A Change of Skin (53 page)

I lead them through the narrow way out and now we are in the alley in front of the tiny neighborhood store. For twelve years the storekeeper has known that I was squatting here but he has never squealed on me. A scholar and a gentleman. “The accused,” Brother Thomas is going on, “because he lived that dream, could comprehend its poetic and mystic greatness.” Brother T. is the Invisible Man. He is Uncle Thomas now, not Brother Thomas. I greet the storekeeper with a nod and we all crowd in to buy cigarettes and Pepsis. The storekeeper's daughter, a girl of thirteen, straight-haired and pallidly green, like a willow, puts our purchases on the glass-top counter and holds out her open hand for us to pay and Brother Thomas is saying in his tenor-basso voice, “You may ask, what did the accused abandon for the sake of his dream? Music and architecture? Yes, but remember, music and architecture without the possibility of greatness.” We tilt our Pepsis back and White Rabbit steps in front of a votive candle that casts flickering light on a print of a Black Virgin who weeps wax tears and wears tinsel and satin clothing. White Rabbit crosses herself. “A world in which he could not be a musician or an architect without accepting beforehand that society would not honor his occupation but would regard it as something at most to be tolerated, basically useless, such a world,” Brother Thomas is saying, “seemed to the accused to be a world that ought to be destroyed. Music. Architecture. Mere pastimes not related to the basic business of living, the getting…” The green-skinned daughter of the storekeeper listens and laughs and covers her mouth with her hands, their fingers rose-nailed, dark hands adorned with sick but happy roses. She cannot understand Thomas, for he is speaking English, his voice booming low, squealing high. But she laughs. She senses that she is watching a performance. Yes, it's a minstrel show and Brother Thomas is Al Jolson, saying, “… the getting together of money so that you could live high on the hog down in Alabammy.” The storekeeper sits outside with his chair tilted against the wall. A small chair with a painted back, red and yellow flowers and blue one-eyed ducks, and he is very dark and very fat and breathes audibly, heavy as a burro, as an ocean. “To live high on the hog with a fat bank account and an easy conscience, using all the old familiar words to stay on top and to keep those not also on top jumping through the hoop just as always: be patient, brothers, be patient, your time will come. Oh, yes. Turn the other cheek. Be loving. Yes, oh yes, be charitable. The meek shall inherit the earth. By and by. By and by.” Brother Thomas is on his way now. He is on his pony, jogging rhythmically, chanting while the others clap their hands to his beat and sing out the proper responses: amen, say it, brother, say it. In the alley a dog begins to whimper and the storekeeper kicks at it and suddenly a crowd of ragged children appear from nowhere, barefoot urchins in gray overalls who throw stones at piles of dust in the alley and then give their attention to chasing after the dog, which now is howling, running away while Brother Thomas in his charro costume goes on with his star-touching, earth-rooted chant, cold, fleshless, yet as compelling as the beat of a tomtom:

“For all men are created equal…”

“Tell, us man, tell us.”

“Oh, yes, equal. And ought to be free to vote now and then.”

“Vote, brothers, vote.”

“Amen! Forty acres of your own.”

“Nobody else!”

“Forty acres and your soul. But be nice, baby, be nice.”

It's a litany and neither the children in the alley nor the fat storekeeper can understand, but they feel the rhythm and they listen intently. They too clap their hands and out into the alley we march, like General Booth on his way to heaven, led by a black-faced captain of saints in the costume of a charro, surrounded now by the children. Behind us, smells of licorice and cinnamon and teaberry and Mimi suckers and chlorophyllic chewing gum. We are on our way too, now, to see where our legs will take us.

Brother Thomas ends his singsong abruptly and wipes his fingers on the loose-hanging tails of his charro shirt and with one hand on my shoulder for balance tugs at his fly to piss. “Hey, man, how do you want me to do it? A cowboy there, a charro here. That's the answer, eh?”

I offer him a pair of white gloves I have in my jacket pocket. The children level the barrels of their index fingers at Thomas and, pow-pow-pow, shoot him and then the rest of us. “Charros, charros, charros! Drop dead, you phonies! Give us a quinto, blackman! A quinto to buy a pop! Come on, don't be like that, give us a quinto!” Brother Thomas has his fly open and calmly pisses and resumes his defense-attorney speech: “The accused claimed the right to take what he had never posssessed, neither strength nor wealth nor even life. He made his own right. The right to wipe away that old world and build a new one.”

