Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“The same taxi was waiting and the driver opened the back door and pushed me in roughly and I sprawled there, drunk and exhausted, hardly conscious. You told him to take us to the corner of Rin and Nazas and you got in front beside him.

“‘Sure, little pigeon, I’ll take you straight to your cage. We’ll let the Mustafa rest in peace behind. I’ll even go in with you before you fall dead too and I find myself out a fare.’

“We were in Mexico City again, Ligeia. We had returned.”

Javier closed his eyes for a moment. Only a moment, he was sure of that. But when he clawed the sheet away from his face, you were no longer there.

“Ligeia! Ligeia!”

You were no longer seated on the bed where he had last seen and heard you. The imprint of your body remained on the sheets and pillow. He looked toward the bathroom. The light there had been turned off.

“Ligeia, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered. “We have come home again. Accept it. Accept it.”

Lord, prevent that we fall into darkness.

* * *

Δ “What are you doing? What? What are you thinking? Tell me!”

“Mother, please.”

Raúl was different. Raúl asked no questions. Neither did he speak often. Of course he had attitudes: nearly always in support of his wife when she was correcting Javier, saying over and over that “For success in life good manners are indispensable,” and not only his attitudes but also his quirks: he crumbled his bread and dropped the pieces into his soup, he dipped his pastry in his chocolate, he read the Montgomery Ward catalogue, while Ofelia’s quirks were more enormous and complicated and made much more difference: she would snuff the lights and close the curtains as if she believed that in shadow their poverty would be less visible and the huge old house, naked of all except the most indispensable furniture, with its unused rooms, like the forbidden stairs to the mansard attic, always shut and padlocked, might seem almost homelike. In the evenings Javier did his homework and Raúl read the Montgomery Ward catalogue and made marks with a blue and red pencil and scratched his bald head and said that he was getting old, he couldn’t remember any more, and Javier could not see Ofelia’s only response, a movement of her face, because she had made the room dark and was hidden in its shadow.

His escape was to the patio, where he did not have to pretend. Tall crockery vases shining with inset studs of glass and porcelain. Water drips from the iron railing and the shadow-loving plants are in the planter boxes on the stairs. Shirts and sheets cross in all directions. He sits there in the twilight of a March afternoon, one of those fevered days that always make him so restless. The cold transparency of winter has vanished and without a season of transition heat has come and the dust has risen and hangs over the city in clouds. A yellow mantle every afternoon, and through it the sun seems to gain heaviness and penetration, and he wishes that it were rainy July, just as in July he wishes it were dry January, as he sits on the wicker chair near the high vases with his hands behind his head feeling that some of the dampness of the plants has worked its way deep into his vitals. The parrots have gone to sleep. Soon Ofelia comes and makes the round of the patio covering the birdcages with hoods of old sheeting. Into some of the red and white cages she tosses a handful of seed. The boy and mother do not speak, though their glances cross. He stretches his leg. Ofelia disappears but she has not gone. She is behind the partially opened door watching him, spying on him this afternoon as every afternoon. She sees him bathed in the misty light, calm, quiet, and her eyes pass from his curly hair down to his bare feet on the tezontle stones that in March evaporate so quickly and secretly the bucketfuls of water that the servant throws upon them every morning. She is wrapped in her flowered robe, her red hair is neatly combed, her face is drowsy as she stands behind the cracked door and watches him. The boy, fourteen now, sits in the rocker and reads and feels her eyes and senses clearly that one of the reasons she spies upon him is that he reminds her of his father, who is gone now. Like Raúl, he is dark and silent, captured by his own distance, lost in dreams. He is incomprehensible to her and she is trying perhaps bitterly, perhaps desperately or maybe only in loneliness, but always secretly and always avidly, to fix and simplify him, understand him. Now that Raúl has gone, she is far different from the woman who bought new dresses in Laredo, Texas. Her face is a red purse, her bust a heavy tide, her abdomen round and hard, and she stands with her legs well spread and her hands pressed to her belly as if she were trying to remember with her touch the pain that is the first memory she has of him; wearing a cotton skirt and the apron that has become eternal, the apron of their hurried meals and her hurried cleaning, she stands at the door and spies on him unaware that he heard the creak of the hinges when she cracked the door and can see her eyes against the dark background of the bedroom, kept in shadow to disguise their poverty. And after their meals, meals to which only the two of them sit now that Raúl has gone, she still leaves the house and disappears without saying where she is going and he makes no attempt to follow her because he knows that if he tries, he will only end by getting lost, he still does not know the city, still must confine himself to the limits of the familiar and obligatory streets.

Before, when Raúl was with them, life was different. Or maybe it merely seems that it was different because now Raúl has gone. No, it really had been different. With Raúl he would go out walking, holding his father’s hand, without worry or fear, walking slowly and enjoying himself. Very early Sunday mornings they would make their way to Chapultepec park. Sometimes they would rent a boat and row on the artificial lake looking at the girls who were rowing alone and at the boys who took other boats to follow the girls and scare them. Entire families would be out rowing, loaded down with paper bags and buckets of ice from which stuck the necks of cooling soft-drink bottles. Sometimes a boat would sink and the girls would shriek and the youths in shirt-sleeves laugh. And there were popsicles and clouds of sugar cotton, yellow and blue balloons, bags of peanuts, the cries of children, the whistles of the balloon venders. Hand in hand with his father he would walk the yellow meadows beneath trees stirred by the wind or stroll along the central avenue of the park watching passing cars, high and black, tops down, sounding horns to spread the swarms of pedestrians out of the way, moving slowly as if promenading, exchanging from car to car stares of interrogation, cries of recognition, words of alarmed or disarmed modesty. They would sit in front of the pergola where the band played Weber and Rossini overtures and Javier would laugh when his father signaled to the musicians with a finger. The imperturbable musicians, concentrated and serious as they puffed and plucked and bowed or adjusted their music stands or put a folded handkerchief to the shoulder. They played continuously and Raúl smelled of sweat, tobacco, leather, and shaving soap, and for the boy he came to be that Sunday music, the band in the pergola and the guitarists in the little open structures of iron where there were tables and benches and beer, soft drinks, and sandwiches could be bought. And away from the park a small fair was set up in a vacant lot, a few patched tents, a few booths, a rickety Ferris wheel, and the wooden horses of the merry-go-round whirled to the scratched music of a record, and down forgotten streets wandering entertainers walked, tooting their feeble trumpets, and an organ-grinder turned his crank while servant girls who had not gone out for the day listened from open windows. Sunday, their one day of freedom and companionship together, the day when they would go to all these places and hear all these sounds and he would ask his father what other people did on Sunday and Raúl laughed and said that some stood in line at movies and others slept all day, some did not shave, some dressed up in their best clothes, some read the comics and some pushed a baby carriage and many worked at weekend jobs to eke out their too small incomes, the women went to Mass and at four in the afternoon there were the bullfights. But that was not what Lupe, the servant, told him. Lupe said that on Sunday she sometimes would go to Tlaxcala to visit her family or enjoy a triple-feature movie or take the bus to the radio studios and enter free and obey the instructions of the master of ceremonies: laughter, applause, silence. Or she might merely go to the park and lie on the grass and let herself be sprinkled by spray blown from a fountain. And occasionally she had sex on Sunday: