A Change of Skin (32 page)

Asphalt was beneath your feet again. You stopped running and walked slowly, kicking at little pebbles, your arms hugging your chest. The road was narrow, winding. Much sooner than you expected, the roadside refreshment stand appeared and there was Javier seated beneath the naked arbor drinking wine. He saw you on the road and came to meet you. You watched him run toward you: his black hair, his corduroy pants, his turtle-neck sweater. You embraced him. He told you that the police in the valley had merely laughed when you did not appear. It happened often that someone was delayed, but it had never yet happened that anyone had been lost very long in the Valley of the Butterflies. You would show up by and by, frightened perhaps but not the worst for it. You hugged Javier and kissed his neck. Let's go straight back to Falaraki, you said. You were sleepy and tired, you wanted to lie down.

“What's happened to Rudy?”

“The German?”

“Yes.” You rubbed cream on the sunburned points of your cheekbones.

Javier stared at the pebbled shore of Rhodes, thronged with vacationers this year of Munich and the Anschluss.

“Rudy is dead,” said Javier. “His wife drowned him while they were swimming. The waiter told me this morning. I thought you knew.”

*   *   *

Δ   Franz finished his beer in a gulp. He paid and the four of you left the restaurant without saying goodbye to the owner.

“Let's go straight on to Cholula,” you suggested. “There's no reason to stop in Cuautla.”

“I'm tired of driving,” said Franz.

“Let me take over,” Isabel cried. Franz got in back beside Javier, and Isabel sat behind the wheel.

Isabel takes over, all right. She starts the car and drives off and with one movement of her slender arm reaches toward the radio and turns it on and finds the station that she knows and prefers. Their voices pound out at you, the minstrels, bards, heralds of the new age, the androgynous pages of the monarchic republic, of the democratic elite, who pass up and down from the docks in Liverpool with the poise of the courtier who plays the lute in Giorgione's country concert. Their hair worn long in the style of Venetians painted by Giovanni Bellini, their lips fixed in the ironic smile of Mantegna's most amusing St. George, a knight whose graceful armor seems fitter for the conquest of the ladies who await him in the golden palace in the Paduan background than for battle with the green stage-prop dragon that lies at his feet less pagan and less diabolic than the saint himself, now an unarmed saint whose broken lance can serve only to spear the fruit, limes, pears, cherries, pomegranates, that cluster around the frame. As distant as Caesars, as close as Satans, as innocent as angels, they sing

I love you because you tell me things I want to know

and I go on reading my newspaper as I am driven along the superhighway from Mexico City to Puebla. It is an odd sort of newspaper, Dragoness, one I don't entirely trust, not even when the byline lists someone so respectable as Jacob von Königshofen. His dispatch informs me that in this year of 1349 the worst plague in memory is raging; death runs from one end of the world to the other on both sides of the Mediterranean and is even more terrible for the Moors than for the Christians. In some regions the entire populace is dead, there are no survivors. Full-laden ships have been found drifting at sea with dead crews. Half of Marseilles has perished, the bishop and all his priests, while the toll in other cities and kingdoms defies description. The Pope, in Avignon, has adjourned his Court, has forbidden strangers to come near him, has ordered that a fire be kept blazing before him night and day. Nor can the sages and physicians say more than it is God's good will, and that it will not cease until it runs its course.

You sit beside St. Isabel, Dragoness, with your eyes closed while the Volkswagen passes Cuautla, constantly accelerating

There's a place where I can go

swerving around slower cars without blowing the horn, hitting eighty kilometers an hour, then ninety, then a hundred and ten while chickens leap out of the way with flying feathers and bloody-eyed dogs howl and the car races for a moment along the rough shoulder and raises a cloud of dust and shakes the walls of straw-roofed adobe huts and a boy shouts from behind a fence of cactus and Isabel steers with one hand and with the other adjusts the radio, turning the volume up

In my mind there's no sorrow,

Don't you know that it's so?

the voices of the young men who like the painted figures of Luca Signorelli garb themselves with testicular elegance and, releasing the constructive aspects of their spirits of destruction, create around them a world as vast, rich, confused, free, ordered as a canvas by Uccello, as piously demonic as one by the Bosch who pays the price of admission to the rites of Satan. And you have read, Dragoness, and you, Isabel, know intuitively, that no one has clearer visions of God than those of the Devil. That is precisely why he stands so aloof from God; he is God's other face and like Him is a succession of contraries, a permanent fusion of antitheses:

What am I supposed to do?

