Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin
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- Название:A Change of Skin
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- Издательство:Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр:
- Год:1986
- ISBN:нет данных
- Рейтинг книги:4 / 5. Голосов: 1
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“She used to pay a peso, Ligeia, for admission to a dark room where a man would fuck her standing, sometimes the same man, sometimes an unknown one, beside other couples.”
On Sunday sounds were different, clearer. Even the barking of dogs was louder and sharper. And it was the day when the wives of prisoners went to the prisons to visit and sleep with their husbands. Raúl said that it must be a very sad thing to die on Sunday. He rubbed Javier’s head and then Ofelia called to him and they shut themselves up in their bedroom and spoke in voices so low that not even a murmur could be heard.
“Can memory return to us the places we have known, the people, the feelings, make us experience them again? I don’t know, Ligeia. But I know that you and I have come home and that you must accept it.”
* * *
Δ The highway twisted back and forth pressed upon by basalt walls scarred by picks and showing dark veins of hard stone separated by pale, softer bands. Franz drove swiftly, expertly, gradually accelerating as the stone walls spread apart to become a canyon of lustrous clay. Javier moved away from Isabel and leaned forward resting his elbows on the back of Franz’s seat. He touched Franz’s shoulder.
“You slipped off from our talk after the movie the other night. I still hold that love is created, that it is an act of the will…”
Franz did not reply. You half turned, Dragoness, and said to your husband, “Please, Javier. You told us that only a few minutes ago. You’ve said it a thousand times. Please don’t make us listen again.”
Javier tilted his head to observe your head tilted, its vertical line now formed by your eyebrows. A real mocker, Elizabeth. He said dryly, “Since the first day you knew me, all I have done is repeat one or two ideas that had been written before you knew me, in that little book that won me the fellowship to the United States and so allowed you to hear my ideas.”
“I haven’t heard them,” said Isabel, touching Javier’s arm. “To me everything you say is new.”
“At any event, they are words that can stand to be revivified.” Javier leaned back and spread his knees. “As if they were being taken from some ancient ceremonial urn and burned in penitence for our deaths. Our deaths, Ligeia. We ourselves, the death of what we once were but have ceased to be. For all of us, except Isabel, of course, have been very different persons than we are today.”
“Why did the audience laugh and hoot and yawn during the movie?” Isabel asked. Javier looked at her appreciatively. She was holding a characteristic pose, her hands together beneath her breasts ready to caress or squeeze her body with a grace and smoothness that would be accentuated by the opaque sheen of her yellow shantung dress.
“Because they didn’t understand it,” said Javier. “They’re not used to seeing life itself on a screen. But ask Ligeia. She’s the expert on movies. She spent her entire teens in one long movie.”
You did not look at him, Dragoness. “No, it’s more than that.” Nervously you opened your handbag and searched for your mirror and didn’t find it. You closed the bag. “Those apes who whistle and make cracks during a movie like that do it because they feel outraged. They can’t take it that Antonioni deals with Monica Vitti with respect and love, that he sees her as a human being.”
“You mean that he communicates his own rhythm while receiving that of another,” Javier said. “Be careful now.”
With your left hand you nervously twisted the rear-view mirror until you could see your reflection in it.
“Come on, Elizabeth,” Franz said brusquely. “This is a damn dangerous road.” He raised his hand and readjusted the mirror and looked into it briefly at the car behind just swinging out to pass. The car, a Ford, went by, floating back a string of curses.
“It bothers them to see simple objects,” said Javier. “Books, ashtrays, lamps, the things that are part of our lives but not part of us. They would prefer to humanize everything, it’s their guilt complex. The things a woman touches when she and her lover separate. That part of her life which is not her, which she won’t see or touch again, which has value precisely because it isn’t her. It disturbs them to see how living men and women leave each other. They would prefer something melodramatic that would give a kind of integrity to the disguise they insist life must wear. They are, as Usigli has said, gesticulators, in love with the gestures of living, not with life itself. They don’t care to accept that people simply lose time, walk along a street, stop to think. They don’t care to see the true slow light of dawn, day, sunset, darkness. They want to go on hearing the lies that have comforted them for a century and a half, from the time poetry was written for young ladies down to the latest suds opus on Channel 4. They live in eclipse and honest light terrifies them.”
“No, it’s more than that,” you said again. “What they can’t stand is that a woman should be more than simply a cunt dressed out in some romantic illusion. To see the birth of a love in which the woman is just as free and just as much a person as the man makes them furious. When Vitti and Delon go to the apartment and instead of jumping straight into bed take time to discover themselves slowly to each other, to play together like little rabbits and to do this because they must discover themselves first and share laughter and a game in order to go to bed only later, only apocalyptically, if you see what I mean, everything for everything, entirely committed with all their defects and fears and hatreds and weaknesses … that’s what offends your Mexican he-man macho male. What did they call out during that scene?”
“Put it to her, put it to her,” Isabel laughed.
“Yes, that’s right.” You directed a dry smile to Isabel. “Put it to her. Get it over and done with fast, pronto, for that’s what a woman is for. Underneath, the macho Mexican is merely an onanist. If he could have intercourse with himself, he would do it. The woman he takes is no more than an object that happens to be neccessary. Bah, they disgust me. Underneath they are secret homosexuals. The hidden desire of every one of the mustached bastards is enchiladas with cold cream, as a caifán friend of mine once said.”
Thank you, Professoress Dragoness. I read you clear: Latins are lousy lovers.
“Have you known anything better?” said Javier, arching an eyebrow.
“Don’t be coarse, Javier.” You let your head rest back against the cushion. “You’re many things, but you aren’t coarse.”
You closed your eyes and smiled and began to hum while your hand blindly looked for a radio station. ¿Dónde están mis amigos queridos de entonces? ¡A pan y agua! “Someday,” you murmured, “the women of the world will raise a statue to Michelangelo Antonioni. The David who cut down the Goliath of misogyny.” You laughed and went on without looking toward your husband, “You would like to accept it intellectually, Javier. But underneath you react like all Mexican men. You can’t help yourself.”
“You’re wrong,” Javier protested. “I’m for womanhood too.”
“There: ‘womanhood.’ But Antonioni is for this woman or that woman, and without demanding anything from her, he wants to give her everything.”
Franz’s hand pushed your hand from the knob and he turned it, looking for a station.
“Now who’s repeating?” said Javier. “That’s exactly what Franz said a little while back. And moreover, do you think to offer a woman only pessimism is really to offer her anything?”
“Leave the tango, Franz. For an intellectual, you’re very thick sometimes, Javier. Don’t you see that we can’t help accepting that we will never attain some things, and that to admit this is not to deny the value of those things? It’s to find freedom.”
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