Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“It’s good, Franz,” you said as you lit two cigarettes and passed him one of them. “It’s very good. I didn’t expect it. But do you know what it makes me miss? The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Monk. The Castle of Otranto. Melmoth the Wanderer. Mrs. Radcliffe. Monk Lewis. Walpole. Maturin. Do you know what I enjoy most? Jean Epstein. Robert Weine. Henrik Gaalen. Paul Leni. Murnau. Fritz Lang. Conrad Veidt. When I was a little girl I used to dream about Conrad Veidt. Dreams in which all his faces appeared superimposed on each other, but each completely present and visible. Have you finished yet?”

You pass, Dragoness. Whoever made up that line that the heroine is the princess and not the witch? Pitee ye poore Monsters, Dragoness! Your classic of 91 Revere Street advises this and I assure you it’s not mistaken. Have pity on Herr Voivode Dracula, even when he dons his alias of Nosferatu, for he lacks what we mortals have but don’t need. Or what we believe, fools that we are, that we don’t need. Imagine the vista that opens if alongside the so ordinary necessities to wake to the alarm clock, shave with brushless cream, breakfast on stereophonic cereal, and take the tram at eight to the office, there exist the parallel necessities to drink the blood of English young ladies, surround oneself with vampires in a pad in the Carpathians, voyage in a ship without a crew, take one’s daily nap in an iron coffin filled with Transylvanian earth. To say nothing of the fact that mirrors refuse to reflect you. And consider that to the alarm clock they give social security and paid vacations and a pension plan and a senior citizens’ community with nurse service and bingo, and that all this provokes endless debate in parliament, endless echoes in the press and in citizens’ campaigns, but for poor Dracula there exists no humanitarian legislation by which he can enjoy a tranquil eternity with regular fixes of hemoglobin. Do we hear someone object that Voivode performs no function useful to society? Bah, successful disguise is itself an uncommonly useful function socially. Don’t we all put on our disguises when we need them, when we don’t care to be recognized by the shopkeeper or greeted by the landlord or dressed down by the boss? And if you would follow a truly revolutionary road, Dragoness, you would don the disguise of Major Barbara and with your blue coif and your beggar’s bowl circulate, demanding suffrage for the witches of Macbeth, so that when the hurly-burly’s done they might count on their old folks’ home and when finally, as tired as we, preceding us and acting as our heralds, they renounce immortality, they might find rest in some more dignified spectral Forest Lawn. And that’s the point: our witches and monsters refuse the last curtain and thereby expose themselves, while we go on tied to this mortal coil; they opt to be immortal, which is a much harder apple to peel than the anguish of dead-ended living. They make their way to that other land that is beyond both mortality and immortality, that is a parallel of mortality of which we do not even receive distant sniffs despite the fact that Purdy, wreathed with acanthus, has informed us that “Silhouettes tell everything.” And who indeed has the right to snap the endless thread of a Medusa, a creature who represents a way of remaining fixed and stable rather than rattling from here to there with a too sentimental, worn-out, and rather useless nervous system? Consider Perseus, for bad example. That paragon of clean homey Olympic youth frustrated us forever with his damn dutiful hypocrisy, robbed us of the one monster worth careful contemplation, took him to the boat and thus shipped a good and useful potential for thought clean out of the repertory of the natural and possible. But if someone needs to be eliminated, then let fried sausage be made of that Al Capone of antiquity, bloody Hercules, whose murders twisted nature awry and removed from her and from us the invulnerable lion, the seminal hydra, the mad bull and the charmed oxen, beings which represented alternative possibilities for nature, who today observes us coldly if not suspiciously, doubtless wondering whether we may not once again give the name of hero to any mere advocate of straightforwardness who may insist that we make her complexity conform to our own anthropomorphic simplicity. No, let us have variety, for God’s sake. Noah committed a great goof when he left to drown the couples of the unicorn, the salamander, and the phoenix. And who the hell told Orestes that he ought to subjugate the Furies and chase them underground where their sacred blood could no longer drain rivers dry and burn harvests? They also were obeying nature. Sanctimonious Orestes, a Boy Scout in Greek sandals, merely opened to them the opportunities of the negated: the chance to reappear sea-changed, their visages simulating neatness and order but their blood still envenomed, still sowing confusion. And there you have it: when the ancient heroes slaughtered nature’s darker powers and forced them to return to the human scene disguised, they gave birth to literature, to the epic, the lyric, to tragedy, psychology, and all those moral dramas that hang upon struggle, a surprise, a divorce, a masturbation, upon the ambiguity between the limited Hero and the depthless Furies who remain as they have always been the children of proliferating and all-including nature. What I am most annoyed by is those Sherlocks of history who rush around with their lenses and their analyses, pursuing the guilty. There are no guilty. Leave Professor Moriarty in peace, and be grateful that he helped to create a little confusion among nations and to kick flags and loyalty to king and country in the ass. He had his revenge upon Sherlock when Holmes took that Victorian square Watson to cohabitate with him; what was elementary about the good Galenist was not limited to his noodle, and Holmes’s continual complaint would be a fit study by Wilhelm Reich. But one good turn deserves another, so today the English themselves have given us the sex-sleuth, James Bond. The cape and dagger become pretexts for ejaculation. Sure, something big is coming up, and it is not the robbery of Fort Knox but the fleshy horn of Agent 007. Orrida maestà nel fiero aspetto! Or, to quote your classic Baudelaire that Javier was wrestling with before you left Mexico City ( Flowers of Evil is a fine little book to read before a vacation, Dragoness), “Jusqu’à cette froideur par où tu m’es plus belle!” Or did you know already that everything that maims morality enhances poetry? And whether you hail from heaven or hell, what the hell difference does it make: Oh, Beauty, enormous monster, horrendous, naïve …

I think I’m going to put the Sunday paper aside for a while, Dragoness. That editorial was too boring.

* * *

Δ “Yes, if you want me to, I’ll tell you how I pass my days.”

“Fine. Let’s start with getting up. Do you find it hard, Dragoness?”

“Hard to wake up, caifán. Not hard to get up. The moment I sense myself awake, before I open my eyes, I feel around with my feet for a cool spot, a spot that hasn’t been slept on, you know, and when I find one, there’s a terrific temptation to go back to sleep.”

“But you put down the temptation.”

“Usually, yes.”

“Because Javier has to go to the office.”

“That’s right. And I have to get up before he does.”

“Why? To cook his breakfast?”

“Of course not. You won’t believe me.”

“I believe everything you tell me, Elizabeth, even when you don’t believe it.”

“Some time I’ll have to think about that. Well, I get up first to win a little victory over Javier. To prove that I’m very active and energetic, that while he still lies there in bed, I’m already ready for whatever the day may bring.”