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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

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These places are always far from the usual human walks, from towns and cities. They have to be far, otherwise they would lose their meaning. I don't know what you had to pay before they would let you in, what you had to do; I don't want to try to guess. But you had always said, Some day I'll tell you everything, and I had no reason to doubt your word.

Of course, they made you stay outside my door. Even there you were running risk enough. Your voice reached me very feebly, very low, but then the walls of my room caught it and amplified it. That was why I didn't move nearer you. I stood facing the part of the wall that pretends to be a window and I caught your voice before it fled from everything, before it died.

You have to do much before you can understand what they say. This tightrope walking is my daily bread, which I eat to understand. As they have never lived, any life that can be called living, they know nothing, not even the secrets of this their place. They have created isolation and believe that four walls can contain it. But nothing is utterly isolated. Nothing, Dragoness.

They would be surprised if they lived here with me and discovered that the absolute silence of the first days is merely the announcement of a universe of sounds which at first are heard one by one, then fused into a pattern, an order. When one of us to his shame tells them, they laugh and say it is all imagination. Be it known it is evil: to live imprisoned. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, the screws tighten. They themselves begin to imagine what we imagine and then we are no longer alone: they also are living imprisoned. They know it and they know that it is contrary to the principle of authority that they themselves attempt to impose. And then they stop your food, Dragoness, so that you won't have pangs of indigestion. Or they stuff a viscous pap into you because they believe that your imagination is the result of your hunger, which sharpens it. Or they cover the floor with cotton mattresses to shut the sounds away.

So I tell them nothing. I play the mute idiot and keep all I hear to myself. All the voices that come through the stone. The panting of love-making, the shouts of a quarrel. The snapped commands, the fall of clods of earth. The volleys of rifle shots, the crack of a rubber-hose lash. The whining of animals and the crying of children. The night music of an eternal repose and the million footsteps that drag past. The moaning I hear every night when I put my ear to the floor to communicate somehow with someone who must be buried beneath the soles of my feet.

It makes me happy that you have come to see me. You are going to tell me that you and Javier came out of the pyramid dragging the body behind you. The first thing you saw was the parked Lincoln. You left the body lying across the iron rails and took advantage of the sad Cholula night, as silent as falling dust, so dark there at the foot of the pyramid and the church, near the insane asylum, in order to get rid of your burden. You opened the trunk of the Lincoln and he dragged the body up. But inside the trunk you found something you couldn't have expected. It was something alive, wrapped up like a mummy, a little bundle that stirred and whimpered. You felt afraid. Behind those bandage-like wrappings there was life, perhaps there was even more than one life. Javier was also afraid but with him fear showed itself as action. He went back and got the body and dragged it to the car through the sad silent darkness, the darkness as secret as the deepest recesses of the earth. He took the body by the armpits and made you take it by the feet and between you, with difficulty, you raised it and dropped it into the trunk. Javier wanted to put down the lid at once. You hesitated. When the body of the dead man had fallen, you had heard a soft cry, one that for a moment you let yourself pretend you couldn't identify, it might have been the cry of a nun in the church on top of the hill pyramid, it might have been the cry of a patient in the nearby insane asylum, it might even have been only the cry of a cricket. But you knew all the time that the cry had come from within the trunk of the car. You reached beneath the dead body and took out the small living bundle and held it in your arms without knowing what it was. Javier wanted you to leave it there. He told you that it wasn't yours, that it wasn't any of your business, that he had better put the lid of the trunk down and both of you get the hell out. But you cradled the bundle in your arms and accepted it, accepted everything, knowing that whatever was within those tight wrappings was both yours and not yours, and that the world has many riddles and enigmas that must not be too closely looked into except at the risk of catastrophic destruction. And whom could you ask about it, anyhow? You began to run, Dragoness, not sure where you were going. You could have gone up the steep road to the church, or down the street into Cholula. Or around the pyramid to the asylum. You chose the last, knowing that there would be doctors and nurses at the asylum. You ran to the wide gate of its spacious grounds and put down the bundle where it would be found. Then you went back to your husband, Dragoness, as you always go back to him, to Javier waiting beside the closed trunk inside which lay a new skin to rot in the stead of the skin you had saved from rotting. You will always know whom you have to care for and protect, Dragoness. And let no one say anything about fear.

Now you have to go. I think you have come a long way just to be with me these few minutes, for, as I said, these places are always far removed from civilization. I would like to believe that in order to reach me you had to call upon the influence of important acquaintances, to pay large bribes. Yet I also know that it's possible you may be locked up here too, just like me. For your parents were as infected, or at least as suspected of infection, as those of any of us. I shan't say that you have come from the contaminated soil of Nazareth to this earth where live the dead who resuscitate themselves, this palace of Our Lord Lazarus. Yes, Lazarus lives here too. He of the resurrections. He who has given his name to our dwelling place and also to the pyramid and also to the church atop the pyramid. If you stand on tiptoe at the window, sometimes, not always but sometimes, the pyramid and the church can be seen, or at least can seem to be seen.

It's time for you to go now, Dragoness. Caesar the Sleepwalker serves his immortal master well and if he should suspect I have listened to you he might murder me with a cold in the head, a touch of indigestion, perhaps a twinge of hunger. It's mealtime, Dragoness. The yellow dog is feeding on the bones of the masked child and will soon be finished with them. I can't recognize the face of the child, but I am sure it isn't laughing. Our children never laugh except when they wear comic masks, funny faces of sugar, sweet skeletons and death's heads that laugh for them. And death is the puppet theater where the sad eyes of our children look and see their own faces on the white skull because they know that, long before their childhood ends, their heads will be white skulls too.

Go, Dragoness, go. The yellow dog is turning from the bones of the child. He is tied only by dirty rags that at any moment may break, and then … I know that his hunger is far from sated.

So long, Dragoness. Take it easy. Stay loose. And don't forget your ever lovin'

Tonantzintla, March 1962

New York, October 1965

Paris, September 1966

 

BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES

Where the Air Is Clear

The Good Conscience

Aura

The Death of Artemio Cruz

A Change of Skin

Terra Nostra

The Hydra Head

Burnt Water

Distant Relations

The Old Gringo

Copyright © 1968 by Carlos Fuentes

All rights reserved

Originally published in Spanish under the title

Cambio de piel, ©
1967 by Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, S.A.

First published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1968

First published in paperback, 1978

Library of Congress catalog card number: 67-15015

eISBN 9781466840089

First eBook edition: February 2013

*
Who said
MAILER
, brethren? If we were born to die!

BOOK: A Change of Skin
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