Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Yes. You may be right.” The little man on my knee is becoming every moment softer, yet more rigid, between my supporting hands. “Just once, only once, my dear friends, I myself lost my calm patience and succumbed to the temptation to live life over again.” I set him down on the floor and his legs double under him like rags. “Pride blinded me. Just once, to be sure, yet that was enough. Before that I had lived with true humility. But that one time, having flesh, I was weak. I wanted an immediate demonstration of my powers. I betrayed my role, which ought to have been one of simple, steadfast waiting. The role of pride so strong it could survive by itself alone, supported by no act, by nothing.” I raise his arms over his head and make him walk, feebly, tottering, an infant of twelve or thirteen months, toward the trunk. “I decided to take the chance. To die simply that I might return to life on the third day and prove who I was, that there was at least one other Savior, not merely one.” I lead him to the trunk and wrap him in the red silk coverlet. “And on the third day, I did indeed rise. I came out of the refrigerator and took some pills and went back to my room and covered myself with my sheet, my face with a pillow. And waited. And now … Gute Nacht, meine Herren und Damen. Ich muss Caligari werden. Ich muss nach Hause gehen.” I cover the yellow face of Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke with a little cloak.

The only requiem is spoken by Boston Boy: “No man has a claim on eternity. Yet our every action demands no less.” He turns and faces Jakob. “Wasn’t I a man in spite of everything? If I was inhuman, nevertheless didn’t I go on being a man? Whom do I harm today? The scar on my soul has healed. A soul of jelly, like Javier’s, is far more guilty than mine. Forgive the great dreams, brothers, and punish the foolish little naps. Brothers, brothers, hasn’t twenty years with a clean conscience been enough to earn forgiveness for what was at most a guilt of abstention, a submission to a temptation which I swear I never clearly understood?”

Judge Morgana laughs dryly. “Sure, man, sure. Go back. You’ll be honored by the whole nation.”

“Go back,” says Rose Ass. “You’ll be given a job at Krupp.”

“Or at Farben,” chimes Jakob.

“Or maybe in the Bundeswehr,” says White Rabbit.

“Why even go so far?” booms Brother Thomas’s bass. “Just head north to Laredo and cross the border. That’s where the busy factories are today. You can get yourself a job making napalm or detergents that wipe away the color of the skin.”

“On the contrary, he must go further,” Jakob says. “Duty itself calls. More strategic hamlets are needed in Vietnam. The accused is efficient. He’s careful. He executes orders with energy and precision. Such professionalism is invaluable. He is needed urgently in all the prisons and death rows and crematoriums that still must be built. In Cambodia. In Laos. In Peru. In the Congo. In Mexico. In Spain. In South Carolina. Oh, there is a world of building yet to be done. The labor of organizing isolation remains. To be concluded in his image and semblance. A great work, one that requires men of dedication and responsibility. Before the end of the century the entire world must become one single vast concentration camp. Each individual citizen must become a black star wandering through black space, isolated and alone and giving off light, if at all, only invisibly. The accused faces a bounteous future indeed.”

“What the hell do you know?” the accused, still on his knees, says angrily. “What track did I leave? I died, I disappeared, I changed my name. But I swear I looked for your mother’s grave. I went back to Prague, and in those days that was to take a certain chance, believe me. I didn’t find it. She was nameless. An anonymous victim in the mausoleum of all the anonymous victims.”

“But you never though of looking up Professor Maher, did you?” Jakob is rubbing White Rabbit’s feet. “He lived in the same old house, you know, on the same street. All those years during the war he had hidden refugees among his flutes and oboes and helped them to escape. He saved many lives. And he never forgot the young man and the young woman who used to dine with him and afterward talk music and architecture. Professor Maher didn’t try to play it safe during the occupation. He put his neck on the block, again and again and again. And he did it in your names, for your sakes, for the sake of the love he remembered between you.”

