Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“But rediscovery was hard in that smoke. ‘Have you ever seen such smoke?’ It clouded around us, almost suffocating.

“‘It’s horrible,’ she said. ‘Please, please, let’s get out.’

“‘We’re going to have some drinks.’

“… lo traen desde San Miguel, lo llevan a Sombrerete …

“‘Bards, Ligeia. Minstrels. Bards with dyed silver hats and bellies swollen by pulque. Let’s sit down. Let’s try to hear them. A violin. The guitar. A guitarrón. Bring us two tequilas.’

“‘No, nothing for me.’

“… Oiga usté, mi general, oiga usté, mi general …

“‘Do you know what those voices remind me of, Ligeia?’

“‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘What?’

“‘Cries at birth. As though both mother and child were to go on shrieking their pain the rest of their lives.’

“‘So what?’ the girl said to me. ‘It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me, Javier. I’m not interested.’

“‘As though the act of giving birth had never ended. They shriek, howl, blindly…’

“… yo también fuí hombre valiente; quiero que usté me afusile en público de la gente …

“‘… as though the child were still tied by that blue flesh rope to his mother, who howls with him. As if he were still wrapped in the placenta. Look at them. In the eyes.’

“‘I’m not interested, Javier. Let’s go.’

“… tanto pelear y pelear, con el máuser en la mano …

“‘Listen to them. Listen to how they live today on violence from the past, as if when they are born they can remember the brutality of the act of conception…’

“‘God, Javier, enough, enough. How tedious you can be.’

“‘Cheers, Ligeia. Bring us two more.’

“‘None for me.’

“‘Then two for me.’

“‘God, how tedious, how disagreeable…’

“… para acabar fusilado en el panteón de Durango …

“‘J’aime, je l’avouerai, cet orgueil généreux qui jamais n’a fléchi sous le joug amoureux…’

“‘Cut it out. Javier. Don’t keep it up now. It’s broken already, beyond repair. It doesn’t matter now, there’s nothing you can do about it. Some other day.’

“‘Oh, there’s to be another day! Mourez donc, et gardez un silence inhumain; mais pour fermer vos yeux cherchez une autre main. Cheers.’

“… ya no vivan tan engreídos de este mundo traidor …

“‘You’ve had enough,’ the girl said to me. ‘Don’t drink any more now.’

“‘Look at their eyes, Ligeia. They’re the children of the great whore.’

“‘Oh, my god, now he’s being original.’

“‘Yes, look at them. They see us and they hate our guts. They don’t want us to visit them here. Why should they? To them we are Martians. We don’t speak as they do or think as they do. We never stop even to glance at them casually. We merely boss the shit out of them. If we do see them, it’s like the zoo. So let’s take a peek at the little bastards, Ligeia. See, they’re monkeys dressed up for carnival time. Howling like coyotes. And we are their enemies and they know it. We stand outside the bars of their cage looking in at them. Good. Maybe we should throw them some nuts. Here, monkey, catch.’

“‘Javier! Stop it!’

“‘Open your mouths and catch them, monkeys. Pumpkin seeds for the little monkey bastards on the other side of the bars. Catch ’em! Eat ’em!’

“The music stopped. What did the man look like, Ligeia? Can you remember him? I remember all right. He was dark-skinned and tall and he had a bushy mustache that ringed his mouth the way the bushy hair of a monkey rings its red ass. A circle of mustache, without beginning or end, a snake swallowing its tail. His sombrero was decorated with silver roses and he swept it off with a dramatic gesture and walked slowly toward me. He moved like a lean black panther, the movement we with our inner-spring mattresses, our porcelain toilets, our steel desks have forgotten. Like a forest animal pushing its way with his head through ferns and vines. Like Rousseau’s tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night. His teeth sharp and white. The veins in his neck swollen. Claws that grabbed me by the lapels and a voice that grated, Listen, drunk! Listen to me!’

