A Change of Skin (33 page)

And you see, more real now through the wall of flabby flesh and wrinkled skin, the form of the man who was, the man who has forgotten his own geometry. His jawline, once so sharp and lean, always brown from the sun, the foundation for the angularity of his nose and mouth, had come apart, swollen up, degenerated into carefully shaven floury bags. Vasco Montero, grown old.

“Vasco didn't greet me. I don't know whether or not he recognized me. But yes, he must have, for I've hardly changed. Have I, Javier? I've been careful to stay trim. Pictures don't lie. The fashions have changed, clothes and hair, but I haven't, not an inch or a pound, I look exactly as I did twenty years ago. But maybe he didn't recognize me. Maybe he saw me and saw that I hadn't come apart, as he had, and couldn't believe it, thought I had to be someone else, not myself. Javier, how do people see us? As we see them? It would be ridiculous to live fifteen years and then be recognized. For time passes, I've lived with myself and I know I am different, even though I don't look different. Why did Vasco stare at me?

“We went in for dinner and you still hadn't arrived. I went in alone, holding my bag in my hands. Vasco had disappeared and I didn't dare go look for him. The buffet was served on a long table in front of a window that looked out on the lighted garden. I took a plate and filled it, the usual things … you know, chicken cooked with almonds, ravioli, baked ham and pineapple. No one said a word to me. No one knew me. I went back to the living room and sat on a taboret. I recognized a few faces. The faces that one sees on the society pages, the people who give teas, receive showers, go sailing at Acapulco. Jaime Ceballos and his wife, the daughter of the banker … Régules, I think; they picked out the records for the changer and turned the lights down. Pedro Caseaux, the polo player, was there with an absolutely silent girl on his arm. Charlotte García, the famous party giver of the international set. And with her, her eternal Bobó. Both as aged as mummies, withered and yellow, like Lotte Lenya with Peter Lorre. Our host turned out to be Reynaldo Padilla, who inherited the empire of old Artemio Cruz. You remember Artemio Cruz, I know. He died six or seven years ago and the newspapers wrote about him for a month afterward. We read those eulogies and died laughing. He was simply an old millionaire, but you would have thought he was a great national hero. I sat alone on the taboret and ate my chicken and understood that you had sent me alone simply because you knew I would know no one at that party and could talk with no one and would have nothing to do except think about you, tell myself that however I might feel about you sometimes, to have you was good, at least it kept away the loneliness of this country, this city where even after so many years I was still a foreigner, an outsider isolated from these silly people who all knew each other and talked about the same silly things, their servants, their children, their priests. I was annoyed by their damned rudeness, leaving me alone, no one walking over to talk with me, to ask me who I was and where I was from, why they had never seen me in their clubs or at their beach houses. I tried to laugh at them. At their stupid serene confidence that they were the incarnate belly buttons of the entire world, the center of everything. I told myself that maybe I had changed more than I knew and that was why Vasco hadn't spoken. And then, just as I was beginning to feel really out of it, you arrived. I noticed suddenly that I was sitting in darkness and that people were dancing and Judy Garland was singing
Alone.
You stretched your hand to me in the darkness and led me out to dance too, touching me as if we were meeting for the first time, as if this were our first evening together and I was once again the unknown to you, the unrevealed, a girl to be discovered and conquered. I let you pretend whatever you wanted to pretend, let myself be caressed and returned the caresses because they came from you, from Javier, the man I had loved and lived with so long. I declined to pretend too, my love. I could tell that you were touching me as if it were for the first time and that disgusted me and made me shiver. Yet I gave in and played along because it was you and you were mine and I had given up everything for you, had left my home and my country to follow you, Javier, and I returned your caresses precisely because you were familiar, known, not a stranger, and now in your arms I was feeling as I had used to feel, that everything had worked out all right, that though I had given up much, I had gained just the same because I had gained you and you were worth everything. That was what I was feeling and it was all I wanted to feel, that confidence and happiness again. The party was horrible, but I had you. And for you it was just as horrible, but you had a new woman in your arms, a new woman to discover as we danced together in the darkness. Oh, I understood. I knew that you were touching me because you had made me cease to be Elizabeth Jonas, born in New York forty-two years ago, and had transformed me into an adventure. And how you touched me, Javier! Your hands were on my thighs, your cheek rubbed against mine, you nibbled at my hair, felt my breasts beneath the sleeveless dress; oh, you were great, the cock of the roost in action, the seducer of virgins, the answer to every woman's dream, out with a new lay while Ligeia sat at home in the apartment with a best-seller in her lap. Shit, Javier. Just shit. And you were telling yourself that you were risking everything, while I, at home alone, played it always safe, always secure. As if any woman is ever safe. I'd rather go into battle a thousand times than give birth once, that's how safe it is. And when will it be possible to be a woman and yet not feel that fear? No, I don't mean that. I take it back. I have to hang on to you. Yes. I put my arms around you and hold to you, for you're all I have, I have no home, no country, no parents, no brother, just you. That's why I let myself play your game. Sure, I'll drink with you, dance with you, let you dream I'm anyone you please, it's all right. I'll try to guess each move fast enough to keep up with you, try to remember the scene, the lines, the business, a scene that after all we have played a hundred times before. That's been our whole life together, hasn't it? And I chose it, didn't I, freely, voluntarily? Ha, ha, ha. It's our very life, Javier. That's why we read so much, you and I.”

