A Change of Skin (55 page)

“Come on, come on, we have to get inside.”

“What? Hanna? Who is Hanna?” Not a muscle of her face moves. Face of the sea, of the green wet earth, of dry flame. Everyone stares with phony seriousness at Jakob while Boston Boy raps his knuckles on the brass door and the eyes of Gladiolo appear in the peep window. “I don't know who Hanna is,” says Boston Boy. “I never knew her well.” Gladiolo stares at us, sniffs, sees and recognizes me. “Order, order,” snaps our judge. “The witnesses will testify in turn.” “Did you fall into an oil well or something?” asks Gladiolo, sniffing. His face is rouged and powdered, his eyes are made up.

The Capitana, the madam of the house, greets us and leads us through crowded drawing rooms. It's an old building, from the end of the last century. The stink of our gasoline-drenched clothes overpowers smells of powder and perfume and ripe fish. The whores are in a group at the foot of the wide stairs quietly jabbering with each other while their customers, tight pants and narrow lapels, drink at the bar and the girls' pimps circulate with drinks on embossed metal trays. The Capitana, shaking her head and fanning her fingers delicately back and forth in front of her nostrils, guides us to the stairs. “The girls with you probably want to be alone, I suppose, very secluded, eh? We have some fine shows later in the evening. The drinks will come up in just a minute. Cigarettes, whatever you care for. How many girls do you want? I have to admit,” shaking her head and chuckling a little, “that I don't know which of you want girls and which want men. You there in the red pants, how about it, pussy or prick? Unbutton,
joven,
and let an old woman have a peek at you.” Rose Ass-Long Dong unbuckles his belt and drops his pants and the Capitana stares. “God save us! Girls, take a look at the way this man is hung!”

Long Dong-Rose Ass is pale, his hair is like straw, his nose a little like Pinocchio's. He speaks, softly, “It's that I wanted … to be a witness of something…”

“Witness?” cries the madam. “With that hose between your legs, you only want to watch? Ah, come off it, don't be selfish.
Ay
,
papacito.
”

Long Dong sits bare-assed on the edge of the bed. The room is very large and has no windows. The windows have been bricked up, plastered over. Once, perhaps, there was a balcony to the right. “And maybe,” Long Dong goes on, “that's all I have been. I've remained merely a witness. Only a looker-on. But I swear I didn't know it.” Judge Morgana has jerked off her boots and she falls on top of Long Dong. “The witness will be coherent or shut his mouth.” She shuts his mouth for him, with kisses. Long Dong quickly undresses her. “Capitana,” I say, “dry our clothes for us, won't you? This night will be longer than a forest road, deeper than the mountains of the sea. And none of us is Sanforized. Tell the girls to be a little less impatient. To step back and stop biting their fingernails. Better: make them look the other way.” “Let's get the hell out of here,” a whore mutters. “They don't want
us.
” “No, they're not serious clients. They've just come for the kicks.” “But my God, look at that man's prick! He's hung like a Piedras Negras bull. Like a Zacatlan burro.” “
Ay
, what a shaft, what a baseball bat!” “Girls, listen!” cries the Capitana. “We'll hold a raffle for him!” She stands like an oak. An old oak with hanging moss, her double chins. “We'll raffle him off. Get them undressed.” They crowd around us, laughing, murmuring, on their knees with their heads bowed, trembling with excitement and with satisfaction in the servility of their roles. Professionals, their hands expert. They are ancient slave girls. They are cinnamon-skinned geishas, pockmarked, overperfumed, undressing their lords and ladies, ourselves, who stand like statues. Long Dong and Judge Morgana are alone in the bed. An enormous bed such as you don't see any more. Four posts carved with vines and topped with urns. A high headboard. A red silk coverlet. Long Dong the muddled witness but the experienced lover; Morgana the passive judge naked except for the black garter belt that hangs upon the bones of her hips like a cowboy's cartridge belt without cartridges. Long Dong is saying: “If I could only get my thoughts straight. But it seems that everything happened so long ago. We all had that dream. Didn't you have it?” “Who wants to buy her chance in the raffle? The chance of a lifetime, girls. You'll never see another to equal it.” While the trial continues:

“What dream? Please relate it. Dates and facts.”

