Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Once they passed their examinations, however, they would have their revenge. They planned a celebration and had invited a number of their classmates. They owned the only refrigerator in the student community and would stock it with wine and beer. Their guests would all bring additional bottles. A costume party. A real blast.

“The day we were examined we almost danced all the way home. We had both passed. We cracked jokes, sang songs. But in front of the house we found the concierge standing with her apron raised to her face, biting her nails. She called to us to run, quick, quick. We imagined some disaster. A short circuit in the refrigerator. The ice had melted and run over the room. Or a fire had started.”

As they hurried up the stairs, the concierge explained. Something was wrong with Herr von Schnepelbrücke. He had not been seen since day before yesterday. She was sure that he had not come out of his room, neither to go to his meals nor to pick up dolls to repair. And his door was locked. Something had happened! Franz took the knob and turned it. The door was locked, all right. Ulrich put his mouth near the door and shouted. “Herr von Schnepelbrücke! Open the door, sir!” “I tell you I’ve already tried the master key,” said the concierge. “It’s barred inside.” At once they ran against the door with their shoulders while the concierge wailed and crossed herself and said she would report them to the landlord if the door was damaged. The rickety bar finally gave. The door opened. They ran inside, one looking for the light switch while the other opened the drawn curtains.

They found themselves in the midst of an amazing confusion. Broken dolls hung from wires attached to the ceiling, a whole array of little figures that as Franz and Ulrich bumped into them knocked against each other, emitting small cries and complaints. Twenty dolls hanging with wires twisted around their small necks. Blond wigs and black wigs. Tulle skirts. Patent-leather slippers. Staring porcelain eyes. They were not surprised, at first, for they knew Herr Urs’s occupation. Then they looked closer and were astonished. The dolls had a shocking peculiarity. All that were female had some male garment or characteristic; all that were male had something female. A hussar wore a lace bodice beneath his gold-buttoned fur jacket. A girl in crinoline showed off military boots and carried a whip in her hand. A train conductor with a striped cap was dressed in cambric panties. A little Chinese girl with black braid and silver hairpins possessed a small male phallus carefully glued between her legs, the plaster still damp and unpainted.

“Stop, Franz,” you said quietly, Elizabeth. He was exceeding his role, surprising you with something that perhaps was not subtle but that you had not expected. Now, however, you could guess what would follow. Good nose, Dragoness.

“Then, while the concierge covered her face with her apron and began to pray, we looked at the walls and found the same kind of incongruence. On the one hand, there were canvases of the most ordinary and traditional scenes. A ship entering harbor. A party lunching on the bank of a river. The rooftops of Munich. Flowers in Chinese vases. That sort of thing. And on the other hand, paintings that were deformed and insane or obscene. Vague shapes with gaping mouths and terrified eyes. Hands with long curling fingernails. Heaps of excrement. Animals copulating. Dead, rotting snakes and elephants swarmed over with flies. Severed smiling heads of bulls and boars. A tiny man carried high in the air by the claw of a gigantic invisible bird.”

“I know, Franz. I know. You don’t have to go on. I can see it.”

They stared around the room and entirely forgot why they had entered. Then gradually, little by little, they both became aware of the dominating object in the room, an enormous old-fashioned four-poster bed, its mahogany posts carved with climbing vines and topped by urns. “A wide bed, Lisbeth, a vast desert of a bed, the kind they don’t make any more. Huge pillows. The covers in confusion. Beneath the bedspread, extending up under one of the lace pillows, a tiny shape. We lifted the pillow and saw his head. His enormous head.”

“I know it already, Franz. Caligari and the Sleepwalker, lost in a white labyrinth. You don’t have to go on.”

He lay there as if sleeping. Like a child having a nightmare. Sleeping with his eyes and mouth open, his black hair down over his forehead, his hands joined under one cheek. Small and made even smaller because his short legs were drawn up and bent. Yellow and old like a centuries-old papyrus.

Ulrich touched one of the sleeping shoulders and prodded it. He put his hand to the temple of Herr von Schnepelbrücke and felt for a pulse. He announced that Herr von Schnepelbrücke was dead. “Do you know whether he has any relatives?” Franz asked the concierge. With her head and hands she indicated that she did not know. “Where he keeps his money?” Again no. “Someone may owe him something on these dolls or perhaps for one of his paintings,” Ulrich suggested, and both of them smiled. The concierge was wailing again. What was she to do? What was she to do? A dwarf dead in one of her best rooms. Suppose the other tenants were to learn? Everyone would move out. The house would be emptied overnight.

