Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Mirror of the youth, of the little girl, of the tree, of the bird.

“I thought you had only seen the movie.”

“No, I read the book and saw the movie, too. Fredric March and Claude Rains. And Olivia de Havilland when she was still lovely, before that miserable snake-pit thing.”

Mirror of its own fish mute in its profundities.

“Holy macaroni!”

“Gulp! You mean you don’t believe me? You doubt my veracity, eh? Well, just let me tell you what happened that year we went to Greece. Hitler gobbled up Austria. Mussolini pulled out of the League of Nations. We listened to Kate Smith and Kay Kyser and laughed at Jack Benny. Father Coughlin was spouting off. Huey Long was killed, I think. Cárdenas expropriated the oil companies. Garbo loved Taylor. Dick Tracy was working on Boris Arson. Little Orphan Annie didn’t grow an inch. Léon Blum’s cabinet fell. Alice served tea to four lunatics at Berchtesgaden. John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath and John Ford made the movie with Henry Fonda. We were humming a tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket. Li’l Abner escaped from Daisy Mae again. Orson Welles invaded New Jersey. Let’s see, what else? Snow White and her seven dwarfs. Enough?”

Sea: element withdrawn from the original One, that by losing itself, it might recover itself.

“Okay, okay, so we used acetylene lights. Write it down.”

“Ten point o and you win your diploma, Dragoness. What about letters? Did you write home? To Gershon?”

“Are you nuts? Haven’t I already told you? We threw the letters into the trunk.”

“Well, the point is, I have an old envelope here.”

Sea of whiteness.

“Give me that. Where in God’s name did you find it?”

“In an old trunk, Dragoness. So?”

Cradle of dreams that ignore grief.

“Check the address. Avenida Amsterdam 85, Colonia Hipódromo, Mexico, D.F.”

“No! You have no right! Not yet. Where did you find the trunk?”

Prince of magic hours.

“What’s more, it isn’t true … No … 85 West 99th Street. Yes, that’s it. Or some address in the Bronx. I don’t remember now. It’s so long ago.”

“Take it easy, Dragoness. We all want to be different from what we are.”

Sea that receives the ashes of brothers.

“We can’t be different today. Listen, caifán. We need something to hang on to. And this is all I can see, it’s all that can be seen and touched, not Greece and not Mexico, not anything, just the world called Paramount Pictures Presents…”

“Sure, Elizabeth. The flag of Revlon. The national anthem of Disneyland. General Motors’ army. And the countries are called U. S. Steel and Conrad Hilton and IBM. That’s the atlas of the stinking world we live in today.”

Sea of Orestes and Electra.

“We don’t have myths any more?”

“No, suddenly they are only dreams. But a dream you can touch is called a myth.”

Sea of little voyages that cannot reach the regions of the sun.

“And a place, caifán. There has to be a place. It can be any place, even an imaginary one. So that we can go there and return reborn.”

“A setting, Dragoness, a place to stand fast. The Last Time I Saw Paris. Or San Francisco, Here I Come.

Sea dyed with the blood of Agamemnon.

“What’s wrong with Greece? The harmony, the classicism, the spirit. Our cradle.”

“Pay now, travel later.”

Rock of lamentation.

“I was more bored than an oyster. I don’t know what you’re going to tell.”

“Yes, Medea.”

Watched sea, guarded sea.

“Who told you?”

“Jason.”

Sea of pitch.

“You found our traveling world.”

“And opened its little drawers.”

Port of nocturnal daggers.

“You know everything.”

“Almost everything. As far as to where you wrote.”

Sea of bloody vines.

“We were on the ship almost three weeks, caifán. An eternity. We had to amuse ourselves somehow.”

“Yes, that’s the simplest answer. Why make life complicated?”

Sea of conquest.

“I don’t know if we foresaw everything or if it was that every time we wrote a scene that made us roll with laughter, and threw the page into the trunk, into the drawers of that world we traveled with, we condemned ourselves to live it out in real life sooner or later…”

“But there, then, there were only two characters. You and Javier. Remember?”

Sea of the rudder and sword of fortune.

“Yes, only two.”

“Everything could be written, Allah willing, everything could be foreseen, and then the actors failed. They couldn’t handle their roles.”

Tomb of star watchers.

“The plan was so perfect. Only he, only I. Living what we had written in the steam of the ship.”

“It wasn’t perfect at all. No one can play all the roles in a movie, not even Erich von Stroheim. You have to have supporting actors.”

“Promise me that you’ll never mention any of this again.”

Sea.

“Never again, Dragoness. I burned the pages. I had one hell of a time finding that trunk, let me tell you. I smelled my way through all of Mexico City. Finally one day I came across a place on Tacuba where an old Jew collected things people had given him or thrown away. So many Jews came to Mexico City during the war. And afterward, so many Germans. They never talk about these things, they’ve forgotten them, old trunks, suitcases, boxes tied with string, fetuses in alcohol, naked dolls, cellos, petticoats and hats, old picture albums, Nazi flags and armbands, old movie film, broken records, books without covers. Junk enough to write ten books about.”

“It’s funny. We would have liked to live our own novel, just the two of us, together.”

United only by your hands. You fell on your knees before him in order to give it its name. He standing before you, you kneeling before him, you embraced his legs harder and harder and moved your hands up to his waist as he reached down and held you by the hands only, you always lower, seeking the floor, he always higher. You rose, you sought him standing, joined together and sustained by your hands, then pushed backward without need for kisses or caresses, united and sustained, you over him and he beneath you, he pulling you upon him and you penetrating, imitating him, doing what he did, believing that you were possessing him in the way he possessed you, lying upon his thighs as he entered your thighs, saying to him: take my skin, Javier, take my breasts, learn to fulfill all your desires, sleep upon my breasts and don’t wake until the day is as warm as we are and Elena knocks at the door …

* * *

Δ The motor started and the car moved off with a growl of gears and Javier observed that as a boy he had often gone to the States by train with his father, who had been a businessman. But only to the border, to the other side of the Rio Grande, to Laredo. And he had used to return to Mexico with a feeling he could not define, shame, perhaps, or sadness. That was why a year ago he had traveled all the way to New York by train. He had wanted to remove the contrast with Mexico, to see the States not in relation to another country but isolated, a single canvas.

“There you go again,” Elizabeth groaned.

Only two or three clear impressions remained from that trip. The junkyards of old cars: the masses of twisted steel, the sooty air, the absolute rustiness of everything.

“You could also see them like modern sculptures,” you interrupted him, Elizabeth. “Like unforeseen, unexpected sculptures…”

No, said Javier. If Mexico is nature in ruin, the United States is machines in ruin. “In Mexico everything is a ruin because everything is promised and no promise is kept. In the United States all promises have been kept. Yet it is a ruin just the same.”