A Change of Skin (8 page)

“I could tell some stories too, if I wanted to,” you go on. You are face down across the bed and you let your head hang over one side, your feet over the other. The coverlet is white, here and there stained with yellow.

“Javier, please take a Kleenex and wipe away those two fleas I squashed.”

Blood runs toward your head and swells the veins of your temples and forehead and neck. You let your shoes fall from your tired feet. You wriggle your toes as if they were fingers on a keyboard.

“Oh, if I wanted to, I could tell stories that would bore you too.”

Javier fiddles with the bronze curtain rod from which hang the muslin curtains that cover the glass-paned door.

“Javier, it's smelly in here. Haven't you noticed? Doesn't it bother you? Why don't you go and complain to the manager.”

“The picturesque usually smells a bit. Don't worry. Some day there will be a Cholula-Hilton.”

The pressure of blood in your head begins to make you dizzy. And the squashed fleas are still there on the wall. Again you close your eyes. “For example, I could tell the story of Elena.”

“Elena?”

You raise your head and look at him as if surprised.

“Elena, of course. Elena. Don't you remember the beach at Falaraki? The colored pebbles? The figs Elena sold? The hot, sun-rotted figs that she brought in a bucket and sold to sunbathers sprawled out on the sand under the sun that would end by rotting them too, the…”

“The sun, always the sun.” While you are speaking, he closes the shutters of the door. “Ever since I've known you, you've always been looking for more sun.”

“Why close the shutters at six in the afternoon?”

“Because it is a public hall and you are lying there with your skirt up to your ass.”

You laugh a bubbling laugh and Javier closes his eyes in the darkness. He is wrong about the hall, Dragoness. It is not open to the public. It's a closed gallery that surrounds the four sides of a patio roofed with glass panes set in an iron spider web with dust gathered in its angles and crotches.

Javier folds down the coverlet and the sheets and in silence lies on his stomach. You are seated with your legs drawn up, your knees holding the covers high. Although Javier tries to keep his face turned away, your woman's smells come to him: cologne water, menstruation, fatigue. With a fold of the sheet over his face, he murmurs: “Men from the States are more sensitive to smells than we are. They are aseptic. Every odor seems aggressive to them. Offends them, irritates them. Here, we're immune.”

He removes the sheet from his face and out of the corner of his eye peeks at you as you sit smoking with open eyes that are pensive and distant. He covers his face again and again smells your smells.

Just a deterioratin' little boy, Mama-Dragoness.

He believes, when he wakes, that he has slept only a few seconds. He had felt nothing. But when he removes the sheet from his face with a jerk and calls out, “Ligeia! Ligeia!” he sees that you are no longer seated there. Your imprint is still visible on the pillow and the sheets, but you, Elizabeth, have vanished. And the light has vanished too. He sighs and says bitterly: “Ligeia, oh, for Christ's sake!”

*   *   *

Δ   Sometimes I really don't know how you speak or listen to him, Dragoness. He makes me too aware that all of us want to close the circle of our lives, to be able to think that the round line ends where it began, to want to live many lives within the one we do live, to be sure that if we only had more strength of mind, will, and dream, we could make our little pasts have meaning. Unconsciously we are all poets and we struggle to oppose nature with our patterns: nature which does not consider us individual beings at all but rather confluences of lives that cannot be isolated one from the other, that flow together in a great whirl that neither begins nor ends. Suppose then we are confronted by a man who believes that he has closed his circle once and for all, that he has left everything behind, that he has understood it all: what does he do when you address him speaking any words that may come to mind, any sentence whatsoever, no matter how cryptic. For example:

“That is a finger bowl. When you finish eating your shrimp, you dip your fingers in it and wash them off. Like this, see? You must learn these things. If you don't, people will say that we don't know how to bring you up.”