El Güero hangs his head and surprises us with his voice: faint, hopeless, the cultivated accent of a very proper Bostonian. “No, it wasn't like that. No. It was … destiny, I think. I was caught up in my times. And … I was used to obeying, that was my habit, more than my habit, my duty. And I didn't want…”

The children turn and stare at him and nudge each other with their elbows. He shines a little in the darkness. His yellow hair lights up his face. He is almost iridescent. “A
güero,
” the children are whispering. “A gringo
güero.
”

“I didn't know what was really happening. I just went on doing, being what I had always done and been. Nothing changed for me. Nothing has ever changed. I'm still today just what I was then. I swear it … I thought I was doing the right thing. Others were fighting and dying for my sake. They were heroes in my name. Maybe I felt grateful to them for letting me go on being the same as always, for allowing me to feel heroic without having to be heroic. Maybe … maybe…”

The children grin at him and form a ring around him and begin to dance.

Mistress Morgana, our honorable judge, plants her black boots in the dust. She is just out of a comic strip, but she doesn't know it. “The accused will remain silent while the attorney for the defense tries to save his skin for him,” she pronounces rather grimly.

The small brown arms of the children rise, jabbing, pointing. “El Güero! Father Jesus! Father Jesus!”

Brother Thomas tries to interrupt them: “Yes, he had to live inside a dream. A dream of a heroic people, Volk. With heroic leaders. For if he kept himself apart from it, he would never understand it, or, above all, understand the terror…”

“Father Jesus!” yell the children, and maybe they are mocking our Bostonian blond German and maybe they are not. They grab him and he stiffens to his full height, trying to escape their small brown hands. Brother Thomas goes on like an opera basso: “… the terror and the pain of knowing something that after all can never be understood.”

“Come on, holy Jesus, touch us, let us touch you! Give us your hand! Bless us!” El Güero, ringed by the prancing, shouting children, has fallen behind us. “The accused wanted to be able to believe the last legend, to take part in the last battle of the legendary warriors, the struggle fast and last against modern mediocrity.” Brother Thomas is shaking with laughter now. He is a plantation slave defending his master. And his master, shoved off balance by the clawing hands of the children, stumbles and falls into the briars of the thick hedge, while the window of one of the adobe huts that line the alley opens and a woman shouts, “What the hell are you kids up to out there? Leave those gringos alone!” Laughing, laughing, Brother Thomas continues, “He wanted to prove that the strength of the ancient heroes is still possible, that it can be the strength of feeble modern man if he will only give up his comfortable middle-class myths, his golden life in the miserable mean, his masks of decency and decorum.”

The children have pounced on El Güero where he lies sprawled in the hedge. “Get away from me!” he yells at them. “Goddammit, don't touch me! Don't let them touch me! They want to hurt me!” He struggles free and stands with his face hidden behind his palms. Then his hands move away and show his eyes open very wide, his lips peeled back from his white teeth, his golden hair shining in the darkness. The children, silent, retreat one step, only to return again throwing a mocking chant into the night air like a mortal leap,

Dingaling let's go to mass

And fuck Jesus up his ass

and Brother Thomas must raise his voice: “Give up those absurdities and have faith once again in his hidden and secret powers that for centuries have been suppressed by the faithless faithful, the chicken-shit believers and the self-satisfied unbelievers and the well-educated burghers whose credo is the dollar now and after death, an even greener reward.” El Güero, standing again, lifts his hands in a pious gesture and announces: “I forgive them. They know not what they are doing.”

“For God's sake,” Jakob mutters. “Playing Christ isn't in the script. Stick to your role.”

“No,” admits El Güero. “But I like it. I saw Buñuel's
Nazarín
a few days ago.”

“For God's sake,” Jakob repeats.

I notice that the kids are picking up stones and are going to throw them. I shout a warning and we are all running toward the wide avenue at the end of the alley, the swift Beltway, cold white lights of a hospital, a morgue, a mortuary. The kids race after us but stop at the end of the alley. It's their frontier, not one more step. Brown-skinned little sons and daughters of the great whore, swollen small bellies, worm-infested blood, infection in their guts, tetany in their skinny necks, shouting after us and shaking clenched fists that hold stones they do not throw.

