A Change of Skin (35 page)

Isabel laughed and tickled Javier's ear.

On the plain stood the blackened ruins of old haciendas. Burned lifeless walls, fields that afterward had not been tilled again. High walls without windows, with open holes. Towers of dark brick. Old wooden gates that had passed through fire. Cane presses, abandoned, rusty. Abandoned high-wheeled carts. Burned-out stables, grain rooms, vague memories of patios. Empty fields. The towers of the old haciendas ruined, alone.

“The road to the right goes into Cholula,” said Javier.

*   *   *

Δ   Javier said: I won't pay attention to you. I'll go back to Isabel's room. No, I'll stop in the corridor and look through the keyhole. Darkness. I'll open the door gently, and you won't wake. You always succeed in disappointing me. And that isn't easy. You are lying there whispering, not asleep. You didn't deserve my worry. Now I'll be quiet not for you but for myself. I'll tiptoe barefoot across the room. Barefoot because I left my shoes in Isabel's room. I forgot them. Into the bathroom like a shadow in the night. I won't turn on the light. I'll find my pills and take one. I can tell them by their size. There, I'll swallow it. I don't want a stomach spasm and I know that one is coming. The pill will stop it. I'll sit on the john and wait. Think about something else. Just as I do when I make love. There are problems I must consider, solve, that's why they pay me. And Monday I'll be back in the office. I have to check those recommendations before they are sent to New York. I'll stress that high prices for imports must not be established unless simultaneously prices of raw materials are regulated. Request the Economic and Social Council to submit its findings to the General Assembly. Aaaahhh, there now. And Goodchild is scheming to be promoted over me. I'll have to go to New York to fight that. The Ministry of Foreign Relations will stand behind me, I think. They can't be allowed to discriminate against Latin Americans. Oh, no. Resolution … in my briefcase, Resolution Three-forty-one, section twelve. Let's have it, make it serve for something now and then. Aaaah, again. What day's today? Wednesday. Wednesday, not Holy Thursday. Wednesday? Yes, let it serve for something finally. No, it's Sunday. Only Sunday. When do they perform the Passion? Every goddamn day. Every day, hunger, then agony. Will there ever be a day that won't be the same? The day I die, maybe. We're all going to die. And Ligeia will be beside me, forcing me to understand that in loving all life we also loved all death. And at last I'll be able to laugh at her, stop listening to her, be alone with my fear that I may know I'm dying, be aware of it. Damn, I'm going to have to take another pill. Yes, to die consciously, certain of death in the moment of death. Before eternity can be discerned. Another wait, longer than this one. To be dead waiting for eternity to put in its appearance, which it refuses to do, to go on, dead, waiting. And Ligeia will have been right and death will simply be another life with the same old rules. I remember a Bosch painting in the museum in Rotterdam. Figures in paradise, but paradise has its own hell, a hell that in turn opens upon another abyss even blacker. No way out. No way. For in our imaginations are all possibilities, and our imaginations go where we go. Harvard. The river Charles in summer, swimming with sun-puffed condoms. And I in love with Ligeia. I thought you understood. It was there, then. Have you ever realized how I loved you, distant but at every moment present in my imagination? Nature represented, remembered, not nature itself, which was what you wanted to be. My Attic Stella, distant, motionless, frozen, beyond reach, complete, a woman who could contain and satisfy all my hunger for variety, my mental polygamy …