Then he will have to remember that he was thinking,

“Where will I go after dinner?”

and also that one day he wanted to follow her, to learn where she disappeared to every afternoon, but he fell too far behind and got lost. He was ten years old and it was the first time he had ever left the house without knowing where he was going. Before, when he went out alone, he always knew that it would be to the park or the candy store or to his school. And, moreover, he rode a school bus to school. This time he went beyond his coordinates—Calzada del Niño Perdido, Parque de Ajusco, the school of the Marist Fathers on Avenida Morelos—and in four or five blocks he was lost and he observed that he did not know the city, that in reality he knew nothing about it because he had never walked it alone.

“Where were you this afternoon?”

“I went to the movie at the Parisiana.”

“Who with?”

“Two boys from school.”

“What are their names?”

“Pedro and Enrique.”

“What picture did you see.”

“A talkie. I forget its name.”

“Let me have the paper. It'll be there.”

And, after all, he had not grown up in the city. He had been living there only a year. Before that, the trains were everything, much more than the cities. Always running behind schedule. Often stopped by breakdowns, stuck sometimes for twenty-four hours in a row in the middle of a desert while his mother dried herself with lace handkerchiefs and his father played cards with other men in the salon diner that smelled of too ripe bananas. At first the trainmen would say that no one should get off because the trouble was minor and they would be on their way again in twenty minutes. Then, when the rumor was circulating that the tracks ahead had been blown up, some of the passengers would get down and smoke cigarettes and drink from canteens but the sun would be too blistering and they would climb aboard again seeking refuge, shadow, and his mother dried the back of her neck and between her breasts and said to him, “Don't get off the train. It's too dangerous,” and on the other side of the dust-thick glass the desert could be seen like its own mirage, colorless, empty, a stage upon which at any moment something terrible might happen and all colors be born of the absence of any color. Only the clouds moved. They hurried along playing at racing each other and Javier could amuse himself watching them for a while, but not for long. He pretended that the train had gotten tired. It had huffed and puffed and groaned to reach the high desert and now it had fallen exhausted, mouth down, panting without strength, and everything smelled of tired steam, of grease and old food. With his finger he began to draw houses and trees and faces in the dust of the window.

“Go wash your hands while there's still water.”

An old man was eating
chongos zamoranos
and offered the boy a bite. Javier was sweating but he had been forbidden to take off his brick-colored wool jacket. He sat beside the old man and the old man smiled and offered him a wooden spoonful of that curdled milk and Javier opened his mouth and tasted the sweetness and the grain of the chipped spoon. The old man smiled again. He had no teeth. The honey ran down his wrinkled chin and the front of his white, buttoned-up, tieless shirt. He was wearing a faded felt hat and a black suit with frayed elbows and lapels and he ate the
chongos
without saying a word.

“Where is the boy?”

“In the living room.”

“What's he doing?”

“His homework.”

“Close the door.”

Yes, close the door. The door of their bedroom or the door of the compartment on the train when the train crossed the river and left behind the homes with lawns that had no walls but instead little signs with the name of the family living there, the stores, the movies, the soda fountains. The people who were different. No, that wasn't right: the people who were different were those who boarded the train in Nuevo Laredo, after it had crossed the wide shallow brown river between the high earthen banks, the river with its little sand bars and islets and its bushes growing surrounded by water. And then he could understand the language again. The allusions, the jokes, that way of speaking without ever referring to things directly, as if the names of things burned the tongue a little, were prohibited and secret and needed to be approached lightly and laughingly from a distance because the direct word was dangerous. The lightening, softening diminutives. The oblique slang. While his father Raúl sat rubbing his head, his suspenders hanging loose, and one by one held out and examined the purchases he had made on the other side this time: the extension cords, the transformers, the electric irons and coffeepots. And Ofelia his mother stood in front of the compartment looking glass and held her new dress against her body until she saw him, her son, reflected in the glass also standing in the open door with a toy boat in his hand, and with a movement of her head she commanded him and he closed the door.

He seldom understood what they said at the table. And they spoke very little. Without his knowing why, he came to believe that their faces and their hands, their expressions and their gestures, so familiar, so habitual, had nothing to do with the words they spoke during their meals.

“Pass the salt, please.”

And Raúl had the habit of breaking up his bread and dropping it small piece by small piece into his soup.

“You look tired.”

