Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Superstitio et perfidia.”

You put your penny in the slot and out came a hard candy round like a marble and you sucked it.

“Mitzvah. A good deed every day.”

“Gershon! Salt and buy some herring for dinner!”

You sucked the sugar-covered ball and clung to your father’s head and left behind the fire escapes. You smelled cheeses and garlic. Then a better smell, oranges and apples. Dogs barked and canaries chirruped. Vegetable shops. Hat shops. Tobacco shops. Delicatessens. Furriers. Shops where capes and silk and colored chintz were sold. The fluttering breasts of pigeons. And dogs, dogs that barked and barked and barked.

“They have destroyed the beautiful forests of New York and built the ugliest neighborhoods in the world. Thank you, our leaders.”

The light, Elizabeth. The light in the dark living room where you could not see but had to imagine the bead curtain, the crocheted cushions, the flower vases, and light came in cross beams from the street and filled the room with false auras. And when the light ran away you had to go looking for it, or, better, looking, with an unconscious gratitude, for its origins: to a place on the Hudson where the river was silver, to the stained fog and green of the Palisades, to the yellow wind that came from where the worn gold sky, a gaseous gold, floated over lower Manhattan. Sometimes you would go down that way with a feeling of adventure. As far as the fish markets of Fulton Street. As far as South Street, Peck Slip, Chinatown, where the river is full of sound and the barges of freight cars pass and the tugboats that are towing no barge whistle and whistle because they are idle and free, and the cars passing over the bridge make a swift music, and the rumble of the elevated, a sound so repetitious, regular, so different.

You see, Dragoness, it is also my city of sun and fog.

“We are going to go to America. We are going to be men.”

You and your brother Jake sat on Gershon’s knees and Gershon slowly turned the thick yellowed pages of the old album and did not have to point at things. Look, just look at that already! Oh, no, not that! You and your brother Jake laughed and laughed. The streets without pavement, deep with mud, lined with wooden houses. In the distance towers crowned by bulbous cupolas. A man with a long beard and high boots and a long black gaberdine coat. On his chest a yellow wheel.

“Yellow.”

“Yid. Hey, Yid. Hep, hep.”

“Ein Jude und ein Schwein dürfen hier nicht herein.”

“Is it you?”

“It’s you!”

You and Jake laughed and Gershon turned the pages and you could not believe that the man with sideburns and beard and the gaberdine coat and the young man in a vest and derby with a pearl in his tie were the same person. Then you turned to him and saw the other Gershon smiling and touching his tongue to the gap in his teeth. Wearing a striped shirt without a collar and checked trousers and loosed suspenders. Barefoot. The cuffs of his shirts too long but raised by Becky’s needle and thread.

“Even his back is straighter. Look, even his face changed!”

“Haven’t you been struck by the restraint of human gesture and expression in the Greek stelae?”

* * *

Δ The Volkswagen pulled away with growling gears and Franz said that down the road there was a restaurant he liked. “Beer. Sausages, mustard.”

Isabel looked out the window. Mexico’s midland, semi-tropical, a road of straw huts with inclined thatch roofs, of low-flying vultures, of little boys wearing tattered short shirts with their small genitals showing and their bellies swollen out, little boys forgotten by parents who worked in blue shirts and muddy sandals, stooped over in the rice fields shoveling along with their hands the water that had to pass evenly the length of the meandering channels. And then the land changed. The Volkswagen descended the rim of the tableland into the zone of heat, from the high desert to the low coastal region.

Franz drove swiftly, expertly, slowing and accelerating smoothly, gearing down for turns, shifting up again without a jerk. It was his car and he knew it like his hand. A foreigner, like you, Dragoness. And like you blond and graying but with a blondness that was almost white. His skin, in contrast, was burned dark by the sun. A face of precise firm lines: short nose, smooth forehead, smooth cheeks, firm jaw protruding a little. White, even teeth. Rather thin lips that smiled with restraint. A German, Dragoness, as German as they come.

* * *

Δ He had used to love music and architecture, he said. Both. Music perhaps even more than the other, though it was architecture he studied. He lived with his friend Ulrich in a rented room on a winding narrow street. The gables of the houses facing across the street almost touched and made the street dark. You were too close to them, you could not get back far enough to admire their old baroque façades properly. More accurately, they were façades that had been added as decorations to the still older, medieval structures beneath. Smooth ancient stone, covered by yellow or rose plaster that today was falling off, allowing the original gray to be seen. And the city, a German city, was full of yellow plaster palaces with golden domes and striated columns, capricious eaves, niches filled with vines and cherubim, labyrinthine halls, patinaed mirrors.

Flies buzzed in and out through the open window. They irritated you. Franz was saying, “We had little money. Almost none. So we roomed together. It cut our expenses in half.”

It halved also the effort and time needed to cook their meals on the electric hot plate and make up the bed and straighten the room. They took turns with the bed, Franz using it one week, Ulrich the next. The one who was bedless bunked on a narrow divan that creaked all night and forced him to sleep with his feet on a stool (Ulrich) or propped on the arm of the divan (Franz). Splitting its cost, they bought one wooden drawing table and a high stool. Rolls of paper were strewn around the floor, and the room smelled of India ink, of gutta-percha gum, of glue. On the papered walls they thumbtacked reproductions of classical architectural models: the Parthenon, Saint Sophia, Charlemagne’s chapel at Aixla-Chapelle. Monday through Saturday they got up early. Franz would go out in the hall to fill a basin with cold water from the faucet while Ulrich rubbed his eyes and groggily warmed the coffeepot. They washed their faces mechanically and drank their coffee as they dressed.

“I remember him putting on his shoes. Sitting on the couch holding his cup in one hand. With the other hand pulling on his shoe without loosening the laces.”

They would wrap in their mufflers and run out, hurrying to catch the 7:12 trolley, smiling as they trotted down the winding street, their breath clouds puffing before them. Caps tilted, mufflers up over their mouths, hands stuffed in their pockets, they would wait for the trolley and then swing aboard and stand outside on the platform swaying to keep balance as it moved away with a jerk and stopped with a jolt. The shaking trolley that carried them from the crowded streets to openness. Past the trolley yards. The park with its rusty statues and its fountains that now during the winter had no water. The art museum and the wide avenues beyond. Then a foggy plain and finally the school of architecture. There they separated. Ulrich was one year ahead of Franz. They met again at noon in the student tavern, the one arriving first grabbing a table, by force if necessary, and holding it until the other appeared, in the meantime ordering their standard meal: two sausages, cabbage, beer, a cream pastry they divided. And until then, all morning, they would rise to their feet as the professor entered the classroom. Four professors each morning, different names but the same pomp: black coat, striped trousers, wing collar, spats over high shoes.