A Change of Skin (31 page)

And afterward, when it was all over, your father looked for you and you told him you had only a minute at a corner, the corner of Forty-fifth and Madison or any other downtown corner, and the old man in the double-breasted suit and the gray hat walked toward you and gave you his card with the name and address of a hotel on Central Park North and told you that was where he lived now and he would never again live as part of a family or a community; he told you, rapidly, without looking up, that at a hotel you can go and come as you please, you eat alone, whenever you want to eat, you don't have to talk to anyone, not even the waitresses, and in the evening you can go alone to a movie and maybe eventually you make a friend and even play golf; if you wanted to see him, ask for Johnson, Gershon Johnson, they would know at the desk of the hotel. Without kissing you, he disappeared whistling down Madison Avenue.

“Jake! Beth! Come out, stop scaring me! Do you hear me? Listen, come on out, I feel scared and they're waiting us already, for dinner, children, we shouldn't be late.”

*   *   *

Δ   Outside Cuautla beside the highway was a posterlike sign made of silver foil shaken by the wind and shining in the sun. “Restaurant Corinto.” “It's the place I was telling you about,” said Franz. The front glass, and behind it a dozen tables with red-and-white checked tablecloths, wicker chairs, the wall showing a long shelf on which stood porcelain plates with German, Swiss, and Austrian scenes: you know the sort, the Lorelei, the Matterhorn, Salzburg. The four of you entered and were received by a red-faced type who rubbed his hands on his apron and when he saw Franz shouted: “Señor! Señor! It's been a long time!” Franz smiled and the fat owner of the restaurant invited you to a table by spreading his arms.

“Today there is sauerkraut or good barbecue. And beer, of course, beer…”

You all took seats and Franz ordered sauerkraut and mustard and mugs of beer. The beer immediately: driving had tired him. He did not ask the rest of you if that was what you wanted. Javier rubbed his stomach with his hand and said nothing.

“The sausage will upset your stomach,” Isabel said to him.

“You aren't my doctor.” He picked up a toothpick and did not look toward her.

“Oh, excuse
me,
” said Isabel.

You looked at them, Dragoness. First at your husband, then at Isabel.

“A chronic colitis can never be cured,” said Javier slowly. “It's part of your personality. I would have to change my whole psychology.”

“It must be like dying of thirst at sea,” Franz smiled. “Not to be able to enjoy so many good things.”

“Oh, you get used to it,” said Javier. “It's like living during wartime. Constant rationing.”

He looked up and smiled at Franz and Franz smiled dryly back. “There's a little difference,” he said. “During war you can feel heroic when you go hungry. With colitis, you can only feel ridiculous.”

“Touché, Franz,” you sighed.

“Who asked for your comment?” said Javier. “And besides, there is more than one way to be ridiculous.”

An Indian waiter bowed and placed the mugs on the table. Franz drank rapidly, with gusto. The rest of you sipped slowly.

“Look, we're talking too seriously,” Franz laughed. “We're supposed to be having fun, aren't we? Let's drink to Mackie. You know, the
Threepenny Opera
is running again. I first saw it thirty years ago. Thirty years!” He began to sing: “Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne…”

You smiled, Dragoness. Franz pounded his mug on the table to the beat of the song. At the end of each line, he drank. His cheeks were becoming red. You tried to match his gaiety and make it your mood too, humming and smiling. Javier and Isabel silently observed you and Franz, the two foreigners who seemed so sure of the immediate merriment of a song sung with energy and good will. The fat owner of the restaurant stuck his head through the kitchen door and beamed and wagged his head to the rhythm. He sent another round of beer. Again Franz drank quickly. He looked at Javier's and Isabel's full mugs and reached over and took them, one in the right hand, one in the left, and tried to drink from both at the same time. Beer gushed down his chin and he burst into laughter and you laughed with him while Javier and Isabel looked on.

“Shall we serve your meal yet?” said the restaurant owner. “It's ready. But if you prefer to have more beer first…”

Franz slapped his open palm against the belly of the owner of the restaurant and laughed. “Patience, señor. Patience is a fine Christian virtue. So bring on the food!”