*   *   *

Δ   A world of ants was there and Javier wanted to give it his attention, Elizabeth, because although minuscule, it contained everything. He began to follow the ants and his path became the entire length of the island of Delos, for the ants had taken possession of it all. They carried miscroscopic bits of marble. That fascinated him. Little by little, a grain at a time, as the centuries had passed they had carried away the dwelling place of Hermes and the temple of Isis. And you didn't want to look at the ants, you stopped in the House of Masks, fascinated, in turn, by the floor mosaic of Bacchus. You interrupted and distracted Javier, forcing him to look at what you began to explain to him, as if it were not present before his eyes: the panther, at once grave and vital, one claw raised and an acanthus necklace, while the God astride him holds a lance of peace (ribbons and laurel) and a mirror. He rides there examining himself, narcissistically. Androgynous Dionysus, pearls at his throat, his chest covered, his belly naked, his hips broad, his robe rolled and falling down over the loins of the panther. The ants, you told me, streamed through the panther's yellow eye, gnawing it, blinding it, and Javier stared at them and followed them and did not notice the mosaic masks, the alternating devils and angels with false faces; he went out into the debris of walls, columns, streets, pediments, temples, porticoes, from which Apollo's light was to have been born. Ants and the wind and the sun and the thistles had built a second Delos that you explored without a guide. Open to the sky, Delos of the lost faces, eroded away if not beheaded. Pagan Isis in the center of the simplicity of a temple of two columns and two buttresses, a contrived simplicity that contrasted with the confused richness of the striated rocks and the yellow thistles above which rose the foreign sanctuary of the second Pantheon. Chameleons jumped among the rocks, brown as the stone itself, or stretched on scattered statues of Cleopatra and her husband Dioscurides, Artemis and her deer, Cybele, the great phallus of porous marble set erect above enormous testes. The water in the pools among the ruins and at the bottom of the cistern was stagnant. Javier observed details while you raised your eyes and searched for some totality that would encompass everything, some tactile, audible unity in this lifeless world that possesses no surviving or resurrected being in what you are accustomed to. Delos is not a museum. It is not the ancient preserved for modern appreciation. Nor is it a point of contrast that can sharpen the definitions of a life foreign to it, a past which, Javier wrote in his notebook, if it could be held by or included within the contemporary rat race might perhaps console us for certain of our lacks. Nor is it even a ruin that grows alongside the lives, indifferent to the old stone, of the descendants, fishermen and peasants, of the ancient faces; there are no descendants, no one lives on Delos, in Delos there is only Delos, not man, there is only what time and the wind and the sun and the ants have made of what Delos was. Nevertheless, Delos is not dead. And your eyes, Elizabeth-Ligeia, insisted that morning on grasping everything, fusing everything and carrying away a complete picture of the dry mountains and the bare rocks that here, as in all Greece, are the objects toward which the marble arms stretch to rescue, here beside the sun and the sea, from impenetrable sadness and distance. Ah, Dragoness, here again you insisted on creating a mirage. You, Dragoness, the young wife, are dreaming on top of Mount Cynthus. If Javier looks down to see the minute concrete reality, you break in and force him to look up, at the dream. Your fantasy obtrudes upon his observation and thought. You move side by side, his slacks touching your skirt, and you feel compelled, driven, to drag him down to that sufficient lie which offers us consolation and inflicts upon us paralysis …

“Did you believe that it was later? No, right there and then. There, there…”

… descending among the stones toward the distant and beautiful point of the island, you both approached it that hot September morning, naked and sweating beneath the burning sun, with the same fear. He held your hand and would have liked to find an answer for you, but your questions that afternoon when you returned to Mykonos on the Meltemi, rocked by an Aegean which had begun to lose summer's calm, the patched and mended canvas sails swelling, your unspoken questions would not permit him to answer.

“And just what overwhelming thought was it that came to you in the ruins of Delos, Ligeia, and made it possible for your make-believe to become mere bitching as we were eating in that restaurant on the dock?”

“Oh? You have a free moment when you can listen to me? You don't have to run scribble something down?”

You drank Turkish coffee together and Javier paid and you got up and walked in step toward the Matoyannia and the high whitewashed stairs with painted wooden railings that lead directly from the street to the quarries above.

“But you don't carry it off well, my love. When you pretend that your muse is sweating you, you don't really seem at all burdened. Or at least, not burdened with inspiration.”

Badly shaven men wearing white shirts and old caps, donkeys loaded with baskets: grapes, figs, tomatoes, pumpkins. You walked past the Alefcandra, where the white houses fall with mossy skirts into the gulf, showing their piles of gnawed green wood covered with barnacles like the hull of a ship.

“What you fail to pretend well is that you aren't pretending. It shows, Javier. Fake, fake. You're not so goddamn tired. You're just tired of me.”

Javier looked up toward the mountain. Then the church of Paraportiani, the sand castle of his boyhood, of the vacations Ofelia and Raúl had promised and never provided, a white sand castle with smooth corners caressed rather than built by two hands, left to crystallize in the sun, to be worn away by waves of hard white water.