“The dream with which I left Mexico and my mother?”

“Continue. In detail. Don't summarize.”

“The dream that took us to Greece?”

“Remember carefully. Precisely.”

“The dream of the thirties. Of my early reading, of the romantics…”

“The witness will please define what is a romantic.”

“Someone who paws your dream.”

“That is sufficient. Go on.”

“Everything is impending. Everything is an aberration. Both the beautiful and the criminal.”

“You need not follow chronological order. Let the first be last.”

“I can say on oath that I have remembered Raúl and Ofelia only to try to know whether they lived for my sake. But I don't want to go on talking about them. If I can, I'll stop.”

“The witness will endeavor to be born again.”

And the girls wait, staring at Long Dong's blooded razor, his lecherous shadow, his Nestle tower, his golden banana, his octopus nerve, his black fish. “Who wants in the raffle?” “Here, Capitana, here's my ten pesos.” “Here's mine.” Stone ear of yellow-kerneled corn. Slim head of a slant-eyed fox. Fur of a puma. And the humpbacked older woman, squat Elenita, the towel girl, with her wrinkled elephant skin, tough hide that will never serve for a lady's gloves. “Pay up, girls, pay up.” The Capitana's teeth grin like piano keys. “What's he saying to her there?” “Christ knows. They're speaking Chinese or something.” “… And the point is, a few minutes ago the attorney for the defense spoke about rediscovering the unity we have lost. About desire fulfilled simply by being desired. And I realized…” “Yes, my love. Deeper. A little deeper.” “… that both the poets and the criminals…” “You, too, Elenita? You can't resist a horn like that either? Well, pay up, pay up. God will choose the winner.” “… could be born of the same mother. Sade is named Auschwitz. Lautréamont is Treblinka. Nietzsche is Terezin…” “No more now. The cards go into the chamber pot and each of you will draw one. The girl who draws the rooster wins the cock.” “… And our dream, the dream I could never write, was born of the spirit of those times…” Into the white chamber pot drop the cards one by one: the Soldier, the Serpent, the small Negro, the Watermelon, the Rooster … “… and was part of those times and had to die with those times…” “Quick, my love! Now, quick! Don't worry about who's next. Come for me now, I'm first.” She has her legs locked around his waist. “… to end with the end of that world which had crippled all of us…” The Charro. The Skeleton, with its tapers. The Hunchback. One card for each whore. “… and the only way to destroy that world was to do just what the attorney for the defense said. Put everything to the test. Compel reality to submit itself to will and our purpose. Our desire that no man had dared to feel before…” The Capitana hoists the chamber pot and shakes it well, rotates it, mixes the cards. “Wait your turns. No cheating. Everything square and aboveboard. We're whores all right, but we're honest whores.” “More, my lover! More, more!” “… So there had to be two revolutions instead of one. One in the world. One within ourselves.” “Oh, my love, my love, my love!” “Victory for will and desire at last. At last an end to the terrible oppositions that for centuries had isolated us from each other. Yours and mine. Word and action. Dream and waking. Body and soul. Homeland, flag, family, property…” He stops. If he were to go on, his words would be drowned, he would have to squirt them out as foam.

“And was that your dream too, Elizabeth?” asks Brother Thomas.

The whores draw their cards one by one and hold them face side down. At a signal from the Capitana, they all turn the cards over. “Ooooooh, nooooo! Look who has the rooster!” “God, what luck!” “What saint did you pray to, Elenita?” “But she doesn't know her cunt from a hole in the ground. She's no more a whore than I am a copper.” “If that black-haired bitch who came with them hasn't tired him out, you'll be flying high in a minute or two, Elenita.” “A pearl before a sow … shit, shit!” And the Capitana, the only gentle voice: “Put down your towels, Elenita. Your chance has come.” “Better have an alcohol rub first. You'll need all the pep you can find.” “We were cheated. Capitana, you did that on purpose!” “I? I didn't do anything. Didn't you see her draw it herself?” So Elena the towel girl wins the raffle. Short stooped figure wearing black cotton stockings, a checked gingham dress, a tattered white sweater. The towel girl. Flabby breasts. Wrinkled face. Sinewy arms. Brown hands accustomed to wiping away blood and semen, to cleaning the cunts of whores and the pricks of apes like King Kong, monarch of the jungle. Elena of the warm washcloths, the soft white towels, always ready, quick, Long Dong is yours, you can forget your towels for a while.

