Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“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.

“Twice I made love to you, because I thought you understood.”

Understand? You spent your days in Falaraki that summer and on into the soft Mediterranean autumn looking for beach pebbles. You became almost a tradition: the blond American girl who sought colored stones: Klondike Lizzie, the Pebble Rush.

And one day the sun did not come out. One day in November the little bay ran its waves agitated and cold against the shore and the sea became slate-gray and saltier than usual — you could taste it on your lips — stirred up, threatening. The fishermen decided not to go out. There was only one old man who stood far away on the rocks, flaying, under the rain, a dead octopus. You went to the empty beach because you wanted to swim. Javier trailed along some distance behind you. The rain wet his turtle-neck sweater and his corduroy pants and his bare feet sank into the once golden, now dark sand. You swam to the rock where the old man was flaying the octopus. You stretched your arms up from the water and the old fisherman grinned and threw the octopus down to you. Slowly you swam back. Everything seemed predetermined

“… as though you were living out a pact, Ligeia…”

and the white cat came from the house buried in the sand and waited for you, drenched and shivering on the sand

“… and you came out of the sea, Ligeia…”

out of the cold water, Elizabeth, with the black arms of the octopus twined around your own arms and your nude breasts. You stretched a hand and the cat moved to you and you lifted it up and placed it on top of your head and slowly, illuminated by a rose and ocher light that revealed all of the serene, almost static contours of your brown and blond figure crowned by a cat, you walked to Javier.

* * *

Δ Dragoness, just look at the day we are living in. Here you have it in the paper. Dated Pittman, Nevada. Crime of passion in which the weapon was a two-motored Cessna. Three victims who were inside a bar, while the target of the deed was untouched. John Covarrubias (hey, a compatriot!), thirty-eight years of age (more, a contemporary!), had a violent argument with his wife in a bar during the afternoon. In Pittman, Nevada. He wanted to effect a reconciliation and have her return to live with him, and when she refused, he became blind with fury and went and got his Cessna, flew over the town and dived at the bar. Missed. Destroyed two cars in the street, swiped the bar and injured three of its seated clients, and angry Mr. Covarrubias was killed but his good wife, who had just walked off down the street, was merely shocked and survived to live happily, we may suppose, ever after. And so it goes, sweet Elizabeth. Once you begin to monologue over the skull of Yorick you discover that the Dane’s doubt is the only way to affirm the elemental truth that we are, yet we are not; we were, yet we were not; we shall be, yet we shall not be. Now you see me, now you don’t: boo. That is: there is a state of nonbeing that summons us continually whether we are feeling terror or laughter or insanity. And we like to play games with it, but who knows, suddenly we may be only playing our role in earnest, our eternally present and eternally denied possibility of nothingness. Well, not everyone takes that step. The risks are too great. The devil takes you, or your name is Rimbaud. Which makes me ache with boredom, Elizabeth. And to return to you and yours, if we are ever going to know who Javier is and why he is, we must go back and remember and let him go back and remember. There is no other way, however tiring you find it as you sit in the rocker in your damp-smelling hotel room in Cholula and say to him: “You’re exhausted, Javier. So much talk always wears you out. Why don’t you lie down?”

Your husband pays you no attention. He unzips his little leather bag and one by one places his bottles and vials on the narrow glass shelf held by two nails above the washbasin in the bathroom. He sees himself in the mirror there and in a low voice asks, “Don’t you want to unpack your things?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“I asked if you don’t want … oh, nothing.”

He places his shaving mug on the shelf, lifting it by its handle, and then puts the white-bristled brush within it, the silvery straight razor flat beside it.

“Ligeia, listen. The party was just about over…”

“What?”

“Worn down, tired, nearing its end, though the moment had come, as it comes to all parties, when those still present could believe that it had never begun and would never end. But to a newcomer just arriving, to me as I arrived, it was clear that the party was almost over.”

He stands in the door of the bathroom looking at you and you say wearily: “Please, Javier, please. I know that old story. We both know it. It’s past, done for, a closed chapter. Please don’t go through it again.”

“They greeted me with a certain coldness precisely for that reason, because I knew that it was over and they didn’t want to know.” He goes back into the bathroom and continues talking while he takes out bottles and places them in a row: the cologne — Jean-Marie Farina; the eyedrops; the Alka-Seltzer. Then his manicure tweezers and the bottle of Vitamin C tablets. The capsules of Desenfriol. “Yet they pretended gaiety, to be receiving me as a kind of prodigal son, the latecomer who could be forgiven because his arrival gave an excuse to go on, put on another record, look for an unopened bottle. But after a few brief and intoxicated words they abandoned me. Left me to my own devices and I searched for a clean glass and ice and something to drink.”