You read as actors reading scripts, Elizabeth, to find, written by others, words and actions you can build your days of. And on that night at the party, you made up the answers as you went along, followed the path he hinted at: a path that led to a love that without pride would be lost because pride, impeding it, forced it into being. That led to a man who could be the accomplice of your passion but not your intelligence, a man Javier would never know. The real stranger in this game he forced upon you was that unknown lover, not you. He himself, in the role he was acting, was the stranger, and you played your responding part because you wanted the promised reward: that he would take you afterward and fuck you as he hadn't for a long time, as if you were indeed a new woman and he a new man, and it wouldn't matter by whose name he called you as you made love, all that would matter would be the passion you had found together again after so long, had found through different names and different faces but the same pulsing flesh …

“So I said to you, silently at first, Let's go now, to the apartment. Quick, quick, let's go to your apartment, the one I do not know tonight though I know it better than the mirror there knows my face, my hands have touched and remember every inch, every angle, every surface. I've done my part. I waited for him, I let him make believe about me. And now nothing matters except to lie beneath him, beneath you, as quickly as I can. You can call me any name you want. That doesn't matter. Nothing matters except…”

You embraced him in the taxi, Dragoness. You kissed up his body, his chest, his neck, his cheek, his ear, his eyes, finally his lips. Then a long and silent kiss that lasted blocks. Every movement you made I could see in the rear-view mirror.

“We kissed in the taxi and I stopped hearing, seeing, I merely felt. I was hot, Javier, as hot as I have ever been in my life. I could hardly wait, control myself. Then the cab driver said something. I don't remember what. Whatever it was, it broke everything apart.”

The cab passed the circle at Rin and Niza without turning off. It continued on down to the Caballito, then down Avenida Juárez. Javier told me to stop at the corner in front of Bellas Artes.

“You weren't going to take me to the apartment. Your apartment, ours, whose didn't matter, just so it had a bed. Everything would be wasted. I didn't want to leave the cab. I still wanted to have you naked on top of me, that was all I wanted. To strip off my stupid dress and the garters and the stockings, which were all I was wearing under it, and be fucked, fucked, fucked. But you wouldn't let that happen. You took me by the wrist and made me get out. We walked along a deserted street. I following, with the passion I had felt hotter and stronger than for years slowly draining away. What did you want now? What new game was this, or what part of what old game? Earlier in the evening you told me that you hadn't used up all your suprises. What did that matter? I didn't want to be surprised. I wanted the habitual. The old habit when it had been new, before it became old and a habit. The love we had made in the beginning.”

That was what you told me later that evening, Dragoness. I remember well. Javier lying passed out in the living room. I with my candle cooking your papaya for you. And by the way, I didn't notice you cooled off so much then.

“We stopped in front of a little joint. Somewhere near the Plaza Garibaldi. I went into a cave filled with smoke, following you, a little hole that stank of piss and beer. What in God's name could you want there? Two tequilas. Then two more. And words, words, words. And then to toss pumpkin seeds at the face of the mariachi musician who was blowing the trumpet. You threw the seeds at him, right in his face, and waited motionless while he walked toward us, fat, dark-skinned, and put down his instrument and took off his hat and grabbed you by the lapels and began to beat you, there in front of all of them…”

Muscular and graceful as a tiger? Come off it. I saw him too. Fat-bellied, flabby, less than nothing, his cheeks powerful from blowing the trumpet so many years, for the rest less than nothing. His mustache curled around his mouth.

“They made a circle around us and laughed and yelled.”

