A Change of Skin (57 page)

Boston Boy seats himself on the floor next to the manikin. He throws several coppers down beside it. He sucks on his joint of marijuana and exhales a thick mouthful of smoke above the holy little infant. I stare at him with surprise. Son of a bitch, you can never be sure of anything with these Monks. Now he wraps the doll in toilet paper and hands it to Elena, who has been watching, waiting, crouching and hoping with an old desire that she has never forgotten. She accepts the small bundle. She holds it to her breasts and begins to croon to it. She looks at us with pride, with hauteur. And you, Dragoness, standing now and feeling only curiosity, ask: “So you saved it, Elena?”

Elena the towel girl does not understand but smiles and goes on crooning.

“Protect it. Hide it. Don't let them chop off its head. Don't let them throw it out with the trash. Don't let them put it into their death ovens. Hold tight to your lost child.”

“The statistics on those ovens are grossly exaggerated,” says Boston Boy Franz.

“If there had been only one child alone, that would have been too many.” Your voice is cold, Dragoness. You spread your arms.

Now both Judge Morgana and Elena the towel girl know what they must do. Elena covers the doll and holds it between her breasts as she hurries to fetch White Rabbit's clothing. Morgana goes to the trench coat and searches through its voluminous pockets for tubes and bottles of beauty creams and lotions. You stand rigid, White Rabbit Ligeia, like a statue, white-skinned Ligeia who, thanks to the debility of your will, still belongs neither to the angels nor to the damned; you wait, pale Mother Mary of the temple and the brothels, and allow Elena the forgotten forgetful one to put your stockings on you, to stroke her hands of burned stone the long smooth length of your legs.

“Don't let them force you into a taxi in the middle of the night, Elena. Don't let them take you to the factories where angels are made, don't let them abandon you in the black palace of Herod. Watch over what you yourself carry hidden. Watch over it, little Elena with your body of a grape, don't let them scratch it out of you, don't let them make it disappear, don't let them make it become invisible. Your child may be the last child ever to be born in all the world, Elena.”

Morgana, fraud as a judge, as a maid not much better, with both hands dabs an astringent fluid pat pat pat on White Rabbit's face. Yes, you must use your beauty, enjoy and display it, my Pepsicoatl. And you, our patient looker-on, our observer who has followed us on our twisted journey through this long night and will, I trust, continue with us until dawn breaks, you, my kind, my generous, my all-necessary reader, are you aware that the women of the great United States of America spend more each year on cosmetics than the entire national income of the Estados Unidos de … México? Elena snaps the yellow garters around your thighs, Dragoness White Rabbit, and Morgana anoints your slender neck with lotion. And your eyes are accusing, damning fingers as you look from Boston Boy to Rose Ass and say bitterly:

“Where are my children, damn you? And do you think that you've won now, simply because my children are dead? Do you think I'm all alone now, that my life ended with the lives of my babies? Shit! You're fools. You think it's so easy to destroy a woman's life. But the life of a woman doesn't let itself be destroyed except by the woman herself, and she must act from her marrow, her core. You outside her can't touch it. Haven't you seen them, imbeciles? Haven't you seen them this very night, selling pop in that little store, playing hopscotch in the dirt? Won't you see them again tomorrow, silent, half naked, rolling around in the dust beside the highways and the rice fields, on the land where battles are fought? They're the life of a woman, you idiots. Of all women.”

Morgana's fingers work upon the blank white lime-washed skin and form a new face. Elena is fastening the garter belt with two copper hooks. Morgana offers lipsticks: flamenco pink, icy coral, skeletal smoke, lunatic livid. White Rabbit chooses a subdued red.

“You've been able to exhaust and destroy my sensations, to tire my touch, to offend my smell. But that was all. No more. Not my life. And today my senses hate and condemn you and my hatred is a long patient waiting that is far from its end. And just as long-lived as my hatred will be the love that sustains my hatred.”

She caresses your cheeks, Dragoness. She prepares your lips. Elena offers you your panties with their copper-colored lace and you lift one leg and then the other, crying, “Becky, Becky, wait for me! I'm coming back now! I'll believe everything you taught me, even if it costs me the sanity it cost you. I'm coming back, Becky, Mamma. We'll settle our accounts with these damn men once and for all.”

Morgana is finishing. The last touches: eyebrows, eyelids, the lips again. And now we know this woman who formerly was faceless. She raises her naked arms and fastens her hair at the back of her neck with a copper-rusted ribbon. Her naked arms, bronzed from the sun, then the tossing movement with both hands. That is how we always see her, her arms raised while she ties up her hair with a ribbon. Sometimes in profile, sometimes from behind, sometimes in front as if she were a turning statue with a windblown blue curtain for her grape-leaf garment. From in front, in profile, from behind, as Morgana slowly turns her, makes her drop her hands. We inspect Morgana's work. Kneeling, Elena looks on. “Yes, Becky,” the woman with the new face says quietly, “the God of Israel exists and lives, though far from us. He is not merely one more fantasy created by these mock men who love women as if they were dreams and dreams as if they were women, who murder innocent childen with abortions before birth and gas chambers after birth. No, Becky. God is real.” She is a beautiful Jewess. A beautiful dark-skinned Jewess whose beaded sweat we can see on her temples, in her armpits, on her upper lip, at the division of her breasts. A dark-haired Jewess of black prolonged orgasms. The discovery of America. Land-ho. Bullshit. “I'll come home, Becky. I'll make one more voyage and come home.” Elena covers her with the damp trench coat and her arms drop.