Give back your ring to me

And I will set you free:

Go with him

and so they sing, setting us free from all the false and murderous dualisms upon which has been built the civilization of the judges, the priests, the philosophers, the artists and hangmen and merchants, and Plato dies drowning, surrendering, entangled in their long hair, mesmerized by their drowning voices, trampled upon by the pound of their rhythm as the Beatles, liberated, leap high to their heaven and slowly float down again, like Antheus, to the new earth where there are neither men nor women, good nor evil, body nor spirit, substance nor extension, essence nor accident; where there is only the dance and the rite, the fusion and the flowering mask of Arcimboldi which grows continually around everything and is the being and the nothingness of everything, its own moment seen from a helicopter that comprises the totality, the unity, in which die the old schizophrenias of the Greco-Christian-Judaeo-Protestant-Marxist-industrial dualism

There'll be no sad tomorrow

Don't you know that it's so …

and this summer, the newspaper goes on, the plague has reached Strasbourg, where it is estimated that sixteen thousand souls have expired. All over the world, Jews have been charged with causing the plague, they have been cursed, they have been accused of poisoning wells and springs and in Berne and Zofingen a number of them, put to torture, admitted their crime and it was discovered that the wells they mentioned had indeed been poisoned. So from the Mediterranean to Germany, though not in Avignon, where the Pope protects them, Jews have been burned at the stake, and in Basel townsmen have marched on the Council and forced them to swear not to admit any Jew into the city for the next two hundred years. The bishop of Strasbourg, the feudal lords of Alsatia, and representatives of the three cities have gathered in Benfeld and questioned the deputies from Strasbourg about the fate of the Jewish population of that city. The deputies replied that they knew of no crime with which the Jews should be charged. Then why, they were asked, had they covered the city's wells? Thus a clamor of indignation rose against the deputies from Strasbourg and in the end the Bishop and the lords of the Imperial Cities agreed to annihilate their Jews. Thereupon Jews were burned in the cities, and when they were merely expelled, the peasants in the countryside captured them, drowned many, put others to death by stabbing. It was on Saturday, St. Valentine's day, that the Jews of Strasbourg were burned on a great wooden platform in their cemetery. Two thousand of them. Those who asked to be baptized were permitted to live. Many children were removed from the pyre and baptized against their parents' wishes. And in this way were burned the Jews in Strasbourg and in all the cities of the Rhine, whether Imperial Cities or free cities. In some places they were formally tried, in others not. In some cities, toward the end, they set fire to their own homes and died in flames they had started themselves. It was generally ordered that their property be expropriated and the promissory notes they held made void, and at Strasbourg it was decreed that no Jew be allowed within the city for the next hundred years, but before twenty years had passed, the Council and magistrates reversed this decision, and in the year of our Lord 1368, the Jews returned.

It's been a hard day's night

And afterward, Dragoness, one had to dance on as if nothing had happened, forget forget forget so that it would not happen again, cast up the sum of agony afresh, though to do so might be all but impossible, and recover the Renaissance that had been made and stolen by Vico and Calvin and Descartes, the Renaissance that ended swamped by its rationality and its history, its good, evil, predestination, Natural Man, its Faustian activism and its will to the tragic, that had ended incinerated in the ovens of Auschwitz and on the leveled plain of Hiroshima, while now the innocent cynics sing

You can't buy me love

and the women who worship them attire themselves from time to time in the cardinals' hats and the black and red garments of the Constable of Bourgogne and the Bishop of Beauvais and the she-Pope Joan, cover themselves with the Gothic cloths which were used in the coronation of the kings of Hungary and are preserved among the treasures of Bamberg and Ratisbon and resurrected from the
Livre des Métiers
of Etienne Boileau; the rain capes of the Passion of St. Bertrand de Comminges are worn by the Dianan nymphs who dance in the discothèques of New York and Paris and London, the saddles of the Apocalypse at the cathedral of Angers shake to the rhythms of freed slaves in every whiskey-à-go-go, and in the new Missa Luba Hecate, dressed like Eleanor of Castile, and angular Circe, pale as Our Lady the Virgin of Beaune, mix the ashes of Tournai and Valenciennes with the rotten vegetation of Gabon and Nigeria while shaking to the throb of John Henry and King Oliver and Johnny Dodds, Billie Holliday, Satchmo, Cannonball Adderley:

Hesitatin' Mama, hesitatin' blues

Tell me how long do I have to wait,

and the new
pervigilium veneris
is officiated by the virgin witches who have betrothed themselves to the angelic Satan and forever mock the
jus primae noctis
while charming the Priapus-Bacchus-Sabatius, the kid on St. John's day with the short chin whiskers and thick lips and tight pants and cowboy boots and a large rowdy court of relatives, wolves, elves, gnomes, white cats, legless fat dogs, ox-headed hounds, black rabbits, who celebrate the Black Mass of the great synthesis, the great game of opposites outlawed by the judge called rationality and the hangman called morality and the jailer called history, and clamor to God that He release His thunderbolt, the punishment of sins and hells that no longer exist, and the new Sibyl and the new Pan profane the idols of twenty-five centuries of lying prejudices, terrors, excuses, and become themselves the altars—of service and sacrifice—in the garden—remembered and promised—and there begin the new dance of St. Vitus, the ballet of the existential revolution that digests everything and consecrates and sacrifices to the human purpose everything, in its pulse, its fleeting eternal validity

She's got the devil in her heart,

and so, Dragoness, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and you, Isabel, for I am talking to you too, to both of you because this Mass must be celebrated first by a woman: all Masses begin with an Introit, just as do the life of every woman and the lives of the men who are born of women; you, Isabel, will discover only what you accept and you must accept everything. And having begun with the Introit, we end with piety before the Anointed Priapus, before Christ-Bacchus who at the very end does not demand the love of the God who abandoned him but the consolation of the witch, Mary wise in lore of potions and sleep-inducing herbs: Devil Lady, Green Virgin, Rosemary, Angels' Ass, Burning Hair, Vinegar Woman, White Princess, Juanita, Marijuana, and also the drugs that make desire and vitality live again, drugs that bear the names of women too but are children of the totemic snakes of Mexico and Africa and the witches of Oaxaca and the Peruvian Highland and the black Congo who go into the white world with their rhythms and mushrooms and songs and magic in order to become part of the New Renaissance, the renaissance of the Only Faith, that of body and soul fused upon the cinder ruins of a Dark Age of bankers and munitions makers and Talmudic commissars and Pentagonic marines, all the planners and orators of the crusades for collective death and individual degradation. And Isabel sings with the radio

Anytime atall, anytime atall,

and suddenly closes her eyes and hits the brakes and the car rocks, skids, finally stops just short of a plaster-flaking adobe wall in front of which a child of two is rolling over and over with his scabies-ridden pup, crying, laughing, and you, Elizabeth, screamed as if you had given birth and opened the door and ran to the child and snatched him up in your arms, crying, “I can't stand it, I can't stand it any longer!” by which you meant the terror, not just the terror of Isabel's lunatic driving and the frightened baby but the terror of terror itself, and the child became quiet in your arms, as if he recognized you, and you lifted him and held him high, as if you were displaying him to the sun, while Isabel sat behind the wheel with her eyes squinted shut and her clenched hands wet with sweat, and Javier watched you and Franz calmly smoked his cigarette.

*   *   *

Δ   “All right, Javier, if you're there, turn the lights on. I'm tired and I want to lie down. Don't you hear me? I think that maybe you aren't there, or you don't want to hear me. You never want to hear the truth, do you? What really happened, instead of your pretty dream. Well, let's see, when was it? A year ago … eighteen months? I had already dressed and you were shaving and you told me to go on, you would join me later, and you told me the address and I still remember it: 1270 Sierra Paracaíma, the party would begin at ten. Who was giving it? Oh, that didn't matter. We wouldn't know anyone. But because of your work, it was important for us to be there. I left you. At ten exactly I was there, and as you had predicted, they were all strangers. All except Vasco. You remember him, Javier. Vasco Montero, who came back from Spain. At the party he wasn't the same Vasco. Fifteen years had passed and he had aged. I hardly recognized him.”