They were coaching from the corner, Dragoness, that's all. Give it to him, the son of a bitch, smash him, send him to the Red Cross, gouge his eyes, slice his balls, shiv him, put him in his coffin, choke him, hang him by his horn, stomp him, cold-cock him. Up his ass for the shit we've had to swallow, for the right you are sir and the just as you say sir, the step this way ma'm, the thank you for nothing, not a goddamn thing, for the fat-assed queers on the prowl. Kill him. Kill him!

“I couldn't move. I understood that I was there to be your witness, to see you with blood running from your nose and gums. They kicked the air out of you and you doubled up. Your face began to look battered. Your hair came down over your forehead. Your eyes were closed. Tears were pouring down your cheeks.”

He fell to the floor amid the butts, the upset cuspidors, the bottle caps. And you had to watch, to take it all in. Before he would make love to you, you had to know him this way. A ruin to be pitied, not slept with, Dragoness. And you had to accept him so. Pick him up from the floor and lead him out into the cold dawn on Aquiles Serdán. Wipe him off, gently, with your handkerchief. That was what he had wanted.

“These people don't understand me, Ligeia. I've said it before and it's true, in Mexico a man can't do anything. They can't criticize, they can't appreciate, there are no standards, there is no certainty, everything is liking or disliking, mere feeling. And unlike Vasco Montero, I don't own a chapel. Look. Look what they say about the book here.”

The little book bound in manila paper that took its place on the lowest shelf of the bookcase and there gathered dust. He did not publish again.

“Come on, Javier. Let's go home now.”

Home in the same taxi that had brought you. The driver had waited.

“Shit, Javier. Shit.”

You got out of bed and left the room without turning on the light and walked along the hotel corridor to Franz's room.

*   *   *

Δ   “‘Paul traveled, but only to cities where Jews lived or Jewish culture was known, for only there could they understand his teaching. And after the dispersion of the year 70, a Jew had to buy the right to live in Gentile communities. That was how the German Judengasse formed, the Portuguese judiaria, the Provençal carriera, the French juiverie. The Church forbade Christians to engage in commerce. But not the Hebrews. Recently arrived, free of local customs, they had a point of view the local people lacked, and could see and seize opportunities the latter were blind to. The Council of Ravenna decreed that all Jews must wear a wheel cut of yellow cloth … so they could be distinguished from Christians. The Jews gathered in the Italian borghetto were the first bourgeoisie. The last ghetto in Western Europe was the
serraglio degli ebrei
or
saeptum Hebraicum
in Rome; it came to an end in 1885.'”

Professor Maher closed his book.

“Pivo! Pivo!” he shouted.

Franz and Hanna laughed. Kamilla was already at the door, plump and smiling, with the beer on a tray. She entered immediately and served their glasses. The room, Maher's studio, smelled of old muslin and waxed stone. A large house, five stories high, entered through the broad arcade in front of the plaza; a varnished cedar gate, then up the stairs to Professor Maher's quarters, weakly illuminated by winter light that came through honey-colored stained panes the leaded dividers of which formed, curiously, the head of Jan Hus.

They laughed and drank and the conversation followed the course that had been established the first time Hanna had brought Franz there: music versus architecture. Franz's simple idea was that the new in architecture is not something that just happens but that it results, in the first place, from the fact that the people who live in buildings change. Because people change, so must architecture, which must be at the service of valid human needs, not of some fixed idea about what is and is not monumental, or of models handed down from the past, or of the spirit of decorativeness. Maher, on the contrary, thought precisely in terms of models from the past: if a building of the twentieth century did not attain the total integration and eternality of the cathedral of St. Vitus, it was not worth the raising. For Maher, the architect would always be the medieval master-builder surrounded by his apprentices and assistants. Franz pointed out that unfortunately this could no longer be. If Gropius was right about anything, he was dead right in warning that today the architect had been abandoned by the craftsmen, they had vanished into industry; today the architect had to compete with scientists, engineers, industrial researchers, and labor as merely one more wheel in a collective undertaking in which, nevertheless, his role was to provide that tension between reality and illusion which can make a building be at the same time both a work of art and a functional object. Maher, as Hanna smiled, became impatient with such theorizing and grunted that certainly architecture might confuse its function with that of mere utilitarianism, for it was, after all, an art of the concrete. For himself, he would simply go on building and visiting Gothic cathedrals in his imagination, abstract and musical. He wiped the foam from his lips and added, Well, yes, Franz might be right. All abstract beauty probably
was
born of something very concrete, of the tension the young man referred to.