Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

No, Dragoness, they signify nothing. Why should they? They are the letters written and the books written and read by a pair of young lovers who before the war found themselves on a slow ship of the Lloyd-Triestino Line, bound for Greece or for China via Saturn and Sirius, and had therefore light-years of time to kill. They diverted themselves through the long hours at sea, and put the sheets of paper away in the drawers of an empty world. And an old Jew near Tacuba sold me that world very cheaply. The police had caught him peeping at adolescents in a public toilet. He was a voyeur, like you and like me. It was a temptation, he told me, that he could never resist. Now he was going to sell everything he owned and disappear. He was an expert at disappearances. He offered to sell me the cellos and the top hats, the sewing dummies, the funeral hearses, his entire great storeroom in that old palace on Tacuba behind a naked patio with a dry fountain, behind a soaring portal of ductile sinuous stone supported by two twined columns that rest upon the paws of a gigantic cat.

“I, Jakob Werner, born in the year zero, condemn to death Franz Jellinek, born two thousand years ago.”

I am about to laugh, Dragoness. It seems to me that these six young Monks have contracted the very disease they want to cure. I can’t be sure whether their theatrical enactments say anything true about anyone or are simply caricatures put on to put me on, caricature scenes entirely unrelated to the lives they purport to represent, yours, Javier’s, Franz’s. I am sure of nothing except that their trial of Franz has not convinced me of his guilt or of the justice of the punishment they intend to impose. And also that I am the Narrator, goddamn it, and I ought to hold their destinies in the palm of my hand, to make or break and arrange or change just as I please. Yes, I ought to. But my palm feels empty except for the sweat there. Now they are moving toward my door. I step calmly in front of them and without drama, holding fast to my cool, I tell them:

“Cats, you have not convinced me. Not at all.” But they either don’t hear me or prefer to pretend that they don’t hear me. They keep moving forward chanting another of their endless litanies: “He crossed the courses of the stars…” And I would like to jeer at them. To tell them to their faces that they have lied to me. Haven’t they boasted that they play life’s little game alone? That they accept the world as the world is, and that all of us are in one way or another guilty of everything that any one of us is guilty of? I would like to throw those words back at them, but all I can think of at this moment is Isabel … of you, little Pussycat, locked in Javier’s arms in a cheap motel on the road to Toluca.

“He put back the times of the sea…”

They come toward me slowly, shuffling, dancing, chanting, rolling their mushroom-clouded eyes. And I stand before them opposing their hallucinations with my uncertain sanity. Then forgive him, for God’s sake, forgive him, keeping in mind that he also has loved and breathed and …

“He killed the fruit in its seed…”

But today he harms no one. He has been pardoned, time has pardoned him. Javier is ten times less a man, a hundred times more a criminal. He deserves punishment at least a thousand times more. Eh, Dragoness? Enough? Let’s just say that this is a detective story and we have come to the moment when the rewards must be doled out and we do not have to reward sinners as if they were men of justice.

“He has corroded the child’s mouth with the mother’s milk, he has gone into heaven to defile it, he has descended into hell to deliver it from subjection…”

Isabel in a cold motel room with her absurd Proffy, whom she does not seem to find absurd. And White Rabbit is not mine, either. She will never be mine and she is the only desire I have felt this entire night. Shit, shit. That goddamn kiss. And the very convincing way she insulted her make-believe husband. She showed old habit there. Then Jakob, caressing her, holding her in his arms. The tenderness with which he protected her. The way he led her so gently to the fireplace. Jakob is my rival, that’s clear enough.

“He bade the moon to shed poison…”

I can’t tell them my doubt and misgiving. She, pale White Rabbit, may never be mine anyhow, but it’s damn sure she will never be mine if I seem unsure of myself. So adiós, Franz. And after you make your departure, I’ll tell them they were wrong. Not now. Now I shall shout with them that you must not be pardoned, for to pardon you would be to deny forgiveness of all meaning. Only later will I insist that you didn’t deserve to die, that you have paid the price of whatever may have been your crime, paid with twenty-five long years of decency and honesty. Javier and Elizabeth have maintained their hell, heaping more fuel to it day after day. Not you, Franz.

“He bade the air to fall in flame…”

No longer do I stand in their way. I stand against the wall. Let them pass, let them pass. The single candle has been blown out by someone and in the darkness I try to sense them, feel them, smell them. I would like to reach out my hand as White Rabbit goes by. Touch her and stop her and explain my doubt to her and insist: damn it, what did he do? And what difference does it make now to anyone? I shan’t do it. I can’t do it. The six Monks file out and start down the spiral stairs. I know her answer. What Franz did or didn’t do doesn’t matter, man, it’s just that he is the old and we are the new, and the old must shake over out of the way. Yes, the cycle has ended and the new pyramid must be built upon the tired shell of the old. And Franz is that tired shell and so must die. What did he do? Much, little, nothing, it makes no difference. I would still like to know, though. Maybe it’s written somewhere in one of the notebooks, on one of the scraps of paper that I haven’t found yet in the drawers of the trunk. For there are so many of those little drawers. There are thousands. And now I don’t have time.

I gave up the fight, Dragoness, and joined them. Not with much enthusiasm, that’s true, yet with a certain feeble excitement that was enough to swing the balance. I wanted to say, with them, to hell with the old. To hell with my forties. Back to a memory of youth, if not back to youth. You would have done the same. Middle age is not bitching. It’s merely a bitch. So I followed them down the stairs and across my half-assed garden and out into the alley and across the Beltway to the street where their old Lincoln was parked, and I stood as they gathered in a semicircle before the door and pointed to the six small black swastikas pasted there. Five of them bore large X crosses, like the crosses made on fighter planes to show the number of the enemy the pilot has downed. In turn, one by one, each of the Monks stepped forward and put a finger to one of the crossed-out swastikas and curtly explained it:

“Oberscharführer Heinrich Kruger. Organizer of the transportation of the three thousand Jews whose lives were taken in revenge for the murder of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.”

“Ruby Richter, SS guard in charge of the women’s baths at Auschwitz.”

“Lieutenant Malaquias von Dehm. Participant in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.”

“Lisbeth Fröhlich, trained nurse. The preparation of poisoned marmalade for the physically and mentally defective children sent to Treblinka.”

“Lorenz Kemper. Factory machinist. The manufacture of cylinders for the gas known as Cyclon-B.”

Who these people were, I don’t know. You’ll find out for me, Isabel. You will make Franz talk and tell you, and then you will tell me. You will help me fill out the file. But I do know that these people are dead, and I know who killed them. Maybe it would be better not to know who they were. Just to forget those hazy years, years of my childhood and adolescence that are fused together in a mosaic, still strangely unfaded, of movies and newspaper headlines and radio reports and crime stories and cracked phonograph records, the written and heard debris of which half our lives is composed. No, I want to know. So you will learn and tell me, Pussycat. I still have you, despite your insistence that you were psychoanalyzed in your nitwit mother’s womb. Yes, I still have you. And somewhere out of sight a distant voice is singing, and far away out of sight on the other side of the fat round world, dawn is rising. Not so far, perhaps, after all, though I have no idea what time it is. The six Monks surround me and we gaze somberly at the swastikas on the door of the Lincoln, the five that bear X’s, the one that remains unmarked. And I say to myself: Of sand water is born, and of water, fish.