Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

That little saint must have been the blessed Jeanne Féry, who was exorcised yesterday in Mons. Her story is told in the paper today by the present archbishop of Cambrai, M. François Buiseret. Between 1573 and 1585 Jeanne was possessed by no fewer than eight demons. She declared that she had been seduced by the devil himself at the age of fourteen. From that time on she suffered seizures that resembled epilepsy and was tormented by spirits of evil named Heresie, Treeson, Wytchcrafte, Belial, True Libertee, Namon, Bludthyrstee, and Homicide. During her convulsion and delirium they make love to her. And as Jeanne does not care to make love with these spirits, she has her relatives and the priests immerse her in baths of holy water, during which treatments she vomits, from her mouth and nostrils, the testicles of a male goat and various animals transformed into hairy worms. Her attacks generally occur at night and she has visions of hell that verify what she has been told in sermons, “Fyre, Sulfure, Darkness and a most Abominable Stink.” The pains in her belly are unbearable: it is as if a serpent is devouring her alive, and it is because of this torture that she agrees to meet willingly with her demons and shout the obscene words they dictate. She alternates between “les douleurs continuelles” and “la grand joye.” In her moments of ecstasy she cannot eat, speak, or feel the pain of the lacerations which at other times with the help of the demons she inflicts upon herself. Sometimes she returns to the simplicity of small childhood and forgets all she knows about God. She behaves like a spoiled little girl, plays with a figurine of Mary Magdalene as if it were a doll, offers it her breast to suck. One day following communion she utters a shrill cry and a priest finds her on her knees, her body rigid, her face pale, and her eyes open very wide. A little later she begins to laugh sweetly, as though to herself, and to sway her shoulders from side to side. Her heart is pounding and she trembles violently. She cannot speak, but with her hands she makes signs. A nun sits beside her and rubs her hands and legs. She is conducted to her cell and there made comfortable before a fire, and soon she expires.

So, Dragoness, Sister Jeanne Féry. And we see why instead of playing the usual and tired game and putting together our belly-buttons, we should take out our peashooters and force ourselves and others, Javier, for example, to face a little truth. Ah, Elizabeth. Between participation and escape there remain to us only our individual maladies, our personal cancers, our parodies of the great synthesis.

* * *

Δ 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 he tries to keep his face turned away, your woman’s smells come to him: cologne water, menstruation, fatigue. With a corner of the sheet over his face, he murmurs:

“I finally saw her and went near her because I could see that she had been crying. I thought to myself, a woman cries to attract, to show off her tears and share them. She would never cry in solitude. Or, if she did, it would be in the belief that her tears could be felt by someone even though he was not present, that they could charm him at a distance, move him, be heard by an ear that was out of sight but not out of reach. There are no tears in vain. I think that was what I thought. She went on crying and around us the party went on. We were in darkness again. Perhaps only by chance I was the only person who noticed, the only one tuned to her wave length, open at that instant to her tears and the thread of silence that had led me to her, past the couples dancing and kissing in the dark room.”

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

“The music was pointing out that it was just one of those crazy flings,” he says with his voice slightly muffled by the sheet. “Yes, for to go to a party is always to venture an encounter only chance controls. But not to venture it unarmed. No. Always with the breastplate of an attitude, the shield of words, the lance of memory. Always with a mockery ready, should the need for it come. A game to play. And what a laugh if the girl should play the game too.

“I found her again. A warm damp hand that I couldn’t see took my hand, which apparently had reached toward her. It was she who took my hand. I didn’t take hers, I swear it. She found me more than I found her. We stood in the darkness of the room, for the lights had been turned off now, and the contrast between her warm fingers and my cold ones must have seemed strange. Then it had to happen, I had to move close to her, let my skin feel the nearness of hers. Still not looking at her. And now I took her hand as she had taken mine. We embraced, we pasted our bodies together and began to dance again, discovering ourselves to each other little by little and gropingly, the softness of her skin, its fine golden hairs, her smooth blond hair combed to the side of her head. Her warm neck. Her breasts firm and free under her dress. Her thighs tight, hard.

“I said to her, ‘So you came alone?’”

And you, Dragoness, sitting on the bed smoking, remember and say quietly: “The girl nodded yes.”

“I asked her, ‘Did they leave you all alone?’”

“She nodded yes again. Her hands were like yours. They were giving names to the parts of your body without her imagining that you were both thinking the same thing.”

“‘And the man you gave the drink to?’ I said to her. ‘Why didn’t he say something to you?’”

“The girl shrugged her shoulders,” you say, repeating the action with the words. For if he wants it this way now, Dragoness, you are willing, for a time at least, just as you were willing then. You go on: “In a low voice she sang along with Ella Fitzgerald, ‘ Too hot not to cool down. ’”

“‘Maybe,’ I suggested, ‘he had been worried by the mystery of your absence?’”

“She raised her face to you, Javier, and looked at you.”

“And I went on, ‘Maybe he wanted to avoid giving you pain. Perhaps he knew you would not have been happy if he had told you his thoughts.’”

“The girl answered that it’s worse to live not knowing what someone is thinking, only imagining.”

“‘No,’ I told her. ‘Often it’s worse to know. Maybe when he found you there in the dim light and you gave him his drink, he loved you so much that he decided to say nothing.’”

“The girl said that she would have preferred that he not be so solicitous of her.”

“That he be the partner of her intelligence as well as her passions?”

“Maybe, something like that, I suppose.”

“But I replied, ‘He would have had to give up his pride, and you would have stopped loving him. He knows that you love him only so long as you have his pride before you to overcome and defeat. That once you succeed in that, there will be no reason for love.’”

“‘Well, you know him if anyone does,’ the girl said.”

“I laughed. I laughed because she was playing my game so marvelously. I stopped and took a glass from a low table without releasing her waist. She had accepted the game, the parody. But at the same time it was beginning to be a little shaky, she was beginning to take it seriously. I decided not to let her know how it might end. I said to her, ‘Do you think he has exhausted all his surprises?’”

You put out your cigarette and light another, Elizabeth, and exhale slowly, then say quietly, “‘Oh, don’t say that!’”

“‘Why?’”

“‘Because,’ the girl told you, ‘this time you are going to repeat yourself.’”