“Elenita,” says the Capitana, “peel me a grape.”

“When are you going to tell me the story of that monster of a bed, Capitana?”

“Get them out of here,
caifán.
With a little order and dignity, please. Who's paying, you? Gladiolo, make out his check and wait downstairs. When you go out,
caifán,
try not to attract the attention of every cop in the colonia. We have a little protection, but not very much. And God knows what would happen if anyone was to find out about this witches' Sabbath you and your … The dough,
caifán,
let's have the dough. That old bed? Bah, it came in handy, didn't it? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“But you've been here for years, Capitana. I know you know about it.”

“Years,
caifán,
you said it. Long years and a few happy days.”

“I believe you were here when the house first opened.”

“Yeah. And I remember you, too. You were just a squirt kid who used to come in to have his horn sharpened every now and then. I remember, all right.”

“Be careful with the step, Capitana.”

“Always the gentleman,
caifán.
Thank you, I appreciate it. Look, please don't bring these werewolves of yours back again. It's indecent to have that many in one bed at the same time. The prestige of the house suffers.”

“You heard the madam, werewolves. Move along. There's blood in the streets.”

“I suppose you've forgotten how I was in the old days.”

“Forget, Capitana? How could I? A sugar dumpling. A ripe mango. Just to look at you was enough to make a man…”

“Yeah, and today, a pot gut and double chins. But still lively, old man. And still smart.”

“Tell me about that bed. I'm curious.”

“Why not, if you want to know? I don't mind telling you. It's just that I hate to remember. I don't like to go back to anything. It hurts, you know. Not always. But often, too goddamn often. Well, the bed. When we moved in, the house was empty except for the patio, where there were canaries in cages, and for that big bedroom, where the bed was. We let the canaries die. Who cared about canaries? There wasn't another stick in the whole house. Oh, yes, the bead curtain that we still have between the bar and the living room. And a bottle of morphine tablets hidden away behind the bed. With a syringe and a needle or two. What do you think of that, eh? But I don't know. Maybe she was dying of cancer or something. The señora who owned the house, I mean. And yes, there was a painting, a portrait of that honest lady. The head of a woman, but her face was the face of a little girl. So, she had died and her son had sold the house and everything in it except the canaries in the cages and the big bed and the painting and the bead curtain, and you know who was the buyer and what business began. They said that the son would be back to get the bed and the painting. He wanted them in memory of his mother. But he never showed. We didn't complain. Beds like that aren't made any more. It's given us damn good service. Hah, just imagine, that gentle girl-faced lady passed her entire life in that bed. Slept there, fucked there, gave birth there, dreamed there, finally died there, all alone at the last with her Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging on the wall and her memories watching her from the shadows. A decent, Godfearing, well-bred lady, as proper as white gloves. And now in less than half a lifetime, how many thousands of broads have spread their legs on that old bed. Shit,
caifán,
what can you be sure about in this mess we call life? That saintly lady has been rolling in her grave, I suppose, while we were rolling on her mattress. Thanks for coming tonight. It's good to see old friends sometimes. Come back again. It's your own home, you know, any time you want it. Open the door for him, Gladiolo. Those kids, though … keep them out in the pasture where they can kick up their heels as they please. In the barn…” The six Monks filed past her silently. She squeezed my arm and pulled my ear down to her lips. “Listen,
caifán,
come back all by yourself some evening. Don't forget your little mango. Shit, you can die crossing the goddamn street. Better to do it in bed, eh, fucking your fat old hot mama.”

