Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

White Rabbit advances and touches the blue pagoda and dragons of Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke’s red dressing gown. She lets her fingers touch, and she stands motionless. Jakob does not dare move either. But he speaks to her, softly, earnestly: “Don’t believe their lies, Jeanne. No poet is a prophet of torture. No philosophy proclaims the justice of murder. They speak of evil, Jeanne, so that we may see it before us and accept it as part of life so that we will corrupt ourselves with it, Jeanne, and in our isolation from each other it may overcome us. Jeanne, don’t let yourself be defeated, my love. Neither your body nor your thought will be evil if you let yourself love, if you touch and let yourself be touched. He’s afraid, Jeanne. Always remember that he is afraid. He doesn’t want life to come near him. He wants to save himself alone. Alone and through the evidences of death that offer him his illusion of being…”

“My dear young sir!” Herr Urs says politely. “Everything is permitted, after all.” Jeanne steps back from him with an expression of loathing and falls upon the floor twisted, strangled, vomiting out the testicles of goats and devils transformed into hairy worms. Jakob covers her vomit with one hand. “Yes,” he replies to the little man on my knee, “all life is permitted. But not death. Not death!” Jeanne laughs and groans and her heart beats wildly and she trembles from head to foot. With a certain difficulty, my little man crosses his legs.

“Heresie, Treeson, Wytchcrafte, Belial, True Libertee, Namon, Bludthyrstee, Homicide,” cries White Rabbit, the tormented nun. She clutches her sumptuous robes and asks us to throw her into the river. She writhes on the floor murmuring “Fyre, Sulfure, Darkness, and a most Abominable Stink.” Jakob holds her in his arms and makes himself part of her convulsion. He puts his lips to her clenched teeth and whispers, “No, Jeanne, not you and I. Your suffering will be a chance for greatness. You and I shall struggle against ourselves, Jeanne. We’ll try and fail and try again and fail again, and go on to the end of all the ancient contradictions in order to live and repeal them, ridding ourselves of our old skin and exchanging it for the fresh new skin of the new contradictions, those that will await us then. We shall struggle alone, without hurting others, neither faces nor crosses, neither heads nor tails, neither eagles nor suns.”

“I fear that won’t suffice, young man. No, it will never be enough. You will be forgiven much too easily. What I suggest is that you do what can never be forgiven. Only so do you make it worthwhile to humiliate yourself seeking redemption.”

“A man doesn’t need victims merely to abandon solitude,” Jakob whispers in White Rabbit’s ear. She murmurs the simple words of childhood: “Mother? Father? Papa? Juanita? Vacation? Vacation?” She points her finger at the little man on my knee. At seated blond Boston Boy. Now, her fist closing, at the window. By the movement of her body she begs the window to come nearer and offer her, though she has lost the strength to speak, an opportunity to flee. Jakob caresses her gently. “Don’t give up, Jeanne. He says that his power is in his isolation, but he must have victims to escape solitude. Believe in me, Jeanne. Believe what I tell you. We shall oppose his collective violence with our individual violence. We shall make history with our lives so that he cannot make history with our deaths.”

The little man laughs. “There will always be a power, an order, an enthusiasm that will permit me to win my converts. How foolish people are, with their drums and bands, their flags and parades. So raucous, so raucous. Bah, who needs a black shirt? It’s enough to wear mere flannels. Caesar needs no disguise. He is Caesar, and he knows it. If he is mistaken for the plebe in the street, all the better. He can melt into the mass on the street, then, and invisibly attain what he seeks. And I shall be at his side.”

“We will be fallen masters, but our own masters,” Jakob whispers, turning White Rabbit’s face tenderly between his hands. “Constant pain and great happiness we will have. I promise you only that.” “But I don’t feel anything, Jakob,” she replies. “There are sores on my nipples but I don’t feel them. I don’t feel the fire burning my feet, or the nails in my palms…”

“Pah, promises, indeed,” the little man chuckles. “From afar I shall tempt you to abandon every promise you have ever made. Come to me. I too am eternal.”

“I hear music,” Boston Boy interrupts.

“Be quiet, my young friend. Listen to it and enjoy it and keep quiet.”

“I see light falling around us.”

“Idiot, you see nothing of the kind. No one is talking to you.”

“Herr Urs, you have told me of my temptations. My homeland. My blood, my imagination and my memory, even my love. Tell me … No, excuse me. That’s the master of ceremonies’ line.”

“Fool, imbecile, you have no right to ask questions now. You have been condemned.”

“I? And what of you, who infected me?”

“As he has infected every servile bellhop who stands in the lobby of every hotel awaiting his precious tip,” pronounces Judge Morgana, advancing.

“As he has infected every teenage Fascist who stands, disguised as a Tyrolean youth or a Bavarian maiden, on the German frontier with a fistful of shuttlecocks that he throws at passing cars in order to preserve the memory of Germany’s greatness and the hope that she will be great again, that the little map of Germany today will become once again the map of Germany’s vast dream.” Jakob holds White Rabbit tight in his arms. “Tell me,” he says to her softly, “where was your home?”

“In Holland, sir. Father. John. Vacation. We will take the train and go on a long vacation.”

“And you?” to Morgana.

“From beyond the Oder, sir. We had traveled south, also by train, to Czechoslovakia, and as I was getting down from the truck that took us to the fortress, I dropped my doll and its head broke. I remember I cried. Someone touched my head.”

“And you?” to Rose Ass.

“Bratislava, on the Danube. I can hardly remember it. I was a child. The dogs were howling. It was cold. They undressed us and separated us and someone made a bitter joke, Arbeit Macht Kalt.”

“And I? I the son of Hanna Werner who died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz in October 1944? I, her son Jakob, who at the age of two weeks was sent from Terezin to Treblinka? And you, the rest of you, the chorus of the children’s opera at Theresienstadt, didn’t you admire the efficiency and dedication of your captors? Weren’t you pleased by the excellent construction of your prisons? Didn’t you feel warm and protected by your guards’ fanatic attention to the least detail? Could you ever point accusingly to the slightest want of foresight, to the slightest frivolity in the treatment you received? My God, what did you want? To live in a cell built by Franz Jellinek was to be safer than on a Lufthansa flight.”

“Bah!” snorts Herr Urs. “The ghetto has contaminated all of you. And the infection of the ghetto is real infection.” His hands are out of my control now. They touch the keyboard of an invisible piano, trip off grotesque fluttering arpeggios, strike violent chords, tap a sentimental melody. “Neurosis was born in the ghetto. By fear out of ridicule.” He stares at his fingernails and becomes silent Tired-eyed White Rabbit, sitting now beside the fireplace, exhausted but serene, wrapped like a magician in her opulent robes, finally looks at him neither afraid nor attracted:

“No. You don’t understand anything. The ghetto taught us that nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever resolved. Everything has to be lived and relived and relived, over and over, again and again.”