The fat owner of the restaurant laughed and the waiter came in with a platter of smoking sauerkraut. He placed the mustard beside Franz's elbow. Franz talked with his mouth full:

“Four hours' driving. But it's a great car, a really great car. For Mexican highways it's a superb car. I enjoy selling them. No high pressure. The car sells itself. No need to lie about it. A solid product.” He looked at Javier. “But I envy you. You've never been in business. You've done what you wanted to do.”

Isabel turned. “Not in business? Why, what bigger or dirtier business is there than television?”

Javier stared stolidly straight ahead without blinking, Dragoness, and you looked at him in disbelief while Franz said to Isabel, “Television? Who's in television?”

“Javier is,” said Isabel. “He's not only a professor, he works in TV too.”

As if Isabel were not present, Javier said solemnly, “I used to be in the diplomatic corps. You have to do many things and one of them is usually to put up with a superior who is an ass, some idiot of a politician who has been given his post to get him out of the way…”

You held back your laughter, Dragoness, while Javier went on, “… When you are in the diplomatic service, you live isolated in a small circle of vain and hypersensitive bureaucrats.” Your laughter finally burst out, but Javier did not seem disturbed. “Now that I am an official in an international organization, my job isn't ideal. But I earn more and at least the hierarchy is more diffused.”

Franz began to laugh too. Isabel peeked at the three of you from the corner of her eye and seemed not to understand anything. Then Franz lifted his mug again and again began to sing the ballad of Mackie. Now and then he pounded his mug on the table. The restaurant owner stood in the kitchen door wagging his head and Javier ate silently and Isabel looked at him with a puzzled frown and you, Elizabeth, laughed, laughed, laughed.

*   *   *

Δ   The man in the beach chair was a German, robust, red-faced, in his fifties. He swelled out his bare chest and with a certain ferocity touched his gray mustache. A virile show-off, with a white sailor hat. Presently he began to shake with silent laughter, his eyes became mischievous. He placed several small pebbles on the flat arm of the chair and by straightening his crooked forefinger shot them at his wife, who was lying facing the sea. She squealed playfully. She put her hands together beneath her chin and said, giggling, “Nein, Rudy, nein. Soyez gentil…”

The German in the beach chair went on shooting pebbles at his wife while his inner laughter continued to grow until it finally emerged as a snort, foaming out through his nose, his ears, finally his open mouth, where gold teeth could be seen. His wife curled up a little. She was docile, ethereal, a sweet Hausfrau, less irritated than flattered by the bombardment of tiny stones.

“I can't stand that woman's coyness,” you said, putting on your dark glasses.

“I can't stand German gemütlich,” Javier said.

The man stood, stretching his fat arms, patting his oil-smeared paunch. He ran toward the water. You and Javier watched him swim vigorously out to the raft, while the woman, unaware that he had departed, went on moaning like a joyous prisoner: “Rudy, Rudy, nein.”

“Javier.”

“Yes?”

“What did you do with my collection of pebbles?”

“Elena. She came while I was writing. She saw your pebbles and got all worked up about them. You know how she talks…”

The German spat a geyser and waved his arm.

“… God Almighty. Holy Virgin. St. Joseph and a large assortment of fellow saints and a few archangels. In short, she had never seen a prettier collection of pebbles. So I gave them to her. I told her to make them into a necklace. I felt you'd be pleased, since you like her so much.”