The door closes behind us and we are alone and exhausted. Once we are in the ancient Lincoln convertible, no one will speak. No one will know where we are going, why we are going there. I will know nothing except that I want to write what they have told me, that they have told me enough and more than enough, and to put it down on paper well, cleanly, truly, will be to face all the sand of an endless desert. I will betray them. I'll have to, for as my cousin Pepe Bianco shut up among his books in his place on Cerrito in Buenos Aires puts it, every novel is a betrayal, an act of bad faith, an abuse of confidence. For at bottom we are most contented with what appears to be, with what goes on monotonously day after day and by its repetitiveness earns, and perhaps deserves, the name of reality.
I don't give a damn
in the drugstores on Broadway.
Fiche moi la paix
in the cafés on the Boulevard St-Germain,
Andate a fare un culo
in the restaurants of Piazza Campitelli,
Me importa madre
in the supermarkets along Insurgentes,
Me importa un corno
in the movie houses of Lavalle, and who knows how the hell they say it but we can be sure that they say the same damn thing in the hotels of Mayakovsky Square, at the camp grounds of the Tatra, in the shops on Carnaby Street. So why do we wear ourselves to less than shadows writing books that say only that the reality that matters is a false one and that death awaits us unless we protect ourselves with lies, with appearances put on like wigs, with lunatic aspirations, the aspirant lunacy, to be precise, of a book. Truth bares its teeth at us from every side. Our lie isn't what threatens us. What threatens is truth, which waits as patient as a diamond and makes us drowsy and satisfied, conquers us with contentment so that it can overcome us as we were first overcome in the beginning of everything. If we were to let it, truth would annihilate us. For “truth” is the same as the beginning and the beginning was nothingness and nothingness is death and death is the enemy, so let us all lie together, or surely we shall all lie alone. Truth would like to offer us a vision of the beginning, of life before it learned to doubt, before it was contaminated by idea. And that vision is precisely the vision of the end: the other face of creation is apocalypse. And the “lies” we spinners of tales tell betray “the true” simply in order to hold away from us, from all of us, that day of judgment when the beginning and the end shall be one. Yet nevertheless literature pays its homage to original, mortal, entirely unacceptable might; we recognize it because we must if we are to control and limit it. Not to recognize it, not to limit it, is to open the door on the fanged wolf of assassinating purity. And if that happens, all of us end up very small brown turds, Daddy-oh and Big Mama, desiccated and scentless.

The Monks understand me. Sure, they understand. That's why bearded Boston Boy has his foot against the floorboard and we are whirling along Insurgentes like a projectile that knows it has a target. I would like to know what that target is, to learn if it is the one I suspect. But we are all too tired. I look at their faces, carried beside and around my own in the illusory immobility of togetherness, and I see that I don't really know who they are or who they were a moment ago, much less who they may be an hour from now. April's night wind, Mexican wind of dust blown from the dry lake beds of the flat valley, twists and disfigures those young faces, and perhaps among them there is someone I have never known: may not this same wind, born of land that once was water, may it not whip the muffler worn by a German student who takes the 7:15 tram, toss the hair of a pair of young lovers on a Greek island of goats and pebbles, drift golden fog around the heads of the baroque statues of a Karlsbrücke, beneath the Tropic of Cancer throb the lost polyphony of a great requiem, dissipate the gaseous warmth of a Jewish block in Manhattan, touch closed the eyes of an old man seated in the sun on a bench in Mexico City's Alameda Park? I confess I don't know. There are many things I don't know. Ask me some other day. Maybe I'll be wiser then. Now, at this moment, seated within this night-hurtling ancient Lincoln, I refuse to admit that if I should relax my will and my imagination, the six young faces and bodies traveling with me would be carried away into darkness like so many tiny sparks from a dying fire, that they, like the wind, the car, the night itself, are my creatures, and if I should cease to sustain them with my creative love, they would disappear in a whirl of transparent circles, vanish even from memory. Yes, I speak of loving you, my six Monks, for you
are
my six Monks, my six Monkkin, Monkkernels, Monkkites, Monkkings, Monkknights, Monkkittens, Monkknaves, and as with me you race through this April night at something near a hundred kilometers an hour, we see together my compatriots pushing their carts down the aisles of open supermarkets bright with light, buying canned goods that bombs may fall a little sooner on Peking, the world be saved a little sooner for freedom and Palmolive soap, standing before rotisseries that slowly turn with chickens under the arm that the helmeted Marines may cross the Rio Grande in the north and the Bío-Βíο in the south and we ourselves become the last Vietnamites; we see them emerging from Sears carrying a new aspirator that the world may become one wide field of burning napalm, see them climb into their Chryslers and Plymouths and Dodges that the universe may achieve the New Order of peace and tranquillity and decency sans all upsetting spectra, yellows, blacks, reds, and all unsettling specters like you, my Monkkeeners, my Monkkreatans, my Monkkristers, my Monkkillers. But now it isn't my wind I hear. I never huffed and puffed up a wind that wails like that, that blinks its red light and waves its gauntleted hand for us to pull over and stop in front of the illuminated glass box of the Comercial Mexicana, where pleasant families, we can see them from our car through glass and more glass, an aquarium of a market, pass along shoving their carts and baby carriages, carrying their wire baskets and their children drowning among bottles of catsup and heads of lettuce and boxes of Kleenex provided to wipe away their snot as they wail. And the boxes of Kleenex and the files of artichoke militia (dry beneath their scales, Pablo) suffocate with so many children heaped on top of them and the man in brown raises his goggles and swings off his stilled wheels and swaggers toward us on shining boots as he takes out his ticket book and his pencil and Boston Boy assumes an expression of innocence. Play it cool, now, Boston Boy. Just play it cool. The cop wants fifty pesos and that's all he wants. Viva the Emperor President seated upon the Great Pyramid.
Si haut que l'on soit placé, on n'est jamais plus haut que sur son cul,
quoth Cousin Michel, the Old Man of the Mountain.