While Ofelia always squeezed lemon into her soup. Always, every day.

“Yes. Well, what do you expect?”

Javier brushed away the flies from the metal net that protected the bread. Sometimes the bread became old there and began to turn white.

“Maybe we'll be able to take a vacation the end of this year.”

Funniest of all were the dining room pictures. Long and narrow, they told the story of a boy who was teasing a sleeping dog (the first picture); the dog awakens (the second picture), bites the boy in the seat of the pants (the third), and the boy cries and climbs a tree.

“Maybe. I don't know. It depends.”

The bead curtain that served as a door rustled as the single servant came from the distant kitchen, where the cooking was still done on charcoal braziers. Thin filets covered with onions.

“It would be nice to go down to the sea for a few days.”

“Yes, Ofelia, it would be nice.”

They stopped talking while the servant served them. They resumed again, with difficulty, after she had left the room.

“Javier is getting very good grades.”

“Fine. That's fine.”

“Aren't you, Javier?”

He nodded without stopping chewing and tried to understand what it was that his mother and father were saying so mechanically and expressionlessly though their lips were smiling. And now and then Ofelia would throw her head back almost happily: a vacation at the end of the year.

“Don't start eating before your father. It's bad manners. They'll say that we don't know how to…”

He opened the curtain in order to climb …

“Ligeia? Where are you? Oh, for Christ's sake.”

… to his upper berth and there in the lower, where he had to be, where it was ordained that he be, was the old man of the
chongos zamoranos,
panting and gray-skinned but with the strength born of pure weariness that belongs to the aged because it has become their habit, on his face the toothless smile Javier did not then understand but which later, if he had tried to write or even to talk about it, he would have described as the transient mask worn when an instant prolongs itself toward fixity; withered, wiry, in his collarless white shirt that hung down to his flaccid buttocks, and beside him the old woman his wife who saw Javier first and pulled long locks of her white hair across her face to conceal it but left her naked heavy breasts exposed, the nipples like brown craters, her wrinkled belly like old linen. She mumbled something and the man turned and observed Javier staring at them. That was how it was. Or no, that was not quite how it was, but really only where and what it was, and Javier never wrote about it because he felt that it had been a meaningless encounter, not one in which anyone had been involved, he told himself this and he put the incident aside, scribbled in one of his notebooks with the comment that sometimes the distance that separates us has not only more value but also more meaning than the closeness that joins us. He was to meet them again, not the same yet the same, years later when he was an adolescent schoolboy and was being punished for some misdemeanor such as forging his father Raúl's signature and had to stay in the classroom after everyone had left, alone writing on the blackboard
I will not forge my father's signature, I will not forge my father's signature, I will not forge my father's signature
twenty times until the blackboard was filled and then he erased and began another twenty
I will not forge my father's signature
and behind him the room, a makeshift basement classroom in the school of the Marist Fathers, began to change as darkness crept into it, ceased to be the familiar place of slanting light and shadow and familiar smells, ink, paper, crayons, sweat after coming in from exercises in the recreation yard, wood, floor oil, chalk dust, sky dust from the high small open windows and he sat there either not hearing the teacher at all or hearing very indistinctly like the buzz of a distant bee; it ceased to be that room and slowly filled with darkness and coolness that seemed to wipe away the smells of the day while he went on writing
I will not forge my father's signature
until he finished, left the last sentence he had written unerased but erased all the others and gathered up his things and took care to turn off the lights and close the door so that it would lock. And tomorrow confession would be given to all students in the first year of law. He had completed his punishment: done it on word of honor, as the teacher had ordered, and in the night the whole school was dark except for those hidden and prohibited patios and rooms of the building next door where the nuns lived, the pale women without makeup who in those years of persecution could not wear their habits, their hair combed starkly back and tied in knots bristling with combs, their spectacles gold-framed, their clothing dark blouses and dark skirts with high-buttoned shoes. He came out to the corner. There they were, crossing the street, an old man in a black suit and a white-haired old woman in a gray and white polka-dot dress, humped, exhausted, patient, hurrying, the same and not the same, he had seen them again.