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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

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BOOK: A Change of Skin
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Do not be distrusting.
No, for mistrust and doubt and suspicion are invitations to betrayal. Distrust him who counsels you to distrust—knowing that there was no need to light the cigarette. Then he returned both cigarettes and matches to his pocket and heard the motors of cars, the sounds of radios, jukeboxes, shrill whistles, a voice singing, mortar slapping against bricks, the burrr-brrr of a handsaw, a tinkle of piano keys, the steps of a rag vender crying his wares, a clatter of dominoes spilled out on a tabletop, a sigh, a cry, the cackle of chickens passing in a cage carried on their owner's back. He opened his eyes. Black-clad mourners were walking out of a church. A hunchback was shining someone's shoes, his brushes and waxes and clothes in a small wooden box festooned with bits of glass and copper centavos. A kitchen with its nested kettles and its smells of boiled chicken, white rice, garbanzo soup. A bakery with trays outside on the sidewalk showing large and small loaves and rolls, twists, puffs, muffins, coils, an endless variety. Across the street, a telegraph office. He moved toward it, dodging cars, and entered and propped his elbows on the marble counter and held his face between his hands. Now he was relaxed with the lassitude that was his compensation for the pain the barbital had subdued. But in an hour or two the lassitude would depart to be followed by its rebound, banal, sterile tension, and his nerves would be taut wires again and he would feel afraid, his fear of death by water or the absurd fear, the ridiculousness of which he would recognize but he would feel it just the same, of sudden death in the street. His fear would concentrate itself in the spastic pit of his belly and he would close his eyes and see himself laid out cold and colorless with a beard that like his fingernails and toenails would go on growing, with his guts distended by gases as if there were still life in him, as if the glassy eyes could still see, the gray-lipped mouth, hanging brutishly open, could still breathe. His hands cradled his face and became tactile mirrors reflecting its protruberances and declivities, its hairs, its orifices, its greases and oils, its dryness and dampness, its weight. They smelled of cologne still, his hands. He put them down. Scattered over the marble countertop were fresh telegraph forms and crumbled, wadded, discarded ones that he smoothed out and read:
Please return home everything forgiven. Happy birthday dearest mother. Arriving bus from Acapulco tonight. Freddy passed examinations all well kisses. Papa died yesterday please come. Rorra my life how long will you resist your big daddy. Reference our conversation bales ordered shipped. Intended no offense will you forgive remember nights of love. Baby boy Alicia fine all happy. Book required for thesis out of print. Wonderful time keys to the city wish you were here mother stop.
Stop, when perhaps the only way to ensure the permanence of a pleasure was to repeat it until simply that permanence became pleasurable no matter how jaded the repetition.
Remember nights of love.
The tachycardia had started again and his legs were leaden and the jerking in his chest would spread downward and excite the spasm and release the burning juices upon the duodenal ulcer and in spite of everything he would have to return to the radiologist and sit for an hour in that room ineffectually disguised as a room for reading, surrounded by others who would be waiting just as wearily, all sitting like stiff wax dolls on the foam-rubber cushions, no one daring to begin a conversation, to say anything more than to ask for a light or an ashtray, all hungry for consolation that would be inappropriate and undeserved because it was not pain they were going to have to endure but simply an experience lacking all dignity. And when the dark-skinned nurse wearing spectacles came and called his name he would rise and leave behind their curious looks and follow her to the cramped dressing room, where, after removing his jacket, tie, and shirt, he would bump his elbows and knees against the walls trying to get out of his trousers and underwear and for a moment after he took off his shorts he would stand naked looking down at his feet in their red socks and black shoes and then he would put on the white robe, ragged from many launderings, that is open behind and must be fastened with ties. And when he came out the nurse would open the door and he would enter a dim room and stretch out on the colorless surface of a table and when he was prone there the doctor would appear and turn lights on and off and press buttons and the X-ray camera would first nudge his belly and then push hard all the way through to his backbone and they would order him to breathe, stop breathing, breathe, stop breathing, breathe while he would be thinking that no compassion so cold and objective as that of a doctor deserves the name of compassion. Then the table would be elevated and he would be vertical again, feeling afresh the coldness of the nickel and mica pressed against his skin. The nurse would give him a glass of that miserable mud to drink, that white clayey liquid still clogged with lumps. And they say that X rays can produce cancer, yet every time he felt the spasm he told himself that he had to go for more, a cure that might be worse than the sickness. After the second glass of barium they would let him rest and then they would order him to assume indecent postures so that the ultimate kink of his intestines could be photographed and he would twist his body and raise a shoulder and tilt a hip, press his buttocks together and spread his feet, lie on one side and then the other and presently they would say that it was all over and he must take a laxative because barium can harden like stone in your belly. And the irritation would be worse because of the combination of barium and castor oil and X rays and heightened tension and one night he would wake vomiting blood, weak, frightened, and an ambulance would have to come and take him to the hospital hemorrhaging, dissolving, helpless, too late, too soon, too …

Ligeia often laughed. But that was another story.

