Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“And I you, Isabel. From the first day of class last year.”

“At home everything was ‘Chabela, don’t do this, Chabela, don’t do that. Don’t wear your hair loose, you look like an existentialist or a straw broom. Chabela, don’t pick your nose, you’ll make your nostrils even bigger than they are already.’ You can imagine what I felt. Am I boring you?”

Javier shook his head.

“I like to get rid of my complexes talking about them.”

“But above all…”

“Above all, my dear parents. Did you know my father has made a mountain of money higher than the Matterhorn, which is where he keeps it, by the way.”

“How?”

“Gas stations. You do it like this. They give you a concession and you rake in thousands and let a little trickle back to Pemex. And the next thing we knew we had our house in the Lomas de Chapultepec. And God, talk about houses! You remember that plantation house in the movie we saw together?”

“Gone with the Wind?”

“Yes. There you have it. Doric-Ionic or Ionic-Doric columns or whatever they are. Green slate roof. French windows with louvers, darling. Everything! And inside! God only knows where they found that furniture. Authentic Chippendale, Mother says. What a blast! She’s off two centuries and one continent. Don’t you believe me?”

“I always believe you.”

“Some of the chairs have leather backs with copper tacks. Some have blue embroidering and skinny legs, and some have lilac brocade and enormous fat legs. And don’t even mention my bedroom.”

“I’d never dare to.”

“Silly. When I turned fifteen and became a young lady, they bought everything new for me. A bed with a canopy, you know, and some prints that Mother said were French. Rosy-cheeked girls carrying parasols. A dressing table that would make you upchuck, darling, all cambric and tulle. Everything for a very well-bred young lady.”

The record stopped and you stood with your legs apart and your arms akimbo and tossed your head to throw your hair back.

“Don’t you want a Coke?”

“No, Isabel. You know that I can’t drink soda.”

“ Ay, tú. You and your precious stomach.” You opened another bottle and drank it quickly. “Then the old man pulled another little deal. Remember the last devaluation?”

“Yes, I do, but you don’t. You were still a baby then.”

“Well, I found out about it later. Father knew ahead of time and bought dollars like a lunatic.”

“I suppose he cries when they play the national anthem.”

“Oh, at least. It was on a Friday. Saturday the news broke and dear Papa had made I don’t know how many millions without turning a finger. What do you think of that?”

“A man of great ability, Isabel. He’s got it. He’s…”

“I’ve never heard of anyone who’s made so much doing so little. He’s a genius. And he believes it, too. He talks the livelong day about work and struggle and hardship and how we manage to skimp by, only thanks to his sweat. Shall I go on?”

“If I may go on listening.”

“Listen, then. Then there’s Mother. She’s an antique herself. From the time I started kindergarten, I had to study with the nuns. Everything always just so. Confession and communion every first Friday. Don’t step outside the house during Holy Week. And what ideas. ‘Chabela, don’t dance. Don’t go to the movies. Watch out for boys. Don’t wear makeup. Chabela, be careful, you are a lily the devil would like to pluck.’ Ay, that old debbil devil! He plays the clarinet at dances. He waits to pick you up outside movie houses. He drives by in a convertible whistling at you. And Mother, always the contritest of the contrite, with all her hopes in me.”

“I can believe that.”

“Yes. I had to be a saint who would out-virgin the Virgin of Fatima. And I had to cry by the bucketful, so that my tears could wash away poor Mother’s sins. But what sins, darling? I would puzzle and puzzle and still couldn’t think of a single one. But there was one. Oh, yes!”

“A terrible sin,” Javier smiled.

“Can you guess? One day I went to steal a cigarette from Father’s night table and there they were. Their condoms. That was her great sin. Violins, please. She couldn’t accept the stream of brats the good Lord might want to send through her, so they used rubbers and that was why she felt somewhat less holy than the Magdalene and never went to confession even though she attended Mass every morning. I laughed and laughed and after that I was never able to take them seriously again. I asked her, you know. She broke into tears. How could an innocent girl like Chabela know about such things? So, I graduated from the nuns’ school and entered the university, and the end of the story is that now they just give me my allowance and leave me alone. Now and then they come to the end of the rope and they jump me and ask how I can ever hope to become engaged to a decent young man with a good future when I spend all my time hanging around those university good-for-nothings, who are all Reds and troublemakers. So, Proffy! Sweet and lovely, tra-la-la-la, the girl with the Ipana smile. Now stop writing. That’s enough.”

“But I haven’t even started yet.”

“Don’t start yet. You have plenty of time. All the time in the world.”

“Isabel, Isabel.”

Javier kissed the hands that went around his neck.

* * *

Δ The girl appeared when autumn came. Your apartment had a small balcony, hardly large enough for the awning-shaded coaster. During the heat of summer you both stayed inside, for the apartment was air-conditioned. Now, however, as cooler weather came on, you began to use the balcony. Several linden trees grew as high as the story above you and during the summer their thick-leaved branches hung over the balcony. Now the leaves gradually disappeared, first turning golden, then floating down in the silent breeze. You and Javier would sit swinging gently in the coaster watching the leaves fall, he in his old turtle-neck sweater, you hugging yourself with your arms, and every day the sunlight was weaker and cooler. Sometimes Javier would precede you outside. He would put a mixture of blues and fox-trot records on the phonograph and go out to rock in the coaster and you would throw a sweater over your shoulders and follow him and sit beside him. You would talk a little, with long intervals of silence. He told you about happenings at the embassy, about invitations to dinners and cocktail parties. You made plans to go to Bariloche, in the south, or across the river to Carrasco, if Javier could get ten days off in June or November. And you would watch summer’s curtain of leaves drift down and reveal the pastel-colored building across the street, a building neither of you had noticed before.

Javier discovered the girl first. You never knew just what he saw then, though you imagined that her behavior had been no different than it was later. You always saw her cut in half by the window, invisible below the torso, and sometimes, when the wind blew the curtain across the window, she was concealed entirely. In no way was she different from the girls who walked along Santa Fe or Florida in the afternoon. If it had been that important, you could have waited and seen her enter or leave the building dressed for the street. But you never did. You saw her only in the window with her arms raised as she tied her hair up with a ribbon, arms that were as bare and brown as her face. From the front sometimes, her armpit curly and her pectoral muscles standing out. Sometimes in profile, her bust small but erect. Sometimes from behind, the muscles of her back tense as she held her arms high to tie her hair, place her combs. You saw her in snapshot glimpses, snapshots of a turning statue. She would rub cream on her face, pluck her eyebrows, apply eye shadow and lipstick. Always alone: no one else ever entered that bedroom, although in the adjacent windows could be seen servants with feather dusters, students with open books, men grabbing a meal between their regular and their moonlight jobs. There surrounded by those conventional sights, a turning statue making herself up or combing her hair, every afternoon exactly at three. Sometimes she would put her head out the window and look down at the street. Sometimes her lips would move as if she were singing. Little by little, day by day, her skin lost the deep tan she had acquired at Punta del Este or Mar del Plata. She never smoked. Apparently she slept all day and got up at three. One day she drew back her blue curtain and had a glass in her hand. Immediately she disappeared. A little later she was seated as usual at her dressing table.