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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

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BOOK: A Change of Skin
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“You act like you're thinking of living here.” You looked around the room, its damp walls, its broken windowpanes. Some pad.

With both hands Javier removed the socks he had chosen to match his slacks and shirts. “This was quite a modern hotel ten years ago, I believe,” he said. “It has been eroded by all the unfortunate travelers forced to stop over, as we are, involuntarily.”

That's how he talks, Dragoness. Yes, that's how your husband talks. You can bet all you have on it. You ask him. “When will the car be ready?” simply to hear him reply, very subtly, “You should ask Franz.” He presses his socks to his chest while you exhale smoke.

“But really, why put your things in the drawers when we'll be here only one night?”

He carried his socks to the dresser as if they were a dozen fragile eggs.

“One night, one month, the principle is the same. We should take advantage of what time we have.”

“Advantage?” You curled up in the bed, resting on your elbows. “In this miserable dump of a town?”

Javier arranged his socks all in a row in the top drawer. You began to laugh. You drew your legs up again and laughed and pushed out your breasts and watched him putting his shirts in the pine dresser one by one, very neatly, the blue cotton shirt, the black knit wool, the yellow silk, the pleated
guayabera,
the terry-cloth shirt to be used after swimming in the sea. You slapped your hands on your open thighs and laughed.

“The point is not that the town is miserable,” said Javier, “but that whatever you see, you never really observe.”

“I saw their benighted children, didn't I?”

His underwear was at the bottom of the suitcase. He lifted it out and on his open palms carried it to the dresser. There he counted: six jockey shorts, six undershirts. He made a face. You knew it: as usual he had forgotten his handkerchiefs.

“The beggars came out of the city at dawn and went from dwelling to dwelling, marketplace to marketplace…”

Abruptly you got up from the bed.

“You can't hear what they say here, Javier. You can't hear a damn word they say.” And with both hands you struck Javier's hands, sending his underwear flying around the room. You laughed again.

“… a barefoot multitude of rags and outstretched arms…”

You will tell me about it many times, Dragoness. You know that the first time will be hard, that you will expect too much of the second, and that only the third time will everything seem right to you. So. You panted for a moment against Javier's face. Then you let yourself fall face down on the bed. “They were then just what they are today. Things with neither eyes nor ears nor voice. To hell with them, they bore me. Let me sleep now.”

Javier knelt and retrieved his jockey shorts and undershirts. He placed them in the drawer.

“Don't you want to bathe, change clothes?”

“What for? To stroll in that withered-up park and listen to cha-cha-cha?”

You hid your face in the pillow again. Javier closed the drawer. You rolled over, shut your eyes. Javier looked at you, at the fatigue just faintly showing on a face that with the eyes closed seemed to disengage itself from the world as if its voice would never be heard again, as if its body were no longer there. He walked toward the bathroom carrying the small leather case in which his medicines and pomades travel. At the door he stopped and you said slowly, laughing quietly: “Abandon human sacrifices. Stop worshipping idols. Well, why not? No longer eat the flesh of your fellow man. Give up sodomy and your other stupid degeneracies. Hah, hah. Sure. Graduate and join the Navy and see the sea. Ship ahoy.”

You rose and looked at your husband as you sat down before the broken-paned window that opened on a sour interior patio. You sat in a rocker beside the drapes and began to rock back and forth, awaiting the moment when you could say: “We walked along the arcade, silent, infected by the living death…”

You jerked the cord violently and the drapes swirled open and the afternoon sun poured in. Viciously you went on: “… by the dead life of this goddam funereal town. Javier! Javier, are you satisfied?”

You opened your eyes. He was no longer in the room.

“Javier! Javier! Don't you understand I'm doing it all for you?”

You heard a gush of water into the washbowl, then the voice of your husband: “The battle lasted only five hours. Three thousand lay dead in the streets, in the ashes of the destroyed temples.”

You waited with your hands resting against the sides of the bathroom door and in a very slow voice you said quietly: “Oh, yes, they are gods. They divine treachery in advance and in advance they take their vengeance. Who can oppose them?”

You went into the bathroom. At its farther end, half hidden by the shower curtain, Javier sat on the throne with his naked knees showing, his trousers down around his ankles and shoes. You approached him without haste, even with a certain professional air. You pulled back the curtain and lifted him from the seat and offered him the roll of paper. He took it. Mechanically, yet precisely—oh, yes—he tore off exactly three segments. His hand went to his buttocks. Then he pulled the chain and hoisted his trousers. You smiled with a twisted mouth. Thus, good Father, would I like to stand before Thy final judgment.