“Ulrich and I looked at each other. We had lived together for a year and a half. We knew each other completely, we had become like one mind, and now the same thought came to both of us. Want a cigarette, Lisbeth?”

“Yes, thanks. No, Franz, you were different. He was Ulrich and you were Franz. You’ve never been anyone but yourself.” Franz lit your cigarette and handed it to you. In the mirror across the room you saw your naked bodies on the bed, the cigarette in your mouth, the smoke rising.

“We told the concierge not to worry, that we would take care of everything. She must stand in the corridor and make sure no one saw us. We wrapped Herr Urs in his bedspread and Ulrich took him in his arms. We went out quickly, quickly into our room. The concierge wanted to follow but I put my finger to my lips and warned her: not a word or the other tenants would find out and take their departure. Nothing had happened. Nothing at all. Clean up his room and throw out his things and forget him.”

You moved your head from his shoulder and studied your reflections in the mirror.

“That’s enough, Franz. Look at us in the mirror. What do we look like?”

“I don’t know, Lisbeth. Like Lisbeth and Franz. What?”

“We look like a memory or a premonition.”

“You’re being as complicated as your husband.”

“Are you through?”

“No. I’ll tell you about the party.”

“Let’s smoke first. What did you say to that old Indian this morning?”

“Nothing, Lisbeth. Nothing at all.”

“You know, I can take almost anything so long as there are compensations. Not just part, either, but everything. But there has to be a compensation. I really love these people. And maybe to love them earns a kind of forgiveness.”

“Maybe, if I understand you.”

“Don’t look at me as if I were an ingénue. It’s true. In the end I have no other way.”

“It’s a woman’s way.”

“It’s mine. Smoke your cigarette, Franz, and then put your head on my breast and fall asleep. Sleep until the room is as warm as we are.”

* * *

Δ Elena rapped on the cabin door and came in, saying in her broken Italian that it was a beautiful day out, and put the fresh figs on the table and winked an eye. Javier got up from bed. Elena laughed and said wheeee! showing the stumps of her teeth; she crossed herself and covered her face with widespread fingers and said that it would be a better world if the signor could walk on the beach exactly like that, and you, Dragoness, were lucky, oh, quant’è lungo, oh, quant’è bello il signor, sei fortunata, signorina, sei fortunatissima. You got up too and put on your bathrobe while Elena waxed as eloquent about your beauty as she had about Javier’s, and the three of you walked out Indian-file, Elena and her bucket of figs first, her face dark and wrinkled as the kernel of a nut with eyes and a brilliant smile, wrapped in a black shawl, the torn white shawl beneath framing her brown face. Elena with her stride that was at once both light and tired. Elena with her black stockings and her canvas shoes which she placed on the sand with supreme elegance as she told you what she told you every morning, the story of her eight children. She has eight children and five of them die (she never used the past tense in speaking of them) and her husband is sick with rheumatism and the oldest son works in Athens but she knows nothing about his job, nothing except that he has a girl there and never sends money home, while the other son is a waiter in a café in Rhodes and the last child is a little girl. And every day someone leaves the island, emigrates to a better country, for here wealth is to have olive trees and not many do have them. She raises her arm and gestures toward the restaurant near the beach. The couple who own that restaurant used to be as poor and skinny as she herself. Today they are fat pigs. She aims her finger at them and shows her rotten teeth as she shouts “Brava, brava!” She laughs and shouts at them that now that they weigh two hundred kilos each they have forgotten that once they didn’t own a pot to piss in. The fat owners of the restaurant grunt and turn and run inside. Elena shouts “Brava, Brava!” and shows you and Javier her hands: twice a week she must scrub clothes; she shows you the copper bracelet that is her amulet and serves to protect her skin and nerves from the effects of hard labor. The owners of the café reappear with a carabiniere. They shout in Greek, he in Italian: they have told her again and again to stay away from the beach in front of their restaurant, that she may not sell her figs there, how many times must they repeat it? Elena plants her bucket of figs on the sand before her, she looks at Javier, she looks at you. Loudly she hums a song that makes the proprietor of the restaurant furious. The carabiniere moves toward her and she begins to sing. You look at Javier and he is motionless, merely observing. You step in front of Elena.