Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“We should have gone straight through to Veracruz, Javier.”

“It wasn’t I who insisted on seeing the ruins. For my part…”

“And that story of yours bores me terribly.”

He watches you stretch across the bed, and he thinks that, despite everything, your waist is still as flexible as a reed. What reed? It would be a pedantry, he tells himself, to remember its scientific name. Nevertheless, he murmurs, hoping that you do not hear him, “Phragmites communis.” Well, Dragoness, man does not live by bread alone, and especially Javier doesn’t. He commands himself again to be silent but already and automatically is giving the old definition: “Un roseau pensant…”

“I could tell some stories too, if I wanted to,” you go on. You are face down across the bed and you let your head hang over one side, your feet over the other. The coverlet is white, here and there stained with yellow.

“Javier, please take a Kleenex and wipe away those two fleas I squashed.”

Blood runs toward your head and swells the veins of your temples and forehead and neck. You let your shoes fall from your tired feet. You wriggle your toes as if they were fingers on a keyboard.

“Oh, if I wanted to, I could tell stories that would bore you too.”

Javier fiddles with the bronze curtain rod from which hang the muslin curtains that cover the glass-paned door.

“Javier, it’s smelly in here. Haven’t you noticed? Doesn’t it bother you? Why don’t you go and complain to the manager.”

“The picturesque usually smells a bit. Don’t worry. Some day there will be a Cholula-Hilton.”

The pressure of blood in your head begins to make you dizzy. And the squashed fleas are still there on the wall. Again you close your eyes. “For example, I could tell the story of Elena.”

“Elena?”

You raise your head and look at him as if surprised.

“Elena, of course. Elena. Don’t you remember the beach at Falaraki? The colored pebbles? The figs Elena sold? The hot, sun-rotted figs that she brought in a bucket and sold to sunbathers sprawled out on the sand under the sun that would end by rotting them too, the…”

“The sun, always the sun.” While you are speaking, he closes the shutters of the door. “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always been looking for more sun.”

“Why close the shutters at six in the afternoon?”

“Because it is a public hall and you are lying there with your skirt up to your ass.”

You laugh a bubbling laugh and Javier closes his eyes in the darkness. He is wrong about the hall, Dragoness. It is not open to the public. It’s a closed gallery that surrounds the four sides of a patio roofed with glass panes set in an iron spider web with dust gathered in its angles and crotches.

Javier folds down the coverlet and the sheets and in silence lies on his stomach. You are seated with your legs drawn up, your knees holding the covers high. Although Javier tries to keep his face turned away, your woman’s smells come to him: cologne water, menstruation, fatigue. With a fold of the sheet over his face, he murmurs: “Men from the States are more sensitive to smells than we are. They are aseptic. Every odor seems aggressive to them. Offends them, irritates them. Here, we’re immune.”

He removes the sheet from his face and out of the corner of his eye peeks at you as you sit smoking with open eyes that are pensive and distant. He covers his face again and again smells your smells.

Just a deterioratin’ little boy, Mama-Dragoness.

He believes, when he wakes, that he has slept only a few seconds. He had felt nothing. But when he removes the sheet from his face with a jerk and calls out, “Ligeia! Ligeia!” he sees that you are no longer seated there. Your imprint is still visible on the pillow and the sheets, but you, Elizabeth, have vanished. And the light has vanished too. He sighs and says bitterly: “Ligeia, oh, for Christ’s sake!”

* * *

Δ Sometimes I really don’t know how you speak or listen to him, Dragoness. He makes me too aware that all of us want to close the circle of our lives, to be able to think that the round line ends where it began, to want to live many lives within the one we do live, to be sure that if we only had more strength of mind, will, and dream, we could make our little pasts have meaning. Unconsciously we are all poets and we struggle to oppose nature with our patterns: nature which does not consider us individual beings at all but rather confluences of lives that cannot be isolated one from the other, that flow together in a great whirl that neither begins nor ends. Suppose then we are confronted by a man who believes that he has closed his circle once and for all, that he has left everything behind, that he has understood it all: what does he do when you address him speaking any words that may come to mind, any sentence whatsoever, no matter how cryptic. For example:

“That is a finger bowl. When you finish eating your shrimp, you dip your fingers in it and wash them off. Like this, see? You must learn these things. If you don’t, people will say that we don’t know how to bring you up.”

Then he will have to remember that he was thinking,

“Where will I go after dinner?”

and also that one day he wanted to follow her, to learn where she disappeared to every afternoon, but he fell too far behind and got lost. He was ten years old and it was the first time he had ever left the house without knowing where he was going. Before, when he went out alone, he always knew that it would be to the park or the candy store or to his school. And, moreover, he rode a school bus to school. This time he went beyond his coordinates — Calzada del Niño Perdido, Parque de Ajusco, the school of the Marist Fathers on Avenida Morelos — and in four or five blocks he was lost and he observed that he did not know the city, that in reality he knew nothing about it because he had never walked it alone.

“Where were you this afternoon?”

“I went to the movie at the Parisiana.”

“Who with?”

“Two boys from school.”

“What are their names?”

“Pedro and Enrique.”

“What picture did you see.”

“A talkie. I forget its name.”

“Let me have the paper. It’ll be there.”

And, after all, he had not grown up in the city. He had been living there only a year. Before that, the trains were everything, much more than the cities. Always running behind schedule. Often stopped by breakdowns, stuck sometimes for twenty-four hours in a row in the middle of a desert while his mother dried herself with lace handkerchiefs and his father played cards with other men in the salon diner that smelled of too ripe bananas. At first the trainmen would say that no one should get off because the trouble was minor and they would be on their way again in twenty minutes. Then, when the rumor was circulating that the tracks ahead had been blown up, some of the passengers would get down and smoke cigarettes and drink from canteens but the sun would be too blistering and they would climb aboard again seeking refuge, shadow, and his mother dried the back of her neck and between her breasts and said to him, “Don’t get off the train. It’s too dangerous,” and on the other side of the dust-thick glass the desert could be seen like its own mirage, colorless, empty, a stage upon which at any moment something terrible might happen and all colors be born of the absence of any color. Only the clouds moved. They hurried along playing at racing each other and Javier could amuse himself watching them for a while, but not for long. He pretended that the train had gotten tired. It had huffed and puffed and groaned to reach the high desert and now it had fallen exhausted, mouth down, panting without strength, and everything smelled of tired steam, of grease and old food. With his finger he began to draw houses and trees and faces in the dust of the window.