A Change of Skin (54 page)

For a moment we stiffen our poses in a phony, absurd Laocoön group.

But the figures of our ensemble come apart and the only serpent is the embroidered silver snake that twists across the ass of Brother Thomas's charro trousers gobbling up a silver eagle.

Feeling a little melancholy, we cross the Beltway. Brother Thomas is speaking very softly, sadly. “Because you, all of you, have hidden, buried, killed your being. You have created a crooked, mutilated half-man, a man lacking myth.” Oh-ho. Master Swift, who despises the Animal, Man, yet so loves Tom, Dick, and Harry, I remember you, and so does Brother T.

We approach the old Lincoln convertible. “But not the Accused and his comrades. They dug up again the buried pieces of man, pulled aside the veil to show him entire and whole again.” Boston Boy raises the lid of the trunk. It is filled with a tangle of clothing. Their disguises, I guess. None of them suspects my surprise, nor do I suspect theirs, when Boston Boy gravely removes the living, moving, moaning, threatening little bundle he has been carrying buttoned inside his frock coat and tenderly deposits it in the car trunk. No, not worms after all. Two tiny animals. Each wrapped around the other and each quietly, patiently eating the other alive. Yes, that's clear enough. The lid slams down. We can still hear the whimpering, the tiny moans, the choking sounds. All of us stare at Boston Boy but he is completely self-possessed and unconcerned and none of us says a word, and who knows what will be the end of this journey that will end when night does.

The Monks stand there and I turn my back on them and get in the car. Brother Thomas follows, muttering: “For man is Satan's son too, Old Harry's heir, born on St. Bartholomew's Day.” The springs of the seat creak beneath us. I move my feet around among cans of motor oil, looking for room. “And he, man of evil as well as man of good, is complete only when he accepts, parades, makes use of his nocturnal face.” Rose Ass and White Rabbit squeeze in as best they can on my left, their weight pushing the cushion down as the springs creak again. Jakob and Judge Morgana sit in front on the right and Boston Boy is behind the wheel. “Where to?” asks Jakob. I tell him, Calzada del Niño Perdido. “That hidden face of darkness that for centuries was concealed by the Judaic-Christian barbarism that maimed and mutilated him. Thomas. Peter. John.” Yes, Niño Perdido, and we can stay on the Beltway as far as the Barranca del Muerto. “Let Gimp Man render unto Goof God what is of God, and unto Purty Gerty what is hers. Amen.” No one echoes this time. Brother T.'s chorus, like myself, has had enough. “The accused had to say everything that had gone unspoken. He had to find the fury and strength to go back to frightened God and face him once and for all, confront him with human unity, oneness, integrality, the unity the holy circumcised and the fainthearted faithful had forbidden, the weapon man had always possessed, but had forgotten how to use.” I say softly, Sure: and every year too many children are born in Mexico and Haiti and India and maybe in hell too, and must starve sucking withered breasts, while in the less fecund States, in half a decade seventy-five percent of the two hundred million or so good citizens will be under twenty-five, by which statistic my graying Yankee contemporaries can understand that their revolution is already upon them and comes not only with demonstrations and marches, long hair and miniskirts, but also like an avalanche, is no more to be resisted than an avalanche. “What,” Brother Thomas is saying, “what does the evil in us prove? Simply that evil is as human as every other attribute of man.” “Cut out,” says White Rabbit. “Can it, for Christ's sake. You're crazy. You're out of it.” “Yes, and in a world that believes itself to be so impeccably in it, rich with Rationality and strong with Sanity, someone
has
to be out of it, to be openly and proudly sick and lunatic.” I hunch forward and look at the heap of magazines and newspapers and posters that these Monks carry with them on their pilgrimages or perhaps pick up along the way. Eros.
The Evergreen Review.
The
Adventures of Barbarella.
Circus posters with their sadism. Shirley Temple and Boris Karloff movie stills.
The Wall Street Journal. Der Spiegel.
Charlie Brown staring at Snoopy. Brother Thomas is beginning to give me a royal pain in the ass. If he is a defense attorney, I am the Secretary of State. Every word he speaks seems planned to harm our blond accused, not help him. Why for God's sake is he standing up now, braced against the folded back top of the convertible, and laughing, laughing, laughing and shouting as we whirl through the underpasses of the Beltway, “The accused was Sick, Sick, Sick and Crazy … but in the name and for the sake of all mankind, that all might be healthy! And that is what you will never understand … Neveeeeer!” laughing again as we bank around a curve, “and not even failure teaches you!” I wait for him to be silent. Then I observe, shouting to be heard over the rush of wind, “Master Swifty offered the only way out, you know. To fatten the offspring of the poor and when the babies are one year old and, as Swift puts it, at their most succulent, to market them as gastronomic delicacies. A black market, I suppose…”

