A Change of Skin (40 page)

“No, Daddy. No thanks.”

You got up and walked out of the smell of smoke and grease and chocolate and coffee and a red-headed sailor passed looking in all directions, freckled, his canvas ditty bag in his hands, obviously lost, and an old man with a faded felt hat that came down over his ears was led along by a young woman who looked like him, the same damp eyes and high cheekbones, the same pointed trembling nose. She stopped and tried to straighten the black band of his hat and they walked toward the train platforms.

“Have you been to see your mother?” asked Gershon.

“No. Have you?”

Gershon smiled and adjusted his suspenders. “No, no, not me. I trust you to go see her once in a while. I leave it to you.”

You walked on, your heads down.

“It takes a weight off my shoulders knowing that you go there once in a while. And it isn't like I like you should see that place.”

Two girls leaned against an iron railing and played with their hands joined, swinging their hands without looking at each other, with growing nervous giggling that finally shook them into silence. One of them raised a hand to her mouth. The other covered her face with both hands. They joined arms again and leaned against the iron railing without looking at anything.

“Maybe one day we ought to go together,” you said.

Gershon shook his head, not once but several times.

“You mean it's no use?”

“You know it's no use, Lizzie. The doctor told me the last time I went. Not even me she recognizes.”

“Do you know what she does?”

“No, I don't know anything.”

“I do.”

“What does she do?”

“She says over and over again the same things she said that afternoon.”

“Yes, yes.”

Boys in white shirts stood arms on each other's shoulders at the newsstand kiosk and thumbed cowboy magazines and magazines with pictures of nude males. They swelled their biceps and wrestled without laughing.

You and Gershon went down the iron stairs.

“Careful, Lizzie. Don't slip in your heels.”

The Negro porters gathered at the bottom of the steps were laughing. You stopped and said, “Excuse me,” to pass through. One of them put on his red cap and said something vulgar as you went past holding your skirt in with your hands and Gershon stopped and said, “Dirty niggers,” and showed them the badge that he wore pinned to the lining of his coat. The Negro put his hand to his cap and grinned, “Sorry, capt'n,” and you walked along the deserted platform beside the public rest rooms.

“I have to go, Daddy.”

“Why? Come in and visit with me a little.”

“I have to study for an exam tonight.”

“Think about it. You don't want to go back home?”

“We've already talked about that.”

“Don't living alone make you feel sad?”

“I've already told you. I dont want to live there again. You don't need me. Now you're free, as you've wanted to be.”

“I'm asking you, Lizzie, if it don't make you sad to live by yourself.”

“No, it doesn't. I'm fine.”

“Come in here with me for a little.”

“This is where you work?”

“Sometimes. I cover the whole station. Why are you laughing?”

“I'm laughing from love, Daddy. It's seeing you working as a policeman.”

“Well, the world should keep turning.”

You followed him through a narrow door that he opened with his key. He removed the padlock and put it in his pocket. A short corridor with piled-up, unused lockers. The stench of urine.

“So you're fine, you say. Just fine.”

“I am, really. I swear it.”

“Because you are sleeping with that boy.”

“That's none of your business.”

Gershon closed one eye and put the other to a tiny hole in the wall. With the butt of his cigar between his teeth, he whispered: “We become invisible. Sure we do.”

You smiled. “It smells in here, Daddy.”

Gershon began to laugh, his teeth biting down on the cigar. In the shadow his broad laughing face was like a theatrical comic mask. He took you by the arm as his laughter came out thick, halting, speckled with spit.

“Look, Lizzie.”

“What?”

“Take a look, I'm telling you.”

Laughing at first, you put your eye to the peephole. You saw an old man's hands and heard whispers you could not understand. Gershon squeezed your arm. The smells of urine and disinfectant were overpowering. You peeped again and saw their pants and the hand of the boy taking the old man's hand in the public rest room next door. You moved away silently.

“This is the third time I've caught that old pig,” Gershon said. “The kids never come back, but the old bastard never learns.” He looked at you for a long time. “Well, it's all in a day's work.” He patted your cheek. “You should come back with me. I'm all alone. For all that your mother rubbed me the wrong way, still…” He laughed and then sighed and you turned your back. “Are you coming for Sunday supper, Lizzie? I have to go take care of this now.” You shook your head and went out onto the platform again.

