Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

You turned the volume of the radio up. Este tango nos unía en aquellas noches inolvidables de Armenonville. And the whole point, Dragoness, is to move first. To take hold of the world before it can take hold of you.

* * *

Δ Buenos Aires. January. Javier had rather uncertainly promised to meet you at a tearoom on Avenida Santa Fe. You remember the month because the streets were almost impossible. The tar of the macadam had melted in the heat and on some corners they had laid boards from sidewalk to sidewalk so that people could cross. You had walked all afternoon. Lunch alone. Then to Harrod’s to choose some wool material for an autumn suit, but when you pushed through the revolving door you changed your mind and walked on around and out again, the glass moving in front of you. A rebellion, but not a very important one. You felt the damp heat on your skin, heat mixed with the smells you always associate with that city: Argentine gasoline, which is different from any gasoline in the world and is the city’s most characteristic odor, even more identifying than its smells of the shops and restaurants, linen, wool, and leather, warmed-over pizza, grilled steaks, fried sausage, kishke, the fainter scent of chocolate-topped ice cream, and above everything, or within it, the smells from the docks: tar, coal, steam, frozen meat, livestock, fertilizer, bales of wool. Why had the thought of an autumn suit come to you in January? You walked on. A building was being constructed at the corner of Maipú and Sarmiento and the workers had stopped to eat. Some of them were standing on the sidewalk at the entrance to the job, others were seated high among the girders of the framework, as if in niches. They were eating long flutelike rolls stuffed with cheese and ham or slices of beef loin; they were drinking wine while conversing in Argentine Spanish with Polish and Italian accents. You stopped in front of store windows: crocodile purses, swatches of merino and alpaca, ponchos. A perfume shop on Maipú. You entered and they offered you ten or twelve perfumes in succession and you laughed and let them spray you with all of them and left the shop wrapped in fragrance and without buying anything. You would end, you knew, spending an hour in the Ateneo bookstore, finally emerging with a copy of Martín Fierro bound in cowhide. You avoided Florida, closed off at this hour of the day for auto traffic only. You walked along Lavalle to look at the placard-bearing tripods in front of the movie houses. Maybe there were some new movies playing, or an old one you had missed. They often showed, unadvertised, old Argentine films that you enjoyed enormously. Terrible melodramas with many tangos, thick with nostalgia for the Belle Époque of the Centenary, alive with folklore from the various parts of the great city. Walking slowly, you stopped in front of each of the thirty movie houses on Lavalle. You were wearing an orange silk print and white high heels that picked up the hot tar and you were carrying a purse you had bought in Buenos Aires and you looked at the placards, the stills of a triple-feature of Luis Sandrini and next door La Vuelta de Rocha was showing, with Mercedes Simone and Hugo del Carril, and the music of the city during that period enchanted you and in the summer you would go to the open-air restaurants on Maldonado and Belgrano, on the way to the Tigre, to hear the orchestras of Canaro or Pichuco. You also enjoyed music from the interior of the country, the carnavalito, the pericón, the vidalita. Malambo with Delia Garcés was showing. You saw many titles and names that were familiar because you had come here every afternoon since you and Javier had been living in Buenos Aires, to Lavalle Street to see movies, Floren Delbene, Tita Merello, Tres Hombres del Río, Nini Marshall, Esteban Serrador, Santiago Gómez Gou, Los Ojos Más Lindos del Mundo, Enrico Muiño, Angel Magaña, the Legrand sisters, Los Martes Orquídeas, Petrone, Amelia Bence, Silvana Roth, La Casa de los Millones, Olinda Bozán, Semillita …

“J’étais une vraie cinglée du cinéma argentin…”

Finally you stopped before the stills of Los Muchachos de Antes No Usahan Gomina, a title you found amusing. You bought your ticket and went into the tiny theater, narrow, the wooden seats high and uncomfortable, the whir of the ventilating fans louder than the sound track of the film. You found a place in one of the front rows. The picture had already begun. Two dandies of the 1900’s were out on a carouse and had just met the great courtesan of the Centenary, blond Mireya, played by Mecha Ortiz, and they were dancing the milonga “The Swan” and you felt your hand touched and looked to the right and there was Larraín, the secretary of the Chilean embassy, sucking chocolate milk through a straw. He bent to greet you and said that it was a small world and offered you a sip of his drink, suggesting softly but shrilly that for that one afternoon you could pretend to be sweethearts, it would be a secret no one else would know. You wanted to sit there relaxed, escaped, and watch how Mireya would relentlessly descend the path of her destiny, a way as relentless as a tango, to end up an aged vender of flowers living in the gutter, to be rediscovered there by and by, in the last reel, by Arrieta and Parravicini, the dandies grown elderly. Twenty-five Aprils that will not return. The tango, you told yourself absently, is one of the few contemporary forms of tragedy, and you got up and moved toward the aisle.

“But you’ve just come…”

You murmured that you had forgotten an appointment and you walked out of the theater. To the Ateneo bookstore. There no one would bother you. You walked to Florida and let yourself be swept along toward Corrientes by the crowd of men in jackets with too wide shoulder pads, high stiff piqué collars with big-knotted ties, their hair pomaded. Old men and youths were reading bulletins at La Nación. Women whose hair was dyed two tones. The bookstore was not crowded. The familiar clerks wearing linen dusters with their sleeves wrapped to the elbow in black damask. You came out eventually with a book bound in lambskin. “Moreira was never one of the cowardly sort of gaucho lost in crime and with a completely perverted moral sense.” You closed the book and escaped from Florida toward Maipú and went down to the San Martín Plaza and there sat on a bench facing the Torre de los Ingleses. You breathed the fresh scent of the high trees and looked, just to be looking at something, at the sidewalk with its design of pink squares. You opened the book again. “No, Moreira was like most of our gauchos. He was blessed with a strong soul and a generous heart, and if destiny had launched him along a more noble path, at the head of a regiment of cavalry, for example, he would have been a glory to his motherland.” There were many children about, for this was vacation time, children playing in white and blue dresses, youths in knickers who were reading Billiken, and you thought to yourself that you had never seen boys more serious or better reared than the Argentines. A boy whose hair was plastered smooth sat next to you, wearing a tie even in that heat, and opened one of the little volumes of the Sopena classics series.

“I don’t remember what it was. In that heat…”

He inclined his head slightly in greeting to you and you returned the salutation. Then you both settled to your reading, turning the pages almost at the same time, and as you grew engrossed, you forgot the youth. The adventures of the gaucho Moreira on his home ground. You thought of Javier as you observed how Moreira was both the actor and the victim of his own words: “Fearless and sure of himself, always in the middle of things, not very Catholic, sticking to his enemies like their shadows, good at dancing, his eyes always open, always a little suspicious and always alert…”