The city slides past us in glimpses and fragments. Brother Thomas takes off his Mexican sombrero with its decorations of dark silver roses and waves it over his head, greeting the World, the Universe: “You will never understand because today you feel that you have proven yourselves right and anointed in contrast to the demonstrated insanity of the accused. Yet nevertheless he is your savior. His rich insanity remembered what all of you had forgotten, that every goddamn one of us is capable of cruelty as far as cruelty can go, of total pride, even of a little suffering.” The Monks have begun to sing, quietly,
Pretty Woman, Holy Mamma, have mercy on me.
A traffic cop blasts his whistle at us. And my city, I tell them, though they don't hear me, is falling apart into islands between which we make our lonely voyages, we see no one standing on his own feet, we see nothing, the rich live hidden in their phony reproductions of colonial-period palaces behind high walls topped with pieces of broken glass, as if with barbed wire, while the poor live hidden in the ruins that are left of the authentic colonial palaces on the impenetrable other side of deserts of pavement where living men are never seen: we see only speeding cars and overloaded speeding buses and trams, everyone is locked up in a steel capsule that orbits on rubber wheels, and the schedules of these transitory planets are so arranged that their trajectories never cross, no one ever meets his brother, no face ever gazes upon a comrade face, we forget in our alienation that others exist too, and indeed we fear to encounter another existence because that might lead to an understanding of the value of our own and end in mutual murder: oh, my Mexico City, impoverished metropolis with feet of clay, poor village greasy as
tuna
candy cakes, village that stretches, like an oil slick, the length and breadth of the wasteland valley, poor salt castle awaiting the oncoming tide of sulfur: and I see Jakob looking at me in the rearview mirror, it seems with an expression of understanding and compassion, while Brother Thomas drones his empty monody of hollow words and windy ideas, and it seems to me that the rest of the Monks have gone to sleep like tired children, or perhaps died like old hatreds, none of them hears me and it wouldn't matter if any did, for this is my city, not theirs. And from the trunk comes an infant-like moaning that the roar of the open muffler suffocates. No, the Monks are not sleeping or dead. They are awake, whispering with each other, preparing the scene that will follow this Judgment Scene for which Jakob, good German, is responsible, a farce trial full of legalisms and empty of blood. It's true that Brother Thomas has spoken as fervently as an itinerant tent-preacher with one eye on the Holy Spirit and the other on the redhead in the third row. But he has convinced no one. Brother Thomas in his role of defense attorney is a shyster and a fraud. He's a switch knife with a blade of soft rubber. A hammer with a cork head. The tiny pellet of a boy's BB rifle. Yet he goes on: “Try to understand, try to see it. We were liberators, not oppressors. We were the only mortals in ten thousand centuries who had dared to feel and acknowledge the evil within us, who had the courage to act out that evil instead of crippling and smothering its power.” He throws his sombrero high in the air and it floats down and is leaped upon by dogs barking from the sidewalk. Long-snouted dogs with slobbering mouths and eyes of feverish razor blades. “We could love as you could not, for as you could not, we could also hate.” He collapses on the seat beside me. “We demanded to be hated bitterly, because we knew that only if we were hated could we be loved with equal intenseness.” He coughs.

All of us are silent and now we're there. “To the left,” I say. “Park at the filling station. They know me there.”

“No, no one understood,” Boston Boy Franz murmurs as he swings the convertible into the station. “Why couldn't anyone understand?”

White Rabbit Elizabeth stares at him with disgust. “Oh, I understand. You wanted me only because…”

“Yes! Believe it, Bette. Don't fool yourself.” He takes her hand and twists it.