Oh, yes, you laugh, Dragoness. The wonder is that you haven't died of laughter.

*   *   *

Δ   “Dragoness,” I asked you, “tell me how it was the first time.”

“I'll tell you, but don't look at me that way. Let me laugh.”

“Okay, I'll behave. Tell me.”

“He was sleeping. It had rained all afternoon and I took the subway to Flushing Meadows and he was in the motel sound asleep and I opened the door, soaked, my raincoat wet through…”

“You don't have to lie to me, Elizabeth.”

“Who's lying to you? I'm telling you how it happened. He was lying on the bed fast asleep and I came in soaked to the skin and stood there in the door and looked at him.”

“Okay. I'm not wondering what happened, but where it happened.”

“I looked at him and waited.”

“All evening?”

“No,
caifán,
not all evening. Stop interrupting. I waited because I was sure that my presence there would awaken him and because I wanted to feel him still asleep and feel myself waiting.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,
caifán.
I believe everything they tell me. But you're a disbelieving type, aren't you? You don't trust people.”

“That depends. I've been roasted trusting people sometimes.”

“We're getting old, old man, that's all.”

“Sure. I'll wear the bottoms of my pants rolled up. Forget it.”

“It bothers you? That's funny, I think. Believe it or not, it doesn't bother me at all. Except for one thing. You begin to be too damn tolerant. Consciously and deliberately tolerant. What a horror that is.”

“You're depressing me, Dragoness. Okay, now enough suspense. You waited. Did he wake up?”

“Of course he woke up. Then I went close to him with my dripping raincoat and my wet hair and drops of rain all over my face. I went close to him finally. At last. The boy I had met at City College and decided I had to have. The handsome boy from Mexico, so damn good-looking that when you saw him you felt you had to pinch yourself to be sure.”

“A swarthy Apollo?”

“Yeah, you could say it that way. And I told my girlfriends, or maybe only myself, that one way or another, little by little and no matter how long it took, I was going to get that man.”

“Win his lightning fast-on-the-drawers beauty with time and patience?”

“Bullshit,
caifán.
Stop grinning. That's the way it was.”

“You aren't reading me clear, Dragoness.”

“Clear enough. Why do you always laugh?”

“Maybe it's because I don't care for solutions.”

“We're leaving on a vacation trip tomorrow.”

“Where to?”

“Veracruz. I want to see the sea again.”

“Who's going?”

“Javier and I.”

“That's all? Come on, Dragoness, give.”

“Little Isabel.”

“And that's all?”

“All right. Franz.”

“Ahhh.”

“Well, it's a solution, isn't it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Let's go back to that motel room.”

“I knelt on the bed and Javier opened his eyes and smiled at me. He reached his hand out and unbuttoned my raincoat. Under the raincoat I was wearing only panties. Javier was shocked, oh, he was scandalized. But really. ‘Did you come that way all the way from home?' The same prude then that he is today, but at the time I thought it was his innocence, that he was pure, inexperienced. He was trembling…”

“And you, Elizabeth? What did you feel? Quick now.”

“Well, that … That everything was going to happen very very quickly. Too quickly.”

“For what?”

“Too quickly for … love, I suppose, magic, dream, reality. The word doesn't matter. That it was going to be over and behind us very quickly because the whole world was pushing us forward toward it, making us urgent, unable to wait, take our time…”

“Yes, I think I get it. Go on, Elizabeth.”

“Well, then there we were. And now we had become a
pareja,
a couple.”

“Already a couple?”

“Yes, already. You know, after we got up from the bed we filled the washbasin and washed our hands together in the motel bathroom, soaped and washed our hands together, our fingers touching in the warm water…”

“This may be too personal, but were you couple enough to come together that first time?”

“Nothing you ask me or I tell you is too personal,
caifán.
No, not then. Only much later, after years together.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Afterward? I thanked him. I told him not to worry about it, just to try to let himself go as much as he could. That only by giving could he take, by spending, save. Well, it's true, isn't it?”

“Sure, very true. How did he answer you?”