“Well, you were enjoying yourself,” White Rabbit is saying to El Güero. “Why didn't you go through with it to the end? We could have found you a cross somewhere.”

“I didn't care for the set,” he replies.

We are standing on the narrow traffic island in the middle of the Beltway. All of us in a line holding hands like shipwrecked sailors, one misstep and we will all fall, and now and then no cars pass but now and then again they go by like projectiles. White Rabbit is beside me. Her hand is in mine and I can smell her makeup, which has dried and stiffened and is ready to crack. I smell her like an ocean beach about to be murdered by dawn, small in the trench coat that is exactly like the ones Sam Spade and his sons Garfield-Bogart-Belmondo used to wear. “Your style will come in again,” I am about to say to her. I let her hand go and hug myself with both arms and by breathing in her smells I secretly embrace her. “Long hair will go out, little gringa, dated, washed up, old hat.” I say it silently and feel stronger. But White Rabbit is not reading my thoughts. She is murmuring to El Güero, “I suppose you wanted Cecil B. De Mille as your director.” Her voice is amused and tender.

“Why not?” he replies in his damn Brahmin accent, the accent of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (for which read Wasp), the accent of a Boston Boy, which is what I think I shall call him from here on out. He has something hidden under his long corduroy frock coat. It's a cardboard box full of wriggling earthworms. Yes, that it is, that it is. And why the hell not? Can't a Boston Boy carry worms around?

“What are you hiding there?” White Rabbit asks. Her pink eyes are golden through her dark glasses. “And who made that coat for you?”

“Cut it out, you two,” Jakob says harshly. “We're not here to discuss our personal problems. No one is interested now. Stick to your roles.”

“But I
am
looking for a savior, a god, something,” White Rabbit retorts. “In all seriousness.”

Jakob calmly slaps her cheek.

“Shit, it
is
my role!” she says. “Do you think this is
me?
”

“Okay, okay, so excuse me, I'm sorry, I'm wrong.” Jakob bobs his head up and down as if he were memorizing something. Brother Thomas, his voice deep in his chest, shouts, “An ultramundane glory! A loving forgiveness!” Now he is begging like the plasm of a ghost abruptly remembering what it is, who he must be, the attorney for the defense, Franz Boston Boy's alter ego. “Full pardon for the most extreme excesses, those of a life of conformity, for the pointless squandering of transient strength, oh Hero, oh Captain.”

We stand there arm in arm and I feel the coldness of the night and don't want to run away from anything, from this drowned meeting with the whimpers and soft moans that come from beneath Boston Boy's long-skirted coat of the Romantics, tight around the chest, loose below. I read in
Harper's Bazaar
that Pierre Cardin has made that style coat the fashion again. Or, to drop a pleasant name, China Machado told me, and certainly she must know, for she is the most exciting woman in the world (except you, little Pussycat, of course). And none of us is exposed to anything. We risk nothing. No one is going to stop us and ask us what the hell we are doing here, why Brother Thomas is crooning to us a repetitive canticle of abstractions so dry and remote that they are entirely senseless. “They marched forward to meet what man had lost. The tragic life. The life of the animal. The final dangerous and true limits of human action. The will to continue to the end, to the edge, to the precipice.” Yes, the papier-mâché mountains of Götterdämmerung. The mighty Hausfrauen carrying lances and wearing gold breastplates and horned helmets. Sure, and Goebbels was Siegfried, I suppose. “Joyous acceptance of all the faces of man. That freedom.” Sure, sure, Brother Thomas. Oh, bullshit. Stuff it, stuff it.

At this instant a car whirls by with mocking voices, laughter, jeers, waving fists, the horn honking
shave and a haircut, two bits,
the voices crying
go fuck your goddamn mothers
as a cellophane bag filled with urine flies out the window and hits good Brother Thomas squarely in the face. He is drenched and the rest of us are spattered. He ignores it. “That true freedom to accept all, not only what man is but what he may be. All the powers of Man, of Man, of Mangy, Maniac, Manacled Manequin Man.” He wipes the piss off and gravely concludes: “All human being. The most secret and the most terrifying.”