Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Oh it isn’t from vice,

It isn’t to fornicate,

It’s to make a child

Who Thy service will take!

You laughed and Franz, laughing too, kissed your neck. You went on: “And the old grandfather every time he would ejaculate would cry out, ‘Kyrie eleison!’ and his sainted wife would answer, ‘Christe eleison!’ God! I tell you, Mexico is the most morbid, puritanical country in the world. It disgusts me. Let’s get out, Franz. Tell me that some day we’ll take off together and leave it. Like Magellan or Gagarin. Tell me.”

You stretched your hands out to him and Franz took them.

* * *

Δ Gershon squeezed your hand and said bitterly: “In ignorance there is never justice. Never, Lizzie.”

“It doesn’t matter, Daddy.”

“And how do you know such wisdom?”

“I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.”

Your father held his cup under his nose and looked at you half squinting as if he were trying to make the dim light clearer. You were in the coffee shop hidden in the mezzanine of the station. He put his cup down on its saucer of cheap porcelain and took out his handkerchief and honked his nose and then he laughed. He dried his eyes and went on laughing with his tongue pushed against his teeth. With the extended fingers of one hand he tapped his head, then immediately hit his head with the closed fist of the other hand. He repeated this several times, saying: “Head against muscle, nothing more, that’s what it is. That’s all it is.”

“Your cold is bad, Daddy. You should have asked off.”

“Bah. Shutting oneself up to nurse a cold is no medicine. Better one should go out and let it breathe fresh air.”

“You shouldn’t have drunk that coffee.”

“No? Tea I should be drinking?”

He touched his forehead, then his bicep.

“Brains against force. Always the same. Head against muscle.”

The waiter approached with an air of bored disgust. He brushed flies away from the stiff cinnamon rolls and sighed and moved his head from side to side. Your hands gripped the cushion. The waiter tore off the check and threw it on the table. Gershon contemplated it for a moment and then looked down and began to feel for his wallet in the lining of his coat. He sneezed and the waiter stared up at the low ceiling and you closed your eyes and smelled the stale watery coffee and the grease and the glue of the dangling flypaper clustered with mounds and craters of dead flies. A faint scent of rottenness came from the flypaper. And the too-sweet smells of chocolate and blackberries and rootbeer. Old bread, fermented sugar, corruption. Gershon pushed a dollar bill toward the check. You opened your eyes and said, so that the waiter could hear you: “So a dollar is a dollar. Whose it is doesn’t matter.”

Under the table Gershon squeezed your knee with your hand and you were silent as the waiter looked at you rather pityingly and turned his back without picking up either the check or the dollar. He murmured something that you and your father could not hear. You stared out at the people moving toward the platform gates of Pennsylvania Station.

“Maybe you want something else, Lizzie? Another drink? Maybe a vanilla soda?”

“No, Daddy. No, thanks.”

A redhaired sailor passed, looking in all directions, freckled, his canvas ditty bag in his hand, obviously lost. And an old man with a faded felt hat that came down over his ears was led by a young woman who looked like him, the same damp eyes and high cheekbones, the same pointed trembling nose. She stopped and tried to straighten the black band of his hat and in so doing exposed felt that was not faded. The old man paid no attention and she led him off toward the platform for Baltimore. Two girls leaned against an iron railing and played with joined hands, swinging their hands without looking at each other but sometimes looking down at their red socks and patent-leather shoes, and then they began to giggle nervously and then to laugh and finally they were silent again, one of them raising a hand to her mouth, the other covering her face with both hands. They joined arms and leaned against the iron railing without looking at anything. Boys in white shirts, some short-sleeved with a school emblem, others sleeveless and tattered, crowded around the magazine kiosk and turned the pages of cowboy novels and muscle magazines full of pictures of strongmen wearing leopard-skin loincloths. Some of the boys took turns swelling out their biceps. Others laughed and rubbed the fuzz on their chests and in their armpits. The old man led by the woman passed again. They seemed as lost as the redheaded sailor, who was no longer in sight. He had found his train. But the old man and the woman had not found theirs. She supported him by the elbow as he stumbled. She looked through the window into the coffee shop, she looked at you. You closed your eyes again and again smelled the smells of coffee and grease and fermenting sugar and smoke from the trains and farther away, far away, the concrete sidewalks and the macadam streets and sweat-drenched clothing, sweat-darkened collars of this month of July.

Becky moaned and you hugged her around the waist. You felt her trembling sweaty hands and both of you shut your eyes and hid a little more, moved back a little more toward the farthest corner in this brown room illuminated by light that came from the gas pilots and from outside, the street lamps and store windows, and fell upon you like light in a theater, outlining Becky’s profile, forming a faint aura around her hair so severely and cleanly drawn back with only a few loose hairs straggling and catching the light, the faint light that showed the flower vases dimly, the crocheted doilies pinned to the back of the velvet sofa, the vague swaying of the bead curtain between the living room and the kitchen-dining room.

“Mother, I tell you it is only the cat.”

“ The cat or a cat? Which are you saying?”

“It’s the cat from next door. Joseph’s cat.”

“Hug me, Betele. Hug me tight.”

“But, Mother, it’s only the cat.”

“You’ve said that already and you didn’t say it right. You did not say the truth. A cat isn’t here and it isn’t ours. Either there is cats or there is a cat, but the cat is not here.”

“Mama, I don’t know.”

“Hug me tight. Can’t you notice that I’m…”

“Please put on a light.”

“Come and hug me. Tell me…”

“Yes, Mama. I’m afraid. I’m scared and I’m glad to be with you, the two of us together…”

“You’re scared?”

“Yes, I’m very scared.”

“You are sure it’s a cat?”

“Yes. Don’t you hear it miaowing?”

“And it stinks, Betele, doesn’t it stink? Oh, hug me. It stinks from wetting. Don’t say it doesn’t. You smell it too, don’t you smell it?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“They’re going to find us, Betele!”

“Please, Mama. Put on a light and don’t be afraid.”

“It is eleven o’clock in the evening. And your father hasn’t come back yet. So why should I put on a light? Tell me, who puts on a light at eleven o’clock in the evening if the father is at home? And tell me, who would be afraid at eleven o’clock in the evening if…”

“Look, Mama! See, I was right, it’s Joseph’s cat!”

“Shameless! Chutzpah! Out, out with you, out of my house!”

And sometimes Gershon would take you down to the street without telling Becky. He would take your hand and you would go down the stairs with him and he would lift you to his shoulders with a smile and you would make yourself comfortable there and look up at the black iron fire escapes like webs down the black sides of the brick buildings, as black as if fire had already happened and the fire escapes had served for nothing.