“Oh, quietly and with complicated words. But very sincerely. He told me that he loved me because I wasn't an echo from his past, from his childhood or his teen years. That our relationship was authentic, not a parody. Something like that. Probably he had read it somewhere. But at the time he seemed very moved and very sincere.”

“What did you say then?”

“I asked him how he could know he wasn't lying when he said he loved me.”

“A proper question.”

“He didn't answer it. We made love again and we went on feeling that we were joined together deeply. A couple now.”

“That pretty couple. Self-sacramented. Stealing from each other.”

“I suppose. But I think I sensed even then that he wanted a problem, something to worry about, to be disturbed, troubled by. And that maybe that was what I was for him. The
troublante,
the difficulty. Lord, I forget what language I'm speaking.”

“You're speaking pop language, Dragoness. Pop literature, you know. The big sign in the background:

POP LIT

“What,
caifán?
Slow down. Sometimes you buzz like a neon light.”

“Sorry, Pussycat. I was carried away. You say it was in Flushing Meadows?”

“What, Flushing Meadows? God, no. It was right here in Mexico. In a tourists' court on the road to Toluca. He took me there in a broken-down taxi.”

“Off of it, Pussycat. No cracks about cabs. Cabs mean a lot to me. They bail me out. They keep me going. They're one of my trades. By my cab alone…”

“Sometime you're going to choke on pure air,
caifán.
Drowned by words.”

“Well, words are another of my trades. What did he say to you?”

“At the court? Oh, you know. That he loved me. That he loved me because with me everything was new and fresh, he wasn't repeating anything from the past. You know the way he talks. That we weren't living out a parody. Jazz like that.”

“And did you believe him?”

“Well, Proffy's sweet, you know. I liked it that after we made love he got up and went to the bathroom with no dignity at all, half groggy, half out of it, nothing hip. Do you know what I mean?”

“Sure, Isabel, I always know what you mean.”

“He had brought along some panties and he made me put them on. Then he made me put on his trench coat and get in the shower and he turned on the water until I was soaked and laughing. He asked me to go outside and knock and come in again and look at him pretending to be asleep on the bed. I went to the bed and knelt beside him and he very slowly unbuttoned me and took the trench coat off. And there I was in those borrowed panties, so we made love and then we went to sleep. It was nice,
caifán.
Different.”

“You went to sleep and the dreams began? Thought became a dream that whittled itself down?”

“Man, how did you know?”

“Artaud said: We believe in the absolute power of contradiction.”

“Who are you?”

“Who are
you?
Let's keep it a secret.”

*   *   *

Δ   You walked down the path to the Volkswagen thinking, Elizabeth, remembering. You were seated in a café in Herakleion. Javier was reciting a poem by Gaspara Stampa and looking at you while you watched the men passing in their gold-embroidered trousers and then he alluded to the Duino Elegies and asked if you hadn't been struck by the restraint of gesture and expression in the Greek stelae and you replied, sipping your Turkish coffee, that in Greece everything seemed to have its name while at home in the States so many things were nameless, undefined or very vaguely defined and therefore hard to talk about, even to think about, and that was one of the reasons that you had been glad to come here and sit in a café and look at the leathered faces of men who knew the names and the meanings of things. Javier smiled and pressed your hand and said that he had come to see the living embodiments of the restraint to be found in the stelae, the memory of those gestures still maintained, the way they moved, extended an arm, held their heads. From reading books, he went on, one could deduce a way of thinking or speaking. But not physical movement. He had wanted to try to discover how such restraint could nevertheless hold such passion. While he was still young enough he wanted to learn the lesson that was first of all in their architecture, where the form is its own content with no need for ornament or commentary. Just as their tragedy is architectonic, so their architecture is their theater enacted in stone. Everything is exactly what it appears to be. Gray-haired women with paunches and double chins and fat arms called back and forth from their balconies and then you and Javier left to look at the golden Mycenaean masks, those funerary suns that provide a third face, one that lies between the faces of life and death and is the only face that we can receive from others, the only possible homage to death: to understand that beyond life but this side of death can lie a visage containing both. You went to see the dead children covered with beaten gold, the sketches in marble of the Cycladic women with their high breasts, their very simple figures, slender, angular, yet soft, a sharp contrast to the broad-buttocked women in the statues at Aegina whose strong hands rest upon their heavy knees, an equal contrast to the Athenian caryatids placed by their builders in stances of support but transcending that destiny thanks to their blind distant eyes looking forever far away, far beyond their setting of eternal fixation, beyond the Acropolis and beyond the step their motionless legs are about to take into another time, having outlived the time of their creation.

BOOK: A Change of Skin
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