“Rest now, Javier.”

“But I don't believe I'm sleepy.”

“Take one of your sleeping pills.”

You embraced his waist, rested your chin on his shoulder.

“I haven't unpacked my medicines yet.” He was motionless in your arms. “Elizabeth?”

“What, old man?”

“Why are we here?”

“Because we're on our way to the sea. Because once in a while we have to get away from the city. And you feel better for it, don't you? Isn't the lower altitude better? Come on now, lie down and rest. Get your sleeping pill.”

“I forget its name. It's yellow, I think. A capsule. Good Lord, Ligeia. How well I used to know my medicines! What's coming over me?”

“Don't worry about it. Look for the pill and rest.”

Javier stood in the bathroom door and stared down at the woman who had not had time or inclination to change the wrinkled skirt and blouse in which she had traveled from Mexico City to Cholula. At you, Elizabeth. Liz, Lizzie, Lisbeth. At you, Beth, Bette. He blew his nose on a Kleenex and drew up the zipper of his fly.

“Ligeia, do you know something?”

Oh boy, you thought. Here it comes.

“Do I know what?”

“The snail is androgynous. What was the point of those two snails coming out of their shells on the wall? I mean, if both are bisexual, what was the point of it? Can you tell me, Ligeia?”

*   *   *

Δ   And this morning, Dragoness, I also traveled from Mexico City to Cholula. I rode turning the pages of the Sunday paper and marking certain interesting items with a red pencil. For example: Linda Darnell and La Belle Otero died yesterday. Carolina Otero, of pure old age, ninety-seven. Ninety-seven long years with her fat clitoris always fighting the stout good fight. She died in a room beside the tracks, not a cent to her name, several years behind in the rent, nothing except some yellowed bonds from the time of the Tsar that a Russian noble once gave her, face value, one million rubles, but then came the revolution. The revolution always comes and goodbye bonds. And that was back when it was easy enough to predict your revolutions. Just the same, nowadays no one gives away bonds worth a million rubles, before the revolution or after it. La Belle Otero. And think of it, Dragoness, she left us just as we are moving into our own Belle Époque: she saw the age whooping back to art noveau, to Gaudí, to Oscar Wilde and Beardsley and Firbank and Radiguet and Baron Corvo, and out she bowed. It says that she was born in Cádiz. The daughter of a gypsy girl who was seduced by a Greek officer vacationing in Andalusia. Knowing gypsies and the Greeks, I suspect it may have been the other way around. At the age of thirteen she ran away from school with a lover and went to Portugal and danced in a cabaret. Resolved: the profession of lover. She granted D'Annunzio her favors. Yes, her favors. Look at the picture of the old girl: some favors, eh? So D'Annunzio discovered that to write well a man must screw hard, and there he was, hooked and wriggling inside the sour cave of La Belle Otero, baffled by shadows, confounding observant asceticism with the hot balls of the stud. Well, for all that, something worked. Pure sexotherapy. No. The best was the night she dined with five crowned heads: Edward VII of England, Nicholas II of Russia, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Wilhelm II of Germany, and Leopold II of Belgium. At the Café de Paris. Oh, the royal cocks! Now I understand it. Imagine the coolness, the disengagement and intelligence it took for her to give herself to them and yet preserve her essential virginity, that virginity born of absolute indifference and absolute sexual virtuosity. You must be very optimistic to make love in that way, neither hurried nor hopeless. Just as we do, La Belle Otero believed that her age would never end. Except that we disguise our conviction by putting on a pessimism that is really no more than an attempt to preserve psychological health: we tell ourselves that the world will die not with a cry but with a whimper, that Doctor Strangeloves are on the loose, that Big Brother is watching. The future is cloudy, we insist, we accept, we even enjoy. Mere psychotherapy. Our pessimism is hygiene for our invincible optimism. We use the condom provided by Thomas Stearns Orwell. In contrast, La Belle Otero and the Belle Époque knew very well that they could not last. Their cheerfulness actually expressed a profound despair, as sinister as the gingerbread castles of Barcelona, the flabby breasts of Beardsley's Salome. And then she went on the dole. She died yesterday, in the morning; they found her body. So I read my newspaper, Elizabeth, while you rode in the front seat of the Volkswagen beside your blond, sunburned German and Isabel and your husband rode side by side in the back seat and you turned the knob and the radio faded with the voices of the Beatles floating on for an instant, and then you looked ahead and saw the curve and said sharply, “Watch it!” and in one movement grabbed Franz's arm and pushed your foot down hard on an imaginary brake. In the seat behind Franz, Javier touched his handkerchief to his lips and smiled and said that the drawback to winding roads is that they make conversation difficult and Franz said that soon the worst of it would be behind and you were aware that Isabel had not grabbed Javier as you had Franz and that she was looking at you fixedly as you moved your hand from Franz's arm and said: “Ten years ago this was all unbroken forest. But Mexicans don't know how to preserve their riches.”

