Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“The war between the sexes narrowed down to the civil war of wife against husband.”

“What else? And while he watches me with eyes that keep falling shut again, I open the window, oh, very briskly, and do my yoga exercises. And that’s another victory. I haven’t changed a pound or an inch in twenty years, and he is beginning to develop a pot.”

“And so you prove your Yankee mental and moral superiority to a drowsy Mexican male. That’s psychological imperialism, Dragoness.”

“My drowsy Mexican male brings it on himself, like most forms of imperialism. God, how he provokes me. His laziness, his hypochondria, his flabby body.”

“What else provokes you? I don’t necessarily mean Javier. Don’t you like Mexico?”

“I think I may love Mexico, but I’m damn sure I often don’t like it. This city is impossible. You have a secret code by which you communicate here. And just when an outsider thinks he has it figured, everything backfires. I mean, he goes into Bar X and buys a drink for the house and they love him and cry with him and call him cuate, mano, whatever you want. Then he goes into Bar Y and buys everyone a round and they take out their knives and ya, the communication ends with his guts spilling out.”

“Well, at least it’s spontaneous.”

“Spontaneous, shit. It’s merely unconscious premeditation. Death and fiesta, they are your two poles, caifán, and everything in between is ceremonial rigidity.”

“If we’re stiff, Elizabeth, it’s because we’re scared stiff. Mexico is a country with a tiger sleeping on its belly and we’re all afraid that at any moment it may wake.”

“Yes. And in the meantime you keep it knocked out with the sleeping pill of corruption. Do you know that I gave up driving and we sold my car? Every time I went out, a cop would stop me and I would have to pay him a bribe. Every time, the same cop, as regular as Sunday. And I always believed that he was hooked up with the burglars that would rob the apartment periodically. When he saw me out and stopped me, he would phone them and tell them the coast was clear. It stinks, caifán. It really stinks. The crook robs the citizen and splits with the cop, who splits with his captain, who robs the cops under him and splits with the mayor, who robs from his captains and department heads and inspectors, and so on, and splits with the district commissioner, who robs from all the mayors he controls and splits with the PRI delegate, who robs all his districts and splits with the governor, who robs from all his delegates and splits with the minister, who robs from everyone he can and splits with the president. In Mexico you end up paying yourself a bribe every now and then. It’s lunacy.”

“It’s the old pyramid of power, Dragoness, that’s all. Can’t you admire its aesthetic? Everything in Mexico forms a pyramid: politics, economics, love, culture. You have to step on the poor bastard beneath you and let the son of a bitch above you step on you. Give and take. And the man above always solves the problem for the one below, right up to the supreme father at the top who is disguised in the name of society itself. We’re all disguised, one face when we look down, another when we look up.”

“I know. But you’re the worst actors in the world just the same. When I first came here, I enrolled in a theater-arts class to kill time and to learn Spanish. And you know, not one of the people in the class could act. I mean act … repeat words written by someone else with authenticity enough to make them your own words. Play a role. The people I was in the class with couldn’t come even close. Everything was always phony, phony, phony.”

“Because they had been playing a role, each one of them, all their lives, and to have taken on another would have been redundancy. You have to be somebody before you can pretend to be somebody else. And the only person you can really successfully pretend to be is yourself, which is the secret, I suspect, behind our excellent gunmen and our lousy bullfighters. How long did you study acting?”

“Not long. Then I joined an English-language group and we did Noel Coward plays, one after the other, until that became a bore too. And then I read novels and that’s how I’ve passed my days since I came to Mexico, fifteen years of days, lover caifán. Ugh.”

“Well, at least one can choose among one’s memories.”

“Yes.”

“And fifteen years ago this city was a fun place.”

“You’re right, it was. A kind of innocent lay. The whorehouses with their emerald lights and their smell of disinfectant. The hundreds of cabarets dressed out in tinsel. The Indian prostitutes parading in their satin dresses. It was a city full of con men and bouncers and pimps. And people like Diego Rivera and Siqueiros and María Félix and Tongolele. It was a brash, sentimental, gutty world.”

“All that was left of the revolution, just before it became the Establishment.”

“I suppose. You’re always saying that the revolution was betrayed. I don’t know.”

“Revolutions are always betrayed, Elizabeth. It’s inevitable.”

“Why?”

“Look, a revolution destroys one status quo and creates another. That’s all. But in between the two there can be some glorious times. And that is all.”

“I guess. Our life has certainly gone on being the same these fifteen years. Javier with his nervous stomach and his X rays and his pills, his teaching at the university and his job with the United Nations. Me with my best-sellers. God, is there any point in even talking about it?”

“Tell me what you want, don’t tell me if you don’t want to. We aren’t writing a book.”

“Oh, hell no. And speaking of books, lover, the other day I was reading a really good one. A novel by Styron. If you ever need an epigraph, here’s one I memorized for you. ‘Didn’t that show you that the wages of sin is not death, but isolation?’”

“Put it the other way around, Dragoness, and you’ll understand why Borges says that at wakes, as the process of decay proceeds, the dead man recovers all of his previous faces.”

“The film reversed.”

“Yes. By the way, no matter what your husband thinks, I enjoy watching you jump up from bed. Zip, pow, like the Marines making a landing.”

“Get off my neck, caifán. What you like is not how I get out of bed but the way I hop into it.”

* * *

Δ “Have you finished yet?”

“No, Lisbeth, not yet. I want to tell you about our party.”

Yes, the party, Dragoness. An end of the semester celebration by young German students, in costumes yet.

“Ulrich and I sat beside the coffin-refrigerator for quite a long time, as if we were holding a wake for Herr Schnepelbrücke. But darkness was about to fall, and with it, our guests. I ran out to buy more beer and wine. When I came back, Ulrich already had his costume on. I laughed when I saw him. A brown uniform with a wide black belt and a wide strap slanting down across his chest, black boots, a swastika arm band. I laughed and he laughed and he pranced around the room goose-stepping, throwing his right arm up stiffly, crying ‘Heil, Heil, Sieg Heil!’ He did it perfectly. I roared until my sides hurt.”

“The Nazis were a joke to you then, Franz?”

“I went behind the screen and put on my own costume. A horned helmet, a chest-plate and long red skirts, a yellow wig of curls that came down to my neck, a bronze lance. I came out with a shrill Valkyrie howl and it was Ulrich’s turn to laugh.

“There was a knock at the door and our guests rushed in, happy, shouting, carrying bottles and cans, loaves of bread, sausages, Limburger, all of them disguised. Heinrich was old Goethe and with him was our classmate Elizabeth decked out as Mephistopheles, her eyes blue and candid beneath the painted arched eyebrows, her red lips smiling above the pointed painted beard. Reinhardt and Elsa were dressed as Tyrolean peasants. Malaquias was a Prussian officer. Otto was an Austro-Hungarian hussar. Ruby, in wooden shoes and a striped skirt and the customary liberty cap with its tricolor ribbons, was a French Marianne. Lorenz was Rasputin: black gown, long beard and wig. And Lya was dressed like me but had a higher rank; she was Brunhilde and I was her aide-decamp. Everyone cried out ‘Yo-ho-to-ho-ho’ and danced around chanting the Valkyrie music and using the wine bottles as lances. High-pitched voices, low-pitched, a crazy chorus, all of us in costume to celebrate the end of the school year. Finally the singing died down.