Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Now you have to go. I think you have come a long way just to be with me these few minutes, for, as I said, these places are always far removed from civilization. I would like to believe that in order to reach me you had to call upon the influence of important acquaintances, to pay large bribes. Yet I also know that it’s possible you may be locked up here too, just like me. For your parents were as infected, or at least as suspected of infection, as those of any of us. I shan’t say that you have come from the contaminated soil of Nazareth to this earth where live the dead who resuscitate themselves, this palace of Our Lord Lazarus. Yes, Lazarus lives here too. He of the resurrections. He who has given his name to our dwelling place and also to the pyramid and also to the church atop the pyramid. If you stand on tiptoe at the window, sometimes, not always but sometimes, the pyramid and the church can be seen, or at least can seem to be seen.

It’s time for you to go now, Dragoness. Caesar the Sleepwalker serves his immortal master well and if he should suspect I have listened to you he might murder me with a cold in the head, a touch of indigestion, perhaps a twinge of hunger. It’s mealtime, Dragoness. The yellow dog is feeding on the bones of the masked child and will soon be finished with them. I can’t recognize the face of the child, but I am sure it isn’t laughing. Our children never laugh except when they wear comic masks, funny faces of sugar, sweet skeletons and death’s heads that laugh for them. And death is the puppet theater where the sad eyes of our children look and see their own faces on the white skull because they know that, long before their childhood ends, their heads will be white skulls too.

Go, Dragoness, go. The yellow dog is turning from the bones of the child. He is tied only by dirty rags that at any moment may break, and then … I know that his hunger is far from sated.

So long, Dragoness. Take it easy. Stay loose. And don’t forget your ever lovin’

Tonantzintla, March 1962

New York, October 1965

Paris, September 1966

*Who said MAILER, brethren? If we were born to die!