You turned your head and looked out at the stumps that had been the forest, at the deep gullies worn by the swift muddy water that carries Mexico's mountains down and levels her hills and presents us with a land of excrement, dry, suffocated, hostile. You closed your eyes and let yourself be lulled by the steady drone of the engine and the sway of the highway. Presently you heard Javier ask Franz to turn on the radio again, but Franz shook his head and said that you had gone to sleep. And then again presently you had opened your eyes with a start and interrupted Franz, who was saying something about the tightness of the curves, by asking: “Didn't they once have a big race all the way from one border to the other?”

Yes, Isabel replied, it was called the Pan-American Race, and no one who drove it survived. You paid no attention to Javier's nasal laugh, for now you were intent upon your purse, looking in it for your mirror and comb. You combed your ash-dyed hair with quick strokes, making a face of disapproval as you saw your reflection. You took out your lipstick and puckered your mouth and applied red to those lips which are indeed, sweet Dragoness, wide and full. You moved the mirror around in front of your face and allowed your gray eyes to study themselves. Now you noticed that Javier was talking again and that from time to time Franz was nodding without looking away from the road ahead. Javier was saying that perhaps simply to know it was enough for the woman, but it forced him, the man, to create something that might correspond. You turned and faced Javier and stared at him while Franz said dryly that after all there was the matter of the pleasure involved and that for his part he did not insist that any woman be this or that or the other, simply what she was. Franz pointed toward the valley and said that from here on the road was easier. That would be absurd, certainly, said your husband. Yes, that was what he said. You looked at him and spoke again: “How many hours before we'll get to the sea?”

“To the sea?” smiled Javier. “When, Franz?”

“Not until tomorrow.”

You turned and closed your eyes again. For several minutes you were all silent. You sensed Franz feeling in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and opened your eyes and reached across his chest and got the pack. You lit a cigarette and passed it to him stained with the red circle of your lips. Then you lit one for yourself. Only when you had finished the cigarette did you say, as if the conversation had not been interrupted for a moment: “I can accept everything except the same old thing forever repeated. Nothing is so marvelous that it can't eventually become boring.”

You felt Javier's eyes and passed your hand over your hair.

“The truth of it is that love can be created without passion,” Javier said. “One can appreciate beauty and a woman's character quite coldly and with no desire. Love without hunger, without urgency.” Franz raised an eyebrow and shrugged his shoulder. I would have done the same, Dragoness. Really I would.

Now you were passing through a village and Franz slowed down. You deliberately turned your head away from the window. But Isabel pressed her nose to the glass and watched the gray, unwhitewashed, one-story adobe houses go by, the little roadside stands selling eggnog and mulberries and plums and cheap crockery junk, the motionless figures stiff with cold and wrapped in gray cloaks. Her nose was against the glass and her breath clouded it and she drew a cat in the cloud and then began to play tick-tack-toe with herself, drawing round O's and X's. Ah, me. Her right hand, which was drawing the X's, was defeated by the O's of her left. She stopped and stroked her fingers across the sun-brown skin of her arm. Now there was a true forest to the right and against that dark background Isabel ought to have been able to see her eyes reflected in the window, green and brilliant above her smooth high cheeks. A lovely woman, Dragoness. No one can accuse me of not appreciating her. No one. Suddenly she moved forward and leaned across the seat and opened the door beside you and without a sound lunged toward it. Javier caught her by the shoulders and jerked her back just as soundlessly while you reached and pulled the door shut again and Franz said evenly and without surprise, “Careful there.” Then Isabel had fallen face down across Javier's crossed legs, her mouth open against his thighs, and was crying, waiting for him to caress and calm her, touch her long dark hair, wipe away her tears. Javier paid her no attention. When he moved his hands, it was only to raise them and study his fingernails. He laughed softly and reached forward and touched the back of your neck. You did not move, Elizabeth. You stared straight ahead. Bravo. As you would put it, you had graduated and joined the Navy, ship ahoy.

BOOK: A Change of Skin
10.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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