Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Ligeia. You gave me that name. My real name is Elizabeth. Ligeia. How silly. You remembered something. ‘A man does not completely surrender to the angels, not even in death, except from the debility of his will.’ You remembered that and you named me Ligeia. How silly, silly. Bette, Beth, Betele, Liz, Lizabeth, Liza. You were very different then. At times you understood exactly what I wanted and at other times…”

At other times he made you understand. But those were not your best times. Your best times were when everything was as spontaneous and natural as sleeping or waking. If you saw him exhausted, not from having emptied himself but because he had worked all day yet had accomplished nothing, and his energy, so nervous and volatile, had found no escape, you would undress slowly before him, in the living room or the kitchen or wherever you happened to be and whatever you happened to be doing, smoking, opening a soft drink, preparing a sandwich. If he was angry with himself you would rub his temples and pull him back on your lap, light his cigarette for him between your lips, place the cushions on the floor and wait for him with a certainty that you do not feel today, that you have lost today, and that then, without your knowing it, offended you in a way: the certainty that as you gave yourself to him because he needed you, an outlet for his frustration, as you gave him yourself because you also needed it, you would meet on the spread cushions naked and panting and would loose the tight reins of the words that neither of you had ever dared to speak, neither he in his writing nor you with your lips, and nothing would have to be overcome, there would be no obstacle, no difficulty. And it was different again and worse when there did not exist even that invitation to give yourself, his frustration and anger and irritation, when without any pretext or any special reason

“… we would grab each other blindly, in the darkness of waking at dawn, and it would be only my body and your body, two bodies that came together and united for no reason except their closeness, the warmth of their skin, the cold of the morning, the fact that we were husband and wife now and lived together. It couldn’t go on that way, so pointlessly and mechanically. Who was it, was it you or I, who first asked for something more? To possess, to possess. How we appeased our dissatisfaction during those first years by telling ourselves that each of us possessed the other. That was enough, we tried to insist. Enough, shit. Did either of us count the times we possessed and wasted each other in those days? Without either of us losing himself, only because we happened to be together. Your obscenities in Spanish and mine in English, sometimes exchanging our languages in order to try to say the same thing, just what we didn’t know, we had to learn, your kisses finding me and taking apart all my secrets, discovering every inch of my flesh, moving across my forehead and down my back and I felt your breath on my face and then on my thighs and then between my buttocks while your tongue touched every part of me, your spit tried to possess me, your tongue and your fingers and your breath and your hair and your eyelashes…”

How many places. On a wet gray Atlantic beach under the rain. In a hut of old beams and white plaster on the island of Rhodes, beside a wooden table soaked by spilled wine and scarred by heavy knives. On a Spanish steamer, twenty days from Vigo to Veracruz, when Javier decided that the time had come to return to Mexico City, that he needed Mexico again, that if he did not face and overcome its terrible negations he would always believe that he had taken the easy road and his writing could have no value: on the Spanish steamer beneath a porthole dirty from smoke and encrusted salt, in a narrow bunk. In your apartment in Colonia Cuauhtémoc on a wide bed in a room decorated with posters from the shows you had visited before the war in Paris and Haarlem and Milan, dramatic letters and brilliant, contrasting colors, the names and images that now were lost, Franz Hals, Gustave Moreau, Paul Klee, Ivan Meštrović.

“Every month those old posters became a little more tattered until finally we forgot them and painted the walls and threw the posters out. For we had come home to Mexico City. We had sold the furniture that had been left from the old house on Calzada del Niño Perdido. You had been taken, as usual, practically giving the furniture away, but nevertheless we had a little money again and could go on living and you could devote yourself to writing. You would leave the apartment and roam all over the city looking for God knows what, contrasts, images, words, profiles, masks. For you were writing the poetry of the commonplace, the visible-invisible ordinary and everyday, and you went out to find your words in that world that belonged to you and that I was discovering beside you. The poetry of the commonplace. You know, someday I’d like to read that poetry, I wish someone would write it, the poetry of the old movies we remember and the old songs, the things that take up more than half our lives. So many lovely forgotten songs. Remember The Isle of Capri? In a Secluded Rendezvous? Flying down to Rio? Cheek to Cheek? What was I saying?”

You were saying that in the Orient all the men wore pith sun helmets and white suits à la Clark Gable in China Seas and the background would be a shot of Singapore or Macao and gliding by would be Anna May Wong, Sessue Hayakawa, and Warner Oland, who was also Charlie Chan; even Peter Lorre, who played Mr. Moto. Marlene Dietrich you discovered, of course, in The Blue Angel, with Emil Jannings, and you remember it as if it were only yesterday or a moment ago, Marlene sitting astride to sing in a silver top hat and black stockings. No, Marlene and Garbo never acted in the same picture. Garbo, wrapped in fox, entered the Grand Hotel where John Barrymore was smoking as he paced the floor in his black silk pajamas and Joan Crawford was taking dictation from Wallace Beery, who played a horny industrialist dressed in a jacket with a wing-collar shirt. “He pretended to have a German accent and Lionel sat at an enormous chrome bar and got drunk and the hotel was run by Lewis Stone, who hid half his face because it had been burned by acid, and Lionel was dying of cancer and that was why Crawford, in a dark dress with a large white voile collar, agreed to marry him, it would be for only a few months and then she would inherit his money. She was called Flemschen … Flemschen or something like Flemschen, and she was simply divine, the best actress in the movie, the most modern of them all. Even Jean Hersholt played in Grand Hotel. Do you remember? Afterward he played the doctor who brought the quintuplets into the world. Dr. Dafoe. You don’t remember. I bet you don’t. But we used to know them all. Every afternoon after school we would go to the movies. Or we would sit in the soda fountain and ask movie riddles, to see who knew the casts best, the cameramen, the other technicians. Yes, we even knew the names of the cameramen. And today the only ones I remember are Tolland and James Wong Howe, and Tissé, who was Eisenstein’s cameraman. But then we knew them all, both of us, Javier. We were like one memory, we went to the movies like one pair of eyes and ears, do you remember? And which of us was the first to ask for something more? Were you thinking then what I was thinking? I heard you come home one night…”

You heard the key scratching, Elizabeth, searching for and finding the keyhole. Then silence as he remembered that it had to be upside down, the serrated edge up, and the scratch as he tried again, this time with too much force, for that lock required

“Gentleness, almost tenderness, as if you were threading the eye of a needle or making a cheese soufflé…”