The German swam wearing his sailor hat and summer ended and you no longer looked for pebbles. The sea turned cold and gray. More and more you and Javier shut yourselves up in the cabin at Falaraki. You would make a fire in the fireplace and then get in bed and listen to the panting, under the bed, of the dog that Javier had once let in during a storm and that had stayed on. You watched Javier at work and sometimes asked him to read you what he had written, but he always said no, not until the poem was complete and he had gotten well into his novel. So far, indeed, he had only their titles: “The Golden Fleece,” a poem with Greece as its point of departure and return;
Pandora's Box,
a novel about secret love. And now and then you made excursions and returned to Rhodes in a boat shaken by the November sea. The eroded stairs at Ladigo Point. The lemon-colored water along the coast of Zambica. The walk to the ruins at Camirus, the dead city that lies open before the Aegean like an amphitheater. The climb to the monastery of Fileremus, a cloister surrounded by white villages and pomegranate orchards, by laurel and oleander. The Valley of the Butterflies. Farfale. The butterflies were not there when you went, but in spring and summer, you were told, they swarmed so thickly that the sky could not be seen. You walked up from the road along a path of dry pine needles, guided by the sound of the water rushing down. Sometimes it happens in a forest that one does not dare speak because the silence is so full of forgotten sounds that can be heard only at such moments. As you put it, the forest makes us remember what we have lost and after a little time in that silence, one's daily life vanishes, yet the forgotten life the forest promises is not yet found. You let yourselves be guided by the sound of the waterfall until you came to the thread of water flowing between the ferns and rocks. You wanted to follow it to its source and you climbed laboriously until you reached the falls, but you did not find the spring. By some secret acoustic trickery, what was distance was disguised as closeness. The valley of Farfale had discovered a way to hold trespassers off: a wall of deceiving echoes.

You turned to say this to Javier and you realized that you were alone now, that he had stopped somewhere. For a moment you felt lost. You yelled, but the sound went nowhere, it hung above your head as if it wanted to return to your lips. You decided that if you tried to go farther into the valley you would end up lost in earnest. Instead you would climb to the naked top of the mountain and there get your bearings, locate the road in the distance below and see the way to return to it. The pines became farther apart now. And now there was no path, there were only brambles and clods of loose earth that turned beneath your feet. You climbed, pulling yourself along by holding to the bushes until one bush came out by the roots and dropped you back into red thorns. You were only halfway to the top of the mountain, but already exhausted, and your legs were scratched and your blouse torn. You looked behind you. If you tried to go back the way you had come, you would fall down the steep slope and in the end merely be where you had been when you started. So you scrambled up and continued to climb, slowly elbowing your way through the yellow thistles. You were exhausted, Dragoness, but some force pushed you toward the summit. You thought you would never reach it. As your breath came panting, you cursed silently, cursed the mountain and yourself and especially Javier because he had let you go on alone. And still cursing, you finally reached the top. You fell on your face to the bleating of wild goats that were creatures from mythology put here to guard and protect the height. They looked at you and jumped off, moving down, among the rocks. In the distance the sea and islands that emerged from the sea like mountains and were severed from it by the haze in which they floated. Still farther, the coast of Anatolia stretching like the claw of a puma toward the island of Rhodes.

You could not see the road. The sun dropped lower and was concealed by the clouds that had drifted west from Asia Minor. You waited. Javier would simply have to look for you and find you. The people of the valley would tell him how to climb up to you. You sat on a rock and rubbed your arms where they had been scratched. With tinkling bells the black goats gathered around and looked at you. You thought how it would be to stay here forever, alone, cut off from the world forever, companioned by goats on the dusty summit of a mountain that had lost all contact with the land below, if indeed there had ever been any contact in the first place. You opened your eyes on solitude, awaking from a dream in which other beings existed, your parents and your brother, old schoolmates, old boyfriends, your husband, acquaintances, people known and unknown, living phantoms very busily delivering milk or driving taxis or selling razors or writing books or publishing newspapers or signing documents that declared war or peace … You sighed with a mixture of fear and relief. And there you were, you and the black goats, alone, staring at each other, high in the air on a coin of dust and stone, solitary, sufficient, eternal. Abruptly you jerked to your feet and ran among the jumping goats toward the distant promontory of the Turkish coast. Swift clouds cut the light, made it blaze, sifted it fine, and you ran down through the brush and thistles, down, holding your terror in your throat, unable to find a sound or a word that could express it, down with your eyes fixed on the distant shore, your eyes fixed because otherwise the drumming silence, the radiant darkness, the still wind would have devoured you, down in a descent without a path toward the Aegean.