“How can you know?” the accused repeats bitterly, standing. “How can you know anything? You were a child, a baby, you couldn’t have talked with anyone. Who told you? That time was not your time. You can’t know that time. It’s forgotten, gone, lost forever.”

“Shall I show you?” Jakob jumps to his feet and goes to the old trunk and begins to open its small drawers and to seize fistfuls of papers that had lain there, Dragoness, for years and years untouched by anyone. He threw the papers into the air, down on the floor. “It’s all here, Franz. Nothing happened that was not carefully recorded. These papers remember. Here. And here. And here.”

The Monks fall upon the papers. The oldest, the most recent. Those that have yellowed, those that still are freshly white. Wrinkled sheets, smooth ones. Perhaps they are searching now for the understanding that will allow them to depart in peace, according to someone’s words. The testimonials of humiliation. The testaments of need and gratitude. The acts of birth and death of our eternally repeated readings. As if such an understanding were possible. As if the irrational were explicable. Have faith and don’t be afraid, Dragoness. This envelope that White Rabbit, acting in your name, recovers from the floor and tears open as you did so long ago when you and Javier returned to Mexico, will explain nothing, even though she reads it aloud to us: Esteemed señor: In regard to your communication of April 12, we find ourselves unfortunately obliged to inform you that for the moment we cannot publish your manuscript, which we are returning to you under separate cover. We remain, most sincerely yours … And Professor Maher’s letter to Jakob will always be no more than a mere succession of syllables, though Boston Boy the blond accused pronounces them as words: She never loved any other man. And I can swear that no matter what he may have done or failed to do, he always loved her. He told me that, here in this very house, seated beside the desk where I now sit writing to you, and I know that he spoke the truth, I am an old man and can recognize truth. When I knew him he was a youth who loved this city, loved music and architecture, above all loved her. Old men are never deceived, Jakob. “Professor,” he told me one night, “never worry about her. I’ll always take care of her. Always. I’ll never abandon her.” I believed him. You will read this when you are a man. I have given you your name and now I give you his. I do not know what happened to him. He was reported killed the very last day of the war, but there was a certain confusion and mystery about the report, his parents believed that it could have been a mistaken identification. At any rate, he never came back, so he may indeed be dead. If he is living, perhaps you will want to seek him out some day, perhaps your spirit will demand that kind of certainty, and perhaps you will be able to find him. Or maybe this letter will merely disturb and distract you. If so, please pardon an old man who loves everyone, loves everyone very much … Nor will anything more enlightening be said by the forgotten pages of Javier’s book, found crumbled in a drawer wrapped in pasteboard covers on which is inscribed, “Pandora’s Box.” Rose Ass reads: The name of the name? Jason? Argonaut? Medea? Nature dies but its names remain, unchanged. Flower, bird, river, tree, harvest are always and forever the rose and the humming bird, the Nile, the spruce, the wheat or the cotton. Death in nature, nature’s passing away, changes no names. But with men not so. The name of a man dies with him. He does not wish to repeat himself, and is willing to pay high for his singularity. But I would be a man who lives on giving names to what has preceded me and what is to follow. Jason. Argonaut. Medea. And this that everything should not need be learned over again, lived over again, from the beginning. Order and Progress? That slogan is neither human nor accurate. Man makes no progress. Every child born is a first creation. He must repeat everything for himself and for the world, all the ancient events, as if nothing had ever happened before his birth. He is the world’s first infant, first child, first adolescent, first lover, first husband, first father, first artist, first soldier, first tyrant, first rebel, and finally the earth’s first corpse … And now Brother Thomas comes upon an ancient, tattered, disintegrating folio which he pages through and begins to read aloud: “This was printed at Uppsala, in 1776, apparently. Listen: In 1703 a magician and charlatan who called himself Doctor Caligari sowed terror and death from village to village and fair to fair, through his obedient serving man, the Sleepwalker Caesar …”