And that weekend you had to yell over the sound of the sea as you lay in Javier's arms and begged him to take you away, to the ocean before anywhere, so that you could know him, for here you were separated from each other: the feverish sea of Long Island, that sea of your lies, that sea that rises in flames to embrace the coast while Javier points, with the same hand that today rubbed your neck in the Volkswagen, and recites poetry about the sea, naked, a foreigner, a man from another world, with a different skin, olive-colored, with black curly hair whipped by the wind of a summer storm, hair that makes his eyebrows even darker and his eyes darker too, the shadow on his unshaven cheeks, and you went out on the wet beach with him in brown rain that you both welcomed, both of you wearing sweaters that you pulled off to run toward the waves of the foaming, agitated Atlantic, slate-gray, cold as lemon, hard, and dove in and swam in the effervescent foam. At last you knew each other. He held you against his chest to protect you from the high waves and while the rain pattered against your heads he murmured: “Like the clean new earth. The earth of the beginning, before it's touched, built upon, scratched open. Earth before man's first death. Earth where no one has been buried. Ligeia … Ligeia … Ligeia … Ligeia.”

Man does not surrender wholly, neither to angels nor to death, except from the debility of his feeble will.

“I live in a hotel now, Lizzie. In a hotel you come and go as you please. You eat by yourself and when you want to eat. You don't have to talk even to the waiter. In the evening you go to the movies. And maybe you make some friends in good time. Maybe you even play golf with them. If you want to see me, ask for Johnson. Gershon Johnson. They will know at the desk.”

*   *   *

Δ   “I was waiting for you,” you said, Pussycat.

Franz looked at you doubtfully. You shrugged your shoulders and tied the tails of your white shirt around your waist.

“I tell you, I was. I knew you were coming. And now here you are.”

You walked to your record player and listened to it for a moment.
Pretty woman, have mercy on me.
You didn't laugh, Isabel. You took the record off and looked at Franz. A graying blond German wearing a blue shirt, gray trousers, no shoes. His shirt unbuttoned. You unplugged the record player and the flickering dim light in the room brightened perceptibly. But you were still almost in shadow. You were wearing only the shirt and you played with it, showing and then hiding, hiding and then showing your pubis, soft as a tongue of the sea. He stood beside the door and began to feel aroused. You could sense that as you walked toward him. Through the open window came distant hushed voices and lost horns and tires on the highway and boleros from the loudspeakers around the plaza where you had strolled during the afternoon. You stopped and stood before him and he knelt to kiss what you were offering him. Young, soft, clean, Isabel, after so much washing that afternoon, lacking that taste of rotted seafood that earlier you had given to Javier. Dry now, clean. But now maybe your juices would flow again.

*   *   *

Δ   I was not far behind you when you left your car and began the slow walk up the stone path that leads very steeply from the base of the pyramid to the Spanish chapel on its top. The pyramid does not look like a pyramid; from a distance it is simply a high rounded hill flattened off at the summit. It is covered with earth and shaggy pines grow thick and the terraces under which the stone mass lies have almost vanished. Actually there are seven pyramids, they are nested inside each other, the first is smallest and is covered by the second, which is covered by the third, until the seventh is reached, and it is covered by earth. The Great Pyramid of Cholula. The Great Cue. Every cycle of fifty-two years a new pyramid was raised on the base of the old one, for the end of a cycle required, as homage to the arrival of the new, that the old should disappear.

You walked slowly up the slope and reached the summit. A flat, attractive landscape lay around you. The great circle of the valley locked between the cardinal points of snowy Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl in the west, the distant white star of Pico de Orizaba to the north, the enormous foothills of Malinche to the east, the humped shoulders of the Sierra Madre to the south. A level valley dotted with round-crowned trees and green squares and domes of glazed tile, hundreds of churches that glistened in the sun.

You reached the top of the pyramid out of breath. A belvedere, flat, with a balustrade, surrounds the chapel, which is walled with yellow stucco. It was Spain's final reply to the underground world of stone and sacred monsters that lies far below the little church beneath four centuries' accretion of earth. You entered the shrine. Four slender cypresses stand in the atrium. At the end of the nave, beneath a glass bell, is the Virgen de los Remedios, a diminutive doll in a bulky skirt, standing on a half-moon that looks like the horns of a bull. The four of you examined the image briefly and then went back outside. Isabel was the first to notice the nineteenth-century red and yellow brick buildings below you, the neoclassic portico, the stone balustrades and high fences behind which were a series of park-like yards with narrow gravel paths and palm trees and benches. Some of the buildings had barred doors and windows. Men were walking across the lawns and along the paths. Men made small by your height above them. Men with shaved heads or cropped heads, wearing gray pants and gray shirts, many of them barefoot. They walked with their heads down, staring at the ground, or looking up at the sky, sometimes accompanied by men in white. They sat in twos and threes on the stone benches, hiding their ears or eyes with their hands, scratching their ribs or their shaved heads, rubbing their chins. Some sat with open mouths and merely stared. Some crouched on the grass with their knees supporting their faces, like squatting monkeys. Others sat with their feet drawn up to their mouths.

