you know it.

“You felt no pain, Javier. I think you felt nothing at all. He was lying in front of the door of our apartment house in his stocking feet, yes, his shoes were gone, and the knife was still in him and his eyes were wide open. I looked around us as if to make sure I knew where we were. The bookstore that stayed open until midnight, Durrell's
Quartet
in the display window along with
Hopscotch, Explosion in a Cathedral,
and
The Mind of an Assassin,
the mind of the man who murdered Trotsky. What a laugh: the mind of an assassin. And Trotsky had been killed a year or two after we came back from Europe. I remember his picture in the paper, his head bandaged, no glasses, his little white goatee, dead. And the ciné-club of the French Institute, where we had gone together to see
An Andalusian Dog
and
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
A tailor's shop. On the corner, a bakery, and in front of the door of our building, the body with the knife in it. We had spent the evening dancing the twist in a cabaret on San Juan de Letrán. Some of your students had persuaded you to take me along because they were sure I had to be an expert at the twist, and we had danced all evening while the voice at the microphone repeated endlessly,
twist again like we did last summer, twist again like we did last night,
until we were sick of it and our arms ached and the muscles of our bellies were sore, the right leg stiff with the foot gyrating about itself, the hips moving in the opposite direction, the arms holding still a third rhythm,
twist again like we did last summer.
But last summer we were not twisting, goddamn it, last summer we were young, we were in the islands and we loved each other. And the other last summer we weren't twisting either: we were making love, fucking to kill time and reading Robert Lowell and Octavio Paz and William Styron and the afternoon showers came along and we were tired of reading and you came to me already stiff and I was waiting for you and we made love as if I were a bitch in heat, without really wanting it, just smelling of it and needing it, expecting it of the summer, the long rainy afternoons, the sultry and brown-faced afternoons of Mexico City, fucking because fucking was better than getting drunk or running out for some goddamn pill of yours, last summer we made love and twenty-five years ago in Greece we made love and the day they killed Trotsky too…”

And here you can have another quote, Elizabeth. Catch!
Oh, Mexico City, if all your sewers were scents and your modern apartments lost their cracks, would your women cease to look so sad, your men so silly?
*

“But when autumn finally came,” you went on, letting yourself fall on the squeaky bed and reflecting that if you turned on the light you would merely see again the smears on the wall left by the dead fleas and the bisexual snails, “when autumn did come, we didn't remember it. It didn't matter to us, despite the fact of there being no seasons in this damn country and every hour being exactly like every other hour…”

A plateau that is either dry dust or dust lashed by rain. A place where time curls up, Elizabeth, with its teeth sunk in its tail, like the serpent at Xochicalco.

“This damn country where you brought me, Javier, and made me lose the seasons I loved so. The different clothing. The changing hours for meals. Oh, how I miss it! To wear white dresses through a summer that is really a summer. To put on a tailored wool suit for an autumn that is really an autumn. To buy snow boots for winter. In the spring to go shopping for a straw hat with ribbons … You made me lose my changing weather until I stopped even remembering it. You made me come to believe that summer with its rains is a real season, the season when you used to be horny and I would be forced to respond with an excitement that, that …

*   *   *

Δ   Rain began to fall in the patio of the old house on Calzada del Niño Perdido. Javier closed his book and rested his elbows on the railing. July's shower redeemed the hot morning that preceded it and the lichens dampened and the geraniums began to droop, humble and grateful, beneath the silent quick rain. He had just finished reading one of Byron's letters:
Passion is the element in which we live; without it, we hardly even vegetate.
The only sound was water running toward the drain in the center of the patio. He turned up the lapels of his coat but decided not to go into the house, though he knew that Ofelia was there waiting for him, tonight as every night, that she was seated in the living room and soon, roused by his tardiness, would come to the hall door and wait behind it, this evening as every evening, wait for him to keep his promise and come in and spend half an hour with her before dinner. He opened the book again and sat under the naked light and the buzzing mosquitoes, opened the book so that she, hiding behind the door with an incomprehensible presentiment, with a longing fear, would see him occupied and he, when the meal came that he had forbidden himself to miss, would have a concrete excuse for being late.

“I've been thinking,” he said as Ofelia served the tamales and the watered wine. “What are we doing living in this house? We really ought to sell it.”

“When I am dead, sell it. Not before.”

“When
we
are dead,” Javier said, simply to introduce the prohibited “we,” the “we” of the time before.

“Look,” Raúl said, running his index finger across the wet front page of the newspaper. “It says that the Cristeros are the ones who have been blowing up the railroad tracks. Now, there you are. How is a good Catholic businessman going to make a living when it's the Cristeros themselves who keep us from working? I'll be damned if I can understand anything that happens in this country. Why don't they let decent people work in peace? I don't understand a damn thing. Why kill priests and blow up trains?”

“Javier, don't walk with your hands in your pockets. It looks very ugly.”

“Who's going to buy anything when the country is in such confusion?” said Raúl as he turned the pages of the Montgomery Ward catalogue. “Yesterday I was asked to cancel an order for transformers. Last week, the irons I ordered didn't come.” He loosened his suspenders. “Figure it yourself. Five hundred pesos less this month, for sure.”

“Enough!”

“Ofelia … What…?”

“Enough, be quiet!” She turned her back to them and retreated into the shadows she herself had created in this house of drawn curtains and padlocked doors. Ofelia, his mother, at that time still slender, her face pale and her features still attractive, even though nagging. Raúl looked at him questioningly.

“Now what the hell have I done? I must have done something … I don't understand…”

“Javier, go to your room.”

“Damn it, Ofelia, the boy's thirteen now!”

She ran out of the living room with her closed fist over her lips, and Raúl, shaking his head and plodding heavily, followed her.

That was what he was used to: the whisper of voices which although distant were never alien, voices that were suppressed to make their absence habitual, a different kind of presence in a world that had to give itself order behind its four walls if it was to oppose the chaotic violence and brutality beyond and surrounding it. Ofelia was to tell him this, though not in the same words, shortly before her death: she had wanted to overcome the anarchy of the country in those years by countering it with a shield of domestic calm behind which he could grow up protected and secure, behind which his childhood, a time that sooner or later he would want to return to and would not be able to except in memory, could be prolonged. And he, when he wrote his first book, the book he began that same evening after hearing Raúl talk about blown-up railroad tracks and cancelled orders, he wrote about that closed-off and isolated world, perhaps because it was the only world he wanted to write about or could write about then, the only one he knew. He wrote about the world of his childhood and about the way our energy is spent and wasted by the emotional erosion of daily life. If he had only been able to negate himself in that world, to remain silent himself, to accept without protest the reprimands and punishments he received when he refused to answer the prying questions that drained away his strength, where had he gone, with whom had he gone, what had he done, what was he thinking. But to have been that enduring and perfect he would have had to cease to be what he was. That was what he said in his first book, and in each of its poems he probed the events of day-to-day existence in a dialogue between reason and will from which reason emerged the victor precisely because it could not understand what was happening around it. And thus those poems, new and virginal, fresh and solitary, built of the artificial shadows in his home, built of Sundays beside the lake in the park and walking the lonely streets and listening to the organ-grinder and watching the servant girls, built of Raúl's smells, tobacco and shaving soap, and of Ofelia's face of a little girl grown old: thus his poems came to hold the truth, the mistaken certainty, of adolescence, the truth reason speaks when it tells the certain lie that it must supply order to the world if the world is incomprehensible. But only a world that cannot be understood, neither at its irrational edges nor in its core, can be an object to be acted upon by the will, the strength of maturity.