A Change of Skin (38 page)

Before the paralysis when you had used to say, “When we grow up, we'll go to the university together,” it had been understood that your dream, and his too, was that you would both leave the world of your parents behind and do things, simple, natural things, actions that would be entirely your own, not inherited, not bound to the past. And then he would laugh and accept it as if you were stating the only possibility. Now everything was again as it used to be when you were small and would hide in the closet and listen to your mother Becky looking for you, saying that she was afraid, please you should both of you come out and turn on the lights, except that now Jake was not in the closet with you but outside in the living room with Becky, you were alone and did not know who hid in this game, you or Jake and your mother, and it was you who had to ask them to come out and not frighten you.

“Who is he?”

“He's a Mexican. He has a scholarship and is going to spend the semester here.”

*   *   *

Δ   The newspaper again, Dragoness, for a final time. The story is datelined San Luis Potosí and I read it as I walk under the arcades of the Cholula plaza. At the Rancho de los Humos, which belongs to the Municipal District of Valles, a young woman, assisted by her husband and his friend, murdered her three newborn children and buried them. Her name is Delia Alvarado Olguín, her husband-accomplice is Emiliano Hernández Lucio, and the friend is one Gabriel García. Mere ignorance was the principal element in the triple infanticide. Poverty was an important consideration. Three babies had been born when only one was expected. Delia couldn't cut it. She asked her husband if he agreed and when he gave his consent, she suffocated the three babies and her husband and Gabriel García buried them. That was several days ago. The neighbors found it strange that a woman who had been about to give birth was from one day to the next no longer pregnant, yet there was no newborn child in the house, and they notified the police, who yesterday investigated. Delia and her husband and their friend are now in jail. The neighborhood is in a uproar, the hue and cry is that the unnatural mother must be killed. And she, Delia, if she had a chronicler beside her, would exclaim: “Receive me into the home of your different land, into your halls, and I will do away with your sterility, I will give you children of your seed, such enchantments do I know.” And the chronicler, tired, tempted to change his role to one of participation in the game, would reply sententiously: “Yes, my name will die with me, so come with me, be my woman. But you yourself must make your own escape from this land, for I must be innocent, innocent even in the eyes of strangers.” And Delia, before the act, would whisper: “Don't exile me. I am a woman and there is nothing more brutal. I will be brave. I will not doubt you. But a woman is only a woman and is born to weep.” And then the chorus of all the women of Los Humos, a chorus of black witches, would remember and screech, “You are man's fate, less than a shadow. You may kill but the dead will love you and you will love the dead. Your children have departed. They live no longer. Think about your children.” Delia would console herself quietly: “Pain itself is good. Oh, children, children, destroyed by the lasciviousness of a father. For it was your lust, your hunger for new loves, that killed them.”

So I finish reading and throw the newspaper aside, Elizabeth, Dragoness. I have read it from cover to cover, beginning to end, and now know all the news of this Sunday, April 11, 1965.

*   *   *

Δ   The world has surrendered to insistent sleep when you wake, Elizabeth, alone in the night in Cholula, alone in a hotel bedroom, awake remembering a nightmare you would like to go on dreaming. In the darkness you look for the body of your man but it is not there beside you. You put on your robe and run into the corridor to Franz's room at the same moment that Isabel moves away from Javier and he lies on her bed face down.

“So now there's nothing left, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“That was all that was missing.”

“When it's all over, anything that is left is surprising.”

“I tell you that if you think you're tired of me, then you better damn well let me go my way and you go yours.”

“Little girl. Silly little girl. Come here.”

“Leave me alone. Let me think about this. Don't touch me. Let me tell you straight to your face that whatever you have to do, Proffy, you have to do with your bourgeois family and your stupid drugs and your busy little prick and your sinecure with the United Nations, with your violence, with everything else you are. Sure, anything can be used for a book. But you've got it backwards. You don't use everything for writing. You use it for doing nothing. So split, seagulls, split.”