In the hot season, snakes leave their dens. Their old skin is no longer good enough, and abandoning their solitude they go out into the sun to join their brothers in a tangled mass and wriggle over the trampled fields of Eden, scraping across the bristled earth until their skin is pulled away in strips and they become naked skeletons with egglike eyes. And I don't know who touches whom when Rose Ass-Long Dong-Javier rises from the bed and we all pile in. I don't know what he says to Elenita, the runt, twisted, ugly towel girl who has seated herself on a stool beside him, still holding her stack of towels, while the Capitana amuses me with the black kiss and a pair of socks that I think belong to Jakob fly past my nose.

“I wrote a short book. I left my mother. I met a woman and we went to Greece. That much I know is true. At least I believe it is true. But the world didn't change. It denied me and refused to notice me.”

“Look, young señor, the rooster!”

“I wanted to be one with the world, with my dream, with art, action…”

“Look, señor, just look.”

“Did I lose confidence in the strength of my desire?”

“See, señor, I have the rooster.”

“Now let me try to stand beside Franz. Accuse me too…”

“I won, señor! I won!”

“We are just alike. Except that what was action in him in me was only possibility, latency. In me it lacked all greatness, all courage. I have been a kind of larva Franz.”

“I won the raffle, señor.”

“Try to see it, Elenita. We were told that the world could be made over only when we all acted together, as one. A single man, alone, could do…”

“The raffle, I won the raffle!”

“But history never thinks. History acts.”

“And my prize, señor? What about my prize?”

“My isolated desire could do nothing. Nor could love, the proclamation of the desire we all have.”

“Aren't you going to be nice to me, señor?”

“Can love be a summary of everything the world is? Can we be one with the world by making ourselves one with a woman?”

“That's in God's hands, señor. Are you going to force me to be satisfied just watching?”

“And isn't love really a struggle, a resistance, a desire: like the world, something we must conquer or let conquer us? Doesn't one lover always impose his being upon the other, prevent the other from becoming what he might? And … what? What the hell comes next? Damn my memory, I've…”

“Elena! Elenita! A towel to Number 6! Damn it, where has she taken off to now? Elena! Why in God's name do we pay her? All she does is sit and listen to the drunks make their confessions. Elena! I'm dripping like a sponge, damn it, hurry up!”

“Touch it if you want to, Elenita.”

“Oh, I want to, señor.”

“You have very pretty hands.”

“I have to have something pretty. The rest of me…”

“I like your hands. They're heavy as two wet stones. They're heavy as a bag full of silver.”

“That's from carrying the towels all the time. Sometimes my arms are so numb I can't feel them.”

“Is it enough for you just to watch?”

“But I ought not to have entered the raffle. Meddling in something that isn't my business. They're going to be mad at me. They'll holler and yell at me. Better put the little rooster back and let someone else … Thank you, young señor. You've been kind.”

“They're yelling for you already. Is it true that you listen to men's confessions, Elenita?”

“Yes, when they're drunk they like to talk and they know I never tell. But I have to go. They'll fire me if I don't hurry.”

“Sit still. I'll pay them for the time you stay with me. What do you earn?”

“Just my tips, my meal. Now and then a drink.”

“Come here, Elenita.”

“No, señor. Not to the bed. They'll get mad.”

“Come here, Elenita. Come and listen to my confession. Just listen, that's all. Can you understand me?”

“No, I never understand. That's why men talk to me. While they're waiting, before or after, they all talk to me, like cloudbursts they talk. And I forget everything, every word. I can't remember. They call me forgotten Elenita, the forgetter. Yes. That's me.”

“Come here and forget some things that don't mean anything.”

“No, señor. I'm not the one for you to do this with.”

“Lie down.”

Jey joneybonch. Loveydovey. Hazme un huequito, cherriblossom. Foqui-foqui …