“But maybe I'm wrong. Let's look at it another way. You've come to be afraid you may satiate me. Can that be it? Admit it, Javier. That's why you stay at your work so long. You…”

You pass into the Hagia Heleni. A golden belly, a cloister where you cannot breathe. Incense rises as high as the shining cross, the copper candelabra. Light enters from a very high, very small niche. The walls are covered with icons of dull gold. Javier is in front of you and your voice pursues him: “You don't want me to think that you…”

Fifty saints, apostles, virgins, martyrs, patriarchs, priests, each framed by a golden circle, all surrounding the virgin of St. Cyril. In her arms she holds a child who lifts her mantle with one hand and in some secret, even forbidden way seems to dominate her.

“That you're available…”

Javier hurries on down a white street past the statue of the heroine of 1821, Mado Mavrogennous. Your sandals, following, are noisy upon the cobblestones.

“But don't be afraid of exhausting our love, Javier. If you trust yours, then don't worry about the weakness of mine.”

You follow him down the little street, smudging your shoulders with white plaster. There are many small shrines. High chairs line each side. The whiteness blinds and tires Javier and he searches for some relief from it. Venders of cactus leaves and chestnuts. The millers who at twilight roll up the sails of their wind vanes. Children with cropped scabby heads. Old women, staring, with enormous balls of yarn. Sailors who sweat as they haul boats up the sand. Porters with their pants rolled to their knees and makeshift jute hoods.

“Do you think that we should give ourselves to each other only when everything is perfect? I understand, Javier, but you're wrong.”

You sit again at the same café facing the bay. Night falls. You order ouzo again and they bring you the white bottle.

“Please, Javier, I do understand. But our love exists to be used. I don't want only the rare perfect moments. Javier, Javier, don't hurt me. Love is made to be used, to be spent. Only by using it can we make it last. Only when it is gone will it renew itself. Give yourself to me, Javier. Only by giving will you receive.”

White, bled, and exhausted, are the guardian lions of the island of Delos alive? Javier was afraid to go down to them and so were you. The point is that they are there and they aren't there. They are there because their hind legs rest sunken forever in the stone pedestal, their forelegs are erect and secure, about to rush upon whoever would profane; they are there because of their long torsos and powerful ribs, their eroded heads, their open throats, their grieving eyes. But they are not there because your Island of Delos itself is not there, Elizabeth. It's a dream, a mirage, and everything it contains is a dream. It exists only for you. And you want your men, myself, Franz, Javier, to let themselves be dragged into the mirage, to be infected by it and participate in it. When you and Javier stopped before the lions, you dared to say that they held a mystery, a miracle, a surprise, and Javier said nothing. And that afternoon in Mykonos, on your way back, you pursued him like a rejected and bitter fury, baiting him …

“You wanted to defeat me, Ligeia. You've always wanted to defeat me, to pull me away from my purposes and down me and drown me in the rites of your sensuality. And I had wanted you because I needed a bridge between my world and the world of what is. You didn't give it to me. You gave me only an appetite that was always aroused, always waiting to be satisfied. You demanded that I attend to it, and to your dream built upon it, rather than to my own needs. Shut up now. Shut up, it's enough, enough! You will never understand how you have destroyed me.”

You burst out laughing.

In the first chapter of his
Pandora's Box,
Javier wrote: “A novel discloses what the world has within itself but has not yet discovered and may never discover.”

*   *   *

Δ   “It looks like scenery from a movie by Pedro Armendáriz and María Félix,” Isabel laughed. She pressed down harder on the accelerator.

You turned and looked back at your husband, seated beside Franz. “And I know all your defects.”

“The advantage in losing your innocence is that you also lose your prejudices,” Javier replied.

“Hey, we're going into Cholula now,” said Franz.

“Listen!” you cried, Dragoness. “Listen, I'm going to tell everything! Out with it, everything!” You looked at them, from one to the other, and found only patient, tolerant smiles. There was no need for Javier to lean forward, apparently to light your cigarette, and whisper, “I remember, too, Ligeia, but I don't talk.”