“And my indifference to everything? The nothingness? The no one?”

“You mean your self-centered narcissism, that's all. You don't want to risk the knockout, that's all. Listen, Javier, the point is that my generation was born psychoanalyzed while yours hasn't even made an appointment to see the doctor yet. You want me to tell you something? For me there's no waiting. Do you understand that? No waiting! If I want something, I take it, do it, or drop it. You've really made me laugh, you know. Courting me a whole year, little by little, always strictly by the old-fashioned rules. You behaved with me like a Freddy Ainsworth-Hill.
Ay,
those pretty formalities. The long preparation. The holy conventions to be observed before the final beginning lay. Well, please yourself, Prof, but it's top much for me. Neither of us has to render his account to anyone. So bang, you go your way and I'll go mine. Goodbye, sayonara, ciao. As a friend of mine puts it, rape unto others as they would rape unto you.”

“Little girl, little girl. Let me tell you a story, so you'll understand something. You publish a book and immediately they raise you high. You've given Mexican literature its new and ordained direction. You're the greatest. You're king of them all. You're Big Shit. Do you know why? So that by and by they can cut your balls off next to your neck. They build you up first, so they can chop you down later. They make you into a demi-god so that when they castrate you they can feel they've done something. And when they do castrate you, it's all over.
Ya,
the end, that's it, period. You think I can't speak your language, little nut? I know your language and I know more. I know the crazy logic of this country. If you fall on your ass here, it's fuck you, friend, fuck you. But if you do something, it's the same thing. And you never expect that. It takes you by surprise. You expect to be crushed if you fail, but not to be murdered because you succeed. But that's Mexico. If you dare to go on living, you're the failure of failures. If you die in time, you've got it made. Do you understand me, Isabel? That's our little Mexico. And that's all our little Mexico is. The only country in the world that hasn't killed its gods. Everyone else, including the chicken-shit Christians wherever you find them, kills his gods so he can worship them. But here they're still on the loose, laughing, mocking, setting everything upside down, making national heroes of the most blatant traitors, making Robin Hoods of pickpockets. Oh, I could tell you about it. But you know already.”

“Proffy, I give up trying to understand you. It's like all that complicated nothing you wrote about the Indians, in your little notebook. So what? Who cares about the Indians? I certainly don't. Do you think I give a damn about that stupid Pepsicoatl? I'm tight, Proffy, nothing can shake me up. Nothing, do you get that? What you just did to me, for example. For you it was a great experience. But for me, I knew it already, even though it was the first time. I'm ready … ready for everything, even when it takes me by surprise. And there you have it. That's the difference between you and your kind and me and my kind. Don't worry, Javier, I won't tie you down. You can stop shaking. Relax. I'm not looking for a husband. All I'm looking for is orgasms. How's that?”

“May God bless you, Isabel.”

“You're impulsive, my love. That's what you are. Impulsive.”

“Yes, I may be impulsive. And you, aren't you tired of standing there humped like a camel?”

“Leave me alone. It still burns. For Christ's sake, Javier, stop playing games. If you're a son of the age of Don Porfirio and Queen Victoria, that's what you are, don't you understand? Please, stop fooling yourself. Do you think I don't know you? Why did you feed me that line about working in television? Do girls fall for it? You tell them you'll make them stars? Are you ashamed of the work you really do? God, what mediocrity! God, what a drag you are! No, Javier. No, no, stay still. Javier, Javier, not that way…”

It seems that sometimes one has to think about something that has nothing to do with the present, in order to prolong the present. Javier placed his hands on your waist and closed his eyes. When you noticed, Isabel, you were already saying:

“Second-rate, Javier. You're just second-rate. They all say so. The whole faculty, the students.”

Javier was silent and you sighed with relief, Pussycat.

“What's wrong, Isabel?”