“Who are they?” said Isabel. “Who are they?”

“They're mental patients,” said Javier. “Lunatics. This is the Cholula insane asylum.”

Pigeons flew above the heads of the men below. One patient had a transistor radio turned to the top of its volume. Their voices could not be heard but the sound of the radio floated up clearly as the patient moved the tuning knob and finally found a station he liked. A corrido from the north, its words carried up to you,
Valentín como era hombre de nada les dió la razón
 … A group seemed to form around the radio. But they weren't really interested; they listened without curiosity for a moment and then drifted away. One of them was dragging the rope belt of a bathrobe along the path. The music rose:
Estas son las mañanitas de un hombre valiente que fue Valentín.
You, Elizabeth, rested your elbows on the yellow-painted balustrade. Now lunch was being served. A group of suntanned men in gray sat on a bench and one of them had a nested column of kettles which he set down one by one. He separated a stack of bowls and began to pass them to his companions. But it was not really lunch. They knew, and you knew, that the bowls and kettles were empty. The man shook his arms. He must have said something but his voice did not carry to you. He made a gesture with his closed fist, jabbing the thumb down toward the ground like Nero commanding gladiators to die.

“He is asking for salt,” guessed Javier, who as a child had not understood gestures. He looked at Franz. But Franz's face was empty, or at most merely showed that seriousness some of us adopt when we are witnessing something that is generally supposed to be of interest, even of scientific interest.

Look at them, Dragoness. Observe them from the distance. Don't identify with them, don't go near them. And come into my arms, Betele, hold me, don't let me go out. Turn the lights on. The lights, please. You are scaring me. Don't be scaring me, turn the lights on and …

One of the patients suddenly dropped his pants. Another knelt behind him and a white-jacketed attendant ran to separate them. A bell was heard.
Madre mía de Guadalupe
 … A doctor moved among them as another attendant read a list aloud.
Por tu religión me van a matar
 … “Because of your religion they are going to kill me…”

Javier looked at Franz and Franz looked back at him.

*   *   *

Δ   The last day he had found himself in an abandoned barn that was empty of everything, where there was nothing except shadows to hide behind. He told himself that shadows alone could conceal him. Seated on the floor of the wooden loft with his legs spread, he told himself that it was precisely the absence of grain, fodder, animals, that assured he would not be found. Not even horseshoes were left. There was only a leather bellows beside a cold forge, a few pieces of the iron that once had been worked here. No hammer, no nails. He leaned forward and began to pick up bits of straw from between the cracks of the boards. Nothing was real to him in that moment except his hunger. Because of his hunger he would have liked to have been outside in the fields: the sun is brother of abundance. And today he would not ask for much. A very modest life, simple, lacking ambition, above all undisturbed. That vision came back to him again and again. A little life of quiet comfort at his childhood home in Prague with his parents, those quiet and comfortable Sudeten Germans who, he realized now, only now, had merely wanted to defend their comfort, to find order and stability, and had believed that that was all they had wanted. He crawled through the darkness of the barn loft picking up whatever he could find and hoarding it in his fist. And on his hands and knees, wearing a stained torn uniform and mud-caked boots, he could laugh and see that what his parents had wanted to preserve had now been destroyed forever with his parents' aid. His fist was full of bits of straw. He stopped laughing. He thought of his parents and saw them clearly, a quiet couple who had passed from adolescence into old age as if the years between had not existed, unable to understand the time of inflation, unable to comprehend the shifts in national boundaries and fortune, the violence and the killing; who had comforted themselves in the early days of Hitler by saying, “He studied architecture, he is one of our class,” and later, “He has given us the Autobahn and established order,” and finally, “Because of him, Germans can be proud again.” He felt in his tunic pocket for a scrap of wrinkled brown paper. Some sort of document. He emptied the straw into the paper and rolled a makeshift cigarette. He felt in his pants pockets for his matches, matches that had resisted dampness, fire, mud; as always, excellent manufacture, even under these conditions. Efficiency. He smoked slowly, coughing repeatedly. The substitute tobacco eased his hunger pangs a little, let him think of something besides food. He rubbed his face with his free hand and tried to remember himself as he was. His skin lay thin against his bones, tight across his forehead, loose around his nostrils and mouth; he had a seven days' beard. He would have liked to sleep. He raised his head and leaned forward away from the wall. He put his hand to his empty holster. That morning he had thrown his pistol into a river after firing his last cartridge.