“‘Listen? Now is the hour, eh? The moment has come to listen and pray. Your prayer, Tiger. To Eurynome, the mother of everything, who rises naked from Chaos and by rubbing her hands on her belly creates the serpent Ophios and then dances wildly while he pushes up between her legs…’

“‘Knock it off, drunk. Shut up! Have some respect for the musicians.’

“‘… and copulates with the Mother of All Things, to the end that she may lay the great universal egg…’

“‘Didn’t you hear me, drunk? I said shut up!’

“‘… from which she hatches, while she sleeps, her son Ouranos, who sprinkles his semen between the legs of his mother and covers her with grass and rivers and flowers and birds. So the moral is, fuck your mother. Go look for your goddamn mother, Master of Musicians, and fuck her and this cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.’

“He jerked me up by the lapels. I no longer saw you, Elizabeth. I saw instead the crazy whirl of the starlike lights in the ceiling, the thick blue smoke of that cold night, the circle of lunatic bastard monkeys who were crowding around us shouting and laughing and climbing on chairs and tables, howling, shrieking, laughing, their gold teeth, their flat noses, their pock-marked cheeks, their dark greasy hair, their heavy breasts, their powdered arms and their satin skirts and their spindly legs, their black mustaches, their forked red tongues, their eyes of polished coal, their short necks, their dirty T shirts. All the world that until that moment had been silence and obedience was screaming now. ‘Give it to the son of a bitch, smash him, send him to the Red Cross, gouge his eyes, cut his balls, knife him, put him in his coffin, drown him, hang him by his horn, stomp him, cream him, choke him. Up his ass for the shit we’ve had to swallow, for the right you are sir and the just as you say sir, the step right this way, ma’am, the thank you for nothing, not a goddamn thing, for the fat-assed queers on the prowl, for the pinched asses and the broken promises, for the quick gallows and the crooked courts, for the hand that holds a whip and a pistol, for the foot that stands on us and holds us down. Cold-cock him, shiv him, cut him up!’ A screaming circle of violence and fury and the tall tiger driving his fist home again and again, yet they still seemed far away and unimportant to me and I cried out to you where you stood looking on rigidly, loving me as you had never loved me before, my jerking body, my beaten face,

“‘Et Phèdre au labyrinthe avec vous déscendue, se serait avec vous retrouvée ou perdue!’ and at the same time I tried to remember their words as they shrieked ‘Shut the bastard up! The fucking son of a bitch! Shut him up, shut him up!’ Then they were suddenly very close to me and fists were at my face, my chest, my belly, my testes, again and again until I fell crying to you…’

“‘Phaedra. Theseus. I wasn’t so far off, was I?’”

“and finally they dragged it out of me, a wild helpless groan, ‘Ahhhhggggg!’ as I fell on the dirty floor amid the cigarette butts and the sputum and phlegm and the spilled tequila, a cry that was identical to their cry. They had beaten me and captured me. I was on their side of the cage now. I was an animal too and all I could do was lie there with my knees drawn up to protect my testes and my hands over my face, moaning while I caught glimpses of the ceiling lights wrapped in yellow cellophane and the face of the dark-skinned tiger who had overcome me as he turned and walked away rubbing his knuckles and cocking his sombrero again. The music again. The guitar. The guitarrón. The trumpet. Again a voice singing. I struggled up and hung on your neck. I couldn’t see your eyes as you took a handkerchief and wiped off my face. We moved toward the door. Someone was waiting there and helped us outside into the cold air of the street. It was the same cab driver who had brought us down from the Lomas. I smelled steam and coal smoke from locomotives. I tried to see what time it was, what had happened to the moon. Dawn was breaking. I heard the swish of sewers and the roar of the great trucks that come into the city at dawn loaded high with vegetables, beer, cheese, bales of cotton, fruit, frozen seafood, crates of eggs, flowers. Roaring motors of red-fingered dawn. Huge eight-wheeled trucks driven by men in leather jackets wearing straw sombreros who have driven all night from Veracruz or Monterrey, from the coast of Guerrero or the mountains of Oaxaca. To feed us. To prevent us from once again eating each other’s flesh.