“It burns,
tú.
”

*   *   *

Δ   You parked your brother under a tree and he smiled and said that you could leave him there for a while. He wanted to read. You and Javier walked away down one of the paths in Central Park. It was cold, the trees were bare. You took Javier's arm to stop for a moment and look back at Jake in his wheelchair. He waved one hand to you and with the other pulled up the zipper of his Scotch-plaid jacket. The cold had reddened his face, his eyes were dark and deep-set, his black hair was curly. He had taken after Gershon, he was clearly a Jew, while you, Elizabeth, were falsely Jewish, a blonde. Jake looked small and helpless and somber in the distance. He began to read and you and Javier walked on holding hands and you invited him to come to your home that evening and listen to records, you had a collection of Kay Kyser that he would enjoy, and afterward you could go to a movie. New York was filled with those signs:
Garbo loves Taylor.
You began to talk about the movies, telling him that you went two or three times a week and one of the best scenes you had ever seen was the one where James Cagney pushed a grapefruit in the face of Mae Clarke, a good way to begin the day, eh? Both of them in pajamas. You talked about love, adventure, violence in the movies, about Clark Gable on the deck of the
Bounty
challenging malevolent Charles Laughton, about Errol Flynn as Captain Blood dueling on a tropical beach with that English villain, Basil Rathbone, who ended up cut through by Blood's sword and tossed aside on the sand, his face washed by waves. You told Javier that you wanted him to teach you many things. Everything, for you knew nothing except what you had learned in the movies and you didn't want to spend your time with him telling each other “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” or repeating over and over “Lizzie loves Javier.” You stopped and the noises were the accustomed ones, the elevated in the distance, dry twigs under your feet, muffled traffic, the laughter of some girls who were singing very far away. And maybe, you weren't sure, the voice of a radio, the music of a record player. Then you were racing back along the path with a look of disbelief on your face, your hands to your mouth as if to stifle a scream, your shawl and heavy brown coat flying, Javier right behind you unable yet to see what you saw: Jake's wheelchair whirling toward the stone bridge pushed by black-skinned hands while Jake tried to get up, get out, and looked all around for you and your boyfriend, the wheels sliding across wet grass and mud, shouts, “Kike Christ-killer, Christ-killer,” shouts and laughter, out of sight beneath the bridge, the sound of baseball bats against flesh and metal, shouts of triumph, then the swift flight of the Negro youths, six, eight, nine, a whole gang of them who ran away as hard as they could without looking back, leather jackets, wool caps, the book lying on the path. And there, under the bridge, lying beside his overturned and smashed wheelchair in a stink of urine and sodden newspaper, Jake with his legs in their leather and steel braces raised on one of the wheels. His face white. His mouth open. His skull misshapen and bleeding from the blows of the bats. Cards with the faces of Indian chiefs strewn around him. He had died with his arms raised helplessly to protect his head. He had died at thirteen, captured, defeated. And you, Elizabeth, knelt in the water beside him and touched his red lips.

*   *   *

Δ   You found Franz, Dragoness, outside Isabel's door.

“I've been looking for you.”

Franz raised his finger to his lips. You put your arms around his neck and hugged him and did not try to listen too, because inside you a creeping snail was telling you softly about your dream and then as you stood there embracing Franz you saw the white empty corridors of an insane asylum, the white and chrome rooms of a hospital, nor did you think for a moment that Franz might have a dream very like yours, that he might be seeing also a world of black tiles covered by a cold tangle of low twisted trees growing over seventy-eight thousand corpses, the dead of seven centuries gathered layer upon layer in Prague's Jewish Cemetery under the carved symbols: Israel's clusters of grapes, Levi's sacred cup, Cohen's open and joined hands; and stones are at the corners of the graves because these dead are in the desert and the wind of Exodus must not be allowed to uproot them and carry them away converted into sand; no, they must become the stone and moss of centuries, and Franz looked among the black stones for a name, Rissenfeld, Lederova, Waldstein, Schön, Maher … But he found only the names of the places on the monument raised at the entrance to the cemetery:

Belsec

Majdanek

Flossenburg

Lodz

Stutthof

Ravensbrück

Riga

Monovice