“Let me go, damn you! You wanted me only to make your peace with yourself. You had to have a woman like me, any woman, didn't matter who…”

He turns her and pins her arms to her buttocks. “No, you're wrong. Not even that.”

I sigh and want to get out of the car. I don't want to understand too much now. If everything becomes too clear, I'll lose interest. I have come this far because I wanted mystery, an approach to the mystery that is left, genuine and baffling, once the pseudo-mysteries of similarities and contrasts dissolve. I wave a hand to the man coming out of the filling station toward us, but he doesn't recognize me. I vault out of the car. “Hey, José! We're going to leave our wheels here. Okay?” Nothing can be heard from the trunk of the car now. José suddenly smiles. “Yes, sir! For a minute I didn't know you.”

“No, not even that,” Boston Boy insists. White Rabbit has taken off her glasses and without them her eyes are small and a little crossed. “You didn't understand,” goes on Boston Boy, who has jumped out after me. White Rabbit stands there, slow to react. We move toward the street. Suddenly she is shouting.

“You've got to tell me! You've treated me just like Javier!” She runs to one of the gasoline pumps. “And at least he never tried to deceive me!” She grabs the hose by the nozzle and drags it toward us. “I always knew what he wanted, that I had to pretend to be another woman.” She squeezes the trigger and gasoline showers upon us. “No, he never tried to deceive me!” We run to the sidewalk, away from her, and she lifts the nozzle so that the stream of gasoline arches after us. “He made me play games.” José grabs her from behind, around the waist. “I had to go late to a party so that he could come even later and find me there and pretend I was a new love.” She tries to bite José's hand. “A love he had never known before.” Both White Rabbit and José are drenched with gasoline now. “He would arouse me, then deny me satisfaction.” José hoists her high, kicking, wriggling, and she lets the hose go. “He offered me one humiliation after another.” Her skirt is up and I can see her lovely thighs and a glimpse for a second of her crotch glistening copper under the cold glare of the filling station's powerful mercury lights, and my breathing has quickened. “He made me share his own humiliation, his failure, but at least…” She falls to her knees, soaked with gasoline. “At least he was willing to gamble that I could take it and survive it.” She has a box of matches in her hand. “No, he never deceived me.” Good God, I am thinking. And this is how you ought to be, little White Rabbit, nameless White Rabbit, the way I and any man must want you. My prick is stiff and I think to myself, I have what you're asking for, White Rabbit, and I want to give it to you. José, red with fury, is putting the nozzle of the hose back in its hanger. “I always knew his game, always.”

She gets to her feet and crosses after us. She comes toward us holding the box of matches extended. We all stink of gasoline. None of us dares move. I think: you don't have to put a match to me, little gringa nun. I'm hot enough already. She lights a match and stares first at the flame and then at blond Boston Boy Franz: she doesn't even glance at the hard bulge behind my fly. She says to him, after waiting several long seconds, “And you…”

“Here, wait a minute,” Boston Boy grins. He opens his frock coat and from the inside pocket takes out a creased envelope, from the envelope a letter. Jonathan Nathan Richardson. Greetings. Having passed all tests. Will present yourself for induction. Proceed then directly to Basic Training Camp X, South Carolina. And so off friend Boston Boy will go, Uncle Ho, to call upon you with gifts of napalm and lazy dogs.

White Rabbit laughs and touches her match to the letter. It burns like a bamboo Buddist Monk.

They chuckle and begin to sing the Marines' Hymn, everyone except White Rabbit, Jakob, and myself, who have something of a sense of propriety.

“Look, we better go inside quick,” I say to them. “The cops keep an eye on this place.”

No one moves. They are holding themselves stiff, at attention.
From the halls of Montezuma
 … Sure, the goddamn bastards began their legend right here in Mexico.

Boston Boy moves closer to her. I would like to hold a match to him, his yellow beard and hair. He takes her arm. “No, Lisbeth. I didn't want you for that. I swear it. Not to wipe away a guilt I never felt for a moment.” White Rabbit lifts her face, washed of its makeup by the gasoline, a face without eyebrows, without lips, without shadows, a face with slightly crossed eyes.

“Then why?”

“You'll die if I don't explain everything, won't you?” He speaks with his voice softer and softer. “To possess again a girl I had lost years ago.” His voice drops to a whisper in her wet hair.